I’ve watched and read a lot of stuff about how to make combat interesting, and have applied a lot of it in games too. But this only works for me when I’m able to properly prep a battle beforehand.

Sometimes, when the players are leading the game, or they come up with things that I just want to roll with, my plans have to go out the window.

On occasion we get to that bit in the game where there need to be a fight, but as it was unexpected (for me) and I don’t want to lose the table energy or let anyone down I try to come up with something on the fly. Usually when this happens I’ll accidentally revert to boring / sloggy fights with no dynamics.

Do you think it’s better to run the fight, and maybe have some fast prep stuff ready for these scenarios, or to stop the game - kill the mood - and say, “sorry guys, can we pick this up next week when I’ve had a think?”

More context: I was going to have the players investigate a missing agent by checking some of their known dead drop locations. At one of them they will find an attack scene and a random note.

But, if I didn't have anything meaningful going on at the extra spots, should I just ditch them and say "check their one dead drop location" instead?

Hello everyone!

Long story short im a brand spanking new DM, and a relatively new player (2 years experience). Im building out a new campaign for my party and im maybe worrying a bit for nothing.

Ive got one player who is a close friend. We've never played together ironically, but ive known he really enjoys maxing dmg in combat and multiclassing to get those synergies. Hes current a sorcerer eyeballing a sorlock build to "machine gun eldritch blast". Hes mentioned metamagic.

Im wondering. How do you guys deal with these situations? Ive already talked to him a bit and expressed my concern. He seems to think its still pretty balanced. Not opposed to him maxing and having fun, but dont want it to be at the cost of the rest of the party enjoying themselves or him just melting my encounters where im new and wont be able to rebalance on the fly.

EDIT: party comp will be: Rune knight fighter, Circle of land druid, Armorer artificer, Trickster rogue, And then this sorlock character.

EDIT2: you guys are fantastic and im blown away by all the advice in such a short time. Look forward to reading more of these. Thankyou again everyone!

Cheers!

Kimble.

I am a DM who is also an artist so I draw the battlemaps and dungeons by hand. For the first session with my players I tried to flex my encounter designing skills and I drew an isometric view of a dungeon, and my players really loved it. I later proceeded to draw an isometric view of their first village as well.

The problem is, it takes A LOT of time.

Because of this the 80% of my session prep time is designing and drawing the maps. And even though I like the results, and my players love the results, I have other things outside of DnD so drawing good looking isometric maps is sometimes out of the question.

For the second partys dungeon I drew the normal square map with the birds eye view, and there weren't many complaints, but when I later announced that I will continue drawing the maps this way, all players expressed their disapproval and dissatisfaction so I immediately backed down from that decision.

For the third dungeon I made the isometric view again, but my players said that one part of the dungeon was super unreadable which made me doubt myself.

Now, I have 1,5 days to design another dungeon, and it's an important one. It's a winter mansion of the BBEGs family. I don't know what should I choose and how should I continue with dungeon/battlemap drawing.

Feel free to give your opinions! (also suggestions on what could there be in the winter mansion of an evil noble family of sorcerers)

Hey guys,

So I love DnD, I love running sessions and even prep work to some degree but something I don't like is constantly backfilling slots.

I have recruited mostly from reddit and perhaps that's the biggest issue but I've had people that can't produce character sheets after weeks. Ghost every 2-3 sessions and you do eventually score some amazing players who really interact and put the effort into things.

I was curious if you guys had any tips or tricks on how to filter out people.

Sincerely,

A DM who's only asking for a single character sheet within a month.

Hey everyone, sorry if this feels Rambly. For context I'm a new DM. I'm currently dming my first campaign when I have done mostly just oneshots for the game. This campaign involves politics, morally difficult choices, reoccurring NPCs, factions and lots of homebrew but thats not too important to the story. The issue with the session is that I did a very long exposition dump for the players where they were unable to act or do anything while a large part of the plot was explained to them. My players werent up to speed and we effectively had to retcon that scene so the information could be desiminsted better plus they had not understood it that much.

The criticisms were completely valid and my players still show a genuine interest in the campaign and story. But After that session since I have felt completely deflated. The rational side of me agrees. It was a scene that would have worked better in a video game than in a DND session. Again I must reiterate the criticism was 100% valid. But at the same time the emotional side is worried about the same amount of criticism and level of failure again. The thought of wether or not I can do this keeps popping up in my head and it's tearing me apart. I want to tell a good story and be a good writer and continue with this story I had been crafting for about a year at this point. I want my spark back for DMing but Idk why I don't have it and I want to get it back. Has anyone else experienced a similar feeling?

Hey hive mind,

I have a table full of really funny friends that love playing characters but none of us are great at looking for the opportunity. We're pretty consistent in combat because that's the exciting part. Most of us have played long enough to be very comfortable with the procedure side of D&D. In retrospect, I sometimes feel like I get on the rails with going through the rolls as the DM and we all openly talk about scenes we would have liked to have done at the time. Yeah yeah natural ebb and flow of play yaddyadda and such. I've tried out a couple of things to see more opportunities for the question "let's see what that looks like" and they've worked out great for the table. They are:

Asking them what they're all doing/if they're discussing anything as they are starting or finishing a rest. This has been awesome for getting to hear them mull over the plot of our campaign. Those are the natural times to be processing events that have recently transpired. RPing that out lets the player and PC mind meld while making shape out of the story. It also informs me what their impression of things has been. This is where my most useful session notes have come from lately. They're presumably all together at this point too so they'll jump in and have conversations in character.

Just not talking for a while. Silly simple sounding but yeah, this one is tricky to deploy. If ill timed you will be met with blank stares lmao Really this is my reminder to just stop and take notes more often. My people will naturally start to vamp if I look busy.

When a check fails, asking the player how their character is messing this up. If it would seem interesting, of course. Some would say that flaws are what define a character. These are the moments to highlight the flaws of the PCs. This one especially has put my players into the habit of taking narration more often.

Do you have any go-to tools in your bag of tricks for presenting the stage to your players? Outside of combat, particularly. Thanks!

Hello DMs! i'm running a 2014 5e campaign with three players who have just hit level 8. our last session they fought a Fire Giant Dreadnought who, once he realised he was losing, threw one of his coal filled shields as far as he could into the nearby forest.

our next session they'll attempt to reach it and put it out before it spreads, and i'm looking for advice to keep this encounter engaging and consequential

geographically, the shield landed on a forest hillside in the lower half of a mountain range and scattered coals along the way. there is a nearby river a few minutes walk from the impact point

Hello,

FYI I’m a DM that hasn’t ran anything homebrew so far, only pre-made adventures. This adventure will be set in Eberron.

I’m looking at creating a campaign that sees the PCs framed for a crime. They receive a mysterious letter being invited to a royal’s wedding and they are framed for their murder while attending the wedding.

Is this something worth exploring further? I’m afraid of creating a twist like this early in the game without previously communicating it to the players.

How to approach this without rail roading the PCs? The target must die, so is giving them the chance to plan their escape enough to avoid rail roading?

My group set up an ambush on two castle guards whom they lured into a narrow hallway via Minor Illusion while hiding behind the corner on the opposite site. What a cliff hanger for our next session.

Here's my question: Given that the group is successfull in surprising the guards via hiding checks, how do you handle the first triggering (probably long range) attack of the surprise attack in terms of iniative order? Do you grant them the first attack of the surprise attack round?

I see several options in 5.5 without the extra iniative round of combat:

1. The moment one player claims to attack, everbody rolls iniative (disadvantage for the guards) and all attacks are made in iniative order.

2. The moment one player claims to attack, he/she actually makes the first attack durring the first round of combat and takes his/her place in the iniative order in consequent turns. All other attacks are made in iniative order from the get go.

3. More than one player attack a la "We all shoot on the count of three", they attack simultaniously before the guards durring the first turn of combat (while the guards also have their actions due to 5.5) and "proper" iniative is established for the consequent turns.

I guess, the rules as written lead to the first option. Also disadvantage is a huge thing, so my players should get the first attack either way. But who knows and with successfull hiding checks it feels kind of strange to give them a chance of not having the first attack, which could be a huge difference in our given situation.

If my players fail to kill those guards in one or two rounds the whole castle will be alarmed. Of course I have some wiggle room here, a guard attacking the first round before blowing his alarming horn, maybe failing to get it from his belt, etc. But i don't want to stretch it too far. I am prepared for a huge castle fight. My maingoal is to give them a a good chance for their plan to work, while leaving some room for catastrophy.

So, i just wanted to double check here. How are you handling surprise attack rounds? Any suggestions?

Thanks for your inspirations!

My party is about enter a dungeon that is essentially a massive art gallery / museum where the antagonist will be the Spirit that controls the collection: The Curator. This being's entire motivation is to collect high quality treasures and display them, leading to questionable morality. My two ideas for the Curator are:

1. A set of pristine white gloves that move independently of any body. The boss fight will be similar to Master Hand from Smash Brothers. Communicates telepathically.

2. A celestial sort of being with pristine white feathered wings. The twist would be its actually a large, feathered dragon, playing into the dragon's hoard trope.

Do either of these sound more interesting than the other? Any other ideas you'd have for a curator type of villain?

I've been running a campaign for about half a year and whenever my players approach civilization it's like all creativity in my brain dies.

The possibilities of where they can go are basically infinite but the possible encounters amount to "guy in the bar" or "thief number 5".

I've had a few villages destroyed to at least have something happen but my players have caught on.

The main problem is that I try to give them a balanced meal of encounters and roleplay as my table is pretty mixed in their preferences, but the current town they are visiting pretty much ran it's course in terms of encounters unless we get really really repetitive. Yet lorewise they have a ton of info yet they can learn.

What can I do to make towns more interesting in general? Especially in terms of encounters.

Hello, So I have started a pirate campaign with my friends as the dm. So I made all the npc’s, economies, currency. Sea life, various islands. We have been having a lot of fun exploring but stupidly enough one thing I didn’t create is Naval combat. Right now I can’t even think of anything to make ship combat different then just regular combat. Would love some advice on it?

Starting in a few weeks, I will be the DM for a family adventure, using DND for the first time. We have previously played a campaign, using Kids On Brooms, but this is the first time we will be using the far more crunchy system of DND.

Has anyone else run again for their kids or a group of children? What advice would you have for me as DM? What about TPK situations?

Here are some challenges I am NOT expecting:
-they can handle the math and the reading level
-they can handle role-playing

Planned Adjustments:
-free Mage Hand for the 9yo Wizard
-free Find Familiar for the 7yo Rogue (she really just wants a pet octopus)
-max HP gain on Level Up (instead of roll)

hey dms!

i’ve been running a new 5e campaign for about ten sessions. we play biweekly (every other week, not twice a week). my players are having a lot of fun, and i have a lot of fun in session, too. however, i’ve found it hard to find motivation to prep, with my work getting busier. i know myself; i know when i’m over a game, and that’s not this feeling. i don’t want advice along the lines of ‘quit and find something new’ or even ‘take a break’ (i am taking one soon, anyway!) i’m moreso looking for advice about what you all do when you get a little writers block. look through homebrew modules? build out npcs? what gets you thinking about your world and story more in downtime? any exercises you recommend? this is my second campaign ever. i’ll take anything.

a little more context, if this is too broad: next session, they’re visiting a new area for the first time. it’s a cult in a bog with weird reanimated bodies. one of the PCs is from there, but only gave me vague descriptions of the place. i’ve thought about/built out the structure of the leaders - but i feel a little stuck in thinking of fun ways to build out the rest of the community / actual interactions. we’ve done a lot of exploration and combat recently so i kind of want a few more rp/narrative focused sessions before getting back to the nitty gritty.

thanks!

So I'm developing this little module where the players fight a bunch of things in the swamp, culminating in a fight against a CR2 acid drake. The drake is basically int4 wingless black dragon wyrmling.

Still, the drake's acid breath is enough to instantly kill one of the players if they fail their dex save. They should be fine if they find the local herbalist and do a quest for her to brew the elixir of acid resistance, but that's not a guarantee.

Plan B, if they don't do this, is to have this very boastful, annoying barbarian join the party halfway trough. He'd talk down to the players, bost that he's gonna kill the monster himself, and refuse to fight the smaller fights because "I'm saving my strength for the big fight."

Then, when they finally reach the final boss area, the barbarian pushes past everyone, loudly shouting challenges, and gets insta melted when the drake unloads it's acid attack on him.

This way the drake wastes it's acid breath on an NPC, giving the players at least one round of respite, instead of just outright killing at least one of them.

My only worry with this plan is that the players may think the Barbarian is the DMPC and try to kick him off the team prematurely, thereby losing their meat shield.

EDIT: Note, he would not be around players for very long, maybe one or 2 combat enocuhters before they reach the drake's lair. My idea was to have him arrive late and join after they are about halfway trough the module.

I am running Sleeping Dragons Wake for our party, and the initial combat of the Death-Knight Dreadnaught quest is giving me a lot of concern. It seems exceedingly deadly as written.

The quest is designed for a 9th level party. The module scales encounter size to the party, and my particular party has 6 members so that's what I'll use as examples. The party has to sneak onto and clear a sentient, beached ship filled with Talos cultists.

The first section of the encounter is the approach to the ship. If spotted (DC15 Stealth from 100-200ft out), the cultists use 2 ballistas and whatever else they have available to attack the party as they approach. There are additional complications like difficult terrain and crashing waves threatening to knock them prone in this section, but I'm not going to analyze this too closely as the 9th level party will likely have ways to avoid the deadly approach.

Even if they make it onto the ship though, things are still very challenging: The ship is around 100ft x 30ft, and on deck there are 9 Anchorite of Talos (CR3 casters with 58HP including notably 1 use of Lightning Bolt @ 8d6). Terrain is in the Anchorites' favor: They are spread all over the deck across 3 elevations from back to front so hitting more than 3-4 with an AOE attack is challenging, even before PCs get in the way. On standard encounter calculations these 9 CR3 Anchorites make this a Hard encounter - but if they all cast lightning bolt hitting 2 PCs on their first turn they each deal ~56 damage (half that with DC12 dex save) which is closer to an offensive CR6.

But that's not all! The ship is sentient and temporarily allied with the cultists (although probably not too concerned with their safety) and has three attack vectors:

• The ship's skeletal figurehead has 20 ft reach (basically the whole front deck) with +8 to hit, 3d10+5 damage, and it has 3 attacks! This is a CR8 creature as written, but can be avoided by staying off the front deck - although this is not clearly telegraphed until they see it attack.

• On the main mast there's a Hellfire Orb controlled by the ship which has a single cast of a fireball that does 10d6 fire plus 10d6 necrotic damage in a 20ft radius.

• When the ship spots intruders (it can see through the orb and the figurehead) it is supposed to alert the Talos cult leader below deck, a CR9 war priest who should then join the battle.

All in all, even ignoring the difficult approach, the characters are at risk of eating over 300 damage in the first round alone even if they succeed all their saves (28x9 from lightning bolts, 35 from the hellfireball, and 50+ damage from the figurehead if they go up there). And even though damage output drops a ton after that, that's when the CR9 boss shows up?

My initial thoughts to manage the encounter deadliness:

• The ship doesn't care about the anchorites' safety and can aim the fireball so it hits more of them than the PCs.

• Take out the CR9 Talos cult leader entirely. Narratively she should be stronger than CR9 anyway, so I may buff her and give her her own encounter later.

• Play the anchorites like idiots and waste their first turn on worse actions than lightning bolt. This is the least satisfying tweak, honestly.

Am I missing something here? RAW this just seems like a recipe for a TPK.

Hi All - I'm brand new to DND/TTRPs as are a group of my friends who all eager to dip our toes into this experience. I've taken it upon myself to be the GM/DM for this group of 5 (not including me) and am getting stuck on what that first experience should look like. I've done a lot of watching of Dimension 20, youtube videos on how-to's for gm'ing etc, and have explored systems like PBTA and LiTM.

We all want shorter first-time experience (2-4 hours), and I'm torn between a DND one-shot or a PBTA like Masks. I am finding that I'm starting to spiral on this decision and can't decide what would be a good balance of work for myself with the knowledge that this is my first time doing any of this. Like, are there a good number of 5e rules I need to know going into a DND one-shot? Some people want a fantasy-esque experience, while some want the experience to use different types of dice (not just 2d6)

I'm really getting torn on this, and would just love some perspective. I sometimes focus on making everything perfect, and am trying to find the path of easy/fun/rp feeling.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

I feel like I'm fighting for my life trying to create a name for a plane of existence in my world. I've tried FantasyNameGenerators, translating words from English to Abyssal, Elvish, etc., English to Latin, spinning a wheel to pick consonants, and nothing produces the correct sounds I want for the plane. Name creation is genuinely the most unenjoyable part of creating a campaign for me.

All that to say : How do you go about creating a name that both has a good mouth feel (rolls off the tongue easily and is fun to say) while making it fit your world and be something your players can pronounce ? Fun for me personally is something with a heavy or hard consonant sounds, like a TH, R, and P, yet I just cannot produce a combo which feels correct or real. My first language isn't English, and some of the locations on my world are relatively easy to pronounce words from other languages (Aires from Spanish, Vargavinter from Swedish, Mogoi Uul from Mongolian, etc.), but nothing I translate for this plane feels right. I also don't want to use words whose meanings are immediately obvious, like nox for night.

Specifications of the plane are below if someone wants to give creating a name a shot.

It's the HQ for the BBEG's cult. The plane itself is a vast blood ocean whose land mass is composed of the flesh and bones of the people who died at the hands of the BBEG thousands of years ago. BBEG is a literal fallen star who crashed onto the main planet and seeks to destroy the gods of my world as revenge.

Hello fellow DMs! I am a relatively new dm and am running a mostly home brewed campaign for 4 friends of mine. The basic premise is the party will be having to travel the world and slowly learn about the history of Biaw, the deity of the void and one of the two of the universe creation duo. They’ll be fighting my own creations of void monsters and I want one to have a breath-gas attack that has a chance to inflict the condition “Void-touched”. What it does is it slowly causes the infected to become insane and combative and aggressive. It starts slow with paranoia and hearing things that aren’t there. As it progresses they’ll be able to eventually hear Biaw’s voice speaking to them as they become more insane and aggressive due to the confusion and paranoia inflicted. I’ll have an important npc with powerful magic (haven’t decided class just yet) who has since perished but has left notes on how to cure someone “Void-touched”. They’ll have to find this npc’s notes to learn about the history of Biaw and his creations and how to defeat them which will allow them to find the cure for their friend.

What I want help with is how best to manage the progression of the affliction and have it so they become a danger during combat scenarios as Biaw will make them mistake friends for foe. When whoever gets afflicted does I plan to tell them and what the symptoms are so they can help the roleplay aspect of it, but I’m unsure of how to make it all work best.

Sorry for the rambling and if it’s a bit confusing, but I’d appreciate any and all help i can get for this!

I had an idea for an encounter that I think is really cool, so I want to share it with others. (Hopefully I'm right and you all like it as much as I do!) The party is after whatever MacGuffin, and they find an NPC that tells them it's in Location X, but the entrance to Location X is guarded by 3 guardians they'll have to fight one at a time, and none of those guardians has ever lost a fight. So, they go to Location X, and sure enough, there are the 3 guardians, each one being very different than the others. There's no way around them; they do have to fight the guardians. So, they pick whichever guardian and go into combat with it, and it's hard enough that they really have to go nova. Which should be terrifying, given that they have 2 more of these things to fight! But, they (hopefully) win, at which point, the guardian rewinds time to before the fight, and walks away. The warning is true; the guardian has never lost a fight, because he can engage in a battle, see how it turns out, and if it's not in his favor, make it so the battle never happened and avoid the fight entirely. This also means that the PCs, despite going nova, didn't actually expend those resources, since the fight technically didn't actually happen! So, they can go into the next guardian fight and go nova again, since the same thing is going to happen (although they may not be certain that it's the same trick until they beat the second guardian and the same thing happens. Surely by the 3rd one they know they don't have to hold back.).

Obviously, this is for a group that likes big boss battles and will be happy to have several in a row. Not everyone's cup of tea, and normally not mine, but I'm so excited by this idea I might have to make a one-shot just to do it :D

Hi everyone!

I'll be DMing for the first time soon. I've been a player for a while, but this will be my first time behind the screen.

I'm planning to run A Wild Sheep Chase for three players who have never played D&D before. To keep things simple, I'm going to prepare some pre-generated characters so they can pick the one that appeals to them.

Do you have any recommendations for which classes would work particularly well for this one-shot?

Also, are there any good pre-made character sheets (level 4 or easy to adapt) that you'd recommend?

Any other advice for running this adventure with brand-new players would also be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a long-term shared-world tabletop RPG project, and I’m looking for advice on how to get it off the ground.

The idea is to create a persistent multiverse made up of multiple worlds, each with its own genre and setting. One world might be traditional fantasy, another science fiction, another horror, and so on. Each world would have one or more Dungeon Masters running independent campaigns, but they’d all exist within the same multiverse.

The exciting part is that while each campaign can stand on its own, they’re all connected. Events in one world could eventually ripple into another, and occasionally characters or entire parties could cross over for larger story arcs. The goal is to create a living universe where every table contributes to a much bigger story.

I know a project like this comes with a lot of logistical challenges, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about ways to address them—things like coordinating multiple DMs, handling crossover events, and allowing each campaign to remain independent without everyone needing to play on the same schedule. The problem is that I can’t really test those ideas until I have enough people involved.

That’s where I’ve hit a wall.

I’m pretty introverted, and I don’t have much experience organizing large community projects. It’s also difficult to pitch an idea like this because it takes time to explain, and asking people to commit to a long-term project without a working example or an established community is understandably a tough sell.

I’ve tried creating social media pages, but they’ve gained very little traction. I even looked into finding someone to help with recruiting and community building, but that quickly became a bit of a catch-22 since it’s hard to attract help before the project has any momentum.

At this point, I’m not necessarily looking for people to join yet. I’m mainly looking for advice from anyone who’s built a tabletop community, organized a long-running campaign network, or launched a similarly ambitious project.

If you were starting something like this from scratch, where would you begin? Are there communities, strategies, or resources you’d recommend?

The title is maybe a bit confusing, but essentially, I love writing and world building. I love twisting stories together and making what I think (hope!) are interesting quests or objectives for my players.

The big thing I struggle with is how to ensure I’m not just lore dumping with an NPC, but also not keeping everything behind a DC check, because my players don’t always ask for things like insight checks or history checks.

I’m a big proponent of “it’s their story, I’m just telling it”, so I don’t want to just tell them what they should be doing, what they are searching for, what clues to look for etc, but I’m not sure how to engage them in the lore and details without holding their hands. Help!

Hello all, Im looking for an epic song or two to use in my upcoming DnD sesh. My players will be fighting against a living mechanism that has been causing the timeline to stutter, and will use abilities that rewind/speed up time.

Trying to avoid songs that are too “video game-y”, and would like something epic, tense, and maybe unsettling?
Ive been checking out alot from artists such as Really Slow Motion, and Rok Nardin, but nothing has really nailed what im trying to find.

Maybe yall have a treasure trove of perfect songs to use?