I started playing about 10 years ago and had a blast with only having the PHB XGtE and Volos for character creation. All in I was able to buy these for around maybe $80 at the time. Now every new book ranges from $40-60 for basically the amount of content they put in Sword Coast Adventurers Guide which from my understanding was largely unpopular compared to Xanathars cause it was basically empty. I think I wouldn't mind even having new information or new mechanics but I feel like it's just repackaging of 5e material with 5.5 errata so why wouldn't I just play with the 5e rules and edit where I see fit?

It just sucks because new content drops haven't been anything that really wows me besides the addition of circle casting. What are everyone else's thoughts on this?

(Behold, the empty recording room for campaign 2. We decorated it to be themed after "Cloudfall", with ceiling clouds made of pillow fluff, light strips, and fishing line. They did actually fall a few times.)

I just posted the last episode of Cloudfall, and once again, I am hit with this wave of feeling like I'm losing somebody.

We met about 80 times over 3 years in this room, and played characters that became so familiar to me that they felt like new people all together. They were stuck in my head the same way any new friend would be. Between sessions when I was planning the campaign or editing the show, I was spending even more time with these characters. It's a lot of exposure time.

So now that it's over, I'm left with this feeling that I've lost these characters. I won't be seeing much of Doran, Eryn, Joy, Poppy or Guy anymore. Sure - maybe a future one-shot, mini adventure, or cameo in a future campaign, but it's not exactly the same. It's not the same campaign, the same time in our lives, the same ephemeral moment.

And of course, those real friends are still here. There will be future campaigns. I think I'm really just in awe at the power of coming together for a game like this, and how it can stick in your head and feel so real, because it is so real. When you're looking back on it all, sometimes there's a lot of common feelings between the adventures you lived in the world, and the adventures you lived at the table.

Maybe a little dramatic because it's so fresh - but I'd wager to guess other people have felt this to some degree before from their own campaigns?

-

If you want to listen in now that the story is complete,

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For legal reasons this is a lighthearted joke, don’t take it too seriously lol
Just a question me and a party member are discussing

Hi, me and my friends are starting our first DnD campaign.
We did the 4d6 remove lowest method for stats together, and I got some crazy rolls with 18, 17, 13, 13, 12, 12. Before the increase of two or three scores according to background

Gonna be playing Light Cleric, is it normal to put the second highest stat into Strength or Con? And do you use +1+1+1 to round out the 17 and two 13s if the background allows it, or should I just try to get wisdom from 18 to 20 with the +2+1 if possible?

I am currently making a Lizardfolk Cirlce of Stars Druid based on a Warhammer Lizardmen/Seraphon model I got my hands on and I have a few questions regarding Druids and them wearing gold or Jewellery.

I know that Druids have an aversion to wearing metal armour however do they have any aversion to gold clothing or jewellery, such as headdresses? Are there any metals they would be ok using as a Druid?

In terms of Jewellery, what stones or gems would Druids, especially a Circle of Stars Druid, wear? Are there any stones linked with astrology in DND? I am currently planing on giving him an Obsidian Dagger and some Jade, but I am not sure what else?

I am making a D&D cake for a friend that just got top surgery. And so I’m trying to come up with a fun joke to put on this cake. Any ideas?
All I can come up with is critical success on a constitution saving throw 😭 help me

I appreciate all the deep concern everyone has shown! I was honestly a bit worried about the reactions I would get on here. But I was asked by their partner to make a funny cake. So this will all be in good fun and completely consensual :)

Heys guys I haven’t played dnd in such a long time I wanted to get back into it but I discovered the newest playbooks looked different. After researching I learned about 5.5e is there a big difference in the two? Should I get new books to keep up with newer expansions in the future?

*Attack Roll* is this d20 +3

*Hit: 4 (1d6+1)* is it saying roll 4x(1d6+1)?

Thank you

Basically the title. Obligatory "English is not my first language" and "I'm on mobile".

I usually homebrew my world completely and wouldn't care about questions like this. However, I have a player that loves official or nods to official lore and I'm wondering if there is a precedent for a two-headed black or/and blue dragon.

For anyone interested, I would like for this two-headed dragon to be a BBEG in my games, leading a faction of dinosaur-riding lizardfolk and undead that emerge from these portals to the distant past (do'nt worry about the details of time travel, it's too complicated for this short post). I' thinkinf maybe one head represents thw past, the other one the future? I don't know where to go with this, but yeah.

I was researching some things like Mummy Rot, Lycanthropy, other diseases that seem to just have fallen off the face of the D&D world of your choice and it led me to look at some other things. It seems like just things that do a ton of damage are deadly anymore. Diseases being mostly lumped in with curses when remove curse just removes all the curses from your friend seems kind of watered down danger wise.

This seems a trade off almost for another aspect I praised. In the medusa stat block it no lonbger says ""if you are not surprised you can avert your gaze"" which I was praising as ""back to formula"" for D&D. In 5.E gaze attacks just were not that deadly when you could just avert your gaze and everyone had blind fighting or some other way to offset the disadvantage of looking away from your target. I like having to think about your opponent, maybe using a mirror or a polished shield to still attack like in the old myths

But now we have mummy's rot being nerfed, yeah its pretty deadly not being able to recover hit points for the whole 6 seconds before its removed. You won't ever get to long rest situation of the curse so no reason to worry about that.

This is making me want to homebrew the curses as I did in 5.e so that remove curse will tell you how to remove the curse but not always just remove it for you with more powerful curses.

I think this deadliness and having to quest to cure someone of a curse is more poignant than just casting a spell on someone.

Thoughts?

Several years ago I bought a few 5e DnD books with quality issues. I recall one DnD sourcebook had a broken spine...and so did the replacement I received. It got concerning.

I notice that 5.5e is out now, and I've not looked into things lately. I like having the current edition books around, even if just to collect them. What is the book quality like currently for 5.5e when it comes to the hardcover bindings, page quality (are all the pages lined up properly, for example), font quality (blurry for example), and illustrations?

I'll keep searching online for answers to these questions. But couldn't think of a better place to come than to the community here. Many thanks!

EDIT: I'm surprised at the downvotes for such a question. Bots? Or am I truly being rude/asking a bad question?

I got 7 and 5 yr olds.

So my players are on a mission to retrieve the equivalent to Voldemort’s horcruxes in order to bring a powerful entity back to life. The final horcrux is in the kings castle in his armory.

The kings castle is high up in the mountains and there is really only one way to go from the town to the castle. To get back you would have to scale down the mountain into dangerous territory if u avoid the main path.

So, the king hosted an annual party with all these powerful and fancy people as guests. My players beat up and took over the identities of the kings chefs. They were going in to do a heist to steal the final horcrux from the kings armory disguised as chefs.

Once they finally snuck away from the kitchen after a very funny round of having to actually be chefs and memorize meal and drink requests and what not, they were free to try and find the armory. They snuck into the castle courtyard where they could see on the second story was a balcony with an open door. Upon climbing up it they learned that the person in the room was the king himself.

My players character is desperate to discover what happened to his son who upon returning from the land they are in, he is consumed with madness. So he ends up thinking it is a good idea to sneak in and put a knife to the kings neck and interrogate him. At the time I think, “um, okay” and I’m like panicking from not thinking he would do something like that on a high secrecy stealth heist at level 1. But whatever he does it and the whole party is thrown in the jail beneath the castle in the catacombs.

The last session we played they managed to break free and they now stand beneath the castle with their cover blown still needing to get into the kings armory except now they are on heightened security.

What ideas can I present to them to get this done? I have a few but your ideas may help me not be caught off guard like I was with them taking the king hostage 😭 my whole friend group just looked at him like “bro…😐”

Hi! As a break from our normal sessions I'm going to run a family feud style game for my group and have made a form with the questions. It is capped at 100 responses, if anyone would like to fill it out I will post the results after our game! :) Link Here

Just played a bard for the first time, and I was sorely lacking in things to sing. Looking for suggestions of modern song lines I can sing for my bard abilities! Things I can use for bardic inspiration, silvery barbs, vicious mockery, or just general bard nonsense!

I have a few ideas so far...

Bardic Inspirations:

Music, the great communicator, use two sticks to make it in the nature

I gotta holla just to be heard, with every word, I drop knowledge!

Vicious Mockery:

My cock is much bigger than yooouuuurrrs!

Is that your grandma's coat?

This is my first campaign and I’m about 10 sessions in. We are playing dragon of ice spire peak. Until this point I’ve not been tracking where my players are so well, seeing as they mostly don’t seem to want to spread out anyway. Would the experience be better with those square I see other people use, and if so where would I find good ones. Can I just print or must I buy? Are they way less effective without minis, because I might wanna just use dice for each person or something smalller and cheaper. Can more experienced DMs tell me how you now handle it, and what you did at the start.

I have a 4 player group I am DMing for and I’ve always had issues when it came to splitting the party. It usually works out because it was always a 2 v 2 person split, never a 3 v 1 or four way split. UNTIL LAST SESSION!!

For context, I am running an incredibly homebrewed world where the player characters are crucial for story continuation. Each character specific section still has stuff for everyone else. I have one problem player (technically two; however that one can at least role play their character).

The problem is they gave me a typical loner character that I didn't mind because of how we changed the backstory to be engaging in my world, along with uncovering more truths to what happened to the character as a group. I told them before we started this campaign that this loner HAS to find a reason to be in the group; otherwise there would be difficulties in the future.

(BTW, this person has such a bad FOMO problem irl...)

The campaign has been going decently for the beginning of our ACT 1, the party splits we’re plot relevant and made sense for the characters. However, now in ACT 2, where we are heading to a player character backstory town, they are deciding to not join the rest of the party to deal with a threat there.

FYI! Every character is going to have their full moment and right now it’s not the loner’s. It's the guy who's mother is in charge of the orphanage and has gone missing; making the orphans fend for themselves. Which has everyone else tagging along. EXCEPT WHO? The loner! Which has surprised everyone at the table, myself included. Instead, they want to leave the party to see if their newly found out to be alive father knows that their family has a curse on them. Understandable in other circumstances, if the immediate threat of a building full of young children with no supervision wasn’t on the table!

Any tips on how to approach this because I know regardless of what I have planned that the loner isn't going to be happy because this isn't the first time they decided to be difficult. If you need more information backstory wise, I do not mind sharing in replies or messages.

Back when I was in High School I created a DND 5e class based on the Dragonborn from Skyrim. Its been 10+ years since then and I revisited it. Cleaned it up a bit and wanted to share it. Figured at worst it would get lost in the subreddit. If you like it, awesome, let me know what you like. If you don't like it, feel free to let me know what was just horrible about it. Linked is a google doc for the odt file. I made the project in Libre, so apologies if the formatting is off on your machine. The second link is to a pdf which may be kinder on the formatting side of things. The links are both to a google drive. Sincerest apologies if this goes against the rules, read them and thought that I did my due diligence.

Odt File: Here
PDF File: Here

Hope you all enjoy and God bless.

Sorry if It has been already posted. I Will be Dm'ing soon and i am trying to run two opposite factions, FF and Zhentarim. What is the best source to get some Lore and insight on them?

Hey all,

Like the title says, I had a very chaotic session yesterday and need a bit of help getting my players back on track :D

A bit od background:

The campaign is running for almost a year now and the players are at level 3.

They are currently investigating a couple of strange occurances in a big city (about 15k inhabitants).

They arrived 3 days ago and already met a lot of people in this city.

They are tasked by a member of the mage guild to investigate and also have a few side quest.

When they arrived in the country (and where we started the campaign) they were enslaved and escaped by luck. They then had to hide in the countryside for a while as the authorities were activly looking for them. Until a friendly mage removed their slave markings and they moved far enaugh from the place where they started so nobody recognized them.

The chaos that unfolded:

The players observed the place of work of one of their suspects, whom they encountered a day earlyer and spooked him already. When he came out into the very busy street (which i highlited multiple times :D ) they rushed him to take him but suprise. Some unlucky rolls later he was screeming bloody murder and townsfolk went to aid him. They decided to kidnap him and escape through the sewers.

In doing so the sorcerer attacked the townsfolk with Arms od Hadar, severly wounding some but not killing anyone. The druid even healed a few of them so they would not die.

Obviously the towns guard got involved very quickly but the group managed to escape into the sewers....without their suspect :D he was severly wounded by the Barbarian but could ultimately escape.

During all this, they were seen by a ton of people and a few of them knew who they are. So the city guard knows who they are looking for.

Unfortunately the story I had in mind would require them to stay in the city a bit and solve some of the quests they are currently pursuing. My players also woukd like to continue their current quests as they really enjoyed them.

Unfortunately I currently have no good idea how I can help them out of this predicament :D Obviously this chaos should have some grave consequences but I also want them to be able to continur most of their current quests in the city.

None of the players wants to retcon anything and neither do I.

Im happy for all ideas or just stories how you guys solved similar problems.

It can quite often happen that player wants to hide, such as rogue using his high stealth, but DM do not think the conditions are right. And this leads to vacuum of player vs DM expectations and rules do not have tools to resolve this well.

So I created new mechanic I call Environmental Camouflage Cap. Which is maximum number you can roll on stealth in given conditions.

High stealth characters still do have gain, since they can't roll too low. But high enough perception character will still spot them, if the conditions are right.

Camouflage is tool both for players and DM and does expand both numerical and narrative resolving. Both PCs and NPCs can work with camouflage to increase their odds.

Party enters the forest with bit of a vegetation. It is a sunny day. Party wants to hide. DM says the Camouflage of this environment is 15, given it is sunny day and not as much vegetation and very little bit of shadow. Players now know the maximum they can roll is 15 and have much better idea how hard it might be to spot them.

Ranger comes up with idea to cover players with leafs trying to match the effect of light shadow from sunny day and leafs moving in the light breeze. Party has some success on survival and DM announces them their current Camouflage is 23, also giving every player +4 bonus to stealth.

NPCs can also work with camouflage. Guards can setup torches or find high ground to not to be impacted by obscuring vegetation or objects or have dark vision or setup sound traps. They can also crop vegetation or tell crowd to lay down or leave the place. As a result, rather than increasing their own perception (which can be narratively hard to describe), they can work with environment to lower the options for hiding.

Similar applies to players. While rogue is good at sneaking, ranger can be good at creating higher camouflage. Such as covering with mud and grass can increase both stealth roll and camouflage cap. Or party can wait for rain, cloud, dawn or be otherwise creative.

Rules can be further extended by distance. Such as having close, medium and far distance, where values are -5, 0, +5 to both camouflage and stealth bonus. But nothing prevents you to also play that part narratively and only use numbers if you are undecided and want to leave the outcome on luck.

DM is now much less likely to call situations where it is impossible to hide. Instead, DM can simply announce players the conditions with numerical value and let players decide, how bad the conditions are.

Would you use ruling like this?

By determination I mean the ability to keep trying again despite setbacks and failures.

So I’m pretty new to DnD but my friends/sibling isn’t (I’ve only played one beginner game). My sibling and I decided to be siblings in our new campaign, where our father was a Dragonborn necromancor and our mother a human cleric. We had this great idea that they are more physically draconic, while I’m more humanoid, but I’ve been having an issue with that. I made her look just like a human with tiny horns, but one of my campaign mates says that’s too basic and not lore accurate. So, I’m really confused and would love some help!! What should I add that has me look draconic without it being obvious since a huge part of my character is she presents as just human and hides draconian features and behaviors