Greetings DnD, @Devil_Master and I are bringing this topic to the community as a whole for discussion rather than making an executive decision like we had to on Piracy.

• The Question

While this has not become an issue yet, it would be a good idea to start this discussion now rather than later. So, the question is, where will we as a community draw the line between OC and Homebrew posts, and advertising.

• Why This is an Issue

This community is an open space for everyone to share their ideas, questions, stories, art, maps, homebrew, ANYTHING relating to Dungeons and Dragons (within the rules). We do not want to discourage anyone from posting, BUT we have to draw this line because no one wants to be spammed with advertisements.

That being said, there are those who create content for sale on various platforms, which is by no means a bad thing and entirely expected when someone puts their heart and soul into OC content. For example I am talking about OC art prints, OC modules, OC maps, OC homebrew, etc. These things take enormous amounts of time and talent to create and it is completely within those content creator’s rights to ask for payment for their product.

What we as a community need to decide on, is how to define when something goes from content sharing here, to advertising.

• Solution for Discussion

OC content MUST be posted in a way that is freely accessible by users of this community regarding the specific thing posted.

1. Artwork - OC Artwork must be viewable here, without paywall, but may be linked in the body text to payable prints, higher resolutions for sale, etc.. No comment spam, No reply spam, just a single link in the body text of your post.

2. Battlemaps - OC battlemaps must be viewable here, without paywall, in a usable and not excessively downgraded state but may be linked to a payable version of a higher resolution/quality/detail etc.

3. Homebrew* - OC Homebrew Content must be posted in a viewable, usable, and not excessively downgraded state but may be linked to a payable version that has higher detail/quality/etc.

*Clarification - Say you have a homebrew race. You can post here at the bare minimum, a basic framework of the race, how to use them, how to create a character with them, etc. and then you may link to a PAID version where maybe you have more details, lore, art, formatted in a way you’d see in official books etc.

Looking forward to the community's ideas on this topic and establishing a rule set for this in the near future. I think it also goes without saying this will be a living rule set and will be amenable in the future.

Edit: We have also considered the idea of implementing post limits if that becomes an issue, for example if someone wants to show off their art work and link to their site, they can only do so once per week to cut down on the spam.

Welcome to /c/dnd! Glad to have you here.

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TL;DR: Try rerolling attributes for a character only if the geometric mean is too different from that of the standard array.

I gather that lots of people like to randomly generate their player character's attributes ("roll for stats"). As most players/DMs have probably realized, this can cause problems:

• One or more players might roll lower than the rest. Either they're stuck with an underpowered character or they'll want to reroll until they like the results. The latter kind of defeats the purpose of rolling for stats.
• One or more players might roll higher than the rest. The resulting characters can outshine the rest.
• The average randomly generated array makes for more competent characters than the standard array. Players who prefer the standard array might not like this.

Folks on r/onednd have described a number of solutions, including rolling one array of attributes for the whole table and rolling a whole bunch of arrays and letting players pick from those.

I suggest an approach that's a bit mathier, for those who like that kind of thing. If you take the geometric mean of an array of numbers, you'll get an average that isn't sensitive to outliers. For six attributes, you multiply them all together and raise the product to the power of ⅙. The standard array's geometric mean is this:

(15×14×13×12×10×8)^(1÷6) = 11.74

When randomly generating a character's attributes, try taking the geometric mean of the result. If it's too high or too low (say, greater or less than 11.74±0.5), reroll. This should keep arrays pretty similar on average while allowing for some decent variety. It also lets people use the standard array or point cost methods without being left behind.

Here's an example of some randomly generated attributes for a party of four:

Character 1: 16 14 13 12 10  9
Character 2: 14 13 12 11 10  9
Character 3: 15 13 13 12 11  8
Character 4: 16 16 14 13  9  5

You can do this with some six-sided dice and a calculator, but I also slapped together an R script that does this and put it on Codeberg if you're interested. I can write instructions on how to use it if anyone asks for it, but right now it's just a bit of code and a free software license.

Firstly I would like to thank you all for the plethora of responses to my original post! I hadn’t expected so much engagement! I read each of your comments eager and earnestly.

TLDR - pcs have offered limited input into world building and expressed desire to have some light rails to keep them on task. Theme fate vs free will.

A lot of responses offered excellent general principles and advice on how to get the ball rolling, much appreciated! A handful of responses requested additional information please see below if you would like to delve into my crazy person string board.

I’ve started with fishing a few lines from each player about who they would like their character to be in the world.

We’ve landed with a orc barb who has been dishonourably discharged from his junior officer military career for refusing orders to subdue a village suffering from unrest during a food shortage. They now work odd private mercenary contracts primarily security details.

A gnomish divination wizard who recently graduated from academy who could only find work as a cartographer for a regional ley line siphoning conglomerate.

An arsonist ranger who I managed to steer into a fire worshipping cultist whose cult has been persecuted for their destructive tendencies. They’ve been displaced since the destruction of their sect forcing them to work odd jobs to make ends meet.

The fourth party member makes up for his lack of imagination with willingness to show up 🤣 and has opted for total amnesia. We will leverage the freedom offered and have plot hooks to pull and memory drip feed that should help keep us on narrative.

We’ve spoken about what type of campaign we would like to run and collectively the party understands they want a compelling plot but have a tendency to get lost in the weeds without direction. (previous campaign I ran with them as a player ended up some weird fishing village builder where we had a significant combat that destroyed the shanti town, followed by multiple sessions of rebuilding and ultimately lost interest).

The theme of our campaign is fate vs free will.

I’m no Brennan Lee Mulligan and free will might be philosophically heavy to unpack but I have some literary works to draw inspiration from.

Primarily influences for our narrative James Islington’s Licanius trilogy - a story following a young hero with a magical gift of future sight on an epic quest of good vs evil when you already know how it ends for you. This description doesn’t do the series justice if you haven’t read any of James work both this series and his hierarchy series are 5 star chefs kiss technical magic systems with masterful narratives and compelling characters work. I will die on that hill.

Christopher Ruocchio’s The Sun Eater series - an epic space opera spanning over 1000 narrative years following a wayward hero on a rollercoaster of character arcs all guided by the shortest path to the future that must be. A truly epic story that will see more than a few nods in our campaign.

If you are familiar with either of these works they have a strong emphasis on fate with agency. Seeing glimpses of the future but not enough of the picture to know how your actions will lead you too it…. The plot twist at the end of the Licanius trilogy.. damn James.

To get things started I have semi compartmentalized sessions 0’s planned where after I’ve firmed up character sheets our wizard will be commissioned on a surveying assignment cut to our Barb and Ranger meeting as part of a team hired for security for aforementioned surveying project.

Our session 1 is when our players will meet our 4th party member I have a couple of hooks to ensure this goes smoothly ideally one of our wizards mentors will hurriedly give our pc an artifact with a sigil on it that’s glows (brighter the closer it gets to our 4th pc) with a vague description about a light to guide those who find themselves surrounded by darkness.

Our mentor is actually under duress compelled by our 4th pc to deliver the artifact to our wizard before they had their memories wiped but this won’t be revealed until much later lol

Our wizard will have a vision of things to come during their first long rest that plants the seeds for their next encounter. These visions and 4th pc memory drops are going to be my primary hooks but between major plot points I am hoping to yes and most shenanigans.

I have a home brewed divination system similar to critical roles desperate measures flavoured to allow expending critical resources.. high level spell slots / death saves to reach out through possible realities and choose more favourable outcomes to hopefully prevent bad rng from derailing the plot for us.

Our setting will be Delos nod to Handrian Marlowe’s home-world. I’ll establish the regional map, layout the 3 factions in a power struggle in the region and draw attention to a large portion of the map that’s shrouded in mists which is said to be home to many banes from a forgotten age when bbeg and our deities warred over the fate of the world.

Our hero’s will hopefully by session 5 or so uncover that one of the factions is actually a puppet regime headed by the bbeg who is seeking to remove individual agency locking the world into its darkest timeline.

If you made it this far thank you so much :) this community is awesome! Any thoughts or feedback is more than welcomed I’m aware the party may derail me on their own 🤣

Hello friends first time DM here who foolhardily decided to jump into world building rather than running a cookie cutter adventure.

I’m hoping some battle tested dungeon masters could throw me a couple pointers on how you introduce players to your worlds to help flesh out my pages of notes 😅

We used to have several more people. Right now it’s 3 players and a DM. The DM is my cousin, and our rule right now is if one person can’t make it, the whole thing is called off. They really don’t want to just have 2 players, which I can understand.

This has been the only group I’ve ever played DnD with, but I’m not enjoying it at all. Part of it is the DM’s style, and part of it is another player.

I feel like I can’t do anything as a paladin without being yanked away from it. My first few sessions literally any time I tried to cast something, this other player told me I really shouldn’t. They’re so terrified I’m going to run out of spell slots. I never have.

At a certain point I just started doing nothing but regular attacking. That’s it. Just sessions on end of attacking as a paladin and nothing else without any complaints. I’m bored out of my mind.

I’m still a new player and I’m just trying to enjoy the game. But Any time I try to cast something, I’m being told not to, or given like a 5 minute thesis on how ” actually Bless isn’t as useful as this other thing, but hey if you WANT to use bless I don’t GUESS it would hurt…”

Also the DMs themes just don’t relate to me at all. The best way I can describe the game is like some mix of analog horror, SCP, and the backrooms. We never ever just meet some bandit or goblin. It’s always some unexplainable entity that the DM must use esoteric language to describe. It’ll be some object or being that is cognitively distressing to witness yet impossible to comprehend. And I’m having to roleplay a reaction to it?

Not to mention the crunchiness of the campaign is just wearisome to me. Our last campaign we spent an hour and a half just going over inventory, crafting, quest progress, and stats. All above the table; never in character.

It’s just such a boring campaign to me with a player that’s about to make me rip my hair out. But it’s also my cousin’s game, and I’m fairly certain it will have to disband - at least for a long while - if I leave.

I'm asking because the question the other day about silliest characters had a lot of funny comments.

Personally, I like to play as characters who are perpetually on the brink of fucking things up. Other players adore this, their PCs don't.

As an example, a week ago, the party was being escorted by a noble to a fort, although the noble was lagging behind. My character (who was a kobold gremlin) announced her presence and demanded to be let in. The guard manning the gate asked how he could be sure that we hadn't killed or kidnapped the noble. My kobold said "Isn't the whole point of kidnapping to announce it and use it as leverage? Why would we be hiding it from you?" The party's 'dad' quickly interjected that we had not kidnapped the noble, and that they were just around the bend. My kobold insisted to be let in, arguing "Just let us in, and if you need to arrest us for killing the noble, you'll have us surrounded." The party dad stared daggers at my character, and asked if she was deliberately trying to fuck things up. (the answer was yes, she had been slighted by the dad who did not let her be a gremlin) The dad asked the games to ignore everything my character had said, and the DM asked us to both do persuasion rolls. The other player rolled a nat one, and I rolled a nat 20. We both said "fuck." At the same time, and he burst out laughing.

I will be heading off to fight the morally grey fight as an Oathbreaker paladin in the service of Kelemvor this afternoon. I believe that we are going to steal a boat, sink that boat, get mad about not having a boat, steal another boat, and then set out on our adventure.

What are you getting up to? (If you're here after Sunay, what did you get up to?)

Mine was a shark person male named Susan (he didn't understand the idea of gendered names but liked how human names sounded)

I used to use OneNote, which worked ok but it got really crazy organizing and reorganizing every time we started a new chapter of our years-long homebrew campaign. Frustrated, I started looking around at other tools.

For the past year my players and I were using World Anvil to create a sort of online wiki for my players to replace the journal from our VTT which is not always online. I wanted to give them resources where they could check back on things that happened during the sessions, people they met, etc. I stopped using World Anvil recently because they straight up lost a bunch of my nested articles. I had articles nested in articles - which was something that I learned to do by watching their own internal YouTube guide videos. I asked for help on the official Discord server and was told "don't use nested articles", which breaks my entire organization methods - the same problem I came into with OneNote. Losing data randomly though isn't ok with me. A lot of those articles were WIP and I had no backup...

I started using Kanka recently because it's a small team and it seems like it's going to work out, but before I get super invested, I wanted to hear from the rest of the community, so - do you all use any tools? How do you keep yourself organized, especially in a long homebrew campaign?

We're back! New Dalancia is live at 5pm Central over on Twitch!

twitch.tv/geeks_guilds...

#dungeonsanddragons #dnd5e #ttrpg

Like adventures that are just laid back traveling and doing easy quest for NPCs?

Come join us on our adventure!

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

I finally ran my party through Tomb of Horrors. I’m going to give my overall thoughts first, then some room specific things. The main thing, setting expectations was critical for running this dungeon.

• I told them that it was a “puzzle” dungeon and that combat would be minimal, so they brought characters that were good at investigating.
• Telling the party that it was unfair and to expect to die, made it easy to keep the game moving and they had backups ready. I included a narrative hand wave to explain how new characters could catch up so fast.
• Putting the mcguffin in the final room absolutely worked to drive the party to reach the end.
• The time limit worked an absolute treat for preventing the party from long resting at all really.
• I used the 1e elf/thief ability to auto detect hidden doors, and altered it to use passive perception instead. It really worked great for keeping the party from getting stuck everywhere.

The monsters were absolutely no challenge for a party of level 12 characters. Even tuning them up to as deadly as their 1e versions didn’t take into account the power increase of the party. You should definitely wholesale replace them with much more challenging encounters.

I had said that they couldn’t use mage hand to open doors, but then let a PC later use a rope tied to a handle, which was effectively the same thing. You should pick one or the other. Standing in front of the door to open it is dangerous, so it’s just if you want to force that or not.

Poison didn’t really feel right. In my game if you were poisoned, you immediately fell to death saves. In every instance the party was able to quickly heal the downed PC. So they were as deadly in theory as the 1e traps, but also effectively not.

One PC had detect magic up near constantly, but it didn’t really adversely affect the adventure in any way. The one place I fudged it was the dungeon collapse illusion at the first false ending. I waited until the PC stopped running and said they stop to look at something before I revealed that they were seeing illusion magic.

Entrance to the Tomb of Horrors
One of the PCs was a divination wizard and used a high level spell to determine the exact location to the entrance. Not a thing in 1e, but I felt it was fair to trade a spell slot resource to skip the two false entrances.

The Face of the Great Green Devil
One of the PCs sent their familiar into the mouth of the devil while looking through their eyes. I had them make a Wisdom save or they would have taken psychic damage. They succeed, so instead I described an ineffable eldrich abyss.

Chapel of Evil
The chapel was the first place they got stuck, which is what I expected. One PC kept walking back and forth to the corner with the secret exit, but also kept failing the passive perception roll. After about an hour and at the end of the session, I allowed them to spend some resources to get a big hint where to look.

Magical Secret Door
They found the door and investigated it enough to know what needed to be done, but none of them had the right spell prepared to unlock it. We did a little horse trading and I let them use a different spell of the same level to open the door.

Adamantine Door
Another door the party didn’t have the right setup for; they didn’t have three swords between them. Unless explicitly stated, I assumed all traps and doors were mundane things. So after they investigated enough I hinted there were switches in the sword slots that needed to be pressed. They carved up a quarter staff to make it work.

Cursed Gem and Bronze Urn
These two played off each other very well. In my game, one PC scooped up the cursed gem on the way out of the pillared throne room. The party did not accost the bronze urn and opened it gently. All I had to do was wait for the cursed PC to suggest a Wish from the efreeti, and boom.

Statues
I was worried the party would get stuck here, but for whatever reason they took an affront to the statues and used their first wish to send them away. Lucky break on them.

The Crypt of Acererak the Demilich
This scene also didn’t play out like I expected. The party was so distracted by the ghost that one PC thought they were going to grab the skull and run out of the crypt. I had them roll initiative and they were still focused on the ghost until Acerera’s turn which caught them off guard. It was a fun fight but still not a challenge for them.

I hope some of this helps some future DM.

This has probably come up somewhere but I am keen to hear your guys creative or interesting items you gave your players. I think there is a lot you can do but sometimes I get stuck in my head when thinking of cool items that are not just overpowered.

I go first: a magic music sheet that when played has a certain effect (in my case a "sonata of the forgotten", effect is pretty campaign specific) unslippable shoes, glowing chalk you can use to mark smth for example in a labyrinth and a mirror that makes invisible things visible

I recently started posting all our stream highlights over on Loops and I'm super excited about migrating all our content over to the Fediverse! I hope these are a welcome addition!

During each stream, our viewers can spend points to ask our characters anything, and the players (or the DM) have to answer in-character. It's been a lot of fun and this was one of the first few AMAs we did.

Enjoy! :)

Gestern kam die neue Folge der Pen & Paper News Online!

► https://youtu.be/pFdcS81nBq4

Mit dabei unter anderem @kritischerfehlschlag.de bzw. das Werk von @Seba und viele andere spannende Themen von @dnd und @wizards_magic !

Donnerstag (morgen) kommt die nächste Folge, ab nächste Woche wenn ich es schaffe bis dahin eine fertig zu stellen, heißt die News auch etwas anders, wartet ab! <3

Liebe Grüße und Hugs für alle
euer Martin

#penandPaper #news

I am planning a set piece that involves some NPCs deceiving my players. The short version is that my players will meet some simple farmers trying to bring their crops to market, only to find that they're actually smugglers in a Hatfields and McCoy's type feud, which the party then gets messily swept up into. I generally don't trick my players; I don't think there's anything wrong with it but I imagine some tables would take to it more than others. Do you trick your players? Are there some tricks you find acceptable and others that are unacceptable? For me, I have no qualm getting my players swept up into the seedy underworld of drug or artifacts smuggling, but I don't think I would run a plotline on human trafficking. That I think would be difficult in an unpleasant way for everyone involved.