#Dm advice

[thelibraryofthacey]

No idea the source, but here have this.

Edit: Source is Pretendo Games. Thanks to @happilyeveraftereveryday for finding them!

[theworldbrewery]

1d12 ways to complicate an encounter

A magic or mundane artifact generates an effect harmful to the PCs, but it is guarded by the monster's minions.

The encounter's setting starts to collapse during the battle, and all the combatants will need to escape.

A boss monster has a 'second form' that activates mid-way through the battle.

Traps are placed throughout the battlefield, and characters must be wary of them.

The PCs must complete a ritual while fending off attacks from the enemy.

The encounter area is a series of cliffs or platforms, forcing characters to jump around and risk falling, possibly into a pit, water, or lava.

There is a monster that uses the blink spell or tunneling to avoid attacks between its turns.

A minor enemy has the ability to summon or call for reinforcements every round.

There are three sides, not two, battling in this encounter.

A disastrous environmental effect, such as an avalanche, wildfire, or earthquake, occurs in the area, dealing damage and forcing the combatants apart.

An anti-magic pulse affects some areas of the battlefield periodically, suppressing spells and magical items when it is active.

The enemies are shockingly weak and easily defeated, but the PCs' goal isn't here -- the treasure chest is a mimic, or their princess is in another castle.

[dailyadventureprompts]

So lately I've been running games that give players a lot of power when it comes to world building, encouraging them to make up facts about the world or npcs whole cloth as a regular part of play. Thing is, I play with a good number of people who don't consider themselves storytellers and tend to be quite intimidated by the idea of improv.

Some people (like myself and a few others I know) are endless fonts of ideas, eager to scribble in the margins of someone else's work, but for other folks it can be a real challenge to come up with things on the spot or work up the confidence required to be that kind of collaberator. As such, I've been working on techniques to help my more reticent players get accustomed to their own creative agency:

Give them a Scaffold: Often it's as simple as giving players an emotion they can tap into along with the prompt to make something up, whether it be funny or nostalgic or gross. I can say " This person who you need to get past to talk to your contact is annoying and doesn't want to let you through. What's pissing you off about them?" or " we open the sarcophagus looking for the amulet and we find something awful inside, what is it?" and the player will add the requisite detail with something they find relevant or horrifying. BOOM, instant engagement. Other times I'll have them describe something from their own past or a work of fiction they like, which most people can recall details about just fine when they'd struggle with making something "new".

Give them Homework: Making up stuff on the spot is HARD, so give them time to work on it ahead of time. Say I was prepping an adventure that happened at a mall, I might ask my players to make up 5 stores or NPCs each and give them a little ingame reward for posting them in the groupchat. Things like this can especially help if you're prepping an adventure in a region/town that's more focused on exploration and so requires more material than average.

[dare-to-dm]

A rule I have when DMing games is that a player can always choose to fail. If they think it'll make things more interesting or if it's funny or fits the character or if they just want to see what happens. Sometimes I'll give them a little reward for doing this, but I've found that once you establish that failing can lead to interesting consequences, players get on board.

[sheepintheastralsea]

if you are a dungeon master (or even a fantasy author/worldbuilder of any kind) and you don’t know about donjon let me make your life a million times easier

want to make a fantasy calendar with your own year-lengths, weeks, months, and lunar cycles? https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/calendar/

need to come up with some medieval town demographics? https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/demographics/

want to make a map and layout of a city/town? https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/town/

want a fleshed-out tavern complete with menu, innkeeper, patrons, rumors, and secrets? https://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/inn/

leading your players through a dungeon and want to customize the size, treasure, layout, theme, etc? https://donjon.bin.sh/5e/dungeon/

tired of creating lists of magic items for different shops to sell, or hoards to be looted? https://donjon.bin.sh/5e/magic/shop.html and https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/treasure/

even a customizable initiative tracker! https://donjon.bin.sh/d20/initiative/

and that’s only scratching the surface! I really recommend all dms check this out. oh, and it’s completely free!

[agentgrange]

I saw this post and couldn't stop thinking about it, so here is the answer I gave after some consideration-- I'll tell you when I find out. Sometimes it really feels like it depends on your Agents, and what they're accustomed to. I have two groups that I play with, one is mostly serious with a handful of gallows humor quips while the other one is absolutely clown-shoes-goof-goof-times. You could lovingly craft a deeply unsettling body-horror scene or run a tried-and-true encounter straight out of an established campaign and your mileage will greatly vary depending on your audience. That's not *necessarily* a bad thing, a handlers job is to guide a narrative in a way that's first and foremost fun for the players. If they want to take it seriously and buy into the horror they will, but if they want a bit of levity then there's nothing wrong with playing to the crowd. But I do really, really empathize with struggling to convey the awesome and terrible might of some cosmic horror with nothing but your words in a group of people that (hopefully) instinctively feel at ease and jovial while fooling around playing games with their buddies. Here's a few practical pieces of advice I can give you.

Try to cultivate an unsettling environment for your players. This one seems obvious but is actually really hard to get down right, especially when people mostly play online these days. But you’d be surprised how much regularly providing good visual aids, a Discord bot playing ambient music, and a good playlist can really set the tone for your session. Don’t just provide visual aids for the money shots of alien greys and deep ones either, running a campaign based on The Conspiracy era gives you ample opportunity to post a ton of weird, liminal 90s photographs to set the vibe for everyone even during otherwise mundane scenes.

Make a point of explaining to your players the difference between what they are experiencing and what their characters are experiencing. Yes, facing off against a 8ft tall fish man with a crossbow is inherently ridiculous as a fictional abstract. Its an entirely different experiencing actually being there, face to face under an incredible amount of stress seeing something that should not exist. In a lot of ways your players aren’t their characters so much as they are mad gods guiding their characters’ fates. THEY can laugh from the safety of this higher dimension we all exist in, that’s part of the fun. Hell their characters might even have a passing thought or two about how absurd the situation might be—but that entire time they’re fighting their lizard-brained instincts just to stop from mentally imploding. Let them laugh, but then tell them how their characters' hands might be shaking, or how any clever quip they wanted to say just comes out as a mumble as their body betrays whatever thoughts their rational mind tries to convey.

Know the rules of comedy. Comedy usually needs a straight-man, so if your players are goofing around don’t be afraid to give them a straight-man NPC to react to their antics in a way that makes it feel like you’re in on the bit but keeps the narrative going. Better yet, try to get ahead of it. Set up designated low-stakes areas in your story that are designed to add a bit of levity. They say comedy comes in threes, so you should structure these segments to let your agents to do some dumb shit about three times before they get all the sillies out and are ready to move on. And the emotional highs during these side quests will just make the crushing lows in the main plot feel that much more horrifying.

Building off that last one I have one more secret, forbidden technique. Buyer beware on this one honestly, but I cannot overstress just how much. Players. Love. Silly. Characters. And as David Lynch has proven, you can have silly characters that are still deeply unsettling. Try adding a few characters in that flip the script on your players and make *them*  want to play the role of the straight-man reacting to what your NPCs are doing every once in a while. If done right, it can kind of trick them into taking things seriously or feel like the eerie out of place comedy is at their character’s expense even if the players are in on it.

I hope some of this was at least partially useful. Good luck out there.

[anim-ttrpgs]

A big part of Eureka is splitting the party. Normally games are loathe to do this because of the potential to bore players while they passively watch others play the game. I'm curious how you deal with this when you run Eureka. Sending players away seems like it could make it either better or worse. Like if it's at a home, people can go hang out by the snack table and drink and chat, but that doesn't work as well at, say, a game store. I'm curious how people felt about having to leave the game several times.

While the risk of boring the players or putting too much stress on the GM is a real concern, the addage of "don't split the party" actually originated in the TSR D&D era, where splitting the party made them weak and vulnerable to all sorts of situations that would be less of a problem for a full strength party, However, for a game like Eureka that produces more conventional narratives (everyone take note that I did not say that Eureka produces more narrative or is "more focused on narrative", just more conventional narratives) and has more of a focus on intrigue and horror, the party splitting up to cover more ground and collect more clues in the limited time they have to solve the mystery, but also making each one of them more vulnerable if something happens, is an actual trade-off that can improve the gameplay and story.

First of all, besides it just being really entertaining, I really recommend you listen to the Tiny Table Actual Play of Eureka. It has some really good examples of splitting the party and sending players away that are executed really well, and also some good discussion of it in the post-mortem episode and the interview.

I’m going to answer the ask directly from my own gameplay experience, but I really really urge anyone who has played Eureka to comment with their own experiences with splitting the party and sending players away.

Alright, so, obviously how long players are willing to wait their turn is group-dependent, but with our own group, we’ve actually kinda had the opposite problem from players getting bored. Instead, Narrator and the players whose characters are currently in the spotlight start to worry that they’re selfishly hogging too much session time, and try to rush the scene along (to its great detriment), when in reality the players who were sitting out were happy to keep waiting. Realizing this led to us altering the advice regarding splitting the party in the rulebook, and actually recommending the Narrator go a little longer before switching to the other characters.

I personally am happy to wait up to like 90 minutes if my character is out of the scene, because I have faith in my group and also in Eureka that the payoff for waiting will be that much greater, seeing the characters relay what they have learned while they were apart in dialogue rather than the player just saying “My investigator tells them everything that happened.” It really heightens the tension, lets the characters shine, and can even really help with solving the mystery, because having the events and evidence recounted out loud can help with making connections that might have gone over people’s heads the first time.

Of course like the rulebook says, it also comes to the judgement of the play group as a whole, and should definitely be discussed beforehand basically as part of session zero, and even mid-session if it needs to be. (Communicate your preferences to your play group!!!!!) There’s plenty of scenes and situations where having the other players leave the room instead of sitting and watching would add nothing at all to the experience.

Now I want to hear other people’s opinions. If you have played Eureka and had a party split where some players left the room or otherwise excused themselves, how did it go?

[dungeonmalcontent]

If you ever feel like maybe it's a little embarrassing to do voices in d&d, like maybe you won't do it good enough or people will think you're weird, you will never be more embarrassed than my college rhetoric TA. This girl was maybe 23, tops, pale white girl with red hair, stood out in the room like a sore thumb. She was smart, don't get me wrong. Had the course material memorized (probably better than the professor, honestly). But the first time we went through the "lineage" of Greek philosophers and got to Cicero she busts out with the best Cicero (TeS) impersonation I've ever heard in the middle of the class. Not much, just a "what?! Cicero?!" Like someone was accusing her.

No one expected it. The Prof looked bewildered. She mumbled her explanation about how she and her bf had been playing a lot of Skyrim lately.

Anyway. Tl;Dr. You will never be more embarrassed than Cicero, my rhetoric TA.

[david-goldrock]

Is this balanced? A bard wanted to use this homebrew spell... I think it's a little bit too much damage, but I need help rebalancing

[the-chessboard-is-personal]

hey does anyone have any tips for dnd (or any ttrpg really) campaigns that don't have an economy/currency?

I'm trying to run a Mario themed one but can't use coins or anything similar for........reasons

let's just say. I 100% cannot have any form of currency in this campaign for reasons that I won't spoil bc my players are on tumblr

but like..there's no videos about that ever. so uh

help?

[bbubblerum]

BBED: Big Bad Evil Dudes

Hello I'm Ana and this is the second in the BBED series! Each installment is a different Homebrew BBEG of a different Challenge Rating that is as fleshed out(And hopefully cool and fun!) as I can make it. The art and statblock for each is made by me and I hope you have fun using them, either as they are or reflavouring them. Remember the lore info and stats are there to inspire you to do what you want to do, not as hard rules!

Lore: Norlash is an abnormally large Yeti born in the far north to the North Peak Yeti Clan which was ruled with an iron fist by a terrible Frost Giant.. He made a terrible deal with the Demon Lord Kostchtchie, Lord of the Iron Wastes for the power to free his people from the tyranny of a terrible Frost Giant named Baranok. In exchange for the frozen hammer Coldcrusher and all its dark power, Norlash was cursed to become all he hated.

Desperate to free his people, Norlash agreed, and with this magical warhammer he slew Baranok. But in the power vacuum of the Frost Giant's death, Coldcrusher urged Norlash to take his place and unable to resist, Norlash sat upon his frozen throne and became the ruler of his Clan.

Slowly he became just as tyrannical as Baranok, ordering his Clan to conquer all the other Yeti and Goliath Clans until all of the north had sworn servitude to him. Now growing older, Norlash the Yeti King is more impatient than ever to grow his empire. Marching south to conquer even more land as his hammer corrupts his mind.

Running Norlash: Norlash is Chaotic Evil and likely to respect physical might over magical. He is likely to target the largest enemy combatant in a fight. This does not make him unintelligent though. He has 11 Intelligence which is above average for a human and far above average for a Yeti. He is a commander first and foremost and is smarter both in Intelligence and Wisdom than most. He has a keen mind for tactics and is used to completely devastating his opponents spirits rather than going straight for a swift victory. As a king, he is usually going to send his minions after enemies far before actually getting in a one on one confrontation.

Norlash was gifted two Winter Wolves as cubs by a Goliath chieftain in exchange for his life. They are named Hosnar and Malbidun are are his closest allies and some of the few creatures Norlash trusts. They can accompany him in a fight at higher levels or act as his generals.

Norlash commands legions of Yeti, Winter Wolves and Goliath who are loyal to a fault, also falling under the influence of Coldcrusher. If you wish, it would be easy to include creatures such as Goblinoids, Orcs, Xvert, Bheur Hags, Bandits and Kobalds in his army. Anything he could have conquered in your game can be easily added to his legions. Though if you are following his lore to the word, he would be unlikely to employ Frost Giants.

If your party is high enough level such as 9+ while fighting Norlash, it would be advisable to have him not be alone when confronted. Consider adding Goliath Berserkers, his two Winter Wolves or one or two other Yetis to the encounter if your party is abnormally powerful and you want it to be a tough fight.

I couldn't fit this on the statblock and make it tolerable but here are the layer actions!

Lair Actions: On initiative count 20 (losing initiative ties), Norlash takes a lair action to cause one of the following effects; Norlash can’t use the same effect two rounds in a row:

-A frozen wind descends on the battlefield, causing all creatures of the King's choice to make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or take 3d6 Cold damage. On a successful save they only take half damage. Norlash gains 10 temporary hit points as his armor is coated with frost.

-The King beats his hammer upon his breastplate, causing each creature in a 30ft. cone originating from Norlash to make a DC 15 Strength saving throw or take 2d6 Thunder damage and be knocked prone. On a successful save they only take half damage and are not knocked prone.

-Norlash roars, causing icicles to fall from the ceiling. Choose three 10ft. cubes within 60ft. that the King can see. Any creatures within those areas must make DC 15 Dexterity saving throws or take 3d10 piercing damage and be knocked prone and be grappled as they are pinned to the floor. As an action, a restrained creature or a creature within 5ft may attempt a DC 15 Athletics(Strength) or Acrobatics(Dexterity) check free the target from this condition.

[theworldbrewery]

saturday d&d tip: as a player, knowing the TTRPG snack etiquette is crucial. obviously going 3-6 hours straight with your crew with no snacks is an untenable situation, but how do you do snacks for D&D?

every table’s needs are different, but some principles:

good snacks are quiet

good snacks are high in protein, salt, and/or fat — all good for concentration and stamina.

good snacks are shareable - ideally can even be split into multiple serving dishes so people don’t have to reach or constantly ask for snacks to be shared.

good snacks don’t interfere with speaking — a spice level everyone can tolerate to avoid coughing, skip the dairy (which creates throat-clogging phlegm), etc.

good snacks are easy — prepared before the game starts, require few or no utensils

good snacks are clean — keep cheeto dust off your character sheet!

good snacks are provided by the players — the GM works hard enough prepping everything else, pay them back with treats!

[dailyadventureprompts]

Want to know my spiciest d&d take as someone who introduces a lot of people to the game?

Classes (and subclasses) should be rated for complexity, and newer players should be steered away from overly complex options so that they're not asked to do double or triple the work of memorization of other players. This is especially true if the player is going to be slower to pick up on game mechanics, be they young, old, or simply not someone who's very experienced with games in general.

Think about it this way: everyone at the table is expected to learn the base game (what dice to roll, how to pilot their character by talking, actions in combat), some of which is written down but the rest being vibes based and mostly communicated through gentle coaching by the DM. On top of that a portion of your players are going to have to learn how spells work, effectively doubling or trippling their early game class features. This is to say nothing of druids, who not only have to learn all the base features and spells but also have to keep several different statblocks on hand when it comes time to turn into animals/summon familiars. If you have my luck, it's always going to be the shyest/most anxious player at the table who selects the most complicated class, paradoxically meaning the player who's least likely to ask for help is usually in most need of it.

I'm not saying we should restrict all new players to only playing vanilla human champion fighters, but I think a level of oversight is absolutely necessary when guiding new folks into the game. Consider running a trial adventure that's limited to martial classes, introducing a few magic items half way through to give them a taste of what spellcasting could be like.

Forget about the traditional Tank/dps/expert/support/caster party balance, that shit is for experienced players who know what they're doing.

[craigofinspiration]

no one wants the game to grind to a halt because of a failed skill check or a newly deceased NPC

what do you think?

follow for more dnd shenanigans @craigofinspiration find my blog at pointsofinspiration.com support me on Ko-fi! Ko-fi.com/craigofinspiration

[dare-to-dm]

I often see references to the concept of a Forever DM in discussions of my favorite hobby. A hapless person who would love to play D&D, but is forced to forever manage campaigns instead because they don't know anyone else who will step up to do it.

I feel fortunate to not have experienced this in my own life. In the gaming groups I've been a part of, there's always been a rotation of Dungeon Masters, with multiple people happily volunteering to run the next game.

Perhaps I'm just very lucky, but I also feel like the concept of a Forever DM the way it's usually presented is kind of like a self fulfilling prophecy. If you see DMing as a chore that needs to be done in order to facilitate the fun of others, you're not really presenting it as a desirable role. You're discouraging others from giving it a try. And it's a shame too, because being a Dungeon Master is genuinely very fun and fulfilling. And it's something you can spend years honing your technique and getting better at, but you don't need to be an expert to enjoy yourself. The process of practicing is itself very enjoyable.

So I guess what I'm trying to say, is that if you see yourself as the Forever DM, and that's not something you want to be, than you should try reframing your own perception about the role. The DM is a player too, and the more fun you have, the more likely someone else is going to see you and say "I'd like to try that".

[quinnyyyleft]

DM Tip - Consequences.

Really that's the end of the sentence, but if you want further elaboration - Let your players see the fruits of their decisions come to fruition.

Let them see that village burn down because they didn't stop the evil Lord in time.

Have an ancient evil rise from the abyss that they ignored the call of for the longest time (I'm lookin' at you, Mighty Nein).

Even something as small as that tiny rabbit whose family you killed? They spend the next ten years training to kill your entire party in a revenge quest (Maybe not simple, but really cool)

Idk man, be an asshole.