#dnd d&d

[customcreatures]

[mindboogling]

I love making a gag character for D&D, forgetting they’re just a gag character, and then take a step back to look at the original ref

[lesbeansoups]

I think we need to appreciate this part of Brennan Lee Mulligan's WIRED interview a lot more:

"The evangelical right in this country needs to manufacture outrage to hold onto its voting block. [The satanic panic about DnD] was arbitrary, as the targets of their outrage always are. Fight the power."

[ukrainian-groove-metal]

“my sentient sword came out to me as transmasc, i mean, talk about un-she/they-ing your blade!”

[dndprofessor]

[yendarvis]

Once the dead man is revived, we can ask him five questions, at which point he will die again, never to be re-revived.

[ordinarysparkplug]

you ever meet a guy you just KNOW would get enthralled by the amulet 🙄

[shutinthenutouse]

[just-dnd-thingys]

[customcreatures]

magenta galaxies

[kirain]

My favourite bit of BG3 lore is that Withers is legitimately responsible for the Dead Three, but he's probably too embarrassed to tell you, so every time you ask him to elaborate he just gives you a very stern, "Noooo."

I also love that the reason he's responsible for their uprising is because he got bored. He literally got bored of his position as Lord of the Dead and wanted to retire, so when these three morally questionable humans came looking for godhood he was like, "Hmmm. Yes, okay. Here. Take my portfolios. Fight over them. I don't care. I quit."

So after bowling with skulls in a friendly competition to decide who would get what portfolio, they took up his powers and wreaked havoc on the world. Only at that moment did Jergal, AKA Withers, AKA our precious Bone Daddy think, "I'm just now, internally, asking myself, in quite a worried way, whether I might've made an error."

So he joins your merry band and watches your escapades, calmly twiddling his fingers while you clean up his mess. He's happy to lend his aid, even to the point that he'll bring Durge back to life if they reject Bhaal, even though he technically shouldn't. But he's Withers. The rules don't apply to him. If Ao doesn't like it, he can descend from the Heavens and say it to his rotting face.

And the reason he saves Durge isn't necessarily because he likes them or because he's a morally good entity (though one certainly could make that argument), but because he wants to add insult to injury. He steals Bhaal's child with a big smile on his face, dubs them his Chosen, and praises them for rejecting all the power they were promised. But of course, he still doesn't tell them who he is—or rather who he was.

Then, when all is said and done, he throws Tav and their companions a cute little party. No one knows it's probably half a thank you party and half a "Withers is bored again" party. And if anyone misbehaves, he'll get irritated and whisk them away. Because how dare they? He put a lot of work into that.

And at the end of it all, he walks up to a mural of the Dead Three and basically goes, "Lmao. Thou didst fuck around, and thou didst find out." Just savagely roasting them.

And then poof!

He waves them into non-existence.

[maximumzombiecreator]

It's often remarked how D&D 5e's play culture has this sort of disinterest bordering on contempt for actually knowing the rules, often even extending to the DM themselves. I've seen a lot of different ideas for why this is, but one reason I rarely see discussed is that actually, a lot of 5e's rules are not meant to be used.

Encumbrance is a great example of this. 5e contains granular weights for all the items that you might have in your inventory, and rules for how much you can carry based on your strength score, and they've set these carry capacities high enough that you should never actually need to think about them. And that's deliberate, the designers have explicitly said that they've set carrying capacity high enough that it shouldn't come up in normal play. So for a starting DM, you see all these weights, you see all the rules for how much people can carry or drag, and you've played Fallout, you know how this works. And then if you try to actually enforce that, you find that it's insanely tedious, and it basically never actually matters, so you drop it.

Foraging is the example of this that bothers me most. There's a whole system for this! A table of foraging DCs, and math for how much food you can find, and how long you can go without food, etc. But the math is set up so that a person with no survival proficiency and a +0 to WIS, in a hostile environment, will still forage enough food to be fine, and the starvation rules are so generous that even a run of bad luck is unlikely to matter. So a DM who actually tries to use these rules will quickly find that they add nothing but bookkeeping. You're rolling a bunch of checks every day of travel for something that is purpose built not to matter. And that's before you add in all the ways to trivialize or circumvent this.

These rules don't exist to be used, that is not their purpose. These rules exist because the designers were scared of the backlash to 4e, and wanted to make sure that the game had all the rules that D&D "should" have. But they didn't actually want these mechanics. They didn't want the bookkeeping, they didn't care about that style of play, but they couldn't just say, "this game isn't about that" for fear of angering traditionalists. And unfortunately the way they handled this was by putting in rules that are bad, that actively fight anyone who wants to use that style of play and act as a trap to people who take the rules in good faith.

And this means that knowing what rules are not supposed to be used is an actual skill 5e DMs develop. Part of being a good 5e DM is being able to tell the real rules that will improve your game from the fake rules that are there to placate angry forum posters. And that's just an awful position to put DMs in (especially new DMs), but it's pretty unsurprising that it creates a certain contempt for knowing the rules as written.

You should have contempt for some of the rules as written. The designers did.

[big-boss-things]

dnd character idea; warlock that calls their party "chat" and their patron "mods"

[luciasatalina]

Lovely character named Favor for @fiestyguava, thanks again!! ♥

[dndprofessor]

[dwarf-posting]