u/Val_Fortecazzo

Have you ever thought to yourself you don't own enough RPGs?

Well I have news for you. Matt Colville, D&D 4e's greatest soldier, has finished fixing D&D 5e, so he's decided it's time to fix the OSR as well. This may or may not have been influenced by Matt seeing how grognards will buy any Kickstarter zine they come across even when it's the same damn systems and advnetures over and over again but slightly tweaked.

Introducing Crows: Fortune or Death. It takes all the things you know about the OSR like dying a lot, dungeon crawling, and black and white art, and it introduces new things you've never heard before like dungeon turns, organic progression, thinking outside your character sheet, PCs as competent professionals that don't need to roll to open a door.

Now as for pledge levels, what you really want is the 400 dollar GOAT edition, this gets you all the hardcover books, a screen, and some normal looking dice.

But if you are a poor, we also have a 50 dollar PDF that comes with a custom message by Matt to go fuck yourself.

Buy our game today or you hate small publishers and independent creatives.

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So a player (M38, furfolk vorelock pact of inflation) ate Vecna. Dunno what to do now.

I asked them why they ate the lich. They said they are expecting to gain some cool New abilities.

Thankfully the Session ended right after they finished swallowing the lich. Rules wise i haven t seen anything related to eating an undead wizard god, so I could use a hand here.

Do bones even digest in stomach acid? Or is he going to pass through completely sapient and cognizant and mentally scarred from the experience?

Player: "I use seduction on the dragon"

GM: "the dragon looks down at you in disgust upon the suggestion, deflecting with it's racism dice against your seduction, make a test to keep your cool"

Player: "I invoke my horniness to add to my roll. The dragon may view me as inferior but I'm into that shit, my seduction roll is 12."

GM: "okay that's fair, add your horniness that makes 15. The dragon is confused but turned on, but the dragon knows you sleep around with lots of dragons and is afraid of getting draconic chlamydia. I will exploit that to make her racism 16. You're sweating"

Player: "I will deflect suspicion towards the wizard, and remind the dragon I have 3 levels in paladin."

GM: "at your accusation the dragon unsheathes it's giant schlong, roll your dexterity and charisma to see who mounts who first"

Player: "but wait DM, first I play my feat "big things come in small packages" in attack mode"

GM: "ok that gives you advantage on the save"

Player: "ok that's a natural 20, critical!"

GM: "good that will give you a bonus to your orgasm modifier"

So me and my group have been playing shadowrun for awhile now but one of my players has recently acquired an intense phobia of D6s due to a horrific accident too gruesome and private to discuss here. So we've been shopping for a new system.

Preferably something that would mechanically support our current adventure which involves helping a young witch girl solve the disappearance of her neighbor's cat in a small village in the alps.

I will not be elaborating further on what we want from the system or what else we didn't like about shadowrun.

Thank you in advance!

We're currently 22 sessions into a campaign that I planned to run for around 70 sessions. Its a very story heavy sci-fi campaign with inspirations to Deltarune, Gravity Falls, Doctor Who and Warehouse 13 as the players interact with scp-like objects and weapons and locations or explore different realms.

I've put an embarrassing amount of time into preparing the maps, npcs, artifacts, homebrew features and weapons, random sexual events etc and lately I feel like my players aren't taking the game as seriously as I am.

One PC has started going full murderhobo. Last session was supposed to be a lighthearted beach episode like in my favorite animes and have the busty female NPC scream "pervert" at them, and he kept saying things like "I want to rip the teenagers in half while everyone screams" and spent most of the session destroying scenery, breaking NPC property, and trying to derail roleplay moments. Another player constantly tries to rob or attack innocent NPCs because they have interesting items. Another barely engages with roleplay because he's often playing other video games during the session in the background and only explicitly interacts with his ranger subclass anthropomorphic female dragon pet.

They're level 10, but it feels like they think that they're untouchable or something, except for the martial who dies to even the most basic goblins of my world (literally everyone has magical abilities except their loser). They once tripped over a blind guy with crutches while all three were invisible because they wanted to get into the camera room that the blind guy was blocking... btw this camera room deal wasn't an objective I gave them, they just wanted to check the records and archives because they didn't trust the person in charge...

So how should I kill their characters? Classic falling rocks? Level 20 tavern owner? DMPC? Or something really out of left field? Would FATAL fix this?

EDIT: I seem to have given less information then I had thought so let me say this, these players are all my friends of 3+ years. they're all adults, and we're playing online using discord and owlbear rodeo, because we're far apart (2 in the US, 2 in EU) and these friends of mine had played in other campaigns, they're not beginners and at least one of them has dm'd before, the murderhobo guy I talked about has dm'd a campaign for 3 years before cancelling it. the others have also played in other games and campaign both in and out of our friendgroup. ALSO i get that maybe the whole sci-fi setting doesn't fit dnd (5e 2014)'s module, I want to run a campaign with a module I MYSELF am familiar with, and that the other players are also familiar with, I don't want them learning a new system or go through a custom homebrew one just so that it fits the setting of the sci-fi world I built, I try my best to add features and items that give the feel of dnd meanwhile keeping it sci-fi

So just to start off I love actual plays and this will be my first time playing D&D at all. So I decided to DM for a bunch of strangers. And also not play D&D.

So I decided my DMPC is going to be like chuckles the clown, he's my favorite legends of avantris character because he's the only one I know. I'm also going to be playing the druskenvald setting but as a plot twist we are going to be reenacting critical role season 3's story. Needless to say it's going to be amazing and I plan to stream it on twitch (without the players knowledge btw, I want their acting to be real).

The only thing I'm missing is how to port all the player options, monsters, and mechanics over to Daggerheart. Is there another supplement I can buy to do this? I'd also like to port over the dungeons & daddies - not a bdsm sourcebook when that comes out. I don't know how it's going to fit into this plotline but I'm thinking like a crossover episode.

Also how do you play Daggerheart? I've never read the rules for either book.

So first up I just want to say I'm so glad that all that shit that happened in 2027 is finally behind us. Oh boy that took years off my lifespan.

So I've been messing around with the universes beyond splatbooks and I'm thinking of starting out as a pony race, taking pact of the demonologist warlock, with Archimonde as my patron. Pretty basic stuff, but should I also take a dip in fighter for hadouken? Or bard to get the Miku Miku beam? My DM also told me we will all get a chance to pick up a pip boy during the campaign and I've heard great synergies from some of the options in the Warhammer 40k book like the dakka dakka feat. The options have become so overwhelming over the years, but no matter what I pick Strahd won't know what hit him.

Or should I ditch all this and go for the classic and safe option of straight spongeborn wizard Jedi subclass with dual lightsaber proficiency? Since it gets online much faster.

So to get things out of the way you've probably seen my work in subs like r/DnD and r/osr and yes commissions open and link in the bio NSFW on patreon yada yada.

Anyways this guy, his name is Ron, he's been a regular customer for years now. Kinda weird but he's a nice kid. About a year ago he excitedly told me he finally got to play in a D&D group and asked me to make a commemorative portrait of his favorite PC. And so I do. But every week he comes back to me telling me his character died and he needs another new piece to commission, and this happens week after week after week. He even has an ongoing commission to add characters to a sort of graveyard piece and it's getting pretty full now. The pieces are easy enough and he pays really well. He gives me these absurdly long backstories to work with but Ive gotten good at just scanning them for key words, they are usually based off some cartoon or anime character anyways. The issue is he's kinda annoying and seems to think we are friends and he's always crying about his character deaths and saying how disappointing he must be to play with. And it's just a lot of emotional labor I don't know if I get paid enough for.

Last week seems to have broken him. He just keeps asking to talk and that he really needs a friend right now but like, I'm not his friend. How do I tell him to politely fuck off? I don't even care at this point if he goes somewhere else I'd rather go back to working at the mini painting shop even though the owner has a really short fuse at least he cared about us.

Strangest part is I don't know how he gets this much money, he's never told me what he does for a living.

So awhile back I met this nerd on a discord server where he wouldn't shut up about all his min-maxxed characters with 40 page backstories and treating them like his Tumblr OCs. Most of them aren't even particularly original, usually based on some anime or hazbin hotel character. So me and my group got a hilarious idea, if he loves making characters so much why don't we invite him in and keep killing him off so he has to keep making new ones?

We were subtle at first, a fudged dice here, a DC a bit higher than it should be, a monster that for one reason or another really wanted him dead. But let me tell you this guy is either stupid or a total pushover, so we eventually just gave up on hiding it. Rocks would randomly fall out of the sky and crush him, other players would attack him on purpose and claim it was an accident. At one point he rolled up a priest and first scene I have his own god smite him. I don't think he's actually gotten to play for more than 6 or 8 hours in this entire year he's been in our group. We kinda turned it into a game of who can come up with the most absurd death for him. Last session he went to the bathroom and we were talking about how fun this has been.

Anyways I'm coming here to reddit to ask for more creative deaths because the last one was just kinda phoned in. We just had a fire giant come in, stomp him to death, and leave. Or even just new ways to fuck with him in or out of game.

So we've been playing this campaign for a couple of months and I typically like to take game design from video games as everyone should as it's the superior medium. Part of that is restricting all my players to narrow corridor levels with arrows pointing in a single direction with waves and waves of enemies in the way. There are also a bunch of collectibles they can grab on every level.

It's been going well so far, I've been able to defuse every complaint from my players so far with facts and logic. But the players keep trying to go off course or ask where towns and shops are despite the fact I told them they would be in the central hub area. I don't know what they want from me since they seem so confused on where to go. Should I add yellow paint as well? Maybe a DMPC that escorts them through every level?

And if they keep asking for "player agency" and "open worlds" then how should I do it? I'm thinking ubisoft tower maps.

(Language warning)

(Violence warning)

(Sexual content warning)

(Mention of AI warning)

I already said it succinctly in the title (aren't I so refined) but this rant has been long coming and I need to get it out now so I can actually sleep. I’ve been dming this group for about 3 ish years now, playing with them for about 5 now in total, I consider them all intelligent and generally insightful people (less so than me of course) and above all my friends, but they keep using ai to make token art, or suggesting I use it for maps when I can’t find something that works, and it’s fucking infuriating. I’ve said it directly and acted in as blatant a way as I can without just calling them out on it that I abhor ai. The last time I tried to make a statement (a very clever and zesty quip I promise you that) after I had to begrudgingly use one of the ai maps they generated they acted like I slapped the guy in the face when I literally slapped him in the face. I’ve commissioned art of their characters, paying several hundred dollars. I’ve helped them build their characters from the ground up so they have a deep connection to the world I’ve made (because those plebs could rise to my level as a writer) and they can have with their character concept fleshed out as they want them to. And then I have to look in our server and see them posting more slop, taking the art that was made of their characters and pulping it like chicken nugget. I haven't been this disappointed since the 4th time they got up from the table to run a train on my wife.

Every time I see ai “art” being used in my game, it feels like I’ve invited my friends into my home, helped them make a nice sandwich with some appetizers I made on the side, then to come back 5 minutes later and see them throughly enjoying the same food vomited onto the floor and telling me and themselves how good it is, and also fucking my wife while I watch. The most infuriating part is they all know it’s bad, they know it’s a wasteful thing to do even in concept, not just for it’s unreliability or how brain dead it’s making people (especially my already illiterate peasant brained friends), yet they still use it out of just laziness or nihilism as we’re all being forced to with it. God I hate all of them so much, especially you Derek, you better have the child support ready in 4 months.

I understand that ultimately it’s their characters, and that bespoke art is expensive (I should know I've spent 6k dollars this year alone to get the critical role experience), or generic art out there won’t be a thing of best fit, it still feels like a slap in the face and that they don’t respect me or the effort I’m putting into this game. There are tools out there like hero forge, or just ms paint doodles (which I didn't use because it's not critical role compliant), I loved when they used to make those while we were playing, that make game art possible, and I hate that I can’t escape this plague of ai even in the world I am literally creating and am an infallible God over.

This was mostly a vent, mostly likely what I’ll have to do is take a hard stance on the next game I run with no exceptions (I won't probably), cause I can’t stand this in the long term, I don’t expect advice, or really any input other than praise, in fact if anything I expect to get a bit of hate for this (as the matyr I am posting how much I hate AI art on Reddit), but if you have any constructive examples of how to broach this with your players that doesn’t involve grinding your teeth to the root, I would appreciate it. (And irl too so I don’t crash out a relative next time they trust the google ai results, or get weird holiday shit from distant family).

So please tell me how morally righteous I am and give me lots of good boy points.