r/DnD

I had a bit of a polarizing boss fight. Group of 4, we've all been playing like 10 years. They show up to BBEG, last session of the campaign, who has an amulet that sets off an illusion spell which made the players swap bodies. Mechanically I told the group to give their character sheet to the person on the left, "dont tell anyone how to play your character". 2 of them loved it. Their jaws hit the floor, they got all excited etc. The other 2 got upset because I didn't have them make a saving throw. Under normal circumstances I'd have done the throw, but the whole swap was kinda the gimmick of this entire encounter. Else it would have just been a standard fight with an orc with flaming swords. I told them my rationale, and to just roll with it and have fun with it, but they spent the entire boss fight irritated.

I guess I could have deceived them with an impassable saving throw but that's not really my style.

I dunno what do you guys think? Was I wrong?

EDIT: I just wanna clarify the campaign wasn't very long. About 5 sessions. So I wasn't expecting a ton of attachment to their characters. I would not have done this in a longer campaign as the final boss fight. We've been playing as a group for a long time, but this specific game was short.

I've got a new player joining the party; she'll be playing a life cleric. She wants to make it one of her character's convictions that the character will not kill 'people'. That would apply to all playable races, but she obviously can't have her elf say: "I will not kill playable races."

She also can't say 'humans', because that applies to only one race, or 'humanoids', because there are humanoid monsters. So, what would you have her say?

This feels like a dumb question, but I've been reading the lore of these races and it doesn't quite make sense to be. Dragonborn and Half-Dragons both seem to be half-dragon half-humanoid races descendant from dragons and both Cambion and Tieflings seem to be demonic humanoids descendant from fiends. In both cases, what's the difference between the two? Couldn't I just play a Dragonborn and roleplay it as a Half-Dragon, or roleplay a Tiefling as a Cambion?

This is something that's struck me playing both Pathfinder and... most editions of D&D, in addition to my recent runthrough of CRPGs Baldur's Gate 2, 3 and Wrath of the Righteous (in which they had to re-homebrew the Assassin class because they messed it up so bad).

In 5e, the Assassin procs his 'special ability' only on Surprise which is basically entirely GM dependent, and means that after the first round of combat the trained Assassin is indistinguishable from a basic Rogue.

If that wasn't strange enough, they then introduced the Gloomstalker class, which gets an additional attack on the first round, improved initiative and a bunch of tools that are arguably more Assassin than Ranger, and fairly inarguably more Assassin than... well... Assassin! Why do Assassins have to multiclass to properly realise their class fantasy?

Then they tried to fix this in 2024 with a sort of half-baked 'Assassins do more damage equal to half their level'. This feels like such a lazy, underdeveloped bandaid on the problem, and as far as I know has been met with an equally muted response.

What about Pathfinder, then? It, too, has a fairly underwhelming Assassin... and then it has the Slayer.

The Slayer studies it's target for bonuses to knowledge skills about that target and bonuses to hit and damage - something essential for a Rogue with it's lower BAB.

So what gives? Why is there another class that's had very Assassin-like abilities loaded into it, rather than into the Assassin class?

Studying targets, making extra attacks at the beginning of combat, reacting quickly at the beginning of combat? Outisde of janky surprise rules, these seem like things that belong to this class.

How do you make sure that your players find the secondary quest or storyline hooks without shoving them in their face?

For example, let’s say that the wizard at the top of the tower they just defeated to save the village was actually working with the mayor to extort the village or lure adventurers in. I thought a note left on the desk or trunk would suffice but want to make sure that the players would find it. If they are looking around the mages room, do you draw attention to it or make them be thorough so that they may miss it sometimes?

As the title says, I’m not currently playing in any campaign. I love D&D though. I love playing, and I’ve DMed before too.

I’ve played both live and online, and it was all great.

But right now, I just can’t play. My friends and I all got busier with jobs and life, and you know how that goes.

I’ve always liked writing and developing worlds, but I’ve struggled with creating fully original settings or fleshed-out book-style stories. I can write a short story here and there, but I usually end up scrapping them pretty quickly.

That’s where D&D comes in for me. I absolutely love developing stories, characters, ideas, and even mechanics for the game. It lets me take a framework I already enjoy and build onto it creatively.

I think it’s amazing how a game created decades ago still inspires so much creativity in people — not just active players, but fans in general.

Can anyone else relate?

I was thinking about villains or BBEGs who seek to destroy the worl/kill everyone or something similair, but they can tend to have pretty boring motivations such as just power for power's sake or to feel superior or some other in my opinion relatively banal reason that I dont find very engaging. So, what do you think could be interesting reasons for someone to desire the downfall of humanity?

In the campaign the party have to stop the BBEG from destroying the world. The BBEG plans to travel back in time, kill a peace loving king or someone of importance that will drastically change historic events…..

Here’s the twist… the current timeline isn’t the original and is the results of the Party playing with time magic. In the original timeline the BBEG was a member of the Player’s party and their friend and was a virtuoso with time magic… they went back in time to stop the King from dying… but the current world is worse than the original…

BBEG hates the current players party, as he knows everything about them as they were really close but they aren’t his real friends, just bad copies that don’t matter once the BBEG “fixes” the timeline…

What are your thoughts?

I was reading the PHB, and I saw a line suggesting that a backstory for your character could be that you were an experiment by a lich.

So I had a funny idea. That’s your backstory, but this lich keeps turning up to see how their creation is progressing. I was thinking they would be a wizard in class, so there would be awkward scenes where the lich tries to teach the sorcerer how to be a wizard, and then gets frustrated when it of course doesn’t work.

Kinda a funny npc to pop up every so often when you level up a few. Maybe even a patron to the rest of the group.

If you are in darkness, but your target is in dim light 15 ft away, do you still take disadvantage on a ranged longbow attacks for that creature? Even though you can see it perfectly fine?

Just wrapped up another session of a undead/crunchy campaign that has been going great!

The party just fought against a raised Paladin being controlled by an evil sorcerer

Two party members die!

The Undead Paladin coldly impales the two by the heart. The Barbarian thanks the survivors for trusting her, the party's paladin tosses them his Orders amulet before dying by his old masters undead hand

After we've wrapped up session, my girlfriend says:

"You need to go fuckin shake G. R. R. Martin's hand after this one, ye fuckin _rude bastard_"

I am a DM starting up a new campaign. Currently then players are figuring out characters. Our youngest player is 21, our oldest players are 30. I have one player who wants his character to be 15 years old. I personally don’t feel comfortable having a minor character, as I cover very adult themes in my campaign (drugs, vampiric seduction, brothels, and the like). This player is saying he’s okay with changing it to 18 but he’s being kind of passive aggressive, arguing age 15 “makes more sense for his character”. Another player is saying that I’m being too strict. I will note that a few other players have expressed concern, comments like “uhhh what the ****?” Or “that’s a little weird.”

What’s the verdict? Am I being too strict, or is this a fair rule to have in place?

Let’s assume there are humans who remember a world before magic. There were stories, sure: holy men able to cure illness with water from a sacred pond; wizened recluses who could walk among the brush and beasts without issue; minstrels who could soothe not only a soldier’s night terrors, but their physical pains as well; and so on and so forth. They were only stories, tales told to children to lull them to sleep. When people went searching for those places, they found… nothing, and no one could recall or produce any record of such things ever truly existing.

Then, all at once, at the height of some emotional outburst, a child calls forth a bolt of fire from a bloodline long suppressed; a fervent prayer is answered; a lutenist’s “Thy Mother” joke causes actual pain.

I’m trying to wrap my head around if I do this, what needs to be taken into consideration?

So long story short we added a party member's brother to the session and ever since everything dies before I get my turn in rotation even things that should be super tanky. They both play minmax monk style builds with some barbarian and dish out multiple attacks every turn that move the enemies around the battle mat. Last night's session I was there 6 hours and didn't get to make a single combat roll out of 4 different combat scenarios. How should I talk to my DM about adjusting enemy health so I feel involved without making later encounters impossible.

Very disorganized mess of me trying to explain my perspective on the matter. Please bear with me.

When I first got into DnD, the group I started learning with had a style of "DM writes the story, players provide characters to experience the story with" which meant very little development of the characters was going to happen. It was basically a JRPG where you made a static character that would go through the DMs book, and I was fine with that. I'd never played before, how would I know anyone played it any differently? That first impression was my only impression of the game for about a year, and I think it's something I need to un-learn, but I also need to learn what the correct alternative mindset is, because my current one is definitely still wrong.

Over the years I've heard all kinds of horror stories about the extremes of "player's backstory is too long and act like the main character" and "player doesn't care about their own character and doesn't have a personality" so I try to stay in the middle where I care about my character but try not to be too intrusive.

I also hear stories about DMs that either butcher or completely ignore their players' backstories/goals, and have been in a few myself (I originally wrote them out, but this is the wrong sub for that) so avoiding that frustration is definitely another reason I avoid writing out long-term goals for my characters. Besides, if I really wanted my character to have a pre-determined set of experiences throughout the campaign, I'd write a book instead.

Most DMs I've played under try to convince me that my character needs a personal hook/goal within the campaign, and I just don't get it. The way I see it, we'll be going on whatever adventure the DM has planned anyways, why should my character's motivation for adventuring be something specific, and why should it be something different from whatever the main adventure is? If my character is only adventuring to get revenge or whatever, why would he go traveling with a bunch of strangers to do anything that isn't seeking that revenge? That's a distraction from my goal, and requires me to intentionally act against my character to join the adventure. So why even have a secondary goal if I need to pretend it's not that important in order for the game to even start?

That being said, if another player has a personal goal, I will do what I can to make that happen. The relationships and interactions between player-characters is my favorite part of the game, and helping them achieve their goals is part of that.

Hi, I'm settting up a small space for running our DND sessions. I wanted to ask what complaints have you had about chairs during your DND sessions. Computer chairs or gaming chairs are not possible due to costs and I need to be able to fold the chairs or stack them for storage after the session is done.

Give me a GoT-Character and his/her DnD-Class. I start with Jon Snow - Beastmaster Ranger and Battlemaster Fighter.