r/DungeonMasters

Soo, I love building characters, looking at how various classes combinations mesh together and how much damage/healing/etc. I can dish out with a character. I will not be a hypocrite and pretend that's not the case. But I reckon that comes at least in part from the fact that I arrived at TTRPGs after growing up with video games, with MMOs and other such things, where character builds where quite central.

I would also make the argument that, TTRPGs shouldn't necessarily be about that. Or at least that the primary focus shouldn't maybe be on that. That the character's story should take precedence to its build. It's identity tied more to his story and the world it is part of then to the combination of race, class, background and feats. Of course, speaking now mainly from the perspective of trad games, like D&D and Pathfinder. I also don't want to present this as if this should not exist, but rather a slight change regarding focus.

I also wanted to look into D&D's history and see how this trend evolved over the years, from the first editions to the current day. And I have to say, this look into the past has been quite interesting. Might do a more in depth article about AD&D's kits in the near future, I found them quite an interesting design space. I hope you will also enjoy it, find it interesting and that you see the perspective of this argument. I know there are other TTRPGs where this issue is not as prevalent, but D&D is usually the first point of contact with this hobby and for many it remains the only point of contact, so I thought offering this perspective might be desirable.

Hello all! I'm running a campaign where the twist is, all my players play as Goblins! They're currently in an all out war with an army of undead controlled by 8 Arch Liches, whom are led by a Lich Emperor of sorts by the name of Ahriman.

Currently, their goal is to go around, liberating all of the cities they helped in my first act of this campaign.

My struggle is, I've never DM'ed an all out war before and liberating cities.

I'm open to suggestions and questions of all kinds!

I'm curious what the consensus is on players pre-scripting their roleplay out of sessions. Some of my players have taken to talking to each other about how they would react to certain scenarios or things that they can say during next session. They plan out their roleplay beat for beat and then recite it during session. As a DM, I'm curious if other DMs have rules against pre-scripting, or if you simply feel like it takes away the magic having your players spoil their roleplay. After putting in a bunch of time and effort into preparing the session, I already know what's going to happen because instead of roleplayers, my players are going through the motions.

hello you all i need help! i need my party to destroy an object that is harmless and i don’t know how to get them there. i’ll try to make this short and leave out unimportant details, because if i explain the whole plot it’s gonna be an essay. basically the plot of the campaign is that there is a very powerful artifact that can be cast magic through, the bbeg is trying to destroy the object. the artifact is somewhat unexplored and introduced a fairly new type of magic, so the world it plays in doesn’t know a lot about the artifact. the players suddenly feel a powerful wave and other stuff. for like 10 seconds. this wave happens when the bbeg is trying to destroy the object for the first time. since the object is so unexplored people who have studied the object don’t think it had anything to do with it because it should be impossible to cast a spell that powerful through the object. the point is, when destroying the artifact it releases a big wave of power - the party has to figure that out. so: party feels strong magical wave party tries to figure out what it is think it’s related to artifact research shows it can’t be related to artifact since spell that strong can’t be cast party has to figure out WAY LATER that it’s related to the artifact, but it’s caused by bbeg who is trying to destroy artifact.

my idea is: the party finds an object, i wanna make an example, i am not set on the object and maybe you have ideas for that aswell: „a shard of illusion“ with which you can cast level one spells of the school of illusion, then they have to destroy the object FOR SOME REASON and a way more powerful spell gets released

long story short: i need an object that holds some sort of magic, it HAS to be related to being able to cast spells and the party HAS to destroy it. what object and how do i get them to?

i was thinking something like after casting 10 spells through it the object plays a loud sound and that’s where they try to destroy it but what if they rather think the object was cursed ? and think the powerful spell that gets released then is related to a curse and not to the fact that destroying it released a lot of magic?

i’m really at a loss here and i need a dnd party full of creative people fool proof plan to get my players to destroy this object and also come to the conclusion that destroying a magical thing you can cast spells through WILL release a more powerful spell (and then they hopefully connect the dots lmao)

thanks in advance and i’m sorry this still has gotten so very long

Hello all!

My party will be entering a dangerous swamp soon.

Any good puzzles I can throw at them that aren’t just generic nature obstacles?

hey guys. i run a game every other week and i have literally never written a proper session recap. i always mean to, and then it's four days later and i've got three bullet points i can't read anymore.

so i built something for it and figured some of you might be interested in it.

Chronicle

basically it records the session and afterwards it transcribes it and mashes it together with the stuff my table already produces anyway, dice rolls, when combat kicked off, who went down, what monsters and npcs turned up. then it spits out a recap i can read out loud at the start of the next session. i still edit it every time.

Chapters

the audio and the transcript get deleted once the recap is written. and if you don't like being recorded or just don't care you can turn the whole thing off.

it's not perfect btw, it absolutely butchers made up names. one of my npcs was called Ysolde Vantenebre and it came back as "isoldeven" lol, but yeah you can fix those manually, and hopefully in the future I will fix these little issues.

anyway it's part of a site i've been building called RollCamp, it's free. i post devlogs over on r/RollCamp if you are curious and wanna see more of it.

Hi Dms!

Looking for some inspiration. I am a new DM, and took on the challenge of making a Homebrew, with some oneshot elements in it. So far 2 sessions in we are having a lot of fun. The next part a 'Villa Heist' is mostly homebrew, and for that I am looking for some inspiration.

The team is 5 level 2 players, most quite new as well. They already now about the heist, and competing parties have asked them to steal something (a mysterious stone). I am thinking of splitting up the party, 2 or 3 as infiltration (they already found a way in), and 2 at a party that is being held. I was thinking of letting the two at the party find out information, that they can magically give to the infiltration party.

I was wondering if anyone has some good ideas on:

- what type of loot is suitable for their level if they find a treasure room

- fun activities at the party to get information

- Before the party, when they go clothes shopping, should I try anything to make that extra fun?

- How to not make this to railroaded?

Any tips welcome, thanks!

I made a campaign recently for my son (13) and nephews. My son is really enjoying dnd and has his friend wanting to try. His friend (13) has never played dnd before.

I’m looking for recommendations for an age and skill appropriate one shot that both of them can play and that we can reasonably complete in either one 4 - 6 hour session or maybe two 4 hour sessions.

I thought about making a new campaign for this, but I’ve been working 90+ hour weeks recently and do not have the mental bandwidth to create a short campaign like this.

Thank you.

There is an NPC I've been planning to kill for a while now that's a good friend to the Party and one PC specifically. I'm planning on killing them in a lowest point/Dark Night of the Soul moment that will be coming up in a month or two. He was going to be one of a couple of NPCs and allies to die and he would die sacrificing themselves to help save some of the party.

The problem was introduced when it came up in conversation that if said NPC dies "that would be hard to move on from" for one player. I asked for clarification, like if that meant it would make the game less enjoyable after that (I don't think I tipped them off or anything) and they said they didn't know.

So now I'm worried about killing them off. Should I still do it? I don't know. As the title says, I'm just looking for advice, thank you!

Something I've been thinking about is how to handle Horde and Alliance characters in the same party.

Back in older WoW, the faction divide was much stricter. Playing together across factions simply wasn't really a thing, and depending on when your campaign is set, having an Orc, Human, Forsaken, and Night Elf casually adventuring together could feel very strange from a lore perspective.

Modern WoW is obviously much more flexible about this, with the factions cooperating far more often and cross-faction gameplay becoming increasingly normal.

Of course, the era your campaign takes place in makes a huge difference. A campaign set during the Third War or early WoW might justify much stronger restrictions than one set in the current timeline.

I'm not sure yet how strict I'd want to be. Part of me likes preserving that faction identity and making Horde vs. Alliance actually matter, but at the same time I don't really want to tell someone they can't play the character they're excited about just because another player picked the opposite faction.

How are you planning to handle it in your campaign?

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Hello all!

I am currently using the free version of Roll20 to play and record my sessions. I am using Beyond20 to connect the VTT to DnDBeyond.

I am thinking about switching to Foundry VTT, Discord for video/voice, and DnDBeyond for character sheets.

Just wondering if the switch is even worth it.

Thanks!

Edit: I play with a group of 5 players. They are all out of state.

I understand computers, but am by no means an expert.

Roll20 I have the MM, but no other books.

Am I able to upload maps to foundry, but then GM from a different computer?