Dungeons and Dragons

Playing the haunted house in Curse of Strahd, and our party was tracking down "baby Walter" in the sub-basement.

We made it to a sacrificial alter, when a bunch of ghostly cultists appeared and demanded "One must die. One must die."

We have a magic using zombie in the party, which was hanging back in the hallway. The cast disguise self to look like a living person, got on the altar for one of the other party members to run them through with a sword. We figured the zombie could be the most convincingly dead, and even if the sword did damage it wouldn't for real kill them. For the deception check the DM had the zombie player roll, they got a nat 20, so the ruse worked and the zombie didn't take any damage at all. The table went wild at this.

The specters disappeared, and Walter appeared from the murky water.

As a human fighter, I jumped on his back, hanging on by digging one hand axe in, and stabbing at the tendrils holding the baby in place with the other.

The rest of the party tried o damage Walter. The zombie player tried to run past but got absorbed into Walter.

Everyone kept hacking at the Walter monster until finally our large half Storm giant monk, who had dropped his weapon, was able to reach in with his bare hands and rip baby Walter out of the core of the monster, causing the creature to collapse into gore and Walter to turn into dust.

Kind of a shower thought, and maybe it's just how I run campaigns, but it feels like there's a lot of parallels between DMing and that guy who has a great idea for a book/movie but will never write a single page.

The DM comes up with "So what if there's this guy with this magic power, and the only way to beat him is through a very specific process." And then all the Players decide: who are the characters? What do they do? What do they say? How's it all work out?

This Kickstarter is for odd-numbered dice: D9. D11, D13, D15, D17 and D19. Available in Black, Red, Yellow, Green, Indigo and Purple. $12 plus shipping for the set of six.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/impactminiatures/cursed-dice

I’ve backed Impact! Miniatures before and it’s always been great.

I really like that odd-numbered dice even exist. It sounds like a what-if that was taken too far. And it turned out great.

What about a unique way to show curses and disadvantages to your players. Impact!'s cursed dice allow you to give your players a unique die to use for the session to show the effect of their misguided actions. A D19 to show a curse that prevents criticals and natural 20s. Along with several other different dice to disadvantage rolls in many creative ways.

These dice were designed to be as fair as possible for an odd sided die. All the sides are equal sized and equal distant from the center mass. Each die was created by a specialist trained in working with geometeric design.

These odd dice are all new molds and modified designs by Impact! We've learned from our attempts to make odd sided dice in the past and these dice are brand new designs to make sure the dice stop faster by being larger and designed to have better defined stopping surfaces. The new designs are also easier to read with larger fonts and better extras to show you the top value being rolled.

Apparently there was barely any change from the playtest version.

Key points:

• Bastions are acquired at lv5.
• Each player has their own bastion. Bastions can be grouped together into one bastion, but they are still treated as different bastions for the purpose of mechanics, except that grouped bastions can defend each other from attacks.
• Bastions can be populated with "basic facilities" (whose only purpose is flavour, apparently) and "special facilities". The latter provide actual tangible benefits by issuing orders to them during the "bastion turn" (once every 7 days). Special facilities are acquired as the players level up: two at 5th and 9th level, and one more at 13th and 17th level.
• Both types of facilities come in three sizes: "cramped" (4 squares), "roomy" (16 squares) and "vast" (36 squares), and can be upgraded later on. Some special facilities may have a minimum size requirement.
• The article provides three examples of special facilities. I'm not going to copy-paste them (click the link, you cowards).
• Project Sigil (WotC's own Virtual Tabletop) ad. Multiple ads, actually. My God stop talking about Sigil pls.
• Attacks seem... Lackluster. "In the event of an attack on your Bastion, a number of d6s are rolled. For each die that rolls a 1, your Bastion loses that many Bastion Defenders. If you don’t have any Bastion Defenders or lose them all in an attack, a random special facility is shut down for your next Bastion turn." Bastions that are grouped together can sum up their defenders total.

From what I'm reading, there are very few changes from how it worked in the playtest. I guess they were either lazy, didn't have enough time to integrate feedback, or both. This thing only exists to sell Sigil.

I am looking for a stat stick build where I just hit stuff really hard and a lot. Which do you think is better in phb 2024?

DM: "You exit the warehouse and make your way across the crowded market square. What measures do you take to avoid the suspicion of the guards?"

Paladin: "We walk like people who aren't covered in blood."

What did your group get up to last night?

The new College of Dance Bard subclass looks like it will be really fun. Unarmed strikes whose damage scales with Bardic Inspiration dice and uses Dex. Unarmored Defense that adds Charisma. Bonus action unarmed strikes when you use Bardic Inspiration.

You get to be 3/4 of a Monk, but also be a Face, and also be a full caster, and also get half proficiency in everything. And then the level six stuff buffs your party’s initiative and movement to the point it’ll be very hard to get the drop on you.

A fantastic new subclass all around.

We take a look at a workflow you can use to make running a campaign with multiple factions more manageable. We implement the concept of user stories, story mapping, and backward planning to create an evolving and flexible campaign.

It's a long one so grab a snack and something to drink. Feel free to use it to help you fall asleep :)

Hey folks! What's better than having a party of optimized characters? Having a party of optimized characters that work well together! Let's look at the concept of T-shaped individuals and how they can help us create parties that are resilient, and can do anything.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, I've never posted anything before.

I randomly got reminded of a webcomic I read around a year ago about a goblin priest(?) and orc paladin for the same god. The last bit I remember was the orc buying a dress using an enrichment fund that had an acronym starting with the goblins initial (it may have been KEF).

I've tried looking on Google, Lemmy and Reddit but I'm pretty sure I saw it on here. I believe it on the artists website but if anyone has any idea what it was called I'd be super grateful

Players who only have access to the 2014 Player’s Handbook will maintain their character options, spells, and magical items in their character sheets. Players with access to the 2024 and 2014 digital Player’s Handbooks can select from both sources when creating new characters.

Running Ghosts of Saltmarsh

I will try and dm Ghosts of Saltmarsh in a some weeks. To ad a twist and some flavour, i thought bringing in a bbeg who controls all three of the factions. I just need some ideas to weave it together. Any tipps and ideas on how to do this?
@dnd@lemmy.world

I made this a year ago for dragon friends, a wonderful D&D show with a bunch of Australian comedians bullying their poor dungeon master.

Highly recommend

Hey folks! Conflicts between player characters are very interesting when it comes to the narrative, but can be dangerous to the health of your gaming group. If you want PvP in your games, you best know how to do it safely. In this video we discuss some strategies to do just that. How do you navigate inter-party conflicts for drama that does not make your group implode?

This guy breaks down just how bad the layout of the new PHB is. The cross referencing is non-existent and the subsections seem to go in the order someone thought of them. I'm sadly unsurprised that they've not improved on any of these problems which existed in the original 5e PHB.

Hey folks! Here's an approach to roleplaying / finding your character's motivation that you've probably not seen in a D&D or TTRPG setting before. A lot of us, I think, could fall into the skyrim stealth archer trap. We start our campaigns thinking we're gonna play a PC that's unique. But as the sessions go by, we find out that we've been "roleplaying" ourselves after all. With this approach, we learn about the CHAMPFROGS - ten moving motivators that make up most people. With them, we can hopefully stop roleplaying ourselves, and instead graduate to Capital R roleplaying (if that's what we want to do of course - you're not doing it wrong if you're having fun).

Hi friends!

I wanted you to know about the City of Arches Kickstarter going on right now!

The City of Arches is a 160 page PDF and hardcover high-fantasy city sourcebook built for Lazy DMs and usable with any version of 5e or other fantasy tabletop RPGs. In this book you’ll find

• a high fantasy city setting surrounded by countless adventure locations.
• a setting easily dropped into any existing published or homebrewed campaign world.
• a setting where any race, species, origin, heritage, and culture makes sense.
• over a dozen adventure “biomes” with hundreds of adventure locations.
• three 1st to 20th level campaign arcs.
• an intro scenario, three adventures, and an adventure toolkit for building your own heist or infiltration adventure.
• beautiful full-color art, dungeon maps, and overland maps.
• a player’s guide with background hooks and setting-specific backgrounds.

Download the free 42 page preview on the Kickstarter page! I hope you’ll back this fantastic new book.

Thank you so much!

So the 2024 Players Handbook (PHB) is set to release in September. I've already bought and paid for the book. In fact I get early access in early September.

However a bunch of YouTube and other folks got the books much earlier and the embargo for them to talk about it lifted in early August.

So now I have to learn piecemeal how the new rules work. I have to hope whatever YouTube video I watch got the rules right. My only reference is random videos.

Luckily someone did write down a rough outline at https://rpgbot.net/2024-dnd-5e-transition-guide-and-change-log-everything-thats-different-in-the-new-players-handbook/

Anyone else find this to be bullshit? It's like Christmas morning for "influencers" but my gifts arrive in a month.

In short if folks know of a good copy of the 2024 PHB I'd love to read it.

Hi friends! I recently came across an interesting topic in D&D that I wanted to share with you all: creative use of items. For example, a rope can become not only a tool, but also a trap or a weapon. In one of the games I played, a mage dissolved a grate with acid instead of attacking. Have you ever had any unexpected situations with items? I'd love to hear about them!