I'm gonna be playing a tiefling hex paladin oath of vengeance. My DM let's me pick only bloodline of Asmodeus, so my tiefling spells are thaumaturgy as a cantrip, hellish rebuke as a second level spell and Darkness. I'm starting 5th (or 6th level, depending when I will join the story) and I'm going with 1st level paladin, 3 levels in hexblade, and the rest in Paladin. I will be taking pact of the blade feature and I'm definitely taking agonizing blast (so I'm taking eldritch blast). That leaves me with 1 warlock cantrip, 1 eldritch invcations, 3 1st level warlock spells and 1 2nd level warlock spell.

As for paladins spells, I will have 4 spells known at the start and 2 (or 3 if I start at 6th level) so which spells do you propose to prepare, I know that you can change it, but what spells do you say are good? So what should I choose?

I’m making a homebrewed potion that basically gives the user that drinks it a limited use of the Hold Person spell that doesn’t apply to spell slots, and I can’t think of a name so I thought you guys might be able to name it

I’m playing in a one shot soon and I have no clue what to play class and race wise. What do you guys think? (Level 5 character with one very rare magic item or lower and two rare or lower)

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I sent out a long letter to my party to prep the storyline, I got little engagement. This is my second attempt. I hope they and you enjoy it! We're a pretty silly party, so I think it works.

I DM a campaign with some of my best friends, and we have a blast playing together. Today, they were trying to find the villain's fortress, which required going through a land I created called "The Boiling Wastelands", which is basically a gloomy place that is extremely hot and has pools of boiling water. Anyways, they come across this wandering old homeless dude who's suffering 3rd degree burns on his legs. One of our players is a Wood Elf ranger named Cersei. She helped the guy out of the boiling pool, and then one of our druid variant humans named Vyravys wanted to buy the guy's shoes, despite them being boiled, stinky, and in tattered condition.

Vyravys somehow manages to persuade the old man to sell the shoes for 1 CP, thanks to his charisma modifier and a lucky Persuasion check. So now the old man has no shoes, and the old man doesn't quite feel comfortable around these guys now, so the old dude decides to try and run. Cersei catches him just barely thanks to the old man having really badly burnt legs. They threaten him his life if he doesn't stay with them, so he stays with them, and they come across some bounty hunters sent by the BBEG who forcibly kill the old man, and take them to the prison where they'll be executed. They start a prison riot, and Vyravys decides he wants to go to the gear room and steal all the guards shoes. He does so, getting 11 shoes total (including the old guys shoes). He then manages to buy the other prisoners' shoes, which is 15 so he now has 26 shoes. He then shapeshifts into a hawk, finds a rich guy, and our dragonborn dude flamebreaths the rich guy, and they steal his shoes.

So now, Vyravys has 27 shoes and he says that once we fight the boss, he plans to kill the boss and steal his shoes and have a collection of 28 shoes. And yeah, this is the type of campaign I put up with LOL

I’m making a changling hexblade warlock for an upcoming campaign. I’m looking at the Faction Agent but that got me wondering if there’s any factions that a Raven Queen warlock would join. Was thinking Zhentarim but is wondering if there is a less vanilla faction that would be cool to play. My DM is running a custom Forbidden Realms story but cool with multiverse factions. Just curious

So, I noted that, when starting from very low levels (like my upcoming campaign), Mordenkainen's Monsters goliath and Wizard actually make a decent combo, considering the Goliath's Stone's Endurance, and they no longer have an INT penalty. Thus, I thought I might give it a shot - it would be fun to have a big, beefy brute, who's actually super duper intelligent. I've already got a few funny ideas for his backstory - a PHD in Giant literature, graduated top of his class in stone-crushing and fire-making - and wonder if anyone has any more fun little quirks or backstory ideas for him? Open to just about anything!

I've just finished the Stormwreck Isle adventure with my son for the third time. I think it's time to try something else. I'd like something that is simple.

What would people suggest?

Are there easy homebrew stories that are suitable for download and print, or is it better just to buy a campaign book?

I prefer something that would have an interesting story. My son is young, so I find it too much of a challenge to enforce any rules.

I'm working on worldbuilding for a campaign which uses non-standard races, and found Tasha's Custom Lineages to be underwhelming. Individually balancing races proved tedious and extensive playtesting of each bit of homebrew wasn't possible. I wanted a systemic way to create new more-or-less-balanced races, and to allow players agency in creating their own races or builds.

To that end, I've created Sycamore's Expanded Custom Lineages.

It includes every feature from non-setting-specific races, using the most recent version in case of updates. It provides point values for each feature representing that feature's relative strength, flattens instances of the same ability under different names to a single entry, and gives descriptions which, where possible, remove world-specific lore (such as tiefling origins).

To use this sheet, select features from it until the resulting character uses 100 or fewer total points. If you'd like to view existing races built with this system, check out the 'Existing Races' tab. To see how accurate current point values are to WotC apparent valuations, check 'Point Balance' for average scores and standard deviations of all races.

Use Case

• For times when players propose a lineage substitution, and a DM wants to confirm the change is balanced.
• For split-lineages, like a character whose parents were an elf and a dwarf.
• For homebrew settings, which want to avoid baked-in assumptions about the heavens, hells, elemental planes, and more.
• For adding new races to your world, outside of the standard fantasy mold.
• If you'd like to do some fun grain-of-salt comparisons of existing races to see which are the most overloaded (It's Shadar-Kai).

Methodology

Getting point values for each feature was a bit involved.

To start, I catalogued all existing traits across all races. Then I found cases with identical functionality and different thematics (such as Natural Weapons), and flattened them to a single ability. I then assigned abilities into broad categories of power; 50 points for a 'build-defining' ability, 20 points for 'substantial power', 6 points for 'situational utility', and 3 points for a 'flavorful option with very niche utility'. These values were selected to encourage selection of flavorful options over raw power.

Then I calculated a total score for each existing race. These values were wildly disparate, with values ranging from ~350 to ~30. For each instance of each ability, I then took the race's total difference from 100 points, divided it by the total number of features, and averaged those instances for each feature to get a 'suggested delta'. These were applied to each feature, to get a rough estimate of how much WotC values each feature.

Finally, I took another pass over the abilities to compare features of a similar nature. For example, 'Hold Breath (1 hour)' from tortle is strictly better than 'Hold Breath (15 minutes)' from lizardfolk and should cost more.

Notes

• I'm not under the impression that these values are perfect by any means. I'll be refining them through feedback and playtesting down the line, but wanted to share the current state of the project.
• In my own games I will likely remove the options for 'Innate Spellcasting (1st, Early)', 'Innate Spellcasting (2nd, Early)', and 'Innate Spellcasting (3rd)'. Providing these options while allowing any spell to be selected is prone to abuse.
• If you'd like to use this sheet, I recommend making a copy of it. I'll be continuing to modify the doc as I do balancing passes, and things may move around unexpectedly.
• I had to strike a balance between keeping abilities recognizable and scrubbing thematics. Consider 'Draconic Cry' and the Kobold's earlier 'Grovel, Cower, and Beg'. Clearly the same ability, clearly two different implementations, but I wanted it to be obvious what the source of each ability was where possible.

Feedback

I welcome any and all feedback. Feel free to share your own builds, or nitpick about point values. Thanks for reading this!

TL;DR: Spend 100 points on this sheet to create a lineage. The system should be balanced, while providing lots of opportunities to customize.

I am a level 14 artificer that has been possessed by a powerful artifact. Next session I will have to PvP my party as a result of the possession. I have a fairly large and optimized party, so I will get stomped pretty easily. I plan on using Otiluke's Resilient Sphere and Blink to teleport into someone and 1v1 them. The spell specifies that the wall extends to the Ethereal Plane. Since Blink takes you to the Ethereal Plane, would the sphere disappear with you when you blink or should it stay in the Material Plane?

My player has been playing a changeling and is level 16. She has found a loop hole: she can make fae pacts because changelings are considered fae. She made a pact with her now fiancé to promise to marry her, however I plan to kill the fiancé. I keep doing research for what will happen once the fiancé is dead. Does the pact end?? Not intrested in reviving the fiancé for plot reasons. Can someone more well read give some advise?

Thanks!

Dear community. I'm a complete beginner in the world of dnd but I really liked the world and the combat system. I would like to get started but I imagine the game with minis in hex. How big is a minis regular for the game and how big is a hex? 28 mm scenery player characters or 32 ?

So for starters, this was the DM's first campaign, and he kind of inadvertently made it fairly easy, but the fight was fun anyways. We were doing a campaign based on egyptian mythology, and the final boss was the Apep the gigantic sun eating snake. I'm a draconic sorcerer and I've built my character almost completely around fire damage. The battle with apep last on initiative (dm rolled very poorly lol) so we all jumped him with powerful spells. Long story short,I was able to use banish to send apep to the shadow realm for a minute, while we activated an amazing relic the dm gave us that allowed us all one use of fire ball. My allies prepared themselves, and as the colossal snake reappeared, everyone took their turns to use fire ball, each doing somewhere around 20-35 damage, and then it was my characters turn. I was able to use metamagic to use fire ball twice, and early on, he gave me the ability to double a fire spells damage once per long rest, so I use all of this to deal around 120 damage. Overall, our combined fireballs delt just under 25p damage to the boss and killed it. Great ending to the campaign lol.

I was able to get away with sneaking a conjunction into my last parameter with my DM but idk if he'll let it slide if I keep doing it. My readied action was, "I will move in tandem with PC while striking at the first enemy who enters my attack range." DM was okay with it. I saved all of my movement, so that I didn't unintenionally violate any movement rules. I ended up missing the attack, but this taught me a lot.

What are the parameters on readied actions your DM espouses?

What personal parameters do you set on readied actions that are useful in combat as a melee class?

edit: ty for clarification. I'll stop sneak conjunctioning.

What are the most important steps? In what order should you do them? I’m running my first homebrew campaign and I want to know how to go about it since it feels like it can easily become overwhelming

After getting to the end of the skeleton castle, they must sneak a key off the (sleeping) skeleton captain, whose name is Thalor. Rogue fudges the roll, combat starts, and he goes down first turn because this guy rolled well, does numbers, and the rogue was already low. Rest of party scramble to stabilise, so on the Wizard's turn she casts Polymorph.

Thalor fails the saving throw and is now a chicken for a minute. The Aarakocra picks him up and flies 200 feet in the air, unarmed strike (reducing chicken hp to 0, resummoning Thalor)., dropping him and the fall damage knocks a good 70% of his health. Fight becomes trivial from there.

It's a pretty hard WIS save against Polymorph, so am I missing something? Basically I'm asking is a) did i rule this correctly b) will this be an issue against future enemies? c) if so how do i deal with that do all my arenas gotta have ceilings now 0_0

For context, my players are about to come into contact with a potential BBEG who they can also side with. They don't know this person could be a potential enemy yet. The person is a ruler of a kingdom

The person is going to be questioning/interviewing them individually and I really need some ideas on questions to ask them

The potential BBEG is attempting to take over a larger area/nearby kingdoms for a good reason but in doing so is being opressive and not treating everyone fairly so maybe some ends justify the means type questions

I'm starting a "Taking Back Florida" campaign pretty soon and need some ideas. The main premise is that the Florida Men starting turning into aberrations, and they need to investigate, and hopefully destroy, whatever's doing this.

That being said, I'm looking to make some more variations of said Florida Men, but I'm in a slump. I've been pulling inspiration from Left 4 Dead's special infected, but I wanna hear some other ideas. Whatcha got, Reddit?

I started dnd With friends yesterday and I like it so much! We are three completely new players and we all got hooked directly into our game by our dm (who is an experienced player). There is just one Little thing that we dislike, we didn’t yet find a way to communicate well and take decisions as a party, everyone thinks je or she has the best idea on how to do things.

I still like the expérience very much but I was wondering how we can start to work as a team. We all know our forces and weaknesses but we talked about it after our game and we all would like to work more together.

In the meantime, our dm is really understanding and laughs of our behaviour winch is very (first time player) in his opinion. I just want to have more fun with this game, cant wait to play again with them.

Do you have any tips for better communication in beginner players?

So, I am about to play as sns paladin, defender role. We already house rule some pole arm fetishes of rules creators and we use the -5 hit / +10 dmg feat with any weapon. Also, our oath of devotion channel divinity buffs any weapons in hands, so again, no polearm fetish Mr. 5e rules creator. That's the reason I was thinking about going this oath. Gonna two hands fighting with shield and sword, adding -5/+10 to both my weapons when applicable. What do you guys think about making this build? Another oath? What kind of feats etc to protect my teammates and "tank"?

can artificers create constructs if so how?

So I DM for a murder hobo style group and one player is INSISTANT that if you throw someone overboard during a campaign, after casting sleep on them, it won't wake them up. Because rules as written, the spell says "a player must take an action to shake or slap the creature to wake them" And my DM brain says that "throwing someone overboard" would be shaking a creature TECHNICALLY. Otherwise, you are affecting that creature and changing its starts and location by physically throwing them into the ocean.

TIA!

Howdy! I’ve got a session coming up as a DM and I want the party to do the following things:

• make political choices between the good of the village and the ethical nature
• track through the desert from the poor village south to the rich one north

So I was wondering wether anyone has some good ideas. My examples would be:

• choose to between cutting the last trees for money or not. Not cutting them would mean poor villagers, cutting them would mean angry druids/ bad eco consequences
• tracking through the desert would entail sand storms, maybe a Medusa hiding in a cave, maybe being chased by a Dune esque sandworm.

If anyone has any ideas good or bad would be very much appreciated!

My group had a silly little table dispute: We conjured a water wall to fight off an army. One of the players joked that if the entire army started drinking it at once, it would be gone in a flash. So, semi-seriously: Could you? How long would it take it to empty an entire wall of water?

What’s your favorite one that went unnoticed by your players? I like using map layouts, like House from R6 was one they caught, another they haven’t was “Tension” from Hotline Miami. I know some like pulling characters and storylines as well, and I’d love to hear them

I'm curious of traps that folks have made but just never got the chance to see them encountered while playing. My personal favorite is simply placing a living wall as a floor in a hallway.

I have five level nine players who are about to fend off against a mechanically converted dragon. Does anyone have a chart or know how to balance a dragon attack so I don’t end up wiping a party, but want the element of “oh crap this could probably kill us“ it is the act finale of an ongoing year and a half campaign. every time I do a boss encounter it’s either a) too easy, and the players don’t find it as a challenge or b) end up, killing the party. Both have happened in the past. I welcome any and all help.

This subject is a sticky situation and I’m not sure how to handle it. We play in a dark and gritty campaign where not much is off limits as per what was decided in session zero. We have four players in the party: human Fighter, half-orc Monk, halfling Rogue, and half elf Bard (myself).

I split from the party to take care of things in another part of town while the other three went to drop off a cat that had been missing. The cat was to be taken to the inner most district of the city, which is where the rich people live and you need a writ of passage to get there. These writs are hard to come by if you don’t have money or power in this city and only mean you can travel from one district to another, that’s it.

I give my writ, that I got from a gig in the center district in an earlier session, to Monk due to Fighter being distracted and Rogue dealing with an angry soaked cat. When the three get to the center wall, the guards at the wall ask if Fighter is ok and needs help, he says no and they go about their business of taking the cat to Gayle. (Yes, it’s a Bob’s Burgers reference) Comedy ensues and Monk does his best to keep the fact that he is a half-orc hidden and while getting into a making faces taunting contest with the Jimmy Pesto ripoff across the street, his hood falls down, revealing his face. This alerts the Pesto ripoff to alert the corrupt guards who happily come rushing to kill Monk. Corrupt guards are human. Monk runs into an alley and hides in a trash can while Fighter sits in the restaurant hearing all this going on outside, not getting involved. Rogue decides to sneak around to the alley and helps Monk with the two guards that are actively trying to murder Monk. At the start of the fight, Monk was using non-lethal damage. The guards call for backup.

Fighter hears the call for more guards, while still in the restaurant. Fighter ignores the alarm says he gets up and walks out of the restaurant sees the skirmish, shakes his head and says ‘I’m not in this. I’m going to the arcanist shop to get horse medicine.’ Leaving Monk and Rogue to deal with the four guards who are on a murderous rampage. Monk and Rogue eventually kill the guards, after Monk almost dies.

Fighter is neutral good alignment and actively avoided conflict when his party needed help. Even after Fighter left Monk and Rogue to fight by themselves, Monk offered to split the take of the money from the loot with Fighter. Fighter refused. Monk decided to send what would have been Fighter’s cut to Fighter’s hometown to see some good come out of the situation regardless of how Fighter felt.

This happened after Fighter had drawn down on the rest of the party to protect a goblin who had surrendered and threatened to kill the rest of the party if we tried to kill the goblin. In Rogue’s backstory, goblins murdered his family and he wants to kill all goblins. After the session, Fighter tried to justify his actions by saying that Monk was in the wrong for taunting the NPC and basically deserved what he got.

After my wall of text, I know Monk shouldn’t have taunted the NPC by being childish and should have been more careful with his identity. I shouldn’t have split the party and will never do that again. EVER! Here is my question: would a neutral good character walk away from his party if they were actively getting attacked, even if they did something “deserving” to be attacked?

edited for easier reading

I’m a first time DM and am currently running a module that has deviated quite far from what the original source was. I have incorporated various PC’s backstory to entwine with one another and have an overarching BBEG. One of the PC’s now wants me to use specific dialogue in the final encounter with the BBEG, that would completely dissolve any shared connection with the other PC’s in order for it to allow them to tie their character into a book they are writing. I have reservations in how to approach this as it would ruin a satisfying ending however this character was spawned from their backstory. Any suggestions?

Note: They have specifically written word for word how they would like me to say the final words of the BBEG, which basically makes the BBEG sound like a pawn.

Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions, I spoke with them about this and let them know that it wont likely be what they want but that doesn’t mean it will mess with their plans that will not be attached to this campaign.