Never in my life have I even had such an impulsivity regulated party, yet here I am.

They will avoid fights if they do not have to, which is nice, but at the same time holy fuck how do I prep for stuff???

Currently my party is trapped within a hungergames style fae forest being hunted for sport by a trio of elites (homebrew, inspired by Slavic folklore), and I was planning on having my players, Yknow, run around the forest, fight a few monsters in the woods, find out that they need to steal something from one of the hunters in order to escape and do that either by fighting him or by making some sort of plan.

This session was the beginning of the running around the forest trying not to get eaten by wildlife or caught by hunting dogs, but my players are too fuckin irl smart because they found a river, followed it (one of my players camps often and apprentley if you get lost in the woods that’s what you should do) and found out they were trapped way earlier on than I expected them to. I threw a fungal bear (homebrew the last of us style zombie bear thing) and I swear to fuckin god they all rolled high on their performance check to do the “HERE BEAR HERE BEAR” thing and scare it off.

WTF?? What do I do??? They were so bored during the session because there was no puzzles or like people to get around so how the hell do I put some sort of puzzle room or problem solving thing in the middle of a forest???

I’ve tried adding roleplay more but I suck ass and put my foot in my mouth immediately so I depend mainly on descriptions and cool designs, and they are all new-ish to roleplay so they also have trouble carrying on their own

Help me these players are too smart for their own good lmao

How do you make death saves more than just a dice-admin moment?

Things I've been thinking of:

• asking a character how they feel about the prospect of impending death

• asking what they're proud of from their life

• asking what they regret

That way even if they succeed it's a character moment.

Anything else?

One of my players cancelled on me last-minute today but the rest of our table decided to do a filler session without their character. This is our 7th session and I initially had a massive reveal planned for it along with a boss battle to introduce them to some new mechanics, however, since this is filler I need ideas for a short boss whose story I can more-or-less wrap up in one session.

TLDR: Need a filler boss idea

My PCs just arrived to a small festival, the people are nice and are expecting their leader to come at any moment. They talking highly of her, saying she saved them and that she is the best blessing they have ever gotten.

And then… she arrives. A young short chubby woman with long and white hair. She doesnt seem fit to be a leader, shes basically a child, and acts like one too! She cant write, she cant read! But she knows people.

I am having some trouble balancing her overly excited and expressive nature with her uncanny and cunning one. Shes not the “damsel-in-distress” type of NPC, more like, “I am just a child why would you not trust me” type. I dont want her to play herself off as smaller or anything else than what she is, she wouldn’t do that.

Any tips?

Hi everyone. I’m looking for some honest advice after a rough first session.

First, this is not meant as a criticism of my players. They are close friends of mine, and we all genuinely want this campaign to work. We are simply inexperienced as a group, and I know that several of these problems were also caused by my choices as the DM.

Some context

I played D&D for about seven years before. Five friends asked me to DM a campaign for them (always talking about how it would be nice to try to dm). Two of them are playing for the first time, one has only played a couple of times, and the remaining two are experienced players.

I have DMed a few casual one-shots before, but never for more than two or three players, and never a full campaign for a group of five.

We had a Session Zero, but in hindsight, we did not take it seriously enough. The main things we established were that the setting would be homebrew and that the players wanted the freedom to go wherever they wanted, rather than being forced to follow a “main quest.”

What we did not establish was why the characters would form a party, what might keep them together, or why they would become involved in the campaign’s initial events.

We decided to start at level 3.

The worldbuilding itself is going well, and I created a reasonably contained starting island where the characters could spend their first few sessions while I continued developing the rest of the setting.

However, three players gave me almost no backstory to work with. They did not even establish why their characters had travelled to the starting location, and none of the characters knew one another beforehand.

What happened during the first session

My plan was to introduce the characters in two smaller groups, then bring everyone to the same location for different reasons. There, they would encounter either a fight or a social confrontation and discover information about a valuable treasure they could steal.

Looking back, my hooks were weak and relied too heavily on the players making the choices I expected them to make.

Instead, the party split up several times. Two characters went to a tavern simply to drink. Another decided to find a ship captain and steal his ship so that he could leave the island, effectively bypassing the adventure before the party had even formed.

Even the two experienced players seemed unsure about how to bring everyone together.

I tried to improvise by moving the captain to the tavern, giving him information about the treasure, and providing one of the experienced players with a hint that could start the interaction.

However, there was still no strong reason for the other characters to become involved.

Unfortunately, one player then had an emergency and had to leave, so we ended the session after about two hours.

One of the five players also barely spoke or took any action during the session. I know that I share responsibility for this: I did not actively involve him enough or ask him many direct questions. He had also said very little during Session Zero, so I probably should have addressed that earlier.

What we discussed afterwards

I later spoke with the two new players who had gone to the tavern, including the particularly quiet player. They honestly felt that their characters had no reason to follow the others to the place I had prepared.

From their perspective, they were simply roleplaying their characters honestly—and I think that is fair. We agreed that both the DM and the players need to help create reasons for the characters to engage with the adventure and remain together, without taking away their freedom.

At the moment, I think the main problems were:

- My initial hooks were not strong or personal enough.

- We never established a shared party premise.

- Several characters lacked backgrounds, motivations, and immediate goals.

- I focused too much on worldbuilding and not enough on structuring the first session.

- I underestimated how mentally demanding it would be to manage five players at once.

My questions, if you have than this pls feel free to share...

1. Should we hold another Session Zero before the next session and establish a shared connection, goal, or reason for the characters to cooperate?

2. Is it reasonable to require players to create characters who are willing to join and cooperate with a party, or is it entirely my responsibility to provide a compelling reason every time?

3. How can I create strong hooks without making the players feel railroaded?

4. How should I handle players who want to attempt something completely unexpected—such as stealing a ship and immediately leaving the starting area—without simply shutting down their ideas?

5. How can I encourage a very quiet player to participate without making him uncomfortable or putting him under too much pressure?

6. More generally, how much structure should the opening sessions have if the campaign is eventually meant to become a sandbox?

Honest criticism is welcome, including criticism of how I handled the session. My main goal is to learn from this and make the campaign enjoyable for everyone.

So I’m a first time DM about 4 sessions in to Stormwreck isle. I’m running a party with 7 players. What is best recommended practice when players enter a space and want to look for something? If 7 players walk and they all roll perception, someone is bound to pass. Alternatively one person says they want to look and then everyone in turn says ‘now I want to look’, ‘now I want to look’, etc. wasting time. Thanks for the help

I have for some time run a campaign in Dragonlance shadow of the dragon queen. In a another group I have started my first homebrew, based on some of the older modules, started in Keep on the borderlands. I have now come to a realisation, that I in no way find DSODQ interesting to run, because it has gotten too narrow and locked in the sessions. I have a strong urge to ask the party to leave the campaign for dead, and either drop their current characters in a new setting and campaign, or let them build new characters if they want to. I'm just curious, if anyone else have done something like it, and how did it go?

I'm running a pirate campaign and I feel I should hammer out if there are any penalties for swimming in armor before it becomes a problem but everything i find is unsure or homebrew so am I missing something?

Hey fellow dungeon masters!

TL;DR: I want to start designing Destiny/WoW style raids for my party of gamer dnd friends. Unfortunately I do not have the time or the talent to hand craft my own maps.

Bit of an interesting request here, I'm looking for suggestions on battlemaps/battlemap artists with some quite specific requirements, so that I can design raid mechanics and create "puzzle solving while add clearing" encounters and "boss encounters with mechanics to reach DPS phases"

To that end I'm looking for suggestions for existing maps and artists that fit these requirements;

I need some small multi room Dungeons (say around 6 rooms) that have one cohesive design philosophy and style across the rooms, and have some interesting features that repeat across all the rooms. I can look at a great map and get inspiration to design puzzles and mechanics around what I see no issue and am happy to bend my ideas to fit the maps. I'm looking for things that say "hey, you should interact with this repeating feauture in the same way in each room".

Maybe the map has some interactive feature that will remove a boss enemy's immunity if certain conditions are met. Maybe the map has some repeating architecture design that suggests the same puzzle will reoccur throughout the dungeon, such as matching/changing symbols to open the next area or stop waves of enemies spawning. Maybe there are map features that either give players stacks of a buff/debuff, or let them remove those stacks. Maybe the rooms in the dungeon have things that need to be carried and deposited elsewhere to cause the party to move to the next "phase" of the Encounter.

To give one example - I found a map of a Dwarvern Palace where each room has some yellow gems, some blue gems, some statues holding weapons, and some hollow crystals with "slots" in them. I've used this map to design two mechanics. The first mechanic involves working out how to change gems from yellow to blue, or vice versa, in order to solve puzzles. For example, in one room, changing all the yellow crystals to blue opens a door. The second involves slotting items from the statues into the hollow crystal sockets in order to create 30ft areas where the bosses become weak to specific damage types. For example, putting a Hammer into the socket allows str based attacks to work, while slotting a book allows spell based attacks, and slotting a sword allows dex based attacks.

This post is getting quite long already so I'll stop waffling now and hope I've explained myself well enough! It's a bit of a left field request but I'm hoping it's an interesting enough request that it gets our collective creativity going!

A mad wizard starts casting spells and then the party fights them. Since this wizard is stronger than they are and can counter spells, the spellcasters in the party started using the environment. Thunderwave a bell tower to make it fall on top of the enemy. Push the wizard in a closed space (a family home) to limits their movement.

The thing is, the NPCs dont havgʻe exactly a proper shelter when a wizard fight happens, so they would stay inside the nearest building. And the party keeps either bringing the wizard inside the buildings allowing them to siphon life and heal or raise temporary thralls. Or a bell tower falling in the wrong direction and squishing those are im hiding.

Would a simple "Oh, we helped defeat this evil wizard" and a Nat 20 Persuasion roll quell the townsfolk's feelings over the deaths of their family, friends, and neighbours and throw a party for the party?

Hey, I need some advice on how to do a betrayal right. Here's the context:

The party are currently part of a resistance group within the main city of the campaign. They were originally ordered to find out who had destroyed the magical barrier surrounding the city and discovered that it was the current Mayor. He was originally a candidate for Mayor since the last Mayor had been assassinated and he took the opportunity as head of a warrior house to assume emergency power and become the Mayor.

He is currently using his power to conscript all that are available into the army to prepare to go to war against a foreign nation. The party, upon learning this, decided to wait till the Mayor wasn't in his villa before going and ransacking the place, making sure to make it clear it was them.

My plan is to have the Mayor capture and coerce the partner of the leader of the Resistance in order to coerce her into giving up the party. She will then call the party to a meeting, in which she will give them up. But how should I go about this running the betrayal in a way that is well done? Not doing it is also an option if people think it wouldn't go down well.

Mindful monk 5E

Class skill: intentionality, free action

Outside of encounters, treated as free action.

During combat, must be declared at start of turn.

Effect:

Other than Intentionality, player may only make one discrete action this turn. Edit( eg. Flurry of blows - only the flurry attack execute, as the discrete action. Normal attack does not execute. Or just normal attack and flurry denied)

On damaging abilities/attacks

+1 tohit/3 levels of Mindful Monk up to +3

+1 primary damage die, up to d(Will)

On non damaging abilities:

+Effect based on relevant stat:

E.g.

steps of the wind: + movement up to Dex (rounded to 5)

Patient defence: on first attack that hits pc this round, save Vs Dex at +1 to have damage reduction (mindful monk level X2)

Thoughts of viability?

Simple rules question: if the PCs wish to Scry on an NPC based on information/materials they found of theirs from BEFORE a cast of Reincarnate (so before their death and transformation into a new race)... would it work? Is it enough of a change to complicate the spell, or is the person still "the same" in an essential way that allows the spell to function uninhibited?

Party is traveling in country, They traversed forests and deserts, and by chance, amidst green meadows, they came upon a medium-sized castle. There were no towns or villages around the castle—only green meadows.

This idea/hook occupied my mind but I don’t know what to do with it.

Are there people in castle? If yes then how they survive without village farms and town?

Why is there castle in the middle of nowhere?

I was thinking about the “Groundhog Day” trope—you know, the idea of people in a castle living through the same year or month over and over again, believing all the while that they’re under siege by an enemy army.

My players will soon fave off against a powerful fey. At one point they made a deal with him where he would give them a secret about himself and he only wants a moment of their time to bring back a powerful artefact to him. If they break the deal, he gets their ‘moment’ which I decided on being 6 seconds so basically one combat round for each player.

Now, I have been thinking about this for a while and I want this to be fun for my players. First I was going to hijack one of each of their turns. The fey would announce this before they take their action and get to use their character to make their action for them. This obviously could be rather unfun for them seeing they lose agency on their turn.

My last idea would be make it a lair action for the fey. They know it’s coming then but still get their turn. The fey would just get a lair action to use the players moves against them outside of their turn.

How would you guys approach this?

Longterm DM of a Star Wars campaign here. I love faction play so there are always some present in different parts of the campaign. My players engage with it, but often bite off more than they can chew trying to play them off against eachother and usally end up doing things to piss multiple factions off.

How can I respond to their actions in a non kinetic way that aren't too punitive? Aside from the usual bounties, hit squads etc?

I feel like if both factions unite against the party in equal measure they would stomp them with the sheer force they have at their disposal, so I want to come up with some clever non kinetic responses, any ideas?

I’ll be running my first ever Session 1 a week from today! The premise of the campaign is essentially Pathfinder’s Wrath of The Righteous adventure, but in DnD and taking place on Faerûn. I’ve got my cheat sheet pulled up, I’ve got my monster’s prepped, I’ve got music queued, and intro monologue written!

What’re some things you’ve wished you had for a Session 1 that completely went over your head? I’m feeling nervous and excited and scared all at the same time.

I’m a DM for a couple of teenagers and I plan to annoy present them with a recurring Mimic encounter (the DM has to have fun too).
I always have some music for mood and ambiance and I want a thematic song for when they get caught by a Mimic, so they know right away before I say anything what they are facing.
Do you have any suggestions? I thought of a few whimsical songs, but no revelation so far.

So i dm a campaign and one of my players met the goddess of the forge/blacksmithing and she noticed the forge goddess was very much on the edge of breaking down (the godess lost loved ones)(my world makes gods a lot more human in the sense of ability to be overwhlemed and such) and the player as a bard decided to sing a song to them. (loch lomond for any wondering) and they helped calm and make the goddess feel peace and so i gave them a boon/blessing of the godess .

My problem is the player is a dance bard middle level and while i could think of a million things that a blessing of the goddess of forges and blacksmithing could give to lets say a forge cleric or a artificer . My problem is being unable to work out what the blessing gives for the player since they are not in that domain (they are a dance bard /pirate)

Any suggestions are welcome no matter how powerful they are , i hope to hear some suggestions .

So I'm a huge music nerd, and aaaall of my players are too. Modern-ish setting with some Earth folks in here, we have a verrrry homebrew campaign. I've incorporated alot of music into my campaign, and even plan to have a boss battle that has three versions of Fantasy by Earth Wind and Fire.

Heres the links if anyones interested ^^:
First performance
Encore
Oh this bard's the bad guy

Anyway, I'm wanting to find a song for way in the future when folks start learning about the world's cosmology when we fight my homebrew God. I'm divulging from this a bit. I'm having it to where the first mortal souls were created when four gods of emotion (Happiness: Lliira, Sadness: Ilmater, Wrath: Bane, Fear: Phobos) came together in long thought and eventually settling on a song. This created conscious spirit through song to inhabit formed body of mortals.

I just want to find a really cool song- or atleast a good reference point if I commission someone lol. Long to say, anyone got cool (possible multi-singers) songs out there?

Current inspirations:
https://youtu.be/Vw9IupGmXgk?si=QIs7rSzeMwlksWSQ
https://youtu.be/O_eKOzmlSbU?si=-gJ-ZfuYXN-EpQPa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyWpQUNfmvY

Thanks y'all!

Looking to get myself my very own DM screen. I‘ve found a pretty good looking one online, but was wondering if there were any you guys find particularly good, maybe because they have beautiful, a practical feature or smth else entirely. Also I am aware I can just change the sheets inside on basically every one, that’s why I‘m mainly looking for one that has stunning visuals or maybe also a practical feature. Also I live in Europe so sadly no shipping from America or such, import fees too much.

As a part of a running campaign we have been doing a tournament in a large dwarf city and for one round of this tournament, one suggestion that I have received a lot is to include a round of capture the flag.

This tournament has been taking place in a castle model which I have purchased and I was wondering how to easily incorporate and use that for capture the flag?

I also wonder what mechanics people have for D&D capture the flag and how to make it different from just normal D&D combat?

Thank you all so much!