notyourfathersdungeonmaster

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

Vance is a "nerd"? Literally could not tell.

He's one of those angry, weird, gatekeeping nerds who gets angry when a gross girl wants to touch his Magic cards, then complains that no girls will talk to him.

He's all the weird things we've worked so hard to push out of the larger community of nerds that we all love.

He isn't a nerd, really. He's more of a chud.

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

D'awww, I feel honored! I will say this in relation to the whole thread above: talk to your DM and find out what they prefer in terms of character backstory before you start writing, or even start choosing character options. If they tell you that they really only need a paragraph blurb, give them a paragraph blurb. Early in my DM career I had a player who wrote a literal twenty page short story for her character's backstory, and, being a busy college student with papers to write, I skimmed the first page, looked at her character sheet, and said "Approved". Later on in the campaign, when she brought up something from the backstory that I hadn't read, I was super embarrassed to reveal I hadn't actually read the full thing, and I could see the disappointment in her eyes that this work she'd put so much effort into had fallen flat.

DMs, take the same lesson from this. You don't *need* to hand your characters a massive world bible before the start of every campaign. I put one together only to establish a consistent starting place, the homebrew rules that will apply, and to provide something we can all refer back to between sessions, but when I start character creation with a player, I'm not asking them if they read the document and what they found interesting. Instead, I ask, "Tell me about what character ideas you have, and if I see any spots where we can weave them into the world, or any small tweaks that might help streamline with the lore, I'll bring them up."

Also, give your players the chance to help expand the lore. If you're thinking of adding something to the plot related to one of your player's character background, go to them and ask for their input on whether *they* think this jives with that background, or if they have any suggestions on how to make it work. The more that the player feels like an active participant in the history and cultures of the world, the more that they will become deeply invested in it. @jaesrri and @catblog-weatherwax, along with my other players, have written millions of words between them about or narrative set in our campaign world because I handed them some small part of the world and said, "Here, why don't you flesh this out for me and tell me about this place that's important to your character?" I guarantee you, a deeply invested and motivated player will come up with stuff so much more brilliant and exciting than whatever vague ideas you had in mind for Randomly Generated City #45.

Last, a word to players again. If you really, really want to make your DM happy during character creation, ask them about their world and if there's anyplace that they wish a PC came from. I guarantee you, there is some society or country they think is fascinating and they are just waiting for someone to ask about, and if you find it interesting too, the DM will bend over backwards to build plots that matter for your character related to that homeland.

Obviously mileage may vary with all of the above advice, but if you land a DM who absolutely loves worldbuilding, the greatest gift you can give them is a player who is invested in developing the areas that they haven't yet, or who will work with them to flesh out the spaces that matter. @jaesrri has been prompting me to build an entire conlang for her culture word by word, and every question she brings me is an opportunity to expand upon the world. Be the player who is engaged and inquisitive, and your DM will reward you richly.

Anyway don't listen to the haters; your D&D character doesn't actually need a twenty-page backstory for your GM to read as homework so they can integrate as much of it into their prep as possible. The GM shouldn't have to read a lore document that they then carefully integrate into their prep so they can feed you Da Slop.

You can just show up and go "hey check it out my guy is an Elf named Morningwood" and then play to find out what this Morningwood guy's deal is.

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

#Evolving #onto land out of the sea #bidding all my scales goodbye #looking for some trees to climb #simian form is quite a change #life up here is very strange #can't go back, can't even try #I miss my fish life

Coming out of my cage and I've been doing just fine

Gotta gotta be down, because I want it all

It was only a fish

IT WAS ONLY A FISH

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

Okay, but seriously, imagine an ABBA cover of "Leaves from the Vine". Imagine what the people who brought us "Slipping Through My Fingers" and "My Love, My Life" could do with that song.

ABBA waited until our darkest moments, when the world needed them most, and then they returned.

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

Player's Option: Low Ability Scores for 5th Edition

I perused the 2nd edition Dungeon Master’s Guide last night, and stumbled upon a passage discussing the difference between using 3d6 to generate a character’s ability scores and “4d6 drop the lowest”:

“One school of thought holds that adventures are no different from everyone else (except for being a little more foolhardy, headstrong, or restless). The man or woman down the street could be an adventurer—all that’s required is the desire to go out and be one. Therefore, adventurers should get no special bonuses on their ability rolls. The other school holds that adventurers are special people, a cut above the common crowd. If they weren’t exceptional, they would be laborers and businessmen like everyone else. Player characters are heroes, so they should get bonuses on their ability rolls to lift them above the rabble. If you choose [4d6 drop the lowest] for creating player characters, then you agree with this second view and believe that adventures should be better than everyone else.”  – AD&D DMG, 2nd Edition, 1984

Some of the core 5th edition mechanics were developed in Mike Mearl’s basement in 1981 as a complement to the Basic Rules. Hence, the above quote applies to 5e, even though it wouldn’t to other editions: Because 4d6 drop the lowest is principally used in D&D 5e, the authors of D&D 5e intended characters to be epic, not average.

If you want to draw your characters from a pool of average people, use 3d6 for your ability scores. Mechanically, the average roll is 10.5 for 3d6 (as opposed to 12.2 for 4d6 drop the lowest), so the odds are stacked to make a weaker character. 

Why do this at all? Isn’t D&D about Epic People with Epic Chins doing Epic Things?  If you want a game about epic people, then use 4d6! Please do.

However, there is something romantic about normal everyday people who take up the spear and face the utterly terrifying darkness of the fantastic world. Heroes are supposed to do this, but for everyday people it is an act of extreme courage. Using 3d6 makes for a more interesting game and is perfect for a dark and gritty campaign. It evokes an OSR flavor.

You should obviously discuss the tone of the game with your players. Most of my players eschewed the idea. They believe heroes are people who are a cut above the rest (one player argued that her character was an epic person failing to live up to his potential). So we won’t be using this option for our current game, but this is something I’ll keep in my tool bag for later.

5th Edition Example: Bad Scores don’t make you completely useless. I rolled a character using 3d6 for a recent game. Enter Josh, first level human fighter. He is a street rat with the courage to stand up (and die) for justice. Josh wanted to be a magician, but never had the brains or wisdom to cast spells. After he was kicked out of every wizarding college, he was forced to survive on the streets. Here are his stats:

Str: 4 (-3) Dex: 13 (+1) Con: 12 (+1) Int: 8 (-1) Wis: 6 (-2) Cha: 10 (+0)

This is after racial adjustments. He couldn’t carry his staring equipment without medium encumbrance. My DM floated me warnings about having such a “weak” character. 

But josh is not as meek or hopeless as you might think. He took the magic initiate feat so he knew one healing word spell, which despite the negative wisdom modifier, had a minimum of +1 hp. That instantly wakes up a downed character as a bonus action, not too shabby. He also knew the spare the dying cantrip (you learn a few things even if you fail out of magic school).

Josh also took the archery fighting style as a first level fighter, which got him a +5 to his longbow attacks. His background gave him a proficiency in stealth too. His is still a useful person despite his -4 total ability modifier.

Had he lived, josh would have probably multi-classed in to rouge, but who can say. He died after rolling two natural 1s on death saving throws. Nobody comes back from that; epic hero or average adventurer.

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

You know i live with 2 dms when one of them is explaining the premise for their new character to me, hoping for input on the character, but all i can do is take mental notes to talk to the other one (whose turn it is to dm) because the only things i can think of the whole time are ways to fuCKING DESTROY THIS CHARACTER.

So uh.....thank i guess. @jaesrri @notyourfathersdungeonmaster

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

Bard, visibly excited: Fighter, you have to come meet my old mentor! He's an aarakocra too!

Bard, dragging Fighter to meet her mentor: Mentor, this is Fighter! Fighter, this is my Mentor!

Fighter: A pleasure to meet you.

Mentor: Likewise.

Fighter: ...

Mentor: ... Don't you hate when people introduce you to someone of the same race as if that's automatically supposed to make you friends?

Fighter: It's the absolute worst.

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

REMEMBER SKIP-IT FROM THE 90’S

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

This is basically a more wholesome version of Amonkhet from Magic: the Gathering

A city where necromancy is legal and actually a part of every day society. So long as you follow a specific set of laws to make it seem a bit more ethical, you’re allowed to use it to do anything from helping you in a fight, to helping you run your business. In fact, there are entire shops or restaurants where the staff are undead. Laws to handle the undead could be things like:

• The corpses used cannot have flesh on them for sanitary reasons, especially in the case of businesses. Those who raise undead who are more than just bone will face a fine dependent on their situation.

• Similar to how people can donate their bodies to science, or donate their organs to those in need, people can choose to donate their bodies to necromancers before their death.

• If it is unknown if a person wished for their body to be donated after death, and they have been dead for 150+ years, you’re allowed to raise them. If next of kin is still alive, you must get permission from them first.

• You must take care of the undead in your charge. Keep them clean and unbroken. If one of them starts to get too much wear and tear, you are required by law to respectfully lay them back down to rest. Failure to do this will get you a hefty fine.

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

Which D&D player type are you?

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

How to Make Powerful NPCs Interesting Again

We all know the trope: the powerful wizard hires the party to go run some minor errand, which inevitably leads to them stumbling onto the World-Ending Plot, which they have to solve, alone, with only the occasional advice from their wizened mentor. It's a trope as old as time; even Hercules got occasional boons from godly beings to help him on his quests. It's a great narrative device, until some player stops and asks, "If this wizard is able to stop time with a snap of his fingers, why doesn't he just stride into the field and shove a ninth-level fireball into the Lich's cranial cavity?"

This simple bit of cognitive dissonance can really ruin the fun and undermine the urgency of an otherwise great adventure. If the party knows that the only reason they're on this quest is because Randalf the Off-White can't be bothered to deal with the horde of undead outside his tower, it can make them feel like chumps or patsies, and undermine any sense of gratitude that comes later during the campaign's denouement.

There's a few simple ways to fix this, though: tricks that can help you, the DM, keep your high level NPCs while also explaining why the great powers of the world are relying on this band of scrappy adventurers to solve all their problems. Below are just a few.

The Balance of Powers

This principle is a great one, but is often sadly overlooked in many campaigns. Simply put, in the above example, the wizard mentor doesn't get involved not because he can't, but because doing so would bring in a whole host of other powerful beings that would complicate the conflict. Perhaps there's a council of archmages who have all agreed, for the sake of maintaining the fabric of reality, that they should keep their Ninth-level spells in their pockets unless they all agree it's necessary. Perhaps the BBEG has a patron on the Council, and the mentor can't interfere on his own without dragging his evil opposite into the campaign. This can actually make for a great part of the climactic battle: the mentor decides he can't stay on the sidelines anymore, and joins the fray, participating in an epic wizard's duel.

This can also be used with deities bestowing boons on the party: they can act indirectly by helping the party, perhaps because one of their rival deities is already helping the BBEG. Thus, the conflict of the campaign turns into a proxy war for a larger divine conflict that can't be fought, because it would annihilate all of existence. If you do take this path, make sure your NPC stresses to the party how essential it is that they solve this issue, because if the major players themselves join the fight, no one will survive.

The Protector of Reality

Similar to the Balance of Powers, this rationale places the Epic NPC in a conflict from which they cannot afford to divert their attention or resources, even for a moment. Perhaps there is a constant threat of otherworldly incursion for which they need all (or almost all) of their capabilities; after all, you don't want to be caught with your pants down and your spell slots expended when Tiamat bursts through the material plane like an alien parasite from a man's stomach. Even the threat of such an apocalyptic event would mean that, like a missile in a silo, an epic level NPC would have to sit dormant, never expending his magical capabilities because he never knows when they may be required. This is actually a great archetype to use for the Wizard in the Tower trope; they may have built themselves a convenient magical retreat at great cost because they couldn't afford the spell slot to cast Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion everyday, not while that same spell slot may be needed to banish an archduke of the Nine Hells. So, they sit in the tower, separated from the affairs of the world by necessity - but, still caring about the world and wanting to make sure it's not a shit place to live, they can find and recruit adventurers to handle the more mundane threats that don't shake the foundations of the universe. This is also a great twist finale to use on the party: perhaps the Wizard in the Tower joins them in the final boss battle, expending all his magical power -- only for, at that moment, the threat he's been guarding against for centuries to finally arrive, and now it's up to the party to stand against them where he cannot.

The Otherworldly Being

This works especially well with warlock patrons, but it can work similarly well with questgivers and friendly NPCs that have an otherworldly or spiritual bent. The key idea is that the force recruiting, motivating, and rewarding the players is not located on the material plane itself and is therefore unable to act on it; they need to find a local agent to handle the problem. There is plenty of inspiration throughout myth and folklore; dream visitations, whether by angels, fiends, fey, or Lovecraftian horrors, are particularly common as an impetus to get an uncooperative character to fall into line. There are more tangible methods of communication as well; perhaps they are a being of immense power that is trapped in every mirror in the world and needs an agent to eventually get them free, or perhaps they can only manifest through signs and omens that require interpretation. If you want to pull from Greek mythology, there's also the possibility of a dedicated oracle who acts as the voice of the gods, but gives only vague, ominous prophecies that won't reveal their true weight until later. In all cases, a clear distinction is established between the power of the questgiver and the limitations of their abilities to influence the mortal realm, making the party the ones with agency in the situation.

The Hidden BBEG

You'll want to be careful how you use this one, because you only get one shot to pull it off with a given group, and once the players suspect something it is really, really hard to recover from it. The basic premise is that the powerful NPC who recruited them, who sent them off to fight against the Big Bad Evil Guy, was secretly a villain themselves, trying to bring down their rival or clear the way for their own scheme. Think of Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, sending the Jedi across the galaxy to deal with the Sith and the CIS, only to betray them all. Unfortunately this has become a major trope, and given how paranoid players typically are, it's very hard to pull off. There's a couple of tricks to making it work, and some of them may seem counterintuitive.

Do not make the Hidden BBEG perfect or flawless. Establish a set of motives for their actions, ones that may seem prosaic but also have a selfish bent. The high priest wants to rid the land of the evil king who is oppressing the population, but who is also stifling the priest's ability to build his church. The noble ruler wants to defeat the opposing empire that threatens the peace and stability of his lands, but also is motivated by revenge for the war crimes committed in the past. Create a pretext that puts them on the same side as the party, but a subtext that leaves the party slightly uneasy. If the party is concerned about their ally having selfish motives, they'll be expecting selfishness, even recklessness, but not duplicity and betrayal.

Do not reveal the full capabilities of the Hidden BBEG. If anything, they should appear to be about mid-level; capable, but not able to handle world-shaking threats. Most often they are hiding their capabilities until some final piece is brought into their grasp. One excellent example would be Fraz-Urb'luu, one of the demon princes of the Abyss, who is obsessed with recovering his staff of power; as a Hidden BBEG, he might pose as a friend to the party, waiting until they recover all the pieces and bring them to him before he strikes, showing his true might. Another excellent example is the Heirophant from the classic geek movie The Gamers: Dorkness Rising.

Show genuine conflict in the Hidden BBEG. Let them display passion and inner conflict, moments where they are troubled by the methods the party uses and the methods they and their followers are forced to use. There's an old adage that every villain is the hero of their own story; if you can make that ring true for your Hidden BBEG, to make the party invested in not just their cause but in maintaining their moral character, then the betrayal will hurt even more.

The Common Crowd

This might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes the best Epic NPC isn't epic at all, but just a collection of ordinary folk. If your campaign originates in a specific village or town, especially one full of colorful, memorable NPCs with personal ties to the party, then the collective needs and will of that settlement can become a questgiver NPC in its own right. The town is suffering from an unnatural drought? Send the party to seek out aid or a magical cure. The town is displaced following an invasion? Keeping the town safe and finding them a new home becomes a priority. This can also become a source of individualized side quests for the PCs; they're likely to be far more concerned about seeking out the rare medicine required to save the orphan girl who the rogue took under wing than they are about exploring a random tomb for loot drops. Plus, if the PCs invest their time and effort into protecting the town, it can make for an amazing final battle when the townsfolk come to support the party in battle, armed with everything they can get their hands on, ready to die for their heroes (a.k.a. The 'Mass Effect' Effect).

I hope these provide some good inspiration for your campaign! Let me know if there's any tricks you've used on your campaigns that worked particularly well, or any that you think should be added.

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

130 dice

Guess The Dice Giveaway Part 2 - Mini Dice

As a thank you for 6,500 followers, here's another giveaway

What it is:

Grand Prize: A mini mason jar filled with random mini dice. Most of these dice are not complete sets but there might be a few complete sets inside. These misfit dice are leftover from the DnD Apothecary shop and need a home. There are also some other mini dice in there because why not? It's fun!

Second Place: a set of Die Hard Dice's Moonstone Dreamwalker dice

How To Enter:

Follow me! (This time I'm making y'all follow)

Reblog this post with your guess to the number of dice you think are in the jar

We're doing Price is Right rules: closest guess to the correct number WITHOUT going over wins!

If multiple people guess correctly/closest, it's up to a random number generator to pick the winner

Second place is randomly picked from the notes, so likes and reblogs count

Only one reblog with one guess will be accepted, if you reblog again that's ok just no additional guesses.

There will not be any option to change your guess, so whatever you pick is your entry. Choose wisely!

Open world wide, and I cover shipping.

Happy guessing!

(the die on the outside is for scale only, it does not count towards the number of dice in the jar)

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

As a DM, spoiler alert for players: using your whole body as an improvised weapon is a really terrible idea, because without a weapon in hand or a natural weapon like tusks, antlers, or claws to be the point of contact, I'd rule damage would be split between you and the target. It would be a small amount of damage, because Reduce also subtracts from your damage, but it would definitely be split between you both and just put you in harm's way.

Tl;dr: definitely don't use your tiny body as an improvised weapon, it won't end well.

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

Spurt made my wife die laughing via this meme.

Sometimes I can still hear her voice...

*Warranty lasts 11 days, the vehicle has not been road tested

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

the road to el dorado when in the context of a d&d game is the most astounding and hellish streak of 1′s and 20′s

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

The party first bump into the villain in their side job as a waiter they took up to fund their evil schemes. The main moral dilemma of the session is whether “always tip your waiter” still applies to Z’areth the Destroyer, Emperor of Bones and Destroyer of Nations.

[notyourfathersdungeonmaster]

Use his headshot to get Matt Mercer to haunt your home this holiday season