#and I've dm'd more than I've been a player

[bookwyrminspiration]

Yessss dnd nerds :DD and dam yeah that is a wacky situation it turned out sick tho!! Perks of being at least mostly blonde is i dont have to panic ab bleach tho i was thinking about combing like the three leftover pinks i have and then maybe doin somethin like what u have cause its so cool and i like Need to dye my hair again soon qhfkks <3

Grew up with a dnd nerd (my dad), so I think it's in my dna or something, just latent rn. I've engaged casually, but the extreme nerdom has yet to be activated.

But yeah I really just fuck around and find out with my hair most of the time. If it really goes bad I can just shave it off, so very little stress about it all (despite what my christmas color near meltdown might imply).

Also you are SO lucky ough that's a whole step and situation you don't even gotta deal with I'm. Damn. I'm not jealous because I have no desire to be blond but like. Bleaching is such a hassle and you don't even gotta do it -_-

But also!! If you do something like what I have I sooo wanna know about it and hear what you end up doing! Fun hair colors are a delight of life so I'm very happy for you!! Have so so much silly with it :3

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

Would I be the asshole if I told my friend to clean his fucking house via text? 😷

Hi. I (29, she) play ttrpgs with a few different groups of friends every weekend.

A particular group is DM'd by an old friend (36, he) of mine, named A, and we tend to meet twice a month at his apartment, which he shares with another one of the group's players (also male, same age), "B". I am not privy to the nature of their arrangement, although I suspect A covers most of their expenses from the way he talks.

Anyway, the place is a real mess. A has always been disorganized, and I've been told he has ADHD and autism. But I've never seen an apartment as disgusting as theirs: the floors are sticky, there's trash covering every inch of the floor, something is definitely growing inside their fridge, and stepping foot inside their bathroom is akin to stepping into an alternate dimension. And that's only what I feel like describing right now, things are really really bad in there. I've left the place feeling seriously physically sick more than once.

Whenever we get together to play, we are tacitly expected to clean up the table (which is ALWAYS covered in disgusting shit), wash a few glasses so we can drink (looking into their sink is a nightmare), and even wash whatever we need to use in order to make snacks or dinner. Another one of the players (she/they, younger than me) just does all of this as soon as she gets there, but I honestly find this super annoying. I do NOT live there, this is not my trash and muck, I will not touch it.

At this point, I feel like I have to intervene, if not for their health at least for mine (and A's dog, poor thing). It's just a really awkward thing to say! I know he takes criticisms very personally, and I kinda don't want to humiliate him in front of our friends (he rarely goes outside, at least with me, and there's always someone else there. No chance to do this privately). Also, this may very well be way out of place for me. So I've been thinking of texting him this request in as friendly a manner as I can muster. WIBTA? (Any advice is welcome tbh)

What are these acronyms?

[whatisurspaghettipolicy]

I think it's really fascinating that a lot of the complaints I see about Shadowheart is her to-hit rate because for me that illuminates a very clever bit of character building via her subclass mechanics. Excuse me a second, I've been a 5e DM for about six years now and I've been thinking a lot about each of the BG3 companions in terms of stats/mechanics haha.

Yes, you can go in and rebuild her and make her a light/life domain and optimise either damage or healing. But we can break down two good story reasons for her being a trickery domain cleric:

(behind a cut bc implied/actual spoilers)

1. Trickery and Shar. Shar is an evil goddess, but she's also the absolute embodiment of the Cain instinct; just a constant opp for her twin sister. She's a duplicitous trickster who has even stolen Selûne's identity in the past. Having Shadowheart as a Trickery domain reminds us - the players - that Shar is a primarily a little dickhead who loves to lie and cheat - which stands at odds with Shadowheart's massive penalties to deception.

Early on in her personal quest, just from this surface read, we know: her god lies, her god's domain and followers are all about trickery, and Shadowheart is very bad at lying directly. When you couple this with the initial places where she gets hit with the ouchies from Shar (the Blighted Village when you're reading about children being taken, the Selûne statue in the Blighted Village, finding Kagha torturing a little girl underground...) and it's quite easy to piece together the arc of her personal quest, in a very OH NO way.

(This could be a whole other stat/build conversation - as a half-elf, Shadowheart should be naturally better than average at social rolls like deception because half-elves receive an automatic +2 to their charisma score at creation...but living in a cult and having your personality shackled to a divine shock collar would absolutely affect that. And her high elf ability [firebolt] relying on intelligence to hit??? The fact that as a half-elf high elf she's likely half moon elf????? I love these little mechanical details.)

2. How trickery clerics are best used. This is where a lot of people who haven't DM'd DnD for the life of a small child fall down I think. But here's the thing: trickery domain clerics are best when they do not fight at all. They're decent healers, but it's more than that; they are advantage bots.

Blessing of the Trickster gives your allies advantage on stealth checks. Good for them.

Guiding bolt has a 70% chance to hit? That's why you use Channel Divinity: Invoke Duplicity. You add an illusory version of yourself to the field to distract and disrupt, giving advantage to your allies.

Your teammate's social encounter not going well? You can add either a quick guidance or charm person (again, giving them advantage) to the mix.

Time to sneak? Good thing you get Pass Without Trace. Let's go lesbians! That's a +10 to stealth checks for all your allies!

Each of these things is an action; she sacrifices her own action in a turn to support and aid another. Unless she has Healing Word up, she's left choosing whether to help or heal; actually fighting likely won't be super up in priorities, especially with her to-hit rate.

We know from the House of Grief that she was trained as a healer. It seems odd that she'd be in a subclass that doesn't focus on that - like the Life Domain. But this subclass gives us the greatest indication of all that she was raised as a tool for both Shar and her Mother Superior, making you, as a player, try to balance her ability to heal with her disrupting spells and abilities, meaning a sacrifice in her ability to hit any fuckin thing at all.

Anyway, chef's kiss, I love the secondary story about each companion the game tells via mechanics.

[comicaurora]

Hey I'm getting into DnD, do you have any podcast or series of a DnD campaign to recommend? I know there is critical role, but wich one of those should i start with? Is there a better beginning than critical role? I am lost here, please help

This is gonna very much depend on your personal preferences and attention span! I recommend sampling a range of DnD podcasts to find your personal tolerances and what parts appeal to you. I'm not the most widely-read person in this space because frankly most DnD podcasts are on too slow a boil for my attention span, but I've got a few you could check out-

Critical Role is the biggest and most well-known one for sure, but pacing wise I personally can't get through it. I love it in concept, but it's slow enough and huge enough that my brain zones out in the downtime and I lose track of important details when things speed up again. I think my first successful exposure to it was a brisk two-hour video that's just a Best Moments Of Grog compilation. That's also why I've been really liking The Legend Of Vox Machina, which keeps all the biggest and best moments but paces them like an actual story instead of a game. It's not representative of the experience of playing a TTRPG, but it is a lot of fun.

I personally enjoy limited-run miniseries a lot more, because they work better for my limited attention span, and on the critical role front that means I recommend EXU Calamity, a Doomed Heroes far-distant prequel to the modern setting of CR. Only four four-hour episodes and it's on a bit of a slow boil for the first three, but because everybody involved knows how the story's going to end, there's an endless drip of dramatic tension along the way. The DM, Brennan Lee Mulligan, is going to show up a lot more on this list.

On the subject of short miniseries DM'd by Brennan Lee Mulligan, Escape From The Bloodkeep is my personal favorite and the one I revisit the most. Six two-hour episodes, deeply unhinged and intrinsically comedic as it's a full-series parody of Lord of the Rings. I recommend it for a lot of reasons, not least of which being that Matt Mercer, who is an excellent DM, gets to play, and his playstyle is a great example of how to roll with the punches and the dice, since his extremely menacing nazghul captain is afflicted by a string of hilarious failures and he kind of just owns it, to the point where his character arc becomes accepting his worth as an individual with the power of friendship. It's a great example of not taking yourself or your character too seriously, which is a vital skill for players to learn in order to handle the whims of the dice sometimes (or often) not cooperating with your narrative wishes. If CR isn't working for you but you're interested in what you can pick up from this extremely talented DM, this is a good way to get that!

Dimension 20 (Collegehumor's DnD branch) has several series I really like, most of them DM'd by Brennan Lee Mulligan again. His DMing style really works for me, and he takes an approach to pacing that I quite like, so they're generally a safe bet for me. One I categorically recommend is The Unsleeping City, an urban fantasy DnD game set in New York City. This one is 19 two-hour episodes, so longer than the other miniseries but still much shorter than CR, and it can give you a bit of a sampler for (a) the genrebending you can do with DnD and (b) a longer-form story with a less rigidly determined finale than the previous examples. Brennan's DM style is very cool, and he puts an unusual amount of focus on characters getting solo vignettes, which is sometimes considered a bit gauche in DM circles because it means the other players don't have a whole lot to do during those solo conversations, but it works for him and his players and the effect is very cinematic!

But if you want to see a different DM's style in the same space, A Court Of Fey And Flowers is run by Aabria Iyengar, one of the EXU Calamity players, and she has a very different but also cinematic DMing style! The game is also a hybridization of DnD and a different system for facilitating Jane Austen romances, which is dope. Only the first episode is up on Youtube, but that should probably be enough to let you determine if you want to check out more.

I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention the two DnD Actual-Plays I'm in, Rolling With Difficulty and Heart of Elynthi. Rolling with Difficulty is subdivided into three seasons of 8-10 four-hour episodes each, with each season having one overarching plot or threat but mostly being composed of episodic adventures - it's a Planescape series, meaning most episodes take us to a completely new plane of existence to deal with its unique geometry, fun denizens and wacky threats. It's also a lot more edited than some actual-play podcasts, with an effort to avoid the slow parts and the dice-rolling, mental math, "what am I gonna do this round," etc. Heart of Elynthi is an ongoing series that's only about five or six episodes in, with an overarching mystery in the background and a "collect the things to save the world" plotline in the foreground. It also streams new episodes on Twitch on (some) Wednesday afternoons, so if you'd benefit from a live chat to hang out and talk with during games, that might be worth checking out to see if you like it! Elynthi also has had some pretty cool behind-the-curtain stuff about how the players can handle in-character disagreements without them turning into IRL fights, which is something I don't think I've ever seen another DnD actual-play explicitly unpack but is also extremely important for players to consider, so that's fun.

[pherre]

okay this might be odd lol but i know that you listen to taz and i've been meaning to get back into it. The last campaign i finished was graduation, is there any since then you'd recommend more than the others?? thanks! :)

hi anon! this has been sitting in my inbox for a while dhgdgdhdjsjd i'm genuinely sorry i just didn't have the time to reply properly

the one i'd absolutely recommend is steeplechase! it's DM'd by justin and it's like if balance didn't have world ending stakes and had like. early arc vibes throughout the whole campaign

doesn't mean that it's not dramatic, it's just more focused on goofs and character interactions than story and narration! it's also justin's first time properly DMing so it takes a little bit of time getting into the swing of things but it's so good once it does

it's really funny and the player characters are delightful, griffin's character in particular is one of my favorite taz characters ever

[astral-dragons]

[EDIT: We got enough players now, thanks y'all! ^U^]

Hi internet!

So I'm trying to set up a new Curse of Strahd Campaign, however we've only got a couple players right now and are looking for more. We've already got a DM, yours truly, but I'm hoping to get 2-3 more players for this group.

In case you don't know me, hi! My name's Watson (they/she/he pronouns), I'm 19, I've been playing D&D 5e for about 5 years, and this will be my second time running CoS. Here's some things to keep in mind before you DM me about joining:

This is going to be an online campaign conducted over Discord, joining VC during sessions is going to be a requirement, but you don't need a fancy audio setup or turn on your camera. Just a reliable internet connection and a working mic.

Curse of Strahd is a horror-centric campaign, and will likely stray into some uncomfortable subject matter. Although my goal as the DM is always to unsettle, not upset, there are some topics that are unavoidable as a consequence of the main plot.

Looking for LGBTQ+ friendly players

New players are more than welcome to join!

A consistent schedule is preferred, for the sake of making sure everybody can make it and not have to miss out.

Prefer a roleplay heavy game that's gonna be lighter on combat (as combat light as you can be with CoS, anyway)

Finally, if you've played or DM'd CoS before, you're still welcome to join! I just ask that you don't metagame (though this is a rule to keep in mind regardless.)

Contact me via DMs on tumblr if you're interested :D

[supereffectiveartblog]

Year of D&D 2023

This year, it was difficult for free time to line up for me and my friends. In last years "Year of D&D" post, i started by complaining about how infrequent our play was that year, but this year, we played even less. Mostly because of scheduling issues, but also because its difficult to plan as a DM. The scheduling issue has become more difficult partially because all of our current campaigns have more regular player characters. In 2020, we played with 1 DM and 4 players, but now most of our campaigns have at least 5 characters, one had 6, but one dropped out, and I DM'd a campaign that briefly had 8 player characters. Finding free time that lines up for 8 people is very very difficult. But as I'll discuss later on, we might've come up with a solution to this.

Here's the stats for this year:

In 2023, our group played 4 different adventures, a combined 12 sessions.

I made 13 session arts (1 extra one being the Meet the Party art for Princes). This was compared to 22 sessions and 21 session arts the previous year.

I was a player character in 2 campaigns, and the DM in one campaign and one Oneshot.

Pokémon Oster was the only returning campaign from last year, with sessons 1-5 happening in 2022, and sessions 6-9 this year.

Princes of the Apocalypse is our new core D&D module campaign, continuing from our DM of Tomb of Annihilation and Ravnica. We played 3 sessions this year.

Call of the Netherdeep was my first try at a module campaign, taking place in the world of Critical Role. We have 5 core players that will play every time, plus 3 "guest" players that play as the rival party, and I only intend to join us when they're needed or free.

Frozen Memories was our Halloween One-Shot for the year, and like Call of the Netherdeep, was pre-written. In my opinion, following someone else's work made it flow better than last year's Halloween One-Shot.

Darryl Fisher returns from last year as my player character in Pokemon Oster, our Pokemon Tabletop United campaign. Since last year, there's been no siginificant change in his playstyle. He fights alongside his Pokemon when facing some Wild Pokemon and ruffians, but respects league rules against regular trainers. Darryl is a mono Water type trainer, and his team consists of Piplup, Buizel, Carvanha, Magikarp, Wooper, and Tympole. He embodies everything a water type trainer would be, he is a swimmer, a fisherman, and even a diver, interested in buried treasure. I play him as a blokey bloke, and a bit of a bogan, but he has a good heart, and steps up to the plate when needed.

The Pokémon Oster campaign has no sign of stopping, so we will see more of Darryl next year.

Lilith Maddox is my player character in Princes of the Apocalypse. Lilith is my second attempt at a morally grey character (after Nevaeh), but one who i hope to play on a redemption arc on. Lilith is an Eloquence Bard, meaning I can expect most social interactions to go my way, and although i havent had much of a chance to play her, I want to use that as part of her personality and arc. Her father was an incubus, and this means that Lilith's aura naturally puts people at ease, and more likely to agree with her. Because Lilith usually gets her way, this means she has developed a bratty complex, with the secret fear that actually maybe nobody likes her for real. I want to play her to help get over my own imposter syndrome.

Lilith has also been the artistic bane of my existence this year. Perfecting the look of a character that is both snooty and reserved, with an outfit that speaks Bard and Succubus, but not in an inappropriate way, has been almost impossible for me. What I've presented here is what I hope is my final take on Lilith, but who knows when I'll next come upon a design idea I want to incorporate into my most incomplete D&D character.

This year I also took to DMing more. In previous years, I was DMing a campaign I wrote myself called Rise of the Lich Queen, and it wasn't fantastic. So this year, I've put the Lich Queen on hiatus to make an attempt at a following a prewritten campaign, Call of the Netherdeep. The campaign pre-bakes a rival party into the story, and instead of just using the pre-written rivals, i thought it would be interesting for real people to play them. Since the rivals aren't there every session, their players wouldn't need to be every session either. The necessity of having all character present at the start of the campaign did make scheduling difficult, and we only organised 4 sessions. It is on me to schedule as the DM for this campaign, so hopefully, we will find the time for more of this campaign this year.

Our first year of D&D featured a Halloween Oneshot, and we missed out on that 2021. So i've strived to take the reins and make it a yearly tradition again. Last year I wrote my own OneShot, and it had an interesting gimmick, but was poorly written. This year, like my core campaign, I followed a prewritten adventure, Frozen Memories. Having lore and set pieces already written for me allowed me to flesh out specific moments and better write character moments.

What I think was the better take away from this OneShot however was what DIDNT happen. I ran a couple session zeros to help with character creation and to set the stage for the setting, and at one point, all 8 of my closest friends had drafted up a character idea. But when the year started to run out, I decided I needed a cut off, and one weekend, just ran the adventure for who was available. I think I want to use this format going forward; running shorter adventures and changing out the players depending on who is free. I don't know if it will always be OneShots, but I think flexibility for scheduling will make sessions more frequent.

So if I only played as two characters this year, how was I going to fill in the space on my Year of D&D poster for this year? Well this year I played a videogame called Baldur's Gate 3. And BG3 is basically D&D 5e as a videogame. Since first playing the game, I have beaten the game with 3 different characters, and I based each of them on past and present D&D characters. I have a couple more characters in mind that I will play into next year, but there's not a lot to the game that I haven't experienced in my first three playthroughs.

I did write ups for all these characters in a previous post so if you wanna read up on those, Here is the one for Hawthorne and Lilith, and Here is the one for Nevaeh. I really enjoyed Baldur's Gate 3 and it is 100% my game of the year. It scratched an itch brought upon by a lack of D&D, and I appreciate it for that.

As I mentioned above, I'm hoping for TTRPGs next year I can better take advantage of one-off and short adventures that do not require the entire table to be present. Hoping the pattern of less tabletops each subsequent years does not continue. Here's wishing for more D&D with friends next year. If you want to see specifics on individual sessions, I have a very complex system of links on my Pinned Post.

[camelliagwerm]

skill and playtest for the player questions and homebrew for the dm questions

Playtest: What class (or subclass) do you want to try out?

This is going to sound like the most 5E DM thing ever, but honestly? Battle Master Fighter. However, I think because of how Fighter is in terms of utility, the likelihood of me ever playing it is slim because a lot of the 5e games I've been in have more of an emphasis on RP overall. They'd probably be my go to if I was to play in a dungeon crawl game though.

I'd also love to give Shadow Sorcerer a proper try and Necromancer Wizard a chance. I don't usually play pure spellcasters unless it's Divine Soul Sorcerer because I like being able to take a hit, so even if I do play a spellcaster, I'm usually playing a martial one.

Skill: Do you prefer RP, combat, or something else? Is there a part of the game you consider yourself best at?

I personally enjoy a mix, just because of how I tend to design my characters and what sort of role I usually end up occupying. Nine times out of ten, I'm usually playing a tank of some kind - no matter what system it is (e.g. a blood hunter in Curse of Strahd whose tankiness lied in his hp, a tempest domain cleric in Icewind Dale, a dex-based investigator in my 2e game, a hilariously tanky decay domain cleric in a Fistful of Flowers, a Tzimisce in my V5 game), so by default I enjoy the combat encounters.

However I do think I'm a fairly solid RPer. I'm an ex-theatre kid, I'll commit to the bit no problem. I'm the sort of RPer who will step up when necessary, but I want to give other players - especially newer players - the opportunity to shine.

Homebrew: Do you have any house rules or homebrews you use? What are they?

I have a few specific house rules as a 5E DM:

First is in regard to keeping players comfortable: if there is something in the game that is making them uncomfortable, the player can DM me privately, and I'll end the scene, no questions asked. I've pretty much exclusively DM'd Ravenloft games, so this is important to me.

The second house rule I have is relating to the Guidance cantrip. I didn't have this implemented before, but I had a player once who abused the fuck out of it and it was not fun for the table. You can use guidance, but consider how it looks to an NPC you're trying to persuade, or how it'd feel if you're using it for stealth as it has a verbal component as well as a somatic. That might not make the check easier, but harder for yourself. It encourages a more...tactical use of it, rather than something that can be spammed. I hate that I had to do it because of one bad egg, but it was unfortunately necessary for the table's sanity.

Rule of Cool - if something isn't what'd be classified as 'strictly legal' (e.g. by the book), I'm willing to throw the rulebook out of the window in favour of 'rule of cool' for that action. I like encouraging creative thinking and want to reward that where I can. I like to offer up the potential of one free inspiration die per player per session as an encouragement for this or rp.

This is an exclusive-to-Ravenloft house rule: I implemented a system that was suggested in Van Richten's Guide for the current Ravenloft game I'm running called Seeds of Fear. I'm fairly sure it runs a little like Call of Cthulhu's fear system. In short, fail a Wisdom saving throw (DC dependent on player's level), and I get to roll a D12 - they get a Seed of Fear. With that in mind, if they come across something that might trigger that fear, they have to roll another Wisdom saving throw. Fail that and they're frightened until the end of their next turn. This ties into the "one earnable inspiration die per player and session" rule - as if the player rps the fear appropriately

D&D Asks

[memento-morri-writes]

hey morri!

do you prefer dnd as a player or as a dm? tricky question i know :)

/rodentwrites

Hiii Harrison!!

I prefer it as a player, to be honest. I've only ever DM'd once, and it was for a oneshot. I'd love to do it again, and maybe even run a campaign someday, but I'm not nearly organized nor consistent enough to do that, at least not right now. Part of that is my ADHD, which is SO bad it's not even funny.

I love the idea of creating my own world, and writing my own story, and seeing people interact with it, but the amount of planning that has to go into a campaign, not just at the beginning, but on a weekly (if you play weekly) basis, is amazing. I am just about the least organized person you will ever meet, and I am the world's worst procrastinator. Between those two things, I don't think I could ever DM a campaign.

I'm such a funny goofy person when it comes to playing, though. All my characters have very detailed backstories and personalities, but when it comes to RP, I struggle. I know what my characters would do and say in most situations, but coming up with it on the spot is fucking HARD. Not to mention that I feel more than a little awkward doing it at some times. (Especially since I cannot do voices to save my life, and so all my characters just sound like me.)

I do absolutely adore combat, though. There's something about turn-based combat that just scratches such an itch in my brain. (Hence why I loved games like Wildermyth and Divinity: Original Sin.) I have the brain for it, since I have a really good understanding of d&d mechanics, and also a fair mind for logical strategy, at least somewhat. Actually, funny annecdote from yesterday's session: we were having combat at sea, and the rest of the party was floundering (at one point we had 4 people down), which they claim is due to their year-long curse where all water-based combat goes horribly wrong. Meanwhile, my character, Rook, was all by himself on the back of a whale with 4 enemies, and doing just fine. Was only down 5 HP for 90% of the combat. We joked the reason it was going so well for him was because he's a pirate, so sea-based combat is his natural environment. (The one downside, though, was that he never got to use sneak attack, which is like, the entire point of being a rogue.)

I'm in two campaigns currently (though one hasn't started yet, but will be in a week or two), and I'm having a blast. Even though I'm relatively new to playing d&d, it definitely is one of my special interests. (and I continue to amaze my DM's with my near-encyclopedic knowledge of the rules despite only having been playing for less than a year.)

Hopefully in the future, after these two campaigns, I'll be able to play more and try out more fun and interesting characters, be it with the same people or new ones.

What about you? What do you prefer? And why??

(Sorry this got so long, I am incapable of being to-the-point, especially when it comes to my interests.)

[maintitle]

When I was younger I was always a little frustrated because I always DM'd and never got to be a player in a campaign, and that was true until like four years ago. Now I'm absolutely blessed to not only have two long, on-going characters with one nearing the end of his story, but a bunch of smaller ones from campaigns in other worlds and systems and that ROCKS... but I've been realizing lately that I now have the opposite problem. There's a huge part of me that misses being a DM so much more than I could have ever expected, I miss that outlet so much, and it's really reminded me that that's where I'm most comfortable and most fulfilled not just in games, but creatively. It's so strange to be in the opposite position from what I was from like 13-29.

[natjennie]

I really want to get into dimension 20 and most people recommend starting with fantasy high but what’s your recommendation !?

this is a great question! when I started watching dimension 20, only fantasy high even existed, I finished it about a month before escape from the bloodkeep came out. so I only really have the experience of watching all the seasons chronologically. if you don't have access to dropout, fantasy high is a really smart place to start, because I believe all of freshman year and some of sophomore year is on youtube? someone correct me if that's wrong.

so tldr: fantasy high is probably the most logical and satisfying place to start, but there are lots of other stories that might catch your interest in different ways, so I've detailed that below the cut

it depends on your genre preferences and if you vibe with the cast of the seasons too.

fantasy high, sophomore year, pirates of leviathan, and the seven all exist in the same universe which is sort of modern fantasy? d&d races, fighting dragons and golems, but the characters have cell phones. that kind of vibe.

escape from the bloodkeep is a parody of lord of the rings but from the villains' point of view, which is really fun, high dark fantasy that they don't take super seriously.

the unsleeping city as well as the unsleeping city chapter 2 take place in new york in which there exists a parallel magical version of new york, so your characters include a hairdresser and a firefighter instead of like, halfling wizards.

tiny heist is a "the borrowers" style robbery/heist/oceans 11 deal with tiny people and living toys and bugs and stuff, that's got the mcelroy brothers and their dad in it if that intrigues you.

a crown of candy is game of thrones but all the people are food-inspired.

similarly, mice and murder is clue/a murder mystery with anthropomorphic animal people.

misfits and magic is a super short miniseries that is a direct satire of the harry potter universe full of diversity and commentary.

and I belieeevee that's all of them. so fantasy high, unsleeping city, and a crown of candy are the more substantial main seasons with the original cast, they're a little longer season-wise. bloodkeep, tiny heist, pirates of leviathan, mice and murder, misfits and magic and most recently just starting, the seven, are shorter, mostly self-contained stories if you're looking for something with less commitment.

there are lots of clips and the beginning episodes of seasons on youtube if you aren't confident enough in your interest to invest in dropout, which is the streaming platform all of dimension 20 and the rest of collegehumor's content is on if you don't know, so those might help you narrow down which season grabs you.

they are all dungeons and dragons fifth edition, dm'd by brennan lee mulligan with the exception of misfits and magic which uses the "kids on brooms" system, is gm'd by aabria iyengar, and features brennan as a player instead.

if you can't really narrow it down by genre or universe, it might be useful to look at the guest casts to see if anyone there jumps out at you as someone you really love, the mcelroys in tiny heist, erika ishii is in numerous seasons they're amazing, matt mercer, amy vorpahl, rehka shankar, lily du, a bunch of other collegehumor folks, there's been a ton of people.

so yeah I think ultimately, fantasy high is a smart place to start and work chronologically. I believe a crown of candy was maybe the most "popular" season, if not, it was at least the most rife with engagement, but other than that I think it's really up to what story resonates with you or what universe you find interesting!

[semiotomatics]

thinkin bout my soon-to-be-actualized d&d campaign...

I'm like 9000% certain I never could've dm'd before listening to TAZ: balance. I'd had a decent level of exposure to d&d before I discovered the podcast (i sat in on some friends' campaigns in high school, plus I started watching critical role like 6 months before I finally caved and started TAZ), and it all piqued my interest to varying degrees. I'd say CR prolly caused me to catch the bug more than anything that came before it. I even had a desire to DM a game prior to starting TAZ. but I didn't, and I don't think I could've even if I'd had the players/time/energy dropped right in my lap. I just didn't have the right frame of reference I guess

which?? idek what it is about the balance arc that made me DM Ready™. I mean I love that entire arc to pieces, I've relistened to it like 3 times already, and I seem to be unable to go more than a few months without going back to it. its incredibly different tonally and structurally to CR, which isn't a knock on CR in the slightest! but I think I knew I could never be a Matt Mercer DM, and so having him as my main DM rep made me shy away from taking on the role myself.

but Griffin's style spoke to me in ways Matt's never did. they're both very narrative driven, but where Matt constructs his world and story completely within the bounds of the game, Griffin merely uses it as a launching board for whatever zany ideas he manages to think up. he's also not interested in Tortured Grimdark Drama or Classic High Fantasy Epics or Morally Bankrupt Murder-hobos. his only focus was (and now, with the announcement that season 2 is gonna be Amnesty, still is) telling a fun story with his family, making goofs, and being completely 100% devoted to the characters and the world they created together. I don't think balance would've turned out nearly as good if Griffin had been a rules lawyer, or even a casual rules advocate. tbh I don't think it could've happened at all. from the moment he went off book in the very first adventure he stepped outside what the DMG could provide him

which isn't to say I don't care about the rules at all! I absolutely love the chance aspect of dice rolls deciding the narrative, and I think the many and varied materials from the PHB to the unofficial/supplementary/homebrew stuff provides an excellent foundation to build a world/characters on top of. but I don't want to stop at gameplay. I don't even necessarily want to start with gameplay. I dont think I'm any more capable of being a rules lawyer than Griffin is. I just want to tell a good _story_. I want to tell a hopeful story. I want to let my players be heroes. I want them to know, even if I don't make it as explicit as Griffin did, that ”you're going to be amazing" <3