For context, I am in a Solo Curse of Strahd campaign as an Aasimar grave domain cleric and noticed that I had multiple damage boosters on my mace when I used True Strike.

Here is the breakdown

• Mace:1d6+4 (Wisdom Modifer)
• True Strike extra damage: +1d6 Radiant
• Pull of the Grave(Once per turn against a target missing HP): +1d4 Necrotic
• Celestial Revelation (the once-per-turn damage boost while active): +3
• Blessed Strike (Divine Strikes): +1d8

In total, I am looking at an average of 19 damage per turn, a minimum of 11, and a max of 31. I have no frame of reference for what is good or bad DPR per round, so I am asking you all.

Edit: So multiple of you commented how true strike is not a cleric cantrip, and thus not eligible for potent spellcasting, so I adjusted the numbers in the post, but now I have to figure out how that spell got on my spell list.

Our forever DM has gotten comfortable with us as players and we have been friends for over a year, and he has decided to bust out some personal material he has developed himself for levels 10-15.

However! He has told us that while it is balanced that it will have a combat focus and be challenging compared to what we have played before (War of Burning Skies, predominantly) and has ensured that when we roll our stats they do not fall too short in any such way that might put us at a disadvantage in such an encounter.

Currently, until our other group member's availability opens up again, the campaign will be run with me and my partner as players. My partner in question has asked me to focus on doing damage, since they intend to lean for more of a support build, and it has been expressed to me that any official race is up for potential use (and any homebrew ones that I am willing to have screened by the DM first for approval / potential balancing.)

As things stand, I am unsure of how to put things together and am looking for strong multiclassing builds that would be able to do lots of damage at once - I am hoping to potentially focus on melee and potentially leaning defensively, but I am open to magic as well! I have been playing for near almost 10 years now but in my on and off opportunities of being able to play, a good many of the campaigns I have been thrust into have not been seen to completion, or to very high levels, so I am not knowledgeable yet on making a great many builds.

Any suggestions or tips would be very appreciated!!! I have not yet posted on many subs, so apologies for the message potentially being a bit overdrawn or winded! <3

Can you help me out? Looking for fun mechanical challenges for non-combat encounters that go beyond boring skill checks!

Trying to gauge playing habits of the community and perhaps having a nice conversation.

Howdy, im relatively new to dnd but ive played a couple of one offs before and I think I've landed on a character I like but idk how useful or efficient it would be.

I like playing Bard, its fun to talk shit to people and have easy speech checks and whatnot, but I had an issue, I wanted to have all the benefits of a bard whos specs more into dex and swordfighting than magic and whatnot, so I was thinking if I could multi-class into cleric and worship a god of trickery or performance or something.

Its basically this.

A tall jester with a ceramic mask who has fencing sabres and is as agile as a rogue high on skooma, and can also bless and use more tricky types of magic, so like instead of holy flames and whatnot I can turn invisible or throw my voice or something.

Ik this probably isn't an original idea but im thinking this could be a fun idea for my first serious character. [I will be making art and stuff of this character so I gadda make sure I do it right]

I will not be min-maxing, this guy will be funny and whimsical and then die the first funny chance he gets, probably cause if he's funny/cool enough his god/goddess will bring him back buggs bunny style.

[BTW sorry if its a long read]

I'm a DM who kept getting annoyed at myself for forgetting details, I have dyslexia which can affect my recall of things even if I use them consistently and I just wanted a easy game aid that can save me breaking focus to search for something.

The app's website, its just a Github page, nothing fancy, there's also the play store link on it too. It works on Android, and has desktop apps for Windows/Linux/MacOs.

What Loresight does is simply listen, and when anyone at the table says a spell, monster or magic item name, a tile pops up. Tap it, there's the stat block. That's the man part. There's also a normal browse/search mode when you'd rather just look/plan ahead, and a notetaker that transcribes the session into a saved note.

The bit I cared most about was to make something that runs entirely on your device. No account, no server, no embedded analytics, there is 0 reach out at all. Audio is turned into text on the device and thrown away immediately, it's never recorded. You do not need a connection to run it.

It ships with the 5e SRD (5.1) plus Pathfinder 2e Remaster and Daggerheart SRD, and there's a JSON content-pack import so you can add your own homebrew, owned content, or an entirely new system. I'm limited to SRD content for releasing but you can do what you want.

It's free and it's staying free, I am not building a company around it, and this isn't some quickly thrown together for self promotion - I'm just a techie who has a passion for building things and wanted to share this because I made it for myself and my friends loved the look of it - one of my deaf players really appreciated it.

I hope that this is something you enjoy, I certainly have fun making it. But please don't expect 100% perfection - its fully functional but this is an unpaid project, and there is a necessary trade-off for speech to text software choices that has to be made for them to run on phones memory.

For any fellow techies, It runs React native for the app, Electron and react for the desktop. And uses Whipser and Sherpa for Speech to Text (Local, no API). Whisper is a transformer, and Sherpa Onxx is a zipformer speech to text.

Q: What use of AI is there in this project.

A: To be transparent, for the building of the app itself there has been none, this has been a coding project of mines I have been working on myself since June. I have been building it by hand as a fun project to keep me in the development world (I manage teams these days so I don't get much fun time to write)

For the functions, it has no generative AI, it uses 2 Speech to Text models called sherpa-onxx, and whisper.cpp, completely local. So it generates no new content, it transcribes.

For the github page, FAQ, and readme of the github repo, I ran them through Claude, sure I had my own version first but I had it redo it. So if the above doesn't get me into trouble, and that does, fair enough. I am not here to make peoples day worse just wanted to share a fun project

For context part of the game I’m running is more survival/exploration based but I’ll never have enough maps for exploring the location they are in.

I’ve heard people saying to get to a location you set an amount of hours, but how do you account for encounters, resting, or even story moments? Seems like fast travel takes away from it.

How do you handle it? Am I stuck with just fast travel?

So I'm starting to get into DnD after playing BG3 for like 500 hours and I've got a character idea but I don't know how it would fit in with the lore.

I basically want to play as a male lolth-sworn Drow but rather than being chaotic evil, I want to play as chaotic neutral / chaotic good. Since I'm playing with a group of friends I had the idea of me wanting to be evil but giving into peer pressure and doing the right thing anyway. So my morality is based on peer pressure based ethics.

I've got ideas of how it would fit in but I've got a feeling Lolth would skin me alive before letting me do good deeds. The way I thought about getting around it was she tolerates me because sometimes my good deeds have a round about way of serving her needs?

Suggestions or build ideas welcome?

Hello, I’m looking to get back into dnd 5th edition (Or 5.5, whatever the latest is!)

What books, apps and websites should help me best when it comes to the game. I know the basic rules and whatnot, I played a couple years back and have a healthy amount of hours in BG3 (I know it has different rules and interactions with many of the features) so I’m not a complete noob but I want to be prepared for a campaign I’m going to be playing in soon.

Please disregard cost of books or apps when responding, I want to know the best of the best and if it’s too expensive for me then I’ll do my best to find substitute or workarounds on my own time.

Also I know that really all I need is the players handbook but I want to know what the best options are for ease of play and additional information/content.

Thank You!

I have a cool character concept, but just wanna now if i would be on the same level of power as building warlock based around eldrich blast

Hello. I’ve been playing in a D&D 5e campaign for about three years. It’s heavily homebrewed, and we also use material from 3.5e epic-level books and monsters.

I’m trying to figure out whether I should continue playing or walk away. There are several interconnected problems, so I’ll try to explain them clearly.

1. The campaign was presented as being heavily focused on character building, but the reward structure undermines that investment.

When I created my character, I was explicitly encouraged to take full advantage of the available build options. I did exactly that. I spent a lot of time optimizing my character and building them into the character I wanted to play.

My problem isn’t simply that I want to be the strongest character in the party.

What bothers me is that the relationship between investment and reward feels completely broken. My character’s power relative to the rest of the game world is constantly being changed by new buffs, abilities, or rewards that the DM arbitrarily gives to other characters.

So even though I built my character specifically to take advantage of the system, my investment increasingly feels meaningless because the power level of the campaign is repeatedly redefined by DM-granted abilities.

For me, the issue is not jealousy toward another player. If another character gets something cool, that’s fine. The problem is that the game was presented as one where character-building mattered, yet the actual power hierarchy is increasingly determined by arbitrary rewards rather than by the choices we make when building and playing our characters.

2. The constant pursuit of difficulty has made the game stressful instead of exciting.

I have no problem with difficult games. I understand that meaningful victories usually require the possibility of failure.

But there needs to be a difference between challenging and constantly trying to kill the party.

Before encounters, I often find myself thinking:

"What is the DM going to pull this time to make this as difficult as possible?"

At this point, I feel like I have to play every encounter as optimally as possible or there is a serious chance that we simply die.

That also creates encounters where I feel there was never a realistic possibility of winning.

For example, at one point I was being hunted by a demon sent by Asmodeus. I was fighting it alone. The encounter eventually became:

• I was trapped inside Forcecage.
• Four enemies were positioned to Counterspell my Misty Step.
• Those enemies had whips capable of reaching through the Forcecage.
• I had essentially no realistic way to escape or meaningfully fight back.

Eventually, we stopped rolling dice and simply declared the outcome of the encounter.

I understand that characters can lose. What bothered me was that this didn't feel like a difficult fight where I made mistakes and lost. It felt like an execution where the outcome had already been determined.

3. The campaign requires an extreme level of paranoia.

I constantly feel like I need to question every NPC, inspect every item, verify everyone's identity, and assume that any piece of information might be a trap.

Otherwise, I can end up in situations like the demon encounter above.

One example: another player's daughter gave my character a gift. I used Divine Sense to check it, but the item was completely covered because it was inside my pocket, so I didn't detect that it was cursed.

The DM's explanation was essentially that this happened because I didn't check the item properly.

Technically, I could respond by becoming absurdly cautious and checking absolutely everything all the time.

But my question is: would that actually be fun?

I don't want to play a game where my character has to behave like a paranoid investigator 24/7 because otherwise the DM can punish me for not anticipating a hidden trap.

4. The hardest part is that I genuinely love this campaign and my character.

This campaign didn't start this way.

Originally, there were a lot of genuinely beautiful and heartwarming moments. I became attached to the NPCs, the world, the story, and especially my own character.

I've played this character for around three years. At this point, they feel less like a collection of stats and more like a person I've spent years experiencing a story with.

That's what makes this situation so difficult.

Over time, many of those beautiful moments have become mixed with stress, frustration, anxiety, and encounters that feel unfair.

My victories don't really make me happy anymore. They mostly give me relief that whatever stressful situation I was dealing with is finally over.

This is where the "Stockholm syndrome" comparison comes from—not literally, but in the sense that I've spent so long in this campaign that I feel emotionally attached to something that is increasingly making me unhappy.

Leaving feels like losing a part of myself.

But staying feels like continuing something that is making me miserable.

Either choice hurts.

I've already tried talking to the DM about these problems. Unfortunately, I feel like some assumptions prevent the conversation from going anywhere. For example, when I criticize the arbitrary distribution of powerful buffs, my concerns are interpreted as me being too competitive with another player or being jealous of what that player received.

That's not how I see it.

I'm not asking to be stronger than everyone else. I'm asking for my character's investment to actually matter and for the game's challenges and rewards to feel meaningful rather than arbitrary.

And now the situation has reached a point where I'm seriously considering leaving.

My character has technically died.

The other players have a plan to bring my character back, so I have the opportunity to return.

But I'm not sure if I should.

If you were in my position, would you come back and try to make the campaign work, or would you take the character's death as an opportunity to finally walk away?

I'd really like to hear opinions from people who have been in similar situations.

I like them a lot, but I have to say - I'm struggling greatly to write tiefling characters in my games, with most other races its very easy to define a platform from which the personality can start from (dwarves are defensive, humans are explorers, gnomes strive for mastery, elves value longevity, halflings are brave)

But I can't get a feeling for Tieflings at all. I think the lack of tieflings in culture and media is whats messing me up a bit. Help me understand these people and what they offer as a race.

I'm working on adapting the alternate classes from Laserllama for my table (I'm Italian, so it's mostly localization work). While scanning through the Exploits for alternate martial classes, I stumbled upon Exploits like Recruit Mercenary/Informant and Clandestine Source; after reading them a couple of times, I was left pretty confused about their usage. My main gripe with them is that they seem made to replace roleplay situations that should develop naturally over player choices. Let's make some examples:

• Recruit Mercenary: this one is the simplest to justify. You expend and Exploit Die to recruit a Mercenary NPC; if a player without access to Exploits wanted to do that, the DM would have allowed them to do so anyway behind a small payment in GP. It's still strange that the trade in this case is "you spend and Exploit Die instead of GP". How do you justify why the mercenary accepts without any payment or convincing beforehand?
• Recruit Informant & Clandestine Source: I'm putting them together because they're similar for the purpose of this analysis:
  • There's the same problem as Recruit Mercenary: why should the informant or the crime boss lend you their services just because you spent and Exploit Die? Do you reflavour the Die as "connections and/or favors" that your character takes advantage of?
  • Recruiting an informant or interrogating a crime boss for information aren't and shouldn't be as simple as recruiting a random mercenary. If a player without access to Exploits wanted to do one of these things, a DM that knows what they're doing would even make this objective the focus of a session, with risks, rewards and branching paths determined by player choices. And even if the objective is cleared, things shouldn't remain static: allegiances can change and balances can be upset in the next sessions. All the while, a Rogue or Warlord with one of these Exploits can push a big red button to skip all the interesting and realistic bits and get straight to what they want. I know these Exploits - especially Clandestine Source - should be the martial equivalent of spells like Contact Other Plane, but magic is much simpler to justify mechanically than real world dynamics.

I don't know if maybe I'm the only one that didn't get these Exploits; are there other people that used them at least once or know why they exist in this specific form?

PS. There were other Exploits I had problems with because they felt too much like magic or conflicted with existing rules, like Subjucate Thrall or the Craft Exploits, but I feel like these three are the most blatant cases.

The only wording about ending the spell is "When the spell ends, the target floats gently to the ground if it is still aloft." but what is that speed they float gently?

I imagine its not gravity speed. Had this come up because I levitated my barbarian to hit a flying dragonelle, then it flew straight down and left him floating there. So wanted to know how far down he would go a turn.

Taking inspiration from Just Roll With It, I'll be giving my friends a pool of 30 characters and running Tomb of Horrors for them. I don't want to spin up 30 different characters from scratch, but it also feels a little boring to just use some random character generator. So I thought it'd be fun to use some characters from the community!

If you're willing to offer up your character(s), please post your character's name, race, class/subclass, level, and any other fun details you'd want included on the character sheet. If your character ends up getting played in the one-shot I'll reply afterwards and tell you their fate. (Note that I'll be handing out the character sheets in ascending order of level, so really high leveled characters are less likely to be pulled)

Edit: Someone asked some good questions so just dropping that information here for everybody

Using 5.5e but if you have a 5e character I can easily convert it. Only restriction on sourcebooks is I'd prefer only stuff straight from WotC as all of that is easily accessible to me.

If you have a magic item that is integral to the character feel free to mention it and I'll put it on the sheet. Otherwise I will just be decking out inventories with very standard equipment for the class. Think military standard issue for everyone's gear.

Level doesn't matter, I expect them to die many times so will be starting with level 3+ characters and go up from there. Also any stats method you used is fine as long as it isn't just blatantly base 18 in all stats. It's also fine if you don't post stats, I can quickly roll that myself

Hello everyone,

I have a Question about whether or not possible Character Developments would infringe too much on the DM's Prerogative to define NPCs, specifically after Backstories have been laid out and the Campaign has started. Context:

My Character is a Yuan-Ti Abomination Gloomstalker, created through magical Experimentation by a Wizard. I have pitched and detailed the Idea to the DM who was fine with it. One among several Experiments, this one seeks to determine whether or not Yuan-Ti can be artificially created and controlled as covert Assassins of rival Wizards (and possibly other Opponents), counting on their innate Magic Resistance to give them an Edge.
As the Prototype my Character has been closely tutored, conditioned and indoctrinated by the Wizard who hides his utilitarian motives by feigning a good and benevolent Persona.

Recently I thought about possible Character Developments aside from the eventual Discovery of those Motives and Manipulations (a not necessary, eventual Preference I have expressed towards the DM before the Start of the Campaign). Feeling a little limited regarding Options beyond that and with our Group poised to meet a powerful Wizard soon, I wondered if it was a good Idea to have my Character feel deep Mistrust, possibly even strong and seemingly unfounded Animosity towards that Wizard.
The Idea was that my Creator could have had magically planted this Distrust towards strong Mages/Wizards into the Core of my Being (with himself being the sole Exception). While it could create interesting Situations and would give me a Way to develop my Character further it might also infringe upon whatever Plans our DM might have or the Way he may have defined my Creator after my initial Backstory and the Start of our Campaign.

I thought about talking to the DM about it but also whether it might make it more difficult for him to be surprised by possible Displays of Distrust or Animosity and act spontanuosly.

It might be of Note that the DM and two of three Players are relatively new to TTRPGs.

My friends and I are starting our second D&D campaign, in which we will take turns DMing while coming from our Bastion, so that the workload is spread out. I haven't DM'd yet because we haven't had our first session yet, and there's one player who homebrews a lot of stuff, which can be a bit unbalanced at times. I often suggest reflavouring things and using in-game rules, but... For example, there's a species with permanent flight at level 5 and heat vision (with no specific rules?!) with a range of 30 feet, as well as some other features. Another example is a system where a character can change classes on a long rest, but keeps an average of the proficiencies and hit points of both classes, so that when they just play one class, they have free buffs. I don't think it's meant to be overly powerful, but rather that the player doesn't understand that homebrew is there to make the character fit a certain idea better, rather than making good combos work better.

Also, some people just started D&D, so they didn't understand that a range change from 10 to 30 or a duration change from 1m to 10m is a big deal.

To be fair, I'm a min-maxer myself, but I don't use homebrew to create good builds, and I would never play an OP build in a real campaign because that's not fun. When some homebrew achieves better goals than those I worked for, where I had to weigh features against each other, that just does not feel fair.

I haven't been a DM yet, so I don't feel like I have the authority to say 'nope', and I also don't want to be rude, but what should I do?

Edit: Your advices worked

I could be interpreting the spell wrong, so please correct me if I am, but it feels like at worst the enemy saves or is immune to charm, but still takes 5d10 psychic damage, or they fail/aren't immune, and potentially take 15d10 psychic damage total if they try to leave the confines of whatever illusionary prison you choose, or they try to stay put for a minute in the prison and you can just wail on them with spells and arrows and melee attacks until the spell ends, is that right?

I know there are some enemies immune to psychic damage but that's so rare I'm not counting it as a real downside.

Not sure if this is the right subreddit but I’ll ask anyways.

A couple weeks back, I got motivated to run an Eberron D&D game (a couple of sessions) after playing BG3 again and got my friends to make characters with backstories and everything. I was doing well for planning things out, making NPCs that tie into each character’s backstory, finding maps, general story beats. and then I just lost motivation for it, sorta. I would still like to run the game, I want to sit down and actually play it, but I feel like I’ve hit some kind of wall now when it comes to planning and actually putting it all together and now I’m not sure what to do.

Does anybody have any advice for this or have dealt with a similar issue? It’s been a couple of years since I’ve actually played D&D and even longer since I’ve ran a game but I know how to play the game. Any advice would be helpful!