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Ah, travelers! We don't get many such as you in these parts, not since the Marquis' men took control of the pass. I suppose you're wondering why you can't post images or links on this Fifthday?

Thursdays are Text-post Only Days on /r/DnD. We're disabling picture and link posts for 24 hours to encourage discussion posts.

We originally began this trial about six months ago and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I've personally enjoyed a lot of the conversations that have sprung up on these days (and a smarter mod would have bookmarked some of them to use as examples* in this post).

As of now we're planning on keeping the experiment running indefinitely. We're always looking for feedback, so please let us know of your experience. Have you been enamored with a discussion post that arose one Thursday? Have you mourned having to wait one more day to see your comic update? We welcome all takes.

The switch is still happening manually, so it will happen around about midnight Eastern US time. If anyone is aware of a way to automate the process, please message the mods.

Perhaps you could discuss this...we've heard tale of a path through the eastern ridge. If such a trail exists we could circumvent the Marquis' blockade and supply this rebellion. Won't you help us, strangers!?

* The first Thursday after making this post, someone posts the most classic question imaginable. This is what it's all about.

Martial subclasses are ALWAYS ones with most amount of restrains and unnecesery restrictions because "math" (how much you can trust wotc's math if they think changing damage die from d4 to d6 is huge power spike is out of the question). But i want to see this "broken" martial to at least understand what wotc actually consider broken for martial. I want to see martial Twilight Cleric, or martial Chronurgy Wizard!

We’ll never see anything like that, but what do YOU think this potential subclass might look like? Something far above the curve, but still something that can potentially exist as official subclass.

We just had our first session in a homebrew starting at level 3. I am playing a barbarian with the totem warrior path (I'm fairly new and it's my first time playing a barbarian.) The rest of the party is an assassin rogue, a monster hunter ranger, and a draconic sorcerer.

We were investigating sitings of suspicious cloaked figures in the starting town, and we traced them back to a hideout in an abandoned building. We fought a few low level wizards there and were handling it OK. We tried to interrogate them, but none of them would tell us anything.

Then the DM described a mage emerging from the shadows in a red and gold cloak and saying we would pay for what we did to his men. So we thought obviously this will be a little boss battle with the leader, right?

Well he went first in initiative and he cast a spell that made us all make an Intelligence saving throw. Everyone failed their saves except me, even the rogue got a 17 and that still failed. I don't even have a bonus on my intelligence, just by pure luck I got a 19 which passed.

Well then the DM said the spell did 42 points of damage. I have the most HP of the group with 29, and even with half damage I almost went down. So the other 3 all went down, and I thought oh shit I have to talk my way out of this. Well then the DM starting narrating graphically the other 3 characters' heads exploding, to which we were all like what the hell? Just instant death? He said that's what the spell does and we would've seen it coming if we'd explored more for clues.

So then I say I'm going to beg for my life, and the DM says I can barely speak after this spell. So all my friends just died, I'm low on HP and I can't even speak. Then he just said we're ending the session there.

Am I crazy for thinking that this was not a fair encounter? I get that not every encounter should be perfectly at our level but this feels way above and beyond, even if we missed some clues.

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This player's character, a warlock, has had issues with running off ahead, I warned them many times that this could lead to their death, but they did not listen.

The first time the character nearly died, they ran ahead and was downed by an undead wolf, luckily the other players got to him saving him.

The second time the character rushed into a cave and was again downed by more undead creatures.

The third time was rushing into spiders.

Etc.

But the last time the character turned invisible, crept in alone, into a cave full of tribal warriors finding out they were doing some sort of ritual... Well they interrupted the ritual and awake a beast the tribal people were trying to tame and it all went to hell.

He was killed trying to escape but was surrounded by over 10 warriors....

I feel really awful as I always want my players to succeed and I have never had a player character die.

Any advice to get over this?

I decided to make this post after watching Ginny Di's recent video, "I Forced Myself to DM with ZERO Prep."

I've been GMing for about 10 years, mostly in D&D 5e, although I've experimented with several different systems and approaches over the years.

Eventually, I found a workflow that works extremely well for me personally. What's interesting is that whenever I discuss it with other DMs, many of them find it surprisingly unusual, and I rarely see people talking about running games this way.

The core idea is that I do almost no session-to-session preparation. Sometimes I don't even prepare between campaigns.

Instead, every so often I go through long periods of intense worldbuilding (and I mean really intense). I spend a huge amount of time developing the world, its history, factions, cultures, politics, conflicts, geography, and internal logic.

Once that's done, I simply let the world react as naturally and consistently as possible to whatever the players decide to do. The campaign is a complete sandbox.

There are no rails, no planned story arcs, and no predetermined outcomes. Every campaign is basically a Pandora's box that can evolve in any direction depending on the players' choices and the world's response to them.

One thing that makes this approach work is that every campaign I run takes place in the same setting. Some campaigns happen in different eras, while others occur simultaneously.

Because of that, events from one campaign can affect another if they take place in the same region and time period. The world keeps moving whether the players are looking at a particular part of it or not.

As an example, I currently have a campaign that has been running for 8 years, and it's still going strong.

I've been running games this way for years. Ask me anything.

I'm pretty sure most of us create more character concepts than we'll ever be able to play. In my case I only play one-shots, really short campaigns, or worse, I have to be the DM.

What are some characters you have in mind that you probably won't be able to play?

Here are some of mine to start:

An assassin with the bubbliest personality outside of combat, is really weak (like 6str score) but his whole thing is knowing monster anatomy really well and that's how his sneak attack is strong.

A failing playwright who can't fight for at all but is proficient in literally everything else outside combat.

A street fighter turned priest who's literally just a dude from the Bronx fighting against literal gods. You really can't beat that character concept.

A phantom rogue that lowkey doesn’t like killing and does it as mercifully as possible most of the time. He's cursed to make the trinkets and he tries to make them as comfortable as possible while he needs/figures out how to release them.

I have a LOT more but I'd like to hear your stuff

I am quite new to D&D (I've played one pretty short campaign before), and one day my friends decided to make me the DM. I've created a setting I am happy with, but I want to be able to use my attacks/abilities as best I can. My players are all more experienced than me, and all I really understand is spellcasting/attacking and grappling (sort of). Are there any sort of stances I can enter that make it more difficult for the players to hit me, some type of ambush mechanics, or any other sort of special attacks/utility most characters can use by default? Are there any manuals or anything that clearly explain this? I'm just searching for simple combat stuff that can make my battles feel more in-depth. (And no, deciding to not DM is not an option.)

This is a small dispute at our table. When it comes to any skill check, our DM will ask which player will be making the check and only take that players role, instead of having all the players roll and allowing multiple people to succeed.

For example, an NPC mentions some lore that hasn't been brought up yet, the DM asks someone to make a history check to see if they have insight on the topic. The one player who volunteered to roll fails, so now no one knows any of the history on this subject.

Or during the rare instance we all roll, like perception, he will only let the person who rolled the highest succeed and he will use modifier bonus as a tie breaker if two players rolled the same.

This was brought up because myself and another player both got 17 for a perception roll and he asked about our modifier bonuses and because my teammate had a +3 and I had a +2, he perceived something and I didn't.

This annoyed me and I asked why our characters couldn't just both see the thing?? What's the value of always having a winner? I've played for 17 years and I've never seen the game played this way at any other table, and these guys were acting like I was the crazy one lol.

Am I crazy? Is this actually how everyone is playing? This isn't THAT big of a thing, I just wanted some validation lol.

Edit: I just want to quickly clarify that I'm fully aware that many checks should only have one player rolling, but my issue is pretty specific to perception, investigation, or history type checks that have little consequence to the progression of the story. I still think my DM is doing a great job and I wouldn't push this issue.

I have the beginning of an idea that I'm excited about. I'd love to get some brainstorming ideas to add to what I am starting with.

I'm running a homebrew campaign and many of my players have the Manuals and Times that increase stats on their magic item wishlists. They've run into a situation where they want to go to the best library available to do some deep historical research and high magic research.

Putting the two ideas together, they could find those stat increase manuals in a library like that, but the library wouldn't just give that kind of thing away.

So, my brain said, "make it challenging and weird". The idea is a wild magic cursed library where they store the most powerful and dangerous books. Entering the collection becomes a maze of hazards, traps, and monsters that is a dungeon run in and of itself. Maybe it's non-lethal in that if you reach 0 HP on a run, you just get expelled from the dungeon. Probably a time limit on how often you can enter.

As a hook, I'm thinking that there's a book in the "special collection" that the head librarian needs, but he hasn't been able to successfully navigate the dungeon to get it. Get the librarian's book, and you can keep what you find.

Like I said, any brainstorming ideas of challenges to stock the library with or other ways to embellish the scenario are welcome. The challenges have to be worth these awesome prizes. (And yes, there will be book mimics.)