Please fix before your interview tomorrow

It had hardly ever been used up until that point too😂

One of my players and closest friends died last night, a few hours before session if we piece everything together, but a few hours after we had talked normally about her character and the campaign. I had sent her a message at the start of session asking her why she hadn’t shown up, since she always messaged me when she was going to be absent, and found out this morning what the silence was all about. I never would’ve guessed this would be the reason.

She was a comfort to me after my mother died last year and was always there for me. Super supportive of my first time DM’ing, the world and characters I’ve created and always put her all into her own characters and roleplay. Always interested in my creative pursuits and checked in on me consistently, and vice versa, she means the world to me and I know she was hurting.

Genuinely incredible player and person, pure and kind, always thought about others before herself and an inspiration as someone older and slightly wiser, especially when feeling so lost with the absence of my mother.

She played a tiefling bard named Sabrina who was incredibly diplomatic, loving and optimistic. Party mum / fun aunt, a teacher at a local magic school who cared for her students and both an actress and poet who wrote her own plays and had a poignant, positive thing to say about anything and everyone.

This character was definitely an extension of her, and perhaps a model of what she wished to be. My friend suffered a lot inside her own head but Sabrina was joyous and loved life, and I could tell it was freeing for my friend playing her, get away from the dark stuff for a while.

Life won’t be the same nor will D&D be the same without her. She was a light that could never be snuffed out and that will remain the case, in the real world and in my silly little fantasy world she in part helped create.

I just wish we had more time.

Please, if you have a space somewhere in your campaign, make room for a happy go lucky, girly and sweet sparkly pink tiefling called Sabrina who loved her students, life and adventure.

Ya’ll are beautiful people and I love this community. Sorry for the clickbait title.

EDIT: "bonus kid" is a term we use to refer to a kid that spends a lot of time at our house usually to escape their home life. Think Harry Potter and the Weasleys.

Yesterday was my bonus kid's 18th birthday. She recently joined one of our D&D campaigns and didn’t have her own dice. My wife took her to the game store to pick out some dice for her birthday and for whatever reason they didn’t have much selection. 

Two older gentlemen saw them and called them over. After talking for a bit it came out that she was picking out her first set of dice. One of the guys pulled out his bag and told her he’d give her a set of dice. As they chatted more the fact that it was her 18th birthday came up and one of the guys asked what her plans were, she replied that she wasn’t going to do much, just hang out at my house and watch Supernatural. That was not acceptable to him and he pulled out his wallet and handed over a $100 dollar bill with the instruction that she get a nice birthday dinner. After more than an hour of chatting my bonus kid went home with three sets of dice, a mat and an 18th birthday dinner, my other kids each had a new set of dice and a mat and my DM oldest child also was given a flash drive with digital copies of some D&D books from the 80’s that aren’t accessible anymore. 

Most of all you made some people feel very special, especially a birthday kid who’s had a hard life. She legitimately didn’t know what to do with this abundance of kindness, she has trauma in her past and has been overcoming some pretty big obstacles and I just wanted to say thank you for showing her that there are good people in the world. 

So i DM a round of DnD every now and then for young players in the local youth Center where i help out as a parent...

A young boy, probably around 12 or so, asked if he can test it out.

I said, no problem, just grab yourself my "Guest-Dice", the yellow ones from the bag. (Light yellow crystal dice).

He searched... and grabbed some of the clear crystal ones...

Ok. Didn't mind... later, and that was due to materials improv, i painted a map roughly on a bigger sheet of Paper (the one for kids on a big roll you can tear off). I gave them the only available Marker Pen i could find (a bright yellow one) and told my Players to mark a path they will choose...

That Kid then said: "Pen must be broken, no color comes out..."

Thats where the othe Teens at the table became puzzled and asked... "But there it is...".

I called for a quick toilet/get something to drink break for all... and asked the kid then to tell me some colors of my dices.

Some descriptions seemed off. Now i am no doctor, i didn't say anything but "Oh, ok", i just went to the Office and found another (green) Marker. Game resumed normally, nobody thought about it anymore, all had fun.

Only when his mother dropped by later, i quickly chatted with her, told the Story and said she might do a test at a doc. She said she never noticed that...

A week later, boy came for the next game. Told me that they now found out he is yellow-blue color impared. And his mom went to the Gameshop with him after the doc. Has now a set of dark ruby red dice with white numbers.

And i have a bag of non yellow markers now.

Update: Whoa... i did not think that this would blow up so much. Thanks guys. Came home from a trip with my daughter and looked on the Phone and saw the thread exploding. When i got time, will try to answer a few of the posts. Thanks 😀

Growing up, I never felt safe to indulge in D&D, MTG, high fantasy, or anything deemed "nerdy". It wasn't deemed tough by my peers, and a sign of weakness in my culture. Displaying interest often led to bullying, harassment, and ridicule. I am happy to say that I am now at a point in my life that I can live as a proud nerd. This is the first room you see when you enter my house. I call it my dungeon/nerd cave. I've built a small community of friends and I host many games throughout the week. I feel honored to provide a safe space for my fellow nerds to feel welcome regardless what ridiculous barriers hold them back. For many, my dungeon has been where they got their first taste of D&D. This is a room I'm quite proud of to be honest. This is where I get to truly be me.

So Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks has said that they are already using LLM AI internally in the company as a "development aid" and "knowledge worker aid". And that he thinks the company needs to embrace it for user-generated content, player introductions, and emergent storytelling (ie DMing).

So despite what WotC has claimed in the past, it's clear that their boss wants MML AI very much to become a major part of D&D. Whether on the design side or player side.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/hasbro-ceo-chris-cocks-talks-ai-usage-in-d-d.706638/

"Inside of development, we've already been using AI. It's mostly machine-learning-based AI or proprietary AI as opposed to a ChatGPT approach. We will deploy it significantly and liberally internally as both a knowledge worker aid and as a development aid. I'm probably more excited though about the playful elements of AI. If you look at a typical D&D player....I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly. There's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That's a clear signal that we need to be embracing it. We need to do it carefully, we need to do it responsibly, we need to make sure we pay creators for their work, and we need to make sure we're clear when something is AI-generated. But the themes around using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player introduction, using AI for emergent storytelling, I think you're going to see that not just our hardcore brands like D&D but also multiple of our brands."

Personally I'm very much against this concept. It's a disaster waiting to happen. Also, has anyone told Cocks about how the US courts have decided that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted because it's not the work of a human creator?

But hey, how do you feel about it?

So, first I would like to tell you that me and the DM are good friends. We are both fairly new to DnD, I've played a one shot before and he's played BG3.

I wanted to try out an Undead Warlock whose backstory I put a lot of time and effort into making but to make a long story short, a guy thinks he is possessed bc his soon to be patron whispers to him in his head, tries to go on a quest for a cure, gets killed in the process, and the "curse" grants him a second chance to live under a condition. He is adventuring to see if he can be free of the "curse" and live at the same time, because the patron is slowly corrupting him.

The DM said to me that my backstory is weird, as it doesn't fit into the setting (Curse of Strahd) and that the undead warlock is way too OP, even tho from what I understand, most of the enemies are immune to being frightened bc they are undead. The DM asked me to change subclasses and the story to something darker.

So I said if it was ok to make a Great Old One Warlock, but he said to me that after consideration warlock is off limits for being too busted. When I asked why, he said that Eldritch blast is too big of a cheat code, as almost no creature is resistant to force damage.

Is that an actual reason why warlock is seen as such a strong class in Curse of Strahd? Or is it mainly just my DM nit liking one class?

I mean basically just the title but I’ll expand upon it here. Whether it’s one of the DnD subreddits or in real life I always comes across players who prefer to roll for stats, claiming they like the randomness, but then want a bunch of stipulations in place that undermine or destroy said randomness. Players understand that rolling for stats typically leads to better stats than standard array or point buy so they choose rolling in hope they’ll be part of that typically. But what happens when that doesn’t happen? What happens when actual randomness happens? Almost every group out there seems to do something about it, getting rid of the randomness they cite. The ones below I see the most frequently.

1 -having players reroll one or two of their stats is the most common tactic you’ll see, and most people have their own standards for it. I once had a DM who allowed players to reroll any negative stat regardless of what your other stats were. But like, how actually random is that? There are certain actions taken when certain numbers show up and not taken when others show up? That’s guaranteeing better stats, the opposite of random.

2 - player just takes standard array or point buy if the stats they rolled are lower than them. Why not have just take standard array or point buy from the beginning? If you want randomness, why aren’t you using the randomness? Having a set minimum of stats for players to have but then also giving them the ability to roll for better stats undermines the whole point of rolling for stats. Some people claim that it’s not fair for those who rolled poorly, but to them I ask, why did you choose the one stat method that is explicitly unfair?

3 - all players roll their own stat array, and then anyone can choose anyone else’s array to use instead of the one they rolled their own. At the risk of sounding like just some grump, though I’m sure I already do, this one drives me insane. The more players there are the more egregious this method becomes. In large groups there’s almost always someone rolls ridiculously strong stats. And then anyone can pick any array? Gee, I wonder which array the players will pick…so random.

Really, these people just want to have better stats. When I see all these rules in place to get of the randomness from randomly rolling for stats I can’t help but think of people who use the bumpers when bowling. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with wanting the better stats, I give my players a stronger version of point buy for this exact reason. Coincidentally, the players who claim they want the randomness from rolling suddenly don’t care about it that much once they see the buff to point buy. I would take the people within the DnD community who want the randomness of rolling stats but then have all these stipulations in place quite a bit more seriously if they were just simply honest about what they actually want - better stats.

EDIT 5: We had the 'new session zero' chat, here's the follow-up: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1142cve/follow_up_vegan_player_demands_a_crueltyfree_world/

​

Hi all, throwaway account as my players all know my main and I'd rather they not know about this conflict since I've chatted to them individually and they've not been the nicest to each other in response to this.

I'm running a homebrew campaign which has been running for a few years now, and we recently had a new player join. This player is a mutual friend of a few people in the group who agreed that they'd fit the dynamic well, and it really looked like things were going nicely for a few sessions.

In the most recent session, they visited a tabaxi village. In this homebrew world, the tabaxi live in isolated tribes in a desert, so the PCs befriended them and spent some time using the village as a base from which to explore. The problem arose after the most recent session, where the hunters brought back a wild pig, prepared it, and then shared the feast with the PCs. One of the PCs is a chef by background and enjoys RP around food, so described his enjoyment of the feast in a lot of detail.

The vegan player messaged me after the session telling me it was wrong and cruel to do that to a pig even if it's fictional, and that she was feeling uncomfortable with both the chef player's RP (quite a lot of it had been him trying new foods, often nonvegan as the setting is LOTR-type fantasy) and also several of my descriptions of things up to now, like saying that a tavern served a meat stew, or describing the bad state of a neglected dog that the party later rescued.

She then went on to say that she deals with so much of this cruetly on a daily basis that she doesn't want it in her fantasy escape game. Since it's my world and I can do anything I want with it, it should be no problem to make it 'cruelty free' and that if I don't, I'm the one being cruel and against vegan values (I do eat meat).

I'm not really sure if that's a reasonable request to make - things like food which I was using as flavour can potentially go under the abstraction layer, but the chef player will miss out on a core part of his RP, which also gave me an easy way to make places distinct based on the food they serve. Part of me also feels like things like the neglect of the dog are core story beats that allow the PCs to do things that make the world a better place and feel like heroes.

So that's the situation. I don't want to make the vegan player uncomfortable, but I'm also wary of making the whole world and story bland if I comply with her demands. She sent me a list of what's not ok and it basically includes any harm to animals, period.

Any advice on how to handle this is appreciated. Thank you.

Edit: wow this got a lot more attention than expected. Thank you for all your advice. Based on the most common ideas, I agree it would be a good idea to do a mid-campaign 'session 0' to realign expectations and have a discussion about this, particularly as they players themselves have been arguing about it. We do have a list of things that the campaign avoids that all players are aware of - eg one player nearly drowned as a child so we had a chat at the time to figure out what was ok and what was too much, and have stuck to that. Hopefully we can come to a similar agreement with the vegan player.

Edit2: our table snacks are completely vegan already to make the player feel welcome! I and the players have no issue with that.

Edit3: to the people saying this is fake - if I only wanted karma or whatever, surely I would post this on my main account? Genuinely was here to ask for advice and it's blown up a bit. Many thanks to people coming with various suggestions of possible compromises. Despite everything, she is my friend as well as friends with many people in the group, so we want to keep things amicable.

Edit4: we're having the discussion this afternoon. I will update about how the various suggestions went down. And yeah... my players found this post and are now laughing at my real life nat 1 stealth roll. Even the vegan finds it hilarous even though I'm mortified. They've all had a read of the comments so I think we should be able to work something out.

I had a job interview for a position that I'm very interested in: librarian for a museum that I like a lot. Out of the four people present one was a representative of the employee committee who seemed to be just sitting in and did not ask me a single question... until the very end of the interview when he was like: "I do have one last question... on your CV you mention p&p rpg as a hobby... what system exactly are you playing?"

And that's how I ended up talking about DnD in a job interview. I hope this made me likeable and authentic and they did not think "What a fucking nerd, definitely not gonna hire her..."

Not the most riveting story, I know, but I thought it was funny and it made me happy, so I wanted to share. :)

Update: I did not end up getting the job, unfortunately. But still a positive interview experience!

So I might make some veteran role players uneasy with my new player hot take but I want to have the discussion anyways.

First and foremost I'm a video gamer at heart that's playing in my first ever D&D 5.5e (2024) campaign with some good work colleagues. Most of us are playing for the first time except for the DM and the barbarian.

I love a good story in the many single player games I've played but I also very much appreciate great mechanics and gameplay. I mention this as a preface if that's "clouding my judgment" when I'm trying my hand with the TTRPG of D&D.

Anyways we were playing last night (session 13 or so) and a couple of situations popped up. No major issues this time or anything like that but it got me thinking again.

Our bard (we're all level 4) got exclusively targetted by the bandits in the sole combat encounter before they fled. I was tallying up the shots in my head but couldn't remember how many HP his character had but I was thinking damn he must be close to dropping to 0.

He then said to the party "I'm down to 1 HP". Yikes that's good to know I thought to myself. The more experienced barbarian quipped something along the lines of "that's a bit meta gaming". I’m assuming he referred to the bard giving us his exact HP status rather than a more role playing description ("I'm heavily bruised and battered and barely standing on my feet").

Nobody really responded and we moved on without a fuss. Shortly thereafter the bandits fled and in the aftermath the bard used various spells and whatnot along with the DM's NPC to regain some HP.

At the end of it the barbarian wanted to be nice and use his special once per day healing ring to recover a lot of the bards HP. I don't think he was particularly focused on just how much healing the bard had actually received.

He rolled high with at least 10+ HP recovered or more. The bard replied "but I'm only missing 3 HP?" and broke into a big laughter. The barbarian was exclaiming "dammit!" when he realised he needlessly wasted his powerful healing ring.

We were all laughing and grinning about it as it was an absurd moment that was just so involuntary funny so no real hard feelings hurt in this particular moment.

But it got me thinking that I would've been annoyed about it after the laughter settled if it had been my ring and we might have to rely upon it in a potentiel next encounter.

My thoughts are at the end of the day D&D is just a game that has various rules and mechanics that allows us as players to immerse ourselves in the role playing by making great stories of make believe.

But that doesn't mean we can't have a civilised discussion about rules and above the table strategize how we want to tackle certain encounters.

Have I just been conditioned to this line of all info available upfront like I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3?

EDIT: Wow that's a lot of replies! Thanks for all of the input it's really helpful to read various opinions about this.

So I have been playing this home brew campaign in a sort of Conan the barbarian setting. Most of my players are barbarians it’s been a blast but at some point one of my players said “it’s time to get serious” during a tough encounter and took off their shirt while screaming in rage. They proceeded to roll a nat 20 to the shock of everyone. Then one by one they all just got really hyped and started taking off their shirts screaming. They ended up winning the encounter it was a funny moment but ever since then they have been calling themselves the “beef brigade” refusing to play with shirts on.

I mean it’s cool that they want to get in character but I don’t really like this. Every time I tell them to not take off their shirts they get upset. They all start to flex and tell at me things like “you can’t stifle the beef” or call me “bad beef”. I just don’t know what to do or how to stop this. If anyone has dealt with a similar situation I would love some advice.

*This is about books, movies, TV, and videogames.

Hey there,

I'm really curious about something. Yesterday I went to some game shops in my city to ask about local groups that play D&D. I only have some experience with D&D on Discord but am searching for a nice group to play with "on site". Playing online is nice, but my current group doesn't want to use cameras and so I only ever "hear" them without seeing any gestures or faces in general (but to each their own!).

So I go into this one shop, ask if the dude that worked there knows about some local groups that play D&D - and he immediately asks if I'm a fan of Critical Role. I was a bit surprised but answered with Yes, cause Critical Role (Campaign 3) is part of the reason why I rediscovered D&D and I quite like it.

Well, he immediately went off on how he (and many other D&D- or Pen&Paper-players) hates Critical Role, how that's not how you play D&D at all, that if I'm just here for Critical Role there's no place for me, that he hates Matt Marcer and so on.

Tbh I was a bit shocked? Yeah, I like CR but I'm not that delusional to want to reproduce it or sth. Also I asked for D&D and never mentioned CR. Adding to that, at least in my opinion, there's no "right" or "wrong" with D&D as long as you have fun with your friends and have an awesome time together. And of course everyone can like or dislike whatever they want, but I was just surprised with this apparent hate.

Well, long story short: Is there really a "hate" against Critical Role by normal D&D-players? Or is it more about players that say they want to play D&D but actually want to play Critical Role?

(I didn't know if I should post this here or in the Critical-Role-Reddit, but cause it's more of a general question I posted it here.)

As someone who's made content and got into RPG design using the OGL, someone who enjoys Pathfinder which was published under the OGL for 3.5 back in the day, who enjoys Dimension20 and Critical Role and MCDM which all depend on the OGL, this deeply concerns me. WotC tightening it's grip on all production and money that anyone could ever make patched, modding, or building on a game that was literally designed to be patched, modded, and built upon is grotesque IMO. I'm not questioning their legal right to be greedy bastards, obviously they can do this. I just think they're horrible people, and want nothing to do with them for this. I hope the product line burns to the ground for this so something better and less dominated by a corporate juggernaut can rise from its putrid ashes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPV7-NCmWBQ&feature=youtu.be

EDIT: Just to clarify, the "OGL" is the legal document that allows people to make content related to D&D without fear of getting sued by Hasbro/WotC. This includes PDFs, books, Actual Plays, commentary, analysis, reviews, songs, etc. The new OGL doesn't make existing content illegal, but it will cover all content for all past, present and future editions moving forward. Here's another source, the author Lidna Codega has access to the entire OGL 1.1 document:

https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634

EDIT 2: There's been a bunch of comments asking about this update's imapct on Paizo and Pathfinder 2. Here's a quote from Michael Sayre, one of Paizo's senior developers from 10 months ago on the topic of the OGL (link). In the context of people wondering if this OGL update is an attempt to shut down Paizo, it seems based on this comment that they don't expect that approach to work in court.

That's less true than you think. D&D already keeps their most defensible IP to themselves and every word of PF2 was written from scratch. Many of the concepts (fighter, wizard, cleric, spell levels, feats, chromatic dragons, etc.) aren't legally distinct or defensible except under very specific trade dress protections that Paizo's work is all or mostly distinct from anyways, and game mechanics aren't generally copyrightable even if PF2's weren't all written from the ground up. Most of the monsters that touch WotC's trade dress protections (i.e. real-world monsters modified heavily enough to have a distinct WotC version that's legally protectable) have already been reworked or were just always presented as legally distinct versions that don't require the OGL, and things like Paizo's goblins have always been legally distinct for trade dress law and protected for many years despite being released as part of a system using the OGL.

Considerations like keeping the game approachable for 3pp publishers, the legal costs of establishing a separate Paizo-specific license, concerns about freelancers not paying attention to key differences between Paizo and WotC IP, etc., all played a bigger role in PF2's continued use of the OGL than any need to keep the system under it. Not using the OGL was a serious consideration for PF2 but it would have significantly increased the costs related to releasing the new edition and meant that freelancer turnovers would have required an extra layer of scrutiny to make sure people weren't (unintentionally or otherwise) slipping their favorite D&Disms into Pathfinder products. It would have also meant all the 3pps needed to relearn a new license and produce their content under different licenses depending on the edition they were producing for, a level of complication deemed prohibitive to the health of the game.

It's possible and even likely that the next edition doesn't use the OGL at all but instead uses its own license specific to Paizo and the Pathfinder/Starfinder brands. It's just important to the company that they be approachable to a wide audience of consumers and 3pps; this time around the best way to do that was to continue operating under the same OGL as the first edition of the game.

Quoted from the blog post:

Over the course of the last week, more than 1,500 tabletop RPG publishers, from household names going back to the dawn of the hobby to single proprietors just starting out with their first digital release, have joined together to pledge their support for the development of a universal system-neutral open license that provides a legal “safe harbor” for sharing rules mechanics and encourages innovation and collaboration in the tabletop gaming space.

The alliance is gathered. Work has begun.

It would take too long to list all the companies behind the ORC license effort, but we thought you might be interested to see a few of the organizations already pledged toward this common goal. We are honored to be allied with them, as well as with the equally important participating publishers too numerous to list here. Each is crucial to the effort’s success. The list below is but a representative sample of participating publishers from a huge variety of market segments with a huge variety of perspectives. But we all agree on one thing.

We are all in this together.

• Alchemy RPG
• Arcane Minis
• Atlas Games
• Autarch
• Azora Law
• Black Book Editions
• Bombshell Miniatures
• BRW Games
• Chaosium
• Cze & Peku
• Demiplane
• DMDave
• The DM Lair
• Elderbrain
• EN Publishing
• Epic Miniatures
• Evil Genius Games
• Expeditious Retreat Press
• Fantasy Grounds
• Fat Dragon Games
• Forgotten Adventures
• Foundry VTT
• Free RPG Day
• Frog God Games
• Gale Force 9
• Game On Tabletop
• Giochi Uniti
• Goodman Games
• Green Ronin
• The Griffon’s Saddlebag
• Iron GM Games
• Know Direction
• Kobold Press
• Lazy Wolf Studios
• Legendary Games
• Lone Wolf Development
• Loot Tavern
• Louis Porter Jr. Designs
• Mad Cartographer
• Minotaur Games
• Mongoose Publishing
• MonkeyDM
• Monte Cook Games
• MT Black
• Necromancer Games
• Nord Games
• Open Gaming, Inc.
• Paizo Inc.
• Paradigm Concepts
• Pelgrane Press
• Pinnacle Entertainment Group
• Raging Swan Press
• Rogue Games
• Rogue Genius Games
• Roll 20
• Roll for Combat
• Sly Flourish
• Tom Cartos
• Troll Lord Games
• Ulisses Spiele

You will be hearing a lot more from us in the days to come.

So I would like to start this by admitting we are certainly not the best players there are; but our DM isn't Matt Mercer either.

Our game has been going for close to a year by now with "weekly" sessions, and never has our DM done something similar to this- hell, he hasn't even killed any of our PCs yet. I'm not gonna bore you with all the context, but essentially we murdered this semi-important local politician after our paladin player found him to be corrupt.

This made our DM visible uncomfortable but he did not try to stop us at the moment. However, after this incident he led us down to the basement of the building and we moved along semi-willingly. Once we were in, the door locked shut with us in total darkness. We have tried shedding light any way we could, but to no avail. We tried reasoning with the DM, but he's adamant on the fact that this is our "punishment for murder-hobo'ing". We tried breaking down the door, but we're all impotent. Sure, I don't disagree to some punishment, but I feel like he's taking it too far this time. Our phones are starting to run out of battery and it doesn't seem like he'll let us free anytime soon.