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The mcelroys made an entire generation think that playing D&D badly is activism

Expressing this sentiment a few years ago got me very seriously called homophobic

If I’m going to get really clear and serious about what I mean here, this isn’t specifically the mcelroys’ fault, it’s just funny to blame them.

But for real, in general, people on tumblr do view media consumption as activism, which is already annoying and stupidly pervasive in TTRPG communities, but what I was specifically talking about here is how, like, tons of people view ignoring the rules of D&D5e while still nominally playing D&D5e as, like, sticking it to WotC and big corporations, and of course sticking it to those homophobic grognard gatekeepers

“sure i’ll never touch another TTRPG system as long as I live, but i pirated all the D&D5e books(something we all agreed doesn’t actually hurt corporations all that much), and I’m playing D&D5e in a way that WotC doesn’t want by ignoring all the rules! Be gay do crimes!”

How about if you actually want to materially help someone through your alleged love of TTRPGs, buy and play any other TTRPG at all. Pay for the next meal of struggling TTRPG designers being crushed under D&D5e’s absolute monopoly. Even the ones that are free, I’m sure that the designers would at least get some moments of motivation and happiness knowing you downloaded their work of art, learned the rules, and actually played it instead of letting it sit closed on the table while you fudge dice until the outcome that you want happens.

There are thousands of well-made games out there, starting with this one because I’m lead designer on it

Free worldbuilding idea:

Wizards have the same trust in magic that software designers have in software, which is to say, almost none at all.

“Are you fucking kidding me I worked in a reagrent shop for a few years I don’t trust any of that stuff. Who the hell knows what other components are in the ashes.”

“Yeah I was in the circle that made Alston’s Divine Circle of Teleportation. There’s some pretty nasty corner cases you can get into but the headmaster published it without us. I just take ships. It’s way safer.”

“I call bullshit on that Necromancer channeling spirits of loved ones. What did he say he was using? ‘Medium Conduit Ruinic Circles’? That’s just a bunch of buzzwords slapped together, and they don’t even interact with each other.”

“I’ve been looking at this scroll all morning and I’m 90% sure that the scribe didn’t even look at the standard for pyromancies.”

“Help Desk, this is Gloriline, what did you fuck up this time?” *indistinct vocals* “Dave, I’ve seen the news, and, frankly, I can see the ash cloud from here. You paid for extended support, not enabling support.”

“I can’t get this fucking spell to work, Jane, can you look it?”

*passes a scroll* *a few moments of silence*

“I think you missed a bookend rune right here-”

“GODS DAMN IT! IT’S ALWAYS SHIT LIKE THAT! THANK YOU!” *angrily scribbles on parchment*

(It takes five more aggravatingly tiny adjustments before the spell works)

I don’t play wizards anymore because they’re too much like my day job.

Instead of a orb the wizard has a little statue of a duck he tells his spells to and then swears when he spots the obvious mistake.

You beat me to it! I was going to add that the reason why wizards and witches always have familiars around is so they can Rubber Duck at them until they realize what the mistake with their spell is!

Outsiders get it wrong and figure the familiars are somehow teaching spells to their owners, but no. It’s just explaining to Firewing what you’re trying to do with this teleportation matrix until you realize that you’ve been using telepathy crystals to power it the whole time like a FUCKING IDIOT!

I keep an anti-magic morning star on my desk.

If my spell book makes even the slightest emote without my express permission, I smash it into oblivion.

high level dnd is insane. this week i had a quest where the players navigate a standoff between two ships of rival navies. and our cleric just used water walking to waltz over to one of the ships, and cast control water to part the sea, sinking it instantly. problem fucking solved i guess

The reason tabletop RPGs use polyhedral dice – in spite of them being such an unlikely thing to have on hand in the pre-gaming-store era, and rare even in the roleplaying hobby’s tabletop wargame predecessors – is because there just happened to be an educational supply store where they could easily be sourced near where the designers of Dungeons & Dragons lived.

The reason that D&D dragons are colour-coded is because the game pre-dates the widespread availability of fantasy minifigs, so they represented dragons using plastic dinosaurs from the local five-and-dime, and those are just the colours that the plastic dinosaurs used to represent each type of dragon happened to be.

The reason that iconic D&D monsters like the bulette, the owlbear and the rust monster exist is because one day, a bunch of bootleg Ultraman kaiju figurines just happened to be mixed in with the plastic dinosaurs, and – being unfamiliar with Ultraman, and the bootlegs in question being almost unrecognisably shitty anyway – they statted up what they thought the figurines looked like.

Sometimes I wonder what the history of the tabletop roleplaying hobby would have looked like if any of those coincidences had lined up just a little bit differently.

Art and design challenge, everyone:

Find the cheapest, weirdest, ugliest little toy or bauble you can at a local dollar store or thrift shop. Design a new tabletop monster off of that.

I would LOVE to try and figure out what kaiju ended up being the inspiration for what classic monster

Knock yourself out – the linked page contains numerous photos of what’s believed to be the specific set of plastic “dinosaurs” that served as the original minifigs for monsters in question. Some of the figures that are included in the set are clearly identifiable as classic Ultraman bootlegs, while others are less recognisable; to the best of my knowledge, nobody’s 100% sure what the figure that inspired the owlbear is supposed to be. For reference, it’s this one:

ohhh shit, i always thought the “original” art was just dumb and terrible

“that looks nothing like an owl OR a bear!” i thought

but now i see that it is a VERY ACCURATE ARTISTIC RENDERING

OF SOMETHING THAT IS ITSELF /VERY STUPID LOOKING/

gonna download the extremely bad 3rd party dnd sex book so I can laugh at it

this book's handling of gay characters is surprisingly progressive in an extremely late 90s sort of way

oh this is going to be good

there's an std chart

vampirism is on the std chart

Under D&D rules, a dagger does 1d4 base damage. The average human has a Strength score of 10, adding no bonuses. Several of them, due to the military background of many, likely had strength or dexterity scores of 11-14. But only two or three, and quite a few would be frail with old age, sinking to 8-9 strength. All in all, we can only add a total of +1 damage per round from Brutus.

An estimate of sixty men were involved in Caesar’s actual murder. Not the wider conspiracy, but the stabbing.

Julius Caesar was a general, which is generally depicted as a 10th level fighter. Considering his above baseline constitution and dex, weakened by his probable history of malaria, epilepsy, and/or strokes (-1 dex modifier), and lack of armor at the time of the event, he would likely have something along the lines of AC 9 and 60 HP. The senators would likely hit him roughly 55% the time.

So the Roman senate had a damage-per-round of 66, more than enough to kill Caesar in one round even without factoring in surprise round advantage.

Now THESE are the kind of statistics I wanna see!

As Someone who loves a good Tabletop fantasy RPG, I’ve always wanted to try and make one of my own. As someone who also loves a good western movie, I figured I’d let it inspire this game!

While I used John Harper’s “Lasers and Feelings” as a template for the character and story creation along with basic game mechanics, I wanted this game to play as a typical western, so I added a few features to help that theme.

I also wanted to make sure that any Player or GM running this game has as much creative liberty as possible. Do NOT allow the rules on the above page to limit your creativity. Play around, use your imagination, but most importantly, Have fun!

My DM is sitting with his head in his hands because we, a 3rd level party, just accidentally killed the campaign boss dragon during what should have been an encounter we were supposed flee from

I wish could say this was a strategic move but literally everyone in the campaign but me and the DM are complete newbies. We killed this dragon in three rounds of combat. At third level.

Okay, some details:

We're currently a 6-player party; we were down two players for this session, so for most of it it was just four of us. The DM did not scale down the dragon for this and we very easily could have had a TPK.

Our party is a traveling theater troupe! I'm our stage manager (druid) our bard is the frontman, our other druid does pyrotechnics, and we have our fighter for security. Our ranger and warlock are locals, and were mostly not available for this fight.

The dragon's breath weapon, which was its first attack, rolled poorly on damage, so we were lucky in that only our fighter was knocked out instead of all of us. He was healed before it was even his turn.

I was wildshaped into a draft horse for most of this fight, because that's what I was when the dragon showed up. The dragon tried to pick me up and eat me but that was a contested strength check--the only stat that draft horses really have going for them. I won.

Our bard mostly used his spells to force the dragon to use his legendary actions. It should be noted that our bard did not know what a legendary action was, and thought that the dragon choosing to succeed on failed rolls was "bullshit."

Us winning was a sequence of really good rolls, teamwork to give our heaviest ranged hitters advantage, and freakishly bad rolls on the dragon's part.

Our DM was floored but agreed this was very funny. He's not mad about it.

We spent the remainder of the session following our character's real passion: local politics.

While you’re out arguing whether necromancers or illusionists are more evil, the evocation caster just set 15 people and various nearby inanimate objects on fire, which is a clear breach of Protocol III of The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, thus constituting a war crime. In this essay I will —

I was very sad and I decided to post my pal from dnd campaign

astarion having ultra shredded abs is admissible if boring because he's a mentally ill ken doll gymrat on peds, wyll having muscles is logical because he has a sword and shit even though his arms are stupidly thin and he would not be on a low body fat % like that (75kg wtf?). gale though? who does nothing besides cast spells and try to hump your leg? him and halsin can only be saved by this mod

the way this game insists on using their one same shredded asf body model for absolutely every human man gets completely preposterous sometimes because wtf is this

Oh, no that one makes sense. Elminster is canonically shredded, he had levels in fighter in older editions where multiclassing was more prominent. It was often noted in debates over which iconic D&D wizard would win in a fight that Elminster's best hopes for victory versus the likes of Raistlin or Mordenkainen was to create an anti magic zone and just hit them because he actually had a positive strength score.

“Average wizard is actually muscular under the robes” factoid is due to statistical error. Average wizard needs help to move the couch. Elminster, who took levels in fighter and wins wizard duels with his fists, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

Perception Check | Tom Cardy

dnd jokes that will always be funny no matter what your dm tells you

feel free to add more

CLASS CLOWN - A DnD tragicomedy

DnD is all fun and games until that silly one-off joke character you rolled up turns out to be a tortured byronic hero who makes all your friends cry.

TricksyWizard.com

Patreon.com/TricksyWizard

This might be controversial but I believe that as a DM you should never kill your players. Whether it's "bad luck" or "a long series of bad decisions," it causes a lot of unnecessary hardship all around.

Instead, you should kill their characters.

dnd character idea; warlock that calls their party "chat" and their patron "mods"

"mods can we ban this guy"