I decided to test DS's ability to act as a DM. I have a small campaign that I had an outline for.

First, I ran the outline through DS and had it create a campaign out of my outline.

I next uploaded the outline and had DS run as DM. I played 2 characters. DS added a ton of flavor in there. Names, some general backgrounds and attitudes, names of places, etc.

The interactions were pretty good. It acted out the interactions with my characters. The interactions stayed in character, relevant to the world, relevant to the character's background, and relevant to the current events that had happened both in world and with my characters.

I ran it as 1 continuous chat. No parsing. No summary. I wanted to test the limits of DS and see how far I could push it until it majorly stumbled and went completely off the rails.

To my surprise, I was able to finish the entire campaign (short)! There were a couple of stumbles. Mainly in initiative order. I had to remind it a few times who's turn it was. There were 2 other places that I noticed outside of combat. All instances of stumbles only occured later in the campaign.

It started to try and voice for my characters. I reminded it not to and it didn't again.

When I returned to the beach of the island I landed on, the ship I came on was wrecked. That one I'm on the fence on. The waters around the island were treacherous, and it is completely within reason that the ship could have beached itself while I was gone on the island.

There is a story I had written that I had it make into a campaign. That one is a bit longer but still short compared to many other campaigns. I will try to run that one next. I'm downloaded all of the LLM sizes right now. I am probably going to try that locally hosted with the 158g one. I'm going to end up adding 128g ram soon. I will try the larger size DS LLMs after that.

I'm really curious to see just how far I can push it until it completely breaks down.

Specifically one in particular, my dad spent years making it, creating maps for it, etc. and we'd really like to see it featured on something popular like critical role or similar. How could I go about showing it to different DnD influencers to see if any of them are interested?

Are there any canon rules for an honor duel between sun elves in the Forgotten Realms setting?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24870213

• Bard: College of the moon
• Cleric: Knowledge domain
• Fighter: Purple dragon knight
• Paladin: Oath of the noble genies
• Ranger: Winter walker
• Rogue: Scion of the three
• Sorcerer: Spellfire sorcery
• Wizard: Bladesinger

I want to get into TTRPGs (Cyberpunk 2020, DnD,etc.), but I'm completely clueless as how to navigate the topic.

• I know I have to find a group of people to play with

• I don't have any minis, dice, free table for playing..., would I need to get anything of that? Could Google dices do the trick?

• How is it played? What is the cycle of a one-shot/adventure/campaign? How does the role-playing happen, taking turns between DM and players? Do the players tell an action their character is doing and the DM says wether it's allowed, wether they have to roll dice, or tells them what happens next?

After 4 years, 16 days, and 14 levels, the party finally defeated my final villain. They successfully prevented the return of the exiled gods and earned the highest honor in the land.

I am an extremely tired GM. Time to take a few weeks off, then start planning the next campaign.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/36002110

Back when I was a senior in high-school, I adopted a freshman dork who got me to watch Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (if only to get him to talk about something other than Skyrim). I'm gonna call him Baby Gronk. He was a good kid and I was trying to show him how to be cool, so I invited him to my next D&D campaign. This was a mistake.

Baby Gronk was dead set on playing as Alphonse. I okayed this. Eberron was not out at this point, so I asked him to present me with the homebrew he wants to use. We then had a little talk about how to mechanically handle being a hollow suit of armor (which he wanted to use as portable cat storage!) and I thought I'd got a good read on what his character is going to be since we both have watched FMA:B. I also made sure he understood that D&D is not like Skyrim; it can be fun to break the game mechanics, but at the end of the day you are playing make-believe with a table of people who are trying to tell a story together.

The campaign taught me a valuable lesson on media literacy. I know my baby dork watched the same show as me. I will never know why he thought the Alphonse he brought to my table was anything like the Alphonse in the anime. His only character trait was that he liked cats. Whenever he got bored he would start looking for cats, even if we were in a blizzard in the middle of nowhere. He almost died trying to pet a Remorhaz, which he somehow thought was a kind of cat‽ There was even one time he nearly caused a party wipe because he got bored in the middle of combat and started looking for cats. It was a serious problem.

I got tired of this catastrophe very quickly, and the players were clearly trying to not bully Baby Gronk. When he gets killed in combat at one point, I decide to take the opportunity to eject him from the campaign. We do a funeral scene, and then I pull him off to the side and give him a postcredit scene where his death was actually faked and now he's being recruited into S.H.I.E.L.D. as a secret agent. I then ended the session, ditched the group chat, and moved the date, time, and location of our weekly dnd sessions so he couldn't find the new group. My friends assured me that I had done the right thing.

The moral of the story I took at the time was "Follow the Half Plus Seven rule when inviting players to your table; if they are too young for you to date, there's gonna be issues at the table." A few years later, I reflected on this again, and realized that the problem was that I was a coward. I did not have the spine to look Baby Gronk in the eyes and tell them "Hey, Alphonse's obsession with cats is ruining the fun of everyone else at the table, including me. Can you dial that back?" That wasn't who I wanted to be. At that point, I started setting more firm ground rules with my players, and dedicated myself to making my tables safe spaces for my players.

I ran into Baby Gronk a few years later after he had graduated. He'd got his own D&D group by then, and told me the campaign I ran for him inspired him to be a DM himself. I still couldn't look him in the eye. We then parted ways.

Playing Curse Of Strahd. The DM didn't have a proper mini ready for Strahd's first appearance, so now he is a Lego vampire.

I used IRL mechanics -- inspired by the show Taskmaster -- to spice up and add some variety to a one-shot game, both in-person and run remotely. I thought y'all might find it interesting, so wrote up what I did.

New DnD player I have the archive site version of the manual which my DM sent and I've been using but I'm hoping to find something a little easier to navigate than just the PDF. Everything I've turned up is a different version, and and all suggestions welcome. Thank you friends and happy playing!

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/15193967

I'd like to try DnD out once more, although I may not always be available so I am asking for something casual

Open to using cameras, open to most timezones, willing to GM if taught to me

Since I couldn't find any site where all the 2025 monster manual previews were gathered, I've decided to create my own here. Feel free to add anything I have missed and I'll update the post!

Official DnD youtube videos:

• Everything You Need to Know
• New Dragon Design

Statblock previews:

• The Empyrean (d4: D&D Deep Dive on youtube)
• Animal Lords (Dungeon Dudes on youtube)
• Half-Dragon (Pack Tactics on youtube)
• Cyclopes (Dungeon Dad on youtube)
• Ancient Green Dragon, Kuo'toa and Skeletons (article on comicbook.com)
• Ancient Gold Dragon's partial statblock (post on twitter)

Update 2025-01-13: Artwork and two statblocks, an article on enworld

What's your favorite insult to use when casting Vicious Mockery?

So if I were to be fighting tiamat, and I true polymorphed into another tiamat, would I be able to use fire breath against her, or would we need to do melee combat only? And would our claws be able to do anything to each other or would we have a stalemate?

Hello, fellow nerds:

What are some neat monsters or creatures I could use for a new campaign I'm running in 2025. The gist is that one of the four sons of the Vyshaantar Empire has gathered strength, occupied a castle in the Misty Forest, and is looking to take over the entirety of the territory and spearhead a resurgence of the Vyshaantar Empire. (Or, to put it even more succinctly: Nazi Elves.)

I've got a few Vyshaantar enemies built out, like a Vyshaantar Sniper, Elven War Golem, Corrupted Treant, and Pyromancer.

What are some others that are different but would fit this kind of campaign?

My party recently:

• Got to level 18

• obtained the swords of kas

• I have 17 levels in Bard and one in druid currently, because of that I can cast wish with the right feats, which I have currently.

• my character recently reunited with her last living family member, her sister, who is now a warlock.

• I want to nullify the deal, since the magic can't be taken away and having your soul gone sucks, but none of us know who the patron is.

• Could we learn who through divination spells? And if so:

• could a wish spell nullify the pact and un sell her soul? I would assume yes since the reality bending part is so ambiguous and encompassing

Is there an abridged version (1-2 pages) of main game math mechanics for v3.5 or v5?

cross-posted from: https://ani.social/post/7586224

Some excerpts:

About Record of Lodoss War's origins:

Record of Lodoss War originally started as a TTRPG Replay, a written transcript of a tabletop RPG (TTRPG), with the first Lodoss War stories being a Replay for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Reading the original Replays is oddly endearing. I expected the chit-chat, playful snipes at the DM, or even the reading of dice rolls to be cut out in order to make the players’ adventure read like an actual narrative and not a transcription. All of that stays in the Lodoss Replays, however. Everything from excitedly reading out dice results to the players’ reactions to twists in the narrative, to character creation itself, is kept in the text.

About its influence on Japanese TTRPGs:

Besides the good that Record of Lodoss War did for Group SNE as a company and the aesthetics of anime itself, it was also good for fostering a small but dedicated community of TTRPG aficionados in Japan. TTRPG Replays are still very much alive and well, although many of them are being replaced by Twitch VODs and YouTube videos.

Tabletop RPGs are still enjoyed as a pastime in Japan. Since Sword World [game created by Lodoss War author] dropped, Japanese game designers have produced a plethora of TTRPGs, including fantasy games like Alshard and Arianhrod, which both use their own versions of 2d6 dice systems, similar to Sword World. Both games are distinct from SW, with Alshard taking its imagery from Norse mythology and Arianhrod feeling more like Ragnarok Online than D&D, but they are still high fantasy games at their core.

About its influence on fantasy anime:

In much the same way that Fist of the North Star or Saint Seiya changed the shonen battle subgenre, or how Rose of Versailles changed romance manga, Record of Lodoss War brought a lot of key narrative and design elements to the foreground. The Lodoss aesthetic of flowing capes, long hair whipping around in the wind, and chitinous armour has been recreated and lampooned over the years.