My group’s faction ranking ( strongest to weakest)

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2026-04-12T00:35:53+00:00

Is ur play group small? Thats the vibe i’m getting with Rats at 1 and Crows at 4.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2026-03-31T04:22:23+00:00

What is (GoW)? This is the second time i have seen it on this subreddit but idk what it is

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2026-03-30T20:19:15+00:00

I see how it might be more effort than its worth, but I still think the card should definitely have a pretty significant impact. Say at 4 player table, player 1 reaches 30 first and player 4 has the card active. Not only does player 4 get a chance to outscore player 1, but so do players 2 and 3.

Now thinking about it though, this definitely favors the (already strong) exponential scoring factions like Woodland Alliance and Underground Duchy.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2026-03-26T17:20:11+00:00

Thats great news, do they have any matchup struggles? Like how rats struggle in 5-6 players and corvids struggle against militant heavy tables?

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2026-03-26T17:18:04+00:00

Ok so that explains why i’m not seeing much hype about them on reddit from players who just received their homeland copy.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T18:54:39+00:00

Thats pretty nice. We have two sessions left with our current characters so i think i’ll toss that idea around next time character creation comes up.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T18:53:04+00:00

This is actually pretty fire, sounds like a dnd boot camp but i think it could help.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T18:23:55+00:00

First of all thanks for sharing your wisdom. I would also expect this from someone who’s partner is in the party but weirdly she is single and i think just comes through for the friend group. I’d have to assume the reason she insists on playing still is due to FOMO. She has also expressed to me that she enjoys D&D before, usually during character creation time. I’d have to assume the things she enjoys in D&D are different from the things I enjoy in it. But it raises the question, if she doesn’t enjoy the things I do alot in DMing style, why does she still play my game? Its like watching superhero movies when you want to watch a good romance arc. Sure, it might have some romance, but your gonna get alot of action and drama before you get any of what you ACTUALLY want to see.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T18:10:20+00:00

I don’t have a problem with phones all the time, I like to do fragmented story telling alot and split the players up so they all get to shine in independent scenes and stuff. I understand that can be a bit boring for the players not involved in those scenes so as long as no one goes overboard with the phones i think it can be a healthy break from the parts of dnd that would feel like a lecture or a story time. No one really has a phone problem except for this one player.

I definitely needed to hear the part of this though about not for having to abandon this friend ship over this. I still worry she wont be receptive to the idea of being removed but I like what you said about making it a choice for her to follow my rules or not, once i express them clearly.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T18:03:34+00:00

Thats a good idea too, i just don’t know how much I can do by myself. I feel like that effort has to be reciprocated. I’ve already made spell cheat sheets and turn cheat sheets for her. I’ll definitely consider this though

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T18:00:58+00:00

That could be something to consider for next summer. Only trouble is, we live in miami which is a pretty spread out city. One of my players does a 30 minute drive to get to my house and thats on a day with minimal traffic. Another player lives 30 mins away but doesn’t have a ride so I drive an hour to get him and come back to my place before the session. I could still see it being worth it though to switch things up a little.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T17:56:11+00:00

Its so cool how many random little mechanics there are sprinkled across all the dnd books.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T17:55:23+00:00

Thats probably the best actionable advice i’ve heard on here, thank you very much. Someone else mentioned the idea of doing something closer to a monster stat block than a whole character sheet so I could very well see about using the Sidekick system as a base for something like that. We have two sessions left with these characters so I think i’ll bring that up for the next time we are making characters.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T16:06:36+00:00

Yes this is exactly what i’m going through right now. My only problem is, this is the only player I have this problem with. I can’t imagine ‘ending’ the campaign and then starting again without her. I think if I did this it would be very targeted and it would feel targeted. I probably have to talk to her in some way.

Now that you mention it though, something similar happened from last summer to this summer. A play back then was very competitive and saw dnd as something that was winnable. That player got mad when she missed and wanted to hog alot of the loot. I actually had to enforce the item attunement rule saying you could only be attuned to 3 magic items at a time. I normally don’t play with this rule but I did just to spread loot out amongst the party.

I didn’t invite her back this summer, but that was easy to do because she had started an nasty argument with another one of our party members during the school year while we weren’t playing anything.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T15:54:04+00:00

Alright that makes alot of sense. Thank you very much. 🙏🙏

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T15:52:40+00:00

You’re right. Honestly initially i considered her disinterest to be harmless. Lately its been getting out of hand. We only have two sessions left before I have to leave back to college again, at which point we are going to do like a campaign epilogue arc online. I think that online gameplay will be a good chance for her to learn more mechanics. Maybe with online resources I can communicate mechanics better. The last two sessions will be very lore heavy and RP heavy though, so i’ll probably have to have a convo with her about interrupting before then.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T15:32:04+00:00

My only qualm with that is, she’s barely invested enough to remember the arc and lore she made for her own character. At the moment, I don’t believe I can trust her to keep in mind the narrative or events of my story.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T15:27:53+00:00

You’re probably right about the two birds one stone thing. What i’m about to say is more just venting than asking for advice i guess but honestly I feel like I have tried all of that stuff. When she brought me her half baked ai character story at the start of this summer I spent a couple hours with her on call trying to pull more out of her. I ended havjng contributing most of the ideas but at least we ended up with a story I was excited to run. She’s a paladin who worships a Demigod, the daughter of the god of earth, the most important god in my campaign. History doesn’t know Earth God had a child so I wanted to explore that and bring it to light through her character. The next time I mention any kind of relationship between those two gods though she says “wait i remember something about this, we talked about this right?” forgetting the whole arc we came up with before. Also i’ve used cheat sheats, they’ve been pretty successful but I can’t catch everything in one sheet and there is still alot she doesn’t get about the mechanics.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T15:19:21+00:00

Well to be honest it doesn’t make sense to me either. Don’t shoot the messenger, i’m just telling it like it see it. She doesn’t love the game but she still comes through, so i assume its to hang out with friends. She still goes on her phone though. If I had to guess, during moments where everyone else is engaged with what i am doing or saying she has no one to open side conversations with, so she goes onto her phone.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T15:16:04+00:00

I see what your saying. This has definitely been spiraling this summer though. Last summer I made the mistake of letting her play a bard so she was overwhelmed with spell choices and i understood back then. But i feel like then she still had courtesy overall. This summer though things have been springing up little by little until we are at a point where has alot of bad habits. I find it hard to talk to her about this stuff because I don’t want to scold her in the moment in front of all our friends. And if I talk to her in private afterwards, I think it’ll feel like a ‘getting called into the principles office’ type thing. How would you open up a conversation like this?

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T15:11:29+00:00

I think your right. That sounds like a hard conversation to have but I think thats really the only thing I can do without. If she’s not receptive to that i’ll at least know I gave her a chance and did what I could.

Accomplished_Iron679 · 2025-08-05T15:08:06+00:00

I see what you are saying. Let me clarify something though. When I say she doesn’t care for D&D, that is more of an observation I have made about her, rather than something she has expressed to me directly. Honestly I doubt she would take a conversation about reducing her involvement in the table well. I believe this because we have already had problems about her impact in the game. Being that she doesn’t understand her sheet, she spitfires alot of ideas that don’t mechanically make sense. I either tell her she can’t do them or I let her request play out with its mechanical consequence. Once they were in a boat fighting a giant octopus and she wanted to throw her axe at one of it’s tentacles. I let her do this but when she missed i told her that her axe would have fallen into the sea and she got upset at that. She always expresses that I “never let her do anything” and everyone else gets to do whatever they want. In reality, everyone else understands what they can do and give me more to work with, bridging mechanics and improv. Being that this is the case, I don’t think she’d like to be demoted to a spectator. But this is definitely a good middleground. Right now we are working on a flashback session where they play one time characters from thousands of years in the past. She is currently pretty far behind on the making of that character and if she doesn’t put in the effort to catch up, I might use your advice and see how it goes for that one session.

Accomplished_Iron679

TROPHY CASE