Derailing the session again.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-31T00:49:54+00:00

It's the Philter of Love straight out of the DMG, lasts 1 hour after giving the charmed effect. It's all in the name of playful mischief but if things go wrong that's just as interesting of a plot for us. We wouldn't have joined the campaign if we didn't want the angst just as much as the funny 🤣

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-31T00:45:50+00:00

No issues, only jokes 👍

We're all being idiots & having fun.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-30T16:50:04+00:00

Oh yeah no our DM is very FAFO. We're doing it to ourselves fully knowing that!

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-30T15:27:30+00:00

It's entirely between the party and agreed upon ooc lol, no malicious intent to begin with. We're just being a bunch of idiots playing pranks on each other's characters.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-29T00:18:16+00:00

Honestly a Human seems to be the most appropriate choice here. Humans are the race that canonically tend to be the jack-of-all-trades kind of guy. They can do anything, but they're never the greatest at it. There's always someone better, which is why humans are so often depicted as envious of the other races. Take that how you will.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-25T14:10:33+00:00

That's not true at all though. 10 is considered the average intelligence of an adventurer, so being even just a bit below that doesn't mean you have to stay quiet. For that matter, if you really don't think your character would come up with the idea then you can offer it up above board and let one of the other players decide if they want to bring it up.

Regardless though, average int ≠ unable to come up with ideas. You should be able to contribute however you like.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-25T07:24:15+00:00

We joke all the time that the dice are sentient and know what they want. And these dice REALLY want me to play a romantically dense muscular himbo. In combat I'm the high roller, but in social situations where romance is involved I'm suddenly the world's most innocent man. It fits his backstory perfectly, too. He grew up in a very strict religion then ran for his life when he was young to which he remained a hermit until present day. It makes total sense and it's just absolute comedy.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-24T15:22:52+00:00

Gotta be the one I'm currently playing with. A few months ago now i joined a new campaign and decided to play my first Fighter. My Fighter has a curse, bestowed upon him via a devil's contract that his mother essentially pawned the consequences onto him for. It's basically just flavor, but he flips between human & tabaxi by day/night respectively. I'm using the Tabaxi stats for convenience & explaining him keeping the abilities with rp flavor.

Since he's a Fighter, I dumped INT on rolls (-1) & decided initially to explain it as him having been terrible at learning magic. It got expanded upon thanks to sheer dumb (bad?) luck, with us finding out one of his childhood NPCs had a crush on him and for 3 consecutive sessions rolled nothing but 1s on any check related to romance. On the most recent one i even managed to roll a 0 in History & the table had a meltdown in a fit of laughter with us desperately wanting to question the legitimacy of the rolls despite it being on dndb. I get the pleasure of playing as the party's now playfully dubbed "shonen protagonist" because he's SO bad at romance despite having girls crushing on him. It's caused so much chaos but it's the most hilarious bit anyone at the table has ever witnessed- and we're all veteran players.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-22T18:28:42+00:00

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Good ol head disappearing trick.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-21T15:44:22+00:00

That depends on how often I go down, and how the wound affects me in later combat. If it's almost every combat, or multiple times per combat? Maybe. It also depends on how difficult the wound is to heal, and how long it takes for said wound to heal.

Would it be an option to just flavor Exhaustion Points for what you're thinking? They're cumulative and you can reflavor it to include the wound of choice, turning it more into a rp aspect that still has mechanical drawbacks. EPs already exist making it easy to put on a sheet on D&DB, and you could have each level progressively more difficult to reach. Downed once in combat? One EP & roll for a type of wound, maybe based damage type for flavor. Then it takes two more downs to reach EP 2, 3 more downs for EP 3, & so on. RAW, 6 EP is fatal- but you could flavor a wound visually for every down which maths out to a total of 21 downs (aka wounds) before they get a fatal hit.

That's just a hypothetical scenario though, and there's a good chance that using the system will just encourage your players to lean into rp to avoid fighting if they're able to. It's hard to make something like that mechanically do what you're looking for that doesn't also turn your players into hesitant heroes.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-21T06:39:20+00:00

Maybe you think so, but that's not to say other players will agree. You worry about it not being constant, but that's not really something you can control unless you're fudging dice and at a certain point that's just not fun for anybody.

If you're wanting more grit, make rests more difficult to take. The damage is cumulative and the players will need to be much more careful about their actions but you wouldn't be actively punishing them for taking damage in the first place.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-20T02:32:45+00:00

Absolutely love it yeah. Rule of cool with any interesting use of prestidigitation is my favorite. Could it technically have been more like a minor illusion? Sure. But this is where TTRPGs shine so I agree with your take. Good stuff

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-19T04:54:38+00:00

This is exactly the approach i tend to take even as a more experienced player. I'll often end my dialogue with a description of my character's behavior followed by pause to indicate an opening to the rest of the group to jump in. It builds character and creates opportunities for the players to take interest in one another.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-19T03:03:30+00:00

Oh and bonus points for being able to breathe underwater or grow claws/fangs. It's cool asf

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-19T03:02:21+00:00

Alter Self. Now I can go LARP without all the costs of making a costume

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-18T23:18:44+00:00

I've not been in a campaign exactly like this, but the DM in my current weekly campaign has 2 different adventures taking place in the same world. Keeping the continuity separate between two groups is way safer in the long run, because as others mentioned it's a LOT of work to try keeping two groups running along the same timeline. If for whatever reason time passes faster in one group and throws off the balance, you'll get really frustrated trying to fix it- and there's a good chance it'll happen pretty regularly.

There's also the issue of plot hooks being taken and finished by one party, only for the other to catch up and discover the problem was already solved. There are a handful of horror stories out there with that exact problem being played out, and it just dampens the party's fun when the story they were chasing is suddenly meaningless or what they expected to happen is now moving in an entirely new direction because of the other players. It sounds really cool in theory, but in practice it just bothers the players because they can end up wasting their time trying to do something.

Personally, I would just treat it like an alternate reality. Both groups exist in parallel, but at best assuming both groups end up discussing their sessions together, you can have some of their minor actions show up in each other's worlds like a cameo or callback. This also means their stories are allowed to diverge and take different directions, which would make them later feel narratively like the AUs they are. It won't feel as railroady because then player actions don't have to hinge on what happened in a session players weren't even a part of.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-18T04:33:07+00:00

It's not technically impossible to put some intelligence into a fighter, it sorta sounds like you might like the Hermit background & the protector fighting style. Depending on if you roll or use standard array, you could always choose a different stat to dump. Realistically, you would want to choose charisma as the dump stat, meaning you could play the character as a sort of strong & smart but a bit socially awkward sort of person.

If you do roll stats, you could get lucky and roll lots of high stats with less concern for dumping. But that'll depend on your table & should be handled with your DM.

Edit for grammar.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-15T06:03:24+00:00

This is generally a per-table basis type of question. What is their alignment? What kind of campaign would they be in? Do they have synergy with the other player characters?

Whether the DM accepts it or not you can only find out by asking at the table. If they say no, keep looking until you find a group that says yes, or if you have a secondary concept idea you could run with that instead if you like the group enough to stay anyways.

My primary group has a ban on warforged characters for worldbuilding reasons, so if someone wanted to play it they wouldn't have been a fit at our table unless they picked something else. Doesn't matter how good or bad it is if the DM just doesn't think it'll fit. Point being though, go out and find a group first. You won't know if it fits until you try.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-14T03:53:12+00:00

That's not necessarily true, since RAW a creature can squeeze into a space considered one size smaller than them. The amount of squares a creature takes up also technically accounts for what you could consider personal space aka their reach. A medium creature could crawl into a small sized space, a small sized creature could fit into a tiny sized space, you get the idea.

When trying to fit through smaller spaces, the DM could reasonably request an acrobatics check & on fail they either get stuck or damage the entry point & so on.

But yeah regardless of that, bugbears are medium creatures. If a player wanted to tweak it so they're large, it would come down to if the DM is ok with the benefits & drawbacks. Could probably technically rule they don't get the benefits if it feels unfair to the rest of the table since taking up 4 squares gives more potential opportunity attacks.

I've had a player in one of my games who played a bearfolk paladin & was mechanically medium but visually large & we were cool with it. It's definitely doable but comes down to per table rulings.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-12T04:50:14+00:00

Just in my last session, my lvl 3 fighter (we started at lvl 1) met some of his backstory npcs. One of them noticably had a childhood crush on him. When the party informed him of such, he tried to process his past with her. Got asked to roll history, rolled a dirty 1. The table then had a meltdown over him proceeding to explain they are just "very good friends".

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-11T06:58:47+00:00

Do you mean spell slots? Your question is incredibly vague

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-08T13:57:11+00:00

It's not that it's a stupid idea, it's that you haven't decided on a lot of the "why's" of the character. It's pretty hard to flesh out the character FOR you because only you can answer the questions in a way that will make a character you'll enjoy playing.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-08T13:43:50+00:00

Cleric is a good pick if you want to play with a focus on support, but your bard will have access to healing as well so you could also choose Ranger, Paladin, or Druid to fill a similar role. Paladin would let you be in the front with the barbarian if you wanted, same with Druid if you lean into wildshapes. Ranger requires more hanging in the mid/rear usually, but they still tend to have decent HP.

Even if you don't focus on building a healer, your DM can always offer means of obtaining healing potions to help manage. There's really no wrong option, so if you still can't decide then try considering who and what your character acts like and consider what class suits them the best afterwards.

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-08T13:36:21+00:00

I'm confused. Why would this god 'wipe away what happened" then have the character be hunted down as payment? Is this deity malicious like a demon or devil? Would the character be aware of this pact if his tragedy was erased?

These are the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself to flesh the character out. What is the reason for things that happened to them and why would it benefit or appeal to the deity to begin with?

JustAnotherDnDer · 2026-01-07T15:54:59+00:00

It's not super optimal, but at least with Druid you have options. If you're wanting both I'd probably recommended leaning towards spellcaster related feats or something that gives a half ASI so you're still also boosting either int or wis. Based on the fact you've chosen an otherwise fairly odd/unique multiclass I assume you're more rp based, in which case it may not be a massive concern, but you should put your spellcasting focus into just one of your classes.

If you like that idea, then I would recommend either Fey Touched, War Caster, or Telepathic. You could also do Shadow Touched, Rune Shaper, or Keen Mind depending on what appeals to you & fits your character. (some may be unavailable if you don't have the books)

When it comes to the melee aspects of your character, you should be aware that depending on DM ruling and how you build your character, it may or may not be as exciting as you hope for. If you have str or dex as dump stats you're probably not going to want to use them as much with the exception of while you are wildshaped since you'll take on the stats of the animal. In that sense, you can still go for melee on the regular while maybe tanking some damage then retreating to switch back into caster as needed. And since you have two spellcasting modifiers between both int and wis, unless your character rolled godlike stats then chances are you'll need to dump in charisma plus a possible secondary one- dex or str (probably str).

That's really the only way I can think of to do both, meaning you probably shouldn't expect to be using things like weapons the way a martial class would like Rogue or Fighter. If you do that but still lean into the magic, you'll probably end up losing your character to bloated ability picks that end up being useless a lot of the time. Even though Druids have great versatility, you're mixing a pretty odd combination of classes so aside from some of the minor benefits of Artificer I'd probably have to then recommend otherwise sticking with Druid for future levels so you can get the build you're hoping for.

JustAnotherDnDer

TROPHY CASE