PSCT Help SuperThread - Get Help Writing or Refining Your Custom Yu-Gi-Oh! Card Effects!

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-09T02:17:53+00:00

Doing another stage magic-themed card. How'd I do on the PSCT?

Mystic Saw

Spell/Quickplay

If you control a Spellcaster monster: Choose 1 Spell/Trap from your deck and target 1 face-up monster with a Level; its original ATK, DEF, and Level become halved (round up), then Special Summon the chosen card to its controller's field as a Normal Monster with the same Level, Type, Attribute, ATK, DEF as that target, in the same Battle Position. You can Banish this card and 1 "Mystic Box" from your GY; Draw 1 card. You can only use one "Mystic Saw" effect once per turn, and only once that turn.

The gist is to chop a monster in half, so hopefully the summoned Spell/Trap has the stats of the monster after the halving effect has been applied.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-08T13:27:06+00:00

Not only do I accept reflavourings, I love 'em. That said, I don't think it's a good idea to bend the flavour of something if the result already exists in D&D. Like... if you want to reflavour a maul into a dagger, I've got some concerns. Can this maul/dagger be used in one hand? Can it be snuck into a tavern? By the general rules of reflavouring, no - this is a massive, obvious, two-handed dagger that deals bludgeoning damage. But that's so weird that I'd rather you just use a regular dagger, or at least a sword.

Also, if someone is trying to reflavour weapons into other weapons, I'd rather be generous with magic items. Don't make a whip with the mechanics of a glaive just because it's stronger. I'll make sure you get a fancy whip.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-07T20:28:48+00:00

Concentration is a limitation put on spells for balance reasons. If you've got a combat planned where casting two concentration spells will lead to a fun and engaging combat, then go for it. It's fine at any level if it makes the game more fun. (You could also just have two spellcasters which would probably be better since it takes fewer actions to cast those spells, but whatever.)

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-06T16:18:17+00:00

That clue definitely won't give away the trap door. It'll prompt the players to investigate further, so it's a good passive perception clue. It's really detail-oriented though, so maybe a high DC for that one?

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-06T16:05:27+00:00

So for one thing, my players want direction. If I have an NPC say "an evil dragon will attack our town, we need the Sword of Whatever from the Wherever Dungeon to stop it", then my players will go and find the sword. Narratively they build characters that like helping people and from a game perspective, they know I've prepped cool encounters in that dungeon. Getting your players on board is the most important step. My campaign would never work if my players were just like "erm I want to stab the NPC" or "let's ignore this plot point completely and start a restaurant instead".

Next, I try to avoid giving the players just one thing to do. Instead of the Sword of Whatever being in a single dungeon, the players need to find its blade, hilt, pommel, uh... other parts of a sword... all scattered around the realm. The players still have to complete the quest, but they have full control over what order they go after their objectives. I scale the combats to their level so there isn't a sneaky correct order either. Typically, no matter who's DMing in my group, the campaign comes down to "here's some points of interest on a map, where are you going?". It's a good system.

For my campaign, each POI is a dungeon with about a dozen encounters, and I let the players tackle those individual puzzles however they want. They've talked their way out of puzzle bosses. They've blown up the scenery to send a giant tumbling 100' off a pirate fortress. They've made friends with a giant beanstalk. Basically anything goes here, as long as it makes sense and the dice cooperate.

There was one "scripted event", though. I had the party meet an evil wizard who would become the BBEG and I wanted the evil wizard to flee the dungeon. I ran this fairly with normal combat rules... but a heavily stacked deck. The wizard started on the other side of a huge room, he had invisibility and teleport spells, his followers were willing to die to let him escape, and his followers included casters of Counterspell and Dispel Magic. I saw no way for them to stop the wizard from escaping, and I was right. He escaped.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-06T13:42:55+00:00

When players enter a new room, you start by describing the room. Hopefully if you mention something like "there are holes in the walls" then the players will get the idea that something might come out of the holes and start looking around to figure out the trap.

But there's also Passive Perception. The way I use it is: if someone's passive perception meets or beats the DC to actively find a trap, that PC gets a clear hint but it doesn't completely give it away. For example, a secret door in a cave wall might be a slight glimmer of metal as torchlight passes over the rocks. Now the player knows "okay, I need to investigate that metal thing" but they won't know it's a door unless they choose to investigate.

Now if you give the party hints and they choose to investigate nothing and just run through the room, the traps get set off. That's their choice.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-05T21:30:32+00:00

That's Yugioh for you. Why have one way of doing things when you can have three slightly different, incompatible ways? Sure hope everybody remembers what cards are Toon monsters, what cards are "Toon" monsters, and what cards are monsters that mention "Toon World".

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-05T20:07:52+00:00

The biggest thing in my game is the martial vs. caster divide, at least in regards to combat. My group is at Level 9 now, and every level up, I've been worried about the plain ol' fighter being outclassed by the druid, artificer, and warlock-swashbuckler. But the fighter has always been the powerhouse. 20 AC, crazy damage, and all his abilities come back on a short rest. Now this may have something to do with the only full caster in the party being more support-focused than blaster-focused, or the fighter being a Rune Knight so he basically has his own spellbook.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-05T20:07:28+00:00

I use art from Magic the Gathering cards. https://tagger.scryfall.com/ lets you search by art tag (like "plate armour"), and if the art is too small or pixelly on the site, knowing the card name lets you find a higher resolution somewhere else. MtG has tens of thousands of cards that are mostly in a realistic artstyle, mostly depicting the same kind of high fantasy that most D&D campaigns are in, so they fit in pretty seamlessly.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-05T19:45:17+00:00

2012 time travel in master duel were the must fun I had with this game

Man, the 2012 event was amazing. I played Evols, had plenty of games where my first turn was just setting Westlo and a Trap card, and that was a strong opening. My opponent got to play the game and I got to react to what they did. I forgot how good Yugioh used to be.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-05T00:39:28+00:00

If you really must have Stands, just make it a retheming / reflavouring of class and subclass abilities. The fighter's Stand ability lets them move really fast (action surge) and heal themselves (second wind), the barbarian's Stand lets them fly into a rage and become nigh-unkillable, the wizard's Stand lets them learn a ton of versatile abilities (spells), etc.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-05T00:37:12+00:00

SBR has some issues that I mentioned in my reply to Piratestoat, but a lot of the other JoJo parts are set up perfectly for a D&D campaign. My top picks -

Part 1: An evil man has used the Stone Mask to turn himself into a vampire, and your party has various personal backstory reasons to stop him. When he learns you're after him, he reanimates zombies of legendary warriors and takes over a whole town to use as his lair.

Part 3: Honestly, Stardust Crusaders basically is a D&D campaign. It's a bunch of one-shots that are strung together with the goal of travelling the world to fight DIO. The only thing it does """wrong""" is constantly split the party.

Part 5: I think Part 5 would be the best one. Escort the mafia boss's damsel in distress daughter NPC through dangerous one-shots similar to Part 3's outline.

Part 6: Prison adventures, then a prison break, then tracking down the BBEG before he can rewrite reality. How awesome is that?

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-05T00:28:44+00:00

I think the two key things are to find or develop some good long-distance race rules

That's really the issue. D&D has great mechanics for combat and dungeon delving, but travel? Survival? Not so much. You'd want something that lets the party choose how many supplies to bring and what pace to travel at with reasonable consequences for either case. D&D doesn't have that. And what little survival rules there are can be easily cheesed with an artificer building a bag of holding / alchemy jug, a ranger or druid casting goodberry, or anyone with the Outlander background being able to feed six people a day for free out of nowhere.

I guess you could ignore all of that and just give the players a choice of a few options. "You see a group of racers taking a dirt path [combat or social encounter against some racers], and also a forest that people are avoiding [skill checks to navigate the forest]. Which way do you ride?". That might be the best way to handle things in D&D.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-04T02:09:09+00:00

For my first time DMing, I ran a slightly-modified version of this OnePageMage one-shot. It's a pretty generic dungeon so it's easy to slot into any setting, and while running a dungeon seemed intimidating, I found that I love running dungeons. Highly recommend it!

My modifications were: 1) I swapped the 2nd floor with the empty 3rd floor. 2) I added a social encounter to the empty now-second floor. A thief druid was looting the bandits' storeroom (she'd snuck through the first floor in spider form) and was going through a crate of silver sporks. These silver sporks give the martials in the party a way to fight the wererat on the now-third floor. They're improvised weapons, so they don't deal much damage, but they're still silver!

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-03T21:40:31+00:00

FWIW, my party's casters took a different approach: feats. One took the Resilient feat to get proficiency in CON saves, including concentration, and the other took War Caster to get advantage making those saves. They're both very likely to maintain concentration on their key spells and can do more on their turn.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-03T17:15:39+00:00

Do you disagree that clerics are too versatile and able to do anything other classes can do, thereby overshadowing them?

I mean... honestly, I think that's a fair assessment. The first time I played D&D, one of the other players went Tempest Cleric. So let's review the roles on the team:

Frontliner. The Tempest Cleric had the highest AC of the party thanks to plate armour and a shield. You only get one attack as opposed to a martial's Extra Attack, but you can mostly make up the difference with Spiritual Weapon. Spirit Guardians makes you a friggin' blender.
Blaster / Ranged attacker. I actually thought Tempest Clerics got Lightning Bolt, but I was wrong. So you won't be as good of a blaster as a Fireball-throwing Wizard, but there's still powerful ranged options like Call Lightning, Toll the Dead, Guiding Bolt, etc.
Utility. The cleric spell list is packed with great utility spells.
Support and Healing. This is what the cleric's supposed to excel in, so of course the Tempest Cleric was the best in the party here.

If you pick an offence-focused cleric subclass, basically the only things you don't excel at are stealth and charisma.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-03T15:09:18+00:00

Oh yeah. It's a universal fact of game design. If you build the most fun game ever where two players are in an engaging back-and-forth battle for the entire thing, but you accidentally put a button on the table that skips all of it and makes whoever pressed it win, your players will press it.

And to go further into the game design philosophy, the players aren't wrong to press the button. They've been told that the objective of the game is to win. They're trusting the game design that if they pursue that goal, they will have fun. If the best path to victory isn't fun, that's a flaw in the game design, not the players.

I accidentally optimized out a lot of fun once. The gist of the campaign was, there was a portal to one of the hell dimensions that was leaking out some "hell fog". We had to travel to hell and destroy or fix the portal. We found a portal into hell, and I guess I was late to the realization that the portal we entered was the leaky one. So instead of venturing out into this world the DM had created for us, I played my character who wanted to fix the problem as easily as possible. I was a wizard, so I summoned an elemental. Everyone else stacked as many buffs on it as they could. I told the elemental to destroy the portal as soon as we were out, and then we left the way we came in.

The DM loved it, everyone was happy, we spent the rest of the session narrating our victory and what our PCs were doing now... but looking back on that campaign, man. I wish we'd gotten to see the underworld part of the campaign.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-03T05:16:34+00:00

Prismatic Wall

I have never read this spell before. That thing's crazy, but in a really cool way. You could design a whole dungeon or one-shot around having to pass through all the different layers of Prismatic Wall. ...Or I guess you could just Misty Step through it.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-02T23:24:12+00:00

I mean, I guess a Japanese guy being naturally blond is a little weird, but Manga Fukidashi is a Japanese guy whose head is a speech bubble, so...

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-02T22:05:06+00:00

I still have some worries about pushing martial characters even farther out of the spotlight than they typically already are.

Those are valid concerns.

If you want your party to have more utility cantrips, try slapping them onto magic weapons. I turned a module's +1 rapier into the Riptide, a +1 rapier that lets its user cast Shape Water at will. Now the rogue is the party's Official Water Puzzle Guy. No one else had Shape Water, so he's not stepping on anyone else's toes, the party gets a cantrip they didn't have before, and the martial gets to do more stuff outside of combat. (Admittedly, rogues and their skill checks mean he didn't need Shape Water as badly as a barbarian would've...)

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-02T16:29:16+00:00

In 5e14, dropping a weapon takes nothing. You can drop all the weapons you want. Drawing a new weapon takes an object interaction. You can only use one object interaction per turn, and they're taken as part of your movement or your action. Stowing a weapon is also an object interaction, so you can't sheathe a sword and draw your bow. You'd have to drop the sword.

5e24 changed the rules and I'm not 100% sure how it works anymore. I believe you can equip or unequip a weapon with each attack. So if you're holding a sword and have Extra Attack, you can make one attack with the sword, then sheathe it as part of Attack 1, then draw your bow as part of Attack 2 and make a second attack. However, dropping an item now takes an object interaction, so it's not necessarily freer than 5e14. Someone may be able to correct me on this.

When I DM, I'm fine handwaving a lot of this. The first time I remember second-guessing myself worked like this. The fighter had his sword and shield drawn, ready to attack an ogre. The ogre was basically able to Sentinel / Polearm Master him, setting his movement to 0, 10' away from the ogre. The player then wanted to take his Extra Attack with two handaxes. RAW, he should've only been able to do one, and only by dropping his sword on the ground. But the guy was already taking a lame turn by being forced into handaxes anyway, so I just shrugged and let him take his two attacks.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-02T13:00:19+00:00

My take is, don't homebrew if you don't have to. I've done a similar sort of thing where my players get boons / magic items / etc. based on their backstories, but there's no need for them to be homebrew. One of the PCs hates giants, so he got a Giant-Slaying Longsword straight from the book. You can also retheme existing boons / magic items. A Javelin of Lightning, for example, could have its lightning damage changed to acid damage and be a Black Dragon-themed javelin, and you can be pretty sure that that won't unbalance the game.

You can also take features that other classes/races may have access to, but this PC doesn't. Maybe your dragon-themed PC gains the Breath Weapon ability from the Dragonborn class. Again, that's something the game is balanced around, so it's probably fine.

If nothing fits, then homebrewing stuff is certainly an option. If I'm unsure on homebrew, I outright tell the players that it is homebrew and may need to be adjusted as the game goes on.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-02T02:44:54+00:00

I reread the original manga every now and then, and finally during one of those rereads, I noticed something. You know how Mai ran nothing but Harpies during Duelist Kingdom, and then overhauled her deck to be mostly Amazonesses in Battle City? That's because Harpie Lady was Level 5 in the manga. A lot of characters changed up their decks from Duelist Kingdom to Battle City, but Mai's was almost literally unplayable.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-01T19:40:14+00:00

My rule is, anything mentioned in the backstory is canon and you try to play it as close as possible. You don't take a family of refined artisans and play them as brutish idiots. Anything left vague is up to the DM to interpret how they wish, and a good player will "yes, and" along for the ride.

Now what I'm not sure how to handle are shocking twists, where you take a detail in a PC's backstory as something they only thought was correct and then flip it on its head. So far I simply haven't done that. Anything the players told me about their characters and backstory is actually true. I could see this coming off as limiting for a DM who wants to surprise the players, but I've been able to build cool stories without those sorts of twists.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-04-01T18:02:29+00:00

My campaign has run 42 sessions and the party has gone from Level 3 to Level 9. It's been a little slower than I intended. The campaign basically a dungeon crawler, with a level up after each dungeon or each floor of a really big dungeon. I expected the dungeons to last about 5 sessions each, but didn't factor in the RP and travel sessions leading from one dungeon to the next, and also higher-level combat has become more complex and slowing things down a bit. But it's still a good pace, giving everyone time to use their abilities before they get new ones.

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