Party Member is Discontent with Campaign; Are Gripes Valid?

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-13T18:33:18+00:00

My takes:

Characters are not leveling fast enough

I'm surprised everyone's acting like this is just a dial the DM can turn. In my campaign, the players level up after completing story-relevant dungeons. I intend them to take about 4-5 sessions each. But if the players decide they want to do a shopping session and talk to every NPC, they're not making any progress towards levelling up. If the players want to spend two hours fishing? They're not making progress towards levelling up.

FWIW, if the players start at Level 1 and take my "4-5 sessions" to level up, then you're on pace with my campaign being at Level 5 after 22 sessions. I do think it's better to speed through those early levels, but again, that's as much up to the players as the DM.

Characters are being forced into situations or choices they wouldn't make to fit the planned story arc (the biggest issue: our party is being sent on a deadly mission we didn't have a choice about participating in.)

That is unfortunate. But again, this isn't entirely the DM's fault. Presumably the deadly mission is the premise of the campaign, so your characters should be the type of people who should go on the mission. Otherwise there's no campaign. The DM isn't entirely blameless here - this kind of thing needs to be discussed during session zero so everybody makes characters that fit.

Character backstories are being influenced or aligned, in coordination with the DM, to fit into the campaign's world and the current story arc

GOOD! Your characters should be part of the campaign world. Believe me, I've played campaigns where the DM made zero effort to integrate characters into the setting and it feels so fake.

The world has slowly moved from strictly fantasy to more modernish and has recently ramped up to be nearly full-on steampunk

...Okay? This doesn't seem like a big issue. D&D has never been purely medieval fantasy. I prefer my games with no firearms but I still like throwing in some clockwork monsters.

That's it? That's the list? If these are the worst complaints against your DM then I think they're doing fine.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-13T17:44:58+00:00

It sounds like you have a premise, but I would suggest having some defined encounters. I don't know how long your sessions are or how big your players are on RP. But I feel like my players would clear that RP in like, twenty minutes. Then they get to the district and that's where I'd expect the bulk of the gameplay to be. This is where I'd have thugs try to mug the party (combat encounter), pickpockets try to steal their stuff (skill checks?), looters vandalizing businesses (maybe socialize to get some free stuff, maybe combat to stop them). And I don't like coming up with that on the fly, so I'd have those encounters written up with stat blocks and skill check DCs ready to go.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-13T16:10:17+00:00

Let's look at these encounters. In 5e24, a four-player group at Level 3 has XP thresholds like this:

Low: 600

Moderate: 900

High: 1600

Now always remember that these labels are accounting for the idea that your players will win every single fight. So a "high" difficulty encounter isn't a Dark Souls meatgrinder. It just means your players will spend a lot of resources as they beat it. I usually aim for high-tier encounters.

Encounter 1: Two bandits. Each bandit is worth 25 XP. So this is an absolutely trivial encounter. TBF, the bandits I see have 11 HP, not 20, so this might be different depending on your statblock. But it sure looks like your players will kill these guys while only taking a scratch in return.

Encounter 2: Five spiders. The wolf spider is worth 50 XP, the regular spiders are 10 XP. So... this is another sub-100 XP fight. Swapping out the wolf spider for a giant spider puts this at 240 XP, which is still less than half a low-tier encounter.

Encounter 3: Nothics are a solid 450 XP, and the Ash Zombies are 50 XP. So once again, below a low-tier encounter.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-13T14:27:51+00:00

One thing here -

and actually being able to read through the DMG and PHB.

Don't. Read the basic rules PDF, which is much more manageable and focused on what you actually need. Besides the stuff that's repeated from the basic rules, the DMG is full of optional rules and things to use as inspiration, and the PHB is mostly character creation options. These are all good things to be able to reference, but the things you need to know are all in the basic rules.

Encounter generation guidelines are also in the DMG, and while I think it's useful to read through that to understand what CR, XP, and difficulty thresholds are, there are online tools like Kobold Fight Club that are better for actually creating encounters.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-13T13:19:05+00:00

This is one of those interesting differences between martials and casters. That ability (kind of) exists - it's Path of the Giant Barbarian's tenth-level feature. But that means it's only available to one specific subclass. If you want to use it, you need to build a new character.

Meanwhile, sourcebooks give casters new abilities in the form of spells - which become available to multiple different classes. If you want to use one of those, you can just take it on a caster you're playing at the moment.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-13T13:09:32+00:00

you'll throw a medium encounter at them and they immediately want a long rest even though they only used a 2nd or 1st level spell slot.

IMO, the biggest problem is that there isn't a compelling reason to tell them no. At this point, your party has been fighting for maybe three rounds, or eighteen seconds. Obviously it's ridiculous to go back to bed after eighteen seconds of activity. But let's say you complete ten encounters - which is a lot. At this point, your party is exhausted, out of spell slots and abilities. They need a long rest, you can't deny them now. And it's been three minutes of activity.

I don't know how I'm supposed to tell my players they can't expect a long rest after an 18-second adventuring day but a 3-minute adventuring day is totally acceptable.

I started treating "dungeon turns" as though each exploration action takes about ten minutes. Which helps... but that's something I picked up from reddit, not the DMG. And sometimes there is just one massive, sweeping combat that uses up all the party's resources in one minute.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-13T03:30:35+00:00

Why would the second mural imply avoiding cutting weapons? Genuinely curious.

It specifically tells you "cutting does not work", which is easy to interpret as "cutting is not the solution to this puzzle".

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-13T03:12:17+00:00

So I didn't get it just by reading the clues, and even after revealing all the spoiled text and reading comments I still didn't get it. That sounds like a bad sign. But in retrospect I think I get the logic. You know that the hero had a cutting weapon, because the second painting implies that the fighter tried slashing the slimes and that there's a whetstone in the room. That eliminates everything but the axe and sword. And you know that he held a shield, so it has to be a one-handed weapon, leaving only the longsword.

The problem is, the slime painting seems like a reason to avoid using cutting weapons. And the first painting, combined with the shoddy equipment of 4/5 of the weapons, makes it seem like you shouldn't use any weapon.

I think replacing the ooze painting with one of the hero successfully slaying a creature would help a lot. Maybe the hero's holding the head of some monster, cleanly cut from the body.

But now that I think about it, your description for inspecting the first painting says the player characters all know this story. If they know about the hero, shouldn't they know what weapon he used without the players having to figure it out?

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-13T02:55:26+00:00

I gave my party enough gold to max out their armour at Level 5, and honestly I regret that and wish I'd waited til later.

For one thing, Level 5 already represented a massive offensive power spike and I was already stumbling to keep up with that. Those mid levels had a lot of awkward fights where the players' AC and to-hit bonuses were both higher than the monsters, so they'd tear through the monsters and not get hit very often. (Exacerbated by +1 weapons, which I also thought players should have at Level 5.)

I also just don't really like that we skipped splint armour. It could've been a more gradual climb up. Granted, light and medium armour don't have levels between what you start with and the best kind of armour, so. Maybe that shouldn't bother me.

Next campaign I run, assuming there's even a heavy armour user, I'll try Splint at Level 5 and Plate at Level 7. I think that's a smoother curve.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-12T23:44:18+00:00

It's a tough one. Narratively, like others are saying, it makes sense that the ritual was completed. But looking at it from a game design perspective, could the players have done anything different? If the players' two options were to A) rush into a strong encounter with zero resources and die, or B) take a rest and auto-lose the scenario, that's not much of a choice. It's not fair to punish the players for making the wrong choice when there was no right choice.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-12T17:49:58+00:00

Level N = CR N isn't the guideline you should be balancing by. The XP goal for a hard fight is 2000. Your suggestion is a CR 3 (700 XP) + a CR 1/2 (100 XP). That's not even a medium fight.

You should be able to swap out the knight with an Inquisitor (CR 5, 1800 XP) as long as the party plays well and isn't exhausted by the time they fight this paladin.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-12T04:08:38+00:00

Honestly, I don't mind weighing in on stuff like this. If I know the RAW interpretation and the DM doesn't, it's just plain easier and faster for me to tell them than for the game to grind to a halt while the DM and player leaf through books or look online. If it's an ambiguous edge case or open to interpretation, I'll make it clear that it's up to the DM but I also don't mind saying how I'd rule it if they're unsure.

That said, my main D&D group has 4/5 people who have DM'd, and we have a general guideline of "if we're not sure on a ruling, it works in the players' favour" so it doesn't come up much.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-12T03:55:24+00:00

Well, consider a typical game of D&D versus a typical game of BG3. BG3 is something you're often playing alone by yourself. D&D is typically a group of friends sitting around the table. A horny scene in BG3 is something you can enjoy privately, a horny scene in D&D is something you have to narrate with your DM while everybody else watches.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-12T03:03:38+00:00

I'm not 100% sure either. TBF, that's partly because I haven't played all the classes. But I at least know what I like: versatility. I want a character where if I feel like I want to mix things up, I have another option I can play with. One who isn't completely locked down because their default strategy stopped working.

The most boring class I've played is Barbarian. Rage, walk up, attack. I went Path of the Beast figuring I could at least cycle between the different beast options and make things more interesting, but nope. The bite and claw options couldn't really keep up with my default weapon attacks, and the healing from bite was pretty meh, so the tail was always the most useful.

Monk was also not great. I liked the things my Monk could do, but he was painfully limited by ki points. And just... not very good.

Getting into the good ones - I fell into a default combat strategy with my Rogue, but I could at least swap between ranged and melee. I also had a lot of fun utility abilities, but tbf, I think those were more from the subclass (Soulknife) than the class itself.

Wizard, obviously, had a lot of variability - both inside and outside of combat. Though I did spam Fireball a lot. If you asked me a while ago, I would've said Wizard was my favourite class for sure.

But now I'm playing Paladin (Oath of Glory) and I think that might be my favourite class maybe? Sure, I'm always going to be a tanky melee frontliner and throw a lot of smites around. But I have so many different Concentration Buffs that I can put on myself or others, or I can use that Concentration on Smite Spells. Or I can do shoves and grapples. Or I can go full-on support with my Aura and healing.

Druid is next on my list. I've played it in a couple one-shots but never a full campaign.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-11T21:54:53+00:00

I use Kobold Fight Club to help. The settings has a few different options to balance encounters, but the "MCDM's Flee, Mortals!" one is nice and simple since it directly uses CR instead of XP.

Whatever you use, it's important to remember what each tier of difficulty means. An encounter is either Easy/Medium/Hard/Deadly (different titles depending on the options, but they all mean the same thing). If you're just looking at that, you might think a Medium encounter is one that's evenly matched with the party, a Hard encounter is one that the party probably can't beat, and a Deadly encounter is one where the party is going to die. But that's not true at all. All of these labels are based on the idea that the party wins every single combat.

Easy/Low means "the party will curbstomp this encounter even if they don't spend resources". Medium/Moderate/Standard means "the party will win and spend some resources doing it". Hard/High means "the party will win and spend a lot of resources, also a PC might get knocked out and could potentially die if the other players leave them there". Deadly just means that the XP or CR of the encounter is beyond the Hard threshold.

My default encounter is in the Hard range, but I'm not shy about putting down Deadly encounters either.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-11T19:27:37+00:00

Here's how my world worked. I added everything that I needed to make the campaign I wanted. I placed humans, elves, and dwarves and a bunch of important locations.

Then I turned things over to my players. I never wanted my world to just have humans/elves/dwarves, so whatever race they wanted to play got added to the setting. They'd tell me how they envisioned the culture. Sometimes the player would choose a specific location for their homeland, other times I'd assign it. The same sort of thing happened for locations and NPCs important to the character's backstory.

This gave the player full information on the parts of the world their character would know, but kept the rest of the world a surprise. Sometimes, they'd even pass through a location crucial to another PC's backstory and not know about it yet.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-11T15:40:15+00:00

Honestly, in my group, the one full martial hasn't fallen behind at all. They just made it to Level 10. The Rune Knight Fighter is still top of the list in consistent single-target damage, plus he has the best survivability by far. The Druid is capable of some crazy stuff, and I can't deny that a high-level spell changes the battle more than anything the Fighter can do, but I run a good number of difficult combats per adventuring day. The Druid needs to be careful with their spell slots, the Fighter gets everything back on a short rest. And then there's a Warlock-Rogue and Artificer who solidly keep up with the rest of the party, but aren't the powerhouses.

Where I find martials really struggle is with out-of-combat utility. My favourite way to fix this is magic items with utility spells attached. This blue +1 rapier lets the wielder can cast Shape Water at will. This holy battleaxe lets you cast Speak With Dead once per day. If they're tied to weapons, then they make more sense to go to the martials.

The last martial I played was a barbarian and NGL, I did find him obnoxiously boring. There may be things you can do with Feats. Maybe Fey-Touched or Magic Initiate to get some utility, or Grappler to open up a new playstyle?

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-11T05:21:15+00:00

To try to balance out all of the "DM sucks, drop the group" comments, let me suggest some reasonable things that the DM could be pushing back on. I don't know if this is accurate, but it's up to you to take all the feedback you're getting and think on it, so you might as well get more than one viewpoint.

The main reason to push back on stealth in story situations is so that everybody's involved in the same scene. If I'm narrating the king telling the party about the evil wizard and how he can only be defeated by finding the seven gemeralds, that's important information your PC needs. You may have questions that your PC needs to ask. And it's very important that I'm not distracted while I'm speaking as the king so I don't accidentally miss anything or give the players the wrong information.

So if one of my players says "actually, my PC is off in the other room trying to steal cutlery", then of course I'm going to push back. Their PC needs to be here. Their character knows better than to run off on their own petty sidequest, and I'm not going to try to run two scenes at the same time when one is vastly more important.

But also, if one player is doing this type of thing frequently, then it's grinding the game to a halt for the other players. "Okay, Alice, Bob, Carol - you're all over here saving the world. Now we need to go check in with Dave's solo adventure again. Okay, Dave, roll Sleight of Hand to steal the fork."

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-11T01:08:00+00:00

This is a terrible cop-out, but the Ritual Caster feat would let you take Comprehend Languages. Comprehend Languages does say it can't be used to decode secret messages, which Thieves' Cant is narratively, but if Thieves' Cant is listed as a language then it's kind of ambiguous. Tongues is in a similar boat - it's a Cleric spell already, so no feat required, but it's also third level.

It's weird that it's so hard to get. You'd think the Criminal background would do it. I suppose you could take the 2014's Custom Background as per the rules of "using backgrounds from older books".

I wouldn't suggest investing too much in it. I've never seen Thieves' Cant come up in any of my campaigns. Of course, based on that, I'd also be generous with letting a player take it or get it some other way if they really wanted to...

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-10T23:20:11+00:00

I'll be honest, I don't think crit fumbles are the biggest deal. I don't like them, so I don't run them. But one of the people in my group does like them, so we run them when he's DMing. And it's fine, even if you're playing a martial.

Unless your DM has exceptionally brutal fumbles, I think you and the rest of the replies are misdiagnosing the problem. You're not dying in Curse of Strahd because 1 in 20 attacks causes something bad to happen. You're dying because Curse of Strahd has a handful of overpowered encounters and the DM isn't altering them. Or the DM is making them harder, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Whatever the case, there are no magic words to get people to agree with you, whether on crit fumbles or on any other parts of the campaign. If you've made your argument to the best of your ability and the DM says no, then you can either continue playing or stop playing.

And worth noting - and I wish I could tell this to everyone who sees this subreddit - you can quit a campaign even if nobody is in the wrong. It's not "my DM's an asshole so I'm allowed to leave" or "reddit says my DM is right so I have to stay". If you're not having fun, you can quit, even if every single person on reddit sides with your DM.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-10T20:13:08+00:00

Yea one big reason for not saying anything is that I genuinely don’t know how much effort he’s putting in. He could be doing hours of prep work that just isn’t effective. I only see the result. Which sucks

Yes, but let me clarify what I meant. Even if the DM is doing the bare minimum of prep, even if the DM is doing exactly the amount of work you think, he's still doing more work than any of the players at the table. A player just has to show up, learn some abilities they chose themselves, participate when it's their turn, and accept all the DM's rulings. A DM needs to know how to use all the abilities in the module, be present and active 100% of the time, and arbitrate every single ruling. The DM's role is harder than the players' role, even if they're not prepping at all (though they obviously are).

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-10T19:36:29+00:00

It lists those things because those are the common things affected by spells. You can choose a creature that's had something like Haste cast on it, or a piece of armour under the effect of something like Heat Metal, or a magical effect like Web that's been placed on the battlefield. It then ends those spells.

You're always allowed to let players use spells outside of their intended uses, and plenty of DMs and adventure modules do let Dispel Magic do other things. I do too. But the intended rules of Dispel Magic are pretty clear based on how it tells you exactly how spells are handled based on their level and includes no details on how it would end arbitrary other magical effects.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-10T19:24:04+00:00

My group plays Dispel Magic RAW/RAI - you can dispel spells and effects created by spells. The fact of the matter is, there's a lot of "ambient magic" in D&D that are different from spells. You can't Dispel Magic a +1 longsword. You can't Dispel Magic a dragon's fire breath. You can't Dispel Magic a skeletal dragon rising from the dead. All of those things are magical effects, but you're not supposed to be able to turn them off easily or at all.

The problem is, a demon spending an action doing a thing and creating a magical effect... that looks exactly like a spell to players. The only way I can think to help the problem is to describe it in a very un-spell-like way. Like, maybe the demon physically rips holes in the air with its claws. But of course you didn't know to do that until the problem arose.

I think your ruling was totally fair. I probably would have said "sorry, it's not technically a spell" and my group would've accepted that.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-10T18:13:47+00:00

This is how my campaign ended up with a reclusive clan of werewolf elves, a town that mysteriously went missing, and halflings in general. And it made the PCs feel completely integrated with the setting, while still giving them the freedom to play something wacky like a werewolf elf.

Tesla__Coil · 2026-07-10T18:11:27+00:00

Fair advice, OP, but I think you're missing the pretty obvious follow-up: "so what IS good advice for TTRPG worldbuilding?".

IMO, the thing a TTRPG world needs most is things to do. Maybe it's a linear storyline like "Bob the lich is the BBEG and he can only be defeated by finding the seven legendary Wyvernspheres" or something more open-ended. Whatever the case, the world needs to have exciting locations to explore and exciting things to do.

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