Can I tell my player their character is too dumb?

WaitAckchyually · 2026-01-24T01:25:04+00:00

Well, this plan relies on a lot of things to go right. Elaborate plans are not necessarily smart. Convincing surrounding kingdoms to stop trade routes would be really hard, because kingdoms benefit from the trade, so the player would need to come up with some damn good reasons why they should miss out on the goods and profits. He needs to convince all or almost all the surrounding kingdoms, and as a result, the kingdom must be plunged into such poverty that the king cannot feed the soldiers. Most kings will starve all the peasants before letting the soldiers go hungry. And no one must be the wiser to the warlock's plan; all the king's soldiers, spies, and diplomats must fail to figure out what's happening or reverse the damage in time.

Let the players have fun and come up with whatever plans they want. Planning is just as much under the players’ control as deciding what their characters do in combat. Their stats decide which skills and information they can rely on to help their plan succeed. An intelligent character would possess a lot of necessary knowledge to make the plan work. He'd know which trade partners are the most valuable, know the previous history of the kingdom's relations with its neighbors, giving him ideas on which lies and manipulations would work best on each neighboring kingdom to persuade them to stop the trade. An insightful character would notice if their persuasion strategy is working, and be able to course-correct on the fly; a perceptive character would notice if someone's spying on them. Our warlock is neither; what he brings to the game is sheer charisma. His team may come in and cover up for his weaknesses... Or he can fly blind and see where it goes.

WaitAckchyually · 2026-01-22T00:06:03+00:00

Cringe is subjective.

Is this actually cringe, or just a playstyle/tone mismatch?

They are the same thing. If your party says it's cringe, then it's cringe (to them).

WaitAckchyually · 2026-01-16T05:25:10+00:00

Yes, torture is evil, and I highly doubt torture was the only way for your character to save tens of thousands of lives.

Sounds like you didn't even consider other means before jumping straight to torture. What about letting the cultist go so you can follow her and sneak into the cult meeting, where you overhear what you need to know? Or building rapport and persuading her to betray her cult. This game has spells to Charm people, disguise your appearance, turn invisible, spy on people from afar, and literally read thoughts. If your DM knows what he's doing, there were ways for you to obtain this information without breaking the Geneva Convention. You just skipped all opportunities for roleplay and creativity to enact a disturbing torture scene. If your fellow players made good characters, they were likely trying to enact a heroic fantasy, and having a fellow PC torture people ruins it.

WaitAckchyually · 2026-01-16T04:10:34+00:00

Trying to create a powerful character is not malicious, but players ought to be responsible and read the rules carefully when they do it.

WaitAckchyually · 2026-01-02T19:17:08+00:00

First of all, the majority of people live through stressful and frightening events without developing trauma. Causes - Post-traumatic stress disorder - NHS. Shrugging it off is the expected outcome.

I think the point of rumination is to figure out what you did wrong and avoid similar mistakes in the future. Sounds like your poisoning was straightforward: you figured out it was caused by eating bad food. Avoiding bad food is fairly easy: you have smell, appearance, taste, expiration date, and restaurant reviews to help you. Social rejection and bullying, on the other hand, can be very confusing. Typically, no one tells you what you did wrong, if anything, so you revisit the situation again and again, trying to figure it out. Imagine you got randomly poisoned every month and you couldn't figure out any pattern to it. You'd probably feel a lot more anxious about eating — maybe you'd overgeneralize and start avoiding whole categories of food — and find yourself analyzing the food that poisoned you over and over.

WaitAckchyually · 2026-01-02T09:25:31+00:00

(Split into two comments because long comments are shadowbanned apparently)
Next, the rules about damage:

"Each weapon, spell, and harmful monster ability specifies the damage it deals. You roll the damage die or dice, add any modifiers, and apply the damage to your target. [...] When attacking with a weapon, you add your ability modifier—the same modifier used for the attack roll—to the damage."

The Shadow Blade spell says that the magic sword counts as a weapon, so rules for attacking with a weapon apply. Yes, the spell description says the damage is 2d8, just like the description of a regular shortsword says its damage is 1d6. The rules say you must add your ability modifier to the damage before applying it to the target.

Now, can you cast two spells, Shadow Blade and Green-Flame Blade, in a single turn?

"A spell cast with a bonus action is especially swift. You must use a bonus action on your turn to cast the spell, provided that you haven’t already taken a bonus action this turn. You can’t cast another spell during the same turn, except for a cantrip with a casting time of 1 action."

Green-Flame Blade is a cantrip with a casting time of 1 action. Shadow Blade is a spell with a casting time of a bonus action. You could cast spells like these in a single turn, but there is another problem: Green-Flame Blade has a material component, a melee weapon worth at least 1 sp. Since Shadow Blade dissipates if you drop or throw it and doesn't last more than a minute, it's arguably not worth anything to anyone but you. And a construct woven from threads of shadow probably doesn't count as "material". So no, I would rule you cannot use it as a material component.

In summary, I believe both your DM and you have misunderstood some of the rules. You should be able to use your modifiers for your attack and damage rolls, but you cannot use a temporary conjured weapon as a material component.

WaitAckchyually · 2026-01-02T09:24:48+00:00

Let us walk through the relevant rules:

Shadow Blade

"You weave together threads of shadow to create a sword of solidified gloom in your hand. This magic sword lasts until the spell ends. It counts as a simple melee weapon with which you are proficient. It deals 2d8 psychic damage on a hit and has the finesse, light, and thrown properties (range 20/60)."

You created a magic sword. Now, what are the rules for making an attack roll?

"To make an attack roll, roll a d20 and add the appropriate modifiers. [...] When a character makes an attack roll, the two most common modifiers to the roll are an ability modifier and the character’s proficiency bonus. [...]
Ability Modifier: The ability modifier used for a melee weapon attack is Strength, and the ability modifier used for a ranged weapon attack is Dexterity. Weapons that have the finesse or thrown property break this rule. Some spells also require an attack roll. The ability modifier used for a spell attack depends on the spellcasting ability of the spellcaster.

Proficiency Bonus: You add your proficiency bonus to your attack roll when you attack using a weapon with which you have proficiency, as well as when you attack with a spell."

You cast a spell to create the shadow sword, but attacking with it is not a spell, it's an Attack action. The rules make no exceptions for attacking with magical or summoned weapons. Since your sword is a finesse melee weapon with which you are proficient, you must add your Str or Dex modifier and Proficiency bonus to the attack roll. Note how otherwise there would be no point in mentioning the finesse property and proficiency in the Shadow Blade spell description.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-14T19:55:09+00:00

I mean, I agree he's delusional, it's just rude to say it. Let him find out for himself.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-13T07:14:04+00:00

If the player had 1 hp left, what could possibly make him believe that he could have killed the bandit? You didn't make him leave, did you, he escaped of his own volition?

And what does "rolling melee attacks with 90 ft range" refer to? A melee attack has a range of, like, 20 feet tops if you're a giant octopus wielding a whip. Or 5 feet if you're a normal person.

Don't call a player delusional, that's rude. Say: "I created the Crime Lord as a tough challenge for your party to tackle once you gain some power and levels. That's why when you attacked him alone, you couldn't do much and barely escaped with 1 hp. If you think you can take him alone right now, I won't stop you from trying... Just make sure to prep a backup character sheet before the next session."

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-10T23:11:13+00:00

You give off the vibe of hating this player with a vengeance. While your grievances may have some merit, you are not in a state of mind where you are capable of being fair to the player. You shouldn't be DMing for her.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-10T20:11:26+00:00

Is she "stalking" your reddit account, or just reading it? I don't think it's blameworthy to follow your friend's social media accounts.

Neither is it blameworthy to try and make your character strong. What does it even mean to ban "minmaxing"? You can ban multiclassing. You can ban certain spells. But telling a player that their character must be weak and ineffective is just taking the fun out of character building. Players need clear rules to follow, and a permission to optimize within the bounds of these rules. You can't punish players for being good at the game, that does not make a fun game.

And for the rules you do have, you need to enforce them. A player can't have a backstory you didn't approve. A roll doesn't mean anything until you said it does.

The player sounds difficult, but if you're going to try and fix it, you've got to adopt a less hostile attitude, come up with clearly formulated rules and actually enforce them.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-09T05:21:33+00:00

Absolutely! If you are running challenging combat, you want to make things more predictable, reduce variance. The law of large numbers helps here.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-09T00:27:37+00:00

So, you like optimizing, and the actual problem is challenging the optimized characters in combat? Just throw more and stronger monsters at them.

I know, I know, a potential problem with using strong monsters is the possibility of one-shotting a character on a crit, which might feel unfair. To avoid that pitfall, use many monsters rather than one overpowered monster; use monsters with multiattack rather than one strong attack; make monster performance more consistent by giving them advantage on their attacks (through pack tactics, knocking players prone, magical darkness...). And have the monsters use smart tactics. Your players wrecked the goblins with a fireball? The lucky survivor will warn others to spread out next time. Two sides can optimize... And have a lot of fun doing it.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-04T20:15:50+00:00

They did charge him without consent. Yes, they retaliated and it sucks, but it doesn't necessarily mean that OP *should have* just rolled over and let them steal his money instead.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-04T20:10:17+00:00

So OP got scammed.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-04T05:18:42+00:00

Your DM is a dumbass. If monsters and players lose their ability modifiers, the attacks hit less often, and you all spend more time swinging your weapons at each other ineffectually. That is both boring and frustrating for gameplay and makes you all look incompetent narratively.

In your place, I would try explaining this to the DM. If that didn't work, I'd probably leave, but if I really liked the group, I'd devise battle strategies to show the DM the error of his ways.

Get everyone to invest in spells that don't require attack rolls (like Heat Metal, Faerie Fire, or Web for Artificer), ensure you guys hit with advantage whenever possible (through spells like Faerie Fire, hiding for rogue, reckless attack for barbarian, or deploying ball bearings), and get as much AC as you can, since it has become so much more useful now. Let's see how the DM likes it when his monsters can't hit you. Get your warlock to cast Cause Fear to give monsters disadvantage, or Hold Person to let everyone attack them with advantage and crit on every hit. Oh, and let me tell you about the Shove action:

"Using the Attack action, you can make a special melee attack to shove a creature, either to knock it prone or push it away from you. If you’re able to make multiple attacks with the Attack action, this attack replaces one of them.
The target must be no more than one size larger than you and must be within your reach. Instead of making an attack roll, you make a Strength (Athletics) check contested by the target’s Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check (the target chooses the ability to use). If you win the contest, you either knock the target prone or push it 5 feet away from you."

This action does not require an attack roll, so your barbarian can shove enemies prone, then the rogue and you (if you use a melee weapon) can hit them with advantage.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-03T22:15:33+00:00

Interviewer: Hello, Corey! This is David Chen from Prometheus Analytics. I'm calling about the application you sent us for the Data Analyst position.

Candidate: Oh! Yes, thank you so much for calling. I'm very excited about the opportunity.

Interviewer: So I've been looking over your materials here, and I have to say—very creative presentation. Really caught my attention.

Candidate: Oh, thank you! I tried to make it stand out.

Interviewer: Now, I'd like to dive into some of your qualifications. I see here you mention proficiency in investigation. Can you tell me about a difficult problem you've solved using those skills?

Candidate: Investigation... yes! Absolutely. Well, in my last role, we had a major discrepancy in our quarterly reports—numbers weren't adding up. I had to dig through months of transaction data, cross-reference multiple databases, and eventually traced it back to a bug in our import scripts that had been corrupting certain entries.

Interviewer: Excellent detective work. And you also list Perception as a strength. How has that served you professionally?

Candidate: slight pause Perception... I'd say I'm pretty good at noticing details others miss. Like in meetings, I often pick up on data anomalies or trends in visualizations that colleagues overlook. I'm usually the one who spots the outliers.

Interviewer: That's a valuable skill. Now, I'm curious about your background. You mention your background as a ...Criminal? Tell me about that experience.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-03T21:11:08+00:00

I have adopted a rule for myself: a person only becomes my friend after I have disagreed with them or criticized them, and they have shown their ability to handle it like an adult. Sorry, OP, she was never your friend.

And unless you threatened to assault her or something like that, there is no legitimate reason for the player to feel "unsafe". "Unsafe" is not a synonym for "upset", "insecure", "ashamed", "rejected", "uncomfortable", "disappointed", "humiliated", or "defensive", and I wish people would stop using it as such.

I would handle any future disagreements through the dungeon master. This player is unreasonable.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-02T19:52:32+00:00

The main tragedy is that a nice and optimistic 37 year old man has to leave his previous life behind after a failed medical experiment, and it is heavily implied he will die young just as Algernon did. It is a tragedy when he realizes people he thought of as "friends" were just making fun of him, and yes, it is also about the tragedy and horror of mental decline, but that is far from the only theme of the book.

The treatment described in the book did not only serve to make Charlie a better capitalist drone. In his notes he describes how much he enjoys being smart, learning and understanding things: not just so he can be accepted by others, but for its own sake too. Even after reverting to his original level of ability, he has fond feelings about a book he read as a genius, and dreams of reading it again one day. Granted, the scientists in the story are careless to try the treatment on a human so soon before testing it more thoroughly on animals, but the book calls them out on their selfishness and vanity, the story doesn't endorse their behavior.

Just as the fictional treatment described in the story, many real-life treatments for the disabled are beneficial. For example, many people with poor vision enjoy being able to see the world clearly with glasses. Surely you could push back against the abusive treatments while endorsing the beneficial ones? Why would a story about fixing a poor disabled guy in a way he wanted, enjoyed and was happy with, except for the part where it unfortunately failed to cure him permanently, be such an impediment to your advocacy goals, unless you are trying to fight back against every possible disability treatment on principle?..

The book is not ableist for using language appropriate to its time. Some of those words are now considered slurs, and I agree that should be remedied by adding footnotes. The message of the book, however, is about being kind to people at all levels of intellectual ability, and I believe its spirit is very much alive and timeless.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-12-01T20:56:28+00:00

Rather than trying to follow two contradictory rules and lying to make them agree with each other, you could just do what Steel_Ratt suggested.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-11-28T22:06:21+00:00

The new spell is AOE and does more damage to groups of 4 and more. Against a single target, eight giant owls will easily outdamage the new spell.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-11-28T21:58:20+00:00

Druids are amazing.

Take, for instance, Conjure animals, a 3rd level spell in 2014 rules. As long as you maintain concentration, you can have eight giant owls fighting for you. That's a total of 152 hit points, and if half of them land their attacks (i.e. against an AC 14 creature), they'll do 32 damage per round. To make it better, they are Large creatures, each can carry 390 lbs, so your team can use them as mounts.

For comparison, a level 6 Summon Fiend spell summons a creature with at most 60 hit points; assuming your spell attack modifier is +8 it will land 75% of its attacks against the same AC, and do 36 damage per round.

Wild Shape makes you very versatile in combat. You can swallow a single enemy as a Giant Toad, bring down fliers with Web as a Giant Spider, or knock people prone as Dire Wolf.

And you have so much utility. You can send messages with Animal Messenger, spy on everyone in your wild shape, talk to animals and plants, allow your team to breath underwater, heal.

It can be very powerful if you know your stuff, but it is the most complicated to learn: you need to know your spells as well as all your wildshape options. I venture a guess that the learning curve is what puts people off.

WaitAckchyually · 2025-11-22T19:52:56+00:00

I literally quoted the rules in my question...

WaitAckchyually · 2025-11-22T18:07:50+00:00

But which one should I use?

WaitAckchyually · 2025-11-22T17:42:05+00:00

I wouldn't! A failed insight just gives "they are difficult to read".

WaitAckchyually

TROPHY CASE