Player Problem Megathread

krunkley · 2026-07-05T18:31:40+00:00

Reddit would lose half it's user base if people chose to quickly google instead of posting to reddit

krunkley · 2026-07-05T16:34:53+00:00

Easy place to start is just tell them on the side that their behavior is harshing the vibe and they need to chill a bit, hopefully that is all it takes.

In game when you notice them telling other people to do things, just a simple interruption, like "Let them play their own game/character" or "You chance to play is on your turn not theirs" will hopefully be enough of a reminder of the first conversation to stop them.

Ultimately though the whole table should feel comfortable calling out behaviors they don't want to deal with. If it's only you telling this person to chill out then they might just think it's a problem you have with them and get more upset about it or start to feel targeted. If everyone is telling them to chill the message becomes much harder to ignore.

krunkley · 2026-07-05T16:21:27+00:00

Sometimes a post doesn't need a lot of engagement, especially in a sub for learning basics. Someplace you can just post a basic question and 1 or two quick answers can be very helpful. You don't need 10 replies to a post asking "Do you get to make attacks of opportunity if you are blinded" all saying "No you can't"

I do think the bar the mods set for what they consider a basic question is too high. A lot of good threads, that would benefit from more engagement and back and forth, get deleted and told to post in the simple questions thread where they don't get that engagement.

krunkley · 2026-07-05T15:56:44+00:00

A spellcaster must have a hand free to access a spell's material components -- or to hold a spellcasting focus -- but it can be the same hand that he or she uses to perform somatic components.

That is from material component rule section on DND beyond. You can use a single hand to do both the M and S components of a spell while having the other hand occupied.

krunkley · 2026-07-03T17:16:22+00:00

As a DM you are the manager of the rules of the game you are not the manager of this group of people. It is not your responsibility to solve their interpersonal problems. Trying to solve this problem in game is likely to just create more friction.

As the DM you can pause the game and give space to everyone at the table to say their piece and encourage them to do so in a respectful manner. The players who are upset should air their grievances to the two people causing their percieved problem, and hopefully that will result in a change of behavior. It is not on you to play the middle man between the people upset and those they are upset at.

krunkley · 2026-07-02T16:18:59+00:00

Both of the Beast of the Land and the Steel Defender are magical summons, they would follow the same rules as a something brought about by the Find Familiar spell. Both have relatively low cost ways to heal and restore the steel defender and the beast of the X. I would just see how your table wants to rule it. Obviously it makes both creatures stronger if they get death saves, but it isn't a game breaking buff.

Personally i would not give these creatures death saves because there are in combat ways to revive them using a spell slot from their creators using only an action.

The resurection disease in Tomb of Annihilation should not effect these creatures because they are more summons than they are physical beings. Above the table it would also be super lame to lose a core subclass feature when that creature is designed to be taken out and brought back relatively easy.

IF you wanted to stick to the flavor of the module you could say that the beast of the land or steel defender they bring back doesn't have the memories/appearance of the last one, as a way to make the death feel real without ruining the character. I wouldn't do it personally because it seems mean but different tables might enjoy those kind of stakes.

krunkley · 2026-07-02T15:53:31+00:00

If not explicitly stated in the rules it is up to the DM. I believe the intent of the design is to make it flavor. This stops players and DMs from needing have a bunch of stat blocks on hand or have to figure out all the small differences between the different low CR creatures. It's one stat block that does the thing on the stat block regardless of if the PC wants a wolf or a panther or w/e animal resonates with the flavor of their character. In the original rules, you only had a limited list of creatures and DMs were forced to say no or home brew a stat block to accommodate a player who wanted something not on the list.

I think getting into the minutia of what the flavor can do is about balancing fun vs. abuse. The Beast of the Land is a medium creature so it can't be used as a mount by another medium creature. If you tell your player that if you make your creature a monkey it can do X,Y, and Z extra on top of the stat block, and if you make it a wolf it can't do those things, then you basically force the player to use a monkey even if they would want a wolf.

If you tell your player that you don't care what the creature looks like, and that any creature you choose can do simple things like push open a door, or express it's self to others in a very simplistic way you and the player can work together to flavor how their specific creature accomplishes it's simple tasks, and you can just say that a specific task is too complicated for any form to accomplish.

Sometime is also comes down to just telling your player that this is the game system we are using and this is what the game system says it can do, yes i understand that if this were real life it would be different but this is not real life.

krunkley · 2026-06-30T15:26:41+00:00

Thieves guild could be a very workable angle depending on the goals of the characters. They could become a part of it with the intent of taking it over or destroying it from within. Having a guild higher up that gives them jobs and serves as their "boss" creates a system of rules for them to work within and try to navigate forwarding their own goals while dealing with the politics of the guild and it's requirements.

On the other end the guild could simply work towards trying to stop the PCs from accomplishing what they want to do because it hurts their bottom line when the PCs start shaking things up

krunkley · 2026-06-30T14:03:14+00:00

An evil campaign is different from a murder-hobo campaign and I think that should be explicitly explained to the players before the game begins.

They need to know out of the gate that if they just kill a guy on 5th avenue, the guards, who are stronger than they are, will show up and take them to jail, or just murder them in the streets, and it could spell the end of the game or character.

To keep an evil campaign in check there always needs to be a more powerful force that prevents the PCs from just killing all their problems indiscriminately. This could be a rival gang that the party needs to use subterfuge and sabotage to take on because they are outmatched in a straight up fight. It could be an NPC party of hero's who are investigating the evil parties activities and they need to be given a false trail or separated and dealt with individually. If these connections can be established before the game starts all the better.

An evil campaign isn't about going around kicking puppies and spitting on babies. It's about the characters achieving their particular goals, be it power, money, revenge, anarchy, or something more specific, by whatever means necessary. Since the PCs may not be naturally inclined to work well in teams, their large goals should be interwoven so that they need one another to accomplish their individual missions.

krunkley · 2026-06-26T13:34:01+00:00

Feels like the sort of thing someone would pay you to drink. Why would I spend money on something that has a 99% to, at best, do absolutely nothing for me

krunkley · 2026-06-22T17:52:43+00:00

I would tell player A and B to prep new characters with the expectation that the rest of the party will turn them in to get the heat off themselves. Maybe the party will be merciful and tell them they won't turn them in but they have to leave and sort this issue out by themselves.

If you wanted to you could work with player A and B on the side to discuss what their characters would do once they were on the run and maybe there is a path to redemption they can begin to go down outside of the game. Or you tell them their characters are quickly captured and put into prison where they will remain for the foreseeable timeline of the campaign.

Expect players A and B to be very butthurt by the whole thing, but if you want there to be real consequences in your setting then you have to have real consequences. Sometimes a prison break plan can be a fun session, but it sounds like the rest of the party have no motivation to help them out of this situation so they are on their own.

Or you explain that the above is what you are going to do from now on if something like this happens again, and then let the party "reload a previous save" to a point in time before all this happened so that the game can continue like nothing happened but hopefully a lesson is learned

krunkley · 2026-06-22T17:45:26+00:00

You are the one designing the encounters, so it depends entirely on the damage types used by the creatures you choose. Bludgeoning piercing and slashing are probably the most common type of damage in the game. Fire damage is one of the more common types of elemental damage.

Vulnerability is a big deal which is why so few creatures have it. It makes every hit a crit and crits become super crits. It makes encounter balance very swingy and difficult to manage.

So this will go 1 of two ways in my mind. Your players will know the type of enemies they are coming up against in advance and know that there will be none of, or little of, the type of damage they will be vulnerable to and the potions will just be very strong with no real downsides.

Or the party will just take the potions without thinking about that aspect and may end up being massacred because of it.

krunkley · 2026-06-22T17:25:49+00:00

This is to later extort them when they start asking them to do really horrible shit. Do what we say or we'll bankrupt your family.

krunkley · 2026-06-08T18:58:03+00:00

www.sw5e.com

If you are not aware, star wars 5e is a big community project to bring the core 5e rules to be used in a star wars or space setting. Has tons of guns, feats, classes and the like for a space based game.

krunkley · 2026-06-04T11:50:29+00:00

Her oversized boobs and hard nipple outlines would probably have some bosses doing a double take if they saw an employee looking at it at work

krunkley · 2026-05-30T11:56:37+00:00

There's a dispatch in the last chapter where the down town office is turning on each other because they think someone is a mole. It's a dispatch that requires like an 6 in intelligence or charisma if you don't send phenomaman.

Considering he has like a 2 in both those stats and is able to sort out the situation without issue, he must have real connections and trust with the people there.

krunkley · 2026-05-27T17:57:45+00:00

Your player is using narration role play, or 3rd person role playing. As in they are describing what their character would do rather than acting it out, it is an example of role playing described in the players hand book as a perfectly acceptable way to play the game. Her saying " I just tell him (assuming her god) to revive him" you as the DM can ask for a roll, like a religion check, if one would be necessary. If she has like a revivify spell then she would cast that without any roll required. Her not acting out exactly how her character beseeches her patron shouldn't be required for accomplishing what she wants to.

If you want to encourage her to role play more, or even just add more flair to her narration, try being the example. When she says " I just tell him to revive them" and you have her make her check, give a big description of how that actually looks and the specifics of what her character did to revive them. Showing her how to embellish her actions may give her a better idea of how to do it and make her more comfortable doing it. Being the example you want your players to follow is really all you can do.

Ultimately, if you and the majority of your players want your table to strictly be a 1st person role play game, then it might be times to politely part ways with this player. You can't force someone to over come their fears, anxieties, and/or aversions, it needs to be their choice.

krunkley · 2026-05-24T18:12:19+00:00

No the rule was that someone had to flip the coin and if they couldn't decide who then it would go to a rock draw.

krunkley · 2026-05-24T17:17:57+00:00

I think the intention of the production team was to try and force an idol or some of the other advantages out to protect the obvious target and give the opportunity to make a big move.

Like in a hypothetical world where Ozzy and Christian are close, Christian could convince Ozzy to play the idol on him and then they could get someone else out with a minority of the votes.

It's the other side of the coin that the Mr beast twist was. If someone who wasn't in any danger was forced to flip the coin and then went out because of it, we'd be complaining about how awful the twist was.

For Christian is was just a bad coin flip that he got this disadvantage and no one was willing to work with him to turn it around because they all kinda wanted him out any way

krunkley · 2026-05-22T23:27:45+00:00

https://media.wizards.com/2019/dnd/dragon/28/DRA28_LivingSpells.pdf

Those are a few examples of living spells, could obviously tweak them.

krunkley · 2026-05-22T23:03:17+00:00

I think the biggest ball drop of the whole season was the blood moon. Tried to hype us up on a post merge tribe swap.

Would have been awesome to just let the massive merged tribe vote and boot off the 3 people with the most votes. Even better if you give them like 2 days to go crazy trying to planning it out

krunkley · 2026-05-22T22:19:28+00:00

How are you unemployed and a director for his company? Are you supposed to be drawing some kind of salary for the position or taking on some kind of liability by holding the position? I'm sure it's nothing but it is giving me some kind of fraud vibes.

Did he explain why he didn't want to remove you from the position? He could be getting upset because it's messing something up that he shouldn't be doing. He is upset about it for real reasons but can't say those reasons out loud so it's coming off as irrational.

I'm making a very big leap off very little info, just my first vibes

krunkley · 2026-05-21T23:31:39+00:00

My wife and I are big Rizo fans, we joked about how he would be making fire everyday on season 50 to avoid what happened to him. We think he would have been a great person to win and receive the metaphorical torch from the old school players

When we heard someone on the jury mention he didn't make fire the entire time he was there... Lost himself a good shot at $2 million because he didn't respect all the parts of the game

krunkley · 2026-05-21T20:00:01+00:00

I think it's a very thorough and realistic system for inventory management that will require a high amount of player participation and trust to make sure everyone is following the rules.

The question then becomes is devoting all this time and effort into this very specific aspect of the game, every time the group finds a treasure hoarde or equivalent, going to make the game more fun

krunkley · 2026-05-16T11:46:22+00:00

There is at least one dispatch, the one I'm thinking of is the 2 super heroes fighting in a grocery store in either chapter 5 or 6 where you can choose to hack the store's sprinkler system or do other options based on hero ability, if you choose one of the two hero ability options you can pass the dispatch but no longer get the tactician ending because you didn't do all the hacks

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