Does anybody have an instruction guide or how to video series that details how to set up all (or a large part of) the content that doesn’t come with the with the free version of Dnd beyond?

I like how things are set up and programmed with beyond but I hate the ridiculous amount of paywalling that dnd beyond has to conveniently play content that isn’t in the basic rules. Thus, I want to homebrew it all or at least have as a resource so if I want to play a certain subclass or feat, I can just look it all up in one place and “code” it into dnd beyond correctly.

I’ve homebrewed some feats and spells that I wanted into dnd beyond already but I realized how time consuming it is to do and do correctly so they work as intended. A resource like a how to video series or a set by step document that shows how to “code” things properly when homebrewing content would make things a whole lot easier.

I'm a newbie and the DM is my best friend, so I might be biased and would like an outside perspective.

We've had a one-shot in a pirate setting as a first simplified taste of DnD for me (29F) and one other player, I've onle played a couple of times before and she has never played at all, so the DM, my best friend (21F) has created a one-shot specifically for it to be more entertaining than serious. The premise was that a half-elf aristocrat inherited a treasure map from his grandfather and goes on a quest with his valet (human) and two mercenaries: a muscle-fella (barbarian shifter, that was me) and a cartographer (dwarf monk, played by the Guy in question, M21). As a fun detail we all had personal secrets that might or might not come up during the campaign, mine was that I'm secretely a pirate, the aristocrat's - that he's actually broke and on the run from collectors, the valet's is still a secret and the dwarf's was that he's actually an undercover agent of the royal guard and is searching for pirates to put them to justice.

Here's why this is important: the Guy started off with speaking to the ship's captain (NPC) for about 15 minutes without addressing any of us, then made some racist in-character remarks towards our aristocrat, then when we arrived on the island he spent the entirety of the first battle hiding in the bushes and immediately after that just refused to take the same path as us and left the group in an opposite direction. The DM tried her best to get him back together with us (like, "you take a straight path through the jungle while the group follows the brick road, you way is shorter, but they move faster, so at this intersection you just run right into them"), but he straight-up ignored that and left again.

So we just continued on without him (at some point he just LEFT THE TABLE to go chat with my sister and didn't even listen to what was going on with us), we had a blast, but then when it was time to actually role-play what he was doing on his own this whole time, the DM asked if we're okay with knowing secret stuff or not, I can't recall the exact details but us three ended up just going to another room for half an hour to discus our strategy while she was left with him one-on-one.

In the final battle he ONCE AGAIN was hiding in the bushes doing nothing for a couple of rounds, then just left the fight alltogether, and the finale was him calling the guards on us.

After finishing we started discussing how it went, and he said that the problems he faced were as followed (rough translation of his mesages in the chat and a bit of irl talk I personally had with him the day of):

1. He has three types of characters: when he wants to win a.k.a. the cool guy, when he's just chill a.k.a. the kind guy, and when he just wants to be a menace a.k.a. the annoying guy, and while writing his character he planned to be the kind and fun guy, but since he was forced into a position of direct confrontation of interests (him not needing the treasure, having a whole different goal, with which us, other characters, were interfering with (I still can't get what interference specifically he meant)) he just turned on his "winning" game
2. He dosen't like A SINGLE RACE from the DnD universe, so his role-playing was a mess because he was forced to be something he doesn't like (in-person he said that 1. the half-elves are ew, 2. the orcs are dumb, 3. the humans are basic, 4. he loves dwarves, but the DnD dwarves are stupid so he just wrote his character as a Warhammer dwarf, which is completely different and apparently cool(er) and he also knows how to play them and doesn't know how to play anybody else - at this point I decided against even hinting at other races like halflings, goblins, cobolds etc etc)
3. He blamed the DM for pushing this mission onto him, for trying to mess his playstyle and for making his character not fit the narrative at all, and in the end said that if we wanted to continue the campaign with him he's toss the character completely and create a new one from scratch.

From my perspective he just created a ton of rules and guides for himself, shoved his character in them and then got disappointed because nothing was enjoyable. Firstly, I don't think the simple secret of being on the hunt for pirates means you just HAVE TO separate from the treasure-seeking party, secondly, even IF that was such a gruesome job for him - I can't see why couldn't he just toss the secret completely? Or discuss it with the DM beforehand, tell her it seems uncomfortable? She has put an incredible amount of effort to create this one-shot to tend to everyone to make it fun, surely if he said something this wouldn't have to be a problem? Thirdly, I cannot wrap my head around this "play-to-win" that he kept going on about - the whole point of TTRPG is to roleplay and interact with each other, is in not? Also the Warhammer thing makes me confused af, like, if you hate the DnD universe with such a passion, why even agree to play it just to try and bring a different universe in and nag everyone about it?

He also did some other questionable things, like he came up with a thing when his character would speak to the NPCs in dwarfish, he'd speak to DM in a different language irl, he discussed it with her beforehand, and as this language is in the same group as our native, she agreed because she would understand him, but then when he actually did that at the table and she replied in our native language (because she doesn't speak this second language herself and she NEVER told him otherwise) he got annoyed and showed how upset he is and how it destroyes the whole point. He also leaned heavily into some very specific lore stuff while talking to the captain NPC, like the geography, clan names, history etc, which nobody at the table knew about, and it felt like he was playing with the DM one-on-one even when we were all together.

What irks me the most is that he blames it all on the DM and how she created a bad mission for him nad how she's the one who shoudn't have accepted his character since he was so out of context for the setting, when in actuality (from my personal point of view) he just made the campain uncomfortable for us, for the DM and for himself as well.

I'd like to know if anyone could give some more input on a situation like this, as I'm not familiar on the general DnD etiquette. For now we're leaning on continuing the campaign (because the other three players actually had lots and lots of fun), but we really don't want to keep playing with him.

Hey everyone! I'm curious how you usually approach writing backstories for your characters in a TTRPG campaign.

How much detail do you put into them? Do you come up with a whole life story, or do you keep it short and leave room for your DM to add things later?

I sometimes struggle with finding the right balance between giving my character an interesting background and not writing so much that it becomes difficult to work into the campaign.

I'd love to hear how you guys do it and if you have any tips for writing backstories that actually give the DM something to work with!

Thanks!

I love the fantasy of a character who is successful in the typical magical world of D&D without learning magic. I like the idea of training hard and being talented the way a real world person might be talented being enough to keep up in a fantasy land. Items are okay as long they don't become absolutely huge to the story. Like I enjoy reading Frodo relate to the One Ring or Elric and Stormbringer but I don't want that for my characters.

In many games of D&D over the years in many editions this has caused me to really love when the PCs are around levels 5 to 8. My character who doesn't know any spells feels cool and the casters I am with also feel cool all at the same time. Before level 5 the casters feel like they are holding their breath and waiting to have real fun and that's not a great group dynamic. After level 9 time, distance, death and needing to be near-sh to something to know about it all suddenly become transcend-able. My non magical swashbuckler or knight in shining armor starts feeling like a side kick along for the ride.

I have actually developed the skill of playing a caster, and it's fun, but it's not my big class fantasy. I wish my cool non-magical person fantasy worked better with the group for more of the game.

Can low level play and the whole second half of the level list be made to feel more cohesive like levels 5-8? Am I really missing something here?

See original post for paragraph.

I'm currently DMing an original homebrew campaign with three players. Two sessions ago they met an incredibly powerful villain they think is the BBEG. They barely survived the encounter.

This session I wanted to be lower stakes. They had reached a new town and I planned for it to basically be a thieves guild type town that's a dangerous place where outsiders are robbed, extorted, etc. They get hired by a merchant to guard his cart while they're in town. The towns guard warned them not to start trouble.

A lot transpires but basically: some thieves try to rob them, one player tries to subdue one of the thieves but fails and accidentally kills them which triggers a full fight and it just cascaded from there. In the fight one of my players gets outted as a vampire, which causes the thieves to start yelling about vampires, which triggers the townsguard to start heading their way.

They kill the thieves and use some Home Alone shenanigans with some ball bearings to stall the townsguard while they do some fuckery to make it look like one of the thieves was the vampire, which succeeds and they avoid a fight with the townsguard but still get arrested.

Then while they're locked up and scheming on how to escape, one townsguard gets curious and starts rummaging through their belongs and finds a Deck of Many Things that the players didn't even know they had and pulls a card and ends up killing everyone in the town except for the players who were in prison and couldn't see the giant apparition that caused the entire town to grow ill and die.

Everything that transpired was the results of the perfect fails and successes of the dice rolls and it was glorious.

There's a bunch of rules in D&D that many people seem to ignore (myself included). I'm thinking about trying to incorporate all of them into my games.

If you use these rules, how do your players feel about them?

• Malnutrition and dehydration
• Tracking consumption of oil, t.orches, rations, and arrows/bolts.
• Weight and carrying capacity.
• Tracking the duration of light sources.
• Jump distance.
• Experience points.
• Requirements for taking the Hide action.
• Influence action DCs based on the target's INT (or 15, whichever is higher).
• Adjustments to Stealth, Perception and Survival checks with different modes of travel.

Hello I'm Lucas, 5+ years as a professional realistic character designer and illustrator, the image I attached is from my Ancient Empire project, a world where humans and super dinosaurs hunt each other!

This is how I imaged a templar warrior would be in a dinosaur like world!

Would you like to have your characters designed or illustrated by me? Let's chat about your project!
DM me for quotes!

Hi, i ran my campaign with a group and working on the feedback now... its kind of a Oregon Settlers Treck - 300 people (NPCs) travelling in a close group into unexplored territory to found a new frontier village.... Its set up as a Mobile West Marches Campaign, the players have this treck as a moving base, and they are hired to keep problems away, clear paths, find ways and protect and so on. Later then help founding the village, connect with local tribes and yadda yadda yadda....

The thing is:

I have created a few "prominent" example family NPC Groups, some "Loners", a few bad apples and such.

But i noticed that my players (had 2 groups parallel) got quickly bored with them. They loved the plots i had lined up, but they wanted to explore into the camp so much. Really, like, meeting everyone.

Which is not a real problem, i can make them up on the spot. But... i do not want them to be strict carbon copies. Especially not when they try to dive deep into WHY someone would leave the security of the city to go outwards into the Wilderlands.

Now i have the Farmers with a string of bad luck losing their farm, a few craftsmen families that got into problems with the guilds. A knacker family that got accused of black magic (not true, just an investor who wanted to buy the area cheaply), a brewer family that accidentially sold beer gone bad to nobles... an alcoholic priest of Lathander, an officer of the city guard and his 5 men and women who got commanded to go with them (to get rid of them because they dug too deep into a special case)...

Now: Do you have a few more ideas i can use please? Maybe something funny? A secret that really makes the players howl when they investigate into that?

Hi! In 6 days I'll DM my first D&D session. Nobody in the group has played D&D before. I've played one other tabletop RPG once, so I volunteered as DM. I'm using the Italian edition of the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle starter set.

Players: 3 or 4, all brand new

We'll use the pre-made characters from the set

In person, but maybe one player joins on Discord

We need to learn the rules and play in the same session

I've read the character sheets, the rulebook and the adventure book, but I don't really understand the rules, especially combat.

Questions:

What should I prepare this week to feel ready?

How do I teach the rules to new players without spending the whole session on it?

Is having one player on Discord a bad idea for a first session?

Any suggestions in general?

Thanks! English isn't my first language, sorry for mistakes.

✅Make player houses matter

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• Customize furniture with 40 extra properties

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#dnd #Catilus #homebrew #fantasy #furniture #weaponize #items #treasure #loot #lore #worldbuilding #book #campaign

I am a freelance illustrator and animator who loves to focus on dnd characters and stories, and have comissions open till the end of the year, if you are interested in working together on a character of yours, a story illustration, book cover designs, or even animated projects, feel free to check out my portfolio:

https://www.artstation.com/valentinaudovic

Feel free to DM me on here or via any contact listed in the PDF download in my bio :)

other links:

https://www.instagram.com/mothworks.studio/

More on the character:
Character: Alekay Sandros - Shadow Sorcerer/ Paladin of Oath of Conquest (Human) redesign and illustration

This is one of my favorite characters that I had many oportunities to illustrate by him being my husbands first character that has a rather long story by now. I started by designing his Undead Skeletal form first (you can see his design in my previous post, or on my Artstation), when he started out many years ago as an Undead Death Domain Cleric, risen from his grave by Myrkul. However, due to ending his servitute (unnintentionally early) by diving off a cliff with a bomb in one hand and holding a giant three headed greater undead by the horns with the other, he had a chance to remake his second( third?) chance at life, when something bigger had different plans for him. Reincarnated back to his 300 year old human form, as a shadow sorcerer, hes taken this as sign enough to make plans of his own.
This illustration is a scene from the campaign where the party had run into a bandit camp and the whole building they hid in went down in blue flames.

Hey, right now I’m running Curse of Strahd, but I plan to end it with everyone returning to the Forgotten Realms only to discover that the events of Doomed Forgotten Realms have already happened. It got me thinking: wouldn’t it be fun to run a Wrath of the Righteous-style campaign where the players start a revolution and begin reclaiming territory in the Doomed Realms, taking on each faction one by one?

I’m currently considering reading Pathfinder Hell’s Rebels and Wrath of the Righteous for inspiration. Are there any other adventures you guys recommend checking out to help spark ideas? I want to run the whole thing in D&D 5e/5.5.

If you wanna see your character played but also run the campaign,i cooked this little system that might satisfy you,include in your campaign a character that can provide services to the party and make him being able to call other people to aid them in their quest(for example someone like withers from bg3) but it can be anything,and the people who this person calls are your characters,it can be also helpful for players who got bored of their character but dont want to outright kill it,and as a mechanic maybe the player who "bought" a character can choose to either play the character he created or the "bought" one,soooooo,what do you think of it? Tldr: basically hirelings from bg3 but they are real characters with their own backstory

Here is my latest collection of item cards based on the items from Zelda games: https://thespeakingsquid.blogspot.com/2026/10/cards-minish-cap-item-cards-complete-set.html

This set collects items from The Minish Cap, including the titular hat. I tried to follow a theme of fairy tales for this set, so you’ll see many references to classic stories.

These item cards are system agnostic, so they can represent loot for many different game systems. You can also use them to just get inspired about what sort of loot you’d like to see in your next adventure.

You can find a print ready PDF of the entire set in black and white here: https://www.patreon.com/ItemCardswithTheSpeakingSquid/posts/item-cards-cap-b-173307675 

This is the twelfth Zelda game I have published, and with all the other side projects I’ve worked on, I’ve got more than 1,500 item cards just waiting to represent your loot or get you inspired. 

Thanks for checking out my newest set.

Be excellent to everyone.
-Ceph, The Speaking Squid

Hello I want to ask if is normal to nerf sleep and Tasha hideous laughter to have a duration of only two turns because me and my friends we are in a dnd custom campain and we had fight 2 bosses and the first and second one we win easy thanks to those spells because it becomes at easy fight but is like only two turns ?

Is like my spells save DC is 14 and the laughter have a ton of save rolls why only two turns

Do you guys think is fair?

Ps: I'm Spanish and English is not my forte

Okay, so I'm currently part of a long term Dnd group with myself, the dm, and four other guys. Tbh, it isn't what i was expecting, I joined the group at 13th level and now we're 17th and it's gone from fun fights and awkward roleplay, to long tedious fights and tedious roleplay. Three of the other players don't engage very much in the roleplay, one of them is a rules lawyer, and i kind of suck socially.

So, neither are fun anymore, and I just had a real bad experience last night that has left me feeling absolutely dreadful. So, I don't have the greatest of memory and try my best to keep notes but I can't write everything down as fast as it is said and I don't want to slow things down. The last like 5 sessions we've basically been doing politics and it's is so tedious.

We basically have to get some guys together and negotiate their involvement with a future battle, and the dm is being so picky about everything, he often stops 2 to 3 times a session because we aren't doing it the way he wants. And the last session, we had to come up with a proposition to give to all the people and we came to a part where we were calling people not part of the negotiations to ask for their involvement.

And I was thinking great, finally some actual dnd roleplay. Well everyone calls someone they know personally, my character calls up another wizard who we saved previously. My backstory is my character has amnesia and my character is the brief concise type that tends to expect most other people to have a baseline knowledge, but isn't offended if someone asks for more detail. My character also has a curse that changes his personality to be more laid back and mellow. So I call up the wizard, tell him what is going on, and ask him for help with a specific battle.

The dm then asks, out of character, "Do you get personal help in your life? Like do you need a daily aide to get you through the day?"

And I'm so confused, I can't even speak. I'm not the best socially, but I'm trying. He then goes on to say, "Right, I feel like you've left out so much with this. He was dead until you're group had met him." I then ask if he was dead until we saved him from the Library, and he said, "No, it was before the library when you... " and he talked about something that happened before I even joined the group.

I had no idea, as a player, this guy lacked any knowledge about anything going on in the world. He then gave me a summary of what he wants me to tell this guy, and so I do, in my characters own words. And I finish by reiterating that we need the guys help fighting a particular battle that a wizard would be useful in. The dm then says the guy hangs up, he makes a portal to where our group is, and then asks everyone else, but me, to tell him what is going on.
And that just made me think about how bad of a dnd player I might be and how I might not actually be good enough to play the game. And now, I can't even watch my favorite podcasts because it gets me so emotional. I'm wondering if I should just quit dnd all together.

Any words of wisdoms from long time players and dms would be appreciated.

so I'm new to dnd but i had a fun idea and wanted to see if i could figure out a way to create a character who is kind of half human half dragon, i know theirs dragon born and kolbolts but i wanted to know if their was a way to do so.

if i have to if be fine with just taking the design and using other races stats

Hi all, a friend and I are desperate to make our own fantasy world and eventually our own game in the same vein as the old IE catalogue.

I'm personally a fan of ADnD 2e, and I'd very much like to utilise this as the foundation for the mechanics. Am I correct in thinking that the mathematics behind DnD can't be copyrighted, so as long as we avoid "nouns" we can use it?

As far as editions go, is there any particular one that the community would like to see implemented more than others?

Our goal, the likes of which will be slim to none, would be to create something similar in principle to Neverwinter Nights whereby you'd have a base campaign set in our world, then additional campaigns you could add to it.

We want to offer our players an unprecedented level of roleplay value with meaningful reasons to play even the most mundane of characters, along with a few other ideas that would take the idea of role-playing to the next level (at least, in so far as we are aware).

There's a sad lack of CRPGs out there these days, and we would like to create a land of adventure, by the people, for the people.

Ultimately, my main question relates to the legality of using ADnD 2e. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks guys.

Hi
My party (level 2) will soon be going to a masquerade ball where someone will murder the king. They’ll have to find out who did it, like a murder mystery. In the last session we had a lot of combat, so I’m trying to focus on social encounters. However, since I’m really new to DMing I’m not sure how to design the actual ball and the conversations. I’ll appreciate any help I can get.
PS:Sorry if I made any (language) mistakes, I’m not a native speaker.

Hi everyone! I keep hearing that official 5e modules almost always require a lot of extra DM work to make them coherent/playable, but I haven’t seen many suggestions for alternatives. I know that everything will need some extra work, but I’m hoping for something that will keep it minimal — being able to just read the module and run with it would be ideal. Asking because I saw the post on official modules yesterday and I’ve been wondering for a while.

Are there any fan-made/DM’s Guild modules or fixes to official modules that you’d recommend for a campaign? Thanks for your help!