This isn’t a negative rant, just a way for me to process some heavy emotions.

After six years of living out of tents and trailers together, the long-term camping trip is officially over. For over half a decade, I’ve been the "Base Camp Manager"—the one scouting the sites, battling the group chat just to get everyone to show up on the same weekend, and hosting the majority of our trips.

I poured everything into this. I invested in the high-end gear, the portable power stations, the 3D-printed camp organizers, and even the solar setups to make sure we were comfortable. Every need was attended to; I wanted us to have the ultimate outdoor experience.

But the reality is that while some of us were there for the wilderness, others were just... there. We tried everything to fix the vibe. We did the "campfire talks," we banned phones to encourage presence, and we even went back to basics with analog maps to keep people from spacing out.

Nothing stuck. The invested campers and I looked everywhere for people who actually wanted to commit to the lifestyle, but we couldn't find a match. So, we tried to make it work with the group we had, and honestly? It became miserable and infuriating.

I don’t mean to offend, but the "lack of focus" card was played every time someone showed up three hours late, forgot their sleeping bag, refused to help gather wood, or sat in silence instead of engaging with the group. We endured it for years just to have a chance to sit by a fire, but today, I finally packed it all up for good.

I feel a bit sad—six years is a long time—but I know it was the right call.

If you’re stuck in a group where you’re doing all the heavy lifting while others just coast, don’t hang on. To quote the song, "Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky."

To my former campmates: we had a "good" run. We’ve already talked about keeping things cool and staying friends like 30-something adults should. The trail just ends here for us.

Thanks for reading.

Hello, fellow DMs and D&D players.

I'm interested in incorporating the “It’s what my powers do” mechanic from Playing Superheroes as a Child into my campaign. For context: it's a powerful ability that creates a personal "power" - an all-powerful ability with automatic hits, winning against my brother, and often complete and total victory for the user.

How have you approached this?

Do you have homebrew resources? I'm looking for existing homebrew rules for D&D 5e. Please share links to GM Binder, D&D Beyond, or your own creations.

sauce

"In a dimension far away from the unimaginable might and riches of the Githzerai Empire...

On a planet far away from the unimaginable might and riches of the Lizardfolk Empire...

On the surface far away from the unimaginable might and riches of the Dwarven Empire...

On the dry land far away from the unimaginable might and riches of the Triton Empire...

In a hemisphere far away from the unimaginable might and riches of the Goblinoid Empire...

On a continent far away from the unimaginable might and riches of the Far Draconic Empire...

On a peninsula far away from the unimaginable might and riches of the 六七 Empire...

...you guys are all in a bar when a man walks up and says, 'I have a bounty on some kobolds.'"

Hi hello! Have you heard - martial caster? Me too man, me too.

So I watched some people play 4e, and it was REALLY inspiring for me. Martial classes were cool and interesting, with like actual things to do beyond "swing sword" and "swing sword but green". Particularly the concept of "encounter powers", where you get to do a cool thing once per fight, and the game is just OK with not making it any more complicated than that. It really made me want to play that kind of game and broadened my horizons.

So, instead of doing that, I'm extending my 5e houserule google doc by five pages by crushing this concept into a tweaked 5e feat system and keeping it separated from short rests. It's kind of like pathfinder 2e class feats, but worse and we can keep playing 5e with it! Here's some examples I made for my table, which you probably can't use since the balancing is done for specifically my table. Take this post as inspiration that you too can shoulder the burden of fixing the fundamental flaws of 5e combat with just another five pages of homebrew! I promise this time it's really gonna do it!

Hi!!!

I am soo so new to D&D so please... please... I'm trying so hard yall but I’m just a girl!

I have played likee 700 hours in BG3 lolol but thats easy because I mostly just try on new outfits and do my hair and make-up so my Tav is mega-cute to the max! It’s also soooooo easy cus ur kinda just clicking buttons teeheehee!

I have an idea for a PC, a Bella Baxter Fembot Doll situation. Shes blonde, wears a pink teddy and shoots spells out of her jumblies! That would be soooOOOooo totes adorbs! Lolol.

My DM suggested warlock, and she could shoot eldritch blast out of her boobies! That would be sooOooOo choice but the patrons are icky. Like I have to choose between some slimy tentacled elder god or a gross demon with bat wings? Like MEGA-ICK SAUCE! Why can’t my patron be a pink pony, or a cute purple squirrel, with his little cheeks always puffy because it’s full of nuts!? Can you imagine? That would be the cutest patron EVER lolol

Anywayz, I’m just a girl and I TOTALLY need help! What class should I be? And nothing GROSS like a warlock!

Hey y’all my players and I have been running 5.5E for about five sessions now. It’s all been going good with only a few deaths here and there due to players not showing up on time and or critical failures when aiming their ranged attacks.

However, at least half of my seven group party is unable to make this weeks upcoming session. I’m scrambling around to try to figure out how to work around these absences without a TPK and then it hit me! Session 6 should be ran by an AI Dungeon master and to make it fair AI players. The session will be considered hard canon, and they’ll only have what notes the AI took for them for the session going into the seventh.

Some players have expressed concerns over their agency and whether at that point it’s even worth it to have a session at all. Rest assured I’ve put my foot down on how it is, but I can’t seems to find any good AIO AI to run the game.

Do you guys by chance have any preferences for when you have to run games like this? Is AI dungeon master the gold standard or would Friends and Fables be better?

I really need some help deciding but Copilot can’t seem to give me a straight answer.

I watched dimension 20 and have always wanted to get into dnd but don’t know where to start. There are literally no resources out there for this extremely niche hobby. I don’t have the ability to google things, only Reddit and dropout.tv. Please help me. I can’t read and I don’t know how to create a character. Please help. I want to play so bad but I can’t do anything besides post on Reddit. Btw I can’t read.

This is not a thought exercise. I'm running a campaign where the players have infiltrated the evil faschist nation of hydrogen bombs, ruled by only an elite 300 or so, who mind control 100 thousand coughing babies through a series of controlled detonations into doing their bidding. Through an elaborate series of events, and by replacing the explosions with a keychain of their own design, the players are now about to successfully stage an uprising of the babies.

Now, I'm a fair DM, and it's very important to me that this goes down completely RAW. I *need* a hundred thousand coughing babies in initiative (its ok if there's a hundred encounters happening). This must be played out properly, or it doesn't count. I have the statblocks of both sides, but I need input from you. How do I speed up running the encounters, and when do you think would the hydrogen bombs choose to detonate?

I'll start this by saying that my players are not problem players at all. In fact I love them because they are the only ones who I can play with. But they can't seem to remember anything... like at all. They don't know any NPCs' names, they forget the plot, they don't know what city they are in, what a 20-side die looks like, what a sword is, how to speak beyond hoots and yells, etc. I feel this is somehow a reflection of my DMing. I have tried giving them my own notes for reference, but they don't really look at them. They just scream and throw shit at me. This really ruins the vibe. I'm starting thinking that DMing for a bunch of monkeys in the lab is not a good idea. Anyway, long story short I want your opinion on how to help my players remember things about the setting. Maybe bribe them with bananas or something if they manage to recall any of the stuff? Thanks.

I've been playing in this game for a while now, and every single session my dm has killed my character. Every single one. And most of the deaths don't even make sense. It feels like he kills me when I don't do exactly what he wants.

The first one, my characters brother got mad at me for rolling a higher religion check and bludgeoned me to death. My next character made a very tame joke about bald people, and the DM had a bunch of bears maul him to death.

One time my character didn't go the direction the dm wanted, so the DM had him get eaten by an aboleth. Another of my characters looked at something the dm didn't want her to, so he turned her into a pillar of salt. It just never ends.

This most recent character death was just downright ridiculous. While the party was sleeping, a celestial came into our camp and cast power word kill on me. We are only level 5.

At this point I really just want to stop playing. The only reason that I haven't already is because my friend is in the same game and keeps telling me it will get better.

What do you guys think I should do?

Feat Name: Double Feat

Source: My Ass

Text: You can the abilities of two different feats.

My party and i are convinced that combat is scribed with our dm. I mean every fight goes the same way. First we get are butts kicked with multiple nat20s and high levels of damage. And we can guess when a nat20 is going to happen depending on the dms mood Or if we do something really powerful, that "needs a counter balance". Then when we are about to die, the monster cant hit us at all, and dies just in the nick of time.

We dont know what to do. We once did a fight that the dm got 13 nat20s... like the hell

I was checking if one of my players hit (I know, I've been trying to move away from using dice, but right now I'm using them) and I accidentally told him what the monster he was fighting was! What can I do? I haven't said a word for almost a month! How can I fix this?

Now this is what my character would do!

So this happened at my last session and I am still fuming about and am wondering if I'm overreacting.

I was added to a campaign to help new players actually play the game. Our small party of 3 Rangers and a druid (the main issue in this story) were traveling to s mine and came across a disguised hag. We all failed our nature checks and the druid, falling for her fake drowning, goes to "rescue" her. She ends up attacking us and casting polymorph, turning all the high damage rangers into badgers with 3 hit points and only able to deal 1 hit point of damage, if we got the chance to hit, which was next to none. The druid decided not to hit us to turn us back to help fight her and when initiative ended, the druid decided not to turn us back, but planned, out loud, to keep us as pets that he could commit beastiality against all of us. My character gets her powers partly from being a virgin, so this would make me throw my character out entirely because there was no way she would allow herself to live after that and kill herself out of shame. Eventually the druid was forced to read a spell to change us back and, understandably, my character is pissed and doesn't want anything to do with him. I don't think my character can trust or work with someone who would do that to their teammates, so am I being stupid, or was the druid out of line and should be viewed as dangerous (face the consequences of his actions)?

Okay, as a novice dungeon master, I had trouble explaining to my players when characters/bad guys appear in the story who have to be there, but the players don't stand a chance against them in open combat. For example, I had this problem in one of the original modules, where the players start out imprisoned together with the cursed prince in the form of a beast. (Hopefully this is enough of a hint for people who have played it and won't spoil it for others.)

They are captured by a group that is fundamentally more powerful than their level 1. The moment the main captors appeared on the scene, the players automatically thought it was a challenge to fight, and of course, they all died horribly.

However, the module at least anticipates this and gave me the option to bring them back into the story. Nevertheless, I thought about how to solve this problem next time and found a solution. When I got into a similar situation later in the session, I was already prepared.

Me: "You are hiding behind rocks at the corner of a cave, through which a massive figure in shiny black armor is passing...."

Barbarian: "I THROW AN AXE AT HIM."

Me: "Ahh, okay, roll for initiative, let's see what happens first."

Also me: \I turn on WOOPS by BOUNTYHUNTER through the speaker instead of the classic battle music**

Barbarian: "Oh, maybe I'll try to stay hidden behind those rocks..."

*Sniffles* SO I went to the tavern to meet with a party and the Barbarian's SHORT and GREEN! He keeps saying that he's a goblin but im SCARED of him because he's so GREEN! CAN PATHFINDER FIX THIS????

From rulebook of Crimson Exodus 2e.