(not so) doodle page of a friends dnd character magdelene! character belongs to @pixellyix

Ough. Post-session fatigue is hitting harder than usual today.

Me if you even care

In a long forgotten druid circle, Juniper taps into an ancient power...

serious d&d DM question, how do I tell a player that they are acting more like a co-DM/DM than a player and its not working for the campaign. (Explanation under cut) Any advice would be appreciated.

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So I am currently running a dnd campaign and one player refuses to share their character backstory with me or anything else that they want to incorporate into the story, which prevents me from adding it to the story like they want. So when it comes up in a session they interrupt me to take the story-telling reins for themself, effectively stopping me and the other players from continuing with establishing plot together. And its annoying me (And other players) a lot because I know nothing of their plans and in the past when I've told them that certain things couldn't work because of plot I've already established, they have gotten angry at me.

Most recently they have been setting up something (A trap or monster? I'm honestly not quite sure) within a house they are staying at in game (They have told me nothing of this prior and interrupted me during game to explain what would happen) and they expect me to go along with it when I have expressed that when they interrupt me and try and bring the players on their own side plot is not a cooperative playing style. This player has also attempted to leave the party several times already which everyone has expressed displeasure over.

I don't know how to approach the topic with them gently (I'm not very good with tone) and am not sure how they would react if I told them flat out. I feel a little out of options, advice is welcome.

i realised i REALLY havent been posting any of my art lately and that i should probably change that so, our dnd party after a year of playing

gushing about our campaign below

we're currently close to finishing the lost mine of phandelver module and gonne move on to my homebrew writing and i am EXCITED

from the left we got:

Jared, human paladin oath of glory

Six years after leaving the army, arguing with his family and leaving the country to travel the world, he got a letter from his mother about a war brewing in his homeland, one of his brothers being drafted and the second being ill. She asked him for a meeting before they move inland. We're a week away from the date.

Damaia, tiefling draconic sorcerer/blood cleric

During a festival in Neverwinter, they went to a fortune teller, where she was told the 'Father of Lies' was keeping his eyes on her. She went reaserching and found out about Asmodeus. After they found about about Bib's betrayl and death, she tried to contact him and managed to bring him back as undead, effectively sealing both her and his fate into the hands of Asmodeus.

Paori, half-elven monk, way of the open hand

She comes from an extremely closed off village. After leaving and trying to come back home again she was told to leave ad never come back. After meeting the rest of the party, through a mutual friend she met another person from her village, a sorceress named Sevanna. Through some internal conflicts about religion and allegiance (and inventing atheism in the process(??)), she plans to come back home again.

Wilson, dwarf swashbuckler rogue/barbarian

*slaps the dwarf* this bad boy can fit so much trauma

In his past he had sailed on two different ships. One of his family, who were killed by pirates, second of his lover's, which was attacked by the kraken. He was the only survivor of that encounter (he believes *wink wink*), which still plagues his dreams. Through his current employer he met the rest of these chucklefucks, and currently is mostly down for the ride.

Bib, goblin/hollow one, arcane trickster rogue turned undead warlock

He was part of the Cragmaw Tribe, which were killed by the party in search for Sildar Hallwinter. After the massacre Black Spider (bbeg of the module) reached out to him and he started working directly under him in hopes of bringing the party down. Well, the party found out through a letter from the Black Spider which was in Bib's possession. They tried to stage a middle-of-the-night assult from BS's people, during which he fell from a tree he was trying to climb and bled out while the party was arguing about a course of action with him. Damaia managed to bring him back and his current plan was seeing Black Spider's downfall. After that? A strange symbol has appeard on his palm, so he should probably look into that.

I keep getting recommended videos on how to 'fix' your dnd world or 'craft the perfect setting' but. The world my campaigns take place in was made by a 13 year old kid who was just discovering the magic of dnd and making friends for the first time in years and who am i to tell him the world he made for his friends sucks ??

get you a friend that will dm prep your sessions for you when you spiral and hate dm-ing but you cant bring yourself to cancel the campaign cause guilt and want your players to still have fun but also screw dm prepping golly "@cam-the-orange-cat take the wheel"

Two years ago, I was making props for my very first d&d game (as a player or DM). I certainly have plenty of faults as a DM, but this weekend will be our game's two year anniversary, and if they've stuck around that long, I can't be doing too badly!

It's been a very fun and wild campaign... we've still got a bit to go, but the endgame is fast approaching. It's a bittersweet feeling - I'm looking forward to what is hopefully a satisfying ending, but these characters will be missed!

Butttttt I'm also really looking forward to handing over the DM position for our group's next campaign 😊

I was playing a side quest with a DM (who plays the fighter in our campaign normally, but they wanted to give DMing a go) and my PC (the rogue from our normal campaign). Our rogue is currently unwell and the party is getting him some magical cure. This mini quest was supposed to be a fun little dream quest, right? 

Turns out his consciousness and soul were transported to Limbo where he found out he had accidentally made a pact with an ancient eldritch crab back in our third D&D session and is now a warlock (something I had wanted to do but didn’t know how to, so thank you DM!). He then fell into the Pandemonium, rescued a celestial being of some sort, found his girlfriend who had been trapped in Cocytus (Pandemonium’s second layer), rescued her, went back to Limbo to escape, found a feywild faery who had gone mad from planar dissonance and loneliness, fell into an abyssal portal, escaped, fell into another one, didn’t escape, watched the faery get beheaded, was rescued by a drow, was tortured by the drow’s brother, was rescued by his girlfriend, and now he’s awake with a confused drow (the good one), the celestial creature, a tonne of scars, a missing finger, and a truck load of trauma he’s going to have to unpack. 

I don't want to sleep because I have a D&D session early in the morning and it's Too Soon!!! It's like when I don't want to sleep the day before a test.

hrr grr i need to write a prophecy for this next session... fuck. haven't written one in years.

the real DMing experience is planning a bunch of shit for your party to do but end up having to watch them try (and fail) to make a coherent plan for 4 hours

My players in the Feywild game i run found out there's snail races and have literally been calling them SNACES and chanting to go to the snaces for the last three sessions. I think if they all weren't big dumb heroes that never back down for a chance to fight they would have cut and run

The bard is also obsessed with snail mucin for the sake of beauty 99% of the reason he wants to go to the snaces is to stock up, the other 1% to get drunk and watch his friends make fools of themselves.

Playing a lengthy dnd-campaign has allowed my players to have a long time better understanding their characters and how to characterize them, and it's led to a lot of fun conversations on why certain actions or decisions were chosen. It's a really fun part of being a dm and having people interact with the collaborative story that is a campaign.

god. uh. myhouse.wad, huh? I have, frankly, way too many thoughts about this entire mod. Please bear with me as I try to ramble my way through them, I ended up going off under the read more.

I’m going to be honest, this game felt like an extended, emotional fetch quest for me until this point. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that all the items had emotional and memorial impact, but...this one got to me. This moment hit me like a fucking truck.

For those of you who don’t play Dungeon and Dragons, sessions get long. On average they can run anywhere between 4-6 hours, but I myself have played longer, with the longest taking the cake at almost a half day, or roughly 11 hours. A lot can happen in a session, and most of it is just...joking around. The phrase “roll for intercourse” is a reference to an age-old running gag of players trying to seduce an NPC for whatever reason. It’s funny. It happens so often it’s a meme.

But finding it here...it really hit me. This isn’t just a reference to a well-known meme. Tom and Steve sat down and played D&D together, spending multiple hours in a day to play sessions, likely with other players but always with each other. And this phrase? It stuck out, it’s a moment that stuck with Steve for one reason or another, and my only guess is to say it’s because it‘d become an inside joke. And...you can’t help but wonder what it was. If Steve had been DMing, or if he’d been the one trying to seduce the NPC much to Tom’s chagrin, or...what.

And that at the core is the devastating part of myhouse.wad. The more I sit and think about it, the more I think about it, the more I realize this map is chock full of inside jokes, and we as players will never understand them. Because it’s not meant for us. These are things we’ll never have context for because one of the people involved is gone now. And the more I think about it, the more the realization hit that this entire map is not a game and really, truly is a memorial.

Do you remember when we played with Legos together? Do you remember when we played video games? Drinking milkshakes in the basement, sharing a pop? Our inside jokes? Roll for intercourse. Pumpkin Rick. Shrek chasing after you. Do you remember when we got married? I do. The house does. The house loves you. I love you. I miss you.

This map reads like a conversation, someone reaching out to someone else. You can’t help but wonder who is reaching out to who, though.

You know, I was talking to some friends on Discord about this map, and one of them brought up something interesting that I agree with. myhouse.wad draws clear inspiration from House of Leaves, but there’s a distinct difference between them. They both have heavy themes of grief and closure, but where House of Leaves is mysterious because of the layers and layers of unreliable narrators, myhouse.wad is mysterious because of you’re only ever hearing one side of the conversation. House of Leaves makes me feel like I’m intruding on something that no human should ever know. myhouse.wad makes me feel like I’m hearing part of a conversation through a wall.

Either way, there is one thing that both works share: This is not for you. It never was.

You know, I kind of wonder what their D&D campaign was about, if this moment was enough to stick out as an inside joke. I wonder what their sessions were like. I hope they had fun.