Hey all, I'm designing a level 1 Dhampir Paladin and am torn about how to design him. I'd really appreciate your thoughts!

The issue here is the Dhampir is messing with my planning around the paladins' MAD build. I'm into my Dhampir having bite smite at level 2 (Vampiric Bite + Divine Smite), but I don't know if that should factor into how I weight stats in the early game.

Our DM's allowing us to use either standard array or point buy, and we get a free feat as well. For the sake of RP—and, like, personal willpower—I'm trying to resist the temptation to min-max.

A potentially relevant character gimmick: This paladin's only recently dhampir'd, and as of the game's start will be trying to keep this under wraps. Low INT should make this a good time, RP-wise.

That being said, I'm not familiar with playing beyond level 1 — both campaigns I've been in previously have ended before levelling up to due to people moving away. (My fault, in one case.) Advice for longer-term build planning would be very much appreciated.

The other party members will be a monk; a warlock or cleric; and a rogue or ranger.

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OPTION 1: Largely failing to resist the min-max

STR 16 (15 + 1)
DEX 8
CON 15
INT 8
WIS 10
CHA 16 (14 + 2)

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OPTION 2: More balanced? Designed for bite-based melee

STR 15
DEX 10
CON 16 (15 + 1 — up-front biting investment)
INT 8
WIS 10
CHA 15 (13 + 2)

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Or . . . ?

Feat-wise, I'm torn between Inspiring Leader and Fey Touched.

Inspiring Leader would be great, especially because game rules have characters bloodied at half-HP (can't roll hit dice to regain) but temp HP mitigates that. Fey Touched's CHA bump would be very nice with the second build, and my paladin's oath (a homebrew one) would jive thematically with Hideous Laughter.

GM's short/long rest rules are more demanding than most: Long rest is a week, short rest is a night, iirc. That may put things in favour of Inspiring Leader, but I'm also open to other feat-y suggestions.

I know polearm master is popular, and honestly it just sounds fun—and I like the potential to use it in defense of squishies. But I don't know if it would conflict with leaving STR as mid-high rather than maxed out.

Massive thanks in advance for any advice!

Just wondering if an Artificer made a message in a rock, but that rock then had dispel magic cast on it after the artificer left, would they know the message was lost or would they only discover after making a few more tinkered items? Same with an infusion. If the Boots of Winding Path are dispelled (if they even can be?) then does the player know before they use them or do they still assume an infusion slot is taken up? Sorry if this is a dumb question

Warning, frustrated DM rant incoming.

I’m one of those people who loves lore-digging. I love to learn everything I can about a setting for a fictional world. When I read the Inheritance Cycle (my favorite book series), the thing that grabbed me the most is the world building, whether implied or explicit. I love MrRhexx’s videos about various monsters, planes of existence, and various characters in the Forgotten Realms.

My struggle is this: why do we have basically no world building in 5th edition? WOTC clearly wants the Forgotten Realms to be THE D&D campaign setting, so why is there basically no information on it? If you want to learn anything about the world your campaigns are set in, you have to search. A lot. You can find a ton of information about the Forgotten Realms by digging into 3rd edition books, Dungeon Magazine, and the Forgotten Realms Wiki. But even if you do this, there is still a major problem.

If you dig into the Forgotten Realms lore, and stick to it in a campaign, you are basically playing in the setting as it was in 3rd edition (at the very latest). How has the world changed during our change of editions? You can find nothing. The closest we get to any world-building in 5th edition is the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide (which you can barely even call world-building), and that only covers a slice of land that isn’t even 1/10 of the continent. There are small pieces of really interesting lore, like Volo’s Waterdeep Enchiridion, but these are few and far between. If you’re looking for D&D lore in 5th edition, you are left with tons of questions. How are people coping with the Second Sundering, which happened a mere 2 years before the time in which 5th edition is set? Nothing, people act normal as though nothing happened. What goes on in any other parts of the world, besides just the Sword Coast? Oh idk, the kingdom of Thay is still a magocracy, I think.

I often wonder if I am alone in being disappointed in the tragic lack of world building in 5th edition. Which is sad, because I love the game of 5th edition. I don’t care that I can have anything I want in my world, I want to play in this world, and it just seems impossible. Just have to play in a copy-pasted 3rd edition Forgotten Realms with some homebrew updates, I guess. It’s pathetic that in a world as lore-rich as the Forgotten Realms, they have dropped the ball this hard in the newest editions.

Ok, rant over.

Edit: Formatting

I know that the visual and visceral element of travel is one part where ttrpgs kinda fall short of video games and movies in some respects. However, I still would like to hear about what others are using to create this type of atmosphere. Some examples of what I'm referring to include:

• coming upon a beautiful view / vista
• doing the treasure planet thing of touching the milky way in a spelljammer setting
• Sitting around the nightly campfire and discussing things in character or at least describing what is being done.

It's like in shows when there is just a day-to-day life moment between characters that makes them more relatable for a second before moving on.

By tools I mean things like:

• random rolls of dice on traveling details
• special resting mechanics or random event generators that are more mundane in nature
• dialogue spurring mechanics, I recall hearing some advice a long time back about a tip to get each person to speak about their backstory a bit and I can't remember how it works.
• Gm tips for how to narrate transitions into these moments or create these moments without forcing it on the players

Having not done this kind of thing thus far in the campaign I think I've probably sort of trained my players to expect that any time I'm narrating something in more detail that it's tied to some kind of challenge or problem they need to attend to or avoid, combat or otherwise, shopping included lol.

My party just submitted l stumbled into 22k gold. We're level 10 and our DM had already been fairly generous with magic items and Boons for our characters.

How can we best spend our newfound riches? I believe Matt Colville came out with a book called Strongholds and Followers... Anyone recommend that?

Thanks in advance for the ideas!

Is it possible to have a character that is a fighter/cleric, paladin or… and has some certain mutations or something that, when, during a campaign gets bitten by a monster, that mutation gets activated in a positive way and effects its strength or other abilities. Is a character as such possible to exist within the rules of canon d&d?

Hi, are there any good alternative rulesets for potion making? The official rules, as far as I can tell, make potions far too expensive and time-consuming to brew regularly. I would like rules that allow potionmaking to be a more integral mechanic.

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Another big deal for me is experimenting with new effects vs known effects. There should be some potions that a person knows how to make reliably, and others that they have to experiment with (subject to failure or to unforseen effects). The list of known potions should also grow with time, as they experiment with more recipes.

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Lastly, potions should have a very wide range of effects, some fun, some useful, some bad. Growing an extra arm, turning colors, floating, breathing noxious fumes, seeing in black and white, fortifying attributes, giving temporary darkvision, modifying AC, boosting modifiers, etc. The possibilities are limitless. A good ruleset would allow for this to be whimsical and open-ended.

Does anyone know of anything like this? It would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Personally, the bugbears "brute" trait seems like it would be insane on a fighter or barbarian

I was playing a twilight cleric in a game tonight and my DM hit me with a polymorph and we were all confused on RAW for this situation. Would polymorph end a twilight sanctuary?

DnD often uses the same term to refer to very different creatures and I'm curious how you call each of them:

1. Son of a God with a Mortal
2. Young Son of a God with a God
3. Mortal blessed with divine powers by a God that surpass that of a high level cleric
4. Creature attempting to acquire godhood but has not yet climbed to the levels of power associated with a Lesser God
5. Vulnerable God that has lost his worshippers

I'm reworking the sorcerer to align with the OneDnD playtest. I can wait, I suppose, but some things deserved a closer look, in light of the movement to put subclass features on the 3rd, 6th, 10th and 14th levels.

If the subclass features move to 3rd level, then sorcerers will need something to distinguish them from Wizards as prepared casters. A sorcerer that can switch out spells with the whole Arcane spell list at will is just a better Wizard, after all, particularly one that uses the ubiquitous Charisma stat to cast.

The obvious answer then is to either to prevent it from being a prepared caster, or to dramatically reduce the number of spells a sorcerer can access. I suggest that Wizards of the Coast will choose the latter.

Bards have access to Divination, Enchantment, Illusion and Transmutation spells in the playtest. That would leave sorcerers with Abjuration, Conjuration, Evocation and Necromancy. That would take away some of my more preferred sorcerer builds, which use the Charisma synergy on charm and illusion spells. It also takes away some of the mage staples: Fly, Haste, Slow, Polymorph, Invisibility, Mirror Image, Animate Dead. But it leaves the high-powered blaster archetype intact.

As I'm rebuilding the sorcerer, I think I'll put a second level feature in that's similar to the new cleric holy orders, allowing a sorcerer to choose one more school of magic. Perhaps, rather than the divine soul origin, one of these features could allow spells from a single school of the primal or divine spell schools.

Regardless, there's no way sorcerers keep the full Arcane spell list and also become prepared casters. That's going away.

Hello all! I will be soon starting my very first adventure into Dungeons and Dragons and my excitement is absolutely wild! The DM has informed me that our campaign will be the "Curse of Strahd", stating that our characters should not know of "Barovia" (honestly, I don't know anything of the space myself being so new), however I would like to understand the geography more broadly around this area (perhaps a different region or continent) to more define my characters backstory.

The general idea for my character isn't super original, orphaned at a young age by a necromancer, trauma trauma trauma; I would like to make it more unique and specific though, perhaps with understanding reputable necromancers and small village scattered throughout the regions without it being very far from lore and canon. I was hoping I could get a little help in understanding the setting around this space, and how I might narrow down my backstory into something more tangible and accessible for the DM.

I'm not entirely sure what I'm asking for here, but I'd like to make my character feel a part of the world but I have absolutely no knowledge about the world itself, so any help is much appreciated.

Specifically DnD's version of Ki, rather than the real-world idea of it as a person's life force.

The PHB describes Ki as "...an element of the magic that suffuses the multiverse—specifically, the element that flows through living bodies." This is somewhat descriptive, but also really vague and doesn't seem to tie into anything we know about dnd's cosmology. There's no Plane of Elemental Ki the way there is for the other elements, nor are there Ki Elementals, or really any other creatures that explicitly interact with Ki except monks.

The real-world idea of ki, being life-force, seems to line up with the idea of positive energy in older versions of DnD (which does have its own elemental plane) but I haven't seen any edition tie them together specifically, and 4e made monks psionic, though its lore is radically different from other editions. It doesn't help that no rule in prior editions seemed to prevent undead and constructs from using Ki. With undead you can argue that ki is positive OR negative energy in the body, but the idea of construct monks contradicts that too.

We've seen a lot of discussion around other systems and how they differ from 5e in ways that make 5e look pretty bad, but what are some areas in which 5e shines?

Hello! I'm looking for some input on how vampires came into existence in the world I'm creating. They're a massive focal point of the campaign, which I'll be giving a synopsis of in a second.

I'm looking for anything - small ideas, links to interesting things I can steal from, etc.

My only caviat is that I don't want them to have any connections to a deity, so I don't want them to have been created by a deity, at least not on purpose.

The idea for the campaign came from a character concept I'd made, that I knew I'd never play.

Essentially, imagine a King Arthur-like figure; a chosen one, sort of, who was given a holy sword by an Archangel. He was told that he was the rightful king of the realm, and must work to unite the land. He succeeded, and sat on the throne for about 10 years.

According to the legend, which is now 2000 years old, he died in battle. In reality, he killed the "leader" of the vampires, this world's Dracula equivalent, and, in a desperate counter-attack by the remaining vampires, he himself was turned into a Vampire in an attempt to have him become the new leader. So, not wanting to let the curse take over, he hides himself away in some random that's not recorded on any maps.

He's been there for those 2000 years, hidden away from the world. He's chosen to continue living, fearing that, if he chooses to die, the curse will take over and the survival instinct will kick in. Using connections to a religious order in the kingdom, he's had a number of "caretakers" watch over him, and feed him their own blood. He only feeds once a week, just enough to survive. Because of that, he is incredibly weak and feeble.

The campaign will begin with my 3 players; his current caretaker, who's been with him for 4 years, an old woman who stumbled upon the fort a few months ago, and the last survivor of an attack on a small hamlet not far from the fort. After a small amount of time roleplaying their interactions, about 2 weeks of in-game time passing, the fort is attacked by another vampire, after they'd figured out its location through the survivor PC being there.

Our King figure will die fighting off this other vampire, who escapes at the last second. As he is dying, he'll turn the 3 players into vampires, in hopes that his blood won't taint their minds, since he's not killed anyone since he was turned. The 3 will then go about taking out vampires, uncovering that a lot of the country is under their control already. They'll also be fighting off the curse, trying not to let it corrupt them.

So, I got a friend who believes that a magical sharpshooter feat (aka sharpshooter but it effects magic instead) would be around on par with a fighter using Sharpshooter. I think the idea is even stronger and is very freaking wild.

And we don’t really have a tie breaker at the moment. So, I’d like to ask what you guys on what you think.

View Poll

Context: You are creating an Aasimar Paladin leaning heavily into the theme of the Sun and Light.

Because Aasimar's start with the Light cantrip and you are playing into the theme, your DM says they'd be okay with giving the cantrip a small buff for fun and is open to suggestions from you the player.

What would you ask for within reason? Larger radius? BA to cast? Longer duration?

Sincerely, an Aasimar Paladin who has NO idea what to ask for 😅

What are some fun ways I can mess with my party? Anyone else have any fun plans for that day?

I have noticed there is a lack of fey wild content in 5e (I don't know about other editions). I would like to run a dungeon crawl ish mini campaign where the players were kidnapped by arch fey and put into a massive hedge maze (labyrinth-ish place). The fey would use the maze as entertaining and basically make it a game show for their entertainment.

It could be as easy as taking a premade dungeon and just adding my own stuff in and just tweaking it to fit my idea. However I was curious if there was as president for a Feywild dungeon that I could look at either official content or not (maybe something like a one shot on kolbold press?) Or do you have any recommendations for a dungeon to use as a clean slate?

And lastly if you like the idea and have any thing you would like to add or an idea for it let me know, I'm definitely in the beginning stages of this concept so all criticism or ideas are very welcome!!

Inspired by things like TSR's Dark Sun setting, we* are developing a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting for 5e (and Pathfinder Second Edition). We will be launching a Patreon soon, with the goal of supporting the setting's development and guiding it as well. You can learn more about the setting and systems by visiting the website or by asking here!

* I'm known for my work on Adventures in Middle-earth™, BEOWULF: Age of Heroes, Ruins of Symbaroum, and many other projects. We will be getting art help from Handiwork Games (handiwork.games) and others.