*An alpaca with Shrek ears and the eyes of a demon.

Seriously, I don’t know how people can find it cute, it becomes more and more uncanny and downright horrible the more you look at it.

That’s not a knife!

I appreciate the effort, but I was being sarcastic, I don’t need my DnD habits psychoanalyzed lol

I’d imagine they’d say that a common theme with your character’s is valid misgrievances with authority, especially perceived as incompetent and evil

I mean, it’s DnD. Fighting evil authority/authoritarian figures, be it liches, tyrants, evil dragons or whatever, is a very common trope. Same with external factors disrupting a character’s peace - it’s, like, half the origin stories of any fantasy character out there.

People can absolutely imbue parts of themselves in their characters and their backstory (I’ve read tons of stories of closeted trans people playing characters with a different gender from theirs, for example), but it’s not an exact science. In my case, I just like playing buff dudes and bullying the nerds bonking the squishy casters.

Case on point: my first two characters were neutral and chaotic evil, respectively, yet I’m literally unable to kill a fly in real life. My third character was lawful good and the fourth one is a pacifist. I just like roleplaying as different characters with differing motivations and testing out new classes in the process. Do they reflect my interests? Of course they do. Do they reflect me specifically? Hardly so, unless you squint really hard to find similarities - but I suspect people sometimes try too hard to find patterns where there isn’t one.

My first character was a barbarian who despised magic and made a point to tell every mage in existence that they are bad and should feel bad.

My second character was a grave robber who accidentally unearthed a cursed slab and refused to return it to the owner, resulting in an ancient mummy cursing him. He became a Warlock against his will and made it a point to become strong enough to kill his Patron.

My third character is a normal ass dude who got involved in a situation much bigger than himself. Currently dead set on killing the gods because they suck at governing the world. Also hates magic and refuses to use magical items that require attunement.

My fourth character is a pacifist orc who’s been dead for thousands of years, resurrected by an evil necromancer to do his bidding. The necromancer botched up the ritual and the orc came back with his free will, but unable to die (much to his grievance).

I guess my therapist would tell me that I hate magic and magicians?

I don’t think it’s weird. It’s just an item from your childhood that you’re attached to for emotional reasons. A lot of people have one of these - be it a blanket, a plushie, a toy, a videogame, a necklace or some other piece of jewellery, etc…

They might remind you of your childhood, or maybe of the person who gifted it to you or someone else whom you knew at the time. I don’t see anything wrong with having attachment to your memories.

When I was 5, my parents gifted me an owl-shaped cushion. That same cushion is still on my bed over 20 years later. Looking at it brings back memories of my childhood, and it has this soft, short “fur” which reminds me of the dog I had back then, whom I miss very dearly. Touching makes me feel like my dog is still with me somehow :)

It’s not even the worst thing we did.

A group of low-level bandits, desperate to raise some money for their families, attempted to rob us. I’m pretty sure the DM was expecting us to talk them down and start their side quest.

We mercilessly killed them, taking our time to do so. My warlock locked one of them in our pocket dimension and waited for him to die of asphyxiation, then resurrected him, and killed him with again Finger of Death (which turns the victim into a zombie permanently under the caster’s control).

It became my vassal and I treated it like a high-ranking officer. Gave it a nice-looking helmet, too. We had a lot of fun together. During the final battle, it led my undead army (Danse Macabre upcasted to 9th level for shits and giggles) to victory.

I shall not talk about the Fighter and Rogue’s treatment of their respective bandits. I would normally say that death is a better outcome than eternal servitude as an undead, but I’m not sure that’s the case here.

We also bullied the nicest NPC ever to grace our table into becoming a Paladin of Vengeance, but that’s a story for another day.

Reminds me of that one time the village in the forest of spiders asked for our help against the resident spider queen.

We defeated her. And her spiders. And her whole castle. And the entire forest.

The village was forced to relocate elsewhere. The king of a nearby kingdom allowed them to settle in his lands, but they had to traverse the desert to reach their destination. They never discovered it was our fault.

On the bright side, we got the chance to loot their abandoned homes. Plenty of things the villagers couldn’t carry in their odyssey through the desert.

Fun times.

*Rogue

“They hated him because he told them the truth”

I agree, there are tons of different approaches a DM should take instead of just killing their party for no reason.

The main one would be to have a discussion with their players about what kind of campaign they want to run, so that everyone is on the same page.

Everyone at the table has the right to have fun, players and DM alike. But it should be a team effort.

Level 3 arcane trickster/level 17 assassin makes perfect sense to me.

That’s not a multiclass as intended in 5e rules. That’s just a 20th level rogue that got all the features from one subclass and the first feature of a second subclass for free.

That doesn’t work.

A Spellcaster multiclassing always gets something on level up, be it a feature, more spell slots, or higher level slots.

A rogue multiclassing into rogue and splitting the levels would have dead levels at each subclass level.

To explain what I mean: a Rogue gets its subclass features at 3rd, 9th, 13th and 17th level. By going with your math, a 9th level rogue would classify as a 4/4 rogue (by rounding down) as far as the subclass is concerned, which means that the rogue gets nothing at 9th level.
Not only that. A 50/50 split for the multiclass progression would imply that a multiclassed rogue is precluded from getting any subclass feature higher than the 9th level one. By comparison, a Wizard/Sorcerer/Cleric multiclassed character can absolutely attain 9th level spell slots (although not 9th level spells, confusingly enough).

Where did you get all that confidence from?

I get a panic attack merely by thinking about DMing a one shot.

How did it go?

My friend and I were interested a few years ago and took a look at the manual, and our head was spinning while reading the countless tables referencing other tables. I remember everything feeling twice as convoluted as how it should’ve been, for no reason.

As much as I hate Discord, that’s the software me and my friends use to talk and share screen. It doesn’t support drawing on screen, unfortunately, but you can play music and they’ll hear it if you’re sharing the entire screen and not a single window.

The drawing on screen part is a bit odd, however. At that point, why aren’t you just playing a regular VTT and allowing your players to move their own miniatures? I know that many VTTs are either too complicated for regular users, or too cumbersome for regular use, but I’d suggest testing a few of them until you find the right one for you.

As for me, I’ve tried many VTTs and the only one I liked was Tabula Sono . It’s very easy to jump into and use, and all my less-tech-savvy friends were able to learn it in minutes. It also has an extensive library of (free!) miniatures, supports uploading your own content, and is system agnostic (it’s just a literal virtual tabletop).

I’d fucking buy that thing if I could. Unfortunately, the only way to support the developers is to buy a subscription, and that’s a no-no for me :(

Instructions unclear, I’ve prepped for the past two months and yet I’m in “make shit up” territory already 10 minutes into the session.

Player tip: either use the Spell 5e app or Emmet Bryne’s custom class sheets. Or both, like I do.

I don’t play DnD to be charismatic.

I play DnD to do things I can’t do in real life - have a group of friends, kill the rich and buy a house.

I have been using Duck for a few years now and I honestly prefer it to Google at this point. I’ll sometimes switch to Google if I don’t find anything on Duck, but that happens once every three or four months, if that.

Terminator was almost correct. The real terminator will be Arnie walking around in a fursuit.

I’ll be back. UwU

You hate it because of the internet

I hate it because I’m Italian

We are not the same