Back when I was a senior in high-school, I adopted a freshman dork who got me to watch Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (if only to get him to talk about something other than Skyrim). I'm gonna call him Baby Gronk. He was a good kid and I was trying to show him how to be cool, so I invited him to my next D&D campaign. This was a mistake.

Baby Gronk was dead set on playing as Alphonse. I okayed this. Eberron was not out at this point, so I asked him to present me with the homebrew he wants to use. We then had a little talk about how to mechanically handle being a hollow suit of armor (which he wanted to use as portable cat storage!) and I thought I'd got a good read on what his character is going to be since we both have watched FMA:B. I also made sure he understood that D&D is not like Skyrim; it can be fun to break the game mechanics, but at the end of the day you are playing make-believe with a table of people who are trying to tell a story together.

The campaign taught me a valuab

Just posted this to the subreddit so I figured here too for posterity:

Be me

Be CN catfolk bard.

Be stuck in a nation that isn't too kind to beastfolk.

Passing through village with Adventurer's guild.

Go to adventurer's guild for work.

Only job they have for me is 'rat extermination'.

Job offers 5 copper. Not per rat. Just 5 flat.

"Job with a free lunch!" says guild clerk with a sneer.

WellFuckYouToo.jpg

"Fine I'll take it."

Get to home with rats.

Old lady lives there.

She's nice but poor.

Apparently she's a hoarder because a cursory look inside shows over 200 goddamn rats!

WTF! 5 Coppers for this?!

Fine.

Use Minor Illusion to throw my voice into the cellar to mimic a lion's roar.

Roll 19 Performance, not bad!

RAT TSUNAMI FLOODS OUT OF OLD LADY'S HOUSE INTO THE STREET!

Not a single rat left in the home.

Lady looks nonplussed but is grateful the rats are gone. Signs my completion document to get paid.

Strut to the guild for my 5 coppers feel

Post taken from Reddit, made by u/love61x57rh whose account is suspended so I can't link to it.

Transcription

trying to teach a girl how D&D works

makes half-orc rogue

I'm loving the concept

first fight starts

Okay, DM. I spray the enemy with water!

What? You can't do that.

Why not? Aren't I half orca?

A few days ago, 3 players from my old 5e campaign reached out to me to see if I would be open to reviving that game. Henceforth, I will call them Lynnea, Warlock, and Druid. There was unanimous support for the game to begin. However, when we started arranging for session 0, I got a message from one of them:

Lynnea: So something happened between Warlock and I. I may not be able to play if she does. I have proof that she said something not okay with me if you would like to see it.

Me: Oh absolutely. Tbh I didn't really like them much. What did they do?

Now, before I tell all you wonderful readers what evidence was presented, I should explain my enthusiasm to kick this player out. Warlock was not exactly a pleasure to have at the table, although this was made less obvious by the fact we ran everything online through discord. I have written horror stories back on the alien site starring them, but since I deleted all my posts during the API apocalypse I will have to retell them

Be the party, a ragtag bunch of misfits living in a small town near the border of a peaceful neutral good Kingdom.

Do not be the Dark Empire, ruled by an Undead Wizard for the last 500 years, on the other side of the border.

Rumours of war, armies passing through, we sign up to fight.

At first the campaign goes well, skeleton armies show no tactics or strategy, but their numbers start to tell against us.

Demoralised by fighting our own, raised as undead, running low on hope and food, we end up retreating.

Decide to stay behind and form a resistance group in the Dark Empire side of the border.

Infiltrate a settlement of miners, get jobs in various associated service industries e.g. smelting, entertainment, whoring - stuff the undead are no good at.

I'm playing the bard, so I'm in entertainment for the miners. It's about 50/50 living/undead in the mines. Undead for the grunt work, living to instruct them on how to. Some vampires in town as well, adding to the numbe

Post taken from Reddit, made by u/Zagorath who is likely @Zagorath@aussie.zone here, and transcription taken from u/flippant_gibberish OCRing it on Reddit.

Transcription:

Have you ever watched Animaniacs? Have you ever seen any of the "Chicken Boo" episodes?

We had been playing a campaign for quite some time, allowing us to become high level. During the course of our game, our druid Onar took the Leadership feat after earning the respect of his peers in the Gatekeeper sect. He awakened his animal companion and took him as a cohort. We were somewhat perplexed by Onar's decision to have the bear take all his PC levels in rogue, especially by the amount of money that Onar spent buying his cohort magic items that boosted the disguise skill.

During a timeskip, Meatfists the awakened bear rogu

Transcription:

This thread reminds me of one I saw a while back. Mainly just brainstorming material for making the players sad. Well, the DM in the campaign I'm in apparently also saw that thread, because something similar to one of the ideas that got thrown around ended up as a quick, one shot encounter that we happened across while traveling between towns.

We were approaching a frontier town and ran across a pair of statues by the road. The quality and expressions made it obvious that they were people who had been petrified. A group of similarly equipped people a short distance away confirmed that their party had been attacked by a medusa and they had lost two of their number before they fought it off. We tracked the medusa to its lair, an old ruined temple.

We found what had obviously been its home, but no medusa. We also didn't find the collection of people-turned-statues that we thought we would, which meshed with what the residents of the nearby town later told us. T

“-2 Full Hendersons: The action has somehow set in motion a chain of events that’ll fix every problem previously thought of by the GM for all future campaigns, so much so that not even That Guy can screw it up.” ~ The Henderson Scale of Plot Derailment

Obligatory not D&D. PF2e. Also sorry for not making it a greentext. I don’t know how. I’m basically copy/pasting this from Reddit, because I didn’t know Lemmy existed before now.

This is going to be quite the story. It was with a large party, and there’s a lot of events that informed the decisions that eventually led to the moment. There’s some Out of Character activities and discussion involved as well. I’ll do what I can to show when we swap between IC and OOC.

First of, the setting was Wildemount, reflavored to work for Pathfinder. We were on a small, homebrew island called Petalita, which is somewhere The Dwendalian Empire occasionally sends death row prisoners. Something important for this story is that Petalita has no contac

Extensive background incoming

Be all of humanity, sheltering from the howling devastation of weather and strange ghostly alien monsters outside the last surviving fort

Be unsure how many years it's been, only know the number of forts because we call ours fort 16

There may have been others, but the first we know anything about was founded by people who called it fort 5, so they must have known of others before them. That one, we remember only the name, and a vague location, said to be in the Winterlands north of where we now take shelter

Apparently the ghost aliens of that time were fire based, and the snow was an additional barrier to protect our fragile civilisation

forts 6 to 9, we don't know much more about, fort 10, though, is where the Cult that guides us really took shape. It's where Helena was born, and where her powers were discovered

Helena, also known as Angel-Lena or An-helena, can regenerate, and her lymphocytes can be harvested and transfused into others

Also available in image form:

Or in audio-visual form where someone animated it into a video.

Transcription:

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I'm working on a fantasy world. My nod to being unique are the elves who all wear masks, regardless of gender.

Why? I think it's cool.

But I can't think of why they'd be wearing masks. Help?

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The problem with it being a "cultural thing" is that the masks are intended to be a racial trait.
A race having the same culture all over the world, despite geographical separation, surroundings, or history is not only lazy writing, it is downright bad writing.

There needs to be a reason the entire race does it.
Like a curse from a god ...or this:

"I have traveled across the world studying different people and cultures and everywhere I went, every civilization of elves wore masks.
Many of the different cultures have different beliefs and explanations for wearing them, but I believe I have found the core truth.

There are millions of different combinations of human facial features. A human could go their entire lives without seeing a

I'm looking for a story, it was like a scifi setting with some space bandits or something similar. The main character was in a rivalry with like a space officer woman or something like that I can't for the life of me remember it

Be me, human sorceror with a level of paladin for the saving throw bonus cheese

Be the other guy in my small party, Borbo Butterbit, halfing rogue with a spiked chain for some fuckin' reason

Wierdo

.

Campaign begins... we're on a boat, sailing to the New World

A new land of hope for a fresh start, far from the stifling rules of the noble classes back home, here we can finally have Freedom

The mayflower didn't land on us, we landed on the mayflower? I dunno

Arrive in the semi-lawless frontier settlement

Robbers try to take the seeds, plows etc that the settlers have brought, we fight back and save the day

Borbo doing fearsome damage with his chain

Jokes about "don't yank my chain!" and "I'll chain you up" and shit... in fact, jokes might be too strong a word

Really loves his chain

Wierdo

.

Anyway, with small party size, DM gives us a cleric NPC to help out, he was on the boat the whole time, impressed by our bravery and altruism in helping the settlers, previously he thoug

The story read on Soundcloud.