#D&D5E

[2minutetabletop]

Rainforest Temple – Rooftop & Cellar by Vladir Winters

It's Community Spotlight time again! Today we feature our very own Vladir's stunning jungle sanctuary battle maps from their personal campaign! 🌴🐒

→ Download them here!

#ttrpg #tabletop #dungeons and dragons #dnd #dungeons & dragons #d&d #d&d5e #pathfinder #gurps #rpg #top-down #battle map #map #cartography #encounter #geomorph #tomb raider #uncharted #indiana jones

[greyncvember]

i got to class and my professor said "i have a meme i think you'll really like" and showed me this

#like ok yeah you're spot on #they're my queer studies prof so it makes sense it's just so funny #im writing my final paper on gender/sexuality exploration in dungeons and dragons so they know i like it #just so wildly on brand #i sent it to my dnd group and it was a hit #dnd #d&d #dndmeme #dnd5e #d&d5e #d&dmeme #dungeonsanddragons #ttrpg #ttrpg community #dnd meme #d&d meme #d&d memes

[genghisyajj]

im really pissed about dnd 5e for so many reasons but i think the most important way it fails is its little guy game. like come the fuck on. lets show some 5e little guys:

these are all kind of ehh to me. not very fantastical. they may be little and they may be guys but they arent really little guys you know? Now for an example lets look at pathfinder's art

now THATS a little guy

now THATS a little guy

Look at those antenna! thats a little guy (gender neutral term)

NOW THATS A FUCKEN LITTLE GUY RIGHT THERE

see what i mean? worst problem in 5e. you know im right.

#d&d #d&d5e #pathfinder #pf2e #pathfinder 2e

[anim-ttrpgs]

Why I Dislike PbtA Games, and How Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is Their Opposite

@tender-curiosities

It is no secret that I hate PbtA games.

Though due to a recent misunderstanding regarding another post, I’m going to preface this post by saying that this is going to be a very opinionated post and

I do not seriously think that PbtA games are inherently bad, though I may sometimes joke about this.

While I do often question the taste of people who make and play PbtA hacks, I do not think poorly of their moral character.

While I am going to call for PbtA to be used less as a base for games in the future, I’m not saying that the whole system and all games based on it should be destructified. It’s good for what it’s good for, but unless you’re doing that, I really think you should use something else.

Now that that is out of the way, here’s what I have to say about it.

My first experiences with PbtA games were pretty rough. Monster of the Week was not the first, but it was one of the first ‘indie’ TTRPGs I played after having previously played mostly only D&D3.5e and 5e. I really appreciated that the use of 2D6 over a D20 meant that the dice results would be more predictable, and I really liked the various “classes” I was seeing. (At this time, I didn’t really understand that they weren’t really “classes” at all, though I think I can be forgiven for this because many people, even people who like PbtA games, still talk like “classes” and “playbooks” are interchangeable.)

I was very enthusiastic to play, until it came time to start actually “making” a character, and found that I couldn’t “make” a character. I wanted to make a nuanced, three-dimensional PC who was simultaneously stereotype-affirming and stereotype-defying, with a unique backstory and dynamic with the other characters—but when I went to actually fill out the character sheet for basically any “class”, I found that most of the backstory and most of the personality for my character was being set for me by the playbook. It felt like the only thing about the character I really had a say in was their name, and that two PCs of the same playbook would actually turn out to be almost identical characters. At the time, I thought this was very restrictive and very bad design.

Later, now that I understand the design intent behind it, I still think of it as very restrictive, but I think of it as very bad design for me, not inherently bad.

When I play a TTRPG, I want more freedom in who my PC is. That doesn’t mean I want less rules, in fact having more rules can often increase freedom, but that’s a different post. I want to create original, unique characters, that I won’t see anywhere else. If it’s a class-based system, I want that class to barely touch the details of my character’s backstory or personality, so that I can come up with something original and engaging for why and how this “Fighter” fights. This means that two level-1 Fighters, despite having almost the same mechanical abilities, will potentially be very different people.

PbtA games don’t let you do that. In a lot of PbtA games, you’re not playing your own original character, you’re playing someone else’s character, that every other player that has picked up the same playbook before you has played. It’s more like “character select” than “character creation.” I think I could liken it to playing Mass Effect or The Witcher. Every player may pick a few different dialogue choices in those games that change the story, but we’re still all playing Shepherd or Geralt. No one is going to experience a new never-before-seen story in Mass Effect or The Witcher, which is very much a factor of them being video games and not TTRPGs, and therefore limited to the amount of code, writing, and voice-acting that can go into them.

This anonymous asker who sent a message to @thydungeongal seems to feel pretty similarly to me about PbtA games, and @thydungeongal's response is a very good response about how people find this appealing.

I have more respect for PbtA now than I did, but I still don't like it because to me it seems to play so much against what I consider to be the strengths of TTRPGs as a medium, much like how video games like The Last of Us and David Cage games play against the strengths of the medium of video games, and I will never like it. But other people clearly do, so to each their own.

Then another reason I don’t like it is because I think it’s oversaturating the TTRPG space. I’ve referred to PbtA before as “indie D&D5e”, and i do think that’s a reasonable comparison, because in much the same way that you always hear “D&D5e is a system that can do everything”, I think a lot of people seem to be under the impression that the PbtA system is a system that can do anything. It’s kinda the système du jour for indie TTRPGs right now, and many iterations of it make it clear that many designers do not consider how PbtA differs from more traditional TTRPGs, and how it is specialized for different types of TTRPG gameplay. Just like how I feel PbtA isn’t playing to certain important strengths of TTRPGs, I think that many—maybe even most—PbtA hacks don’t play to the strengths of PbtA. But this isn’t really PbtA’s fault, that comes down to any individual indie TTRPG developer on a case-by-case basis. And the cure for that is something I’m always saying: If you are going to be a writer, you have got to read lots of books. If you are going to be a director, you have got to watch lots of movies. If you are going to be a video game developer, you have got to play lots of video games. And if you are going to be a TTRPG designer, you have got to read and play lots of TTRPGs. That and you have to understand that TTRPGs are specialized. Even "agnostic" systems like PbtA are somewhat specialized, and therefore might really not be a great fit for the game you’re trying to make.

That and, to get more subjective again, there’s like an ocean of them, and I don’t even like the ones that are actually good.

Now that I’ve talked about how I don’t like PbtA games, I’m gonna talk about a game I do like: Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy. Obviously, I like it because I’m the lead writer for it, but I would also like it even if I wasn’t the lead writer for it, because it’s just my kinda game. Eureka is the opposite of a PbtA game. I wrote it to play to what I feel are the strengths of the TTRPG medium.

Eureka’s character creation uses personality traits as a mechanical element of the character, but it does so in a deliberately freeform way. You build your character’s personality out of a list of traits, so who your character is is very much linked to what your character can do, but we aren’t just handing you a pre-made character.

Eureka is designed to incentivize organic decision-making by the PCs, most often by the mechanics of the game mirroring the world they live in. Every mechanic aims to create situations wherein “what will the PC do next?” is a question whose answer can be predicted - it doesn’t need to be ordained by a playbook.

One of my favorite examples of this is, rather than a “Fear Check” forcing the PC to run away if they fail, or “Run Away from Danger” being a “Move” on their character sheet, Eureka opts for the Composure mechanic. The really short version is that one of the main things that lowers a PC’s Composure is encountering scary stuff, and the lower a PC’s Composure, the more likely they are to fail skill checks, and the more likely they are to fail skill checks, well, the less brave they and their player probably feel about them standing up to this scary monster. So if the PC has low Composure, they are more likely to choose to run away. The lower their Composure, the better idea that will seem.

This system really really shines when it comes to monster PCs in Eureka. Most monsters benefit a lot more from having high Composure, but have fewer ways to restore Composure than mundane PCs. Their main way to restore their Composure is by eating people. The rulebook never says “your monster PC has to eat people”, but more likely than not, they’re going to be organically steered towards that by the game and world itself. Sure, they could decide to be “one of the good ones”, and just never eat people, just like you reading this could decide to stop eating food. You technically could, but when your body starts to fail, how long would you? (This is a big part of the themes of Eureka and what it has to say about crime, disability, mental illness, and evil. People don’t just arbitrarily do bad things, it is often their circumstances that leads them down that path until they see little choice for themselves in that matter, and “harmful” people are still just as deserving of life as people who “aren’t harmful”, but that really deserves its own post.)

It has been said that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy actually arrives at much the same end as the PbtA game Monsterhearts, and I actually don’t disagree, but it gets there from an entirely different starting point and direction. The monster PCs in Eureka are very likely to eat people and cause drama, but it won’t be because they have “Eat People and Cause Drama” as a “Move” on their character sheet.

Monsters in Eureka have a lot of abilities, which they can use to solve (and create) problems as the emergent story emerges organically.

(Oh and Eureka is about adult investigators investigating mysteries, and sometimes those investigators are monsters, not about monster kids in high school, to be clear. The same “end” that Eureka and Monsterhearts reach is that of the monsters being prone to cause problems and drama due to the fact that they are monsters, though this isn’t the sole point of Eureka, just one element of it.)

You can pick up the free shareware version of this game from the download link on our website, or the full version for $5 from our Patreon.

And don’t forget, Eureka is fundraising on Kickstarter starting on April 10th, 2024! We need your support there most of all, to make sure we hit our goals and can afford to make the best version of Eureka we can make!

Interested in branching out but can’t get your group to play anything but D&D5e? Join us at the A.N.I.M. TTRPG Book Club, where we nominate, vote on, and play indie TTRPGs, all organized by our team with no strict schedule requirement! Here's the invite link! See you there!

We also have merchandise.

#eureka: investigative urban fantasy #ttrpg #rpg #roleplaying #eureka #tabletop #monsters #coc #allied forces #monsterhearts #pbta #powered by the apocalypse #motw #monster of the week #motw ttrpg #motw character #d&d 5e #d&d #dungeons and dragons #dnd #dnd5e #d&d5e #fighter #indie #indiegames #indie game #indie games #indie designer #ttrpg design #ttrpg community

[dev-the-dm]

Creature: Horizon Mongrel

When stars collapse into black holes, not even light can escape the surface. But occasionally, very rarely when there is not a single pair of eyes in the universe even flitting towards the newly birthed black hole, something else can escape. Something that inherits the churning, black darkness and the intense gravity of its birthplace, and speeds away faster from that sinkhole of death than anyone can follow it.

Black holes incarnate. Many people ask questions about the origins of the horizon mongrels, the creatures called after the black boundary of certain death and crushing gravity near an imploded star. Very few people have answers that aren’t an overactive imagination. Where the mongrels really come from, no one is quite certain, but it’s clear that the patch of space that spits them out is darker and emptier than any other.

Flashing nightmares. Mongrels are solitary creatures that seem to be either completely uninterested in their own kind of entirely unaware of them. Rather, a mongrel seeks out places where the flow of spacetime is warped in some way, or even broken. Powerful graviturges often find themselves hunted by a mongrel, which is capable of great destruction should it ever arrive at its unfortunate victim’s doorstep. And as fast as it appears, it is gone - since they are often not much more than a flash of jaws and choking, crushing gravity, leaving nothing behind.

Slowing down time. The mongrels that have been studied seem to live at a faster pace than most creatures, slowing down their internal clock and allowing them to attain lifetimes of aeons. The only true weapon anyone has against a mongrel is to attempt to slow it, forcing it to experience time at a different speed, which seems to draw out some of its few weaknesses. Stopping a mongrel in its tracks entirely, well... it might just kill it.

#dnd #dnd5e #d&d #d&d5e #dungeons and dragon #5th edition dungeons and dragons #d&d homebrew #dev's homebrews #creature stat block #aberrations #cr12

[janedoe297-art]

TTRPG ADOPTABLE DESIGN!! [SOLD] Adoptable Rules: -payment via Paypal only -no refunds -designs are for personal use only (reposting the art on socials -with credit- is ok, commercial use is not) -you Can modify the design, but please don't edit my art -designs cannot be used for anything N/F/T or A/I related

#adoptable design #adoptable oc #adoptable #oc adopts #centaur #d&d5e #ttrpg design #character design #cleric #sorcerer #centaur oc #dungeons and dragons

[shrimpari]

"I see all of you as rats. Nothing...but...rats."

The Abbot of Saint Markovia

#scp that breached contaiment #uncanny valley #fuck this guy! #some of yall got the most beautiful abbot ive ever seen and we got mr uncanny valley tumblr sexyman over here who is not great to look at #I also have no clue how to tell this story of how we got this guy killed #it was so insane it derailed our campaign for irl months #the abbot #cos art #curse of strahd #the abbot of saint markovia #dungeons & dragons #dungeons and dragons #dnd #d&d #d&d5e #dnd npc #cos abbot #art #my art #deva #dnd deva

[dartagnantt]

Otherworldly Patron: The Bound Demon | Let's be honest, 'the fiend' patron is just 'the devil'

PDFs of this and more can be found over on at my Patreon here!

Anyone else dislike how the patron in the core rule book is called "The Fiend" when its totally 100% a devil? I did, but since we're all about sealing things this week, let's be a bit anime about this and bind demons inside of children and grant them unfathomable power. This would be different from a part demon which is more of a sorcerer situation.

This was slightly tricky considering canonically, each demon is different (even though mechanically there's only like 5 of them) and that of the few demons there actually are, they share very few properties. Originally I was going to make this subclass customisable, but considering this is customisation: the class, I chose against that. But considering that the high level demons are: demon lords, which are way too specific, and the balor, goristro, and marilith which are melee beat sticks, I needed to go for a more generic form of the sort of 'power' a demonic entity would give.

Demonic Endurance

A little something from our friend, the draconic sorcerer. A consistent throughline of demons is their resilience, considering they need to survive the abyss, so hit points!

Unnatural Presence

This is fun, I like the idea that animals are more innately aware of demons. I extended this to humanoids because while we may not understand it, we generally can feel something is off. But for extra flavour, there is some demon (literally, not in a my great great great great grandpappy was a demon way) in you therefore you should ping as a demon.

Envenomed Blood

Not an ability demons really have, but I felt like I needed to give more than just poison resistance since immunity to poison is the demons' thing, and devils too for some reason, but I'm just going to ignore them, so make the poison resistance from the fact that the blood is literal poison :)

Magic Resistance

I hesitated in giving a form of magic resistance, because not even the devil patron gives it while definitely having it, and I avoided telepathy for the same reason (and because it's the GOO's thing) but here we are. That said, most enemies still like to beat you to a pulp rather than to use spells even at high levels, so it's not that powerful

Abyssal Transformation

And this is me giving in and giving your the big smash, but trying my best not to invalidate any path but bladelock. But all high level demons are big and smashy, so I give you the big hurt.

And now to plug my stuff. I release homebrews weekly over on my Patreon. Anyone who pledges $1 or more per post don't have to wait a month to see them, and also help fund my being alive habit.

At the moment, they have exclusive access to the following:

It's a Trap!

Judgement Domain

The Greatwyrm Patron

Breaking and Exiting

I also have three classes, and a splatbook over on DriveThrueRPG to check out:

The Rift Binder. A class specialising in summoning monsters and controlling the battlefield.

The Witch Knight. A class that combines swords and sorcery in the most literal way.

The Werebeast. A class that turns you into a half beast to destroy your foes.

d'Artagnan's Adventurer Almanac. A compendium of races, subclasses, feats, spells, monsters and more!

#d&d 5e #subclasses #d&d #warlock #d&d homebrew #d&d5e

[caleb-crow]

God damn you, Hyde!! Take all your evil deeds and rot in hell! I'll see you there, Jekyll.

New D&D character for a oneshot I drew real quick because ouguhghhh I love the concept of himmmm Edit: I changed up his hair a little! Gave him some variety as a Treat

#mmmmmmmm oc #caleb crow #D&D #dungeons and dragons #Dhampir Wizard with Blood Magic and he's usually a very prim n proper guy!! #until................ #Original character #Character Design #i love drawing so much man i havent done it in so long but you know what #tumblr sexyman and bg3 art coming up soon. though maybe i'll see if i can make this guy in bg3 as a tav? hm. #D&D5e

[dserpentes]

So I've been playing BG3 a lot :') here's my Tav, Luzia!!

#my art #baldurs gate 3 #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #tav #bg3 tav #Luzia #bg3 Luzia #D&D #D&D5e #DnD #DnD5e #dungeons and dragons #ttrpg #table top #bg3 art

[manyworldspress]

Is it Thursday yet? Bruno Romão, Pop Pop!! A monge Beauregard fazendo mongisses [Beauregard doing some monk sh*t]. Instagram, December 17, 2022.

__________________________________________________ Our shop: https://bookshop.org/shop/manyworldspress

#bruno romão #beauregard lionett #critical role #the mighty nein #wildemount campaign #cobalt soul #monk 5e #dungeons & dragons #d&d5e #marisha ray #pop pop! #Is it Thursday yet?

[2minutetabletop]

The Lost Library by Spectralicy

It's Community Spotlight time! This time bringing long-forgotten lore to your tabletop. Can you navigate the maze, solve its puzzles, and escape this perilous tomb of tomes? 📚

→ Download them here!

#ttrpg #tabletop #dungeons and dragons #dnd #dungeons & dragons #d&d #d&d5e #pathfinder #gurps #rpg #top-down #battle map #map #cartography #encounter #geomorph #library #book #tome

[uraniumraptor]

I have gathered a pile of the assets I have made for making D&D maps. They are all PNGs and there are castles, towns, ruins, villages, mountains, trees, forests and hills. They should work VTTs and similar programs. Q: Why do this? A: So other people can use these assets to make their OWN maps. So yeah, I'm giving them away for free. Feel free to test them out!

GOOGLE DRIVE FOLDER OF THE FREE D&D MAP ASSETS.

I have made an example map here, using photoshop. But if you want to change parts of the assets, crop them or color them and you don't have access to any art programs, I recommend using Photopea It is a browser-based version of something very akin to photoshop.

If you end up using these free assets, please do let me know and tag me so I can see what you have made.

#ttrpg #d&d 5e #ttrpg community #tabletop #dungeons and dragons #dnd #d&d5e #map #cartography

[northlight14]

@ anyone who plays D&D, this is your free invite to tell me all about your D&D character! I love making characters and hearing about other peoples so feel free to tell me all about them in my asks or something

#I haven’t played D&D in forever and I miss it sm😭😭 #and I keep making new dnd OC’s in the meantime so like probs not helping😅 #I have 3 so far. might make some posts about their backstories and what not🤷 #cuz I’m very proud of them. a lot of work goes into my characters #dnd #d&d #d&d 5e #dnd 5e #dnd5e #d&d5e #dnd character #dnd Oc #dungeons and dragons

[roguesart-blog]

✨Transcendence ✨

"Rise above it all. You can overcome anything."

#RoguesArt #oc #oc art #original character #sasha #monk #warlock #dungeons and dragons #d&d #dnd #d&d 5e #d&d5e #5e #ttrpg #ttrpg community #sfw #artist on tumblr

[dm-tuz]

Feline - 5e Monster Girl Player Race

Artwork by Dansome and QueenChikkibug!

Get the full PDF for free on my Patreon!

Consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-fi to gain access to additional options for your Feline character, such as an exclusive subrace and several unique feats!

Want more updates on future content and other regular updates, consider following me on twitter!

#d&d #d&d5e #dnd5e homebrew #player race #monster girl #Dungeons and Dragons #cat girl #cat folk #feline #kitty #cat #panthera #cait sith #dm tuz #homebrew race