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Cases! Please! (Patreon)

Published:
2026-01-28 16:03:30
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Hello! Bailiff Jake here to let you know that the Supreme Crit is convening imminently. Please submit your brief (I beg!) grievance and/or table top drama on this thread and we will bring you true justice!

Comments

Clever Innuendo

To the Venerated Dice Elders, I present my confession, which stems from a powerful moment in ahigh-stakes, late campaign fight where we *had* to take a Dragon down to aid the rest of the fighting forces. We were well spaced out to avoid breath attacks and got it to the brink.  However, the Dragon knocked the Fighter prone as a Legendary action, and then used its full turn to dash-fly away, leaving it 200 feet away from us. We had no attacks that could hit in that range. The Fighter was sure she could finish the fight if it had stayed in her face, but there was no chance of that now.  Fortunately, I was playing a Trickster Cleric / Rogue Mastermind multiclass, and was exactly 60 feet away from the fighter! I bonus-action dashed to put a hand on her.  Then, with a Jens Lyndelle-worthy flourish, Dimension Door'd both of us onto the back of the escaping Dragon!  I immediately got yeeted off by the Dragon's Legendary Action to a significant but non-lethal amount of damage, but the Fighter stood strong, got their turn, and took the Dragon down with the last possible attack. I can still hear the roars of the table when it happened. ...But here's the confession: Forgive me, Dice Elders, but I was *65* feet away from the Fighter.  I had enough turns to sit there, plot out this epic plan, and realize I couldn't.  Nevertheless, when it was my turn, I went with it anyway, sliding my mini across the board to the Fighter.  Normally our DM watches move distance with diligence, but I think the fact I only needed to move in a straight line concealed the slight of hand on my part.  No one else at the table was any the wiser. It was a huge moment at the table, but I acknowledge that memory comes with an asterisk, and that it looms in my brain enough that I think about it every time a Dice Christ comes up, so I figured it was time to atone.  I humbly await your whomping.  

Emily and Lauren

May it please the court and the croissanting bailiff Jake I present The case of the campaign ending roll I was a forever DM until a friend offered to run a campaign so I could finally play. I made a bard, Beauty Montgomery, a cryptid-hunting YouTuber who was secretly two kids in a trench coat as my first pc ever. The campaign was frustrating because the DM often tried to TPK us and never made the goal clear. In our last session, we were in a labyrinth that changed mechanically without warning. Even though my bard had high passive Perception and we said we were mapping the maze and using the message cantrip, the DM said we were suddenly lost. I asked why my character wouldn’t have noticed the maze shifting without a roll. The DM got angry, rage-quit the call, and later said they had handled things as well as they could because they wanted to surprise us. The campaign was canceled, and I haven’t been able to play that character since. Was I wrong for asking for a roll that ended the campaign?

Creek Bee Bonks

Dear Judges of the Highest Order and Jakalakading Dong, I present to you the case of Ekko v. Bridge. I was a fairly new player and DM to DnD and gained my interest and honestly my obsession with it after coming across this podcast. My first time playing was in a homebrew campaign with a couple of my friends from college, where I created a young hippie druid named Ekko. Our DM told us that this world was very magical and full of mysteries that he had spent over five years coming up with, so we should create characters with very detailed backstories. Each character also needed a secret quirk tied to something that happened in the world’s history. This was a lot to take on as a new player, so I reached out to my DM and explained that this felt pretty daunting. I asked if we could develop Ekko’s backstory together so I could understand how it’s done. We decided that Ekko was a cursed vessel of an ancient demon and that every time he died he was forced to reincarnate, lose all his memories, but look completely the same. I thought this was extremely cool and got really excited about figuring out his character. Then my DM suggested giving him a fatal flaw. We decided Ekko would have a split personality. One side was extremely chill and carried the innocence of a child, while the other was a ruthless, battle hungry maniac that would destroy anything that threatened him. I was still fairly new to DnD, so I asked a lot of questions and needed a lot of clarification so I could keep up with my more seasoned party. During one of our missions, the entire party got stuck at a cursed bridge, face to face with some kind of eldritch spirit of lost souls. None of us could figure out how to get across, so much so that we spent three full sessions roleplaying the best way to do it. Whenever we asked the DM for hints, he would just tell us that we had to figure it out ourselves. I should also mention that our DM had a big tendency to speak in very convoluted and academic language both in and out of game, and we often had to ask him to dumb it down for us. On the fourth session, I finally asked if he could just clearly lay out our options because we were all obviously lost on how to proceed. He told us our options were to cross the bridge and see what happens or turn around and fail the mission. We decided to cross. As we were going over the bridge, I rolled a high Perception check to see if I noticed anything else and spotted what he described as a cool gold coin. When I grabbed the coin, the spirit immediately attacked the party, which sent Ekko into battle mode. I rolled high on initiative, attacked first, crit, and dealt a decent amount of damage. Right after my turn, the spirit threw Ekko into a wall and instantly killed him. The rest of the party ran away and left my body behind. After that, they started talking IRL about how stupid my choice was and how my character deserved that outcome. My DM agreed with them. At first, I was not really upset because I knew Ekko would reincarnate and thought it would be a cool story moment. But after about 20 minutes of in game and IRL berating, it started to hit hard. The icing on the cake was my DM saying that dumb actions have dumb consequences and that it was the dumbest choice he had ever seen someone make in DnD. This kicked off an argument between me, my DM, and the party wizard. The wizard said that everyone else in the party understood what was going on the whole time and that it was probably better if I made a new character because clearly I put no thought into Ekko. I decided to leave the session, go home, and take a chill pill. After that, I chose to leave the campaign because I felt more like a hindrance than an additive to the group. Later on, I got texts from the party cleric, who is also the DM’s partner. They told me they agreed with my actions and felt like the DM did this on purpose because he thought I was slowing the rest of the party down by asking so many questions. They also told me that the DM and the wizard had been talking for weeks about how annoyed they were that I took so much time to understand puzzles and that I constantly got into fights with monsters instead of thinking of other ways around them. So judges, I ask you. Am I crazy, or was Ekko doomed to fail from the start? P.S. We did end up working through our issues, and about a year later I played with this group again, but as the DM. That campaign lasted three years. I made the main villain an evil druid named Ekko, and in the final battle I threw my old DM’s character into a wall and had a nice laugh about it.

Elana Danielle

dearest clergy of dice christ. i write, not with a confession of wrongdoing, but with a plea. i am a numbers bitch. i love data and a good graph is a sight to behold. so i created a spreadsheet to track and graph my dice rolls. i only count rolls made in a session, called for by the dm (ie sitting and rolling a d20 50 times in a row doesn’t count), and when rolling with advantage or disadvantage, both numbers rolled are counted. while i continue to have faith in dice christ and her benevolent omniscience, i fear she has forsaken me. in 2025, i rolled 353 d20s across my campaigns and one shots, and only 7 of those were nat 20s. yes, that is less than 2% of my rolls (1.98% to be exact). what must i do in 2026 to regain dice christ’s favor so that i may crit once more? thank you for your holy wisdom.

IvyclericHayley

Esteemed Judges. Hake Jerwitz. I am currently playing a Goblin Wizard named Puck in Wild Beyond The Witchlight. One of the character creation parts of that module is your character has had something stolen by the Fey. Puck had her Luck stolen. Earning her the nickname "Bad Luck Puck". Unfortunately, I am rolling like a GOD in this campaign. Even worse I keep on rolling nat 20s on perception checks, which due to my 7 Wisdom Score I have a -2 . Is there any way i can mitigate my amazing rolls for my canonically Extremely Unlucky Goblin Girl.

anna ryan rose

Hello honored and righteous clergy members, Deacon (Dicecon???) Emily and maybe that other guy that’s standing in the sheepishly in the back in a slightly different colored (possibly dirty or soiled) robe. I’m not sure if that means anything religiously but it feels pitiful, anyways, I have a confession. During the pandemic, one of my best friends (at the time) reached out and asked me to join their campaign. I was absolutely ecstatic. It was my first campaign, so my dad gave me his dice from when he played as a child in the 80’s. They are red and white dice with a slightly overzealous font. Everything was going great until initiative when I rolled what I thought was a 19. My character went first in combat and on my turn I rolled the dice and I actually got a 19. Then the realization hit that for initiative I had gotten a 13 and it just looked like a 19 because of the weird font. I didn’t know what to do. This was the first session of DND I’d ever played so I lied and exclaimed “You’re not going to believe this!! I got another 19!” and turned my laptop camera so they could see it. I have no idea why I emphasized my lie soo much but it haunts me, I genuinely think about it at least once a day and I haven’t played with that party in 3 years. I am on my knees in the confession box and it’s a weird fit but I really need to emphasize my desperation. I am begging, please bestow upon me forgiveness or a punishment worthy of my horrendous mistake so I can live free of dice related sin.

Laura Balan

Hello honorable justices and the less honorable but still touted bailiff, I bring to you the case of the impossible persuasion check. My friends and I were playing through the Lost Mine of Phandelver. Myself and the DM had played quite a bit, while the rest of the party were brand new. We were still squishy at level two and had come from a pretty rough fight, with most of us still at half HP, when we encountered a band of very strong (compared to us) red cloaks in the town square. These red cloaks are like the town guard/mafia and were threatening us with violence if we did not pay a certain sum of gold, which between all 4 of us we didn’t have. I was playing a swashbuckler rogue and had the highest charisma in the party, so I began bargaining on our behalf. I was doing everything I could to keep us out of a fight. I rolled pretty high on my persuasion check (a 21). The DM then narrates that the red cloaks reject my bargain and for everyone to roll initiative. We made it out alive luckily - but the DM and I still argue about it to this day. He says the red cloaks were not open to hearing my case from the get go because the source book says we have to fight them, and that not even a nat 20 would get them to leave us alone. (The DM is also my fiance) Judges, I beg you, who is in the right here? We are in dire need of justice so we might have peace in our home!

Joe Howard

To the honorable Supreme Crit justices and the dreaded lowly baliff that shares my name, I bring to you the case of the centipede that “doesn’t take opportunity attacks”. I was playing a level 2 variant human paladin with the shield master feat, allowing me to bonus action shove enemies when I take the attack action. We were a party at three, with myself and the cleric being relatively tanky protecting our squishy warlock, who was the DM’s boyfriend if that matters. We play with a full battle map/grid and the bonus action shoves had allowed our party to, dare I say, whomp our dm with masterful positioning. The encounter in question was against a centipede like thing that was only one size larger than me, allowing me to shove it off our warlock who quickly scampered away. The stakes were all but gone, but the DM had it go for one last stab at the warlock. When I asked about an opportunity attack, he said this had an ability to negate that. We were able to survive and after the session, I asked my dm if it really had that feature and he told me no, he just wanted to take one last stab and knew it was low hp. Justices, I ask you, was it fair for my DM to ignore the rules in order to keep stakes high or was this a case of a power hungry man who was just unwilling to take the small L. PS - we were later TPK-ed in this same session and I don’t fault him at all for that. My only complaint for this night was the one described above.

Ashen

To the honorable justices and I guess also Murph’s DMPC “Jaek.” I present to you the case of the Difficult Druid and the Bleeding Bard. I have been in a campaign for nearly five years with four level 9 PCs: a wizard, a monk, a druid, and me, a bard. We are all great friends and there is no bad blood here. Anyway, our dragonborn druid refuses to wild shape, and instead hangs back to use her acid breath or the spell Wind Wall. ONLY Wind Wall, every time. As the only PC up in the mix, I get absolutely rocked. The wizard takes hits so I don’t have to, and the monk has stopped using evasion. To add insult to injury, we all watched the DND movie together and when the druid in the movie wild shaped, our druid said, “that’s so cool, I wish we had someone who can do that,” to which I responded, “you can turn into a fucking bear.” I prostrate myself before the court and ask if we should get over our tank not tanking or if we should trap our tank in a wild shape a la Tobias from Animorphs. P.S. don’t play, hate the show

Nolan Pavelich

To the sweet justices and the beautiful, cherubic bailiff, I bring you the Case of the Overpowered Character Backstory. I am finally playing in my first DND campaign, and for my first character, I thought it would be fun to play a ‘wizard’ who had lost their magic. My idea for her backstory was that she had essentially been a level 19ish Wizard who had used the Clone spell as a backup plan in case she was killed, but someone sabotaged it and her new clone found itself unable to use magic of any kind, forcing her to start over. (Mechanically, I would play her as a Battle Master Fighter) My intention was not to have an overpowered backstory! I just thought it would be funny to play a character who was in their peak physical condition but constantly yearned for the ‘good old days’, back when they were a feeble old lady! My DM liked the idea and said I could do it, but another longtime player at the table vehemently disagreed, saying it would be unfair to have a character who had been so high level in the past, even though I explained that I would not be casting spells at all! Ultimately he seemed to think it was a bad character and I didn’t want to rock the boat. I rolled up a more standard character who I am having fun with, but I can’t help but think the first one would have been fine! I ask the court, was I overreaching with my character backstory, or was my fellow player overreacting? I humbly await your decisive judgement

Alex T

To the Hallux Jake and the Judges, I bring the case of the humbled cleric. I was DMing LMoP and the party was almost to the BBEG. The cleric asked for a Talisman of Pure Good, that would basically insta-kill any evil aligned character if it failed a save. I said I was fine with them having it as long as it wasn’t used on the BBEG. They agreed. The party busts into the BBEG’s room and the cleric uses the amulet and insta-kills the BBEG. I could tell the rest of the party was upset, so behind the screen I changed the character that died to a doppleganger that was supposed to be part of the fight. Once the party says the BBEG again, the cleric was pissed and the party was ecstatic. Should I have allowed the cleric to have their kill or did I save the fight?

Lauren Laboissonniere

To the honorable justices and the bailiffs whose name I forgot, I come to you with the case of a permanent player death. I recently started in a campaign where the dm is a friend of a friend and it had been going well. I had to miss a session and when I came back, I found out that one of our party members had died during the session I missed. This is when I learned that this DM has a house rule; if your character dies, you are not allowed to roll a new character, you as the player are permanently out of the campaign. The player whose character died still comes to sessions just to hang out, but isnt allowed to play and mostly makes semi-distracting conversation with us. My character has gone down in nearly every combat encounter thus far, so I am terrified that she will die and I will no longer have access to my otherwise very fun dnd game. Is this an unfair house rule, or should our party be permanently punished to remain three (or less) members? I humbly await your judgement.

jennie

To the illustrious judges and their AI bailiff-bot Judy, About two years ago, my good friend - let's call him Jimmy - invited me to join in his D&D campaign. I had been wanting to play D&D for years but never had a group so this invitation felt like a dream come true!! Unfortunately for me, as soon as my character was introduced Jimmy's character was immediately hostile because my paladin worshipped a different god than his. Jimmy joked above table that he would have outright attacked me if he wasn't so low on spell slots. I was able to diffuse the situation, but the tension that lingered between our two characters was zero fun to play out and it was honestly a huge bummer of a first ever session. That campaign fizzled out shortly after, and the beginning of a new campaign felt like a fresh start. Imagine my utter befuddlement when the moment mine and Jimbo's characters meet in this new campaign, his attempts to attack mine. A heated text exchange ensued between myself and Jimmy where he said that he was being true to his character and that it's what his character would have done. Judges, my question to you is this. With a third campaign looming on the horizon, how do I prepare for another potential skirmish with Jimmy's character? Right now I'm leaning towards min-maxing the shit out of my character and prepping for a fight to the death, but I fear this may be straying from Dice Christ's light. I await your wise and impartial judgement.

Steven W.

To the undefinable Supreme Crit Justices and Bailiff Jeb, a guy you clearly only keep around so we can make cheap jokes about a cheap man; I bring to you the case of Bart Simpson, the world's most hated NPC. I was DMing a campaign and the PCs were traveling to the Abyss to meet with a succubus warlord. During the meeting, I briefly introduced the warlord's bodyguards, which included a wispling (half gnome/half demon). I described him as “pacing back and forth behind the warlord, with his hands resting on hand axes” and “he has short and spiky hair. Kind of like Bart Simpson.” I got some light razzing for this description, but we quickly moved on. The meeting with the warlord went well and the PCs were offered to stay the night as guests. That evening, the bodyguard was sent to deliver a message to the PCs. As soon as their room door was opened, the party fighter attacked the wispling, followed immediately by the party sorcerer plane-shifting him to his god's home plane (where the demon would be hunted for sport). Despite him having never spoken a word, my PCs had unanimously decided to kill the bodyguard. After the session I asked how they came to their decision. One player said, “I knew he was going to die when you described him pacing with his hands on his axes.” Two others said it was when I compared him to Bart Simpson. Regardless, they all claim that their actions were justified. The bodyguard was supposed to back stab the party during a climactic fight, so it worked out that they killed him before hand, but I ask you: Were my players wrong to kill my NPC before he technically did anything wrong, or are they just masters at sniffing out a traitorous Bart Simp-- I mean demon?

Nick Neverman

Heartiest of hellos to the humble, heroic & hopeful judges, as well as brief hand wave to the haggard & haunted bailiff. I present the case of the OP one shot character. I am the longtime DM of a campaign for my best friend, little brother & brother in law. My little brother graciously offered to run a one shot around Christmas time so I could get the chance to play again, and so he could run a heist that he’s been building. I hurriedly and excitedly agreed, having not played a PC in 3+ years, and let him know that I’d be making a somewhat busted character (gloomstalker rogue/battlemaster fighter) with a focus on melting bad guys. Once my character was built, I said I wanted to run through the character with him to ensure I didn’t screw over his heist. My little brother responded “whatever, I can handle him.” Here comes the issue, we made our way into the first combat of the session, stopping a rival thief from making off with a special key that we needed, and my brother said “let’s see how quickly you can melt this guy.” I did 125 damage in one round instantly killing said thief, and while my party members cheered gleefully, my little brother stared at me with a mix of disgust and curiosity, and while we went on and completed the heist, my brother said “you’re not allowed to use that character ever again.” Now justices, my question is, is it my fault that he did not want to double check my character or should I have made someone less optimized?

Ashley P

Dearest Clergy of Dice Christ. I write to you with a confession, i am playing in a long running game with my best friends and my husband. My husband is playing a warlock named Hal lelujah praise-alot (Hal for short) and I a Paladin named Blair. We were playing one night and our party was about to be TPK'd. Now, before this, we were in a hallway and I casted a fire bolt at him because he was being a dick. We where fighting a smoke dragon ans two of the players were already down and my husband was at 10 hp. Me being very beefy was doing okay but we all needed to escape through a black hole. All of a sudden my husband goes down getting hit with the EXACT amount of hp I hit him for previously. He would have stayed up if i didnt hit him before. Now for some context, our characters playfully hate each other, like full on despise each other. At this point I'm panicking, not knowing what to do. Im 30 feet away from him and can't get to him in time without taking an opportunity attack. In a fit of joy, I realized I have the spell aid, which can be casted from 30 feet away. I proceed to cast the spell he proceeds to get up and make it through the black hole. Here's where it gets bad, and I will take any punishment or penalty you thrust upon me... i didn't realize I didn't have an open spell slot I was completely out of spells. When I realized it, it was about five minutes later and I said nothing. From this point our characters only hate each other more and mending that has been difficult, i prostrate myself in the name of the church. Thank you for your wisdom

clerby

dearest justices of the supreme crit and jake who no longer works at headgum, i am playing in a campaign with 5 friends from college. it is everyone’s first time playing and the dm and i are the only people who knew any dnd stuff going in. everything is fine and the campaign is fun but one of my friends made their elf pc racist. like fantasy racist, tied to backstory stuff. and then got mad at us for not being serious about our characters. but i’m a person of color and i am here for escapism and so i can have a familiar. i don’t know how to bring up that i don’t want to deal fantasy racism when i deal with real racism irl. please help. thank you kindly.

JustVeryMundane

Dear Church of the Crit, I have a deepest confession that I am will to throw as many Hail Murphies as you deem fit. I was running a superhero campaign and at the end of an arch there was a large battle!They defeated the bad guy, but one of their fave NPCs were downed in the process - and for stakes they had to beat the clock to bring him up. The issue is after they rolled 2/3 successes they had only one more round. Starting with another NPC, I rolled a success, but didn’t want to take away from them saving the NPC themself so I fudged - unfortunately out of the 4 players, not one beat the (relatively) easy DC - and thus their friend Brother Russia had perish.

Lostdmg

Oh beloved Cardinals of the Crit, I lay before you, perhaps not a sin most foul, but a sin nonetheless Allow me to paint you a picture. My players were in an underground dungeon filled with demons, and fairly low on resources. While in this state, they came upon 2 demons eating the body of a third. The group decided to sneak past the demons to avoid a fight. I had them all roll stealth checks one by one, and lo and behold, they all succeeded. However, as the characters were celebrating their victory, the Dark Elf rogue then said, “I turn back and go to fight the demons” All of the other characters were incensed, and tried to stop him. It soon became clear though, that for some inexplicable reason, this Dark Elf Rogue would not be deterred. It was then that the Tabaxi Wizard cast “Sleep” on the Dark Elf. My Cardinals of the Crit, it is importantly to know here, that Elves are immune to magical sleep. Here lies my sin. I forgot this fact The Wizard rolled high enough to put the Rogue to sleep. Instead of carrying his unconscious body, the group decided to leave the body there, and sneak away. Because Sleep lasts for 1 minute, and because the demons were so close to the body, I had the demons roll perception checks every round to see if they noticed the rogues body. Which they did. The demons then jumped at the body, and proceeded to kill this rogue. I did not realize my mistake until 1 session later, and still feel bad about it. So, Cardinals? Am I still worthy of Dice Christs love? Ps. This rogue was 3rd character of this player, and eventually ended the campaign with a total of 6 characters, all of which died, the 6th one being introduced 2 sessions before the final battle of the campaign

Kyle the Chaotic Stupid Wolf

I place my case in the soft, baby hands of the Baliff IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR NAME IS! Firstly, thank you all for teaching me how to play Dungeons and Dragons. May you be blessed by His Grooviness, the Lord Bruce Campbell. As a player and someone with three brothers growing up during the Attitude Era, I simply cannot help but talk shit to enemies. For example, when playing an ancient Warforged Paladin that only speaks in Celestial as he was a construct of multiple good-aligned deities with his 8 Intelligence, at the end of the campaign the party Rogue taught him some phrases one of which we held onto until the fight with the BBEG, Tiamat in which the ancient robot said in broken Common, "Bite my shiny metal ass!" Guess what happened? This often, unsurprisingly, gets me targeted frequently. I have never played as a Bard ironically but am I being wronged for just being a little bastard? If I am to be punished, DMing is already a sentence I am carrying out as I am currently DMing for my usual DnD group where they play as kobolds finding treasure to bring back to their teenage green dragon they serve.

Lostdmg

Dear for the most part honorable judges, and the somewhat honorable baliff, I present would like to present you with the “The Case of the Unused Subclass” I was running my second campaign ever, the “Dragon Heist” module, with my first campaign being the “Out of the Abyss” module that deals with Demons, and the Underdark. My player came up to me, and said that he wanted to play a Drow Druid that was somewhat corrupted by demonic powers during the events of the first campaign. I thought that sounded great, and was even game when he asked if I could make a homebrew subclass that would help him be a melee combat as opposed to ranged spell casting. I was excited, and got to work, I will include the subclass at the bottom of this message. We worked together, and both were happy with what we came up with. Judges, I kid you not, through the entire 30 sessions we played, this player did not use a single subclass feature. Not one. Not even the extra attack feature I gifted him at level 6. The game itself was actually fine, and it ended very successfully, but sometimes I think about the fact that I spent significant time making a subclass to fit my players wishes, and he ended up doing nothing with it. I will admit, I never followed up with my player to make sure things were ok, but he also never came to me to ask for changes. So Judges, did I give a bad subclass, or did I just have an ingrate for a player? ———————— Circle of Viciousness- Tathnar Druid Subclass 2nd level feature; Vicious Curse - When you choose this subclass at 2nd level you gain proficiency with martial weapons In addition, your strikes have the power to further weaken your opponents. When you hit with a melee weapon attack, you can expend a use of your wildshape to cause one of the following effects: 1)The target makes a Charisma saving throw. On a failure, The target has disadvantage on all saving throws. At the end of each of its turns, the creature rolls a Charisma saving throw. On a success this effect ends 2)The target makes a Constitution saving throw. On a failure, the target gains vulnerablility to a damage type of your choice. If the creature is resistant to the chosen damage type, it loses that resistance. This trait does not function if the target is immune to the chosen damage type. This effect ends when the target takes any amount of the chosen damage type. 3)The target makes a Constitution Saving throw.On a failure, at the start of each of its turns, the target takes 1d6 necrotic damage, as your curse ravages its body. This lasts for 1 minute, or untill the creature recives magical healing. While this curse is active, you gain an amount of hit points equal to necrotic damage dealt by this curse. 6th level feature; Extra attack. You can attack twice instead of once when you take the attack action. 10th level feature; Bulwark against Brutality. You gain resistance to Fire, Cold, and Lightning damages. 14th level feature; Living Weapon. As an action, you can expend both of your Wildshapes to become a Living Weapon for 1 minute. While in this state, you gain a +5 to attack and damage rolls using a melee weapon, and you can cast cantrips as a bonus action. Additionally, you score a critical hit with a melee weapon on a roll of 18-20. Additionally, when you score a critical hit with a melee weapon, you regain one use of your Wildshape.

Dylan C

[My best friend Kate asked me to submit this] To the Most Honorable Justices and the Cool Cool Bailiff Jeff (Geoff?), I have been playing dnd with the same group for about four years. Our usual set up is three players and a DMPC to help balance the party. One of our players was really new to dnd when we started so we tried to go out of our way to cater to them. We let them drive the party choices most of the time, we regularly bent rules that were too complicated for them, and we had to institute a no pc death policy since they found the idea of their character dying really upsetting. This special treatment has persisted to this day. Recently we finished a campaign, and that player asked if he could try DMing a one shot before our usual DM started a new campaign. We agreed, and he told us all to roll level 7 characters. As soon as we started playing it became clear that our Interim DM had not prepared. We were supposed to spend five nights in a haunted hotel, fighting the monsters. Instead we were subjected to a long, incoherent, and confusing shopping episode in the town around the hotel. This happened multiple times and stretched the “one shot” into six sessions. When we tried to go back to the hotel at night to fight the monsters, we were not allowed to fight them. They instead made idle threats but ran away and vanished once the party tried to fight them. And we got the feeling that the Interim DM didn’t have any stat blocks prepped. We tried to be patient since this was the first time he was DMing, but then came the final fight. Despite telling us to roll level 7 characters, he had us fight: a bone devil, two nagas, four skeletons, and four ghasts all at the same time. He kept targeting my Paladin because I was the only one with healing abilities. He never attacked his own DMPC, claiming that he “forgot he could do that”. The fight resulted in a TPK where only his DMPC survived, and the DM was both smug and gleeful about killing all of our characters. Judges, I know that DMing is difficult, but was this unreasonable? He literally cackled when our characters went down. I humbly await your verdict. [Jake, please wait until the moment you think it’s funniest to reveal this] PS: Our Interim DM is my 10 year old nephew.

Brock

For CAKE HURWITZ! Two years ago, in our weekly campaign over Zoom. One of our members was getting bogged down with work and at the end of a session told us that he was leaving. At the beginning of the next session Our DM role played his wizards death, we mourned, and moved on. That same session we were sneaking into an evil church’s courtyard which ended in a TPK. After the game our DM revealed that this was supposed to be an easy encounter that was geared twards the wizard and had lumped the enemies together in large groups at the beginning of the fight to make full use of his AoE spells. But our wizard told the DM he was leaving after he created the encounter and didnt feel like changing it. So i ask the Judges, Should our DM have switched up his battle tactics to better suit that of a Ranger, Barbarian, and Rouge? or did we just get good ole fashioned whomped? either way no shade to our DM! LOVE YOU MIKE!!!!

Lucas

To the lavender-scented judges and the stinky bailiff Jonk. I bring forth the case of the illiterate pseudodragon. My pact of the chain warlock and party were in a trial that involved stealing an egg guarded by a dragon and her magical wards. For my turn, I had my lovely pseudodragon familiar (who can understand common and draconic) fly to the egg and read the draconic glyphs guarding it, then translate the deets to me via our telepathic bond. My dm ruled that my familiar can’t read because “although it understands draconic, it cannot speak”. I lost the argument but have since stayed salty. Judges, am I wrong to be offended on behalf of my son who is a very smart and special boy?! I prostrate myself before your 80 foot tall bench.

Michael W

May it please the Bountiful Bishops of Dice Christ and also Junior Choir Boy Jake; I am a man cursed by some sort of Dice Demon, and I need a blessing from Dice Christ to save my eternal dice soul (and also my dice rolls). I am known in my wider gaming group for having some incredibly unlucky rolls; in a recent session, I rolled 3 nat 1s in 5 rolls (4 attacks, and 1 desperate test of a new die). I have tried multiple methods to fix this; I have rolled on DND beyond, discord, and with multiple sets of dice, some of which I made myself. I even fostered some dice with a fellow player in an attempt to purify them. None of these attempts worked. In fact, the fostered die immediately betrayed me with a nat 1 the first roll back. The nat ones are usually very funny, but I'd like to succeed at least sometimes. I beg of you, save me from this curse so I can actually accomplish something in my games.

Jay S

Dice Rollers of the Cloth, For Saint Murph, who teaches us to roll low with grace, for Saint Axford, who teaches us it's possible to win dnd if you womp your DM hard enough, and Saint Tanner, who teaches us the dice know what you're doing and will roll accordingly during a goof, I have a confession. I am a new baby dm, and over the past year or so I have struggled time and time again to schedule sessions. Whether it be work, school, or a combination of the two, or laziness/session prep anxiety it's been really hard to make times work. There would be a few months in between sessions at the worst. It probably doesn't help that I'm also a player in two other campaigns, with both my DMs being players in mine. Saints of the dice (oh and Jake! how's it going, buddy?), while I have been able to lock in biweekly Sundays, I hope dice christ can forgive my scheduling transgressions.

Prof

To the honorable judges Tanner and the Axfords and to jake who is here I bring you the case of the insane robot I ran a Star wars campaign a few years back using SW5e and it was a lot of fun, during character creation one of my friends (who is known for making insane characters) asked to play a droid specifically a magna guard barbarian, I hesitantly said yes. Com session 1 he had 6 reactions, resistance to all damage and 36 AC. was in fact concerned, this was a level 10 campaign but that's crazy. He explained that it is perfectly legal the rule book is just easy to abuse I said you have 22 AC and vulnerability to shock, he said that's fair and we had a blast, judges since the have razed him on it and he has exclaimed still that it's legal, so ask shall keep razing or is it just the systems fault? p.s. he said he's down to send an explanation of his build

Noah Coleman

Hello to the Esteemed Justices and a side-eye the cowardly baliff Jim. I bring the case of the Terrible Teammate. Back in my college days, I agreed to DM for a few of my friends as a first-time DM running the Lost Mines of Phandelver. A few sessions in, and one of my buddies asked to join as a first time player, wanting to play an oath of devotion paladin "because I looked it up and they were the strongest". What followed were all the stereotypes of a problem player(describing in-depth torture, threatening PCs and engaging in PvP over disagreements, as well as threating to kill our beastmaster ranger's familiar after a fight for taking the loot he wanted). Me and the two more experienced players at the table agreed that something had to change, but everyone at this table played for our college football team, including the problem player. I was also the captain of the team. While we wanted a change, we didnt see a world where this was turned out well for the team's chemistry, especially with me as the teams leader. In the end, we had him change subclasses as his actions didn't much fit an oath of devotion paladin, but all these years later I wonder if I should have done more? So judges, was I right to resign my football friends to a toxic teammate, or did I commit a 15-yard penalty by allowing unsportsmanlike conduct at the table?

brightrune

To the honorable justices and the perfectly fine bailiff Jenk- I present the case of Pokémon nomenclature: I am the wife worm of an incredible forever DM who homebrews nearly every aspect of our campaigns. I respect his craft, but I would be lying if I said I don’t enjoy the occasional goof, especially during character creation. Over the years, I have played several mildly goofy characters such as a hot pink grung teen named Gur’lie and an Ooze cleric named High Priestess (HP). All of these characters were for one shots or guest characters in campaigns where I’m not a main PC, and I always put in the effort to make them “real” characters beyond the initial goof. We’ve started making characters for our next full-length campaign. The story will have a gritty, dark vibe and the character I’m working on matches that vibe perfectly- The only problem is her name. I want to name her Altaria, which also happens to be the name of a Pokémon. I think it’s a great fantasy name, and this character has a secret identity so I really like having “alter” as part of her name. However, my beloved DM refuses to have a character “named after a Pokémon” in his game. I explained that while I know the name from Pokémon, this character is NOTHING like the flying dragon type of the same name. I truly feel this name fits the character I’m building. I even offered to use Altaria as her FAKE name at the start of the campaign to soften the blow, but he simply isn’t having it. So I humbly ask: judges, what’s in a name? Is it wrong of me to repurpose a solid name that originally belonged to a baby blue bird dragon, or is my DM wrong for dismissing the name due to its real world connotations?

Sovash Chetty

May it Please my Lords and Lady, and the homeless man who keeps calling out the cases. I bring you the case of the Denied Changeling. I was playing a changeling hiding as a human, because in the DMs world Changelings are persecuted. It was the culmination of a big battle. I decided to dramatically reveal that I was a changeling by changing into the wife of the Bad Guy (Essentially a reskinned Mr Freeze) and try to appeal to his softer side. The Dm just chuckled and moved on. Not deception roll nothing, He didn't even acknowledge that I had essentially outed my secret to the group. I was sorely disappointed, though he did remove my ability to transform later in the campaign, but that's another story. I ask my judicial jesters...was I in the wrong for not flagposting this dramatic gesture? Or should I have expected him to acknowledge my act in some way?

Angie the asshole

Hello the honorable and benevolent justices and that guy Jack that Jill is cucking. I bring to you a question can a shit be so harrowing that it constitutes a level up? I am the dm of a brand new campaign that I have with 3 of my friends and my brother. For contexts I have been trying to get a session going for years now, and finally we were able to start a session using a beginning module since we are all first time players. We had our first session following the module but my friend had to leave early suddenly so I narrated her eating some bad stew and having to go shit at the inn while the rest of the party goes off. The module says after the first job the party levels up so as they finish I tell them all they level up and say our friend does too because her shit was so bad. They razzed me a bit saying that’s unfair but after explaining it makes the game easier moving forward if they’re all the same level they accepted but I’m worried they might take it as a bad start to a campaign so I ask you benevolent justices can a shit constitute a level up?

Compound27

To Hoomans and Possums, No complaints, all is well. -C27

Felix Principe-gillespie

To the Jedi Justices and Padawan bailiff, I come to you with a simple case, can a prequel have stakes? My party have finished our long campaign and In the final battle, it was revealed that they had actually all fought this villain together in the past before, but last time the villain had wiped their memories rather than kill them. Now we’re gearing up for a prequel campaign and everyone is really excited to play slightly different versions of the same characters. One player however is not. They claim that this means this new campaign will have no stakes and will be the ultimate railroad. So I ask you justices, can a prequel story carry weight, or will this just be the ‘ultimate railroad’

Aeriel Belk

To the esteemed skips and the lowly front-end (this is a curling joke), I present the case of D&D on ice! I recently participated in a Dungeons and Dragons themed curling tournament (curling like the sport with the stones and brooms). In this version of curling, each team member selected a class that gave them "spells" they could use during the game. For example, the Bard had Polymorph, where they could turn one stone into a rubber duck, the Rogue had Set Trap that let them put a cone on the ice that you weren't allowed to hit with a stone, and the Cleric had Kati's Adorable Sweater, which put a crocheted sweater on a stone that dampens your ability to hit it. The conflict I bring is this: in the rules, there was specifically no Counterspell (previous iterations of this tournament had that as a spell, but it was removed this year), or using your spell to stop another players spell. In one end (round), the other team played a spell called Bait and Switch (Fighter), which allows you to swap two in-play stones. We were about to win 3 points, and by doing this they got 2 instead (For the sake of keeping this concise I won't fully explain the scoring system of curling, just trust me!). We then played our own Bait and Switch spell, and switched the stone they had just put on the button (scoring stone) with a DIFFERENT stone than they had moved. So, they put stone 1 in the place of stone 2, and then we put stone 1 in the place of stone 3. The other team objected, saying that this was a form of Counterspell. I ask the experts, since we did not move the exact same stones to reset the ice to where it was originally, does this count as a counterspell? I eagerly await your judgement! Sincerely, On Thin Ice in Alabama P.S. Some extra context: The Game Master ultimately decided in our favor, though we later heard that the tournament leader wouldn't have allowed it if she had been on the ice. We still lost by like 7 points despite this, so no one was truly hurt.

Charlie Penn

To their Holynesses, I come humbly before you with a confession. I was a barbarian in a game with friends where we were bounty hunters tracking a notable outlaw. We got to the final fight and took on this enemy and his goons. I got caught up in melee with all the minions and my party members stayed back to support me while I tanked. Our DM had given this outlaw a weapon with more range than we had, so was doing chunks of damage while we couldnt ever quite reach. After rolling 3 nat 1s, I admit, I got fed up and felt abandoned by Dice Christ. I stopped the session and complained about encounter balance, to which the DM said OK, and ended the session. I killed that campaign and have not played DnD since. I am still great friends with the party and DM, and we are all so busy now a campaign doesn't make sense, but I still feel shame for my actions. Can I ever be forgiven for my lack of faith and terrible table manners?

Grynk Grynkleton

Dearest judges of the crit and that other dude you let hang around, I present the case of the forever DM turned player. I am the forever DM, I’ve been Dming since freshman year of college so about 6 dare I say 7 years now. I’ve been a player 2 times in those 7 years in long standing campaigns (plenty of one shots but those don’t count). Where my issue stems from is the most recent campaign my story finished and we took a break while I prepared for the next setting, one of my players expressed interest in dming a campaign and I agreed to take the backseat for a few months. About 2 months in I asked the question “how much longer do you think this campaign is going to take” fully so I could gauge when I should start prepping. Judges I have been labeled a control freak and whiny baby who wants to be back in the driver seat. I don’t disagree with these accusations I want that but I feel it has come at a cost of respect, so I ask is one timeline question enough to label me a control freak whiney baby or do I just like to know what the monsters are doing and get frustrated when I don’t? I await your judgment but hope it won’t take too long so I can take the seat back.

Sam Ross

(maybe don't say my name for this one) Dear Holy Servants of the Crit, I come to you today a humbled man, seeking penance from Dice Christ to lift my gaming curse. I know not the origin of this curse, but my sin must have been dire. The last three times I GM'd for Star Wars RPG, it broke up a relationship. Not in game, but among the players. Not because the players aren't enjoying the game, everyone (even post breakup) says they have a blast when I run these games. But the pattern is there. Two players had an affair, and the husband (not a player) found out. Then a dating couple had a non-game falling out mid-session. I got cold feet after that, but a month or two ago I started a new game, and made sure the only couple at the table was me and my wife. Two sessions later, we're getting divorced. To be clear, I run a lot of games, and this DOES NOT happen when I run D&D, or Shadowrun, or Rogue Trader. It is just Star Wars RPG. And I DO NOT know why. This is freaking me out on a number of levels, and the truly frustrating part is that I really love the SWRPG system and want to run it again, but not if it's going to keep ending relationships. Help me Dice Christ, you're my only hope.

terst

To the strong, kind and wise judges and that guy that I honestly have yet to figure out what he's doing here, I come before you not for judgement but for advice. A new player recently joined my longstanding D&D group. Their character: A tabaxi rogue named Kat. Kat sometimes refuses to fight because they choose to nap or run after a ball instead. Kat also tries to take the loot all for themselves (they're a rogue after all), licks the blood of dead enemies and even ate an ear of one... Recently they've decided to introduce us to Ratto and Batto, their perfectly trained bat and rat. Not familiars or anything, they just suddenly appeared after a few months playing and apparently can perform any task they're ordered to do and now Ratto even got his own sidequest. All pretty harmless, everyone else seems to be OK with it, although it seems to be getting increasingly unhinged. So what should I do? Should I be THAT guy and complain to the DM? Should I have my familiar owl Powlo eat Ratto, since after all it's in its nature? Should I write to NADDPOD and hope my DM hears my passive-aggressive rant? Or should I just ignore it all, since in the end the group is having fun (me included) so it's just not worth it? I respectfully await your wise advice, terst

Frazurbluu

CASE UPDATE / CROISSANT UPDATE To Jake and the Justices, the new band taking the nation by storm, I write to you with an update on a previous case and also some physics. At the suggestion of the court, I converted my campaign about exploring a dangerous world to investigate the fate of a missing god into a children’s cartoon program about managing a fantasy tavern. My players love it, and I think it's still better than playing online at least. But that's not why I’m writing. Following my case, a rather lengthy argument ensued about whether or not a human being could survive diving 100ft into a pit of croissants. As it happens, my close friend has a PhD in physics! So I hit him up for advice. He suggested I would need 2 quantities to compare: the impact speed of the diving human, and the force that would result from decelerating upon striking the croissants. For the human, we’ll consult published data from the Olympic Committee and the Guinness book of World Records. Dives of this height reach about 55mph for impact speed, or about 24.5 m/s (meters per second). We decided to be generous and round down to 20 m/s. As for deceleration, here is what my friend wrote: “You can get [an approximation] actually if you neglect the nonlinear spring constant: the adventurer will bottom out at v0sqrt(m/k) and the max deceleration will be v0sqrt(k/m), where v0 is the speed he's traveling when he makes contact with the croissants Assuming k=100 N/m (there are actually studies putting [the spring constant of] bread at around this value), m=80 [about my mass], and v0=20 m/s, max acceleration is 22 Gs (fatal). So in the linear approximation, there's no thickness of croissants that will save you - you'll die from the croissants themselves even before hitting the ground.” So just to be clear, you did sentence me to death for running an OSR system. Hope you can sleep at night in your gigantic, gavel-shaped novelty beds. P.S. - When you were debating my case, you guys seemed to think that high lethality = grimdark. Nothing could be further from the truth! You should try running a Shadowdark Gauntlet sometime, which is basically hurling a swarm of level-0 peasants into a dungeon to see who makes it out. You might just have some slapstick fun.

Gabagooblin

To the most exalted justices and the most eviscerated bailiff, I appear in court today to advocate pro bono on behalf of another in need of justice. My friend's boyfriend's sister's boyfriend was recruited to play in a DnD group by a guy who was teaching him how to lift at the gym (charging $1200 for three sessions, should the court find this relevant). The guy DMed for the group, and the Boyfriend had never played before. In their first session, the DM looked visibly upset after Boyfriend introduced his paladin character and ended up killing him mid session, saying afterward that they hated the character and instructing him to make his next character a fighter. Boyfriend kept playing with them, but recently the DM asked if they could play on Wednesday instead of Saturday. Boyfriend said that would work for him better anyway, and after being questioned by the DM said it was because he had a conflict that Saturday. The DM decided that it was unacceptable that he would have wanted to prioritize real life, cursed his cat, kicked him out of the group, and blocked him. Prioritizing DnD has not previously been an issue in this group, as during a recent session they didn't play until hours after the start time because some of them were playing Magic the Gathering instead. Your Honors, I implore you to deliver justice for this innocent new player, lest he lose his spark for the game just as quickly as he discovered it.

Rover Bernhard

Deacons of Dice Arceus- I have a confession for the Pokemon TTRPG I play. We all are on a giant discord server with people choosing to DM for other players with pre written encounter tables. For a new PC’s first encounter, I rolled a Togepi, a Pokemon who learns the move Metronome. Metronome is a move that randomly chooses any other attack in the game. The first time I rolled the attack with the automated spreadsheet, I got Yawn, a move that the Togepi already knew. Rationalizing to myself that it might have been a bug, I rerolled the move and got Outrage, one of the strongest moves in the game. Although the Togepi didn’t KO the party with the Outrage, it- along with insanely bad rolls from the PC- definitely contributed to the fact that the PC lost the encounter and had to be rescued. The PC re challenged the Togepi and eventually won, making it part of the PC’s team, but I know I did wrong. Please grant me forgiveness for getting too excited about getting to use the random move generator.

Rover Bernhard

PS: please keep me anonymous in case a member of the server listens to this podcast

Maya

To the cozy judges and the Frigid Bailiff Jonk, I present the case of: Stirges v Elsa. May it please the court! My dad is running a campaign for me, straight from a DND beyond source book. It’s the first campaign for both of us using the 2024 ruleset! It’s only us two, so we decided that I should have an NPC/PC that I control during combat. One Druid (me) and one Paladin. The incident happened on a fateful night, exploring a castle. We were suddenly swarmed upon by 10 stirges. Our characters were level 3, and had already been in a fight, so I was worried. They’re easy enough to kill, but I had four/five attached to me. Instead of taking a full action to remove a SINGLE stirge, I asked him if I could thunderwave myself. I said I was fully willing to take whatever damage I did. This caused a discussion about thunderwave that went on for a hot minute. He brought up the “Elsa Defense,” which refers to Elsa from Frozen 1. He argued that Thunderwave is expelled from your body; similar to when Elsa gets upset in the tower, sending a shockwave of ice out FROM her. He said there wasn’t a way that I could target myself. I eventually acquiesced, because he is the DM. But I ask!! Was I wronged? Or is my dad right? Can you target yourself for spells??? I prostrate myself, humbly awaiting your judgement. [For the record, I coined the Elsa Defense, he didn’t know what I was talking about.]

matthew thanks

Formidable and regulatory lieges, and the utmost bailiff, may it pleasure the court. I am in a campaign that meets semiregularly (in that we regularly meet at least twice per year), and thus our time together is very precious. Unfortunately, one member of our party is a druid who summons a gorillian animals. Normally this would be fine, but she refuses to use pack rolls and thus each turn takes up to thirty minutes to complete at times with moving her army individually and attacking and rolling for each and then making saves and checks for each. I am playing TWO rogues (it was an accident) in the campaign, so I have roughly a minute and a half of turn combined per round of combat. When we have asked her to move to pack rules she has refused, insisting that it’s more fair to roll everything individually. Our DM has not elected to enforce either ruling but also clearly becomes bored during her turns. My question to you, my lords, and especially Mrs. Cybin herself, is am I wrong for wanting the druid to rein it in a bit? Thank you, and happy birthday.

M-Hansen

Dearest justices and the weird gremlin thing hiding under the table. I am the teacher sponsor for the high school I work at dnd club. As the sponsor I usually find a group of students to play with. Last year during an early session for a curse of strahd campaign a player wanted to climb on the roof of a house we were exploring. The DM warned him that it was raining out and he would have to do a dex check to not fall off the roof. He agreed, did the check, and rolled a nat 1. He fell off the building and seeing as we were level 1 he died out right. The player got up and stormed off kicking a chair on his way out. Was the DM right for killing him? was the player right for being upset? was I right for internally laughing at this teenagers anguish. I desire the swiftest judgements for all those invovled

Jackacoyit

Dear most astute judges and the smooth brained Bailiff Jiff, I bring myself before you in judgement of my own possible crime. I was invited to play D&D with some old friends about a month ago and after joining them for a session I have been ignoring the group. Why you might ask because of the DMs constant use of ChatGPT. I knew going into it he used chatGPT for what he called "background information and setting details that just take too long to write" what I wasn't expecting was enemies made bt AI, the plot ran through AI and even AI pictures of my character generated without my consent. I shook my head at it at the time but didn't want to make a big deal in session as its how that geoup played however since I have had no interest to go back and haven't said anything as I don't want to insult a friends DMimg style even if the use of AI disgusts me. Am I in the wrong for ignoring a game when the DM insists on having ChatGPT open and active during a session? I humbly await your judgement.

Zach

To the NADDPOD Trinity - The Father Murph, the Son Caldwell, and the Holy Spirit Emily ... and the honestly really solid alter boy Jacob I come to the church this day not with a confession, but asking for a blessing Our table's consistent DM Matt, who took over for me and brought our weekly group fully digital in 2020, is finally getting to play a campaign as a player in the new Daggerheart campaign I've temporarily taken back DMing for. However, one thing I've noticed is that, as a player, Matt's rolls are comparable to our recent Strahd Drunkle rolls, and I may even go so far as to say Father Murph level PC rolls levels of unlucky. Back in our first D&D campaign, he submitted my wrongdoing to this very body of Critimony on a decision I made as a baby-DM. I bear no ill will, rather I ask for absolvement of any lingering weight this submission may have caused, and I ask that his dice rolls in this campaign are cleansed by the restorative power of the Arch-dice-osese. Amen.

taro ! (he/they)

To the most esteemed and revered supreme crit justices, and the bailiff who is supposed to maintain order in the court but completely lacks the respect to do so. I come to you pleading for your judgement. I play in a campaign set in an ancient greece that was destroyed in an apocalyptic fight between the pantheons. our characters, in a hangover-esque turn of events, lost a week of our time, waking up to find our faces on wanted posters, as well as one of our DM PCs, Gosling (No relation to Ryan), an 11 year old girl missing. Disguising ourselves, we went to get information from the man who put out the bounties. My character cast Detect Thoughts, using their Metamagic Adept feat for Subtle Spell, so that they could get information without the man knowing magic was cast at all. We asked leading questions while the spell was active to try and gleam information about our party members whereabouts, but the man’s surface thoughts were completely unrelated to anything being asked, instead just thinking about what he was going to have for lunch and the weather. The following session, our DM told us that he was changing the rules of Detect Thoughts so that you need to do a saving throw for the surface thoughts, and then another saving throw to probe deeper. I protested a bit, but accepted the rules and moved on. So judges, I bring it to you - is detect thoughts TRULY overpowered? Were my DMs changes unfair to the squishy caster of the party, or do you agree with the changes made? I throw myself at the mercy of the court and you, the benevolent justices

Denatonia (Haven)

Esteemed lords and lady, I present the case of the Forbidden Horse! A few sessions ago, our 5e campaign had a big mid-season finale fight. We had just reached lvl5, and as we approached the BBEG, my beloved paladin Esther cast "Find Steed" for the first time to help her in battle. Citing that he "didn't want to deal with an extra thing on the map", the DM randomly forbade this. (Note: his gf plays a druid in another campaign and frequently wildshapes/summons, and my ranger is also perfectly fine to fight with her dog, so this had no precedent. HIS paladin also recently summoned himself a steed). He said I should have discussed it with him first if I wanted to use Find Steed - a normal and common paladin spell. He's experienced and it wasn't a 'you'll be too powerful' panic moment. Am I right to be salty about this random decision? I also wouldn't ask if my cleric / wizard are allowed to have Cure Wounds / Magic Missile before I use them! PS: Esther died in the fight, Idk if a steed would have saved her but it definitely would have helped. The party knows of one resurrection scroll and are planning to one day bring her back. Except after I'd made my interim bard with an exciting but time-limited story arc, the DM suddenly decided that being resurrected would lead to Esther becoming an NPC and leaving the party (I do not want this, she would not, and I was not asked; I was excited to play out my first ever resurrection!). Normally this DM is chill. Esther was well-liked, the sort of leader of the party but not a showstealer, not a problem character whatsoever and smack in the middle of her arc. Wth?

Benjamin Dale IV

The Case of Prompted PVP: Hello Honorable Judges and Little Buddy Babyliff, I played in a campaign where the premise was essentially villainous Hogwarts- complete with house ghosts, house parties, and teachers and students who sought eachothers' downfall in an effort to create the most dastardly beings possible. By order of the school's headmaster, myself and another PC were put in a situation where we were told to fight to the death as a cliffhanger before our next session. I told my DM between sessions that I was planning to escape to the Astral plane to avoid the combat altogether since as a player and a character I was uncomfortable with PvP. I was fine playing a new character, and I even prepped a backup baddie. I looted the school's magical items, said my goodbyes to my closest friends and other PCs, and used a portable hole with a bag of holding to launch myself into the Astral plane with the intention of becoming a planar pirate. My DM said after 6 hours had passed in the material plane, I appeared back in the same spot from where I had left. Since our game was streamed live, I didn't want to fight about character motivation in the moment as to why I would want to return even though it felt contradictory to what we had discussed. In the end, the duel took place and both PC's wound up dead as the victor of the fight was hit by a power word kill by the school's headmaster. Both bodies were tossed into lava destroying any chance of revivify along with all of our magic items. I ask you, was I wrong for trying to avoid the combat? Should I have accepted the PvP and put my feelings as a player/friend aside in an "evil" campaign? P.S. the DM's wife who played with us told me he had said the session before that the other PC involved and myself "are cockroaches who refuse to die"... I eagerly await your decision.

Secret Grandpa

Dear First Team All-Pro Surpreme Crit Justices and that Waterboy Baliff Jarf, I come to you with a classic tale of DM antics gone wrong (Murph cover your ears). About a year ago I was prepping an Autumn Festival session and was admittedly in a wacky mood. Beyond the normal festival games, I created an NPC who would polymorph PCs into toads for a little harmless fun. As a secret option at the festival I hid a small toad sized hole, which when entered the PC would come upon a sacred seance with tiny toads in witches hats surrounding a pentagram. Said PC would be greeted as the chosen toad-brother or sister whose arrival was fore-toad by Toadstradamus. After a ritual the PC gained a leaping ability and the sworn allegiance of all evil toads. Here's the issue...before all this I mistakenly made the polymorphing NPC a shapeshifting toad, so naturally they swore allegiance to my chosen PC and travels in her pocket. Now my PC has near-unlimited access to toad polymorphs and has used them to get other players out of sticky situations by polymorphing them and tucking them in her pocket. She is amassing a small toad army and I fear there's no turning back. Please help.

Michael Beck

To the judges of inestimable wisdom, and the powerful bailiff of ill repute, may it please the court to hear the case of "Rampant Old Man Adoption". I ran a Curse of Strahd game a few years back, and in my version there was an old man who was sabotaging efforts by the town of Vallaki because he believed Strahd would win and capitulating was the only safe choice. Once the party found this out they ended up beating him up, and handing him off to the Wereravens to keep an eye on. This happened in some fashion or the other 4 more times, because rather than kill them the players felt bad and wanted to keep adopting all the weird old dudes that tried to fight them. Eventually I had to have the Wereravens tell them that they couldn't hold anymore old men in their basement in order to stop my players from backtracking to drop off every weird old man they fought. It all worked out ok but my players were sad that they could no longer "adopt" old men that were trying to kill them. Was I right to put a stop to it, or should I have let them have their harem anime moment?

Dave 3D Art

Greetings Supreme Crit Justices, and the incorrigible lord of deception. I present to you the case Tarrasque teleportation. In a game last week I (Eladrin Bladesinger) was eaten by a tarrasque. While I was ultimately rescued I did retroactively come up with an idea for escape. If I had cast invisibility on the tarrasque from the inside, I could have used my fey step to teleport out. My DM, and table all agreed that it would have worked as a creative solution even if I had not thought of it until after the fact. No harm no foul. I did however mention it to my cousin afterwards, and he argued that it wouldn't have made sense because no invisibility spell suggests that you're also invisible from the inside. Tell my cousin that she's wrong. I cedey time.

DeheMent

Most Divine Congregation of the Crit, I humbly prostrate myself before the altar of Dice Christ and seek forgiveness for my transgression. But one month hence, I came to DM the final session of Vecna: Eve of Ruin. With 7 level 20 players vs merely a single archlich, I knew that the big bad's stat block needed to be buffed in order for the fight to last more than 10 minutes. I gave Vecna extra hit points, more damage dice and some extra spells, and here is where the tale gets sour. Throughout the campaign, with a combination of Silvery Barbs and adamantine armour, almost every Crit I rolled was negated by my wily players. So as a final session treat to myself, I gave Vecna access to Silvery Barbs, and in a triumphant moment I was able to negate a Crit of my own in the final battle. Naturally, the party Bard hit me with a Counterspell - but I responded in kind with a Counterspell of my own. And here lies my sin - for I knowingly used two Reactions in a single turn, and although Vecna's stat block states he can use multiple Reactions per round, it specifies that he can only use one per turn. But in my glee at finally getting my own back on my pesky players, I wilfully ignored this restriction and went ahead with my Crit regardless. The guilt I feel from this lapse in judgment was compounded when I ended the campaign with that most grievous of occurrences: a Total Party Kill. So I ask, nay beg the Church for forgiveness, and await my whomping in this life or the next.

elizabeth

to the deacons of the dice, i have a confession/request for advice. i was called in as a pinch hitter for the second (and final) part of a friend of a friend’s call of cthulhu game based on a pre existing module. it was very last minute (within an hour of the session starting) as the original player was unexpectedly unable to attend and the gm needed someone to run this character. i was more than happy to join but realized, after agreeing and receiving my character sheet, that this was a module i had read for fun on my own time after playing with this group previously. what would y’all have done in this situation? i didn’t reread anything prior to the session but certain things, including some puzzle answers and crucial plot moments, were stuck in my mind. i tried to take a backseat but there were things that my character was uniquely equipped for and i worry even in trying to be realistic with myself about my own puzzle solving abilities/what i would’ve been able to deduce that i may have overestimated and stolen some moments from other players. no one said anything and everyone seems to have had a good time, with the final battle being appropriately tense and climactic, but i still wonder if i should’ve been upfront with the gm/rest of the party about my knowledge.

PlantGang

In regard to the perplexing nature of “mage hand”. If it may please the court, honorable judges, and Jert. While in a dungeon of my creation, the party foolishly walked into a trapped spiral stair case. The nature of the trap is not important, however behind the now sealed entrance was a lever that would reset the room fully. The wizard said that he cast a mage hand behind the wall (which he could not see) and pulled the lever. I read the nature of the spell but because of the curious wording the party was ADAMANT that it works. Was I wronged even entertaining the idea, or is mage hand more broken than I thought ?

Fewzie7

To the formidable justices of the crit and the feeble bailiff, Jacob. I have been running Curse of Strahd, using Dragnacartas Reloaded (shout out!) for the past year. The paladin missed a few sessions and had to join the party in vallaki, so I had Ismark lend this player a horse to meet the others. They encountered wolves on the road (heavily bloodied from a fight the rest of the party won last session) that injured the horse. The paladin wanted to “mercy kill” the horse and get rations of horse meat. Later in the session someone made a joke about the Horse being Ireena’s pet and the rest of the party and I ran with it, including them casting sending to let Ismark know the horse was safe while lying to Ireena that the horse was back home. They have also been feeding Ireena meat from her horse without telling her. Now almost a year later, the party returned to the Village of Barovia where obviously Ireena and Ismark both learned of their lies. There was some very intense and dramatic role play of Ireena feeing betrayed by the party, for lying to her about not only killing the horse but Feeding It To Her. There was also a reveal that the horse was a gift from Ireena’s deceased mother, and ultimately there were almost tears at the table and our sorcerer’s Very Close Friendship with Ireena came into question. the paladin felt extremely bad for everything. I’m coming to you to ask if I should have just let this joke in passing go, without having Ireena question her trust in them or if I was right for going head first into the bit and cranking it to 1000%. (To be clear this is all in good fun and everyone did laugh after the session about it but the paladin feels So Bad)

Brooklyn Friesen

Huzzah to the court and jester, My case is less of a case and more of a quandary. At what point are there too many bits? I DM for 3 of my friends in a campaign that has been going on for 3 years. Most of the time, it's pretty fun, lots of laughs and even a few story moments that actually have an impact. But most of the time, it's like I'm not even there. I am basically a bridge to the next bit, a bit bridge, if you will. I am managing to drag us along through the story, but it feels clunky and disconnected. My players are having fun! But I feel left out. Am I being too lame? Should I let go and let gods? Any thoughts are appreciated.

Alex W

To the esteemed and honestly a little too sexy justices and the regular guy bailiff Jork, I bring to you the case of the attached dad. I DM a campaign for my dad, my partner, and one additional friend. Recently, the friend has moved to a different time zone, which has made scheduling a lot harder. That, combined with the high level of the PCs has made me start to wrap up the campaign. We are, at most, 3 sessions away from the final battle of the campaign, where I will be stealing Murph's d6 mechanic for the armies fighting. I informed my players of the impending end, and they all agreed it was the right time but that they were open to starting a new campaign once this one ended. Justices, when I brought this up to my dad over the holidays, he was excited to play in the new campaign. The issue? He wanted to play as the same level 14 PC. The current campaign that is wrapping up is a true fantasy world, and the next campaign is probably going to be an adaptation of a warhammer 40K world. This fighter with a magical longsword and shield won't match the tone of the new world. How do I break it to him that this PC, who he loves dearly and has played for over 2 years and 50 sessions as, probably can't be in the new campaign? Or is there some way that I could adapt his PC to make him fit? I beg forgiveness and advice from the tasty justices and bland bailiff in making my decision.

Morgan Nelson

To the esteemed clergy of Dice Christ, I have a very important question. I have been a loyal follower of Dice Christ and practiced every tennet, including "cooking" my dice on high numbers (as was preached by Apostle Emily). However, someone at our table decided to "cook" his dice on a 1. He said that way, all the 1s will be used up. My faith is shaken. This is a simple question, but what is the true way to "cook" your dice?

thiswayjose

May it please the Court and tickle Jill's boyfriend's acquaintance Jark (sp?): I run a game for a few friends and just last night we had the following issue - SURPRISE ROUND!!! You are a trio of successful D&D podcast hosts and a guy who was once on YouTube. As you are preparing to work on a new campaign, one of you gets the idea of inviting a Famous YouTube Yoga Lady to play with y'all. After e-mailing back and forth, you secure a 6 episode arc featuring Yoga with Adrienne DM'ed by Emily. When the day finally comes to begin recording, you hear the ring of the doorbell and open it to find someone that looks surprisingly like The Grinch. They seem excited to play and greet you with a big hug. They say "Hey! It's nice to finally meet you, I love your work and I'm excited to play" but they don't address their look. You have zero bars.

Dylan

May it please the court and the ultimate baliff, I bring you the case of the PCs who wanted boss fight mechanics after being possessed. I was DMing a game in which my PCs got possessed by trapped evil gods. The Lich NPC they were allies with warned them of this, and two of them freed three each from their prisons, and both failed the wisdom saving throws. I took control of their characters, and they made temporary characters to help the rest of the party save their original characters. When they found them, I had made custom stat blocks with additional powers, and a boss fight against two former PCs began. After they were saved and exorcised of the dark gods, the two players were upset to see the abilities the Boss Fight version of their characters were using weren’t on their character sheets I handed back, and said I should give them back. I did not, and things went on as normal after this side quest, but it’s always tickled at the back of my mind. Should I have given them the powers their dark god-possessed characters had at one point? Thank you for your verdict, whatever it may be.

Kristian Evans

To the honorable justices and.. Oh hi Jake, yeah we just got seated and aren't ready to order, but some waters would be nice. I bring to you a "retcon" case. My party plays in an Eberron campaign and were trying to break up an arms deal between two rival gangs in a seedy bar. The party soon discovered that the BBEG was also present to try and steal the weapon for themselves. The warlock of the party went to try and run interference but as he approached, I told him to make a Wisdom saving throw, as the BBEG was casting Charm Person. We'd been playing for hours and I thought it would be a fun cliffhanger to not let him know the outcome of the roll before we played next. My player was frustrated but agreed. We ended the session and were packing up our things when he said "Wait I minute, I have Counterspell!" and proceeded to make the case that he would instead be attempting that at the beginning of next session. I did relent and allowed him to cast it the next session, even though I was frustrated by the manipulation of the timing. The party laughs about it now, but judges, how far does the long arm of the retcon reach? Did my player beat the proverbial buzzer? P.S. I am a DM named Kristian, so the admission in one of the most recent Patreon episodes of a roll fudging player to their DM of the same name shook me to my core.

PlausiblyPJ

May it please the wise keepers of the holy crit and that guy who stands at the confessional and announces our sins, I come to you with a confession. 3yrs ago, I started playing in a Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign where I met my fellow players for the FIRST TIME during session. that being said, I made a bold mistake very early on that has weighed in my conscience ever since. During our 3rd session, we were locked in a player debate on whether we should assist a town in need or to turn the people against the mayor, helping the mafia. Only 1 player wanted to help the town. This player (lawful good) was threatening to rat us out if we went through with it. So... I cast Sleep on them. We then proceeded to tie them up, bag their head, lie to the towns people that he was delusional and a danger to others, and left him on the side of the road penniless and alone, kicking the character out of the party and causing the player to create a new one. It was hilarious! This was the point that I realized my mistake. I was playing a bard, and I didn't realize bards can't prepare spells each day. So, Sleep was not on my original spell list. I added it after a rest for this plan to work... Luckily, the campaign continued and has been an experience we will remember forever! Our DM even told us that moment entirely change the campaign plans! But that does not free me from the guilt I feel. I kneel before you hoping for absolution, but accept any meal you decide Jake has to cook for me as punishment.

thiswayjose

May it please the Court and tickle Jill's boyfriend's acquaintance Jark (sp?): I run a game for a few friends and just last night we had the following issue - SURPRISE ROUND!!! You are a trio of successful D&D podcast hosts and a guy who was once on YouTube. As you are preparing to work on a new campaign, you receive a letter in the mail with no return address. When you open the envelope you find some stray green hairs and a letter than reads "I'VE INFILTRATED THE GROUP AND AM HOLDING ONE OF YOU HOSTAGE- The Grinch". Jork, the YouTuber, gets somewhat anxious at this and begins to freak out. You can ask each other questions, but y'all look physically identical. How do you figure out who's the Grinch? You have zero bars.

buttered-shorti

To the Anointed Priests of Dice Christ themselves, and the itty bitty altar boy - please hear my confession. I have accidentally cursed my dice and I do not know how to move forward. I have been playing with my group for a few years now, and we have just started a new campaign that has really started to get rolling. I am playing a tiefling illusion wizard, with really playing into a Criss Angel archetype by having intelligence and charisma be my top abilities, and taking a feat that gives me expertise in deception. I have planned this character to be a skill monkey. To prepare for the campaign, I took all my dice and charged them in the moon. Ever since, I have been truly cursed with my rolls. I have rolled multiple 1s, and there are times I don’t roll above 11 all game. This is where I fucked up - our campaign theme is that the stars are vanishing from the sky, and there is prophecy the moon is next. How can I undo this? How can I cleanse the foul moon energy out of my dice? Please help this weary soul…my poor wizard wants to be a mischievous little scamp but she keeps dying!!

Lord Zoltan

To the perfect Justices Axford and Caldwell, the beautiful Bailiff Jack, and that other guy I guess. I bring you the case of False Inspiration. This year, I ran a level 20 one-shot for some friends of mine. It was my first time dming in a while and I will be the first to admit that I don’t have the best memory. My players were battling a coven of night hags that I had tweaked a little bit to be more combat than role play based to make things more interesting. At one point, I cast finger of death on one of my players. He rolled advantage on the saving throw because of one of his items before I could remind him that he was poisoned and must roll flat. The first time he rolled, he got a natural 20 and a 7. When I prompted him to roll again to get a flat roll, he got a 4. Claiming heroic inspiration, he rolled again and succeeded. When I asked him why, he pointed out that he’d gotten a natural 20 and, per 2024 rules, got heroic inspiration. I let it slide because the session was going long but I wonder, should I have told him to keep his first roll considering the 20 he got was from advantage he didn’t have? I ask not for punishment, only clarity. Thanks sweeties ❤️

Nathan Perez

To the esteemed judges and to the Baliff “New Haven Hurwitz”, I come asking if the campaign I play in is just a bit too much. I play a Celebrity/Stripper High Elf Bard similar to Jens with a similar story, but my DM seems to take joy out of fucking with all of us in silly ways. Some of the occurrences include a God/King coming down and punishing me by forcing me to wearing a magic diaper because I tried sneaking into a convention with the party to get the adventure going. Another included another player opening a magic bottle and being attacked by an incredibly high wrestler who did 55 damage in one round to our level 2 artificer (thankfully non-lethal). But it’s not only in one direction, it’s the other way as well. We’re given way too powerful healing items, like food that heals 20d6, and allies that are way more powerful than us. What are we even doing here? I ask am I being silly for complaining about shenanigans when I’m playing a Magic Mike style stripper who lost his job when his thong choked a queen? I await your decision! (Hello from West Haven CT!)

Maya Soh-Brown

May it please the touted Justices and the tainted Bailiff. I bring to you a case most damning from my recently failed friend/dnd group, which fell apart for non-dnd reasons. (As far as I know). This is less about one major grievance with the party, and more about grievances with their playstyles. We had a changeling rogue, who never cooperated with the party, and actively hindered them seemingly at every turn. If that wasn’t enough, the player almost never spoke to me outside of DnD matters. This player consistently butted heads with the party’s sorcerer (my boyfriend) and it got to the point of above the table snide comments. For this campaign, they decided they wanted to start with a Ring of Mind Shielding to hide their changeling identity. I said okay. They said it would be fun to have a soul already in the Ring. I said okay. Justices, I was halfway through developing a wizard who deserved to be trapped within a ring, when the player messages me “I think the soul was a good person, and he just wanted their ring so he killed them.” Justices, I beseech you. Is that insane behavior? For clarity, this person actively maintained that their rogue was “actually a good person inside” P.S. Long time not-listener. Hate the show.

Null

To the high priests and priestesses, cultists and vicars of the Church. With a heavy heart I must confess. I was DM-ing the BBEG fight for my table after a 7 month campaign. Everything was going great until the monk managed to land a stunning strike on my wizard BBEG. The thing is, the wizard was next in initiative and was down to a couple dozen HP, and about to change to his third form. Fathers and Mothers, forgive me for I did not want my BBEG to be stunned (and surrounded and walloped upon), so in my panic I simply said that this human wizard was immune to being stunned. My player wasn’t buying it, but I said something about the wizard being a chronomancer who couldn’t be surprised and brushed the concerns aside in favor of a satisfying conclusion to a long and epic story. Your honorifics, I failed Dice Christ, because it was only AFTERWARDS that I remembered the Wizard still had legendary resistances that I could have used that would have had the exact same effect and not been bullshit. I never apologized to the player. Your Imminence’s, I beg for absolution; surely I didn’t take anything away from my player, the BBEG died before he used all his legendary reactions, it would have gone the exact same if I had remembered. Right?

Nnamgork

Honorable Judges and the guy that reads cases (whose name I will not try to remember). I bring to you the case of the tea-bag check. I was running a session with good friends, and in this session they were escaping/robbing a large mushroom factory (mushrooms are potions in this world). During their escape they found themselves in a warehouse and decided to hide amongst the boxes. The rogue rolled stealth easily, then the wizard cleverly cast invisibility on the fighter, and crit on their own stealth. Sensing my surprise and feeling as though they had tricked me the wizard shouted “I roll to tea-bag”. Rolling a natural 1. I took this and narrated them tea-bagging and subsequently triggering an alarm, which set off a gas trap (which I already had built into the room) forcing them forgo their stealth and run. Justices I ask you: was I wrong to rob this wizard’s clever spell casting and good stealth check because of a nat 1 rolled as an annoying joke, or was this some sort of divine intervention punishing the punk wizard and allowing me to use my cool trap.

Rook

Dear Honorable Justices Axford, Murphy, and Tanner as well as the questionable but endearing court baliff Jake. I bring to you the case of the dead civilians. This was several years ago during one of the first campaigns i'd played so i was still pretty new. I was playing as a Cleric and the party was in a church when a fight broke out, the crowd immediately started panicking and fleeing. During my turn i casted an AOE spell (i dont remember which one) on a group of bad guys, the DM asks "Are you sure?" This of course gave me pause, but i couldnt figure out WHY I wouldnt cast the spell. I spent 10 minutes going back and forth with both the DM and my own party trying to figure out why this was a bad idea, but they refused to tell me so i gave up and did it anyway. Lo and behold, there were still civillians in the church and I ended up killing 5 innocents and injuring another and this ended up affecting how the rest of the town treated us. The rest of the party gave me shit for this, but i had thought all the people had fled the church and while i dont necessarily blame the DM for not telling me, should my party have at least helped? I leave this up to the court and will abide by your rulling

Skye Delacour

Dungeon Court Dearest delectable Judges and stinky winky pumpkin eating bailiff Jakey, I bow down before thee with an explosive case! I am fairly new to D&D and decided take a stab at DMing so I ran a 5e homebrew campaign with five of my friends. Over the course of several sessions, one of the players, a Warlock Dragonborn, began butting heads with the party by looting everything in arms reach and would even try stealing from the players during key plot points in the story. The players, not fond of the Warlock’s antics, became on edge around him, especially after he sold their ship for 35 gold. Eventually, the party found themselves in a schizophrenic old man’s cabin in the woods who was tied to another player’s backstory. This old man was quite the tinkerer and had vast amounts of explosives and blackpowder barrels scattered around his property. The Warlock, starstruck by the destructive potential in front of him, decided to use his Unseen Servant to steal a landmine from the back room. I warned the Warlock that a Sleight of Hand check would need to be rolled with disadvantage since the landmine was fairly large. The Warlock proceeded to cast his servant and entered the back room. At this point, I warned him once more that this check would need to be done with disadvantage but that didn’t stop him despite everyone also being in the cabin. Judges, you may be able to guess what happened next. The Unseen Servant rolled a 9 and set off a chain reaction in the cabin, promptly eviscerating it and everything inside. Luckily, majority of the party was able to escape except for the Warlock and the Bard. The Warlock was surprised to hear that his level 4 character immediately died after taking 136 force damage. The party was in awe at what just happened. He then went quiet until I eventually asked if everyone would be able to make it to the next session to where he said he wouldn’t be playing in this campaign anymore. Judges, was I wrong for giving this Warlock disadvantage on this check or was it justified given the situation? I await your verdict…

Matthew Sturm

To the honorable Justices and that handsome/weird (depending on the justices’ mood) guy in the corner, I present the case of the invincible rats. I played a swarmkeeper ranger in a level 15 one-shot, flavored after the pied pier with rats as my swarm. The one-shot concluded with a PVP contest where we were trying to get a gift card out of an indestructible barrel. I had found the barrel and was carrying it up a rope trick under one arm. At the end of my turn, I used my swarm to give me a flying speed in order to avoid falling, describing it as the rats grabbing the rope and creating a rat chain platform. One of the other players tried to frighten everyone in the area, and after everyone had rolled their saving throws, he said, “But what about the rats?” My brother, who was DMing, and I tried to explain that the rats were just a feature of my subclass and weren’t really separate entities, so they couldn’t be frightened. After some arguing from the player, he eventually moved on and we assumed that was the end of it. On the players next turn, he tried to attack the rats in an attempt to make me fall off the rope. We once again explained that they weren’t separate creatures and couldn’t be hurt. The other players tried got upset and shouted, “So you’re saying the rats are gods!” After a lot of laughing from everyone else at the table, we eventually got him to stop going after the rats and try something else, although he was still in a pissy mood for a while after that. I ask the court, were my brother and I correct that you can’t target a swarmkeeper’s swarm, or was our friend correct that we incorrectly made the rats gods?

Fish Harlan

May it please the honorable judges and the bailiff who can join if he wants to, I guess. I come here with a case of a stolen character. Our party was facing extra dimensional beings when they possessed more than half of the party, resulting in an effective TPK with the remaining members either dead or knocked out while the possessed characters ran off. My sorcerer, who I loved playing, was one of the possessed players. The DM had us make some temporary characters to go rescue the possessed PCs. He even gave us some tools to help bring them back, like a dagger made of a material that we were told could end a possession with mere skin contact, and rings that prevent psychic influence. Finally, after almost a year, we found the missing characters. The problem is that the items we were told would rescue them did not worked. The dagger caused barely a shudder in the possession, and the ring did nothing when placed on my sorcerer's finger. More than that, the story was somewhat stalled as the party has no idea what the next steps to take are. Judges, I was at a loss. I missed my character, she was one of the most fun I've ever played, but it almost felt like she was being kept from me. The campaign ended getting cut short the next session, and while we did get our characters back for the end, it had nothing to do with the items we were given and we weren't allowed to use them for the final fight, as the DM rules they didn't level up with the rest of the party. Am I right to feel slighted that all the build up and prep for getting our characters back was ultimately useless, or should I just be glad I got to have my character back for even a short time?

TimMc22

To the honorable Justices Axford and Tanner, the beautiful sexy hunky man of men Jake, oh and Durf I bring you the case of "it's what my character would do." It was my first time playing D&D with a group of college friends in a Pegan inspired campaign, session one we set out on a ship to an island to investigate and incident involving some sirens. We arrived at an island and my character decided to stay on the ship, side note that will be important later, my character's and daughter were murdered by sirens. The other two PCs went to find the siren in the Salt water lake in the center of the island. Long story short they get to her and she is trapped and offered to exchange information if we put her back in the sea. The PCs obliged and we're bringing her back when the DM turns to me and says to roll a charisma saving throw and a perception check. I roll a natural 1 (+3) on Char and a 18 (+1) on my perception. The DM then says "you see a sirens you don't know if its the one that killed your family but it might be" I said id like to talk to it, he said "no you rolled a nat 1 you loose your cool and have to attack." so after mild railroad allegations I just roll. Nat fucking 20, I roll for damage and kill the siren. My party was furious (even at the table outside of game) one of them saying they need a break because I ruined their plan for the session. Justices Axford, Tanner and man of men Jake was i in the wrong here, should I have just rolled damage by chucking a dice at my DM, I await your verdict. Murph you can sit with the adults again if you behave.

Slippery Pete

To the effervescent judges and the recently goated, but maybe not quite, baliff Jabe. I bring you the case of the generous DM. I am a player in a weekly virtual homebrew game with a bunch of good lads. The game is great but I wonder about the implications of my DMs generosity in combat. In a recent fight giant wasps with molotov cocktails were about to firebomb our river boat. My armorer artificer Geary Boom, has access to magic missile. I asked if i could target the cocktails instead of the wasps. Even though the spell specifics that it targets a creature, my DM allowed me to target objects, exploding the cocktails in the arms of the wasps. Judges, I worry of the implications here. Can I target lanterns, torches, windows, ropes, wagon wheels etc? Is my DM opening a box of trouble or am I just an ungrateful worry wort. I kind of want the challenging fights and feel like my creative mind needs firm boundaries. If my DM or fellow players see this, I preemptively apologize for complaining

Flying Mongeese

To the Edge Lords of the Supreme Crit and the Edge Lad who dwells beneath them, I present the case of the Grease Immune Spider I was in a one-shot where we were goblins testing out our Dark Lord’s murder mansion. That is to say, our DM told us that death was all but guaranteed. I played an old Goblin Artificer named Gix the Green who used potions as his spells. Gix’s whole thing was supporting the party and not so much doing damage. We made our way through the mansion without much issue, and arrived at the final room. We find a giant, 4-legged Spider creature awaiting us. I tell my DM that Gix will grease up the ground to trip up the monster. I was told that I could only get grease under two of its legs. I was fine with this until the DM added that it would only work if grease was under ALL of its legs. I disagreed thinking that if any of its legs slipped, it would be thrown off balance. The DM ruled against me and I decided to do something else to keep the peace. But Gix was really sad and died as was foretold. Judge Lords, was my DM in the wrong, or should that spider have to at least roll no matter the leg count? I humbly await your judgement. PS to sway the scales in my favor, the DM also ignored a Critical Attack to make the session more ‘interesting’.

Matthew Sturm

To the honorable Justices and Bailiff Jork, I present the case of the barrel rider. I was playing in a one-shot that ended with a PVP competition to win entrance to Heaven+, a premium afterlife. We had to find an unbreakable barrel on an island full of barrels and grab the Heaven+ gift card out of it in order to win. After the barrel was found, I grabbed it and began climbing a rope trick with it under one arm. When I was one turn away from reaching the portal at the top, one of the other players attempted to misty step up to me. More specifically, he wanted to misty step onto the barrel, hoping that the extra weight would cause me to drop it. My brother, who was DMing, initially ruled that I would need to make a strength save to hold onto the barrel, and then the other player would make an acrobatics check to stay on the barrel if I held on successfully. After some further deliberation, he decided to reverse the order of the rolls, citing that the misty stepping player might just immediately fall off and make it easier for me to hold the barrel. He failed his check and fell off, which resulted in me having to hit a lower DC on my save due to only having to withstand the initial impact rather than having to hold a whole person’s weight continuously. I succeeded my save and was able to make it into the portal and pull up the rope on my next turn. The other player initially argued that he shouldn’t have needed to make a check to stay on the barrel because he teleported directly onto the barrel and that I was unable to move out of turn. My brother cited that he might fall due to the rope moving drastically at the fulcrum point of my grip, causing me and the barrel to tip because of the extra weight. The player then argued that my save shouldn’t have been easier even though he fell off, but was overruled due to the original justification for the lower DC. For the record, I rolled higher than the higher DC anyway, so the lower DC didn’t even matter. I’m glad things worked out for me, but did my brother make the correct rulings, or was the other player robbed of his cool moment?

RoleforThat

To the morally correct judges, and enlightened bailiff Jonk, Today, I present you with the case of the ruined pants. I ran a session where the PCs were ambushed by a group of assassins. The assassins were looking for something the party had, and so were trying to restrain them whenever possible. At one point in the fight, the bard of the group found themselves tied up and held hostage, as a way to leverage the rest of the party to surrender. On the bard’s turn, the player had the idea to pretend to die in the hopes that the assassin would walk away, which I admit is not a terrible plan. The part where I objected is that to sell it, the bard described falling to the ground and shitting their pants in order to prove that they well and truly died. I initially said no, but then the entire table yelled at me and basically bullied me into letting the bard make a performance check to convince the assassin that they had kicked the bucket. I set the DC at 25, and judges…..they passed. I then had to narrate their plan working and we moved on from there. But, to this day, I still feel like the plan was too cartoonish to work, even though all my players still swear up and down that it was an incredibly logical move. Judges, who was right in this situation, the scatalitious players or the uptight DM? I humbly await your verdict. P.S. The bard player in question was my then fiancé, and now wife.

Matthew Sturm

To the honorable Justices and the Crabster Man, I present the case of the rope trick robbery. I was playing in a one-shot that ended with a PVP competition to win entrance to Heaven+, a premium afterlife. We had to find an unbreakable barrel on an island full of barrels and grab the Heaven+ gift card out of it in order to win. After the barrel was found, I grabbed it and climbed up a rope trick and pulled the rope up. It took 2 actions to open the barrel and then grab the gift card, so on the first turn I opened up the barrel and waited for the next round. One of the other players directed a kraken, which had followed us onto the island and had been attacking all of us, toward the area of the invisible portal in the sky in a last ditch effort to stop me. My brother, who was DMing, had the kraken use all of its movement to get directly under the portal, then said that it made a grapple attack with its tentacle through the portal, rolling to see whether it attacked me, another player that I had charmed, the open barrel, or just the air. I argued that it shouldn’t be able attack inside the portal because it wasn’t inside the portal and attacks can’t pass through rope tricks portal. He ruled that it could attack because he thought you would be able to punch someone through the portal even if you couldn’t shoot them. He rolled a 1 on a d100, which resulted in the barrel being grabbed and yanked out of the portal. I attempted to save my plan by saying that the gift card might fly out of the barrel when it was yanked. My brother agreed, but gave it better odds to come out outside of the portal than inside. The card ended up falling out outside of the portal, letting the next player in initiative walk up and easily grab the card to win. Did my brother make the correct ruling by allowing the kraken’s attack, or was I robbed of my well-planned victory?

Jon Gravina

To the Clerics of Dice Christ, this is my first confession: I am playing a Giff 2024 Battlesmith Artificer named Captain Hamhock in a homebrew campaign. To say he is optimized would be an understatement. Between his Antimatter Rifle, Giff Astral Spark, Arcane Jolt, Steel Defender, and Homunculus, he does a TON of damage per round, typically all with Advantage due to the new spell, Shining Smite. However, in the middle of our last session, I re-read Shining Smite and it only triggers off of Melee / Unarmed attacks, not ranged. However, my DM does not own the new Artificer source book and I intentionally kept rolling with Advantage during our last combat encounter. Karma got me as I still missed a handful of times despite a +11 to-hit modifier and Advantage. I kept my space hippo jaw shut as it let some of the other party members shine in combat, although they too were rolling with advantage. For 90% of the campaign, this was unintentional and a simple lack of reading comprehension, but given I knowingly exploited this in the BBEG fight, I accept whatever punishments you deem necessary.

Malia Balas

Dear disciples of Dice Christ, Last year, I began playing a true D&D campaign for the first time. For the first few sessions, I borrowed whatever dice my spouse had lying around the house until I could buy some unique dice of my own. About four sessions in, my half-orc College of Swords Bard was landing some truly wild hits in combat. I was hitting every time and rolled two nat 20s in a row. I even rolled a third nat 20 later in combat, but fearing my fellow players would accuse me of cheating, I lied and said it was a dirty 20 instead. However, this is not the main source of my guilt. After the session, I realized the die that had been rolling so well was not a traditional d20, but a Magic: The Gathering countdown die. I’m sure most of you know what that means with the amount of MTG references I’ve heard, but for clarity, this means the high numbers are clustered on one side of the die and the low numbers on the other. I genuinely didn’t realize this at the time and tried to justify it by telling myself I was still giving the die a good shake in my hands before rolling, so it was “random enough.” I have since taken that die out of play, and my campaign is still going strong; however, both of these sins still eat away at me. Will Dice Christ absolve me of this sin, or must I spend time in dice purgatory?

William Blankenship

To the high justices, legendary songwriter, the best guest on Drawfee, and the man who will dunk this year. And an east coast fist bump to the bailiff. I bring the case of Assassin doing their job or DM being a “meanie” I run a 5e campaign kingdom drama GOT ish campagain. There are many kingdoms all within an empire. The currupt empiror has spread false claims that one of the kingdoms’ queen ( a player) is a rebel. He has revealed a shapeshifter who is to take her place. So the party are imperial criminals and bounty hunters were after them. One however was an assassin from the blood guild an assassin guild the party knows of and has dealt with before. This one targeted only the queen as that is who the contract was on no one else. The player went down and I gave them a failed death save from taking the next attack from the assassin to hit them with a cross bow bolt. The table rebelled and that player said I was unfair and none of them being healers the NPC squire had the health potions. He was to far away to make it to her in a single turn as he was helping someone else. But because they rebelled I said this one time he can throw the potion to someone closer and they saved her. I only ruled you can hot potato a potion this one time because they claimed I was being unfair and mean to the player ( my wife). But was it mean to say the assassin was only here to kill one person and they were going to use every attack to make that happen?

grass_illusion

PRAY ! I beg the sexy robed jesters of the court, and their muscle, Jake “The Law” Hurwitz, to ponder my plight, if only for their own (justified) vanity. I’ve been a dm and a pc for a few campaigns with my college friend group. The group is mostly made up of friends who just want to see each other regularly and have little investment in the game, but one person is a HUGE D20 and NADDPOD fan and is very into it. Obviously Im a fan as well as I fork over my hard earned dollars for this patreon sub, but my friend is SUCH a fan that they have begun incorporating naddpod/d20 jokes into their characters and campaign arcs. It used to be subtle, a religious figure wanting everything to be cleansed — but now it has grown increasingly out of control with inside jokes and lore, to the point where the other PCs find themselves outside of a joke in their own campaign. Am I a fool to yuck their inspired-dm yum ? Or am I justified in not wanting to play with a dollar store Balnor spewing Plug (starstruck) quotes ?

Tierney Lorenz

May it please the court (and tickle the fancy of the hard-working and underappreciated Bailiff) - I have a question about how to zhuzh up a ritual spell. There is a player in our group who very rarely speaks up even though they are clearly engaged - they are our best note-taker for example. I think they may have a bit of social anxiety in a group that has several very colorful, talkative players. However, there is one instance in which our quiet friend consistently speaks, which is to declare that they are casting detect magic as a ritual spell. They do it in every room of a dungeon, every time we go to a new town, etc. The DM pulled me aside recently and said this was causing him some trouble in planning adventures because it restricts his ability to meaningfully use illusions, enchantments, etc. He is not opposed to the player using it, but a lot of interesting tricks and traps are functionally impossible if by rote this is "always on". But my concern is that pointing this out to that player would take away one of the very few things they seem to feel comfortable interjecting, and clearly ges a lot of fun out of. My suggestion was to introduce some kind of house rule that lets them cast the ritual and get basic info or choose to do an "enhanced ritual" with an investigation check to learn more about the magic beyond it's school (e.g., where that caster learned the spell). How do you make something feel special if someone uses it a lot but you don't want to take it away? And how can our DM rescue his beloved illusions and enchantments if the player always detects them right away?

Andy Horton

To whom it may concern, (this shouldn’t concern Jake, who should be primarily concerned with being cucked): I present the case of the over powered pistol party. I was playing in an online campaign consisting of 5 main players: A tiefling sorcerer A human fighter An undead warlock A dwarf artificer And me the half elf bard. I joined the party as they were wrapping up the “water deep: dragon heist” module, which features the Lantaneese Pistol a “single shot” pistols from a pirate crew. They had defeated the pirates, and as a reward been given the pistols. Here is where the issue lies: they never needed to be reloaded! Every turn the 4 pistols would inevitably hit, doing 3d8 piercing, and then for some reason 2d6 poison. (Not sure where the poison came from) this obliterated literally all Mobs in the first 4 sessions of the module. This made combat all but irrelevant! I tried raising this to the DM and suggesting the CR be upped, since we were a party of 5 level 5 players, three NPCs one of which was a level 5 paladin, we could handle more than a group of 4 hobgoblins. At the very least I suggested that the pistols should take a reload action (which I think is how it is RAW), which would have curbed the DPS if the party. There was never any combat we didn’t win overwhelmingly. It did result in a fun bit where the fighter would always be one step behind me and fire their pistol right next to my ear, which I reacted with mock rage to. Am I wrong for wanting more challenge in our dungeon crawl? Should I have worked against the party to steal the pistols?

Jarod With

Honorable Priests of Dice Christ, I bring to all of you a confession. For the last two years, I have been running a campaign for my partner and three of our friends. All of these great people share one, not-so-great, character trait: They are all VERY forgetful. Hoping to counteract this trait, I now open every session with a NADDPOD-style recap, have provided each of them a brief lore cheat sheet, and have gotten into the habit of printing/laminating custom item cards for every single item they get. During a recent session, my players asked to loot a dungeon that I had forgotten to prepare loot for. So, I rolled random loot using a generator I found online and began spouting off what they found before actually reading the descriptions of the items myself… One of these items was the Gauntlets of Ogre Power, a wondrous item that instantly boosts the wearers Strength score to 19. Our three friends all have decent strength already (18, 18, and 16) so they offered the gauntlets to my partner, a Warlock, knowing she loves loot and has a low Strength score. My butthole clenched in this moment as I realized this would make Strength her THIRD stat sitting at 19. She ALREADY has 19 Con and 19 Charisma due to rolling three 6’s TWICE during character creation (for real, I rolled them myself and she yelled at me when I tried to nerf her). So… not wanting to give my partner the ability to womp me more than she already does, I did something treacherous… I simply did NOT make an item card for the gauntlets. As hoped, and expected, the next session went swimmingly, as did every session after, and not a single person has mentioned these gauntlets and my partner’s strength remains a lowly 12. However, I can’t help but wonder if I have sinned against dice Christ by taking a page out of my players book and “forgetting” something to make my life easier. Forgive me, I beg.

John Squirrel

Dear sensual Justices and Baliff Junk, I bring you the case of the Monkey Monk and the Salty DM. I currently play a monk butler who is a homebrew chimpanzee race. During a recent fight against an undead who had a frighten effect, my DM got a Lil upsetti spaghetti about the monks Stillness of Mind feature, saying after this session that the ability would be removed from his table. I offered no objections, as he is the DM, and he later changed his mind. Should I have fought harder for my character's base class abilities, or can he just do that?

Sarah Good

Reputable judges and the bailiff whose title depends on the mood of Juctice Murphy, I bring the case of the fueding housemates. I, the DM, ran session one for a campaign ive been writing since August, 2025. I am running it for four players - two friends of ours, my husband (Call him Oscar), and our housemate (Anthony). Things went well to start, Anthony introduced his character who is basically Gambit (Warlock) fleeing his past life as a mafia member and Oscar brought his Dragonborn paladin of the Silver Flame who is the child of two characters from a past mini-campaign i ran (Yes, it was a dragon and a kobald, for those curious). Nearing the end of the session, Oscar ran up on the other three in an ally way just in time to see them murder a Goliath who was blocking their way as they chased a hooded figure. The two other characters stayed and talked to Oscar, while Anthony decided to run. Oscar threw the other two a rope and asked them to tie themselves up and wait for him while he ran after Anthony. Oscar caught Anthony at the end of the ally and pinned him to the wall. Anthony cast Eldritch Blast but failed the attack roll and Oscar held on tighter as the other two PCs joined them. The door in the ally opened, leading to a waterworks system and we ended the session there. Well, Oscar and Anthony went on to take their disagreement away from the table where the argument was that Oscar's character wouldnt have chased the guy that ran, but rather would have stayed and taken care of the other two. I now have Anthony telling me he isnt going to play his character anymore and made a whole new one and I have to work them into the story, despite having written an entire arc specifically for his Warlock. Who's at fault and what should I doooo?

Mister_Darkly

To the Church of Dice Christ: I humbly request absolution for my DM, who accidentally One-Punch Man'd my character. After a decade of playing together, our DM proposed two new rules for our third campaign: rolling in the open (no fudging) and a brutal crit homebrew (max damage + one roll instead of two rolls) for more drama and challenge. We all agreed. During the second session, my lvl 2 Fairy Ranger heroically pursued an enemy orc in a burning forrest. The orc turned around and punched my 14-inch tall fairy boy square in the face. Natural 20. The brutal hit took me past the negative max HP threshold. Instant death. My DM realized what Dice Christ had decided a few seconds before the players did the math. I saw him try to retroactively remove his homebrew rule to save me. I, a notorious rules lawyer, stopped him. "Don't you dare. The dice have spoken." I insisted he follow the rules we agreed upon in session 0. My tiny fairy ranger fell. The table went silent. Session ended shortly after. Now my wonderful DM feels terrible about his lucky roll and murderous homebrew. Please tell J-P that Dice Christ forgives him; he honored the sacred dice and the rules we all agreed to. He can go in peace in the light of the Shiny Math Rocks.

Rena DeLorenzo

To the gracious croissant throwing judges and the seagull magnet James. I present you the case of the PC turned NPC turned RIP. About a year ago I was in a campaign with my friends who I had played in several other campaigns with. This time someone new was taking the DM seat and she decided on an eldritch horror campaign. I joined the game because it sounded fun but I quickly realised that it was a bit too intense for me, so I stepped out and let someone else take my spot. My PC a rogue wizard child of Khirad (one of the eldritch beings in the campaign) stayed behind in a village to conduct research and help the party from afar. The dm would ask me to pop in from time to time to do a scene or ask me questions on what my character would do but for the most part she was an NPC. It wasn’t long before the first big fight was going to happen, between Khirad and the party, my character stuck in the middle of it. The dm warned me that my character might die and I was okay with that but I still came up with ideas that I could use to keep her alive. Casting feign death on herself to trick the party, turning invisible and running away, teleporting out of their reach. And of course I let her know the ideas in case she wanted to include them in the fight. The fight started and my character did everything she could to deescalate the situation or protect her friends not wanting to kill or hurt anyone. The party put up a good fight but the odds were shifting to Khirad so their backup appeared. A giant flying creature that could shoot rays of radiant damage (home brewed) It almost immediately killed my character but one of the party members revived her and tried to tell the squid to focus on Khirad the main threat but when my character tried to run for it out of sheer terror it honed in on her and killed her even doing damage to one of the party members who tried to get in the way. I was a little bummed over the fight, it felt a bit targeted but I didn’t want to make a big fuss over things. A lot of people in the group were upset. A few days later the DM let the players make charisma checks to try and dissuade the squid but none of them worked so the results stayed the same. Judges, the issue has been settled and I’m not that mad over it I’m more just a little sad that I tried to think of outs for my character and she died before I could even try one of them. Am I overreacting? Everything seemed by the book… I await your fair and honest sentencing.

ROMCOM

To the Stylish Justices and the Bailiff who can do better. I bring to you the case of The DM’s Secret Sessions. I’ve been playing in a D&D campaign for almost 2 years now, and most of us are new players. We are all friends from college, and the DM and one other player are especially good friends. This player’s character fell in love with one of the NPC’s, and as a party we worked together to get them to go on a date; the two characters are now dating. The relationship has been really beneficial to help develop this player’s character. I have no issues with this relationship, however… I have recently found out that the DM and this player have hooked up, and are now dating. This would not be weird if not for the fact that they are roleplaying as these characters in the bedroom. Should I confront them about it, or keep quiet about the fact I know at all? I leave the judgement up to you.

Johnathan Gierard

Dear Dice Deacons, I must confess. For I have sinned so gravely, I’m not sure what I can do to appease Dice Christ. I play a Bladesinger Wizard with high Con and the War Caster feat. In my most recent combat my wizard was the target of my DM’s ire, as he is very difficult to hit. Well my DM was successful many times and this is where I prostrate myself before the council. My wizard was concentrating on Haste the whole time. I forgot to roll concentration, for, every, single, attack. 10 times I forgot to roll for concentration. It was a difficult combat… made easy with free haste on my sword slinging wizard. I didn’t realize my horrible mistake until after the session… I thought I was in the clear. Chalked it up as an Oopsie. A grave mistake. Next session I promised I would be very adamant and on top of my wizards abilities. However, in that session I rolled only natural 1s. My highest roll was an 8. I fear I have angered Dice Christ beyond repentance. Am I cursed to forever roll below a 10 for the rest of my dancing wizards little life? Im so afraid mother and fathers, what must I do it balance the scales? Please help me make this dastardly deed right again. Thank you, and may Dice Christ crit on thee, amen.

Joel Little

NOTE: I have a longer version at the end in case you want extra context. To the three Supreme Crit Justices whom are taking Marie Kondo's advice and are using their New Year's resolution to get rid of things that don't spark joy, like Jake, I present to you the case of the Crystal (in the) Skull: I DM'd for a group of five, including a paladin and a bard. While in town the bard split from the party and eventually got ambushed by mooks and goons. Instead of going quietly, she decided to cast Thunderwave. The sound alerted the paladin. When the paladin arrived, the bard was at 0 HP. The paladin was told to put their weapon down. The paladin said no; I had the bard to roll a death save: failure. The paladin was told the bard could be saved if she complied. The paladin refused; cue the second death save fail. Now the bard, and me, are panicking. I then plead/reasoned with the player/paladin that the bard was close to death and they just need to surrender. The paladin adamantly refused. Cue third death save fail. Thinking of the most random BS I could, I had the cult leader take a soul stone, which didn't exist previously, and jammed it into the bard's forehead, r but cursed to do the cult's bidding or it would inflict compounding damage. Justices, I ask of you: did I go against Dice Christ by bringing the bard back from the dead? Which is a bigger buzz kill: allowing DM resurrection to remove the stakes from future sessions or letting a player character permanently die because of a stubborn party member? I am at your mercy. ***start of Longer version*** I DM'd for a group of five, including a paladin and a bard. The party was gathering info in town about the Evil Cult ™. The cult caught wind and sent a tail by the Thieves Guild. The bard decided to split off from the group. Eventually the bard was surrounded in an alleyway by a bunch of mooks and goons. Instead of going quietly, she decided to cast Thunderwave. The sound alerted the party and the paladin with her steed was the first to arrive. When the paladin arrived, the bard was at 0 HP. The paladin was told to put their weapon down. The paladin said no; I hard the bard to roll a death save: failure. The paladin was told the bard could be saved if she complied. The paladin refused; the bard rolls a second death save and she failed. Now the bard's, and me, are panicking. I then had to partly plead with the player and partly reason with the paladin that the bard is very close to death and they just need to surrender and the bard will be spared. The paladin, seemingly dedicated to their oath to never surrender (but not to save people who are dying), once again adamantly refused. The bard then failed their third death save roll in a row. Thinking of the most random BS I could, I had the bandits take the bard to the cult's lair. The cult leader then took a soul stone (think World of Warcraft), which absolutely did not exist an hour earlier, and jammed it into the bard's forehead, bringing the bard back to life but cursed to do the cult's bidding or it would inflict compounding damage. Justices, I ask of you: did I go against Dice Christ by bringing the bard back from the dead? While she was the one who ran off alone and started a fight, she didn't choose to bleed out and she opted not to metagame by telling the paladin's player what to do. Which is a bigger buzz kill: allowing DM resurrection to remove the stakes from future sessions or letting a player character permanently die because of a stubborn party member? I am at your mercy. ***end of Longer version*** Also, if you want follow-up about how a different party member killed the same bard later, let me know.

Baron Bullywug

To the most prestigious priests of pen and paper podcasts and the principled parishioners praying therein, I prostrate myself before your pulpit. Im not a religious man but I thought I would finally saddle up into this confession booth and hork up some bad deeds and submit a cautionary tale: I was dming a homebrew campaign over discord for some old friends and one of them was playing a ranger who focused on archery. I rolled on the random encounter table (which I typically don't use because I tend to plan sessions out enough to not need that extra fluff) and they encountered a lone wolf on the road. My player narrated herself reaching out a hand to pet its snout and, bless her heart, rolled a nat one on an animal handling check to try and befriend it. The wolf rolled a critical hit on a surprise attack and I thought, in my hubris, that I would roll to see if it bit off her hand. This was also a critical success. She seemed initially on board for this event but after she realized her archer character could no longer... well arch... she was visibly deflated. I realized my mistake immediately, robbing a character of their agency like that felt wrong, but I had attached so much hype to the event that it would have felt worse to retcon it. I had planned to have a replacement magic hand available at a curio shop (and an associated narrative hook) at their next stop but the campaign fizzled out shortly after this. I dont know. I was on some shit I guess. "Actions have consequences in this world". PS I am coming from Alabama to see yall in New York so thats fun.

Laura C

To the delectable supreme crit justices and the tasty lil' bailiff: I present the case of the long-term unprepared DM. I've been playing as a PC in the Witchlight Carnival campaign since summer 2026. I have some concerns about how my DM is going about her prep. It seems like she doesn't really know many of the rules of D&D and she hasn't been reading the adventure in advance so she seems surprised when we encounter certain baddies or twists. We do a lot of roleplay and improv, but we're often very on the rails because she is usually reading the adventure for the first time when we play, and we hardly ever roll for checks because she never asks us to. In her defense, she has ADHD and I have whatever the opposite is, which makes me a Murph-style control freak. To be clear: I am having a good time! The improv is really fun and we can do silly things in-world, but how can I break it to her that we (or maybe me?) might have a bit more fun if every session wasn't a cram session for her? I humbly await your judgment.

GuyOnTheTiger

...splendidly: I PROSTRATE MYSELF BEFORE THE COURT AND DEMAND A MORTAL JUDGEMENT! I seek justice as it was at the high crit's origin, and as befits the crime. I bring the case of Moolissa:The Non-Canonical Cow. I played with a group of friends and Bills fans who, rather than all players taking notes/responsibility, relied on one player, Billy, to recap at the beginning of each session. Running my first homebrew module, the party defeated a cult of vegans who had been "liberating" all the livestock. They also befriended one heffer they dubbed "Moolissa." Ending that session, I narrated the party bidding farewell to the animal this starving town could not spare. Imagine my surprise when, at the start of the next session, Billy read that they had taken Moolissa with them. He looked me in the eyes and said "that's canon now." I clarified that they certainly had not, and the session carried on as planned exploring abandoned Dwarven ruins. The third time Billy started a session by insisting that Moolissa had been with them the whole time, and always would be, I felt a call to action. I allowed them to have the cow, as they were about to enter a magical puzzle encounter including a series of long, narrow bridges. I forewarned them that animal handling checks would be required to guide Moolissa safely. The wizard confidently and immediately rolled a 2. I narrated that Moolissa slipped over the edge and followed the mechanics of this puzzle room. She fell past the party 3 times, bellowing in confusion. The cow comet flew some 120 feet before finally finding a bridge on which it exploded. The party seemed shocked into silence for a few seconds before decrying me for killing their fun, and then hastily butchering her to make commemorative jerky. So I ask the court: did I murder Moolissa, or was I within my rights as DM to defend the sovereignty of what is canon? I ecstatically await the court's judgement, and accept whatever capital punishment it "meats" out. PS: I recorded these sessions and would be happy to answer inquiries for further information, or defend myself from likely counter suits as appropriate

Prof Bubbles

To the licentious justices and the big baby butthead Paul. I submit the case of The Embarrassed Wife which includes some of the justices as part of the case. We recently had an incredible time witnessing Dimension 20 at the MGM Grand in Vegas. My wife and I stayed at the Grand ourselves and got lucky running into half the cast (including Murph and Emily) at the elevators going up. We were both ecstatic to see you and gave some words of excitement about the show. I said something to the effect of "We're so excited to see your show", to which my wife added "Yeah, we hate Vegas". And we continued on talking until the elevator came (too full for all of us). Justices, her words have haunted her since, as she feels she put a lot of pressure on you. I have assured her that more than likely you guys don't remember the encounter and if you do, you're more likely to remember our outfits in a positive way than anything we said (my wife was dressed as an Elizabethan woman and I as a wizard, our D&D characters for Halloween). While her intention was to indicate that we came for D20 despite our distaste for the capitalist sore that is Vegas, she fears she came on too strong. So justices, I ask you, was my wife the embarrassing wife worm she thinks she was, or can she relieve herself of her embarrassment since you probably have forgotten the encounter entirely? Some context, my wife and I had just come from the show a tournament of kings which ended in an unexpected pyrotechnics show that had her in a full panic attack, so I ask for your leniency in your judgement as she was still recovering.

Jack Ciccantell

To the most honorable Justices of the Supreme Crit and the practically subterranean bailiff Jake: I present the case of the near-death Dimension Door. In the game I DM, the party bard decided—for reasons I don’t have space for—to dimension door themselves and an NPC 500 ft straight up into the air, from inside a building. The bard then tried to use her subclass ability (Creation Bard) to create a parachute. Unfortunately that requires an action, so I began to explain how they would fall 500 ft and crash into the roof before they had time to take another action (RAW falling rules). At this point the player revealed that they had thought they prepared feather fall that day, but in fact they had not. They only checked the character sheet after casting the dimension door. I had them roll an Intelligence save to see if they remembered in character. They rolled a 2 (shoutout). The bard and NPC then fell for max damage. The NPC was fully dead on impact and the bard was knocked out. The rest of the party scrambled and just managed to reach the bard when she was one death save away from fully dying, with the Revivify caster not present at all (split party). The bard player loved the chaos and wasn’t upset at all about the way things played out, but I would have felt very bad if the bard had ended up dying forever because of this. What say you, judges? Was I too harsh in making the player stick with the dimension door? Should I have been more generous and assumed that the character knew which spells they had prepared that day? I humbly await your judgement. (P.S. under 2024 rules Bards are prepared casters, so they can change their spells every day.)

SebbitySwooty (Seb K)

The the bodacious crit justices and Jerp. I present the case of the sidelined trickster gnome. (Before I knew gnomes were evil. Teehee) I the forever DM was playing an arcane trickster gnome focused on illusion and tricksies in a fun, sort of western heisty campaign with a first time DM. At one point the DM introduced the perfect scenario - a high stakes game of cards against the homebrew settings trickster god. But only one character could play....Before I could say anything another player jumped in suggesting that her husband's character (a grizzled veteran type) should play because he is IRL good at cards. The DM agreed. I sat flabbergasted as he proceeded to lose over and over sort of derailing a scene we were kind of supposed to win. Even my attempt at cheating from the sidelines failed. Judges and Jerky, am I justified in being salty about this years later? Or should I let it go?

Gabe Terronez

Glorious Clergy of His Holiness, Dice Christ, I'd like to sing praise for the miraculous rolls of my player.

Lena Carson

May it please the court I bring forth the case of the halfling Vengeance Paladin (me) vs the DM This campaign is over now but the last session left me with a bad taste in my mouth My paladin Vulfgang had three specific individuals he wanted vengeance on throughout the campaign, two were never encountered outside of a flashback The last was an arch mage that had his best friend killed We go through a whole 3 year campaign and she's the final boss I get to use a bunch of abilities that had almost never come up (Mage Slayer) and manage to get the last hit The arch mage was winter and snow themed so I described her bursting away in a puff of snow The DM then decides retroactively (he said this over the table) that what we fought was a simulacrum and that she's still alive... but that this was still the end of the campaign This really didn't sit well with me after waiting so long for this fight for it to be ripped away simply because of how I flavoured the kill Is my DM right to be this mean :(

Alex VG

To the esteemed and fabulous judges, and the dripless bailif, I bring to you the case of the unjust grieving. In a previous dnd campaign that my best friend dm'ed for me, his (now) ex and her childhood friend, I played a mischievous yet caring bard called Mav, alongside a Fighter and Monk. One fateful session (and also the last.) me and the rest of the level 4 party had an encounter with a banshee, who had been manipulated by a foreign spy to terrorise one of their enemies' towns. At the final showdown, we faced the banshee, as well the spy who had a large metal contraption, meant to absorb the banshee and her power. It was an all-out brawl, and me and the party quickly found out this contraption was virtually unhittable. Yet, when my squishy bard went down, and he laid in range for the spy's burning hands, my allies did not come to my rescue. *Both* of them instead tried to hit the machine again! Eventually my bard died due to the attacks and failed death saves. Only *then* did the other players try to come to my aid. But, we were level 4 and had no resources on hand at all for this scenario. They were also both close to full health! and promptly started 'grieving' ingame about how this could have happened, and how they wish they could have helped me. Judges, am I overreacting or did my fellow players have no right to grieve for a character they did not even try to help?? Ps. We have since stopped playing together, although me and the DM still play together with a different, more considerate group. But I still miss my poet Bard.

Annie&Alexander

To the honorable justices and completely adequate bailiff, I have a case of woe to share. I have a casual monthly game with a group of mostly new players that’s been running for about a year. Recently, one of my players stopped me after a session and asked if we could get lunch together soon. This was an unusual request, but I guessed he had some free time, so I let him know he could stop by my office later that week. When we met up for some delicious dim sum, it became clear that he had invited me out to… break up with me? He asked me to kill his sorcerer, and told me he “just couldn’t give me what I needed”. I told him it was fine, and it was just a fun hang for us, but he was insistent that it was “a big deal”, and gave me everything short of “it’s not you, it’s me.” I left feeling more betrayed than if he’d just said he didn’t like playing anymore. Was this an overreaction on his part, or did I raise the stakes of this relationship without realizing it? Note, I felt guilty, so I also bought the lunch before going back to my desk broken hearted. Am I good?

Doctor Ransom

May it please the most effulgent Supreme Crit justices Murphy, Axford, and Tanner, and also the court stenographer Jon Odenhurtz who has to eat lunch at his desk by himself during recess. I bring you the case of the Moonbeam Space Laser. I’m currently DMing the fantastic Crooked Moon campaign for a party of four friends, and it had been going great until a recent super awkward moment that happened in the heat of an intense boss battle. The Druid player wanted to use his Moonbeam spell to zig-zag across the battlefield to hit the Big Bad and his minions. I told him “No, Moonbeam doesn’t work that way. You can move it onto another target then do damage. It’s not a 60-foot space laser beam.” The Druid player argued that the Moonbeam damages all creatures that it moves through and whined about how “They do it on Critical Role!” I got so mad I nearly shut down our Discord chat and quit the game then and there. Justices I beseech thy erudite minds. I’ve mired myself in a morass looking for a clearcut ruling on this damn spell with no definite answers. Am I being a buzzkill or is Moonbeam supposed to be a badass vaporizing space laser?

Thomas Eidson

May it please the court and the true crime podcaster they let be the bailiff because he kept hanging around the courthouse. I bring a case against MYSELF, the case of On the Fly DM Shenanigans. I am a relatively new DM who started a game for some friends last year after becoming obsessed with DND through Dimension 20 and Naddpod a few years ago. Keeping a long story short we are about 20 sessions into the campaign which focuses on an oppressive multifaction religion and a corrupted ancient deity. Last session, the party engaged in combat with one of the campaign's big bads and his crew of religious zealots. I prepped like crazy and wanted this fight to feel epic w/the possibility of multiple PC's dropping, maybe an emotional NPC ally death, or heck, even the death of a PC themselves. Cut to round 3 of combat and I am getting well and truly whomped! The big bad who had eluded, outwitted, or escaped the players in previous sessions was being overwhelmed and his beefed up crew was spread thin trying to defend a battlefield that was admittedly too large. Next round of combat, the bad guy dropped and I decided, in the moment, to invent a second form. Radiant light blasted from the sky, the just defeated warrior rose again, his eyes and mouth glowing, with brand new, on the fly, out of nowhere attack stats, damage rolls, resistances, and HP. My players being none the wiser to the totally made up bullshit I'd just done, the battle continued. Several rounds later, with an NPC making death saves and the PC's all at low health, the battle concluded with an epic CRIT from the player who was the villain's biggest rival. With no PC's having yet dropped I once again decided in the moment that a massive eruption of radiant energy would spray forth from the twice defeated bad guy as his devotion to the corrupted god exploded from his being. The PC who dealt the final blow would have dropped from the explosion but narrated an incredible scene where they stayed up at 1 HP due to their relentless endurance, an ability I did not know they had. All in all, no one was the wiser, no PCs or NPCs died, and the session was a success but the knowledge that I cheated on my original plan has been gnawing at me. I stuck to the new stats for the second form once I made them up but I still feel like I violated the spirit of the game. Most of my players listen to this show so I guess this is how they'll find out. I throw myself at the mercy of the court to be sentenced or redeemed! P.S. The PC who dealt the final blow and I saw Murph and Emily at the D20 show in Vegas. We were dressed as Barry Nyne and Syx down on the floor, the show fucking ripped. Hoping we can get to a Naddpod show soon!

Heath S

To the honorable justices and the little bailiff, I come to you today with the case of The Dirty Little Secret Between Our DM and 1 (one) Player. In my longtime group, we have all taken turns dm'ing campaigns and one-shots over the years. An instance from a one-shot several years ago still haunts the group. The party (3 of us) had just met up and were leaving town for our quest. The DM asked for a perception check. I rolled a Nat 20. He said, "You see a wanted posted for a guy that looks identical to Kamanye (one of the party members). It says he's wanted for putting people in bags." I turned to my party member, who had previously made a point to tell us about the big bag he was carrying, and when I asked him about it all he said was, "That's weird." And we went on our way. Lo and behold, during the final fight, Kamanye turned on us. When I was low on HP, he cast Disintegrate on me. When I made the save and thought I was gonna be okay, he used a portent roll to make me fail - killing me instantly. Our other partner member (Kamanye's IRL wife) was making death saves at this point. He put her unconscious form into his bag, which was then revealed to be a Bag of Devouring. The DM then narrated that Kamanye rode off into the sunset and lived happily ever after, thanking us for playing in a villain's origin story. Granted, it was hilarious. But the DM and one guy clearly planned ahead. Should my Nat 20 have helped us catch on sooner? Should there have been more clues to give us other players a heads-up and a chance to defeat this villain? I accept the court's ruling with open arms.

Matthew Rudland Barfoot

To the Judiciaries and the enigmatic baker James, Sup Dough Boy. I bring you the PVP (Problem DM vs Problem Player). I run a horror 5e campaign for a group of 5, the players commitment and back stories are varied. One player turned up one week without a character, so I said he could play as any level 3 character with amnesia and to create a new character or a backstory by next session to weave in to the plot. Two weeks pass, and the player arrives at the table, I see his character name "Jeff". "let me guess 'My name is Jeff'" I say. "My name is Jeff" he says in a channing tatum response. To the court, this player said no dialogue beyond "My name is Jeff" and during discussions would say this as his input. I can't help but eyeroll when he speaks and feel he is making a mockery of the game. To top it off, he likes to cast darkness all the time, leaving players unable to navigate combat and dragging out sessions. I'm trying to be chill, I might need the dice devil to make me a deal.

Devin Awe

May it please the most magnanimous, magnificent, murph-ect man of all time, Jake Hurwitz and whoever happens to be around Him when He reads it, This was my third session ever and a new player joined our table. His new character was a Drow covered head to toe in bandages to avoid the surface world’s prejudice. Prejudice that we, as new dnd players, had no idea existed. So when this character introduced himself with the session plot hook to go investigate an attack in the desert, I argued we shouldn’t go anywhere with him. A strange bandaged man asking you to go to a secluded location just seems like a really bad idea in a fantasy world. The rest of the party agreed with me on this and we refused to leave with him until he took off the bandages. The new player relented, took off the bandages and led us into the desert for the plot hook. Lord Hurwitz, should we have gone along with the DM’s plot hook more easily, or were we right to exercise caution against a sus weirdo?

Drew Mindell

(I don't know how to make my patreon handle not my Full Name, please introduce me as Mindy, or else feel free to come up with literally whatever name for me you want :) ) To the esteemed and honorable justices of the Supreme Crit and that guy whose only notable skill is the ability to read, I present to you the case of Kids on Brunch. I run a Kids on Bikes game based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a group of four friends. Initially, the friends were my roommate, her coworker, and a friend of mine from a writing group - let's call them Cat, Mushroom, and Toad, respectively. Eventually, Mushroom's boyfriend, Just Some Guy joined the group as a "guest star" (based on the monster-of-the-week structure enabled by the Buffy inspo, we can easily have people drop in for an episode when we have friends in town, etc). Just Some Guy ended up joining the team permanently, and soon Toad started dating a mutual friend of ours, Raccoon, who joined for two one-off episodes. Being ridiculously busy people (half PhD students and half starving artists with 10000 side hustles), it's hard for us to schedule sessions. What started as a biweekly game has dwindled to once a month if we're lucky. Recently, we were planning on our first session since before the holidays - a game brunch day featuring lots of yummy food cooked by yours truly, including both homemade french toast and fresh baked vegan cinnamon rolls. We were meant to meet at 11 to begin the festivities; with some folks needing to be wrapped up by 4, this worked out well. This is where the situation gets as sticky as vegan cinnamon roll glaze. Justices, the night before the game, Toad messaged the group chat saying that because of their schedules, it's been hard for them and Raccoon to spend time alone together, and they were hoping to do something the morning of game brunch, so would we be alright with them being late? I asked how late, thinking they meant an hour at the latest, and reminded them that Raccoon was always welcome to come, if spending time with them was the concern. Toad replied that Raccoon would come, and they'd be there by 1/1:30, 2 at the latest. We all agreed in the group chat, although Cat and I complained a little the next morning to each other. Mushroom and Just Some Guy arrived on time for brunch, and we did end up having a lovely time playing card games until Toad and Raccoon arrived around 1. Neither of them ate the brunch food we had saved for them, but we hopped right into gameplay. The session went well, with Raccoon being an incredible improvisor and lots of fun character information getting revealed. However, around 3, Toad whispered something to Raccoon, then went over to their bags. Justices, the shock and betrayal I felt when they started to munch from leftovers from the breakfast they'd gotten on their own prior to coming over was unparalleled. They'd ditched group brunch for a couple's breakfast, and when their hunger continued to knock, they did not even answer its call with my homemade baked goods. Justices, do I have the right to this betrayal? Am I simply too sensitive, when the session itself was a delight? Should I have talked this through with my friends before airing my grievances on a podcast? Or have these players foregone the right to ever enjoy my baked goods again? I humbly await your ruling.

Lili McGee

To the illustrious justices and their trusted key-jingle bearer,
I humbly present the case of Sudden Deflation. I play a Level 8 Astral Elf Druid in a Spelljammer 5e campaign. After barely surviving a brutal encounter, we were hurled into another with only a short rest between. That left me with my 1st- and 2nd-level spells and a single 3rd-level slot. I cast “Watch a Bitch Call Lightning” and maintained concentration for three rounds. Then an area effect polymorphed me into a goon balloon with 6 HP. I took damage, the balloon popped, I reverted to my original form, and I rolled a concentration check using the balloon’s stats… and passed. However, my DM ruled that because I dropped the polymorph form, I would be considered downed and therefore would have lost concentration. Yet isn’t the polymorphed form essentially temporary hit points? I was not reduced to 0 HP in my true form, merely… deflated. Her stance is because she ruled in the past I was no longer stunned when I fell out of polymorph due to a failed concentration check, setting a precident on form changes. So, O wise arbiters of rules and reason:
Has my DM truly burst my bubble, or should the storm within me still be brewing?

CommonCatepillat

To the Golden Gods of the highest council, thy kingdom come, thy crits be done, and Jake, leader of the Animorphs. I bring THE CASE OF THE PRIMATE V SPIDER At age 13, I asked to be in my brother in law's tabletop game with two other (adult) players. It was a magitech setting and my character, Snap Clackers, was a Nature powered monkey who gained his abilities and sentience after being captured and experimented on. Me and the other players got along and played well off of each other and it was shaping up to be a fun campaign. At the end of one of our sessions, the DM (Brother in law) announced excitedly that there would be a guest who would play a villain next session which excited the rest of the table as well. However, me being 13 and getting shit grades on my report card, I was grounded that week and couldn't go to the session. The next session I was filled in by the DM what happened. Apparently, the guest played an evil spider queen who womped the party and demanded they bring her 100 peasants to turn into her spider army. Judges, they agreed to do so. My character, who was present while I the player was not, was made to agree with them. You can see how this would be of big conflict to who my character was and, being new to roleplay, I simply played him dispondant and angry for the rest of the session, going against what the party was trying to do that session. The campaign shortly fizzled out due to other factors outside of anyone's control. Judges, should I have been more malleable with my monkey's morals or was I right to lash out at my party for their decision? (PS. The guest who played the spider queen was my 23 year old sibling. The one who was married to my brother in-law)

Jack Ciccantell

I can actually answer this one for you. The 2024 version of Moonbeam works like your player says. The 2014 version works like you say. So, depends which rules you’re using. It’s all there if you read the spells closely.

Zisel

May it please the court, your honors, and whatever extraplanar entity that decides how we're treating the bailiff today: I bring before you the case of the "ummm"prov DM. My regular D&D group are on our 6th game session together, and us players are still level one.... but that's not what I'm here to complain about, I mean report. Since we're all so squishy at level one, the party has been working hard to think outside the box and work together to sidestep combat and other unfavorable situations. In response, our DM has instead taken the path of challenging the party and obstructing us from our goal with -- and here is my case -- what I believe are fully improv-ed, not thought-out, not prepared ahead of time, bad """puzzles""". This has happened three times, with the most recent one being the worst. We'd been navigating some underground secret tunnels, following the clue we'd gotten: "Follow the X's til you hear the music, then take the path that calls to you." Some tunnels were secretly marked with an X, so we followed those. (So far so good.) However, this resulted in us stuck - for a literal whole entire 4 hour session - in the same seven-point intersection of tunnels (all of them marked with an X), as we kept Legend of Zelda Lost Woods-ing back to the same spot no matter what we tried. Finally, after hours of this, the barbarian player blew out her lips in frustration, and said she walked down a random tunnel again. This time, the DM said she didn't come back. We were all dumbfounded. Dubiously, the rogue then blew a raspberry, said he walked down a different tunnel. He, too, was successful. One-by-one, the rest of us unbelievably did the same. The DM narrated how we all stepped out into the place we'd been hearing about and trying to get to for three sessions. As we all packed up our stuff, I pressed the DM for what the logic of this riddle was, what did we even "solve", albeit by accident. I was like, "was making a fart sound the 'music' that would 'call to us'?" The DM laughed and said "No, there was never any music, or calling. You're just supposed to go crazy in the tunnels, and once you do, you get out." Which... what the fuck?! It's been days and I'm still salty about how they watched us be genuinely IRL frustrated for four hours for this """reveal""". I feel like they just belatedly made that up after not knowing what to do with us to make good on their previously improv-ed "clue" we'd been following. Justices, is it just bad improv all the way down? Is my DM a lousy-puzzle criminal deserving of public shame? (And who should definitely let us level up to level 2 already?) Or AITA and just mad that I'm not on their sphinxy riddlemaking level? I respectfully request that the court issue a ruling, a precedent, and—if it pleases the bench—emotional closure. Thank you. 🙇‍♀️

Devin Awe

Slick n’ Quick, 2026 I'm haunted armor. Heat Metal on me, but Cold. Should I hurt? Jake Sucks.

2fastBicurious

To the most honorable justices, and my burpless brethren the baby bailiff. . . Blake? May it please the court and give you all the most supreme crit. ;) I'd like to submit the case of the quiet Kenku. My table was running a home brew campaign and we were getting close to finding and fighting our BBEG. Our party included a kenku, Crowbar, who played by the mimic rules that he could only repeat words and sounds he had heard before. The BBEG was hidden away on another plane and to get to him, we had to enter a cave full of grueling puzzles and traps to reach a portal. We barely made it through alive. At the end of the cave, our DM announced that we would be silent and communicate only in written form or telepathically, (though no one one in our crew had the message cantrip). We were presented with a written riddle (think "speak friend and enter" style puzzle). Part of the riddle was solving for the answer, the other part was determining who could say the answer. If we answered wrong, or the wrong person spoke we were told the reaction would be TPK bad, and we were very weak already from the cave. We sat around the table passing notes, and determined the answer to the riddle was "Onomotopoeia" and the person to give the answer was a choice between either the youngest member of our party, or the physically smallest member of our party. The problem? Crowbar was both. Crowbar vehemently insisted there was no way he would have heard the word onomotopoeia before and therefore could not speak it. Our DM knew going into this that Crowbar was both the smallest and youngest and seemed to be gleeful about our predicament. After several pleas to both the DM and Crowbar to try to find a loophole we conceded we could not solve the puzzle currently. I suggested we take a long rest, exit the cave, teach Crowbar onomotopoeia, rest again, and come back, as it seemed the only solution. In the process, we ran out of potions on the way out, and on the way back our cleric, the party's only healer, went down, and she failed her death saves. My hexblade warlock attempted to call upon my patron for help without success. In the end only 3 party members of our 6 member crew, including myself and Crowbar made it to the end concious. Crowbar triumphantly said Onomotopoeia and the gate opened. Our session ended feeling empty and hollow. In real life there was a fight after the session. The players expressed we were upset at Crowbar for being so stubborn and at the DM for intentionally putting us in this situation. Crowbar argued that's how his character has always been and we shouldn't expect him to change because of a bad in game situation. The DM argued that we could have been teaching Crowbar words throughout the campaign before this so we wouldn't be here. I said it was an intentionally obscure word and we had no reason to teach it. Our DM laughed at me for being so upset, so I got up and left with the cleric, saying we were going to start a new campaign. Later, Crowbar texted me and said I had overreacted to a simple difficult scenario, and that if that's how I reacted when things didn't go my way, then no one would ever want me in their dnd party. I feel justified in being mad, but wonder if I didn't react too strongly. So I come to the mercy of the court asking, was I wrong to take the Murph response of "find new friends" or was my DM being unreasonable? I humbly await your judgement and accept whatever punishment I may receive.

Roman Zuniga

To the esteemed judges and the big boy bailiff that reads them their bedtime stories, I have a case that always bothered me: the blind-eye flyby. Some odd years ago I found a game online for new players, a few sessions in the DMs brother joined the game as a Aarakocra Ranger. The party was going to raid the Rebrands hideout during the night(shout-out to Lost mines before the obelisk.) Our ranger asked to do a fly-by of an opened window on the second level because of light coming from it. Judges, this turned into a 10 minute argument over the call because the DM wanted to apply a -5 penalty to the perception roll our Ranger was going to make. Our whole table was against setting the precedent that a Bird character would take a penalty from looking around while flying, especially in this moment since the Ranger passed his stealth check to get close without being seen. The ranger wasn't even dashing, just moving at base speed to watch his action economy, to which the DM doubled down and said that if he was dashing, it would be a -10. Judges is this just a case of brotherly razzing making it to the table or does my DM have a point to say that an Aarakocra has no scouting advantage on their perception? I will await your judgment and apply any decisions made to any games I run henceforth. P.S. while writing this I remembered that the DM never gave a point of inspiration to the Ranger, just the rest of us. Dude was unserious.

rollinginthecrits

To the diligent deacons of the deity we dearly call Dice Christ, I beg forgiveness. I have committed the sin of having a table issue and not bringing it to my DM. I had a dnd group that played weekly for about a year and a half until our DM (Paul) could not keep DMing due to personal circumstances. To keep us playing, another member, Allan, started a completely new weekly campaign, with Paul, Eliza, and me opting to join this new campaign. After we’d really settled into the new campaign dynamic and tone, a former player, Reese, asked to join “as a guest for a few sessions.” We all said yes, as we’d both missed the original group and had a few guest appearances from others with great success. That was two years ago. Since then, I’ve grown to dread every time Reese unmutes her mic. Her character is an egomaniacal edgelord whose behavior is excused due to their age oscillating between forced bits and maximum “edginess” at all times. Reese barely engages unless she’s interrupting scenes, forcing jokes, or demanding the spotlight. I genuinely cannot remember the last time her character interacted directly with the party instead of an NPC. This isn’t a character choice: upon reflecting, her previous character was the same. The difference is that Paul enforced consequences for shenanigans. Allan does not. Worse still, Allan and Reese now live together and are dating, and Allan finds everything she does charming and hilarious. None of the other party members have expressed discomfort or distaste with Reese’s actions to my knowledge, so I will also accept that I may just have a d4 stuck in my foot (or other colorful location). So please absolve me, Dice Christ, for I do really love this campaign and simply do not wish to navigate the dynamic of a DM and his girlfriend who can do no wrong. If I am in the right, I humbly ask for guidance back into the light.

Taylor

To the honorable supreme crit justices and the court jester reading this. I present to you the case of the flaky roommates. I had been running a homebrew campaign that had lasted for about a year. This was roughly my third attempt to run this campaign as I had tried in the past but campaigns had fallen through for various reasons. This attempt was by far the longest running and consisted of me, my fiance, my three roommates, and one of our college friends. All was going well with the campaign while we were all still in college. We kept a fairly regular schedule, we had advanced through two story arcs, and everyone seemed to be having a great time. They even started a secret group chat without me to scheme about the campaign. We were going strong until graduation. We were all in the same year of college and graduated at the same time. We had sat down together and worked out a post-college schedule that everyone seemed happy and agreed with. We played two sessions before the college friend had to step out. After that, our roommates started receding into what I call "schedule hell". We would make plans to have a session and then once it came time to play one roommate or another would come up with an excuse as to why they couldn't play that week. On more than one occasion, one roommate stated their reasoning for cancelling the session was because "they were planning to be pretty tired that day" (note: days or up to a week ahead of game day, plenty of time to rest imo) or "working a full time job is hard." I would like it to go on record that I too had been working a full time job for the same amount of time as this roommate. After several strikes for this planned exhaustion, my fiance and I had finally gotten frustrated enough and told the roommates that we just wanted to play DND, and this was getting out of hand. (Wife note: i was admittedly kind of mean about this after a couple months of torture). One roommate apologized and agreed to play a session at the end of the next weekend as we had originally discussed. Then on the day before the session, all three decided to stop playing and said they were to busy to hold up the planned session. Am I wrong to still hold a bit of a grudge on them? I put a lot of time and effort into making the campaign enjoyable and meeting their needs, and the rejection of the campaign lead me to self imposed DM-exile. P.s. I came home the evening they were "too busy" for the last session and they spent the whole night casting tiktoks to the living room TV.

sluttyforsoup

To the honorable judges… and the bailiff who I think said his name was Jam? I bring you the case of the Hot Coco Strike. About a year or two ago I was DMing a oneshot for my brother in law, sister, and brother (our usual dm). It was a Christmas one shot that was basically a dungeon crawl as they run through the cars of the astral train Santa drives to rescue him from the gingerdead man. In one car they fought a hot coco mephit and my brother in-law who was basically Ash Ketchum caught one to keep. The next car over for some rest, A bartender was there to give them a healing cup of hot coco and restore them. Judges… in the fight against the gingerdead man things were getting dicey…. so my brother in law asked if he could summon his hot coco mephit and eat it.. since they had drank healing hot coco before. I said no.. BUT before i could over my alternative for them.. they all said they were going on strike and TURNED AROUND in their seats….. refusing to face me. After a minute I was finally able to get them to listen and I said the mephit could go GET them some more hot coco potions. Oh honor judges, was I wrong for not letting them eat the mephit? Or are my siblings just crazy? PS to this day they say they are not sorry about it.

StatusAlbatross

To the honorable Justices and the other guy. I was DMing a dungeon run the other day and had laid a trap that worked to well. It was simple a "chest of holding" was in the center of a small room. The trap was when the chest was touched an endless hole to void would form below it and the chest would be incredibly heavy. They sent the parties construct owl to go and pick it the owl grabbed it and started sinking down the hole as it formed. They all worked together to try and save the owl and keep the chest. They were rolling 20's and were slipping towards the hole. However the construct rolled a nat one dropping the chest down the hole. The chest was lost but everyone was fine until the warlock decided to swan dive down the hole after it they did have a magic broom so they could fly. They weren't able to catch up to the chest and decided to commit an hour to just chasing it while the rest of the party sat down to play cards (in game not irl) and gave the command to the construct to follow the warlock. Well after going so far down the hole ended up doing enough damage to kill them. Feeling bad about the PC death I decided to let them role religion for divine intervention and the warlock was portaled out of the hole. Failing death saves at the parties feet. They saved the person and short rested, but the construct . During that time the trap reset. The warlock then decided to try and get the chest again before the hole opened. They used inspiration and luck points to get a 17 and then grew upset when it didn't work. They then dove down the hole again and put the chest in their bag of holding blasting them to the astral plane. Scattering them and their and the parties items in their bag across the plane randomly. They never investigated the room or tried to figure anything out beyond that chest must be mine. I had them role one last religion check and they were offered to be saved by a devil and they accepted, but their items are still lost. They sent me a long message as a rant about how it was unfair. Was I to harsh? Should the party have investigated more? I leave my fate in your hands

Cora Bright

Hello, delightful judges, Hotty Murph, Lovely Emily, Chaos Caldwell, and the Bailiff, the most supple Jake I know. I bring to you the case of the Nat 1 Attribute Remover.   I have been playing with the same group since 2019. We have completed two campaigns together and are on a third. We meet weekly, every Friday night via Zoom, and our current campaign is Anime 5e themed. I play Truck Kun, a literal kei truck who is min-maxed to be good at strength and speed, and horrible at everything else. In anime lore, Truck Kun is a joke character who usually hits the main character to Isaki them into another world. I have a feat called Blackout that lets me call a shot, and if I hit, the opponent has to roll a DC 10 Constitution saving throw. If they fail, they instantly get knocked out. I know this sounds crazy and game-breaking, but judges, you must know—I roll like Murph. That is to say, I look hot while doing it but consistently roll below a natural 10. I hit some of the time, but I’ve only knocked someone out using this ability once.    The incident happened during a tournament arc of our campaign. We are all engaged in 1v1 fights against strong NPCs to try and win a Devil Fruit (like from One Piece) we need to complete a quest in-game. The DM set up that each tournament day has five rounds. We have to win three to advance in the tournament. In other words, three of us have to win against NPCs, or we are out. We won the first day, but on the second day of the tournament, the battles went like this: first round, we win; second, we lose; third, we win; and then it’s me (Truck Kun) in the fourth.   As I gear up to fight my 1v1, I tell the DM I want to use my called blackout shot. It makes a lot of sense here—if I can knock my opponent out, we win the whole round and advance. So I roll, hit, and my opponent passes his Constitution check. No blackout. I try again, and the same thing happens. Next time, I roll to hit and get a natural 1. The DM says, “You can’t use your Blackout ability for the rest of the fight.” I say, “Wait, really?” And he says, “Yes, really.” I lose the fight.   Our fifth person comes after me and is quickly dispatched. I should note we are not all geared towards 1v1 fights, and our fifth fighter was someone we knew had a long shot of winning. We lose the whole tournament and are now going to have to find a way to get the fruit through dishonest means (this will still be fun! [🙂] ). Judges, the DM concluded the evening by saying, “Well, I didn’t expect you guys to lose. Guess I’ll have to figure something else out.” I respond by saying, “Well, Truck Kun is sort of a one-trick pony, and you took away the trick.” He responded by saying, “I'm sorry if you feel that is unfair, but a Nat 1 is a Nat 1.” Judges, I will admit I am a little salty. I don’t think Blackout is that broken. If someone has good constitution, I have a very low chance of knocking them out anyway. The spirit of Truck Kun is to hit hard and yeet people into other worlds and I felt like this fit the character in a non-game breaking way.   Judges, I am asking: Was it fair that rolling a Nat 1 to hit took away my ability for the entire fight? I await whatever you decide and will accept my punishment if it indeed was a fair ruling.   P.S. See the description of Blackout from the Anime 5e book we are using, in case it is needed:   Blackout (page 94) The character has a talent for knocking their opponents unconscious when attempting a specific called shot (page 166). Their attack rolls in these situations do not suffer disadvantages.   Called Shot to Knock Out (page 166) Rather than attacking with the intent to inflict injury upon the opponent, a character can instead attempt to knock their target unconscious with a called shot – perhaps by hitting with the flat of a sword blade or with a blunt object. The attack roll suffers a disadvantage. If successful, the target must make a successful Constitution Saving Throw against DC 10 or will immediately fall unconscious. The attack only inflicts one- quarter regular damage (minimum of 1 damage).

DJ Matty Lil Crits

To the Wife Worm and Wife Guys of the Supreme Crit, and whatever Jill is obligated to call Jake, I present the case of the Neglectful Husband. We were a group of lv 7s fighting a lich and his minions. the DMPC cleric had thrust her sword into the lich's chest to absorb his magic so the party would take only half damage to lower the difficulty of the fight. Knowing the lich couldn't remove the sword, my bard cast heat metal on the sword. After 2 rounds of my bullshit, my DM ruled that I'd heated the sword enough to melt it, even though that's not how the spell works. I was fine with it, and took it as a compliment for my spell usage ruining his plans. We won without any permanent deaths thanks to the cleric's revivify and her father, a Duke of Hell, being summoned to drag the boss to hell to completely skip the second phase of the fight. My actual grievance is that on the way home, the DMPC's husband, an ancient silver dragon and my DM's pathfinder character, arrived to guide us home. When asked where he had been during our fight, he said he had been busy doing "dragon things." As we celebrated our victory, the dragon cornered my character demanding I buy his wife a replacement sword, as the sword I melted had been an anniversary present. As a lv 7 bard, I did not have the funds to buy a new legendary class sword. He said don't worry, I can pay it off later. Judges, I do not want to buy him a sword. I realize this is just a quest hook, but I am a cheap bastard, and if he wants his wife to have a sword to defend herself, I recommend he be more present in her life. What say you? I humbly await the wisdom of her worm-li-ness and the compassion of the court.

Kevin G

To the most esteemed judges and innocent baby Jake (or if it's an off week - that schmuck of a bailiff), I present to you the Case of the Atomic Slash Smite. I've been running two separate parties in a homebrew setting with a large group of friends for the last five years. Both parties are working towards an over-arching goal of defeating a cabal of ancient sea elves intent on sacrificing the party's world. To help keep their individual exploits from feeling disconnected (and as an excuse to get everyone together), I usually run a "Crossover" Event once a year that allows the players to meet up for a lengthier, larger stakes session. This year, found them fighting the aforementioned elves over the heart of a lesser god . Early on in this combat, one of the party's heavy hitting paladins rushed the sea elves' highest ranking general. This is where things get tricky. In the setting we've established there are two rare materials that essentially work out to be a sort of soul crystal and an opposed malevolent antimatter. When they hit, they go boom. I've give multiple examples of this to both groups and even used it to set higher stakes previously. The paladin had a soul stone sword. The general antimatter armor. I attempted to dissuade the paladin without outright saying the issue "are you sure want to do this?" and even let him roll arcana first (he got a five), but he took the swing anyway and hit. The resulting damage took out half their allies and enemies in one fell swoop, thoroughly bumming out the paladin (though he agreed the results absolutely made sense). Still I feel a bit bad his marquee moment was somewhat sullied by essentially nuking friends and foes alike. Should I have outright warned him of the ramifications or was it fair to let him swing and deal with the literal fallout. It didn't exactly help that later that session, the other party's loxodon wizard fired off a second nuke intentionally at the same spot, killing about 90% of both side including the bulk of the royal family. The atomic paladin, the druid, and a zombified bard the only one's to survive. PS: Everyone had fun, despite or because of all this chaos, but I now wonder if this fictional bloodshed could've been avoided.

Chazz

To the honorable justices and their scrappy doo sidekick, I present the case of the magic sword slot machine. Justices, I am a DM and 3D artist. September of 2024 I participated in an art challenge called Swordtember. Similar to other monthly art challenges it encourages artists to design a new sword each day based on various prompts. Once the challenge was over I thought it might be fun to make stats for the weapons I designed and add them to my game for fun. Most of the weapons were wacky and some were kind of cool. However instead of just adding these swords to the magic store like all my other homebrew items, I thought to instead create a slot machine where the players could put in a hundred gold and get a random magic sword. I was so excited about this mechanic but when I introduced it to my players their reactions were all skeptical to say the least. They didn’t want to gamble their hard earned gold on a weapon they may not like, and some of the party didn’t even use swords. Eventually I coaxed a player to take a spin. They got a cactus themed weapon and were instantly underwhelmed by it. It did kind of clash with that PC's aesthetic. They asked if they could have a refund for it and I reluctantly agreed. Justices I never told them how much effort I put into that homebrew or that I designed all those swords. Of the 20 magic swords in the slot machine 19 were never seen by my players. Was I wrong for introducing a slot machine at my table? Were my players wrong for not wanting to gamble on a spin? Was I wrong to refund the sword? Also what do I do with these 19 unused sword concepts. I humbly await your verdict.

Matty-B-Rats

To the most humble and thrilling justices, and the frontrunner for “Most Attractive Bailiff 2026”, I present the case of the Fragile Felon: I’m currently running a grim post-apocalyptic campaign for a group of 7, that I’ve acted as a mostly forever DM in for the past 4 years. While most of my players are monsters in their own way, one of them takes the cake for objectively overpowered gameplay. This player - who we’ll call Thomas - has made a totally-above-board multiclass of rogue and Monster Hunter (an additional 2024 class that comes from the Grim Hollow expansion, highly recommend it if you’re looking for something new!) that is the most insane glass cannon I’ve seen in the decade or so I’ve run games for. His class, subclass, and species combination allows him at level 6 to use his action, bonus action, and reaction each turn to deal between 20 and 50 damage per hit on average, without critting. Again I cannot stress this enough, he has the capability to do this every turn and all abilities are rules-as-written. My dilemma comes to this: historically we’ve been a more roleplay-heavy party, and combat actions are usually more focused around what enemies would do in their situation instead of what is mechanically most advantageous. Because of this abomination of dice Christ that’s been created, however, I’ve had to target Thomas’s character several times in a combat simply in order to give other players an opportunity to contribute to the encounter. This character has nearly negative HP, so a strong hit or two brings him to zero nearly 100% of the time, leading him to either kill everything in sight or be killed by everything in sight. There’s been a few times that he’s called me out mid-game for targeting his character, and to his credit he is technically correct! However there are 6 other players and I’ve always tried to approach our sessions as “how does everyone have as much fun as I can provide”, and unfortunately that’s required me to wreck his character to give others a chance. So I ask you this: am I correct in hulk-smashing this unholy amalgamation of numbers, or should I allow his character to absolutely decimate pit fiends at a relatively low level (a real thing that actually happened)? I await your verdict with anticipation and glee PS: this is actually a follow-up post! A few weeks ago I was mentioned as the DM “Christian” in a DND court post regarding intentionally not tracking spell selection, and the author of that post is also the player that made this min-maxed character! I now check his character sheet occasionally to make sure everything is above board. He cannot be trusted. PPS: in the first post I was described as the “forever DM”. While thats technically true, I think “Twin Brother” better represents our relationship.

xatlern

Honorable justices and also their bailiff I juess, I bring you a case of potions accounting My party mostly gives all of our earnings to one player to keep track of party funds, and just keep pocket change for ourselves, except for one player who made a bunch of money on a side project and kept mostly kept that money for himself. In a recent session, that player got separated from the rest of us, spent all of his personal funds on something frivolous, and then on his way to reunite with us he murdered a bellhop in an elevator, and then used a Revivify and a potion of GREATER healing to bring this commoner up to more hit points than he'd ever seen in his life. We were not happy about this to say the least, and told him that he wasn't getting anything from party funds for fun money until he'd paid back at least 450 GP to the party funds (the approximate value of the resources he used). Here's the part where I may have taken it too far: I'm the party's primary note taker and I keep track of the bag of holding, and during our next battle when we were taking a beating but I was still annoyed with him, I may have misrepresented how many potions we had left, especially our higher level potions. When he asked why he couldn't have a Potion of Greater Healing I told him that he'd HAD a one, but he used it on a bellhop. We did all survive the fight, but did I take it too far or was I justified in being mad at this party member for wasting precious party resources. I await your judgement. Further information if desired: The player in question is a gnome artificer with the Tough feat and almost twice my max HP, and a long history of being careless. He once cast Thunderwave centered on me when were like level 3 because I happened to be standing in front of him in a hallway. I'm a half-elf sorcerer with a max HP of 90 at level 15. Myself and our bookkeeper, Human Rogue, were the most mad with him; our Dragonborne Paladin and Tabaxi Fighter were mildly annoyed with him but mostly stayed out of it. Also when we looted the lair after our most recent fight, everyone else put everything we found into party resources, except for the Artificer who specifically kept back about half the money he found for himself. I told him we have "a lot" of base level healing potions and "not very many" higher levels when in fact we have 8 base and about 20 higher level healing potions 🙃

Jake de Medeiros

May it please the bailiff, as this is a very business-focused case. I’d like to share an argument that happened at my D&D table when I was at business school in Vancouver, BC in 2022. I was running a campaign for 3 girls who were in my financial accounting class. Since I knew these girls liked money, I made sure to fill my world with lots of merchants, and made sure each player tracked their own coin purse. My currency system was simplified and was as follows: 1 gold = 10 silver 1 silver = 50 copper The issue arose when my party arrived in a city with a large gold mine & gold coin minting facility that had been taken over by an organized crime group. In response to the mine being taken over, the local government had temporarily suspended the use of gold coins in the region until production of the coin mint was resumed. I had hoped this would encourage my players to defeat the bandits so that they could walk through the city as heros and freely spend their gold. Instead, my players insisted that the limitation of gold coinage was government overreach and patterns of economics would naturally lead to the formation of a black market where 1 gold coin could be sold for more than 10 silver, with buyers hoping that the value of the gold would increase due to the disruption. Justices, I took economics, and they are correct that this would be a possibility. Instead of fighting bandits, they wanted to find a silver dealer who would buy all their current gold coins, then they wanted to leave the region/province and swap those silvers for more gold, return to the besieged city, and continue their exploit. I said “No, that’s a good idea, but no.” and they’ve never let me live it down. Should I have allowed this exploit? It admittedly would’ve been pretty fun, but I just got flustered in the moment.

Doctor Ransom

The discourse online begs to differ. Believe me, I’ve spent far too long looking up this damn spell. I can’t see how a 2nd-level spell should work just like a 6th-level Sunbeam spell. I’m hoping the 2 Crew can give me clarity on this cause the wording of the spell is far too ambiguous.

ZZ Digital

Dearest Honorable Crits, i present the case of personal hell. The party needed to steal a gem of planes-shifting from the villains. One player accidentally triggered one, and was warped to hell, where they began to rescue NPCs important to the party from personalized hells. The other PCs encountered a villain, who offered them a gem. Because one of the NPCs i mentioned was one of their husbands. The player was so intent on getting to that scene that she didn't ask any questions, and they were consequently trapped in their own personal hell and missed it entirely. As DM, did i utterly fail to reinforce this self-admitted villain may be lying, in seperating the party at all, or does the fault lay in another aspect?

Ryan A

To the honorable judges and Tuck's cuck, I put myself before the court. I've DM'd a campaign for about a year and a half and recently the party of 3 encountered an Alyxian Aboleth and some minions in its lair. The Warlock cast Banishment on the Aboleth, reading the spell out in full since she hadn't used it yet. The Aboleth failed and was banished, and the party finished off the minions. The Druid and a Monk wanted to prep to ambush the Aboleth. But I told them the Aboleth wasn't returning if the Warlock concentrated for the full minute. The Aboleth is an Abberation and RAW, gets banished back to its native plane. I asked the Warlock if she maintained concentration, she said yes. The combat was over but the party was clearly disappointed because the Aboleth did have some lore relevance and is just a fun creature to fight. Judges, I don't blame the Warlock (who does regret it and felt guilty) but rather myself. In the past as a player, I'd seen this exact scenario play out of banishing a boss to win only to be disappointed. Not only that, but the lore of my world has mentioned the planes are scattered from the Cosmic Wheel and so spells like Plane Shift only fail. But the Warlock was a relatively new player in the campaign, and I typically avoid shutting down player actions. Should I have made the spell fail? Should I have paused and made them pick a new spell to know? I humbly await your judgement. PS: The Alyxian Aboleth does NOT have legendary resistances

spider_pasta

To the ever veracious justices and commonly mendacious bailiff, I require a ruling to direct my course of action concerning a newly acquired d20 and its use. A couple months ago my Curse of Strahd party made plans to visit the local Renfaire together. while there, We stopped to peruse a dice stall selling beautiful but expensive dice and one of my friends commented that one of the d20s reminded her of my character. I remarked that in my experience "the more expensive the die, the worse it rolls". I rolled the dice to prove my point but rolled a Nat 20. taking this as a sign, i ended up coming back to the stall later to buy the die. I've been using it in game since and it does seem to roll an above average number of 20s to the point my dm has remarked on it but it also seems to roll an above average number of ones, and I'm not sure if its just coincidence. It's homemade and have gold flecks inside it so there is a possibility it's not balanced but in my opinion it's fine, no dice is really perfectly balanced and its been humbling me with ones almost as much as it's been critting. My DM has gently and i think jokingly suggested she doesn't want me using what i think she thinks is a slightly weighted die but justices i spent a decent chunk of cash on this die and don't want to leave it to rot in the bottom of my dice bag. Must I abandon my impulse purchase in order to preserve the sanctity of random chance, or am i good?

Reese

May it please the court and the incredible justices and the insufferable but innocent bailiff, The case of Session 1: The Butchering. I started a new campaign with some new friends. In session 0 I discussed that we’ll be starting in a big city celebrating the victory of a war, and the prior heroes that defeated the BBEG. Session 1 begins, during the celebration the BBEG who everyone thought was dead emerges and slaughters a ton of people. She starts with the heroes that defeated her before. The party tries to help fight the summoned demons and prevent more death but the BBEG swoops in and one-shots the party. One of my players laughs saying “what the fuck?” then logs off the video call. The others are all stunned, but i describe that the party awakes months later as one of the heroes proteges saves them and revives them. The party is quiet, and I narrate the groggy return to life of their characters. But they seem to think I’ve taken away their player agency and they feel like they’re on a railroad. Am I wrong? It’s only session 1 and I thought I was giving them an epic intro. I accept the courts ruling in all it’s immeasurable honor. Ps: i talked to the guy who logged off, he’s not interested in playing anymore.

Cass R

Dear Justices and cRaZy Jake, My friend group used to play d&d regularly, and our DM had a house rule: when you roll a nat one you put $1 in the jar. Jar money was used to buy minis, snacks, etc. That group stopped playing in 2018, but i recently made a scintillating discovery. For whatever reason, I have the jar. 😈 Justices, there's $32 in there. I want to spend this money, but my partner thinks I'd be in the wrong to do so. This group is still friends, but I'd be shocked if we started playing again. Would it be so bad if it went towards makeup, or ice cream, or pet food? If it helps, I'm 34 yrs old, and very tired. Jake, feel free to weigh in too. Thanks.

DowdMusic

To these absolute knobs, May it challenge the court and upset the power they wield. I bring you the case of "WTF High Crit, you got a problem with me?" I have written in in the past for your assistance and all you do is punish me. My players fill up a bag with bombs - my fault. My player brings and OP, roided out, charisma laden God bird to the scrub match - my fault. My players name them selves all Tyler - not only my fault - but justice Murphy says he must make an example of me and creates the first NADDPOD precedent in my name. Furthermore, Justice/ Lowly lowly lowly bailiff Axeford openly stated on record she wished to torment me. I have clearly been targeted and I demand retribution from this kangaroo court. I ask YOU NADDPOLES if this tyranny should continue. Good day. P.S. I don't even like this show. P.S.S. I will settle for Emily's 1st ugly mug, that unfortunately sounds extremely delightful

Jordan Washington

If it may please the Court and the Honourable Supreme Crit Justices Axford, Murphy, and Tanner, and the lowly bay leaf jaffa cake. I present the case of the The Dragon, The Egg, and The Eyeball. I'm in a pathfinder 2e campaign with my friends for a year now, where I play a leshy rogue named Peanut, the (now former) beloved silly little guy of the group. Our party was just about to enter a battle, but I couldn't make it that session. Instead of 'conveniently' knocking me out before the fight, my DM offered to do an online one shot the next day. I accepted, which saw me getting teleported to the Plane of Wood. In character, I wanted to get back ASAP to help my allies. I explored until I encountered an ominous giant eyeball emerging from a lake. I asked it how to get back, it told me to steal and eat a leaf dragon egg. I did so, and it brought me home. My team survived the battle without me, and we moved on. Later, we had to go through the Plane of Wood to set up a teleporter system, where we ran into the mother leaf dragon, who understandably wanted revenge. We fought her, and I made the killing blow. Afterwards, it was revealed that the eyeball was an eldritch being trying to tunnel it's way into the Plane of Wood, and that the dragon was the only thing suppressing it. With her death, it allowed the eye to grow, and sap the life in the plane. The problem now, is that my party is constantly razzing my character every session, saying things like "oh, don't give that to Peanut, he'll eat it", "oh, are you going to kill off another endangered species Peanut?", etc. But worst of all, I'm mostly sad that they don't see my silly antics as endearing anymore, instead reacting with annoyance. I see this as unfair, as the party has done other questionable things, from setting off fireballs in crowds, to stealing the souls of an entire (evil-aligned) village with a soul cage. In fact, my party benefited from Peanut's mistake by gaining the promise of a future wood dragon mount for our druid. Judges, was my razzing rightfully deserved, after hastily obeying the first strange being I stumbled upon in a new place? Or is my crime forgivable, as I naively just wanted to get back to my friends? I humbly await your judgement.

Lobbying for another Atlanta Live Show - Mr. Adams

What up Justices and the dope-ass bailiff?!?! This is D&D related as it pertains to the friend group that I DM for. So I DMed a monthly campaign for a group of dads and we had a great time playing, but our Rogue’s wife often created awkward situations including not allowing the Rogue to come play in-person and a few other awkward social encounters. The issue at hand: A little while after the campaign concluded, my Fighter had a real world birthday. I texted him happy birthday and he responded with “Thanks man! Bummed you couldn’t make it to my party on Saturday!” I told him I did not know about it but would’ve come if I had. He then told me “Oh, [Rogue’s wife] organized it and told me she invited you.” I played it off by saying that maybe she had accidentally invited a different me to the party, but I ask you, was I slighted and how do I proceed.

Philthy

To the illustrious judges and. I’d like to share my parties conundrum between campaigns. 3 months ago my party finished our year and a half long campaign despite some challenges (our dm, who is the usual host, had his basement explode (everyone is okay). After finishing the campaign one player, we’ll call Homer, invited his friend Bart to join the next campaign. Another player Marge has had to step back because his kid is going through a tough bedtime phase. Since the end of the last campaign Homer has cancelled a few sessions the day of or the day before and scheduling new sessions is increasingly tough because Homer and Bart are not good at replying unless you directly message them and tag them in the chat a few times. Justices and any others present. Would it be wrong if I suggest a time that I know works for myself Marge and our DM and we look for another player locally. We’ve all met through online local forums and probably could find someone new. I really like Homer but the like communication is getting to be a bit much.

DisClever

To the judges who need no introduction, and the bailiff that is often rebuked. I present to you the Tone of Beans. I run a pathfinder 2e game set in a wild west setting where people use beans as the main form of currency. (Good Beans for Gold, Shriveled Beans as Silver, Crushed Beans as Copper). As it was a wasteland desert, I wanted there to be a simple hunger mechanic to set the tone that you may have to resort to eating your money if supplies get short. I created some simple rules that worked with the currency math to give a feeling of worth to the currency, and the conditions that would occur if the party failed to find sustenance regularly. My players introduced the characters they would be playing, and my brother came out with an Automaton Chef. His character did not need to eat, and he had taken crafting with specific food recipes for survival. Judges, the mechanic became so utterly pointless that by the end of the 8th session I just abandoned keeping track. It didn't seem right to adjust the mechanic, so I have just not been asking or bringing up the food situation. They even got some extra money from breaking down their Corn Ears in what I called "Stalks". We are now about to leave the settlement as the adventure leads them away, the characters have all had some rebuilding done as they have grown from level 3 to 10. My brother's character has removed some of the chef aspects of his automaton in favor of pursuing gunsmithing, which is in line with his backstory. Would it be wrong of me to bring back my hunger mechanic, knowing they are no longer as prepared for it, or should I abandon it completely so they don't feel pressured to build to avoid it? We are well into our 30th session, and are really enjoying ourselves, and I would hate to spoil that. ***** Also if you want to try to play the "stalk market" here's the game. Roll a d20. This is the condition of your corn. Roll that many d6's. Multiply it by 10. That's how many Kernels you get, and each of those is worth the same as a crushed bean/copper!

DevyWevy

Clerics of the Crit I come to you with a confession, one that has sort of weighed my shoulders a little bit. Many moons ago, my party's Changeling Paladin died heroically protecting us from the fuzzy fists of a Yeti. As the group's druid, the task of resurrection fell to me and the absurd whims of her Reincarnation spell. He would return to us as a new, randomly decided, species. Judges, he loved being a Changeling. So when I rolled on our expanded species table, I announced that he would be revived miraculously as a Changeling, and not the Human I had actually rolled for him to become. I altered his story, and perhaps the rest of his life. Is there any hope for me? Please say yes.

GeorgeBB

To the all fair judges of the High Crit Court (tm) and the guy in the corner who keeps mumbling under his breath. I come before you not necessarily seeking justice but, advice to prevent a possible crime. (All names are fake) My friends, John (DM), Phoebe, Thalia, and I (Aurora) all regularly play D&D and are having a great time! One of mine and Phoebe’s mutual friends, Chloe, expressed interest (she has never played before) but due to scheduling couldn’t join our main campaign and insisted for about two weeks straight we hold a separate one shot so they could join and play. We also invited Phoebe and Chloe’s friends, Julien and Dylan, since Julien has never played but wanted to try and Dylan’s old campaign recently ended. We were excited to have so many interested and John was happy to DM and Phoebe and I host all 6 people (Thalia couldn’t make it due to work). Admittedly I go all out when hosting anything so I took the time to print out and physically fill out everyone’s sheet after they completed them on DnD Beyond. I also created separate “cheat sheets” that listed all their abilities, feats, etc. even making custom item, and spell cards so everyone could access all their information without needing their electronics. I bought all the food and helped John set up the TV for the game. I say all this not to brag or to garner sympathy but to add perspective. Now, we planned for this session to go from 6pm to midnight and we knew this could be long for new players so planned plenty of breaks in between for people to check their phones, use the restroom, etc. John began by asking if anyone had any last minute questions before we started and Chloe responded with, “Can we just start playing now?” It was weird but we brushed it off as excitement. Then we got into playing a bit and it ended up with me having my character kinda explaining the reason she was there and Chloe interrupted me midway saying, “Aurora, is that seriously what you chose for your backstory? Like seriously?” It kinda shut me down but I wanted to have a good time so I laughed it off and we continued. About an hour and a half later Chloe was laying down on the couch scrolling on her phone. Then about 30 minutes later when it came to her turn in initiative she said, “To be honest I don’t want to play anymore, I’m bored.” Everyone went quiet for a moment and we all kinda awkwardly looked at each other. John quickly nodded and said he’d take her out of initiative. While we continued playing Chloe began packing up, said goodbye and “Text me when you want to play again” and left. Admittedly it did hurt because I put in all this work for her. John, Phoebe, Julien, and Dylan and I all finished the one shot having a great time and even agreeing to play again when their schedules allow it. Now, this is the issue. Phoebe, who is much closer to Chloe, said to not add her to the group chat and just to ask Dylan and Julien next time. While everyone kinda agreed that we like Chloe as a friend, we just don’t wanna play D&D with her, I can’t help but feel bad. Phoebe reassured me that she’d talk to Chloe but I don’t know… I don’t wanna play with her again either but, it feels rude to just exclude her. Would I be a bad person if I just invite Julien and Dylan to play again (it’d be the same party just without Chloe and her character)?

MadMadamMim

Dear cutie patootie judges and sweetest balif Jake-that's right. I am not afraid to be nice to Jake. I come to you on behalf of one whom I love. My DM (also spouse) runs the most magical and fun campaign I have ever been a part of in the last 15 years I have been playing DND. We just went on vacation and one of my fellow players offered to DM (for the first time) a one shot for the party when we got back. They mentioned this would be a pre-bought one shot so all of us could just show up, open the box and play. We planned the day and time and were feeling good to go. The day we got back from vaction this player did not know where we were playing, what time, and totally forgot they had offered to DM. They also decided that instead of the pre-made one shot they were going to run it in our main campaign world with our regular characters as a connection between our last session and our next one. Before the session they asked him if they could give themself a magical item at the end of the session and if they could give all us players an extra cantrip as a prize for playing. He handled it quite delicately but overall said no and told them they could only run it in our main campaign world if it would not interfere with the story at all. The next day we played. They immediately started playing as already established NPC's changing their overall character and dispositions. And making those NPC'S do things to us that they would not have. When we got home he told me that this was not the plan and they had gone rogue. Judges, was he right to go along with it in the moment to keep the peace? He doesn't currently listen to the podcast (heavens please forgive) so I will liaison dutifully.

Caddy Wampus

Dearest and honorable Supreme Crit Justices and the lowly (or also dear and honorable, if we're in that mood) bailiff, if it please the court, I present the case of the deadly magic drugs. My 13th level party are currently in the fey wild pursuing a long-time enemy (who perma-killed a previous party member) and her army. My character very much wants revenge on this enemy and we have been building toward a battle with them for many sessions, with my DM emphasizing how dangerous and deadly this encounter will be. In the process of preparing for this battle, my wizard discovered a fey drug that allows the caster to cast spells without using spell slots (inspired by A Court of Fey and Flowers) and was warned it would be quite dangerous for mortals to take. I traded a rather valuable magic item for it, thinking this would be a very powerful, one-time boost for this upcoming battle. When my wizard cast identify on it, my DM initially still did not tell me what the exact drawbacks of drug would be. After some back and forth about what identify can and can't do, I learned that once I took it, I would no longer have access to my own spell slots -- all spells would be powered by the drug. Additionally, my DM asked me to keep track of the total spell levels I was using while on it, and when the effect ended, I would take that number of d6 of damage, ie if I used a 7th and a 6th level spell, I would take 13 d6 of damage. In short, if I use this powerful resource to full effect in a long battle, I will almost certainly die afterwards. Being able to cast more than one 7th level spell is extremely powerful and I agree should come with drawbacks, but I felt a little cheated that my own normal spell casting would also end up dealing me damage, especially since my DM didn't seem to want to tell me ahead of time what would happen. Tell me judges, did I get swindled by fey trickery or am I wanting too much bang for my buck?

Lightning 717

I bequeath this case to the justice esquires and the dastardly man you call a "balif", I bring you the case of the almost immediately ruined character trope. I started playing in a new campaign started in my friend group, and the character I chose to make was a knight, one who promised to never take off his helmet after his tragic past to hide his face, including in the story that he might downright have a meltdown without it. Session one, we all awake on a beach after our ship crashed. Each party woke up missing something that we had to find, cool little thing to search for and all that, cool I thought originally. Judges, the dm decided my character was missing his helmet, the thing I made sure to write down was integral to the character. I panicked a little and immediately asked if I could look for, a nat 20 on an investigation later and I did, but the dm told me after that the DC was over 20 already so without such a high roll I wouldn't have been able to find it. It all worked out, and the campaign fizzled out unfortunately, but still. The fact that an integral part of my character and how he played was almost immediately taken away forever from me has sat wrong with me to this day. Should I have said something in the moment, or always trusted the judgement of a dm who's campaign went poorly enough to fizzle out? I trust your judgment with full confidence

Freddie Meraw

To the esteemed and vivacious justices, and bailiff Jack Herwitz: Firstly, I have no intention of jacking any of her wits, thank you for your understanding. Secondly, I bring you the case of the Levitation Parachute; I am playing a Sorcerer in a game with two other PCs, a Cleric and a Witch (shoutout Worlds Beyond Number) with my parter as the DM. Our party is searching for a fallen star that can grant wishes, and this first part of the campaign involves searching for fragments needed to locate it. My character is a princess who is Desperate for that wish, in order to restore her homeland which was essentially nuked by green dragons while she was in a 900-year coma. One of the shards was held by a mad giant at the top of a tower reaching from the sea to heights above the clouds. During the fight the giant fell from the tower, presumably to its doom. My character panicked thinking the shard could be lost, and leapt off after the plummeting foe. Justices, my sorcerer does not have the Feather Fall spell. However, what she DOES have is Levitate spell. Since the spell specifies that it suspends the target weightlessly and allows the caster to change the target’s altitude by 20 feet each turn, I figured that if I cast it on myself while falling it would stop my acceleration downwards, and then could slow my falling speed by 20 feet each turn until I was falling at a speed that wouldn’t harm me. However, my lovely DM ruled that the spell did not work that way, saying “it’s not Fly, that’s a level 3 spell.” By her reasoning, I was falling too fast for the spell to stop my descent, and the change in altitude each turn was a change in position, not speed, so it couldn’t slow my descent gradually. I feel strongly that this ruling is overly restrictive considering the circumstances, bordering on ridiculous, but the other players agreed with her so I backed down before the argument got too heated. Justices, feather fall is a level 1 spell which can affect multiple targets as a reaction, saving them instantly. Am I wrong for thinking a level 2 levitate spell could accomplish something similar on a single target, cast as an action, with a long way to fall so there is time to slow the descent gradually? I humbly submit to the court’s judgement. P.S.: my PC was saved by a flying NPC that the DM had already placed midway down as a failsafe, so there is no harm done, but that felt a bit cheap and it still frustrated me to have my idea shut down. In hindsight, perhaps I could have conjured some croissants to cushion my landing and avoided the argument entirely. I’ll keep that in mind in the future.

Susannah B.

Dearly revered reverends, I come to you with not a confession but a conversion. My party (called T&D, tea party and D&D combo) just finished our 13-year-long campaign at a weekend cabin trip. Previously, I was a nonbeliever and thought that dice rolls were just chance. But when it came time for the very last roll of the game, to convince the final boss to lay down her weapons so we may spare her life - I rolled a natural 20. Suffice it to say I am now a devout follower of Dice Christ and I know now that the dice really do tell a story along with the rest of us. Blessed be!

Gabe Terronez

Most glorious clergy of His Holiness, Dice Christ, and their Jake too, I’d like to sing praise for the miraculous rolls of my player. I am but a humble fool trying to DM for my friends. I designed an encounter where they were investigating a haunted fort. They were introduced to their tasks by a centurion who had a large, brown dog. Among other more important things, he told them the dog might follow them around while they work. They proceeded to find some enchanted tunics of green, orange, white and purple giving various +1 perks. It all came to a head at night when the soldiers, trying to get to their beds, kept running in one door only to pop out another. They finally sniffed out the wizard responsible as well as the fact that I, in their words, “Scoobed their asses.” One player exclaimed, “Wait, what color were those tunics? Mine is orange, I’m Velma! Jinkies!” Another cried, “I'm fucking pissed, I hate this.” They proceeded to run in and out of the doors of the hall eventually parlaying with the wizard and sparing his life, potentially opening them to change sides in the campaign. This brings me to the miraculous rolls. One player, a Circle of Stars Druid named Illum Kun (that's another story) rolled 4 nat 20s in his first 6 rolls, rolling a few more throughout the session. He carried the party through the investigation and getting enough successful persuasion attempts during combat to get the wizard to hear them out. So I sing: Amazing Dice, how sweet the sound Of Dice Christ womping me They once were lost, but now they crit Were blind, but now they see …I Scoobed their asses If you must forgive a sin today forgive me for the Scoobin’. If I may be so bold as to ask. P.S. I’m not sorry, Murph, I would do it again!

Emily Holmes

I come barring praise for Dice Christ. I've been running a campaign of silly goblins and other creatures, I've got a wonderful set of players and I just kept critting on them for the first couple of sessions, but I stayed true! Doing so has led to so many great moments, running from animated armor and defeating a giant toad that was in their way. They have since throughly whompped since. We also stayed true to a crit fail by a player which led to the breaking of an important artifact which led them to flee their leader's camp with much hilarity and shenanigans. The dice are helping us tell a wonderful story filled with laughter!

Gabe Terronez

Most glorious clergy of His Holiness, Dice Christ, and their Jake too, I’d like to sing praise for the miraculous rolls of my player. I am but a humble fool trying to DM for my friends. I designed an encounter where they were investigating a haunted fort. They were introduced to their tasks by a centurion who had a large, brown dog. Among other more important things, he told them the dog might follow them around while they work. They proceeded to find some enchanted tunics of green, orange, white and purple giving various +1 perks. It all came to a head at night when the soldiers, trying to get to their beds, kept running in one door only to pop out another. They finally sniffed out the wizard responsible as well as the fact that I, in their words, “Scoobed their asses.” One player exclaimed, “Wait, what color were those tunics? Mine is orange, I’m Velma! Jinkies!” Another cried, “I'm fucking pissed, I hate this.” They proceeded to run in and out of the doors in the hall. Eventually, parlaying with the wizard and sparing his life. Potentially opening them to change sides in the campaign. This brings me to the miraculous rolls. Praise Him. One player, a Circle of Stars Druid named Illum Kun (that's another story) rolled 4 nat 20s in his first 6 rolls, rolling a few more throughout the session. He carried the party through the investigation and getting enough successful persuasion attempts during combat to get the wizard to hear them out. So I sing: Amazing Dice, how sweet the sound Of Dice Christ womping me They once were lost, but now they crit Were blind, but now they see …I Scoobed their asses If you must forgive a sin today forgive me for the Scoobin’. If I may be so bold as to ask. P.S. I’m not sorry, Murph, I would do it again!

Evan Sherlock-Hubbard

To the Justices Murphy, Axford and Tanner - and more importantly, to You, the listeners, I bring the case of Summoner V. Gravity. I was in a Pathfinder 1E game playing a summoner. The BBEG of our current arc, a heavily-plated anti-paladin with a bonkers Armour Class, faced us in an encounter the DM had pre-described as, "Run or Die". I was playing a Summoner, with my personal summon Congo, being a hulking bipedal Crab Creature that our party usually treated like a tank and a grappler. A light went off in my head -- I cast Evolution Surge, a spell that gives my Eidolon temporary points that can be spent on their physical form. I invested in giving Congo a set of large feathered wings. With his existing crab claws and hooked carapace, Congo was able to grapple the BBEG, and with a hasted speed boost I had him fly vertically skyward for two full turns, soaking a series of attacks until finally de-summoning... And dropping the BBEG from 350 feet in the air. The number of dice I got to roll for damage that turn was like a rattling avalanche of joy, and when I announced the total to the happiness of the rest of the party, my DM frowned, looked at his sheet, and said, "Well he's heavily armoured, so he's cushioned from a lot of that damage" and the battle continued. After a long time we did end up having to flee, since more bad guys began to pour out of nearby buildings. Was I robbed of a sweet kill that took my DM by surprise? Or was the DM right to rule that the damage would be reduced even if I think he wanted to save his cool anti-paladin? I accept any ruling you give, unless Jake is somehow involved in the decision.

Wyred

I joined a campaign my partner was in with her friends, who I didn't really know. The DM was running the same module with another group and thought it would be fun for both parties to race to retrieve a special amulet for a town festival. Each group ran separate sessions through an underwater grotto, using potions to breathe. At the start of the joint session the DM made it very clear that no one would be allowed to die from PvP. Our group was not allowed to make stealth checks even though we ended the previous session having Pass Without Trace up. Our rogue got the amulet off a giant shark and I cast Invisibility on him. The Wizard in the other group--who was also the DM's husband--said, "Focus fire the Druid (me) to break concentration" even though his character had no way to speak underwater. Their party of 6 players proceeded to ignore the shark and take me down in one round, though I held concentration and the rest of my party dashed away with the item. We ultimately "won" but I was salty as the sea. Your honors, should we have gotten to make stealth roles against the other players’ perception? Should the DM have stopped the table talk to uphold her "No PvP killing" rule? I await your ruling with potion-baited breath! Supplementary Evidence: Our group was two Rogues and a Barbarian, starting at level 3, so I had built my Druid to specialize in stealth. We had used Pass Without Trace to avoid most combat in the previous session and still had plenty of time left on it. The full group session was online with about 10 players, so I really tried to be understanding about how much cat-herding the DM was having to do. We entered the final area, a large sea cave, from opposite sides, where the amulet we were all after was being guarded by the giant shark. The amulet was hanging from a spear stuck into the giant shark. One of our Rogues had the ability Psychic Whispers, which allowed our party to communicate under water. We planned to just grab and dash rather than fight, to avoid unnecessary PvP or animal cruelty. The other group initially fought the shark until our party got the amulet, then ignored it to take me down even while it was still attacking them. I had pointed out that the DM’s husband had no way to speak to his party underwater when he told them to focus on me but they all still acted based on his table talk. Our Barbarian did manage to scoop my unconscious body but it still felt like I got punished for our group trying to honor the spirit of the “no killing” rule.

bluemage27034

Supreme Crit Justices and Nacho Supreme Bailiff Jake, I would like to present the case of the rogue rogue. After my several year DND table broke up due to the DM moving across the country, I started going to a local board game bar to play one shots to scratch the itch. 99% of the time, it's been extremely pleasant and everyone was extremely cool. Once though, there was a dude who was extremely not cool. Dressed in a full 3 piece suit, he played a unlawful evil rogue. Every time the party talked to a NPC or interacted with anything, this guy tried to steal or pillage or pickpocket it, despite the DM warning the rogue that we were facing a wary troop of guards or a powerful, ancient owner of a magic item store. In the several combat encounters, he inevitably disengaged, looted a body, then hid. I think he rolled one attack in the session. It got to the point that on his every turn, you could feel the life be sucked out of the table as the DM would sigh and say "I guess you can." Halfway through the session, I started using my monk (modeled after Aang from Avatar) to actively block the rogue's maneuvers, repeating every time (in character) "hey, stop being a huge dick." The DM also sighed when I did this, but did let me contest things and effectively cock block the rogue. Was I in the right to take matters into my own hands at a one shot session at a board game bar? I'm pretty sure the mood in the room perked up as I started checking the rogue, but I still feel bad because I worry I made the DM's life harder. I fully understand it was his game to run, but I couldn't let the dick keep getting away with it. P.S. For additional flavor, when we were fighting the Big Bad of the oneshot in the streets and things were getting dire, the rogue announced he was going to seek cover in the local tavern. We all leaned in, finally thinking he was playing an objective, when he announced his PC bought a drink at the bar. The guy then stood up and said he had to leave in real life. He gathered his stuff and left without another word. After he'd gone, the DM said to the table "I think he might be a rogue in real life." ----- Completely separately, I hope you are having a nice day Jake and things are going well for you.

Styx

Hello Bailiff Jake and others. I present the case of the DM vs the Right Honourable Justices of D&D Court. I am not the DM of the game in question, but as one of her players I am standing in as her legal counsel. This was a few weeks ago during a dungeon crawl style game. We were on a roll, so instead of stopping after completing two floors of the dungeon as usual, we decided to keep going without taking a Long Rest. We took a 30-45 minute break for food during which the DM statted a monster of an appropriate level, which later turned out to use Spinosaurus stats. The fight began with the monster dealing 20+ damage to each of our three characters, and so during her first turn, the wizard cast Hold Monster for the first time, which immobilised the Spinosaurus. Long story short, combined with a Bane from the cleric (myself) and some unlucky rolls from the DM, this meant that the Spinosaurus never got to take an action, or one of its many Legendary Actions in four rounds of combat. We all had a good laugh about this and it was a hilarious, if anticlimactic, ending to a great night. However, the DM lamented that the Spinosaurus had no Legendary Resistances, a feature which has been described as demoralising and spell-slot-wasting by one of the judges of this very court! The charge is levelled towards Judge Emily Axford for disparaging the noble Legendary Resistance which would have saved this poor Spinosaurus from an undignified end and our DM from getting whomped. PS. The DM introduced me to the show and Emily is her personal D&D hero, so it's not real heat, I promise.

Christian Waters

Dear Justices and the highly anticipated and newly touted Jake, I come to you with the case of the sideways hop (in case you were going to learn to dunk). I DM for a group of close friends once every long while when our work schedules finally line up and we ran the Dragons of Ice Spire Peak a while back when we first began. We had made it into a cave and had already had a few encounters and story RP when one particularly tough encounter came up. One of my three PCs (eladrin rogue) was investigating something outside the chamber the other two were in when the two PCs who were venturing deeper into the cave were ambushed. The first PC (Tabasco Fighter) managed to escape the chamber as they were near the entrance while my other PC (rabbit folk cleric) got beat up pretty good. The problem lies with the rabbit folk. These PCs were in a cave which I described as being near the top of the Tabaxi and Eladrins head which I imagined out it a foot and a half or so above the rabbit folks head. My rabbit folk, nearing being downed asked if they could jump out of the room. I argued that they wouldn’t be able to travel very far forward with a jump and could jump out of the room as there was only a ceiling to jump into. My rabbit folk argued that they, as a rabbit, should be able to use their entire jump as movement to escape and maybe even not take an opportunity attack. Judges, am I mistaken thinking that even as a rabbit folk (harengon) that my PC shouldn’t be able to use their jump as a full horizontal movement that imposes no restrictions or opportunity attacks? I ultimately ruled that they could travel half their move speed and take an opportunity attack which they avoided and they managed to escape resulting in our party beating the baddies.

Tyler

Greetings most honorable, magnificent justices of the supreme crit. Hi bailiff Jonk. I previously submitted a case regarding my DM playing a sad trombone sound on the discord soundboard after a heartfelt moment from a PC in our pathfinder game, Nightingale, that robbed Nightingale of his character moment. Our DM had made it up to Nightingale over the course of the campaign through a mixture of more heartfelt backstory moments, touching and powerful interactions with NPC’s, and fun homebrew power ups. This case is not about Nightingale or even our DM but unfortunately the accursed discord soundboard is semi involved. I play a strong willed snow lynx beastkin ranger named Tanja who has a very well defined moral code that she follows both in and out of combat. Some examples of this include being honest to a fault, believing wholeheartedly that she can overcome any obstacle by taking it head on, never attacking an enemy from behind, and ensuring that anybody who she kills in battle receives a quick, honorable death. While our party was exploring a floating wizard’s tower, Tanja stumbled upon a room with nothing but a mirror and signs of a struggle on the floor and walls. I was taken to a separate one on one call with our DM, and Tanja’s reflection started talking to her combatively. Tanja was then possessed by the evil spirit in the mirror who wiped her memory of the interaction before we rejoined the call with the rest of the party. Mechanically, Tanja now acts as the host for this spirit and on specific story beats Tanja shifts between her normal self and this separate entity who my DM and I are referring to as “Evil Tanja”. While Evil Tanja is in the driver’s seat I have to act in direct opposition to Tanja’s moral code and when she shifts back to normal Tanja has a foggy memory of what happened while she was shifted. This happened almost a year ago and none of the other players have caught on whatsoever. In an entire year’s worth of sessions since, nobody in the party has picked up on the fact that for certain stretches of time I will take actions that directly oppose Tanja’s extremely defined code. My DM and I have even made jokes about how actions like flanking an enemy to attack from behind, giving an enemy a slow and torturous death, or coming up with a deceitful plan are extremely in character for Tanja and things she would always do. As Evil Tanja I have suggested the party take measures that would directly oppose Tanja’s primary goal in the campaign. We have even commissioned separate character art for Evil Tanja to use for Tanja’s token while she is possessed. To tie things back to the sad trombone, the way my DM signals to switch between Tanja and Evil Tanja is by playing a foreboding piano riff on the accursed discord soundboard. This sound is only ever used to signal the shift, yet nobody has questioned it. It has gotten to the point where I will purposely be as on the nose as possible about playing out of character because it is truly funny how nobody notices. Am I being to harsh on my fellow players and do we need to be more explicit to help the party catch on to a PC being possessed by an evil spirit or is the rest of the table being truly inattentive? Is it possible or even likely that the other players have noticed, but just think that it would be a faux pas to call me out on playing my character “incorrectly”? I humbly await your verdict and am ready to accept or issue any punishment that the supreme crit hands out.

JesterTheCleric

To the magnificent judges and... bailiff? If he's here? I bring to you the case of "my players keep razzing me about level ups." If i am ever so slightly late to our online sessions (which includes basically me not being first into the call) my players yell that theyre level 69 in every class and subclass. They also ask me for level ups almost every session (they leveled up and fought one (1) monster of a slightly higher CR than them and they were like "we get a level up right we go from level 4 to level 5 right are we level 7 now omg we're totally level 10 we gotta be"). Do I have any recourse?

Quinn Struzziero

To the Honorable Justices of the Supreme Crit, and the extremely lowly bailiff Jake In high school, my best friend was a DM who didn't have a place to play because of his strict parents, so I offered to let him play in my basement because it was the "party house." He took me up on the deal and asked if I wanted to join him for a 1-shot with his crew. I agreed and joined his table. We started, and his friends, some of whom I knew, were great. They brought pizza, snacks, and even a case of beer for me, and we had a good time getting into the world. However, around an hour into the night, one of the friends' girlfriends showed up to watch us play. All was well until they started cuddling at the table and then started kissing. The DM and the rest of the group ignored this and just kept playing. As we got later into the night, the guy and the girlfriend just started making out. This obviously slowed the game down, but the DM did nothing. At this point, I decided I had had enough and wanted to have some fun. In-game, we had just met a travelling salesman, and I asked one of the other players if we should jump him and take his stuff. This upset the lawful good Paladin, who said he would fight to protect the salesmen. I said fuck it and started a PVP that turned into a super fun 2 vs 2, where my character died, but I at least had fun. This upset the DM, who said if we weren't going to take the game seriously, we would be done. Judges, am I the asshole for purposely starting a pvp and torpedoing this already sinking ship or should the DM have tried to stop the make-out session going on?

David Pazmino

To the Honorable Judges Murphy, Tanner, and Afford, and… uh… Balif John? Your honors, I come before you not as a mere mortal, but as a victim of narrative injustice. This is The Case of the Misnaming Dragonborn. I play in a campaign where your race and stats are random due to rolls and you're reincarnated from our world to dnd. Here is Carl: My purple dragonborn cleric with bad luck, worse dice, and the shortest life expectancy this side of a kobold in a wizard’s duel. Carl met an early grave, as is tradition for level 1s. And so, from the ashes of Carl’s tragic nat 1s, rose Randy — a new hero. A fighter. A fresh start. New stats. New class. New soul. But alas… not a new race. Dragonborn again. As if fate herself couldn’t let me escape Carl’s legacy. Here lies the tragedy: For nearly a year, I have walked the path of Randy. I have fought, bled, and roleplayed admirably in his scaled boots. And yet… my party those I trusted most still call me Carl. Not in passing. No, Your Honors. As a habit. A casual disregard for Randy’s existence. Every time they call me "Carl," another part of Randy dies inside. And while I correct them, they laugh. Tell me, your Honors — do all humans look the same to you? Are all elves interchangeable? Is this racial profiling?! Randy deserves better. And now I stand before you with a plea. A crossroads. Should I just embrace this mockery, give in to the peer pressure, and change my name back to Carl — thereby erasing poor Randy’s identity forever… or continue this struggle to be recognized for who I truly am, not who I once was? Your Honors, I am tired. Randy is tired. Even Carl’s ghost is tired of being misattributed. All I seek is justice… or at least a ruling. Sincerely, Randy "Definitely Not Carl" the Dragonborn Fighter

Phil E

Dnd court To the sexy judges and the pretty but approachable bailiff, I submit the case of the final session backstab. I recently played my farewell session before moving as a fey ranger in my friend’s campaign. One of our friends had her last session right before and ascended to the fey high court. I let him know that my character had a full life and was open to whatever closure he saw fit, including death. He said cool and the only campaign related communication I had from him before our session was him sending my a Titania (my ex’s) stat block. The session was interesting; instead of planning with me he had a devil we opposed, mammon, sign an in real life multi-page contract with another player assuring my death in exchange for several boons. I later found out that they negotiated outside the table for several hours. This player was evil in a good aligned campaign but right before our mission I tried to reconcile, show trust, and even gave him my custom bow, the queensguard. I survived but all I could do during the session was encourage my teammates to let me die so they could escape hell. I feel duped and like the session ended anticlimactically. Am I overreacting and not appreciating my amazing dm’s efforts or should I have been involved differently?

Vi

I offer thanks to the grand supreme crit justices for hearing out this case of the forced power of friendship. Also, hi jake. In my first game as a player in many years, my DM loved the power of friendship trope. There were several instances of this throughout the campaign, but the most egregious was in the second to last session. The party had recovered a relic of the BBEG, an evil god, and our cleric wanted to try and glean info on his plans using the spell commune. My character, a Witch, had made several potions of resistance to the various damage types we thought communing to the god might deal. Instead, once the spell began, the DM had the cleric take “Anachron” damage, which reduced her hit point max in addition to avoiding all the resistances. I attempted to cast greater restoration to remove this affect, as removing affects that reduced a creature’s maximum hit points is a listed effect of the spell. My DM simply said the spell had no effect. In the next round, the Anachron damage brought the cleric to low health, so I tried to cast aid at a high level to give her more max hp in order to survive the next round. Again, my DM simply said the spell had no effect. He then, with a slight smirk, asked if we “wanted a hint”. When we begrudgingly accepted, he made a comment about “sharing the burden”, and only let the cleric out of the spell once the whole party held hands in a circle. I remain annoyed about this over a year later, and I would appreciate justice from this highest of courts on who is wrong here. Should I have been more willing to acquiesce to this “theme” of the campaign or was it unfair for all my spells to have no effect? I humble await the court’s judgement.

Ben Heggen

To the two judges and bailiff with correct opinions and Murph I present the case of the invisible instructions I was DMing my first homebrewed game ever piggybacking off the lost mines of phandelver. I had the party fighting in an area with various monsters and an invisible stalker as the final big bad. I had a mechanic where I prefaced the session by saying there would be a puzzle mechanic to the final fight in this area. They got to the invisible stalker and I described the door at the end of the area opening up and nothing seemed to come out but the wind picked up and the flags in the middle of the area went in new directions as the stalker passed and flapped more aggressively when he was close I had them make a perception check every couple of rounds to check. Judges, my players could not figure out how this mechanic worked and being a new dm I decided to dial back damage as they figured it out. But because I did that the fight went on for almost 3 hours. I eventually had to have an NPC yelling from the crowd to explain the mechanic. Ultimately everyone had a blast with the fight and I got compliments after the session but did I make a mistake not making the mechanic clear enough or are my players responsible for not picking up what I was putting down? I will hold my breath until your judgement is administered.

Tim S.

To the justices Murphy, Axford, and Tanner most high, and the bailiff Gieakè (not sure I spelled that right?), I bring before you the case of the Locked Room Familiar Vortex Warp. But this is also a plea for forgiveness, because I'm pretty certain I am indeed the sinner here. I was my party's wizard in a 5e pirate themed campaign. We were on a rowboat in a fog, sneaking up to the side of a large frigate. There was a slightly open hole for a cannon, so the druid wild shaped into a cat, and her and my owl familiar went to investigate. I was looking through the familiar's eyes this whole time. Well, justices, one thing led to another, and they were trapped in the hull of the ship with a metric ton of gunpowder about to explode and enemies blocking their way. And here's where I fudged the rules, the act of which is eating me up inside. My wizard has the spell Vortex Warp, which lets you teleport a creature you can see to a point you can also see. Since I could technically see the druid through my familiar's eyes, and I was in range since my body was in a rowboat next to ship, I cast Vortex Warp to get the druid out of the hull and safely into the ocean. Here's the thing: My familiar had no way of seeing outside the ship, and you need an action to switch your view back to your body. I knew this at the time and I did it anyway, because otherwise the druid would have certainly died. This spell was new to our group, and I'm pretty sure the DM didn't realize I couldn't do what I just did. I beseech thee: In your wisdom, is there any way that I was right to do what I did? If not, I accept whatever punishment you deem appropriate.

Andy

Dear Beloved Justices and , Is a mimic (monster) revealed by the spell “Find Traps”? My party was going through an ancient underwater aboleth palace when they came upon a mimic masquerading as a walk-in closet – think the size of a family room. The mimic’s door was locked (easy lockpick), but instead my Druid cast “Find Traps”. After reviewing the spell's description, I ruled the spell wouldn’t reveal a hidden monster, but I liked the idea, so I asked for a wisdom check plus proficiency. The druid (my girlfriend), bemoaned that she always rolls poorly, which is very true – she has worse rolls than Murph, despite a moon ritual, salt bath, and new dice. True to form, she rolled an 8, and I explained that there was something weird about the room, but it wasn’t a trap. When the party removed a hinge of the door and thunderwaved the door open, I told them that the door blast open, but the door stayed connected to the wall, even without the hinges -- an attempt to allude that there was something weird going on. Once inside the mimic room, the entire room started to attack the PC’s after they grabbed a key inside (the accused “trigger”). The party easily won in true womping style, and they used the key to get to the actual treasure room, rolling on the magic item table G and getting a supreme healing potion, something pretty major for a level 5 party. However, the druid and cleric (the two worst rollers of the group) still argue it was wrong that the Find Traps didn’t reveal the mimic room, and moreover, the druid argues that I shouldn’t have had her roll, because we all knew she would roll low. In their view, I should have just had Find Traps work. How do the justices view it? The druid and I have agreed to abide by your judgement and follow through with the punishment. It may be worth noting – I (possibly erroneously) did not deduct the thunderwave damage from the mimic’s HP, due to getting caught up in the moment of the Find Traps polite debate.

Jonathan Atkinson

Ey up Judges'n'Jake, I come to you with a crunchy conundrum. I recently had my players fight an astral projection of a Brass dragon and a whole bunch of wyrmlings. The party included a monk and a hasted barbarian, who were both rolling four attacks per turn. These players enjoyed rolling 4 d20s at once for their round of 4 attacks (and why wouldn't they, rolling 4 d20s at once feels awesome). The attacks they hit with would finish off a wyrmling and they would ask if they could keep attacking a different one that turn with the "surplus rolls", saying that once their character had downed the first monster they wouldn't have kept attacking and so the rolls essentially hadn't happened. I said that as they hadn't rolled them one at a time, there was no way of knowing which had happened first and so they couldn't claim that they had downed the monster with attacks to spare. This visibly annoyed the monk in particular. It was unclear why (maybe it was the wine) but they both kept rolling 4 attacks at once and the same snag kept happening. Judges, was I right to be so strict or did I unfairly rob my players of the satisfaction of rolling like a billion attacks at once? I humbly submit to your judgement. JT

Rjcaiza

To the Supreme Croissant Justices and Bake, today I bring you a case of the wrongful pre-cog. My party has been playing a modified version of Strixhaven weekly for over a year now, and our party is now in their sophomore year of school. In our party is a warlock that suffers from violent prophetic visions of death. This is something they haven’t told the rest of the party in game but above table we’ve know since the start of the campaign. In a previous session, they received a vision of my characters hut being burned to the ground with my character dead inside. Rather than telling me or the party about the potential doom, they then proceeded to stake out my hut solo in order to keep their visions a secret. Cut to me arriving at my burning hut and the warlock player there out of the blue. When confronting them about why they were there, they rolled poorly on their deception roll and had to spill about their visions. Upon hearing this my character went off about it being selfish and a breach of trust and that they must not be my friend if they couldn’t tell me about my potential death and more importantly, my burned down hut. Rather than apologizing Justices, they doubled down. They claimed they couldn’t tell me because my character would have thought they were a freak for having visions of death or that having visions would not be something I would believe. When trying to justify my PC’s decision, I was then told repeatedly my character’s decision doesn’t make sense and is wrong. Is it wrong for them to not share the vision about my hut burning and my death? Is it wrong to assume that prophecy type magic is so outrageous in a game with talking Dragon school Deans? Or did my precious hut deserve to be partially burned down with all my personal belongings being lost in the fire?

Lainie Stoop

To the esteemed judge's and however we're feeling about Jake tonight; I'd like to present to you the case of the dangerously unmanaged dragon born sorcerer. On a whim and because I was desperate to play DND again, I joined my local gaming cafes pay to play table. When I arrived for my first session with the table I was very excited everyone was kind and the DM was giving us an amazing story. That being said there was a 10yr old kid playing a 14 year old dragon born sorcerer (Named Demon Dragon) the kid was amazingly excited about everything DND ... Till he started getting into his backstory, Justice, edgy players I have dealt with and had no problem, but when I realize that this table of all adults had been letting this one 10 year old make self harm part of their character for 20 something sessions will say I was livid. Playing at cleric, I realized I had the chance to handle this in game and so I did. I had my character who was supposed to be a little staunch and cool play more of a mom role towards demon dragon. Stopping him from Self Harming his character. After two sessions I couldn't handle it the rest of the table blatantly ignoring this kid's cries for help and I never went back but justices what I asked is Did I overreact.... Should I have just let the table play as they had been?

DonutHoo

To the venerated church of Dice Christ and the Deacons of Dungeoneering themselves, I come to you with a solemn confession--and they *are* actually sorry, I think. I co-GM a campaign set on a series of islands floating in the sky with sky pirates, pulp adventure, and an evil empire abound. On an expedition to an island with a giant, ancient sheep from the dawn of time, one of our players was rolling hot. Now, this player usually rolls quite well in general, but they were particularly spicy that night, easily rolling above average and succeeding every roll target. Nothing wrong with that, they spoke to the sheep, got some intense foreshadowing and a fancy new shield for the party member in question. Everybody's happy! We still are, but with the added context of the confession in question. In the post-session cooldown call on discord, our player realized after taking their medication for their ear infection that they had that they might have made a mistake. Their sense of balance and equilibrium had been affected for that entire session and they admitted they had been reading the wrong side of their dice as a result on every roll, leading to very different results to what probably *should* have happened. He apologized and I wanted to offer his confession to the court that the sense of equilibrium in his soul might be restored alongside his now cured ears. Thanks. Hate the show.

bbyfendie

hey murph, i actually have NO case and NO confession. That's right, things are, in fact, good and fun. I am having a great time playing an ongoing campaign for the last 4 ish years with my high school friends (friends from when we were in high school, not that theyre still in high school and im not). I am here as a protestor. Where is Yugo? what have you done with him? I demand A yugo sequel #ReleaseTheYugoCut #Who'sInTheYugoFiles? #WhereYugoGoesWeAllGo #WasYugoVaxxed?

Softlose Uncertainhand

To the honorable and most supreme judges of this courtroom… and the other guy named Jake who is still here. I bring before you a case that has haunted me for over a year. I was running a D&D session—the very beginning of a hopeful new campaign. My party had been sent to the Dwarven mountain known as the Bronzen Summit, seeking jobs that promised honor, fame, glory, and, most importantly, money. The group met for the first time in a tavern, where the elven bard, Portia (Porsche-uh), was promptly thrown out after a terrible performance roll—natural 1—combined with some truly unwanted flirting. The rest of the party brushed the bard off (literally dusting themselves off), found a poster promising gold and platinum, and made their way to the king’s throne room to investigate a missing prince. Upon arriving, they learned that the prince had vanished into an unknown plane of existence: the Feywild. At this point, Portia attempted to seduce the king and convince him—and several guards—to join the adventure. She then proceeded to roll three natural 20s in a row, successfully gaining two royal guards and the king’s “interest,” provided she returned with his son. (Naturally, she wanted more guards.) What truly set things off, however, was their first encounter a few hours later. The party discovered an abandoned town in the Feywild—the very plane where the prince had gone missing—and began searching for anyone who could point them in the right direction. As they explored, the guards began to vanish one by one. When the first guard disappeared, the remaining guard had no memory that a second guard had ever existed and assumed the party was messing with him. Later, he vanished as well, leaving the party confused about whether they had ever had guards at all. This was meant to foreshadow an encounter with a modified false hydra, reinforcing that this new world would not be as easy or forgiving as they had imagined. Portia, however, argued that rolling three natural 20s only to have the guards die before any major battle was bad storytelling. I viewed it as a narrative tool—a way to provide unsettling clues about what had happened to the town. So I ask the court: was I in the wrong?

Mackenzie Iyer

To the hallowed Judges of the Supreme crit and... I want to say Jim? John? Something like that. I present to you the case of the callous counterspell. I am the DM for an online space based campaign using the Mass Effect 5e homebrew rule set with my longtime friends. After a long adventure through unknown space, my party was accosted by a notorious bounty hunter. This bounty hunter had been a thorn in the party's side for years in game and irl, and it was a climactic dangerous fight the party was excited for. Part way through the battle I had thought a party member was using a healing spell, and being devious the bounty hunted started to counterspell it. However I was mistaken and they were just using a potion. A turn or so later the bounty hunter used a powerful ability allowing him to sneak attack multiple targets at once. A different player, we'll call him T (who was otherwiae having a hard time in the fight) used a shield spell. The bounty hunter had their reaction and started to counter spell, and T said "No wait, I forget he had that I dont do that" I told the player he had already used the spell, and as he hadn't actually counterspelled in the fight the character didn't know he has that ability (as it is quite rare in universe). He said "GM if you do this, I will leave the call right now" I was dumbfounded and eventually said, "Okay leave". He did and we had to take a break because I was rattled. He eventually came back and we finished the fight, but it put a sour vibe on a climactic moment. So I ask ye noble judges, was I wrong to not allow him to recon his shield, or was his counterspell knowledge misbegotten?

Janne Storm

To the most holy members of the cloth. I bring you not a confession but a detraction. I was watching a dnd liveshow, where audience was allowed to participate in dice rolls. Great, right? But then audience was asked to make a roll with advantage, and the most frequent roll was taken! This statistically is a guaranteed nat 20! (There where thousands of audience members). But still, the dm acted as if it was a blessing from Dicechrist! Isn’t this a clear false prophecy?! I love the show, but I’m afraid they’re practicing herecy? What say you?

Ray L.

Lovely deacons of the church, I think I have a confession? My rolls are cursed, Murph-style. Normally, I roll average to poor- most of my rolls are below a 10. The main exception is that when I REALLY care about the outcome of a roll, it will not go my way, high or low. I have never and will never lie about my rolls as a player! I have often lied about my rolls as a DM, and will continue to do so. Sometimes I really want my players to succeed, and sometimes I really want them to fail, and I think the dice should take my feelings into account. I wasn't raised Christian and don't go to church. From what I've seen in movies, confession is you say something bad you did and then the priest tells you how to make up for it and then your slate is clean! Going to church regularly feels like a lot of commitment, though, so I was hoping the noble deacons of Dice Christ could give me some punishment I could repeat by myself every few months when the weight of my DM lies becomes too heavy :) thank you! <3

ZroSkeerd

Long time listener, first time caller. To the criminally undervalued bailiff, and I guess the other guys too, I present a Father/Son dispute - The Case of the Nut-Kicking Goat. I’ve only been playing DnD for about four months with six or seven sessions under my belt, but hearing me talk about those sessions got my kids (13 and 15) really interested in playing and it didn’t take much for them to talk me into DMing for them. In our first session they found themselves helping a Halfling farmer gather up a handful of goats that had escaped her pen and wandered off into the town. My son (13 - and playing a Rogue) successfully snuck up on one of the goats. But then he insisted on rolling a Sleight of Hand check to slip his rope around the goat’s neck like a leash without it noticing. He rolled a Nat 1. I narrated the goat feeling the rope brush its skin and immediately lashing out and kicking him in the nuts for two points of damage. Let the record show I rolled a d4 for damage. He mumbled about it for the rest of our session, but now he is still coming to me and telling me that the goat never should’ve kicked him in the nuts. This happened almost 2 months ago, but I still hear about it at least once a week. At one point, he even told me that the goat shouldn’t have been able to kick him because he was off to the side and it couldn’t kick that way. I pointed out that he’s playing a 300 -year-old Wood Elf and that this game is a lot more about fun than realism, but he refuses to let it go. I humbly ask you, wise bailiff – and I guess the judges can weigh in too – was I in the wrong for having my imaginary goat kick my son in the nuts? After all, I had begun to narrate him successfully capturing the goat, but he was the one who insisted on rolling a Sleight of Hand check. And in a world where magic and fantastical creatures exist, is it really so far-fetched that a goat could kick somebody standing at its side? I eagerly await the court’s decision so my household can finally be at peace.

You Yee’d your last Haw

Dear honorable Supreme Court Judges and, nope, I thinks that’s it. I bring you the harrowing case of the player in desperate need of therapy. I have been in a dnd campaign for the last 5 years. We’re all good friends in and out of game. Our problem is our friend, we’ll call Jake. Jake has played dnd for his whole life so when we started our game years ago he asked the DM (my girlfriend) if he could do a pretty high concept character. A kalashtar barbarian with multiple souls in him that shifted and had different personalities. We assumed it was a fantasy take on split personality disorder that would later pay off in narrative. The problem? Later due to a bad weed trip, Jake started actually shifting personalities and me and my girlfriend learn, Jake has DID (dissociative identity disorder. More commonly known as split personality disorder). Some of the alterns had the same names and personalities as his dnd character. The day after he said he didn’t remember anything. After the trip we suggested he get therapy. But the Kalashtar PC is still playing in our campaign. Me and my partner feel weird about it. Especially since it seems like he’s using dnd to work through some very real issues. We talked to Jake and he still wants to play the character. Me and my girlfriend feel like we have to walk on eggshells when RP’ing. The rest of the party doesn’t know. What do we do?

Jane Paintrain

To the auspicious Justices and the guy who kinda reminds me of my brother - I present the case of the Sudden Surprised Condition. A player in the core group recently started a D&D campaign using 2024 rules to give the forever DM (who runs 2014 rules) a break. One week the new DM had to cancel and the forever DM offered to run a one shot that night. He didn't specify which rule set to use, only saying “Bring a level 13 character and prepare for a wild evening". That rainy night while everyone is getting set up in the basement, the DM says “Oh, I hope you don't mind, I invited another player to help round out the numbers." Just then the doorbell rings upstairs. Since it's your house, you head up and peek outside the front window. Standing at the door is a man in an impeccable Grinch costume. Or, hell, it might even be the Grinch himself. In one hand he has a Player's Handbook and in the other is a cloth sack - roughly the size of a basketball - filled with something lumpy. Both seem to be partially covered in a dark liquid. You begin to head back to ask the forever DM about who he invited when the Grinch starts knocking rather forcefully on the glass. Your phone has zero bars - what do you do?

Nicholas Matthew

I personally appreciated this, even if if might not getread

Emily Noye

Hey team I present the case of the 1000 piece puzzle Our DM was running a several session long side quest where the players get trapped in this “escape-room” type dungeon. Although there were some classic riddle encounters, he also had us put together a real life 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle and play a full game of chess which collectively took hours. I don’t know if I’m just salty at the DM because this side quest eventually killed off two characters (including mine) or if this was actually crazy?? I eagerly await your ruling

Melissa Shilale

As someone who is currently getting rocked by a 500 piece puzzle solo, this makes me shiver

Amanda Mingus

Most honorable justices, and the slightly less honorable but oft maligned bailiff. Today I present you with the case of the Guardian of Faith versus the definition of an enemy. I'm in a long-running campaign of Undermountain, playing a halfling war cleric. We've been fighting several drow nobility, and the previous session before the new year we were exploring and found a group of halflings trapped in a cage. A group of drow burst in and fought us, trying to target the halflings. Then we came into this next session and we saw a drow, and my character waved, and then they ran off. We ran after them and stopped them, but they managed to get a warning to another group of enemies down the stairs. We decided to try to lure them up rather than go and face a possible ambush. I cast Guardian of Faith at the very top of the stairs to act as a choke point, so anything that tried to rush us would have to go through that. The drow sent a troglodyte up the stairs. I pointed out to my DM that once he was within 10 ft, he would have to do a Dexterity save. My DM said no because the troglodyte wasn't an enemy. He argued that because the troglodyte wasn't actively engaged in combat with us and was simply a scared monster being forced by the drow, he wasn't approaching with hostile intentions, and so the spell wouldn't recognize him as an enemy. I think that's bullshit. So I argued back that my character has no idea what the intentions of the troglodyte are. She would have no reason to think that this creature wasn't approaching with hostile intentions, and it's my spell. The DM then made a parallel, saying that the troglodyte was like a scared child. That was a ridiculous comparison, and it just felt like he didn't want my Guardian of Faith to do the damage. Ultimately, I said fine and kept it moving because, at the end of the day, what the DM says goes, right? The troglodyte ran away and our barbarian attacks and kills it. She starts to feel bad because of the out-of-character hints that this troglodyte wasn't all bad, and the DM then tries to make her feel better by saying it's basically a dumb lizard. I pointed out that earlier he had compared it to a scared child. He ignored me, and the fight continued with a few other troglodytes trying to come up the stairs and a drow wizard firing from the bottom. To make a long story short, we exited combat without my Guardian of Faith doing any kind of damage to any enemies. There's still enemies below since we never went into the ambush. I suggest we rest because the Guardian of Faith will last for 8 hours, and we could at least get a short rest in to recover some hit points, but then the DM shoots back that we need to be sleeping in a more secure location, and we go back to the surface. The session ended shortly after that, but I was just so frustrated. We had just had a tough fight, and I had used one of my last higher spells to cast this Guardian of Faith, only to be told that it didn't get to do anything and wouldn't even protect us while we tried to rest. So I ask of you, Is the definition of enemy bullshit? Or, more accurately, should enemy be defined by the creature's intentions or by my interpretation of the character's intentions? Also, is the DM really trying to nerf my Guardian of Faith, or are all of these very legitimate points that he had? I throw myself at the mercy of the court, and I will humbly accept any result.

Zonk Bonkus

Dear Illustrious Judges and their lowly Jailiff Bake. I bring to you the case of equal playing fields. I had joined a Curse of Strahd campaign where the party of 6 was made of people new to D&D save for myself and one other player. I played a full support Peace Cleric and our other seasoned player played a Witcher class that “had his own business with Strahd.” Overall the campaign went well and we saved Barovia. After the campaign and outside of the table the newer players had expressed their disappointment and annoyance with the Witcher often bulldozing forward with his own personal agenda and the lack of character exploration each player got to have. I asked if anyone brought it up to the DM during the campaign and avoided it as to not make things potentially awkward with group. As a palate cleanser and a way to show these new players that D&D isn’t always like this, I volunteered to run a small light hearted one shot full of goofs and shenanigans. When characters were created and before the first session, I designed almost every encounter to put our seasoned player, now a rogue, at disadvantage. Often leaving him paralyzed, charmed, or unable to hide. All of our new players enjoyed the chaotic one shot when it was over except the rogue. I shortly moved states away after that and haven’t heard from that group since. I have no regrets over my actions, but wonder at times if I was wrong to target one player. Judges, I humbly leave it to you to decide my fate.

Jordan Lyons

To the indefatigable Justices Murphy, Axford, and Tanner, and the bailiff who tries his best: I present to you a case of grievous injustice regarding non-magical weapons. Years ago, I played a homebrew shadow dragon totem barbarian. By level 9, I had informed my DM that I sought a +1 greataxe. She obliged and made one available for purchase. Naturally, I was exceedingly proud of my gleaming new axe. A few sessions later, we faced the opportunity to fight or bypass an evil adult green dragon. My Dwarven barbarian had an item granting him immunity to poison damage while raging, so I felt confident we could take on this foe. Until the first blow landed. I scored a critical hit with Brutal Critical—35 damage, the fruit of careful planning and many months of play. Justices, the DM stated that I only dealt 17 damage, citing the dragon’s “resistance to physical damage from non-magical weapons.” I reminded her politely that I had a magical weapon. Her response: "That's a masterwork +1 greataxe, not a magical +1 greataxe." After some minutes of futile negotiation, I relented. Combat continued. We died. All of us. I was the last adventurer standing, enraged, helpless, and eventually eaten. I now respectfully argue: - A +1 greataxe should count as magical for purposes of bypassing resistance. - This week, I learned that adult green dragons do not, in fact, have resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage from non-magical weapons, meaning my blow should have landed in full even with a mundane axe. Justices, I ask for justice—not vengeance. My barbarian may have perished, but my honor demands recognition of the magical nature of a +1 weapon and the correction of a rules misapplication that led to the consumption of my party and the end of the campaign.

Emily Noye

Thank you for your sympathy hahaha

Rob's Wit

To the Supreme Crit Justices Axford and Murphy, Time Lord Tanner, and the Benevolent Bailiff: I time-dilated my players in my wish-themed campaign and nearly lost all the stakes. The gist: the party did something that broke time in the entire universe around them. I decided that the way it broke was thus: Where the party experienced two days of time, everywhere else around them experienced more time since the event was centered on them. The farther away from this geographical point, the more time a location experienced. Some nearby lands experienced 25 years in those two days, and more distant lands experienced as much as 100 years during those two days. I conveyed this by deciding that certain friendly NPCs took on a relevant sidequest and traveled to a distant hostile kingdom that our party was hoping to liberate, but never had the chance. And since they had 100 years to do it, those NPCs liberated the kingdom then sent one NPC back to tell the party of all this. When they met up with this NPC (now ~60 years older) and learned of all the time-displacement, I could tell there were mixed reactions. Their reaction was one of shock at first and then a bit of anger and confusion at how so much could happen without them being there. I explained that all the Party NPCs had all been inspired to help based directly on all the things the PCs had done to fix the world thus far. That seemed to help, but the "the NPCs got 100 years to do something while we got 2 days" was still a lot to shoulder for them, saying that it was hard to accept how much happened "Off-screen". Overall they agreed with the time-dilation logic and thought it added a lot of depth of the story, but I worry the players felt a loss of stakes in that moment. Was I in the wrong to allow NPCs to accomplish this much "off-screen"? Did I raise the stake here or nearly lose them? PS - The campaign is Wish-themed, so a lot of fuckery has happened, and the time-dilation was foreshadowed, but this occurred right before the finale where they would face the BBEG in an attempt to fix the broken world. It left the players wondering whether or not winning would fix anything (they did win and it did fix the world, but didn't dial back the time).

Matthew Lee

To the supreme crit justices and balif rake, I present the case of the accidental curse removal. This is all of our groups first Dnd campaign, which is still going on to this day. I play a circle of stars druid, and in the course of our campaign one of our players came to use a ring of greed, and that the only way to get rid of it was a remove curse spell. I don't own a physical book, so I just did a quick Google search for circle of stars and clicked on a link without looking at the source. Wow, did you know druids can smite and remove curses? I was elated. After the next long rest, I stocked remove curse, and had a wonderful character moment with the player who had been cursed. It was only after I looked through the physical book the next time we met in person did I realize my error. However, the curse removal was such a big story moment I didn't feel like I should say anything and kept quiet. Since then, I haven't stocked any of the spells I wasn't supposed to, but I still feel guilty. Judges, do I come clean about my accidental transgressions and suffer the consequences, or stay quiet and leave it to rest?

Miranda G

Hey, what's up Dice Christ, I have a confession. (is this how you confess? I never went to church). So about a year ago, my long-time group decided to start a second game where one of the usual players would DM, and our forever-DM would get to be a player. He made a cool, rough-and-tumble ranger. A few months into the game, the party found themselves in over our heads in a dungeon crawl. PCs were dropping to 0hp and popping back up frequently. During the boss fight, the forever-DM's ranger was KO'd again. Not too worried, he got up to go to the bathroom after his turn was over, and we kept moving through initiative. The ranger's turn came back around, but he still wasn't back. We decided that since he was just going to make a death save anyway, we'd skip him for now and let him take his turn when he got back. Dice Christ, can you see where this is going? The ranger came back and rolled his death save: a natural 1. Then, because we'd pushed his turn back in the order while he was gone, his next turn came up before any of the other PCs could do anything. He failed his final death save, and for the first time in this group's DnD experience, a PC died. Not only do I feel awful about skipping the rangers turn, but I personally could have also prevented his death: when the ranger went down, the wizard was too far away from him to do anything, but as a rogue I could have bonus-action-dashed and stabilized him. I chose to attack the boss instead, and here we are. Several months have passed since then, the ranger has made a new PC who he's been playing for longer than the first one at this point, and I have apologized both in- and out-of-character. But gosh Dice Christ it still weighs on me. Maybe with this public confession, I can finally move on from my mistakes. At the very least I can warn all the other Dice Christ followers: don't skip your friend's turn when they're in the bathroom!!!!!

The Fool Shawn

Hi there long time listener first time poster! Not a court opinion, but could I get Murph's opinion on Kenny Omega getting to do the mocap for Alex in Street Fighter 6 (I think it's personally sick as hell)

Alexandra Ferguson

Dearest and most benevolent judges, I bring you a case of initiative shenanigans. I’ve been playing in a recent one-turned-four shot. It’s been a fun dungeon crawl, but one thing has me looking side-eye at the DM each week: Group initiative. For context, I built a gloomstalker ranger bugbear. She’s an ambush predator with a great initiative modifier and all sorts of extra damage (including a full extra attack) in the first round of combat… provided it’s against someone who hasn’t gone yet. Under group initiative rules, there’s now one roll for heroes and one for monsters that determine whether I get the round one I built for, and sometimes rolled by someone with far worse initiative than me. Tell me justices - is it fair to spring group initiative on us in session one, or did my bugbear get unfairly nerfed? (PS it’s an otherwise great game, so if my DM is punished, please do so in a way that means he can still run the finale next week.)

Ally

Dice Christ I fear I have strayed into the lands of goof and away from the road of rationality. My crime, my sin, the red in the ledger of my DMing life is called Bodega Simulator. After wrapping our first multi campaign the group I DM for we decided for the next campaign we started using the system kids on bikes. The intention was to see the highs and lows of these characters growing up in a small spooky town together. However due to the fantasy band Copperback needing an opening act, a great roll for a signing bonus after the gig, and a lucky gambling streak at an underground boxing match, the party have pooled all their funds and bought the bodega across from their school. Everything has become about the bodega. They finish school and go straight to the bodega, they employed their school friends at the bodega, they host gigs at the bodega, if they find out a clue about a monster or mystery they regroup at the bodega. There's even a Excel sheet for the bodega's finances. We've hombrewed more rules for the bodega's mechanics than there are in entirety of kids on bikes. The party now refer to the game as bodega simulator. I fear my desire to follow the fun the party is having with this will negatively affect the characters they had been developing. The necromancer witch, dumpster thief, silver tongued guitarist, and bear knuckle boxer have all taken a wild left turn into bodega owners/employees.

Gicky

To the lusty justices and the chaste bailiff. I attended my first game of dnd with total strangers at a board game bar last week. At the table was a grandma and her two small kids, around the ages of 8 and 12. One kid was a samurai fighter the other a cleric, and grandma played a rogue called "Sneaky Pete". The DM stressed this was an intermediate level game and that the dungeon would be deadly. On the clerics first roll he stated he had a +14 to his spell attack (we were all level 5) and when pushed for how he got that number the grandma explained they had all created their characters that morning with chatgpt. This infuriated the DM and he lambasted the children for using AI. For the rest of the game the DM was a real hardass on all of us. He denied the rogue sneak attack multiple times because as a halfling she was deemed too small to weild a crossbow correctly, and said my barbarian was not resistant to the bbeg's attacks because they were "magical slashing" (which I know technically is a thing but it felt spiteful). He also stated multiple times he had nerfed the combat because "none of you know what you are doing". Judges was this DMs behavior unjust? Or was this an important lesson to generations young and old about the dangers of using AI recklessly?

Woody

To the honorable members of the high Crit and no one else, he knows what he did. I come before you with a case of the unthrowable Springbok. I've been Dming a campaign for some friends and they have made it to level 6. The players have just competed in a gladatorial competition there they easily made it to the final against one other team. This team I had modelled on the South African Rugby team, the Springboks. In this team there was a Loxodon Paladin called Lox Nche (pronounced Locks In-chair) In the final round of the competition, the task was simple, whichever team got the finishing blow on an elder Froghemoth wins. The idea was, that the teams have to both work together to kill it but also work against each other to get the killing blow. About halfway though the fight, my player's Tiefling Swords Bard, took a swing on Lox and rolled a Nat 20. He then announced that he was going to use his mobile flourish to "pick up and throw" Lox up into the Froghemoth's mouth. I immediately pulled him back and said his Tiefling was not strong enough to do that and that a Nat 20 is not an auto success, but best possible outcome. To honour the Nat 20 though, I narrated that he managed to judo throw Lox so he landed on his back right in front of the Froghemoth ready for eating. My players accepted This and managed to score the final blow. Winning it all with only 2 of 3 players going down. They then also beat the same team in drinking games later that night. Despite this, I have been razzed mercilously for "saving my favourite Springbok" and while yes, Lox Nche is based on my favourite rugby player, Ox Nche, I maintain that a dex based Tiefling would not be able to "throw" him Nat 20 or no. Justices I ask you, am I the victim of a wrongful razzing, or did I save my favourite Springbok unfairly? I humbly submit to endure or carry out any punishment given PS. For my fellow South Africans, the rest of the team was Simba Kolisi, Tabaxi Mastermind Rogue based on Siya Kolisi, and Cheslin Kobold, the Kobold Monk based on Cheslin Kolbe

Sam

Dear Venerable Justices and bailiff; who I could respect…but should I? I am a forever DM with a case not against my players, but against Dice Christ herself. For nearly four years I’ve been running two concurrent campaigns with a large group of friends. But while beyond the DM screen everything looks fine, behind it I fear I’ve lost my faith, or worse. It all started innocently enough — fudging an npc’s roll in combat to make sure the final blow on a baddie went to my players. Next, it was pulling a punch or two when a player was having a bad day…. an 18 became a 14, a 7 became a 12…I was only doing this on special occasions…then only once per session…slowly but surely the fudge began to flow and, as the years went on, I found myself deep in a tango with the dice devil. Soon I was asking for checks, *then* picking DCs to fabricate my preferred result. Enemy armor classes became…flexible. Attack rolls were flexible as well. The bad guys hit when I wanted them to hit and missed when I decided it should be so. And hp pools? Those went fully out the window—villains started to die when it felt climactic, at an emotional high, not when the dice said so. Don't get me wrong, I do roll dice, but as we near the end of these campaigns I find myself obeying the results only about half the time. I don't do this selfishly; I try to decide dice outcomes by what I think would be best for everyone at the table. And isn’t it wiser to trust my practiced storytelling over…dare I say it…random chance? Isn’t it the *feeling* of fate that matters? According to doctrine, I know this is all blasphemy. And yet…I have not been punished for my devilish ways. I have been rewarded, with years of fun sessions and happy players. And here lies my case — if I am as sinful as Dice Christ teaches, then why have my games gone so well? Is she even real? Does she secretly approve? And who should be punished – a DM turning to the devil to make magic happen, or Dice Christ for constantly giving me unhelpful rolls? Let the DM who is without fudge roll the first die. -Devil’s Advocate [they/them] P.S. Please rule on this as a bonus case. I think a few of my players are on the main feed and I’d hate to make their victories feel hollow.

Mo, stoked for Skaldova and about to run Strahd

To the erudite justices and the kinda smart Bailiff Jesk, I bring to you the case of Reaction Redaction. My roommate (let's call him J) and I, along with a couple of friends were playing a one-shot for my birthday (I'm always the DM). Our friend, D, was running this pretty bad ass level 15 all-out brawl with the forces of Hells. Everything was going great, my bard Shrap'nell Roan, was singing her ass off, then a gorgon used a paralytic breath weapon on J. His mood shifted immediately and he started trying to not even have to do the Con save. J eventually gave in and failed with a 6. It was then my turn and I was about to Misty Step up a cliff and do my Red Wine Supernova (Acid Splash) when J piped up saying he wanted to use a reaction to Absorb Elements (which would not affect a paralytic breath weapon). When D explained that wouldn't work in this instance, J devolved into sulking and stating that "everyone else can take 100 years to pick their move but y'all just wanna shut me down". When I tried to explain WHY Absorb Elements wouldn't be able to prevent a paralyzing effectJ cut me off and started pouting. At this point, he went off to his room, and I was able to take my turn. We went through the rest of the round and got back to J's turn. He came back out but was still surly, saying how he never gets to do anything cool and just generally bring shitty to everyone. Eventually the foul temper subsided and we were able to finish the battle and wrapped up a pretty fun Bday sesh. But I ask you, judges, should we have let Absorb Elements prevent paralyzation or was my friend being a Birthday Bully? We await your judgement and may Dice Christ have mercy on our souls. PS Apropos of basically nothing, I'd love to see Emily or Caldwell play a Tabaxi Monk

Doofmeister

**PLEASE KEEP MY ANONYMOUS AS HALF THE TABLE LISTEN TO DUNGEON COURT BUT ARE NOT SUBSCRIBED** To the supreme, and honorable crit justices, and whatever caste systemic role that that one bailiff is in, I forget his name. Today I bring you the case of the unwanted advances while healing. The story begins at the start, my wife (who is not apart of the DnD table, but a part of the story) my friends and I were out at the bar one night, having a great time, when one of my friends invited out an outsider. Normally, as a social person I’m fine with, but this lady that came in is an all around flirt, which I’m also cool with as long as I’m kept out of it. Now, this girl immediately starts butting heads with my wife, because she thinks that she’s the reason I’m not a fan of her (she kept flirting with me despite my obvious uncomfortable body language, I wasn’t being subtle) now, mind you, 2/6 people at the table love her, the other 4, including the forever DM don’t, for the same reasons. The problem lies in the other 2, as one of them decided to dm a mini-campaign and invited her to the table to try out DMing. I had told the new DM my qualms about her, and how I really don’t want her to flirt with me, to which he told me he would talk to her. Well, within the second session, I went down, and she, as the Paladin healer, kissed my unconscious character on the mouth for flavor of “touch hands” to which I groaned and asked if I could just be healed normally, which she said the phrase dreaded most “It’s just what my character would do” This set the bar in motion that I wanted my character to have a heroic death later in the session. When asked why I finally spilled the beans to the table that “I don’t like being flirted with when I’m very clearly not interested” the girl in question just said “That’s my personality, I’m sorry you feel that way” Justices, am I in the right for thinking that the DM in fact did not talk to her? Am I being too monogamous? Or am I not being clear enough on boundaries? I await your judgement. *P.S, The girl in question is not a permanent addition to the table as a majority do not want her there

Logan Stacey

To the most honorable members of dice Christ’s clergy and that little guy ringing the bell in the towers… I come before you to confess an unknown sin. Though it sounds fake, on my birthday nary a few weeks ago, I was DMing a curse of Strahd session. Before the session began I was rolling dice with my players, and lo and behold I rolled 3 natural ones in a row, between two different dice. Immediately after, as I was packing one offending set away, one of my favorite crystal sets from a few years ago, the d20 fell off of the table, and shattered on the kitchen tile. I am unsure of what crimes I’ve committed against Dice Christ…. But nonetheless must accept a clear message he gives me. I come seeking forgiveness for whatever I’ve done, revoke the dice devils in my life, and hope to atone and get back in his good graces. Amen

rotfiendish !

to the absolutely swanky priests of Dice Christ Axford and Murphy, the silly little altar boy Jake, and chanting guy in the corner with incense and a big robe Tanner, i bring a confession, and i wait with bated breath (i will not breathe until you respond) for your penance and absolution. i have been listening to actual play shows since just about 2016 or so. i've been dedicated to writing fiction for about two thirds of my life. i'm not much of a player - never have been too good at waiting my turn - and so i decided it's time to set off on a dm adventure. i'm preparing to dm a campaign inspired by the games Limbus Company and Honkai: Star Rail. i've been writing up the lore of the different planets thanks to the space theme and so on, rolling for details and difficulty, but even alone as i build the world, i realize i am fudging my rolls when i think a different outcome is more interesting than what the dice have put forth. i am worried i have developed this habit that is a sin against dice christ, and i wanted to seek penance and guidance before i actually bring the players to the table. i want to leave things up to chance and using dice to build the world was supposed to be a way to get used to this, but i keep stumbling back into the sin of fudge. i'm afraid of what i might do if the going gets tough in a real session, so i'm begging for guidance, forgiveness, and for Caldwell specifically to forgive me in the Keychain voice if I am deserving. signed most distressedly, rotfiendish

Rob

Dear magnanimous justices and bailiff jeke I’ve been DMing for my 3 siblings in a planescape adventure for a few months which has been a ton of fun!! The problem arose at the end of our last session, I had set up a tough but fair first encounter with the BBEG (our genasi warlocks half brother) it was a long drawn out battle that unfortunately ended in a tpk. I felt pretty bad so I did some quick thinking and narrated that the god of death was so amused by the party’s fighting spirit that she would give them opportunity to avenge themselves and return to life if they pledged to hunt down their mortal enemy and kill him. (Basically making them revenants) I thought this was a good compromise to keep the characters alive and a future adventure hook to hunt down the BBEG, but the only one of my players who took the deal was my warlock. The other players seemed content to let their characters die and roll new ones. I was shocked and when I asked why my sister (wood elf bard) shrugged and said “does it really matter, new characters are fun.” Justices I ask you am I being to sentimental for these pcs my players don’t care about? P.S. the bailiff made me come to terms with my bisexuality when I was in 9th grade. So thanks for the identity crisis Jeke!

Wyatt Royse

To the honorable Justices and the bailiff Joob Hoobwoob, My brother in law DMed a multishot for my older brother and I over Christmas. I played a bard named Bobby badfingers who snaps. But my quarrel was with table etiquette. I brought some nerds gummy clusters along with other snacks one of the nights. My brother in law, we’ll call him Greg, because that’s his name, put the DM screen down in a way that the clusters were behind the screen. I never saw the gummy clusters again. Am I wrong to assume those are perfect for sharing or is the DM snack tax higher in this economy? PS he is one of my best friends and an amazing DM. I lay my case at the mercy of the court.

Nathaniel F

Dearest Honorable Judges, Esteemed Bailiff Jake, and the loud guest judge Smurphy, I bring before you another case of a playerless PC murder most foul! We were running a short side story with some returning characters. We have a spot in our discord for in-world stories for our various characterizes to be told (with DM set limitations). For some time, I had been writing about a few characters from some time ago, creating an overarching plot. I brought one to the two-shot. I clearly wrote a story declaring intent to steal an item. I was sick on the second day. I asked DM “if an opportunity comes up, can you have Thwynn execute her plan? If you aren’t comfortable with it, don’t worry about it”. Apparently, the “opportunity” was while the necklace was hovering by mage hand in front of everyone. Thwynn was summarily murdered and fed to a hag that they were supposed to be fighting. Turns out no one had my character sheet so she didn’t even fight back (she had several ways to do so). When I learned of this, I stated my displeasure but tried to move on. They wouldn’t drop it. The player who finished killing me and fed me to the hag, said he hates PvP, and thinks PCs shouldn’t be killed when player isn’t present. But also that I stole from him so I initiated PvP. Anyway. Fine. I wrote up a follow up where Thwynns wife and friend (who were part of my stories) were devastated. And plotted vengeance. They said I was being dark. So I scrapped the whole story and have been only interested in putting minimal effort in main campaign because I lost my motivation. So. Like. Am I the asshole for writing an intense and emotional follow up story?

MacBeth

To the illustrious judges Axford, Murphy, and Tanner, The bailiff can choke on some grits. I bring to you a case of rightful razzing. I (an experienced player) recently put together a group of brand new players and we started out with me DMing a one shot. The players got trapped in a "magnificent mansion". The very first room they explored was a library with a cat that WAS sitting on a chair. The druid and paladin immediately rolled animal handling to pet the cat. Each rolled poorly so I narrated the cat ignoring them and walking away. Are the same time, The rogue rolled to stab the cat and rolled quite well, killing the cat. The rogue has since been heavily razzed for this insane move. The court should know that the rogue's irl fiance (the paladin) was just moving in and he was nervous about her cat moving in. The rogue defends himself by pointing out that they had just been trapped in a spooky dungeon, how was he supposed to know that the thing that looked like a cat was actually just a cat. He also points out that the body of the cat later saved his life when he used it to distract a test tube monster that the druid threw at him in spite for killing the cat. Judges, does this rogue deserve to be razzed or should the rest of the party be reverse razzed for trying to pet a cat? And if the judges don't mind, could you make the sentencing between the rogue and the rest of the party be more fatal this time? You've gotten weak as of late. The court should also know that the rogue irl now loves his fiance's cat dearly.

Drew Faber

To the holiest of dice clergy, please hear my confession: I’ve forgotten probably over half of my party’s character building & pre-session 0 work. I had the best intentions, I really did; I had them give me a lot— rumors (inspired by dimension20), backgrounds, and character prompts such as “what would your character’s Spotify Wrapped look like?”… and I can’t remember any of it. To my credit this information is scattered across shared notes, docs, messages hosted across 3+ different platforms, and unrecorded in-person conversations. Now I live in fear that in moving forward with my story, I will dishonor my players’ ideas of their own characters… I deeply regret my disorganization and I can only hope that dice Christ will bless my players with fun sessions regardless of any plot holes I accidentally conjure.

Joe Pelaia

To the honourable judges Axford, Murphy and Tannor. And the bailiff so lowly he sleeps on the floor. I bring you both a confession for dice Christ and a case. I am a new DM, who wanted to cheese my players after they expertly beat my stupidity. In my campaign, the bard of the group (we’ll call him Jabard) casts zone of truth while interacting with a PC. This PC happens to be a arch Hag (or as we call the male hags, Hogs). Me not wanting to ruin my NPC reveal by searching the character sheet, I said “he willingly agrees to the zone”. Well lo and behold does Jabard ask “are you a hog”. Now is this a big new dm fumble, yes - but I did try to exact my revenge. They later went to an elemental tavern that charges “5 minutes of their time”. Well why 5 minutes you ask - zone of truth lasts 10 minutes. Therefore I could have cheesed the cheesing, and made them forget the question by stealing “5 minutes of their time”. Alas, I did not willingly due this as I didn’t want to ruin their genius and my fumble. Judges, should I have cheesed the cheesing, and would dice Christ has forsaken me if I did?

Mack Mae

Dear Jazzy Justices and may it please the Crit and NOT please the bleached blond bad baby bailiff Jake. I present to you the case of the Biddy Bit gone Brutal. During college, I was running a homebrew campaign for my friend group of mostly new players. In the first arc of the campaign, the barbarian's friend was in town and asked to sit in on our session, so I gave him an inconsequential NPC to play in combat. My players were trying to find the source of strange monsters plaguing their starter-town, and one recurring baddie they had encountered were called "Biddys" (reskinned gnoll witherlings). Each Biddy was basically a mindless freaky little dude that snarled, skittered around, and followed basic instructions from the smarter bad guys. The players LOVED the Biddys. Each had their own little names like Biddy Ben or Biddy Boop and often a unique silly hat, wig, or item. The players were so excited and freaked out whenever the little freaks would show up again. So, I gave our guest a Biddy to play in the combat: we'll call him Biddy Bad. In the combat, the monkey artificer, who was the newest to DND and was a little less engaged than the others, went down. At that moment, our guest announced that Biddy Bad had created a philosophy called "Anarcho Biddyism" in which "All Flesh and Blood Belongs to Biddy." And thus, Biddy Bad brutally tore open the chest of the knocked-out artificer to cause two failed death saves. The artificer went next, and failed his final save. I was shocked. A PC death at the hands of a bit character and guest player. The artificer loved his character, and I was worried that if I let him die in a random anticlimactic combat, he would lose all interest in the game. So I switched our battle music to an eerie ethereal playlist and narrated his soul leaving his body and being suddenly pulled below him to a dungeon they had not yet discovered, where a powerful spirit (the big bad of the arc) bartered with him to restore his life if he would do its bidding and free it from its chains. This ended up being a great story hook and a fun moment, but the catch is, I had already done it once before. Another player almost died in an earlier combat and was saved by the spirit in exchange for killing a key friendly NPC. After the monkey artificer was revived, the fighter said "Damn, I guess we really can't die in this campaign." Am I at fault for deflating the stakes of our game? Should I have let the artificer go to monkey heaven? Or would it have been a worse fate to let a new player die at the hands of a rando guest Biddy doing a bit? Am I just bad at balancing combats or was Biddy Bad out of line? I prostrate myself before the mercy and fury of the Supreme Crit.

Isaac Weaver

To the Juridical Judges and I guess there's some other guy there too, apparently? I come to you with the case of the Overcooked Campaign. After a glorious, brutal TPK brought our last 2 year grimdark homebrew campaign to an end, our DM told us he had an idea for a new setting. This time, we were going to be a secret group of freedom fighters, running a tavern by day and using it as a base of operations by night. Based off the treachery and treason in the last campaign, this sounded sick. Justices, we were duped (and souped). About halfway through the first session, we received ownership of the tavern, and our kitchen nightmare began. Our DM had crafted a 3pg document of rules for upgrading, expanding, and managing the tavern, to include stove upgrades and meat prices, that practically requires an MBA to understand. But the real issue is operating the mealtimes. Our DM decided to run breakfast, lunch, and dinner rushes in "realtime" à la Overcooked, a game he'd recently discovered at a party. Each of us mans a "battle station" like the bar, kitchen, or host stand, and then our DM begins yelling out orders like, "table for two, fish and spaghetti, 2 ales, " and we all have to say exactly what we're doing to take care of it. "I'm pouring the ales" "I'm carrying the ales to the table" etc... These customers overlap, and our DM even sends more than we can seat, requiring us to turn some away. Afterwards, he rolls for the success of the meal, giving plus and minuses to the roll based on customer experiences. This determines how much gold we get to keep operating the tavern. Justices, none of this is in turn order, and worst of all, we all play online, so it's just 5 people maniacally talking over each other while stressing out about imaginary minimum wage jobs. Needless to say, we've made no progress in the actual campaign because we're running three of these meal rushes each session. Would we be wrong to ask to cut the tavern management and get back to the skullduggery, or are we doomed to slave over this hot stove forever if we want a building to scheme in?

Grace Holland

To the one true justices and the guy that holds their bags, Just last week my party was left on a cliff hanger when we entered a battle where we are out numbered (6 to 5) and a single hit from a single combatant could one-shot our caster. I seem to be the only player convinced this will be a tpk. I asked to strategize in a group chat without the dm but everyone seems reluctant to meta-game and plan. Should I let the party die? Should I push the issue? I await your judgement

Cubsguy108

To the Justices, and Jake. I come to you not with a case but with a request. My group is on the verge of wrapping up a 4 year campaign, my first. We’ve reached level 20 and our dm has been amazing, outside of minor spats we’ve been able to settle out of court. My request is this- I’d like to do something nice for our dm to show our appreciation for all his hard work in wrangling us for 4 years. What would be something we could get or do for our dm to let him know he’s appreciated (when he’s not power word killing us, rather). Looking for thoughts and ideas if willing, thanks!

Sans Zimmer

To the wimples most worthy, I cast a confession at your feet to be judged, redeemed, or kicked in the nuts by crash or whatever. Some years back I was running the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign for my brothers and some friends. They had progressed through to an early big boss fight and were up against some wind elementals, a genie, and a powerful mage (spoilers I guess for POTA). A gnarly Chain Lightning brought them all down to death saves, and the genie they thought might be an ally was commanded to kill them to earn his freedom… My confession is this: at this critical moment, my brother’s dog need threatened to poop inside and so had to be briefly taken out for relief. In the moment, I thought since everyone saw what was coming it would be better to end it swiftly, so the genie acted and double tapped each PC with his sword (technically acting in initiative with death saves!). Sad for those present, but I realized I effectively off-screened a cherished PC, the player being off screen and scooping poop no less. It was a sour pause to the campaign. We eventually rolled new characters and continued on, but it was and remains a dark spot in my DMing history, leaving me wary and unsure how to fairly add deadly stakes lest they feel unfair again.

vintage_rpg

To their most honourable and erudite justices of the Crit, and their most tolerant bailiff. I present a nearly decade old sore spot in two acts for your consideration. A few campaigns ago we played a very gritty, hardcore campaign featuring rules like permanent injury, no resurrection, and everyone starting with a backup character. It was really fun, but intense, and our DM definitely leant into the ruthlessness at times. I bring before you two such examples of this ruthlessness for your learned judgment. Our group of PCs were in a busy town and trying to create a distraction. The barbarian of the group took the relatively uncontroversial barbarian move of trying to start a tavern brawl. She picked a fight with a random beefy-looking townsperson and rolled to punch - natural 20. The DM determines that, following the standard attack rules (double damage, and considering her strength modifier) the absolutely devastating punch instantly kills the guy. She argues that her perfect execution should mean she does exactly what she meant to do - start a fight with him. However, the DM rules that because she did not specify non-lethal damage beforehand, she didn't rein in her swing and the guy is dead. But the real dagger twist from the DM comes when he decides due to her unprovoked slaughter of an innocent bystander, her alignment has changed from neutral to evil. A few sessions later the wild magic sorcerer rolls incredibly high on the wild magic table, and summons a unicorn in the middle of a pretty tense battle with some slaad. However... the DM determines that the unicorn will attack the nearest evil creature when summoned; therefore, it does not go after the slaad, but instead charges at the barbarian. Ultimately, the barbarian was knocked out (although not killed) and only then did the unicorn help us in the fight. I humbly request your determination - in the context of a hardcore campaign, should the critical punch have in fact caused critical damage? And it is reasonable that this changed a player's alignment? There is no apparent bad blood at all between these players and this happened in about year 4 of 12 ish years playing together.

Thunderous Turtle

To the totally righteous judges and the whack baylif. I present the case of the Trouble timeline. I'm a DM here running my first campaign, a Spelljammer. After multiple dragons attack the party's ship it crashes on a planet and they glimpse a duplicate wreck + their own dead bodies before the world “turns to sand” and snaps back to their crash on a normal planet. It’s an Armageddon time-loop: first loop is supposed to feel weird; the reset is meant to make clues clearer on loop 2. Mid-investigation, the party splits. Monk goes alone to search tracks and later says they’ll wait at camp when asked if they’re rejoining. Meanwhile the warforged barbarian takes over in town: threatens NPCs for answers, punches through consequences (knocks out guard captain), townsfolk flee/hide. Barbarian then goes “I’ll go to A then B and threaten until I win,” 'Not sure of a place? Investigate to find a cilvillian to intimidate'. Eventually leads the rest of the party into the ritual cave set-up. I ask if he's really just going to walk in indicating not everyone is there and he does... I go to start the battle but figures this would be a good time for the ritual to complete instead. Armageddon triggers, loop resets, everyone back at the inital crash, end session. Afterward: Vibe at the table felt off. My guess, monk felt abandoned/sidelined, others were uncomfortable with the aggressive approach, barbarian seemed frustrated there wasn’t a clear goal yet. Who’s in the wrong: Me for banking on the reset for clarity? Barbarian for turning a mystery into intimidation-speedrun + tone shift? Monk for staying at camp? And should I have cut back to the monk more aggressively to keep spotlight balance? I'll be here chillin like a villian awaiting your judgement. P.S. We return in a week to the next session and one of the other players at the table also listens to naddpod.

Will the Wraith Dad

to the exhalted high justices, and the baliff Joker, i bring the case of the CCDMs- Camp Counselor DMs. a few summers back, i worked at camb half-blood as a senior counselor (i was head of the Apollo cabin). this camp is based off the percy jackson series but the real life camp has elements from mythologies all over the world, which was so unbelievably sick and exciting for me. on top of the (foam) sword fights and quetzlball and chariot racing, one of the activities available for campers after lunch was Mythomagic, a made up trading card game from the books that was then made into basically DND but much simpler for kids. i cannot tell you how psyched i was for this- sure, the kids weren't going to be able to pull it together to do much, but at least i could set up a very basic adventure. after all, mythomagic was a week long commitment- anyone could join on monday, and the kids who didnt vibe with it could simply choose to do something else after lunch, which would make the group smaller. it wasnt ideal, considering the timeslots were only 45 minutes, but my understanding at the start of the summer was that there would be enough activities and enough mythomagic gms that it would be alright. judges, my first week of mythomagic, i had nearly 20 kids in my group. it was only me vs 20 gremlins with (foam) swords. we didnt have enough pencils for them to fill out their sheets, not that they were listening to me when i told them how to, and i frequently wouldnt even be able to let every kid have a turn to do anything, nevermind something cool and/or meaningful. i asked for more support and less kids as well as proposing other things, even going as far as to try to make an even more simplified version of mythomagic for the kids to play, but leadership continously just told me to basically deal with it myself. i was frequently the only counselor willing to do mythomagic because it sucked to do and took all the joy out of it. after a month or so into camp, i started just doing a mythology themed version of mafia and gave up on mythomagic completely. was i wrong to have given up like this? i had return campers every week who were disappointed that i didnt do real mythomagic anymore, but they were vastly overshadowed by the amount of kids who didnt really give a shit. should i have just stuck with mythomagic after all? p.s. we counselors almost went on strike like 2 or 3 weeks from the end of camp because working conditions were so poor (racism, sexism, blatant disregard for health and safety and also the fucking weather). our director of the camp got demoted to parent liason because he in particular was fucking terrible at his job, and our on site nurse quit. one of the counselors passed out in 100+ degree heat and the ex-director didnt even look up from his phone as she was physically carried to HQ. nobody called an ambulance even though that is basic procedure for someone passing out, *especially* in the heat- had i known, i wouldve called one myself, screw what leadership thought.

Dustimus

I've got a slight follow-up to the "juicer that could juice anything" case. I spoke to the player and he reassured that he would have drank the entire lake of god juice to gain godhood, "Even if it took me years." He even teased me that it sounded like a much cooler scene if that had been the case, like a trial out of Greek mythology. He also reminded me that I made him roll a very high DC sneak attack to use the juicer and it only worked because the god wasn't expecting it whatsoever. PS - I'm sorry I called you a piece of shale, I didn't realize you were touted at the time. You're at least a nice reliable piece of granite. As for the rest of the actual campaign if you're interested, I did use the the character being the One True God for the rest of the campaign and made him reroll a new character, he got to decide how he was worshiped by his followers and what the decor of the temples was but otherwise everything proceeded as planned with him slotting in pretty seamlessly. Not everyone accepted their new Juice Lord but that added a bit of religious tension to the campaign which was nice.

Donny

Upvoting to the bailiff. We need to hear this one in court.

Jackson Hurley

RAZZING - WRONGFULLY? (Hello from Australia) A Bardic Inspiration to the Judges and a WIS save to the baliff for the Vicious Mockery he's taking so far in the court proceedings. To keep it brief (ish) - many years ago we were playing Curse of Strahd and Gloomstalker was hot off the press so I multiclassed it with fighter (for action surge) - now action surge is a very complicated ability (Jake please defend me on this) and wild shit was happening left and right in the initiative (tensions were high). I took too long deciding whether or not to Action Surge and someone said something like "hurry up Snail" - laughter ensued. It stuck - for years now this has been my nickname, I now have snail tattoos - our 2 rotating DMs have since had a baby together and I'm the godfather AKA "Uncle Snail" Was I too slow - or is Action Surge a complicated ability for someone filling out their character sheet in crayon? P.S Hate the show P.P.S see you at the Opera House ❤️🐌🖍️

Stephen

I come to the Church of Dice Christ not with a confession but with a plea for good luck in future endeavors. I recently joined a local tabletop group hoping to dip my feet into D&D. I've been a longtime listener but had never actually played in a game and wanted to try it out. I signed up to join in a oneshot that I had a lot of fun playing in, and told the DM that I would try to come back for the next week's session. However, the sessions are first come first serve and I opted to join too late to make it in. I also haven't had any luck finding other local tables to join so far. I come asking not for forgiveness as there was no crime, but for good luck joining new sessions and hopefully finding a table of my own.

uh

I have a confession to the highest of them all jake and the other people I used to play a simplified version of dnd with a group that changed charecters all the time pretty chill but i beleive i disturbed that chillness i dont know what i did but a few weeks after i joined the table The whole party disbanded i beleive it is my fault for when i joined a new group it disbanded only days after i joined i do not what im doing wrong but its clearly my fault so please absolve me of being a party killer

Mnixon

Hi Mr Jake Mr murph Mr well & Anne from Green gables Upper brief suit thnx xoxox

TheNewMilkMan

To the most noble scramble men and highly honored worm wife, and that guy who I'm pretty sure has been eating the food that goes in possum traps; I ask you this: whose responsibility is it to set the scene when describing what a player is doing. In our most recent session, my best friend of 25 years (and current roommate) was appalled that I didn't give him advantage on an attack after he misty stepped behind a warehouse guard because "I was hiding when I was across the street". Judges... I will admit I was having an off day and didn't describe the scene to the best of my abilities. The same friend (expressing concern for my mental health) pointed out that I only did "one silly voice" and the dm PC Flesh was nowhere to be seen. The player's greivance (i believe) is that our ranger with a silenced rifle was given advantage when he fired from across the street. I maintain though that misty stepping behind someone as a sorcerer who did not specify he wanted to remain hidden, should not merit advantage on the attack. Also every party member who attacked the guard missed and he was eventually killed by the eldritch knight who spent their full movement to run up on him from a nearby alleyway.

Kevin Moore

To the wise judges of Dungeon Court. Just the judges, no one else. Years ago I was a player in a long-running game of Pathfinder with several friends. We met every week online for nearly three years and it was a great experience, but a part of it still haunts me nearly a decade later. The campaign began with me playing a dexterity-based paladin using my Divine Bond on a longbow to smite enemies from afar. To this day, that is still the character I had the most fun playing. During a tense combat against one of the Big Bad's lieutenants I got crit by a random mook for so much damage that I outright died (in Pathfinder a character is "dying" when their HP is negative but does not die until it gets to a negative amount equal to your Constitution). I was disappointed to lose such a fun character, but sometimes that's just how the dice fall. Or so I thought. A few rounds later, as I sat back and watched the rest of the party in combat the DM checked his notes and said "uh oh". It turns out he had mixed up two stat blocks and the random mook that attacked me did so with the stats of the boss, which is why the damage was so high. Given that it was late and the session was wrapping up we agreed to figure it out before the next session. The thing is, I was going to miss the next few sessions because I was moving out of state. When I was able to rejoin the group I found out that in my absence not only did the group decide that my paladin was dead, but the party necromancer had raised his corpse as a skeletal minion that also died! I ask the court, am I wrong to feel slighted by this nearly a decade later? I made a new character and still had fun in the campaign, but should I have insisted on a second chance at life?

Whren

To the esteemed Justices and Jonk, I am currently playing in a Pokemon campaign that consists of four players that I have been playing with for 6 years now, its truly a great group. The infamous event occurred just a few sessions ago. One of the PC's, who I will not name in case he is listening to this, had an NPC romance interest who is a trouble maker. The NPC decided to sneak in to a restricted area on an island that is WAY above the party's level. Our romantic PC decided he should also try to sneak in to make sure his romance interest was okay, we all agreed. Cut to my character, the charisma bomb PC. I thought it'd be a good idea to distract the guard by feigning that there was an emergency elsewhere on the island. The guard followed me but quickly caught on to my PC's deceit. So what did I do? I ran, ran like hell. I decided to swim away off the island. Unfortunately for my PC the waters had some seriously violent and powerful Pokemon surrounding it. To make a long story a bit shorter my character was KO'd and being dragged to the bottom of the ocean. Once my party realized what was happening they sent their Pokemon after my PC to rescue me and the session ended on a cliffhanger. We come back next session to find out that the GM had rolled the entire rescue encounter off screen. Turns out my good friend's PC's primary Pokemon, his ace, died rescuing my PC. The table was in shock and a lot of PC drama naturally ensued. Judges I take full responsibility for having my PC make a poor judgement call that lead to a deadly encounter. But was it right to kill of an essential Pokemon/member of our campaign off screen so unceremoniously? I rest my case and accept any and all punishment for my idiocy.

Luke Stambaugh

Honorable Judges and Jake, I believe I was wrongfully razzed. I was playing a paladin in Wild Beyond the Witchlight. It’s a whimsical and wacky campaign. I made my character, Sir Pol (Paul) to be an affectless, stock D&D adventurer to play up the weird randomness we were bound to encounter. My backstory: a knight who fought goblins and likes cool gear and treasure. Essentially he had just finished the D&D starter set. The party was cool with it, and I got a kick out of role playing what was essentially Master Chief and constantly being made a fool of. My joy was thwarted when we encountered a goblin shop keeper. I role played being apprehensive, because goblins in my experience are the stock D&D bad guys. My party quickly jumped at the chance to label Sir Pol a racist, and my oblivious knight became a capitol storming election truther in the blink of an eye. I spent the rest of the session passionately defending my apprehension and insisting that Sir Pol’s experience would not be an uncommon one in the forgotten realms. Judges was I justified to dig my heels in on this one? I understand times have changed and goblins are no longer D&D goombas, but I still insist that goblins can be bad guys and I resent being made a chaotic-evil character by my dear, dear party members! (Do this in a nasally, pathetic whine) Defend me Murphy! Thanks, Luke

Flipno

To the honorable Judges, hot bailiff Jake, and Murph. I bring you the case of the Monkey King. At the start of a year long campaign I played during Covid, our DM assembled us and told us we could vote on one thing being added to the story. Unanimously we voted on the “Monkey King.” The parameters were vague but think Christopher Walken from the jungle book. Months later, my character was stranded in a snowy monastery on a mountaintop. I passed a cave and my DM described “the sound of distant monkeys echoing within.” I made a mental note to investigate that later but me and the other player characters had to deal with a pressing plot development first. (We had discovered the lost princess another player was looking for.) Later, when I came back to that cave after the princess sitch had been dealt with, my DM told me the monkeys were gone. For years now, we have razzed him about this, saying it was unfair to present the hook for the monkey king then, only to take him away from us later. He has repeatedly countered smugly that we had the chance and we didn’t take it. Eventually the monkey king did show up, but he was as one of the guys in my party described “a stage hazard” Who just threw boulders at our airship from a distance. Honorable judges, I ask you, was this an unfair move by the DM? Or should I have investigated the monkeys when I had the chance, even though the main plot was more pressing? As players is it okay to criticize the DM’s story decisions even though he puts in so much more work? I hold myself at the mercy of the court.

Santa Grinch Hugging HumBaba and two Fairies

Did my Brother DM Womp me by Delivering my Destiny in a Bitter sweet fashion the Goddess my Pixie Pc was Charged with Restoring. The Evil Wizard Got Mold in her Heart and She isn’t Herself. We Only Know she was Invisible Because I wanted to Cast dream Wine. I guess this is A confession? I want to be sentenced to Kicking that Wizard’s Ass

Bubbalo Dee

To the justices, long may they live , and Jake, who I feel okay about his lifespan I bring you the case of feelings not reciprocated. I introduced a friend and his partner to dnd a two years back, and we’ve been playing every week. After I finished up a campaign, he wanted to give dming a try, and invited his best friend, and his younger sister. This group meets up regularly to play magic and board games as well A few sessions in, the dms younger sister asked me on a date, I thought she was pretty, so I said yes. We went on a few dates, and I felt more of a friend vibe. I told her that I had fun, just saw her as a friend, and that I hoped we could still hang out. She now wants nothing to do with me, and is not coming to dnd from now on so here lies my question. Do I still go to mtg events or boardgame nights even though it might make her uncomfortable, or do I just make sure to go to things when she’s not there?

MrCandle

To the well respected and loved Supreme Justices and Jake the Bailiff whom I love but have inferred is less worthy of respect, presumably due to their inability to whistle, I present to you a case of a Magic Lying Dagger. Two or Three years ago in 2014 I ran a game of fifth edition set in a magical city overrun by forest (Eco-apocalypse style) at my University with new friends and strangers. The big thing of this adventure was finding little adventures in a very Monster of the Week style of play. In one of the sessions one of the players happened upon a Magical Dagger that told them they would unlock great power if they were to kill a known powerful NPC who ran the Inn outside of this Magical Ex-City that the players stayed at. This player, we will call them Dave-o, decided to try and kill this NPC while the NPC was asleep. I decided to give full crit sneak attack damage as I interpreted the rules at the time but this was not enough samage to kill the character (I believe he was level 5ish and the players were level 1 or 2. I was intentionally trying not to have an OP GM PC) A fight occured and Dave-o was basically forced to choose between retiring their character, as they would be banned from the Inn, or have their character die in a fight to the death. Dave-o was given many oppurtunities to explain themselves to this powerful NPC but did not take advantage of it. The absolute biggest twist is that even had he managed to 1v1 this higher level opponent the only magic in the Dagger was to talk and lie. Dave-o did not at all question this dagger and it was just intended to be a funny little thing. Dave-o decided to quit the game and some of my friends thought I should've allowed for the instant kill. So my questions to you are: Should I have asked for an insight check immediately without the player questioning? Should I have allowed the NPC to have his throat slit during his sleep? Should I have a third question here because three questions feel better than two? I think I would handle the whole thing differently now with more experience GMing but I'm very curious. Lots of love from Melbourne Australia, Iain (pronounced Ian)

The Wizard Spring

Help. We just finished our session zero of our new campaign as a scientific expedition team in a futuristic space campaign. I'm playing an intergalactic squid paleontologist/paleobotanist and I have specialties in geology-, geography-, and paleontology-related planetary history checks. One of our party members (that I've never met before this) is a dwarf from a mining planet and specializes in legal operations and mining work - he said that we should be forgiving about both legal particulars and mining information and if anyone knows anything about it, to speak up and help him out because he doesn't know too much about them. Judges, I'm a Professional Geologist in real life and I specialize in hard rock mining geology. I happily told him so and he said "oh... cool." Upon our descent to the planet, where we knew there'd be some kind of conflict with a mining operation and our archeological site, my character looked out a window and I asked a few questions about local geography to get a lay of the land and to orient myself. We got a lot of information and I asked a few more follow up questions that were very helpful. The dwarf asked if there was anything that we could use against the mining operatives using legal codes. The DM said that, normally, there would be intergalactic laws about resource extraction on other planets but that this particular planet was too far on the outskirts and wouldn't be considered important enough by governing bodies to protect against mining companies. The dwarf seemed a little disappointed. Out of character (no funny voice), I asked another question about the laws: the outer planets are ignored when it comes to resource extraction, but what about harm to natives on the planets, can mining companies do things that hurt the people of the planet or planetary ecology? The DM said that, while most unexplored environments weren't a huge concern, non-space fairing native planet dwellers were legally protected from harm. I then told our Dwarven lawyer that that could be our ticket because the local village's groundwater wells (we established no surface streams and no water rich plant life in the geography info) would be negatively impacted by the mining. But the dwarf seemed disappointed, saying he doesn't know why he wanted to play a miner or a lawyer when the laws didn't matter and I already know about mining. Judges, I was trying to offer above the table help; my character doesn't know mining stuff. I didn't mean to accidentally have my space swimming squid step on this Dwarven mining lawyer's boots. He seemed pretty checked out for the rest of the session. I feel bad, I thought we were solving a problem together but I think i may have made a stranger feel like their character was useless. It didn't help that he rolled a nat 1 on the only other check he made that day. I'm worried that anything i do when interacting will dominate the scene or make him feel like his character isn't helpful. Even when I asked him a few questions in character, he just didn't know what to say. What do I do to help this Dwarven lawyer gain confidence?

Crimskey Official

To the substantial & superb justices and their subpar subordinate Jake: were currently playing a Curse of Strahd campaign and the question often comes up: is it fair to assume that rules regarding vampirism ie. Hate sunlight, need an invite to come inside, possible garlic allergens, etc would be common knowledge in game as they are irl?

Raijuhato

Dear Honored Justices of the Crit and the most Illustrious, Divinely Chiseled and August Bailiff Jason, I come to you not with a grievance, but with a gift that this humble servant of the court has discovered. I come with this: "Inspired Learning." A special rule where inspo points (IPs) can now be accumulated and used to better a PC. I propose this: cash in IPs for a proficiency, expertise or an increase in an ability score by 1. Higher ability scores would need more IPs. If you have a Strength of 9, for example, you'd need 6 IPs to make it a 10. But with a Strength of 19, you'd need 16 IPs to turn it into a 20. In this way, you can dangle IPs as adventure or roleplay rewards to PCs. We've had this rule instituted for many sessions, and after some tweaks, the table supremely enjoys it. Our frail rogue has attained normal strength (10) from a measly 8, and our artificer is now apparently a marathon runner and an expert in athletics. I wish other tables to delight in this as well. Thank you lovely Bailiff Jayden for bringing this to court. Your Humble Servant, Raijuhato

clover

Hello, high priests Axford, Murphy, Tanner and choir boy jake. I have a confession for a sin I fear I may have committed on my players. It was all of our first time playing dnd (although I knew a lot from play shows). The party successfully completed their first mission of finding the culprit who was stealing valuables from villagers. At this point the PCs have had spent plenty of time together but didn't actually like each other, they bickered and fought and tried to kill each other regularly. I was unsure of how to get them to want to stick together to move on to other things so I crafted a plan. They were celebrated with a party and gifts which included stuff the thief left behind in their lair. This included a cursed sword which took the appearance of something each PC would want. I narrated them each grabbing their item and watching as it transformed into the sword which they could not let go of. To get the party to stick together I literally stuck them together. It ended up working well as they worked together to find a wizard to remove the curse but I feel guilty. The very least I could have done was to give them a wisdom saving roll but I took advantage of them not knowing the game to get them where I wanted them. Will Dice Christ forgive my sin or am I to burn in the fiery pits of dice hell...?

abfg616

Dear justices, and a moment of silence for our dearly departed baby bailiff, Break, I present to you the Case of the Unwanted Deception Rolls. A year or so ago, I had been playing in a D&D campaign with some friends from Community College, originally pitched as a kind of fantasy riff on the Frostpunk setting. My character, artificer Hal Bird, was originally envisioned as a blue collar mid-level maintenance engineer working on an apparatus known as The Kiln, a massive furnace responsible for heating the city where our characters originated. Occasionally, in character, I would mention, offhandedly, some nonsense technobabble relating to my work on The Kiln, to flesh out my character's involvement with the project. Whenever I would do so, our DM would call for my character to make a Deception check, despite the fact that my statements were purely for flavor, inevitably embarrassing my character when he would roll low and be made to look the fool! Furthermore, it had been established beforehand, at my DM's insistence without my input, that my character had been solely responsible for inventing The Kiln itself, which I feel should give me some leeway to claim that "ethereal resonance factors" were involved somewhere along the way, without being made a liar!! So, my lovely justices and skeletal bailiff, may he go with dice christ, I ask you this: Was I right to be miffed at my DM’s insistence that my PC be a filthy liar, or is this my own fault for coming up with minor worldbuilding details on the fly to fill out my character’s academic background? I await, ever-so-goodly, the surely just ruling of this August court and its October tagalong. P.S. I'd also like to say that I am starting a new campaign with new people, as a first time DM! yippee! P.P.S. For Sale: Bailiff Shoes, Never Worn.

Alex Davis

To the resplendent and stupendous Justices Axford, Murphy, and Tanner. Oh. Hey, Jake. I've been running a homebrew campaign for a couple years since I first started playong D&D. I've had players come and go but one has been with me from the start, whom I will refer to as Jake for simplicity's sake. From the beginning, whenever I would introduce a complication or plot twist or even just have monsters target and deal damage to Jake, he would scoff, throw up his hands, and complain loudly. Often he would say things like "Of course, just kill me and get it over with" or "Well I guess we're all going to die now" and other such sarcastic remarks of frustration. At first I took it personally, thinking I was failing as a new DM. So I tried different things to improve his experience and find what he liked. Despite this, the behavior continued. I didn't really know what to do from there so I just moved on with the game and started pulling punches in combat and the plot so as not to make Jake mad. The final straw happened when, after several instances of the party ignoring the warlock absorbing the souls of enemies he killed into a lantern, the warlock's patron made him kill innocent merchants to get their souls because the patron likes the taste of good souls the best. I didn't force PvP and no one except the warlock had to attack civilians. Afterwards, Jake got IRL mad at the warlock player yelling at him that he was just going to get them in a situation that would get them killed and they should just kick the warlock out of the party and end the campaign. The session ended shortly after and the warlock player texted me to ask if Jake was mad in the game or IRL. A conversation with Jake revealed that both were true mainly because he doesn't like the unpredictability and chaos of the game, especially with dice involved, and the warlock is just bringing more chaos into the game. Oh, did I mention that Jake is also my dad? Judges, is it my responsibility as DM to appease a player with such a sensitivityto chaos and unpredictability? Or do I need to follow Justice Murphy's infamous advice and get a new dad? P.S. Hate the show

Choki

To the powerful members of the church I beseech thee…… is the judge in a height chair? I bring you the case of The Talkative Monk: I am running a game in a homebrew world called dread spire and my players are trying to leave the underdark after having their souls connected to the horsemen of the apocalypse in an ancient ritual and then being casted into the darkness below. On their journey I had an encounter with a cosmic owl sealed into the ruins of the underdark who traded in stories for information. While one of my players the drow sorcerer bargained with the owl the human monk cut him off and proceeded to ask the owl to be his pet. Judges he wouldn’t move on from this for 5 minutes., I would have the owl tell him no and that his destiny is to remain here for now but the monk would not listen. After five minutes I saw the rest of the table annoyed and angry so I had the owl ignore the monk and grant the requests the others wanted as they actually had things to trade with the owl after this the party kept travelling. After the session the monk was upset he didn’t get anything from the owl and why he didn’t join them. When I explain he could not leave the underdark he told me “it’s my world I should be able to change it on the fly” am I crazy for not giving him everything he wants cause he wants it? Should I have found a better work around? If I am to be punished I wish to plea insanity. Thank you

Kyle Murphy

Hello to the three people I love listening to most and Jake. I bring you the case of Justice for Little Bobby. I was a player in a campaign years ago and this moment still sticks with me. A farmer hired us to find his missing pig Little Bobby. We spent the entire 3 hour session tracking down and saving Little Bobby ending with a glorious reunion with his father Old Barnaby. But before the session ended and after the rest of us settled down for the night our rogue, mysterious chaotic evil changeling named Black Hood(clearly you can see the type of player), snuck out back to the farm. We had to sit their for 30 minutes of him sneaking through that farm and ultimately murdering Little Bobby for no reason whatsoever. We were furious and to this day I am still furious. Eventually that campaign fizzled so we never got Justice for Little Bobby. Since then, I've been DMing with this same friend in my party and he has had multiple PCs that have been either kicked out or killed by the party after harming too many innocent NPCs. My one defense of this player is he loves to engage with the world and has a clear love for the good parts of dnd, but also a toxic murder hobo side to him as well. I can curb this side of him by throwing somewhat innocent NPCs that aren't important to the story for him to secretely kill away from the party so they don't have to roleplay traveling with a serial killer and making more important NPCs unable to be isolated. It worked will enough and we finished a 2 year campaign. We are a group of very good friends and there have only been small complaints from other players at the table but no one would want to kick him out. Judges, we have started a new longform campaign and he is as bad as ever with a backstory trying to bring back the BBEG from the 1st campaign and murdering any innocent npc he can. Clearly this player is guilty, but am I complicet in all future atrocities commited at my table if I allow this player to continue playing?

JM

To the high crit and the low bailiff. I have been playing in an online home game for over four years between 5e and pathfinder. The DM is very experienced and deep into world building. But I admit, I get lost in the world. He treats the world like a true sandbox, so much that I have trouble distinguishing the overarching narrative. In one town in a single session, I counted thirteen plot hooks (abandoned temple dungeon crawl, political intrigue, pearl farming, jungle treasure hunt, etc.). He will build whatever the players want, but i have a hard time seeing what actually matters and how I can further the story. It feels a little too much like real life at times with the endless options. Am I wrong for wishing I were riding the rails on a bit more bounded adventure when presented with these endless riches?

Hannah Ferrer

dear gorgeous wonderful baby girl justices and the itty bitty baby bailiff jameson, i wanted to ask if i was in the wrong. i am a dm for a group of five of my friends and we were playing in a cyberpunk/starwars cowboy dragon hunter campaign when the alleged offense occurred. i had originally planned for a group of bounty hunters to attack the party while they were asleep in the hotel room, but the artificer had placed an alarm spell on the door before they went to sleep at the end of the session. this was a problem for me because what i had planned was integral to the story lines of multiple of the characters that would eventually lead to many fun discoveries and adventures in the future. in the week leading up to the next session i read the alarm spell and found that the spell specified that the player can decide if the alarm is in their head or out loud. when the next session came around, i asked the artificer if he had the alarm set to be in his head or out loud. when he responded in his out loud , i had the players roll initiative and that the bounty hunters had a surprise round because they were asleep but that because the alarm was out loud, the bounty hunters would not outright kill them. i rationalized this by telling myself that the bounty hunters would ignore the alarm to get what they wanted. however, my party was a little confused but moved on once i explained my thinking. however, months later this truly weighs on my soul. did i let my dreams of story direct a small plot point while sacrificing the ingenuity of my players? or am i justified in making sure that the wants of my players are fulfilled through obsessive spell semantics? i will accept any punishment you give me, i only ask you don’t spit on me too much. thank you.

JK Atula

To the most honorable, erudite, magnanimous judges and also the narrator: A few years ago, a friend of mine started up some Zoom DND. I chose to play a druid, mostly because I was hoping to kick my Cleric addiction. It did not help. I had hoped that Wildshape would mix up the classic heal / sacred flame combo. Unfortunately, in what I believe to be perhaps justified recompense for missing session zero, I turn up for the first session and discover that I have seen 0 animals, and in fact cannot Wildshape into anything at all. Fortunately, I managed to see an owl during the next session... Which I couldn't shape into with it's flying speed as a level 4. Three sessions later, and I managed to see a rat. Judges, and Voiceover Guy, was that some BS or should I be punished for poorly managing my schedule? PS: the campaign fizzled out when the party refused to retreat from a dungeon, especially when we ran out of heals from the monk misty-stepping into another group of enemies.

Sara

To the most honorables Judges and Jacob, My dnd group experienced the most unhinged group members I’ve ever been a part of. There are 7 of us: DM, my bestie Isabella, Stacy, Chuck, Bob & Jan (couple) and me. This is a relatively new dnd campaign inspired by your COS campaign. Isabella, forever DM, and I roped DM (also forever dm) to run it for us. he’s a pro at COS after running it for multiple other groups. He agreed and had a solid group of 4 players. Except the DM wanted to have extra players because he was going to run it brutally and invited a couple that was pretty new to DND. Bob & Jan were the worst players I’ve ever had to witness and ENDURE. It’s a virtual campaign because we’re spread over two continents (North America and Europe), but this couple would consistently burp into their microphones as though mute wasn’t an option. Also, Jan was so severely codependent on Bob that she would refuse to allow any interaction from someone else at the table with him without inserting herself in the role play every single time without fail even if it didn’t make sense story wise/logistically! Bob thought he was a dnd genius and was convinced everything he did worked which usually resulted in lots of conflict when we tried to explain how the dnd rules worked. Both of them played squishy characters but would consistently run ahead and initiate combat without letting us plan or at least let the tanks go in first. We always ended up playing defensively and using our heals at the beginning to keep them in the fight. They had a blatant disregard for the rest of us. Jan played a Druid and would only heal Bob but never anyone else. Bob died and turned into a werewolf, so he created a new character that was a Witcher type and so story wise tried to kill his former character because he was a monster hunter. Which lead to our first PVP between him and Jan who was trying to protect the former character. It got heated and almost felt like a projection of a personal fight as it ended up turning into almost an hour long discussion of accusations between them and rules on pvp that was ultimately resolved when the dm decided we can figure it out as the fight progressed which ended in less than 2 rounds between only Jan and Bob This session was so derailed and unproductive that it was the final straw for Stacy. She’s also relatively new to dnd (her and I have an in person campaign in our home town, but we tend to switch systems so this was her first real campaign in 5e) but always asked Isabella and I questions or recommendations and would have really good conversations with our dm about realistic things she could do in the game. Which lead to our main moral dilemma. Once the dm heard Stacy wanted to drop out of the campaign and realized that Isabella and I were also probably as frustrated and close to leaving too, DM decided that he was okay with dropping Bob & Jan. It turns out that he’s already had talks with them over their virtual manners (burping) and blatant disregard to dnd rules and sharing role playing interactions with the other members. The couple didn’t seem to care much and continued their behavior, so the dm was fine to continue without them. But Isabella and Stacy don’t do well with conflict. It ended up being a long discussion where the DM decided he was going to end the campaign for all of us. But restart it back up without the couple. Everyone else is on board and while the DM would have preferred to just tell them why we’re actually cancelling (FAFO) and I agree with him. But the group agreed to keep the conflict to a minimum, so the DM cancelled due to family obligations. The couple were sad and agreed and only asked that we keep the discord server so we can keep in touch. We resumed the campaign with another couple that play in another campaign (Isabella’s the dm) that most of us also play in that’s been running for at least 3-4 years. It’s been such a stress reliever and I feel like we’re all enjoying the campaign again. I ask the court, was this the best way to handle it? Should we have just let them know they’re bad group members and why we can’t play with them anymore or is it okay to just say goodbye without the fallout? I feel guilty about this even though I don’t even have any emotional attachment to the couple. PS the couple is oblivious and talk in the discord server a lot as though we’re old friends. We’ve taken turns responding to them and the mental space this takes at times can be overwhelming. PSS Emily Axford is the best and you’re my fav dnd player so please don’t judge us too harshly 😭

Haley

To the most honorable judges and sweet sweet Jake, I’m in a campaign about 5 sessions in. The DM is a fist time DM-er. I feel like he says no to everything we ask or try to do. I don’t mean “Can I hit this guy with my axe, bounce off his head and land on the lever?” I mean stuff like “Can I do an insight check?” Also, when we’re looking around or talking to people, it seems like it’s impossible to find anything. If we’re exploring a room, we can ask to check everywhere we can think of and we can find nothing. If we talk to somebody, the person has zero info to give us. We were traveling through a forest, passed by three different interesting locations, and each time ended up having to walk past them without doing anything because we spent so long at each one trying to look for clues and talk to people, but he just kept saying “Nothing happens.” Everything we try to do feels like a dead end. I can’t tell if he has nothing to say or if there is truly only one way we can get info that we aren’t figuring out. It feels so hard to get excited and curious when everything I try to do gets me literally nothing. I know the answer is to talk to him about it, but I’m trying to avoid that. Do you have any ways I can talk about it in-character during a session? Luckily, my pc is a 12 year old. Ty!!!!

Marlin the barb

Hello wise and benevolent justices, and handsome bailiff Jenk. I seek you're insightful council. Me and 5 of my closest friends, that I've known for around 20 years, have been playing dnd for about 7-8 years. We've played multiple campaigns in that time, including 4 that we're playing currently (2 are for when someone isn't available), and we're enjoying all of it very much. Each friend has DMd at least 1 campaign . All accept for me who only DMd 2-3 sessions, and I realized the general roll of a DM, and time needed for prep is overwhelming, and just not fun for me. Especially now as I have 18 month old twins. However, despite this, my friends kind of heckled me a bit for not DMing. At first I took the heckling as a joke explaining to my friends why I didn't want to DM. Most of my friends stopped, accept for one who continues to heckle me. The continued heckling is starting to feel like passive aggressive jabs, rather than playful razing, at this point. Once even blaming me of being a "privileged player" because I've had all the fun of being a PC, without having to do the hard work of a DM. I've tried re-explaining multiple times both in private and in group to this friend why I don't want to DM. Yet he persists with his quips, and I feel it's starting to ruin dnd for me. Justices, am I overreacting to some friendly razing, or is my friend taking it a little too far? Ps Please keep my name anonymous as our groups are still active.

KestertheJackal

Brothers and sister of Dice Christ, I am reaching out my hands to take the stole from your shoulders and rest it upon my own. Us members of the church must share in our burdens. Are you weighed down by any sins which you would like to confess?

The Wizard Spring

Live update - he just messaged the group chat saying that he felt like his character was too dialed into laws and contracts and that he'll be changing it to be more well rounded and engineering focus. I feel like that might overlap a lot with our party's technician and engineer - we'll see I guess...

Camilla Jefferson

i love how there's always so many cases. let no one ever tell you nerds have no drama!

rc47

To the honorable justices and bailiff, I was in a campaign years ago that was set in a homebrew domain of dread. We were fairly early on in the game, I think maybe level 5. This story mostly involves our DM, me (playing a hexblood vengeance paladin), and another player who was playing a dark elf genie warlock. We had a quest to collect sap from a cursed tree but when we got near, it revealed itself to be a treant. At the beginning of the encounter the treant awakened two trees near it to fight us. The DM narrated this by describing the roots of the main treant stretching underground to then wake up the two additional enemies in that wink wink way DMs sometimes do. I took this to mean the additional enemies would die if we killed the main treant. I went first in initiative and attacked the original treant. The treant and other trees went next and each of the two minions attacked the other people in the party while the main tree attacked me. The warlock immediately became upset with me. He said he had a great plan if only I had tanked but now he has disadvantage so he can’t do what he needs to do. He said I needed to keep enemies off of him so he could do his job of killing things. I said “Can’t you just throw a fireball at the main tree?” He seemed irritated and just moved away from the minion and cast darkness on the main treant. I used my turn to run over and start attacking the treant that was hitting him. I smited both times so I did a decent amount of damage but I couldn’t kill it. The treant minion ignored me and followed him instead. This went on for a few turns. Eventually he managed to get a turn where he wasn’t within melee of an enemy so he could finally cast scorching ray. Because he had cast darkness on the treant and had devil’s sight he attacked with advantage and because he had the elven accuracy feat he could roll three d20s with each ray. He crit twice and dealt a truly ridiculous amount of damage because treants are vulnerable to fire damage. It died immediately and the other two treants became normal trees again. The fight was over and the warlock said something about how I should have just tanked. I argued that there aren’t that many ways to get enemy attention in DND and he could have just cast two fireballs and the treant would have died anyway. I got the vibe that the table was all on his side after he basically killed the boss in one hit with the scorching rays trick so I just took the L. Was I wrong to not run interference on the minions?

G S

Dont have a case to submit this time but I wanted to make the justices and beautiful bailiff aware of this guy on Instagram who is "horsemaxxing" by eating 25 pounds of oats in one week and biking hundreds of miles

Ryz

Dear honorable judges and Jackalope Fartsniffer Over the pandemic I played in a game where I built a character whose backstory was being from a family of oppressive Elf Wizards, who rejected their puritanical ways and became a sex educator, named Nero. Nero had ideal stats for a wizard but refused to use magic and was classed as a fighter with high intelligence but low strength and con. While on a journey with their teenage half elf daughter to figure out what her other half was (Nero had slept with a huge number of sapient creatures so it was really not clear), Nero fell into some sewer water. My DM asked that I roll a Con save. I rolled a natural 1 and Nero contracted Giardia. After many, many failed con saves due to Nero’s less than ideal build I attempted to collect mold from a cave and use an alchemy kit to derive penicillin so I could stop having constant intestinal issues. My DM stated that the knowledge of how derive penicillin from mold would have been beyond Nero, despite his Intelligence being 19, and wouldn’t let me roll for the attempt stating that it wasn’t a big deal because Nero just had to beat a con save of 10 to recover. Nero however had a -2 to con and never managed to make that save resulting in his infection becoming far worse and dying in battle due to the penalties from intestinal issues. Judges, was it fair for my DM to deny me even the chance of making medicine to cure my character’s infection, or was their gross and untimely demise in front of their daughter justified?

Atlas

To the honorable, faultless judges and the bailiff doing kickflips in the parking lot as his car gets towed, I present to you: The Phandalin Fiasco. I am a fresh-out-the-womb DM running The Lost Mines of Phandelver adventure for a party of four new D&D players. They are level two and have made it to the town of Phandalin where a corrupt gang, known as the Redbrands, is hustling businesses and murdering anyone who stands up to them. My players, during their first night in Phandalin, decided they should go straight to the Redbrands' favorite bar, pretend to be one of them, and maybe kill everyone. Knowing they could never fool anyone because the party is composed of a tiefling, an orc, a tabaxi, and a half-elf who wears a deer skull and refuses to take it off, I had them have a run-in with a few patrolling Redbrands (the word 'patrolling' is very important). They dispatched them quickly, leaving one alive for questioning very briefly before burning him alive (naturally). From the interrogation, they learned the location of the Redbrands' hideout. They also had asked him several times "how many people are in your gang??", to which I, finding no answer in the module, responded, "I don't know...about 25?" Their response to this information? Go to the Redbrands' favorite bar *in the morning* and kill every patrolling Redbrand who showed up so they could "thin the gang's numbers" since there were only about 25 of them. I, taking a moment, looked at my sweet little level two players and lovingly asked, "...What?" The module has no map for the bar, let alone going inside, and I don't think a gang would just let its numbers be thinned. Also, why does killing 25 people feel achievable?? I asked them if they were SURE and even had an NPC disagree with their plan, but they were adamant. Judges, my panic was high and my rinky toes were TENSED. I hastily drew a bar map and gave them four Redbrands to fight. After the fight, I told my players straight up that they had to go to the hideout to defeat the Redbrands. They're infiltrating it now but I have to confess, I feel dejected. Was I not describing the situation well enough? Should I know how many members are in a gang? Were my players too bloodthirsty to see clearly? Were you all wrong to inspire me to DM? I lay myself at the court's feet for justice and so the bailiff may ollie over me.

Alia Silverwater

Our esteemed Rebbeyim of the Spellcraft Synagogue: I have broken a Mitzvah by a perpetuating falsehood. About our 6th session in, we came across a planar scouting party that was looking to enslave the local populace. We tracked their damage airship to a cliffside, anchored halfway up. Our party snuck up to the top. As a group we decided to push a boulder over the edge. My druid wildshaped into an ox to get a better strength score. My DM liked the idea of it and gave me advatage. The first roll was a 3, the second was a Nat 20. With the success, the group assigned me to roll the damage, my DM asked for 20 d10. Not wanting to math that much, I decided to use the dnd beyond digital dice for the first time. The roll shocked me, 199. I kinda froze for a second because it seemed unreal. My friend next to me very excitedly called out the damage from my tablet. Huge uproar, everyone is cheering and our DM decides that with that amount it breaks the airship breaks in half. The rest of the session goes great. When we finished, I went through to mark a long rest and pull up the roll history and my heart sinks. In my rush to figure out how to use the digital dice, I had selected 1 d100 along with the 20 d10s. I said nothing out loud, marked my long rest and closed my tablet. I've told no one in my group. How do I explain to everyone that our first time of whomping our DM was due to my rushed fatfingers? Please dear Ravs, how do I overcome this?

SeriousC

To the benevolent judges and "AHHH!!!".....Oh Jake! I didn't see you there. I bring you the PC Custody Battle. I was approached by my forever DM and he asked if I could run the next campaign so he could play. I was nervous cause I've never DM'd before, but with his encouragement I gathered the group and we set off. The game was going well for months until my DM approached me. My DM asked if he could make a new character claiming, "I'm bored, I feel I have taken his story to their end." I was worried cause I still had so much planned for him and even offered to workshop, but he was firm. So I narrated his PC leaving and introduced his new character: a swashbuckler rogue pirate captain. Everyone loved the new character, so I thought we were all good. Untill one session later, my DM approached me again saying quote, " Im going to leave the game. I'm finding myself bored and uninvested." Once again I offered to workshop, but he was firm so we bid him farewell and we continued forward. But I had a problem. I was left with his Captain and crew of his NPCs that was taxing for a new DM to organize. So in the next encounter, I decided to introduce my BBEG and as a way to show off the bad guys power, I would have the Captain sacrifice himself so his crew and the players could escape. When I told my DM this, he was upset. Saying that it was his character and he should get to decide what his ending was. I argued that since he left the game, they were now a NPC and as DM their fate was in my hands. Well suffice to say this soured the group and the campaigned fizzled out. So I ask, who owns a character once a player leaves the table? Should I have let his 2nd PC sail into the sunset? Or was I allowed to give him a heroic death? I throw myself at the mercy of the court.

Samuel DeWilde Muthiah

To the allegedly honorable judges and the allegedly lowly, lowly, lowly, lowly bailiff, I come to you humbly asking for forgiveness. In a recent game, another player and I tied for initiative. When it came to our turn in the initiative, I immediately rolled to attack and missed. However, no one noticed that I'd rolled because the other player had begun narrating his turn. I let him take his turn, and then when he was finished, I re-rolled my missed attack roll to start my turn and hit. Did the intervening turn justify my re-roll or must I perform penance to avoid an eternity of nat 1s?

BLT Boy

To the "bow chicka wow wow" judges Murphy, Axford, and Tanner, and the lowly "sad trombone noises" bailiff Joop, I bring for your consideration a case of stolen childhood. My party ran our campaign for almost two years before it finished. I was happy to have a terrible relationship with my in-game mother, which ran the entire course of the story. It was perfect almost the whole time: the party didn't know that my mother was the famous Taylor Swifty (one of our main rivals/enemies in the early game), and the reveal was one of the best highlights of the whole adventure. Over time, I told the Gang my backstory of how I grew up with my dad, a copper dragon, and only saw my Mom when she wanted to teach some cruel lesson. My character loved his cool dragon dad, and despised his snobby mom. Fast forward to the very end of the campaign. Our group was helping headline a charity concert, which more than anything was a front to smear my mom's reputation. We prepped for in-real-life weeks. As the event ended, my DM announced that Taylor Swifty was "really cool and nice, and that she was actually a good mom all along". I protested, citing previously established cruel things she'd done throughout my life. My DM countered by saying "oh, yeah, that was just like a butler you all had. Your mom polymorphed him into a dragon whenever you wanted your dad. You've probably never even met your real dad because he didn't like you or something". I was floored. Was I robbed of the childhood I created? Should my DM have created a backstory that I, as a player, couldn't relate to? I await your wise benevolence.

Attle Phi

To the Honorable and Just judges Murphy, Axford, and Tanner, as well as the baffling, bumbling baliff jake (not the one from from animorphs) hurwitz, I bring to you a case of the Semantics of Opportunity Attacks. This story stretches back to high school, (Im now post-grad), but my friend and I still occasionally bring this up as a running bit. During our old campaign, I played a naïve Warforged Circle of Spores Druid (that was a sentient fungus inhabiting a discarded warforged), and my friend a Vengeance Paladin. His character frankly hated mine. He played an edgy traumatized paladin who kept to himself, which I thought my kind-natured, simple druid was a fun foil to, and would try to stick with him. We would frequently get into spats in game, disagreeing on almost everything, which I thought was in good in-character. This culminated in a full on PVP duel when his character was infuriated when I created a Spore Zombie out of a dead civilian, where he revealed that he had taken the “Mage Slayer” feat, which he paired with the “Sentinel” feat. He argued that Mage Slayer, which let’s you attack a caster as a reaction each time they cast a spell, worked with Sentinel, which changes enemy movement to 0 with opportunity attacks. This allowed his Paladin to utterly destroy my druid, who could not get away and got hit with an extra Divine Smite each time I tried casting anything. I lost, badly, and he only let my character live after I begged him to. Later, I noticed Mage Slayer states that you are able to attack a caster as a reaction, but does not name this an “Opportunity Attack”, so I should have been able to get away without Sentinel triggering after he used his reaction to hit me from Mage Slayer. My DM disagreed, much to my friend’s chagrin, that it was still an opportunity to attack me, so it should still count for Sentinel. I still think the books say I am right, but I understand my DM’s decision; even though he was wrong. Can you please help settle this debate from nearing a decade ago? I need to take my friend down a peg.