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D&D Court Case Call (Patreon)

Published:
2021-02-22 16:00:32
Imported:
2026-06

Content

D&D Court is BACK! If you've been wronged at the table, it's time to speak up. Please comment here with the details and we rule justly.

Please keep your submissions BRIEF! Imagine it's like... two tweets.

Your bailiff,

Jake

Comments

Holden

If it may please the court, I have a case regarding flashbacks, backstories, and betrayal. Recently, I started DMing and I decided to take a page out of the NADDPOD book and use flashbacks to explain in-world the characters’ sub-class choices. I decided to show three separate moments from their childhood as they progressed into the characters they are now. The first two went really well and I spent a ton of effort on them all, but then we got to the paladin. The paladin is a fallen Aasimar that became fallen when he switched allegiances after becoming tired of the slavery within societies that worshipped his original deity. One of the cornerstones of his backstory was an annual festival, the first time he went he saw slaves eating last but accepted it as life following his church mentor’s explanation. Year after year he became increasingly more upset with the slaves’ treatment until one year he punched said mentor. I set the scene for that first festival and made it clear he was only 9, but he RP’d it as if nothing had changed and it was just his character in present day. I tried to keep RP’ing and whittle the 9 year old down, but he decided to stubbornly die on this hill. It really took the entire group out of the experience because the progression then didn’t make any sense. When I asked him about it he said “oh I forgot that was my backstory. I haven’t read it in a while” My question for the honorable justices: should he know his agreed-upon backstory, or should I have told the players that we were doing flashbacks and they needed to freshen up their knowledge? I chose to have them go in blind to keep suspense and mystery. Also, I chose to explain this as he was dreaming what he *wished* happened opposed to what *actually* happened since the flashbacks all canonically happened through dreams. Was that the right call for me to make or is it just a cop out that took away some player agency?

Travis Butcher

I'm running a Megadungeon game set in a little hub town and I was called out for not allowing them to take a long rest. However it's a dungeon with monsters everywhere am I in the wrong for saying it's too dangerous and not allowing it?

Molly Oxenfree

If it pleases the court l, my DM took away a players ability to use Mind Sliver as a bonus action and has implied they might remove it from the game entirely. Had it not been released in Tashas I’d understand but now? Also they removed the Echo summon being a bonus action and made it a per proficiency 1hp summon from my Echo Knight. Is this cool?

Seth C

May it please the court, My party was fighting a dragon eel which has an ability that if you hit it with a melee attack or touch it you take 1d10 of lightning. I argued that because I use a sunblade I should not take this damage since it is made of radiant energy not metal. The DM ruled against me, who is right?

Jamie Claire

My friends think their careers are more important than playing a weekly game. What gives?

Ewan MacDuff

May it please the court, I present my case. My DND group (8 people+dm) consists of newer players and older players. The DM has been trying to get the newer players to RP and play on their own, but it’s making these newer players nervous. They’ve told him they both have different anxiety disorders. The DM has been getting frustrated when the (relatively) veteran players try to help them take their turns (rolling, remembering abilities, etc.) How should we go about helping these newer players, while trying to avoid upsetting the DM? Thanks!

Drumlined00d

I was not wronged, nor the wronger. I think I did something incorrectly during a game that I posted online. I am the dm and my assassin rogue used his ability that gives him an auto crit if he hits on a surprise round. Well, the surprise round was a thing and he rolled a crit, was I wrong to give him quadruple damage and agree to give him quadruple damage in future instances if they occur?

Yoav Hayut

May it please the court, I was in a campaign about a year ago playing a Divine Sorcerer Satyr who was previously a Fiend Warlock. The final combat of the campaign was facing against my former patron, Graz’zt, and in the end we defeated him. However, I wanted to use a wish spell to make it so that his spot as a demon prince was never able to be filled again so that other vulnerable humanoids would make deals with someone like him. My DM wouldn’t allow me to use the wish spell like that unless I gave my Satyr’s life to do it. I still am salty about it today, considering the DM told us multiple times she wanted at least one person to die during the last session, and I felt like the only reason she made my character die was to fulfill that (no one died during combat). Am I in the wrong for being upset about this?

Arwyn Robinson

May it please the court! I DM for a group with a paladin who jumped into the ocean from a boat to rescue someone, but as she was wearing full plate armor I made her roll a strength saving throw to be able to swim in full plate. The players argued that the pre-requisite to wear the armor was strength and therefore she shouldn't take any penalties. I ruled that applied to dry land, but that water was a whole different scenario. Was I in the wrong to make my poor paladin start to drown and have to get rescued herself? Or was I right to apply what I felt like would happen in real life?

Austin Abraham

We snuck into an orc encampment to assassinate a shaman. I, a Ranger, had spider climb cast on me by a party member, and climbed into the main tent through a whole in the roof. I said I was going to wait until everyone was out the door, and get a quick shot on the shaman when she was in the doorway, before legging it away. The DM decided that every single orc would have the time to walk back in, and take a shot at me, somewhere in the range of 50-60 orcs took ranged attacks on me, before any initiative or anything. The DM described how I got pincushioned to the ceiling, and my character was dead in session 1. I got into an argument with him, and eventually he decided that my god granted divine favor and brought me back, but I would be without magic for the foreseeable future. What would y’all rule?

Will Taylor

If it pleases the court. This happened in one of my forst gakes. I was playing a high elf pact of the tome warlock with a demon patron. And the first night in our town our dm had be roll a perception. I argued that I should have some kind of advantage since I only tranced and did not fully sleep. The dm over ruled this and said that a trance is no different then sleeping. The end result veing that my book was stolen and when i tried to get a new one from my patron in burned down the inn with a bad roll. This happened a lomg time ago but still bugs me to this day. Thank you honerable judges. P.s. Savannah ga can't wait to have yall!!!

Pistols O'Brien

May it please the court, I was DMing a one shot version of Curse of Strahd. My players tried to circumvent the fact that Strahd can drink their blood by playing Warforged characters. I ruled that because they are living beings, Strahd can still drain their "life essence". Was this fair of me? Should I have not let them play warforged? Should I have let their shenanigan work? I ask this of the all knowing justices of the highest D&D court in the land!

Rachel From Animorphs

I DM a game with 6 players. Two of them, Tris (Druid) and Lukarin (Sorcerer/Warlock), like to use spells in creative ways. I love it. BUT they always think the spell should go off without a hitch. I enjoy rewarding creativity but using Find the Path by somebody describing their home to you and casting a fireball just right in the air while flying to narrowly avoid all teammates seems a little far fetched. In these situations where we disagree, I gave an arcana check DC based on how hard I think it is. Neither are very good at it, which makes sense since they aren’t wizards, so they get annoyed and fuss. Is there a better way? Should I just let them have fun and get out of the way of it?

Emily Lalande

May it please the court, In our home game, one of our player characters died (it was intentional and the player’s choice but we didn’t know it at the time). In a fit of grief, the barbarian in our group punched out an ally for their bag of holding, and then we tried to stuff our friend’s body into the bag. The purpose of this was to get her body to a wizard in the city who could potentially resurrect her. We ended up putting that plan aside after the player told us that she wanted her character dead, but the consequences of the barbarian punching out our ally got us into a load of trouble in the campaign. My question is: would it be possible to preserve a humanoid body in a bag of holding in hopes of a Resurrection or a Wish spell? Do you think our plan stood any chance of success? We still laugh about it with our DM to this day, who (rightfully) made us work to earn our own Bag of Holding and re-earn the trust of our former-ally and their friends.

Nathaniel Blouin

If it pleases the court! I played a life domain cleric named Gorwin. We were fighting a powerful wizard who had lackeys with guns. I had an item called the mirror shield which was able to deflect projectiles back at the person who shot them. When I got shot one round I was going to go down and the party was going to die. So I said that I wanted to reflect the bullet back at the baddie who shot me. My DM said that bullets travel way too fast and I wouldn’t be able to do that. I argue that there is magic in the world and that if anything there should have been a higher DC to deflect. Please help us settle this dispute

Kyle Veach

I've actually got one this time. So in my campaign, we've achieved lvl 20 and are at the climax of the story, a long, brutal fight with Yeathan, the corrupted god of water. We're all pretty OP from homebrew upgrades and this enemy is like cr 43. My character, a warforged Cleric/Paladin named Rust, drank a haste potion at the beginning of the fight and then a few rounds later, got buffed by a special spell that also included haste. My DM ruled that when the original haste ended, I would still suffer the effects of losing a turn, despite the second haste spell having taken effect. I pontificated that the second haste would override the first. He compromised and said that the secknd haste would be delayed until the first ended, lengthening the overall effect of the spells but still making me suffer the post-haste effect. How do the honorable judges feel about this ruling?

Ricardo, devotee of dice christ

May it please the court! I was playing with some friends and during a session discovered a safe that I cracked open and took the money from. Being I pirate I told no one and no one knew of the safe. Another player decided to ask me about anything I may have found and I passed 5 different deceptions. They then proceeded to ask me to empty my pockets. Due to a bad roll I dropped all the money and there was a max scramble for cash. I feel I was done wrong as I passed many checks but I shall accept any verdict. Thanks!

Tyler Draehn

May it please the court. My DM on our second session had us fight a monster that turned people into stone and crushed them. We were all barely level 5. One person was absent so the DM played as their character (which is normal for us if 1 person can’t make it). The monster turned the absent player to stone and I stayed true to my role play of helping others in need and tried to help get the statue out of there but in the process got turned to stone too and both our bodies were shattered. The rest of the party ran (4 other people). To this day I tell him it was wrong for him to kill us off so early in a hard fight like that, especially killing an absent player. Am I wrong for being mad that the DM didn’t just change up the situation to save us since it was so early in the campaign?

Cameron LaMack

May it please the court, I present the case of the level 1 Loxodon planeswalker. I am a DM for a group of 6 players. Recently, another player has wanted to DM Ghosts of Saltmarsh on the side. We started making characters, when one person wanted to be a Loxodon. The DM said he’d be a planeswalker to explain why a Loxodon in is Saltmarsh. I sent the new DM a text, telling him that allowing a planeswalker with full power at level 1 is overpowered and imbalanced. Am I in the wrong for squashing creativity, and extending my DM reach into another person’s game? Or am I right, to keep the game balanced so we don’t have a veritable god that would lose a one-on-one fight with a giant toad.

MJMM

May it please the court (though this is not a case). Just wanted to give an update on the Abner case, they  made it through the Underdark safely. I shared the episode with my DM and he loved it although he disagrees with the ruling completely. He won't do the GOMAD diet due to his lactose intolerance but he did agree that the next Nat 20 he rolls would somehow benefit Abner (but not my charecter). Thank you again judges, and super happy Abner's story helped Emily get back into DMing!!!

Jack Campau

May it please the court, I present the case of the Mindless Necromancer- Yo, so basically I was playing a spooky necromancer type who was dealing with some edge lord shit because... necromancy. I got mind controlled into attacking my own party with my zombies and quickly an NPC who knew me realized I was fucked up in the head and lesser restorationed me. eventhough I was obviously turned back, a PC made the choice to continue to go after me until I was down, then even hit me while I was down to fail 2 death saving throws because he claimed, "I don't know what spell they cast on you, I was just responding to being attacked" I ended up dying the next turn. Thats a dick move, right??? like I get role-playing or even knocking me out, but going for the kill feels like a lot.

Oriana Mulatero

May it please the court...maybe lower courts. I’m DMing a winter version of Emily’s Hot Boy Summer called, Chill Girl Winter. We got to the part in the “log cabin” where they discover a chute that descends to the depths of the Powder Peaks mountain. I gave them Emily’s riddle, “if you go left, you will get left behind...” When the chute first opened, I said that it had a left and a right way, and one player immediately interprets the riddle to mean to go right and pushes another player down the right hole, making them fall over 100 feet (they survived). After the game, one player was upset with me because I didn’t mention right away that the left side had another fork. I said that they didn’t even take a second to perceive or investigate. He says that if it’s important information, I should have just divulged that information based on passive perception. Did I do my girls wrong? Or is the player just salty?

Flando Maltrizian

May it please the court. I made a bard for a dungeon crawl game I was playing with a new group. As we descended into the creepy dungeon, my bard decided to play a quick Hey Jude on his trumpet just to keep people's spirits up. The DM immediately made a roll, and we were attacked by kobolds. Any time we made significant noise, he would roll for an encounter, and because I was a bard it meant that literally anything I did would bring more monsters on us. We didn't make it out of the first room of the dungeon. I told the DM that he should have warned me during character creation so that I didn't make a detrimental character. He said that our characters couldn't have known about it ahead of time, so it shouldn't factor into character creation. In the end, we didn't get to explore the dungeon, so is that my fault or his?

Paul Hoffmann

Judges and Justices, I stand before you pleading for your assistance in resolving this matter. It is the case of DM vs. Taruk. I am DMimg a game for my father in law, brother in-law, and a friend. My brother in law decided to play a lawful evil tiefling warlock named Taruk. He had been causing problems for weeks so when it came time for the villain that they we're fighting to give his cliche speech about joining him to take over the world. Taruk accepted the offer so the BBEG took Taruk and teleported away. I then asked for Taruk's character sheet since he was now evil. My brother in law argued that he should become the BBEG and the DM since he took the deal. Who is right? Should he become the DM? If not how do I deal with him? Thank you for your time and I hope you can help resolve this issue. -Paul Hoffmann

CallMeButters

May it please the court. My party was battling a high level mage. I wanted to make it more difficult by separating the main damage dealing paladin of the group. So I gave the mage a Staff of the Python, which he then used to restrain one of my players. A druid in the party wanted to use thunderstep to get the paladin out if the pythons grasp. However, I ruled that he couldn't touch the paladin because the snake was wrapped around him. At the same time I allowed the snake to attack the paladin. Was I right to do this or should I be sentenced to death by pythons?

Resa

May it please the court and also the naddpoles, Last time you guys opened submissions I commented about my campaign with my Deaf character and DM who plays 8-10 NPCs at once. I was surprised at the amount of comments people left so I figured I’d give a little update: I’m no longer in the campaign and when I told the DM I was unhappy he didn’t even try to push me to stay. Just asked how I wanted to be killed off 😬 a little brutal but definitely for the best. I tried sorting everything out with him a while ago but he flat out told me “I’m still mad at you, we’ll see how this session goes” and purposefully ignored/targeted my character the entire session. I’m still really proud of my character and have an insane amount of research, art and love dedicated to him so if anyone is looking for a storm herald barbarian/tempest cleric who speaks in Arcane Sign Language please hit me up LOL 😂

Destiny Rector

May it please the court; the case of delayed wild magic. While exploring the underdark in out of the Abyss, one of our spell casters did what he does best (spell casting) when the dm informed us we were in a wild magic area and had been since the previous session. Since he had forgotten to make us role for it before he made the caster roll 3 times. We argued that if we had known it was wild magic, we wouldn't have tried the spell to begin with. He said too late, a nat 1 was rolled and fireball was cast on the group. This killed 1 and nearly 2 more. Should we have had to roll for the dms mistake? Thank you for your time

James Colleran

A friend of mine had a character killed by his DM. His character was knocked out, and the body mutilated by the DM to fail death saves. The DM said they had done this to "teach the player a lesson for hurting their NPC, and had no hard feelings about the character or player." The DM obviously had something against the character, right?

Richard Jacob Meadows

If it pleases the court I dm a small group that has only one experienced play with two fresher players who dont roleplay much in game. At one point they were trying to rob a vampire casino loosely based on the honey trap casino from lust, and before it began I had the owner (based on Strahd) attempt to charm person two of the people. One person managed to get out of it thanks to his familiar mongoose, the other got a 19 with the dc being 18. However my players had not done any of the casino games I had planned out, nor touched any of the drinks. So I made a quick silent change to make his DC 20 if he has physical contact with the person. Is it wrong to do something like that in an attempt to get your players to interact more roleplay wise?

JollyPine

If it may please the court, I, the DM, have been running a campaign for almost a year and a half with 5 other friends. The campaign -shamelessly- mirrors Bahumia quite a bit just because how much I loved the lore and work Murph put into it. I've listened to campaign one probably about 5 times through at this point. Anyways, I spend about 2 hours every other week planning encounters, traps, dungeons, deep lore, and character interaction that intertwines between islands, and, when I'm not actually writing the sessions, I'm listenung either to NADDPOD or some other form of D&D media to get ideas for future sessions. We started off and it was going great. Now that it's nearing the end, I feel like everyones losing interest and not into it. I have two players that are constantly getting sidetracked and talking over the rest of the table trying to RP and play the game. I also can't get my players emotionally invested, no matter how many heartbreaking NPC's I throw into the campaign or how brutally someone kills them. It gets to the point that I'm silent for 15-20 minutes just because the noises of TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube are so loud that it's pointless to try and YELL over them just to keep the session moving. What should take about 2 hours ends up taking 4, so most of the time, I call the sessions early because I'm mentally exhausted to the point of almost feeling sick just trying to juggle everything all at once. It even carries over when we just have game nights and play board games. I've tried banning phones at the table, but everyone at the table has both a phone and a laptop and, considering we use them for character sheets and whatnot, its kinda difficult to have to ban both. Long story short, am I doing something wrong? Am I not as good a DM as I thought? Is it the players that just don't care? Should I try and find new players?

Liam Carrion

If it may please the court, I have a case regarding the passing of in game time. Our friend group had an online guild rpg style game where we stayed at an inn in town and did quests occasionally and 2 of our party members had commisioned high quality weapons, with an in game wait time of 2 days. We said we'd like to wait 2 days for the weapons to be complete and our DM would not allow it, he said if we wanted we could wait 2 irl days but as we had busy scheduels even playing on the day we did was a miracle. I think he should of let us wait in game for the weapons as there was no pressing issue we had to deal with instead of forcing us to go out that same day.

Seasquidley

For the consideration of our honorable judges: I was DMing a level 15 battle royale. One player chose to be a rogue (like always) and was randomly assigned a section of the map that had woods. Despite my homebrew rule being that no one could take 2 non-combat actions in a row (to keep things moving), he hid in the woods and refused go fight. He said "well he'll win if he just outlasts everyone". I eventually told him he had to attack or at least come out of hiding. He was furious and said his character wouldn't do that. He eventually attacked someone (killing them) and then hid in a tree. The tree was then cut down by berserkers summoned by the horn of Valhalla and he was killed by the swarm. He said it was unfair. Do the honorable judges agree that I was too harsh or was he just being a turd?

G.X. Barnett

If it may please the court, but mostly Murph, I was once playing a Ravenloft/Curse of Strahd campaign and at one point an enemy npc summoned a demon to the plane. After my DM finished reading the description of the gnarly demon that was summoned he realized that he was reading the description of a demon that was on the following page while describing a demon pictured on the page he was currently on. It turns out the demon he was describing was a much higher lever than the party (or even the BBEG, in this case Strahd) could handle. He said it was his mistake but left the demon in the game as something that either we or Strahd would have to handle in the future. So, if any of you would have made that mistake mid game would you have retconned the summoning to be what you intended or left the demon as cast into the world as an unintentional wild card?

Kaitlyn with a K and a Y

If it pleases the court: We have a relatively large group (7 players, 1 DM), so it takes a long time to give everyone a bit of roleplay time. One of our friends is very verboise and talks a LOT, but no one wants to discourage it because it is in-character (and it feels mean). It happens at least every other session. Sometimes he finds ways to hijack others' scenes. Am I wrong for being bothered by him monopolizing time? Is there a way to fix this?

Arwyn Robinson

May it please the court! I am the DM and I had a player whose character (a druid) was fixated on nipples. Everything that they killed he asked if the monster had nipples that he could recover. He then proceeded to go to a big city and went to a leather worker to have all the nipples made into a leather vest. I decided that due to the nature/toughness of the skin, it would be studded leather armor, but my other players argued that it was only regular armor. What class of armor should I have deemed it as? Was I wrong to give my player studded leather for the extra 1 AC? (also sorry in advance Murph, I allowed this once and never got away from it. I learned the hard way to not play with terrorists in their sandbox).

Dakota Merriken

May it please the court, My friend is the designated DM and he's been doing it for years. However, he uses negative HP, which I just recently learned isn't even a thing in 5E. I'm about to start DMing more and don't plan on using negative HP; how do I tactfully ask him to stop or explain why I'm not using it? It's really annoying to be at -15 health and have someone spend a turn healing you and only get you up to -5 (so still downed).

Hannah Mueller

May it please the court, I’ve been playing Descent into Avernus and we just got to the part with vehicular combat. I wanted to cast Sickening Radiance inside the other car, but there was a big discussion on if the space the spell occupies is inside the car or the space on the physical plane. This matters because it is a concentration spell with an area of effect that works over multiple turns. The spell would essentially exhaust the enemies until the died. I ultimately decided to cast something else to speed up combat because we couldn’t arrive at a decision. After the fact I argued if you farted in a car the car would still smell so therefore a spell would work similarly. My DM was not convinced.

Grace Atkins

If it may please the court, I am usually thr DM for my group, however a friend wanted to try his hand at it so I was happy to let him. I try very hard not to be a rules lawyer cause I love creativity, however in my opinion our new DM is being unreasonable. The world we are playing in is an exact replica to ther runescape world (or so I'm told, I've never played), which it totally fine with me, I'm not one to hate on other people's ideas for a campaign. The quests are the same ones done in the beginning of the game as well (again this is what I'm told), but we don't really have any kind if map or directions for the quests just the names. I am frustrated because I have never played the video game before so I have NO idea what were supposed to do and every time I ask the DM to throw us a bone, his response is "it's open world, do what you want" even though he's specifically told us we need to complete these quests... Am I in the right for being frustrated over lack or direction, or am I being unreasonable?

Ranger Zenith

May it please the court, I am playing as a Barbearian (Bearkin barbarian) and got to use my javelins for the first time on some giant spiders. After we squashed them I went to retrieve my javelins. According to DM 3/4 were broken due to poor loot rolls I guess. I asked if I could extract the spiders webbings and bandaid together at least one of the broken javelins and they said no. I let the ruling go uncontested but did some research post game and it said that while sticky spider webbing is super strong. Do you think that I should have been allowed to at least have a weakened or makeshift ranged weapon or was the DM just in their merciless ways?

HolyFatFish

If it may please the court- My Aarakoca Ranger was scouting ahead at an enemy Hobgoblin base. I was spotted, and about 30 Hobgoblins began chasing me. I took flight and stated I wanted to stay just at the precipice of longbow range, about 600 feet above / in front of the angry mob, and that because I was shooting downward it made sense I could probably hit them but they wouldn't be able to hit me. My DM some something along the lines of "uh, sure so you are 600 feet or so in the air". After a few rounds they stopped giving chase, so I turned around and shot at the closest, meaning to "kite" the Hobgoblins and widdle down their forces as I lured them to our party. The Hobgoblins all at once however got attacks at me, downing and killing me as the fall damage was my third failure. The DM said they were trying to trick me into getting closer and had all readied attacks. I felt this was nonsense as I clearly stated I wanted to be just out of reach of their weapons. Should I be pissed?

Jack M

Hello my good lords of the court, Was in a combat encounter where there was one of those stereotypical drow dark elf classic dnd villains whatever, he cast darkness on himself at the end of a turn, he had already moved and my character had seen where he was before he cast darkness, I said that because of this my character throws an axe where I last saw them, the dm said I had disadvantage but I argued that I was throwing at that spot so If he’s there then I could hit him and if he’s not then no matter what I miss, he said no darkness causes disadvantage I said okay rolled with disadvantage, when the darkness spell fell the dude was in exact same spot my character last saw them, am I being a little tiktok here or do I have a case?

Schon, the Shadetree Mechanic of Zebuldar

May it please the Court, this didn't happen to me, but I feel that it needs to be addressed. Following an excellent battle, one of the players confronted the main bad guy of said battle. In doing so the player made a personal choice about the appearance of their character, a choice which only improved they story as a whole. Mere seconds later, the DM decides unilaterally to steamroll this brilliant choice by narrating away the the appearance change. Is the DM in the right, or should they be stripped of all titles and recuse themselves for all time?

Castellini Film School

May it please the court, I was once in a campaign where we were trying to trick a mimic into believing we were its master (who was out of town) or otherwise get past it. We decided to try disguise self, which none of us had, and tried two local magic shops for a scroll of it. In both cases, the DM said they'd need to put an order in special, and because it was session 2, our characters were pretty poor, so we plotted to steal from the next shipment. After about an hour of planning a heist, the DM informed us he straight up wouldn't let us do it this way, so we finally relented and agreed to pay for the scroll, and after visiting the shops again (at this point after about 2 hours of gameplay) the DM revealed he didn't like this solution to his mimic so actually, there would be no disguise self scroll, bought or stolen, and we'd need to find a different tactic. The game fizzled after that as we were all pretty frustrated we had wasted two hours on a solution to a mission that the DM never intended to let us use. Is that a dick move, or simply a DM trying to balance out railroading us with needing a specific solution to a campaign he'd planned?

Brad Brown

If it pleases the court, we have a small group of players and for critical roles, natural one or natural 20, I allow the players to choose either extra damage or a special circumstance. If the villains creatures, receive the same roles, I choose extra damage or special circumstance. Have one player who insists the player should choose the consequence of the creatures roll, since they are the one taking the damage/consequence. Which would you suggest is more fair?

Ashley P

One of my friends was playing a game and his character was chaotic neutral, the dm asked him to be the one to fuck with some people within the party. The party was about 6 people so a lot of people. But one of the player's who wasn't really interested in the game dedicated that he wanted to kill my friend. He ended up kicking my friend off the wagon when they were getting chased by some villains. The Dm said that my friend landed in a pit and just killed him without letting him roll death saves. My friend was clearly pissed. Is my friend in the wrong for being upset?

Myka Donati

While DM'ing I had a kenku rogue in my group who was "highly suspicious" of every character, and would ask questions so consistently they interrupted other players. We had a merchant who knew info about crime rings, and gave potential info if the right questions were asked. The interrupt came through dialgoue with said merchant where they (as a kenku) kept mocking the merchant, snatched a sword from their hand, did a lot of disruptive things that prompted me to make a bouncer character and threaten to throw everyone out if the rogue didn't stop. I felt bad because I may have been a little more aggressive than I intended, but several players were clearly annoyed at the time. Eventually I did make them wait outside because they wouldn't stop, and I felt they thought I might be playing against how they wanted to roleplay. I'm still a novice DM, was I wrong in forcing them to separate?

Lisa H

May it please the court: our party just finished our final confrontation with a rogue villain in her hideout. She had our kalashtar party member's soul in a bottle so we were trying to chase her down to retrieve it. The bard rolled to find the hidden villain and rolled a perception check below her 15 stealth check. When my paladin rolled an 18 perception in the same round, the DM rolled a new, higher stealth check. I argued successfully (and loudly 😳) that the rogue villain would not get another chance to hide mid-round before her next turn. I feel bad for calling my DM out, but who was in the wrong here?

Mouse

May it please the court: honourable judges, my aarakocra monk (please don't auto-judge against me for my character choices) had an item stolen from his possession by one of our two party rogues. He got upset and asked the cleric to help him try to find it, who rolled a nat 20 on his perception check. However, the DM ruled that the rogue who took it "found it" on a mod 20 because he used "a more appropriate skill check" (which was either investigation or deception, I don't quite remember). Was the DM correct to do this or should the cleric have been the one to find the stolen item, giving my character the chance to scold the rogues properly?

Evan Gakeler

May it please the court, I was DMing a session for a party of level 12s that included a rather skillful rogue named Cinder Battlecock who liked persuading people. Through some clever planning and the use of expertise, good stat roles, and the rogue feat Reliable Talent, this rogue could not role less than a 22 persuasion role. Because of this, he'd stroll though cities persuading everyone in sight to give him free items, information, and talking his way out of every confrontation. Not wanting to just arbitrarily raise the DC for his persuasion checks, I had a rather powerful and spiteful mage from his past permanently remove his voice until he was able to complete a rather difficult mission. He complained saying that I was targeting him and making his leveling useless. I argued that it was meant to force his character to develop skills other than just persuasion. Was I too quick in striking the voice from this silvertongued Battlecock or was this a just adjustment?

Tessa Sammons

Hello and may it please the court: I would like to formally petition the court to permanently add a judge whose viewpoint and life experience is sorely needed in the Supreme Crit. That’s right, I am of course talking about Justice Lou Wilson. There is a serious lack of balance towards the players in our Supreme Crit and we need to resolve it by packing our beloved Crit with an additional man who has not only taken a solemn vow but also put in the time and experience that I think no one can argue is lacking. Thank you for your consideration and may you make the right decision.

Robert Procida

Honorable judges, I submit for your judgment the case of dm vs. cleric. Our campaign consists of a human fighter, an aasimar circle of stars druid, and a lizard folk grave cleric. We have just reached level 5 and a concern was raised by our dm about the cleric’s ability to use revivify and other means of bringing the other party members back from the dead. He is arguing that it should become harder to escape death every time you are brought back. For instance, the dc on death saves would increase by 1 every time you are revivified, 2 for raise dead or reincarnate, 3 for resurrection, and 4 for true resurrection. He is concerned that being able to bring people back with no consequence removes the stakes. We argued that there are already numerous limiting factors to these spells and that the ability to bring people back from the dead is a cornerstone of the grave cleric’s abilities. We feel that it would be better to come up with roleplay reasons as to why we wouldn’t be able to bring people back over and over again (although I don’t know why we’d be dying that much anyway). Thank you for your consideration and we await your judgement.

Jake Lusk

Honorable judges, I have hurt my player emotionally. I am the DM and I started giving wonky magic things to my players. Some as prank items, some way OP. This one got boots of "silence" where his footsteps were silent only to him. They came across an alter so they all gave an offering and I changed some things around with them. He offered the boots so j changed them to boots of spider climb. I described them as black with a silver web pattern on them and he was asking what they do. When he put them on I said a spider crawls up your leg and onto your shoulder and starts to talk. The spider introduced himself and my player was so excited to get a talking pet spider! To make him more emotionally attached I decided to have him and the spider roll to see he notices a bird swooping in....nat 1 for him...roll for the spider...nat 2...I roll for the bird to take it. 19.....and so ended the 20 second story of Gary the spider. So I ask the court, what should my punishment be for snatching joy from my player? Side note: he thought it was hilarious especially since 5 minutes earlier the rest of the party watched him almost get killed by a mimic since they didn't know they could jump in at anytime

Stephen Charbonneau

If it pleases the court, I am currently running my players through Curse of Strahd campaign setting which heavily features undead. One of my players (Stumpleduck, a gnome ranger) has its favored enemy set to undead. The benefit being that they know when undead are within a certain area of Stumpleduck and her wolf Albertus. As the DM I maintain that its on the player to ask if they sense undead, as it is their ability. The player says I should let them know proactively whenever undead are around, without them asking. Who is right?

Stefanos Moutafidis

If it pleases the court: I dmed a game where the PCs had to find certain soul gems to close the portal to hell but they didn't know their purpose yet. One player wore the gem as a necklace. I had an NPC with assassin stats attempt to steal it in a crowded area fully expecting a chase sequence. Nat 20 stealth roll. Then I had the pc roll a perception check even though I should have used passive perception bc I wanted him to succeed: they rolled a 2 or 3. I next rolled an opposed sleight of hand roll against another perception check. I rolled a 19 and they around a 3 again. The npc took the gem undetected, no chase sequence. Half an hour later, the pc notices he doesn't have his necklace and is understandably angry. Should I have fudged the rolls in his favor or allowed a chase despite the rolls? I felt bad but as the judges say, the dice tell their story. -call me samobop if this gets chosen!

Audrey

Your honors, In an old campaign I played a teen dwarf Druid rebelling against her family by protesting the environmental impact of their mines. After a member of the city council was ousted, I made a comment that I should run to get environmental protections passed. My DM said I had to have property, so I bought some. He said I had to canvas the town, so I got my squirrels to hand out fliers. He said I had to make speeches, but instead of just rolling charisma I had to convince him, being refuted by NPCs the whole time. I talked to my DM multiple times between sessions to see if these roadblocks were because he wanted me to stop pursuing this, but he said he thought it was a great idea. All of the campaigning took away from the fun of the game, and we eventually stopped playing because of it. Should my DM have made me write all those goddamn campaign speeches seeing as it was something in the game that he was actually enjoying? Or is that total BS?

Allison Shaw

Small Claims Court query: Honorable Supreme DnD Justices, please rule on this issue: Is it fair for a DM to decide that a nat 1 on a ranged weapon instead of simply doing nothing, becomes an attack on an ally? Does it become fair if the same rule is applied to enemies as well as the party? What if the enemy has no allies or ranged weapon?

Veronica Plante

The Case of the Well-Travelled Bird: Honourable members of the court. While our party was travelling as fugitives by boat, we were working out the best place to dock without drawing too much attention to ourselves. I was playing a Totem Warrior Barbarian and thus was capable of speaking to animals, the wording of the spell indicates the animal I'm talking to can recall information about locations so I suggested I talk to a bird, (my PCs daughter was a monk, and thus able to grab one out of the sky) to tell us what it saw by the nearby coasts in regards to military presence and alertness. Our DM told us this was ridiculous, and a bird would not know how the locations it saw correlated to a map or identify military vs civilian presence. I argued that if we managed to find a well travelled bird that is wise to the world, it would have the knowledge of the area to tell us, but the DM still refused, eventually allowing us to find such a bird if we rolled a nat 20 with disadvantage, which we attempted unsuccessfully. To this day I claim that a well traveled bird would have been able to tell us this information about the nearby land and cities. Who do you all think was in the right?

Will Knowlton

May it please the Court, I am running a high level campaign that started with a core group of 4 players. As we got further into the game the group grew to 6, sometimes 7 PCs at a time. Combat can sometimes take hours because of this, and one of the core 4 players has started timing each player's turn and keeping track of this information for each combat. I originally didn't think anything of this, because I think there is a way to use that information constructively. However, this player seems to only use this information to shame players who tend to take longer on their turns. Should I try to convince this player to use the timing information in a more constructive way, or ask him to stop the timing all together?

PineappleLiar

Honorable judges, if it may please the court. I was in a combat encounter where my triton genie warlock was stuck in melee against a mage slayer enemy. All of my attempts to put distance between us resulted in my getting smacked in the face. The party druid then cast Polymorph on me to turn me into a giant ape, which is a huge creature. While I was able to get off two big punches, the mage slayer Dispelled the magic of the Polymorph on his next turn, bringing me back to single-digit health. The question is this: when the Polymorph was dispelled, the DM argued that I should reform right next to the Mage Slayer, as the ape had been in his melee range. I argued that the center of mass of the ape was outside of this 5 foot melee range, being a beast that takes up a 15 foot square. Was my DM being a stickler about combat ranges or was I just scrambling to not get punched unconcious on my next turn?

Andrew Greener

If it pleases the court. I am a fairly new player but have listened to the podcast from its inception. I made the choice, with assistance from the DM that I wanted to make a character (cleric of light) like Toph from avatar so they are blind but have tremorsense. In the first session I used a fire based spell which I believe says that it hits 3 seen enemies. The DM argued that as I am blind I can't use the spell but I argued that I can see/perceive the location of the enemies just not with my eyes. Were they right to prevent me from using the spell?

Matthew R

Hey there centaurs! If it please the honorable Supreme Crit/Crick judges, I bring you the case of the truant party. I DM a campaign for a group of friends once a week and I’m having trouble getting the party to move forward in the story or even show up to sessions on time/at all. Even if they show up, the session is cut short because someone inevitably makes plans for an hour or so after we’ve planned the start time. I was chosen to DM because I’m usually the rules lawyer of our group, but I wasn’t really into the idea. I decided to give it a solid try and have really had the experience dampened by the lack of commitment from the players. I’ve already spoken to them about communicating if they can’t make it and setting down other ground rules. They were all fine with the ground rules but then 4/5 of them showed up late and the other didn’t show up at all to our most recent session. Am I wrong for considering giving up on DMing this campaign and running a new one in its place or should I have another talk with my players?

christien

So not technically d&d but it's still a ttrpg. My player wants a lightsaber bayonet for his weapon. It doesn't exist in the rules and I feel like it would be OP but they have their heart set on it and have been bringing it up ever session for weeks. To the point where it's infringing on the session itself and seems to be making people uncomfy. Am I just being stubborn? should I rule it in? Love from West coast Canada

Casey Miles

May it please the court, our group(3 players and a DM) just started a new campaign where I'm playing a Battle Master Fighter Shadar-Kai, level 3. I built him to go with the skirmisher guide that Tasha's added recently so he uses whatever he can to get out of sticky situations. As our party was traveling on the road we noticed a group of goblins coming up behind us. We decided to just book it down the road and my character threw down one of his smoke grenades to cover the road and hide ourselves running. The smoke covers a 40 foot diameter and heavily obscures the area but our DM had the goblins just do full dash actions straight through the fog to get through it and start shooting at us. I feel wronged because I think the goblins should've either gone around the fog cloud or have more consequence when trying to run through it since they are effectively blinded. Who would you, honorable judges, decide is right?

Marty Balmer

May it please the Court: This is a case from a campaign that finished nearly two years ago, but I still felt that I needed closure. This was my very first time playing, and I had a blast playing my Dragonborn Paladin overall! HOWEVER, the DM made one tweak to the rules that haunts me to this day. Whenever I used a Divine Smite, I had to declare the use of the ability before knowing whether or not the attack hit a target. If I missed, I would completely waste a very limited resource in Paladin spell slots. Being new, I didn't think much of it at the time, but the other players at the table constantly argued that it severely crippled me mechanically. Looking back, I realize how much of the class I missed out on because I was worried about wasting spell slots. Should I have fought harder for my right to smite?

Bethany

If it may please the court, This is more of a table manners question than a mechanics one. I was dming and it was our first time playing dnd, so everyone was pretty new and trying to figure stuff out. Starting around the second session, one of my players would basically have her character stay out of whatever the party was doing and she would play games on her computer. For me and one for the other players this ruined some of the fun because she was more or less ignoring us. I talked to her privately and basically explained that if she didn’t like playing that was totally fine and could just hang out, but that playing games on the computer was pretty rude. She apologized and said she wanted to keep playing, but next session she was doing it again. Am I wrong for getting frustrated or was she wrong for playing games on the computer?

RPKB

May it please the court, I am a DM, and during a tough and complicated fight the rogue (with Caldwell-level rolling luck) finally got a crit on a killing blow on a miniboss. Two player turns on the initiative later, I realized that this would have triggered the lair action in play that might change this killing blow. I had the player roll to see if they resisted the lair action and they failed, and so the table agreed to retcon killing the boss and the fight kept going. Now I feel like I screwed over the rogue based on my own oversight. Judges, what is the statute of limitations backtracking because of a rule you got wrong in a battle?

Maximilien Bianchi

May it please the court... A while back I had said that I felt like I was railroading my players too much and so I was open to being surprised if they wanted to go in a different direction with the campaign. Little did I know, my players spoke on a secret chat and decided to do just that. During their character's in-game celebration for having completed an arc, they unanimously decided that they wanted to have a vacation at a water park. Welp, I WAS surprised, I panicked, and proceeded to tell them they didn't have time for a vacation since some dire thing happened far away (the set up for the next arc). They all started apologizing and asking if they went too far. I immediately felt horrible and feel like I punished them for giving me exactly what I wanted. Was I in the wrong? PS. I have been slaving over a vacation one shot for them since). thanks!

Vonvonvon

COURT PLEASE IT MAY, Can yall do some character voices as guest judges or maybe call in to different characters from both campaigns to get their opinion on cases. It would be amazballs to hear from Pendergast more often or Balnor or anyone! Please I miss silly voices and Arc 2 is pretty slim on them, I'm fiending over here! Give us Bullywugs or Frost Dwarves or Crick Elves.

Crane

May it please the court: I was recently kicked out of a campaign with a dm whose story was nearly impossible to have any agency. He needlessly drove the party in his direction which consisted of a computer generated story and encounters with combat rating 43 enemies at a party lvl of 3 ( which he claims to be very justified rules wise). Over 3 months we fought 5 kobolds, the dm saying combat isnt fun. He justifies this system with the amount of work he puts into making the adventure and writing a 200 page lore book he constantly makes us memorize, claiming he runs the best campaign with extra hard rules to make it fun for him (without any thoughts from his party). When I brought this up to him, he called me stupid and kicked me. Then added me to another game and then kicked me again. Everyone in the group liked me, wanted me to play and had no say when the dm gave me the boot. I say to you judges, at what point should players question the world building and rules of their dm if they find something they dont agree with. Thank you from bringing me so much joy.

Jordan Fields

My D&D group has been playing together for 5 years. One of my players, let's call them Mike, has a girlfriend who I am friends with but who has not played D&D until recently. Mike invited her to play with us, which is great and I am happy to invite new players into our campaign. The problem is that she doesn't seem interested in the game. Mike made her character for her (a Grung Rogue) and often rolls for her when we play as she doesn't want to do the math. When I try to involve her in role-playing, her character is very hostile to NPCs, and realistically her character would be hated by pretty much anybody she interacts with. I don't have a problem with chaotic characters but her open hostility makes it hard for the other players to role-play with any NPCs. How do I resolve this situation? I'm open to any suggestions from the honorable justices.

JesterTheCleric

May it please the court, I DM for a half homebrew half module game where one of the characters is an aarakocra open hand monk. At level 8 he told me he wanted to take the lucky feat. I had just given all of them access to the Tasha's additional features, since like gestalt characters, they get a bunch of cool shit but the same number of actions to do them. However, I thought Lucky was too far and told him no. I've learned my lesson for aarakocra and won't be allowing them in future games (run for 2 total and they're way too OP), but should I have said yes to the player? I don't want to tell him his fun is wrong, it's an OP feat so I just ruled it out for everyone, but I feel bad for saying no. Should I have said yes and allowed the OP feat to make sure the player was having fun?

Cyborg Version of Josh the Kobold

May it please the court: in my first homebrew campaign, with mostly all new players, I allowed Fire Bolt to be cast as a bonus action. Obviously, half the party became OP AF. The rest envied these OP bonus actions. I tried to get back to RAW and disallow this, and mentioned it was also unfair to sorcerers with “quickened spell”. With no sorcerers in the party, they didn’t care. They all wanted OP bonus actions. I had to grant this feature to all my monsters to bump up the challenge rating, and it made every fight feel like everyone was a higher level. I sure got my bell rung. How would you fix such a ruling mistake so everyone still has fun and the game feels fair?

Albus

May it please the court, I present the case of The Unskilled Heroes. Our DM is of the opinion that if you don't have proficiency in a skill you can't use it. He is worried that it devalues rogues and bards if any character can use thieves tools, barbarians and rangers if any character can use survival, etc. I have tried to persuade him that the 10% - 30% bonus for proficiency and 20% - 60% bonus for expertise is significant enough that those classes will do better on those checks most of time which is what makes them special.

Lance Minnis

May it please the court! I had a player in several of my home campaigns that always wanted me to prejudge situations for his super min maxed characters before hand "if such and such happens, will you let me do this.....etc." type stuff. In a dungeon crawl I created, he played a shadow monk that he had built according to several weeks of that type question and what he thought the campaign was going to be. At one point, the whole party missed a perception check to see the stair trap which turned it into an 80' ramp covered in oil and water and they all went sliding down the ramp to a short wall covered in spikes. He attempted to avoid the fate that the whole party was headed toward by using a shadow monk feature Shadow Step to teleport from the ramp to the top of the low wall. We were not in initiative, so no action economy (Shadow Step is a bonus action). I told him to make a concentration save to see if he had the presence of mind to use the feature. He argued with me about at the table in the busy game shop. I held firm. He failed the check, therefore I told him he was not able to Shadow Step. Oh Supreme Crit, who was right?

AmberDextrous!

Dearest Honorable Judges of the Supreme Crit: I had been playing with a D&D group for 4 years. Our long campaign ended and we were about to start another one so I invited my husband to play with us, as he was new to D&D and wanted to try it out. He proceeds to make a 7ft tall human barbarian named Chongo. As silly flavor, he asked our DM if his character could just have a massive wang that he used as part of his intimidation. The DM and the party thought it was hilarious, so It became Canon. However, as the sessions went on, the DM kept subtly increasing the size of his junk. At first it seems like it was just for fun, like him tripping over his own member when he rolled a nat one. However as the sessions went on, the DM declared that Chongo was cursed, and thats why this engorgement was occuring. Chongo's little buddy became so massive that he had to wear a bag of holding over it just to be able to exist in the world. The DM then proceeded to fill the campaign with archers and attempt to pierce the Codpiece of Holding and decimate his crotch. Like an obsession. Constant. My husband voiced many times that while he found the joke funny, he really didn't like where the joke had turned and just wanted to go back to normal, So he was willing to go along with the curse aspect, but he really wanted it cleared up quickly. The DM disagreed with him and said "you're the one who wanted a massive member, that's what I gave you." My husband eventually got tired of his dumb flavor joke being turned into something that the DM could actively use against him especially when he had no say and how it went down or to the extent that it occurred and left the game. My question, should it please the court, is whether The DM went too far in taking over the character, or if perhaps this was meant to be a lesson for my husband about making dumb jokes in his campaign? (Way more than 2 tweets, sorry Bailiff Jake)

Supsupcool

May it please the court I was DMing for the first time and the party was in a deadly battle against a fallen angel. One of the members died and I had given the angle an ability to revive someone when they did and become a random beast (There were supposed to be other members for this ability to be used on but the party killed them on the way to the fight). The angle had killed a party member and used this ability on them. After I told them that they became a beast they said that their soal should still be in the body but I said they already have had gone to another plane. I ended up giving them the creature and they royally owned me Was I wrong to let them have it or was there soal still there

Peter Mundell

Dear Humble Judges, I was playing a level 6 paladin in a party of four in a game with an absolutely destroyed action economy. All cantrips were bonus actions, your number of attacks was actually your number of actions, and your reaction was nearly limitless to what you could do. Because of this, our DM was constantly whomped. His attempt to finally make a difficult challenge was to throw a full HP (729) Kraken at us. He thought it was wild when I complained, and even our cleric said it would be fine! Was I wrong to get upset over this, or did our DM finally find a fitting challenge for us?

Jor Elare

May it please the court: the homebrew campaign I run recently developed a bunch of interest among my friends. To allow additional players into the world, I set up a prequel campaign of sorts. Knowing the obvious narrative problems associated with allowing the party to potentially mess with the timeline established, I set it very far back in time and only allowed the party to meet a handful of crossover NPCs. Upon meeting an NPC that the first party knew was secretly a powerful demigod, one of my lvl 3 players immediately declared it to the whole table and went to attack her to prove it. In the first campaign she was patient and benevolent, but this time she lashed out and killed the PC. Was this level of harshness too much on my part?

Kalax the Dragonborn

May it please the court, honoured judges I lay this dilemma at your feet. I normally use a homebrew (found, not our homebrew) sword called the Abyssal Longsword, that rolls extra damage on a 17 (acid), 18 (fire), 19 (necrotic), and when I roll a 20 i pick of of those types of damage to make the target vulnerable to (all good, works well on bad dudes). Exact wording: "On a nat 20 attack roll, the target gains vulnerability to a damage type of the users choice that the sword can deal" However, my character was charmed and told to attack a member of the party (warforged, 25 base AC with shield spell and temp hit points per turn). I crit twice (it was awesome, I did 89 damage with smites), but that means he would now be vulnerable to two types of damage (e.g. necrotic and fire). This is where my question lies, normally when I do this, the baddie dies so consequences don't matter, but as this is a member of my party, he didn't die. Is he vulnerable to those forever now? The sword doesn't specify a time or that its a curse, but some have suggested either using greater restoration or similar. That being said, because of his crazy AC abilities, thus far I'm about the scariest things he's faced, so some weakness doesn't seem terrible... This happened last session so is very much a discussion currently happening. It will obviously be DM decision, but he has agreed to allow you to rule on this.

Wyatte Copeland

May it please the court, My first ever D&D campaign was DM’d by one of my college roommates and played with my 2 other roommates (also first timers). At the beginning of the campaign, my DM implemented a system where anytime he made a reference to a sci-fi/Fantasy movie, the player who said the name of the movie first (in character) got X amount of gold. All was well at first, until one of my roommates pointed out that the majority of the references our DM had included were to movies that he and our other roommate/player had been watching together. Were we wronged?

Zaxbeez

If it pleases the court, I am the DM for my group and after a harrowing battle, the party was resting while some NPCs (who took more plot-based damage) were recuperating. One of my party members, a fire genasi monk, took a liking to the NPC priestess. The monk spent her downtime with the priestess at her bedside, helping nurse her back to full health. The monk decided that she would do her morning yoga sessions in the priestess’ room, and with her being a fire genasi the yoga was hot (Shoutout to Shae). The flirting was going well, and the party Sorcerer wanted to help out their friend and decided the best way to do that was to use Disguise Self to look like the monk and do an extra yoga session while the monk was out collecting some herbs. During the disguised yoga session, the Sorcerer rolled a very good flirting check. This caused the priestess to hobble out of bed and tell the Disguised Sorcerer that she didn’t know if it was love but she was ready to get into this relationship. Literal sparks were flying because of some Prestidigitation and the priestess leaned in for a tender kiss. The Disguised Sorcerer panicked and said “Uh, I have to go to the bathroom.” The priestess reacted badly, embarrassed that she had so clearly misread the signs. The Sorcerer undisguised themselves and the priestess reacted badly in anger at being toyed with and tricked! She lashed out at the Sorcerer and sent him running. The Monk returned to find a crying Priestess and went on a rampage against the Sorcerer. The Sorcerer argues that his high flirting check should result in a positive outcome. I submit that the check resulted in the desired outcome for the appearance he had. Also, he was in too deep at the time of the tender kiss and could have cut me off at any point for any other plans he had. The question I submit to the honorable judges is this: should high rolls for players result in good things for the player who rolled, or should they result in the success of the action, even if it hurts the player?

Evan Spears

May it please the court to hear my one and only D&D story. I'll keep submitting it until I have my day in court, your Honors. I've only played D&D once, for one session, nearly 15 years ago. I spent a good while rolling my character. I drew his portrait. His name was HEAVY, and he wielded a big-ass hammer. When we got started, the rest of the party spent literally two hours getting drunk in a tavern, and I was impatient and wanted to kill some monsters and roll some dice, so HEAVY went out on his own. I encountered a river. DM asked if I wanted to cross it or go try to find a way around. I said I wanted to cross. He asked me to roll to see if I could swim. I rolled a 9. DM said "you can't swim. You drown and die." DM wouldn't let me play unless I roll a new character. So I left and haven't played since.  Admittedly I probably wasn't ready to play. I didn't understand that a big part of the game was role-playing. I just wanted to roll dice and crush monsters. But my experience turned me off on the game for years and years. Shows like D20 and NADDPOD have changed that, but now I'm too busy to actually play. I only made one roll in the game and a lousy DM soured everything for me.  Can the court please rule on whether or not that DM was a total knob? Thank you. 

Thomas Troy

Judges, I once made a character with a thick Middle Eastern accent. I chose this because I wanted him to be a foreigner from a far distant land. A voice unique enough to stand out in the party. Imagine if Apu from The Simpson was a Transmutation Sorcerer. Long story short, my table hated the character. No one took him serious and the campaign fizzled and died in 3 sessions due to weak party coordination. I received the blame for this because my character was "Way out of line". I made it a priority to simply use the accent, and never said anything distasteful but my party still thought I made a racist character. How come dwarves can have cool accents but when I do it I'm insulting? How far is too far with a character's voice?

Sippius

May it please the court, I present a case for a campaign that hasn’t even gotten off the ground yet. I’m a DM and I have a first time player who is incredibly excited to play, so much so that they created over 50 different PCs during their two week stay-at-home vacation. The most recent character they pitched to me, and the one they plan on using for our Tomb of Annihilation campaign, is a Simic Hybrid (Named Shaxxis Concepts) with three different multi-classes in Ranger, Fighter, and Warlock completely planned out to level 20 and engineered to wreck house. This is only one of many characters they spent a lot of time crafting and it would break my heart to not see it through. But on the other hand, I’m a little worried they’ve become too focused on optimization over character as they can’t tell me much at all about any of their creations when it comes to roleplaying backstories or even their personality. I don’t know how to go about nudging them in the direction of making a more dynamic original character instead of creating a perfect well oiled machine. My honorable judges, how do you rule? Is it reasonable to want this new player to focus more on character rather than optimization, or am I just another DM who fears my players won’t have as much fun? (PS: I’m admittedly afraid of their potential to completely destroy me but I love them dearly and want them to enjoy their first game as much as possible. Love you guys and everything you do!)

Namtao

My honourable judges Murphy, Axford & Cauldwell, if it please the court, I present not an accusation, but some case law I'd like the court to rule precedent on: When one player can't make a session due to illness or such, it seems to trigger a huge avalanche of the rest of the players postponing too. As DM, I prepare a lot for our games, how can I stop the cascade happening? Is it RIGHT for me to stop this happening? I just want everyone to have a good time!

quenten schulze

may it please the court I was in a one shot with some friends where I was playing a level 6 kobold monk letting me have pack tactics advantage on pretty much every attack roll. The wizard at the end of the dungeon cast suggestion on me and told me to do the best of my ability to kill one of the other PC's. Me wanting to do the best of my ability, I argued that the pack tactics would still be in effect because he is still my ally I am just under suggestion. The other player was saying that since he wasn't my ally during the affect of the spell. Thank you for your time your honors

Decker Ames

May it please the Court: (Also, congratulations Caldwell!!) My friend bubble in college and I have only been keeping to ourselves so we've naturally started a lot of dnd campaigns together, I DM one and my friend DM's the other. I hate side DMing but he railroads his campaigns to the point we just follow along with his choices. We are forced to use certain abilities and actions at certain times and there are other times where he negates our abilities because they would alter the story(e.g. using the fates card of the deck of many things on something trivial so it doesn't affect any part of the plot). Is there a way to bring this up with him to find a compromise between railroading and the free will of the players?

masterofmerc .

May it please the court. I run a game for my friends, our rogue recently got a revolver. As we were going over the rules for guns i told him the revolver would not count for his sneak attack being that it is a loud gun and he is not proficient. He argued back that it was a ranged weapon and that if his sneak attack was being triggered by his allies being close than the loudness wouldn't matter. We agreed on a middle ground compromise but i feel to this day that i caved too easily due to the non proficientcy issue. What say you Noble and Honorable Justices? Was I being overly harsh or did the rogue have a point? (All the love to Dadwell and fam!!!!)

Austin Hendry

My second character was a Bullywug monk/thief who was exiled from his monastery for kleptomatic tendencies. Basically stealing petty items from other monks to "test his skill", not stealing from other party members. Fast forward, party is in town at a local shop keeper. My character notices a common spear hanging over an open window and decides to be a froggy thief and snatch it by hanging on to the wall outside the shop. Long story short. Failed to steal the spear, shop keeper runs out of his shop looking for me, and I successfully hide on top of his shop. Me trying to RP, decides my character lets out a nervous ribbit after almost being caught. DM says the shop keeper finds me, jumps on top of his shop, and proceeds to take off over half my health in one attack (level 5ish). I then run away and fly from one roof top to the next with a monk ability (4th edition). The shop keeper proceeds to jump off the roof of his shop, run across the street, and flat-footed jumped onto the other building I was on. He then proceeded to beat my character to death and threatened the other party members if they helped me via the town guards with crossbows drawn. There was no trial. There was no persuasion check. Just a dead frog, a very awkward session, and an even more abrupt ending to a campaign. I now know he was completely breaking the rules of action economy and movement, but at the time I was brand new and just accepted it. Fuck that guy right?

ChrisTheWiz

May it please the court, I am playing my first proper game of 5E as a player, after one brief sojourn as DM and many fine podcasts. When my Wizard reached Lvl 2 I was excited to pick new spells as I had planned some out for utility and damage, but my DM told me there were some homebrew rules I needed to know - I can only learn spells from scrolls, never from levelling up, and for ritual spells I have to use components not my focus - for e.g. a 1,000gp diamond I can subtract 1,000gp form my character sheet BUT for e.g. a piece of wood and string I have to have bought those items at a store because they have no gp value. 1. Is this as insane as I feel? And 2, should I have asked about homebrew rules, or should I have been told when choosing my class? No other class has homebrew rules, just the wizard because they are OP. Yours, a lvl 4 wizard who knows 6 lvl 1 spells and basically just casts magic missile and identify all day.

Sawyer Rappa

May it please the court: This is perhaps more of a philosophical debate than a case, but feel free to sentence me or my players if you see fit. I DM a high magic/fae oriented campaign in which one of my pcs is a fairy rouge. Based upon interactions and the stat block we used, I have stated several times that she’s 6 inches tall. We’ve just leveled up to level 3 and my player was keen on taking Disguise Self, but felt it might have limited use for her. Another player presented that if Disguise Self can make you a foot shorter, and since she is 6 inches tall, she could basically go invisible, if I so ruled it. I was baffled and perplexed. She also gets invisibility once per day at 3rd level, so I at first dismissed the question. My players were insistent however, and I was quite intrigued. Based on the language of the spell, ‘you can’t change your body type’, I ruled that she cannot make it appear as if she doesn’t have a body, but we could adapt it more to Hide in Plain Sight and go full Toy Story with the spell. Should I have ruled this a different way and allowed her to become invisible or is my decision fair? https://dandwiki.com/wiki/Fairy_(5e_Race)

Leith H.

May it please the court, In my group of 6, we have managed to have 1.5 problem players. One who has been called put for blatantly cheating, and now that we use an online dice roller he never seems to get his way. And he has become more and more irritable at the table, and another who uses meta knowledge of this hombrew world to take out any suspense. Any ideas of how to approach this to bring the fun back to our game?

Lily

may it please the court: a while back, my dnd group took a mini break from our main campaign to play a semi cannon jurassic park game. it went on for about three games, and ended with them being transported back to their world. however, they “adopted” several baby dinosaurs and an egg (which is pretty much a scientific dragon), which i figured would be left behind when they went back to the new world. However, they players were very upset at this, and figuring it would be more fun to be chill, i let them take them back. they did some investigating on the egg, and learned that the egg might take hundreds of years to hatch. the players think the egg should hatch earlier, but i really don’t want this level six party to have a baby dragons and two baby dinosaurs. Am i right in standing firm that it’s already absolutely insane that they have baby dinosaurs (who i am actively trying not to kill bc they have like 10 hp) or should i let the players have to try to keep another baby pet alive?

Carly Anne

After a lot of encounters in the forest, our party was looking rough when 2 ogres attacked. I approached one and said, "We don't need to fight, you could be our new best friend." Then I cast Suggestion on him, and gave the suggestion, "Protect your new friends from anyone who would hurt them." The spell has an 8-hour limit, so as long as I was able to maintain concentration, I had essentially just hired us a big beefy bodyguard for the next 8 hours. Our DM did not like this. After trying to talk me out of it he said, "Fine, but put parameters on it - there's no way you can have him for 8 hours." Not wanting to make waves, I changed my suggestion to "Protect your new friends from anyone who would hurt us until we reach the next town.” Our ogre protected us through two more small encounters (3 wolves attacked and one bear attacked), I am almost certain our entire party would've died if I hadn't enlisted our bodyguard. I passed all con. checks to keep the spell up. As a group we decided to tie him to a tree just before we reached town, so he wouldn’t turn on us when we got there. Then as soon as we crested a hill and the town was in sight (still a mile or two away), our DM had the spell end and had the ogre attack us in a surprise round. We narrowly escaped a TPK. We were all really upset by this, but he argued that I should've been more precise in the parameters he made me set up. I think he was punishing me for using my spells creatively and using the wording of the spells to my advantage, but I don't want to be a player who constantly breaks the game for the DM. Was I being unreasonable to try to keep a bodyguard ogre for 8 hours with no consequences? Love you guys so much!

Josue Melgar

May it please the court: In the campaign I am in currently in, a pc quite / stop showing up. I asked my dm if the pc that left if we can divide the items he/she was caring. Because he/she had an item I wanted but the pc obtained before I could. However my dm stated no and left at that. Now I'm wrong that if pc leaves shouldn't the rest of the pc remaining have rights to obtain good gear/ gold at least helpful to our quest.

alexandra narvais

DM here, my player is a monk- rogue multiclass, in game he attempted a sneak attack, he used an unarmed strike. I stopped him and consulted the books, sneak attack is only on finesse weapon attacks. I didn't allow the sneak attack damage to be applied, he didn't like it but we moved on. After the game I thought about it, and if given the info before the game, I probably would have allowed the sneak attack to be applied, he's a very fun role player and is my DM in another campaign. Judges of the court, should I allow sneak attack on monk unarmed attacks, even though RAW says no?

Julio Ortiz

Hello fellow justices! This is more looking for advice than anything else. I recently found a new group to play with and we started our campaign about a month back. The players are a mix of experience with me being just a tad bit more experience than 2 others, who are brand new, and one guy that’s been playing forever. The DM has let a lot of things slide with the new players (letting them cast everything at max level spells, not keeping track of spell slots, more than one spell per turn) but is more stern about what me and the other more experienced player can do and is on top of spell slots/levels/attacks with me (I play a hexblade warlock shoutout Emily for guiding me in how to play it through the Trinyvale campaign). I know this can be tricky having players with a wide range of experience but it just feels a little wrong to me. In your experience playing and DMing, what’s some advice that you would give when adjudicating a wide range of experience of players? Love the podcast and everything about it. Hope you are staying well and safe!

Oli

May it please the court; I (a Level 8 Human Way of The Sun Soul Monk) decided to traverse from one Airship to another mid-battle by climbing into a cannon and firing myself across. I loaded the canon with a cannonball to use as a platform for my feet as well as a launching off point to Step Of The Wind the distance to the other ship. On launching myself, the DM immediately stated that I was fried-to-a-crisp-dead by the gunpowder explosion surrounding me in the barrel. Was I wrong in thinking the rear of the cannonball would take all of the explosive force and push me out along with it unscathed? Or should my body truly have been instantly cremated? Honourable Judges, thank you ❤️

Daniel L Hodson

May it please the court, My DM was taking our party through the curse of strahd, i was playing a Wood Elf Sorcerer named Beedle and we had made it to this large tower near a lake. i went to go knock on the door on the off chance it was that simple and i was immediately struck by lighting for about half my HP in damage. Okay so i guess it was a bad idea. Our fighter comes up and tries to break down the door for some reason and the ENTIRE BUILDING COLLAPSES ON ME. Killing my 7th level sorcerer outright with no opportunity for death saves. This being my first DND character ever i felt a little bit wronged. Was I?

L_D

May it please the court. I, a beginner DM, once created an encounter for my players built around a magic ball that would suck anyone who touched it inside and could only be released by a magic pass phrase. During the encounter, my party’s Mage decided to pick up the ball with mage hand and chuck it at the mini-boss I had painstakingly written for them, ending the fight before it even began as he got sucked up into the ball. I accepted my whomping and allowed it to happen. My question arises from the following; the party’s barbarian then suggested the mage use mage-hand again to put the ball in a satchel so they could release the mini-boss as a weapon of sorts in their next encounter. I allowed this, but when they released the mini-boss in the next encounter as they planned to I simply had him attack them almost immediately. My players argued that he would have been confused and attacked the new enemy that they were fighting, but I argued that trapping him in a ball would only have made him more mad at the party. Was I in the right? Or have I just condemned myself to being trapped in a ball? Many thanks.

AJ Carreau

May it please the court at the end of an older campaign I was in right before our final battle we all wrote letters for if we were to die but good news we all didn’t die but everyone refuses to read their letters still to this day what are we do about this #ReadTheLetter

Michael Littlehales

If it pleases the court, I've been playing in a campaign as a dwarven eldritch knight fighter named Ulfgar (thanks for the inspiration) we're level 10 now and at level 4 I took the War Caster feat so I could cast a cantrip as a reaction. The opportunity to use this hasn't come up until we hit level 10, where an enemy was trying to escape from us, jump from a ship and swim to safety. The DM told us we could take opportunity attacks and I told him of my war caster feat and that I would cast booming blade as my opportunity attack. I hit, dealing damage with my axe, damage with the booming blade and damage when the enemy tried to carry on running. All in all about 40 damage in the opportunity attack. My DM flipped, he said it was too powerful and that I wasn't allowed to do it anymore, he said only the axe damage would count and that I couldn't use a cantrip like that again in future. It really annoyed me because I didnt think it was unreasonable, it's a legitimate feat and spell, and I'd had the feat for 6 levels and spell for 7 before I used either. What do the judges think?

Alex S

May it please the court, while fighting a beholder and some ghosts, our cleric was possessed by a ghost and then hit with a petrification beam. The ghost decided to fly the cleric's body to 100 feet on his flying broom in hopes of striking the ground and shattering the body. A series of magical rescue antics brought the cleric statue safely to the ground and a greater restoration restored him. An argument ensued: Would the ghost have remained in the statue, did the petrification of the body excise the ghost, or would the ghost leave the body before it turned to stone?

Lucky

Tempest Cleric (worships homebrew demi-god of storms) my goal was to challenge him and take over. Whole backstory about being one of his challengers. Adopts NPC son with the group, we all become close. Get married and have a daughter. But the goal has always been to become a demi-god. Some of the party view this as abandonment and being an awful father. AITA? I never said I'd abandon any of them. .unless I die.

Westin Lanser

Honored Justices, sworn-in and otherwise, recent I got completely whomped by my party’s Moon Druid and I’d like to turn the tables on them in the same way. They got caught sneaking around by a patrol of werewolf bandits and were ambushed. It was 4 CR 3 werewolfs against my 5 lv 4 PCs. I thought it would be a challenging encounter but the Druid pulled out Moonbeam and turned my scary monsters back into naked, unarmed dudes. Needless to say, they lost that fight. Before the fight, I wasn’t aware that Moonbeam returned shapechangers to their original form but now that I am, I want to use it on my Moon Druid to force him back into squishy halfling form. However, Druids change form using Wild Shape not the Shapechanger monster ability. Would you rule that Moonbeam should effect anything that has changed its shape or only things that have or use the Shapechanger ability?

Melnar Bonemaker

If it pleases the court. I’m a level 10 artificer in a game that’s been going on for nearly a year. We have two DM’s and five players. The DMs traded off week to week and so played half the time. However, tragedy struck, a DM was dating a player and when they had a narsty breakup, it was the DM who left. We’ve been playing for a few months with just the one DM. Our DMs had shared creating a singular world and each had their own NPCs they would voice in session. Since the DM left, the NPCs that they voiced have been missing and we’ve been hopping around planes trying to send or scry them. After two months of real time searching, we finally made it to the edge of the astral plane and received a sending from Elysium. We were informed they had all died in an offscreen battle and couldn’t be brought back. We then had an out of character talk about why a handful of extremely important NPCs, two of which had been in long running relationships with players, had just died. We were informed the DM who left wanted to take their characters with them which nearly destroys all semblance of story we’ve crafted over this year. They wanted their characters to die and not be revived. We decided we’re going to reincarnate them against their wishes because they shouldn’t get to ruin a story they have chosen to no longer be a part of. Are we making the right call in reincarnating against the former DMs wishes? I leave this decision to your honors. May your justice be true, your words be good, and your crits be timely!

Kiefer spence

May it please the court, I recently started a new campaign as an Artificer. Our second session happened and we leveled up to level 2. So I got my infusions (yay!) and decided to make my long awaited homunculus friend. There was confusion during the session about weather you need components to infuse your homunculus (the spell create homunculus requires a ruby worth at least 100gp) so I let it go assuming I was wrong because I'm new. After our session a few days later I confirmed that you don't need an expenswive ruby. you only need an object that serves as the creatures heart. The group confirmed this and I got my Homunculus friend! So I decided to RP how it happened by saying "Zayn gave up working on his homunculus threw it in his pack and started working on something else. Then it came to life, crawled up his back and scared the living shit out of him." So my DM took this literally and had me roll to see if I actually shit my pants. Shout out to the 2 Crew! So Zayn shit his pants, and upon trying to hide it and play it off as some rotten meat that he was gonna go dispose of, he rolled a NAT 1 for deception. So now the whole party knows Zayn shit his pants. Out of game, I think it's hilarious but I just feel so bad for Zayn. He's in way over his head after leaving home to be an adventurer and this will be a huge blow to his inflated ego. He could use some advice from Hardwon actually because I'm sure Hardwon has been in a situation like this before. But to a please the courts, Was my DM unfair to take Zayns words so literally or should Zayn choose his words more wisely?

Billette

May it please the court. I am a relatively new DM. The group I DM for has more roleplaying/TTRPG experience than I do as a whole - though they rarely DM. During a session, a Bodak attacked the group. I misread a piece of information about the creatures ability, misinterpreting it. My husband, who had looked up the creature when I told them the name, jumped in to say that “actually the way the creature is written, it actually works more like this…” at which point I told him in front of the group that he shouldn’t be looking up creatures abilities/stats during session. He said that he was only trying to help me since I was a new DM (had been DMing apprx. 6 months). I’m not opposed to being wrong, and did amend my previous statement on the Bodak’s ability when he corrected it, despite the breach. The issue I bring before the court is related to players looking up creatures/abilities at the table, even for the ‘benefit’ of the DM. I trust my husband as a role player and don’t think he intended to cheat, but still think it breaks the immersion. (And while I was typing this, he did bring me a perfect cup of hot honey lemon water, so if the court should find the law in my favor, consider going easy on him).

Shaun Barker

AM I WRONG TO THINK MY TIME HAS BEEN WASTED?? Our DM took us on a good 40 hour campaign where we got some decent loot, fought some strong enemies and levelled our characters up to where we were very well balanced and took down some challenging monsters. However, our DM then ended a session with us waking up from a magically induced sleep only to play the "it was all a dream" card! Not only that, our characters are now bumped down to 5th level again with none of the loot. Am I right to feel our DM just didnt like how balanced we were so in essence, erased everything we had done? Or should I just be thankful for the times we had and do it all again?

Shrimp Loaf

My wife can be a bit naive from time to time, and while she knows almost nothing about D&D and refuses to watch most fantasy blockbuster movies (like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.)... she insists DMing can't be that hard and has offered to do it for myself and a small group of friends who would be first-time players (but love this podcast). How wrong is she?

Leith H.

May it please the court, Our party recently tangled with the deck of many things, many great cards were pulled (not by me, I managed to pull 2 terrible ones in a row) My question is in regards to 2 cards, ruin, and the star card My party member pulled the star card and gained the ability to cast wish 3 times, after his first wish, he was made to roll percentile dice, and rolled poorly, if the card says you can cast it 3 times should the normal wish rules still apply? Also, I our party treasurer pulled ruin, so all wealth disappeared, but instead of just mine, it was the whole partys, should this ruling be changed to not screw over the party just because I got unlucky?

Lord Josmar

I was playing a troll in a 3.5 game some years ago. In an emotional encounter my character was lured out by the BBEG. When I reached him, the DM had him use some unheard of home brew thing that insta-killed my character with no saves. I was thoroughly bothered and felt like this was very intentional as my character has been neigh unkillable. Am I overthinking the situation or was this a deliberate assassination?

Steven Hoffart

May it please the court, During a climatic part of our campaign we encountered an evil person with a throne she was sitting on a 6 magic stones place around her. She began monologuing about her strength versus ours while slowly going around and collecting the stones that being to float around her. Before she could get to the 6th my character, a Yuanti druid, mistystepped and swallowed the magic stone. The fight began and she spent the fight knocking my character unconscious and then in around round 6 killed him outright and pulled the stone from his stomach. This killed my character but the party managed to defeat her with no one else ever going down. To this day I defend this was the right move but my party continues to tell me how dumb my character was for doing this. Was it heroic or was this the wrong move? signed, the late Bodhi Mangrossa

Stephanie Karisny

May it please the Court, in our campaign my half-orc totem barbarian is equipped with the Boots of Speed and the Ring of Jumping. Both requirement attunement and take a bonus action to activate. I have been trying to convince my DM to allow my PC to use one bonus action to activate both items at the same time in combat (versus over two separate rounds). I have argued that this is not OP as it would still force my PC to choose between using my first round bonus action to rage versus activating these items to make a big move onto the battle field. I have also argued that this would help the narrative flow of our sessions as I wouldn't be trying to interject that my PC activates her boots or her ring each time it seems like we are about to enter initiative. Is my DM right that my request will leave the action economy in shambles or should my PC be allowed to bonus action Yippie Skippy and jump?

Elena

May it please the court, pre-COVID I played one-shot sessions with a local D&D group, so each session was usually with new people including the DM. Each player would bring their own character sheet (or grab a pre-generated one). The DM always had an X card on the table which a player could tap at any moment if they were uncomfortable and the DM would stop no questions asked (eg DM describing dead babies, player taps card, DM pivots into something else). My question is, should I have tapped the card to indicate discomfort with a player’s character? He was a half orc who was hated by the human community he grew up in, so I think you can guess what his backstory was. Is it reasonable for players to object to another player’s character, or is that up to the DM to decide? For context I was the only woman at the table.

Jeremie Berneche

Hear ye, hear ye. May I please the court, The case of the scaredy cats I have been playing for a year and a half with some coworkers, and this week I was once again confused by their decisions. They have been after the Cult of Tiamat for the whole campaign and I have been dropping hints that the Cult was merely preparing to defend the continent against an outside threat. They are fighting in an arena to defeat the champion of the Cult, when suddenly they hear cries of terror in the crowd. Clerics and Priests in plate armor showing a sigil they've seen in apocalyptic visions of the future are killing citizens, when the outer wall of the arena explodes. The Clerics point at the cult Champion and start going after them. My party stands idly by, saying they will finish off the winning side. Okay. I find a way to rope them into the fight (they are wearing dragon masks which the Cult absolutely want back). They kill the Cult champion and flee to the sewers when the Clerics call reinforcement to kill the PCs. When they finally emerge, they are behind enemy lines, where bodies of Halflings, Elves and Kalashtar alike are lying on the ground. They hear a voice in their head that says "People of Centralia. Fear not. Only the unworthy will be cleansed". They go out to see what it is and see a winged creature (angel) hovering over the houses, with no help around, clearly leading the genocide from the backline. I ask them what they do: "We go back in the sewers", the rogue replies. I am astounded and wait for dissenting opinions, but the PCs all agree to just hide while countless innocents are killed. I stopped the game and asked them what was going on, nudging them into intervening (they are level 12 "heroes" of the realm for P's sake!) They fought the angel because I straight out told them the encounter was balanced, and two PCs were killed in the fight (dice rolls were highly in favor of the angel, and I roll in the open) and brought back as zombies through Danse Macabre when the rest of the party allied with the cult to vanquish the angel, with no way of being resurrected. Should I have let them hide and let the city be razed? Should I talk to them about the concept of being heroes through the game? They seem to only plow through easy encounters and flee whenever a little challenge arises...

Crane

May it please they court: My case seeks the familiars judges. I was playing a genie warlock with the pact of the chain feature in a campaign centered around investigating the deaths of some students. The party was trying to tail a suspecting student when I suggested following him with my imp (whose name was Scooby) which can turn invisible. The dm then ranted that familiars are better then some players. He said I was stealing the spotlight from the rogue. The rogue liked my idea and didnt mind. During the next session, the dm denied me at points when I asked my familiar in helping me in skills that scooby was proficient in. I challenged the dm and he kicked me from the campaign with out warning stating I was a meta gaming tryhard. So I ask this, when does the use of familiars cross the line.

Bryan Holt

If it please the court. While playing during the winter break with a college group the DM had an interesting system by which we got together. Each episode we would have a session of travel in which our group patron would go to a location, find a person, then move onto the next team member. This was fun at first untill he decided to do this for the 2 players who dropped before the game started. With massive battles planned the DM controlled at one point 5 player characters. Me a craven fighter battle master , and our parties sculpture bard were often left out of whole interactions. Rather than have us deal with situations he often had his brother, a guest at the table, play a rotating PC usually a guard or mayor, whom we would be attacked if we were interupted or tried to roll against. When me and the bard voiced our discomfort we were told we needed to understand that his brother was a co writer and had as much say over the game as he. He would also promise us he had "Big Things" comeing for us. Was I right to fold up my dice and Skedaddle? Or should I have given a chance to this new DMing style?

Kaylie Elise

May it Please the Court My group is playing Curse of Strahd and I play a super dope Tabaxi Shadow Sorceress named Juniper Jet. To avoid spoiler territory I’ll try to be very vague; my group was punished by some baddies after we lost a battle. The punishment was we each needed to “lose” a part of ourselves and earn it back by completing a task. We didn't know what we were losing, only vague hints (things like Victory and Silver Tongue). 3 out of 4 of the group, including myself, have been knocked out, so the one remaining party member is forced to choose each person's punishment. They chose for Juniper to lose her “Silver Tongue”, which we later learned meant that I have disadvantage on all Charisma based checks and skills. The only way we earn it back is by going to the Big Bads hideout and stealing something. This won’t happen for a while since we’re level 4. As the groups face and only charisma based character, this almost feels like it breaks my character roleplay wise. I can no longer play Juniper the way I designed her to play, which is sharp tongued and witty. Or I can, but it’s not nearly as satisfying. My DM feels bad but really wants me to stick with what I got, so I’m trying to make it work, but I’m really worried Juniper won’t be nearly as fun. Am I overreacting because I knew the risks of the game and should just try to adjust, or have I been robbed of my charming kitty cat? Much Respect and Best Regards

Whill

M' judges My now ex-partner (they/them) is currently in school for animation and as can be expected, is incredibly artsy and creative. I have a habit of coming up with wacky, crazy, character concepts that I hope to use someday when I get out of the never ending DM cycle. Whenever I thought of one, I would bring it up to them and tell them how excited I was about it. At first they would be supportive but over time they grew frustrated and would complain that all these great concepts are being wasted on Dnd and I should put them in some creative projects. I'm a graphic designer and while I love what I do, it doesn't exactly provide many opportunities to create cool unique characters like the ones I think of for dnd. I would argue that these characters get the best opportunity to shine in dnd rather than a drawing in my sketchbook or in a half written story I'd never have the gumption to finish. Although we're broken up now, I still consider us friends. If the topic ever comes up again, what would be the best argument I could make to support my side of things? Respectfully- Whill with an H

Edward Mitchell

May it please the court, Early on in my first campaign, having only DM'd previously, our Goliath Barbarian was given a dragon’s egg which hatched and then flew off, so we knew it would be a problem in future. Much later we returned to the starting town to find out from some bandits it had settled in a nearby abandoned church. We followed them over and got into an altercation with the bandits as they wanted to kill the dragon and our barbarian was strongly against that idea. With the battle easily in hand my lvl 5 blood hunter goblin, Phineas Filch left the rest of the party to deal with them and he decided it would be a good idea to tie some rope around the sleeping dragon’s mouth so it wouldn’t use its breath weapon to murder us all. I rolled a natural 20 on my stealth check which was a 28 and thought I had it in the bag, but my DM told me that I had to roll a sleight of hand check to get the rope around his neck. I protested this arguing that I was trying to do it stealthily as not to wake the dragon but eventually conceded, not wanting to bring the session to a grinding halt. I rolled a 15, but being a young adult dragon, it easily beat that, woke up, breath weaponed just me, and even passing the dexterity check wasn’t enough to save my full HP Goblin. I rolled 2 nat 1s on my death saves and was permanently dead. The worst part is that immediately after the dragon was friendly, non-aggressive and even went on to aid us in the BBEG fight. Was Filch wronged for trying to think outside the box with the DM opposing the dice Gods who gifted him a nat 20 or did the DM correctly summon the dice Devil to give him the fate he deserved giving him the dual nat 1s of permanent death?

Eric G

A quick update on the flying gnome! (His name is Gimble Appleblossom) My party recently angered a small village of aarakocras by stealing a special amulet, so the next time my gnome began to fly, 4 aarakocras swooped down with immovable rods in their talon feet, perched on the rods, then open fired with long bows at the gnome. He immediately went unconscious, and argued that mage hand would have ended since he's unconscious and he would then fall to the ground where he could be healed by the party. I ruled that party couldn't get to him cuz he was 30ft in the air and mage hand doesn't end when you go unconscious. Is he right or just upset?

Shiny

If it pleases the court. My players were in a situation that required investigating by searching and questioning NPCs. One of my players, who is known for not paying attention, was asked what he is doing to assist in the investigation. He looked up, presumably from his phone, and said "I roll intelligence to know what to ask" and rolled the dice. I had to argue with him that intelligence doesn't make me do his job as a player. Should I have given him a question to ask the NPCs? Respectfully- DM Shiny

MechaBeholder

May it please the court, a couple years ago as a first time DM I was running a well known starter adventure that involved exploring a goblin filled broken down fort. All the doors in said fort were swollen shut and required a strength check to open. The party opened one said door only to find a room full of, surprise, goblins. A player's immediate response was to close the door. I said they couldn't given the fact the door was stuck and required a crowbar to open. This lead to a 30 minute argument involving diagrams, real doors, demonstrations, and raised voices. This debate is now a running joke, but doors are still the bane of my existence, between constantly needing to know what direction they open or players straight up just stealing fancy doors to sell. 1) was I wrong? 2) How does the court deal with doors in general? Sincerely, One does not simply open more doors.

Elrohir Shmoon

May it please the court. In a past campaign my D&D character (a wizard) found a portable hole. Later, during an elaborate encounter our DM expected to be very challenging, we whomped our DM and defeated all of the enemies easily. During this encounter I pulled some shenanigans and used my portable hole on the ground in front of a patrolling Duergar, casting prestidigitation to make the hole smell like earth in hopes that he wouldn’t see it (stupid, I know). The Duergar stopped to investigate the hole. I rolled an opposed athletics check to push him in. He rolled a 1. I rolled a 2. I then folded up the hole and let the Duergar suffocate to death. My DM was so upset that these shenanigans worked that later he created an encounter where a Tabaxi stole my portable hole. I haven’t let him live this down ever since. Was my DM justified, or being a sore loser?

isaidlookman

May it please the court, I am a DM and ran an encounter where a star-spawn dragonborn diviner cast delayed blast fireball at my party from a stone catwalk down at my players. She proceeded to move away and detonate the fireball. I ruled that, since she was on an elevated, reinforced, position and also had a railing in the way of the fireball that she was unaffected by the damage of the spell. 3 of my players were cooked by the fireball and protested a little that she was not. Rules as written, the spell only mentions a radius of damage, but it didn't feel right to me that it would somehow hit her and leave the catwalk in tact. I did some quick damage calculations on structures and the fireball wouldn't have collapsed the catwalk but I wonder to this day if I handled this the wrong way. I struggle a lot with damage to inanimate objects as a relatively new DM. Was I right to leave my gorgeous worm dragon princess unscathed by her spell? -Vic

Joseph M McDevitt

I ran a campaign recently where one player wanted to play chaotic evil. I allowed it because he was experienced and thought he would at least play the game with everyone else... first session he refused to join up with the other characters. I kept putting him in their path and giving them reasons to interact but he pointedly would walk away. Eventually he devolved to the point of attacking innocent people because “it was what his character would do.” I marched the entire city guard on the place he was committing his massacre and killed his character. He said I was being vindictive but I argued he can’t kill people without repercussions. Was I right to do this?

Michael Fierro

May it please the court, Years ago I played a warforged barbarian looking for his "Mom and/or Dad", AKA the inventors who made him. He found his gnomish pop in a heartfelt reunion with much rejoicing. We saved him from a den of Vampires, where he ended up dying in a cinematic moment. Our cleric thankfully revived him to our DM's surprise, and my warforged vowed to keep him safe and not leave his side. That night I stayed in sentry mode in his room, not willing to leave him alone for the night. However, the room suddenly filled with magical darkness, and when it cleared my character found his papa eviscerated in bed. Our cleric were out of spell slots after the long fight and could not bring him back again. I found out a year later the DM had our Warlock's patron command the player to discreetly kill my papa or lose his warlock powers. I am fine with the player playing his character, but feel the DM jumped through a lot of hoops to get my dearest papa killed. I feel I should of had some chance to protect him in the room, while their argument at the time noted I was shrouded in magical darkness and could not see anything. Long story short, should I accept that I did all I could and simply failed to protect my papa, or did the DM jump through a number of hoops to get him killed again after our Cleric revived him, which our DM did not expect to happen.

MacMillan Leslie

May it please the court, My group was shaken up recently by the addition of another player. This was introduced by our DM darker campaign and the first entire arc was our characters learning to trust and love each other. This took a while, but it was satisfying when we got there. We planned to have a fun Halloween session back in October, outside of cannon which we were all super excited for. Another one of our friends who doesn't play with us was mysteriously in the Discord when the session began and half way through they were introduced as a new character that one of the players pulled out of a haunted painting. At first this was really cool! Our friend was playing for the one shot. Until the end of the session when the DM said "And now they will be joining as a permanent party member is that OK?" Of course this was super awkward because this person is my friend and I want to play DnD with them, but not really like this... It just felt super weird that the DM didn't check in with us before adding a new player and on top of that it kind of undid the whole last arc because, surprise, surprise, our untrusting characters don't trust this random person we pulled out of a spooky painting in a haunted mansion. Since then things have gotten worse. With this new player saying that my character is too intense for them and asking that in this dark world I play my character to care less about things. So Supreme Crit Justices this is my question. Am I right to think it's odd and super uncomfortable to add a new player in this way even if they are our friend. Sincerely, Mackles

Mad Dungeon Mama

May it please the court: In my first ever campaign, we were running a dungeon. There were several run ins with goblins and I was excited to roleplay with my fighter! However, every time I said where I was going to try to hit the goblin (say his legs so I could try to interrogate him before killing him) my DM would snidely say "oh?! You're calling your shot are you?!" Then proceeded to ignore my intent, regardless of if I hit or missed. I wasn't hoping for a nat 20 critical dismemberment, simply some fun rp. Was I wrong to think that I could try to aim for a specific target? Or is that entirely up to the DM?

Mason McCauley

May it please the Court, I was DMing a party traveling through the jungles of Chult in the Tomb of Annahilation. I read about an encounter with a struggling grung (frog people) tribe whose chief was in love with a goddess. The quest said that party could help the tribe out by either helping the lustful frog king or getting rid of him. I described the outside of this frog temple and my party wasn't interested at all! They tried to leave but I thought it was a fun encounter so I escorted them into the temple at spear-point. They dragged their boots and debated whether or not they should just kill all the frogs but in the end finished the quest. The whole time they made fun of me for being a "frog lover" and grumbled about how weird the quest was. Please Court, was I wrong to railroad my party and do I deserve being called a "frog lover"? Or was I in the right, since I had their best interest at heart and I have been razzed to this day (2 years later) for loving frogs?

Tux M

Barbarian V. Lemon May it please the court, I was running my first campaign. The party’s barbarian, Carson McCaw, had collected some cursed stones that would freeze anyone who touched them. In the final boss fight he says he pulls out the stones and tosses them at the evil wizard. As the player says this, he pulls out a lemon he had sneakily gotten from my kitchen and throws it at me. I instinctively catch it. He says, “Aha! The wizard is frozen!” I said no way, he still had to roll the dice. Which he did and failed. He says I should have rewarded his lemon creativity. Should I have been beaten by my own real-life lemon?

Mike Hamrick

May it please the court, I DM one game and play in another with mostly the same group of people. In the game where I am a player, I purposely built a character who is very observant (high wisdom, decent intelligence, observant feat) so that my passive perception and investigation are 20 or higher. When I DM, I do occasionally ignore my players' passive scores when there are circumstances that specifically justify it (like if they're actively distracted by something else), but I generally try to honor them as a floor for checks and will give my players information they'd know without rolling at all, or even if they roll poorly. When I am a player, my DM (who happens to be the biggest minmaxer and murder hobo of all time when he's a player) almost never let's me use my passive scores even though I built them up very intentionally as a part of my character, usually coming up with what I consider complete BS reasons why they don't apply when I can tell he just wants the group to do more work to solve the encounter. I try not to be a poor sport about it but it is frustrating to have a bad roll keep me from doing something I'm supposed to be automatically good at. It's worth noting that I explicitly worked it out with my DM to take a 2 point penalty to CHA to get an extra point in WIS because of who this character is supposed to be. He's an 8 DEX 6 CHA firbolg that is constantly failing those checks to give him the "insightful hermit who notices everything but is clumsy and terrible with people" vibe, but it feels like I made the sacrifice without getting the benefit I traded for. Am I asking for too much expecting to use my passive scores all the time?

Daniel Koller

May It Please The Court; They say "no D&D is better than bad D&D". I rolled a Dragonborn Way of Tranquility Monk (UA). I asked the DM if this character build made sense in their world, and stated the character would rely on violence as a 'last resort' to atone for the past. I gave story hooks, conflict (moral compass vs. needs of the party/world) and would help us consider alternatives to just a 'beat 'em up" style. My DM agreed and promised opportunities for diplomacy & persuasion. Almost immediately that seemed false. In fact, the DM built in story elements like; a spirit told me that I was chosen to follow the footsteps of a group that used violence to achieve peace, after being named an Ambassador for a Kingdom my attempts to negotiate with a tribal society led to war (because they only respected violence), and 3 trials that could only be solved by a fight. After speaking with my DM and being assured they understood and would give me a satisfying arc, I tried to play along, play into the inner turmoil, etc. The final fight before I quit, we tried to escape from a tough enemy and I used my lv 11 ability 'Douse the Flames of War' - in short, "For 1 minute on a failed WIS save, creature can't attack, use spells that deal damage, or force saving throws", only useable if its cast on a creature with full HP, and requires no violence against them or allies. I succeeded on that roll, and then the DM had an NPC attack the creature anyway, forcing the fight. Honorable Justices, should I have rolled a new character well before this fight when I realized things weren't improving? And I know that the DM planned this fight at the end of the session, but am I right to feel robbed of my characters Moment To Shine, the moment justifying his entire build? Unfortunately I've felt the Monk class has been sullied a bit (though the Hexbuds have helped restore it for me), but should I have known better? PS: They also forced my dragonborn to grow a tail like, 10 sessions into the game, because they felt dragonborn should have tails, if that impacts the decision. I thank the Court for their consideration.

Peter Frank

If it pleases the court. I participated in a shadowrun game through my college's tabletop RPG club. For reasons that are self evident given the age range of the group, It wasn't uncommon for people to skip sessions without warning or simply drop games. Our group had one such person who showed up for the first few sessions, attended occasionally mid semester, then dropped off the face of the earth. Having played many games through the club we felt confident that he wouldn't show up again before the end of the semester. As we were preparing for the epic heist to finish of the campaign, someone brought up the concern that his character might become a problem if left as a loose end. Being idiot college students, we agree to murder their character and use their stuff to help fund our heist. Of course the player shows up the next session and is somewhat cross with us. The defendents have plead guilty of being idiot, murder hobo, college students, and seek sentencing from a higher court.

Kelley40k

May it please the court. In a past campaign I played a wizard (necromancer)/artficer (battle smith) tortle named Grok. His artficer subclass allowed him to build a steel defender. This defender can look however you want but will be meduim sized. That being said i wanted to make a steel defender in the form of a Crab named Shiny. I also wanted to make this defender the size of a golaith as goliath are meduim sized creatures. But my DM said it meant meduim size comparable to a dog. I argued that meduim size covered a lot of different height i.e dwarf to goliath heights and there was nothing saying i couldn't make shiny as big as a golaith. We concluded that i had to start around dog sized and could put in some work and upgrade Shiny overtime. I thought this was a great compromise but i just wanted to know the court ruling of if i could make shiny goliath sized right off the bat.

Kestrel

My level 9 party found ourselves in a huge, unavoidable combat with Imix, a CR 19 elemental prince who had summoned a bunch of elementals and also was making us take a ton of environmental damage. Three of us died, and after the combat we found out that most of it had been designed by a different person, who wasn’t our DM and who actively wanted to kill us. Is that...okay?

Ranch Bass

Oh fair judges I am turning myself in this time. I feel like I am breaking an unspoken rule of dnd. I am a new dm for a party of 2 new players and during our last session our Paladin died- 3 failed death saves full dead. After a bit, for a number of reasons, we decided to redo the battle he died in from the beginning. Because we're all new, story wise in the middle of the ocean, AND we had just bought Paladin spell cards. I am so scared to let my other dnd friends know I am retconning his death but I think I made a good decision. I put it forward to the judges and hope they give me mercy. Love naddpod love you guys! -Alyssa

Austin Johnson

May it please the court So I'm planning an upcoming campaign with some friends and they all want to try playing a low magic campaign, kind of like game of thrones . One player wants to play a fire genasi barbarian(with red skin and fire for hair and everything,) I told him there is no way a guy with fire for hair could just be walking around like no big deal when magic is nearly unheard of. He argues that since he isn't a spell caster nobody should care that he is just on fire all the time, and since I'm making the world I can just make it so genasi aren't weird. But he also thinks Tik Tok was in the right so I don't trust his judgement. Help me out on this oh impartial DnD court.

ThatManGareth

Some years ago, my high school party and I were setting up for our first campaign completely inexperienced. There are a couple of offenses with which our DM has been accused. A ways into the campaign we have our first encounter with the BBEG. We somehow manage good stealth checks and actually get the jump on him, and my character Kelnazi casts zone of silence so we can get closer and attack. After using the spell, BBEG noticed us not because of a failed roll, but DM said BBEG noticed that he couldn't hear the torches crackling anymore. (Offense 1) Fast forward though a relatively straight forward combat with BBEG, and we have enough debuffs on him that I cast Phantasmal Killer. (the 3.5 version of the spell which can insta-kill with 2 failed rolls) BBEG crit fails his first roll and misses the second roll by 1 because of the debuffs. Combat ends and body destroys itself via enchanted armor, which is fine; HOWEVER, we find out later in the campaign that BBEG survived because he "made an army of clones" that his soul transferred to when he died, (Offense 2) implying this would continue happening if we killed him again. Only one of our players was a try hard with his character as it was a casual setting, so we were not trying to ruin anything but simply save the world. Is our DM guilty or are we expecting too much. Please help settle this 6+ year old debate over who was right.

Liam Berger

The people versus A Creative Water Genasi, I was I was playing in a one shot a friend of mine was running where we were infiltrating a gang hideout. Since the water genasi(the race I was playing as)’s whole deal was that he could control water, I at one point asked if I could use my ability to innately cast shape water to boil/freeze one of the gang members eyes in order to blind him. I admit I was being a bit of a knob, so I didn’t object too much since the DM said no, but I also feel like since it was a one-shot he should’ve let me just do the cool thing I wanted to do. Thoughts?

Hannah McFarland

What would you do if ur party chooses to abolish an existing government. Ok fine right that’s what this game is all about. Well what happened when they throw it to ur NPC and expect that NPC to tell them how to do it. But you as a person don’t know how governments work...

Veronica Plante

We were playing a level 14 combat, and one of our PCs died a Kenku bard named Cricket. two of the PCs have revivify so this shouldn't have been a problem, however the lich flew over to the dead kenku pc, dimension doored away with them on the justification that a corpse is an object and not a creature. I was playing a sorcerer who was right next to Cricket and tried to counterspell the dimension door, but the lich counter spelled me back. She then cast Time Stop twice after Dimension Door to get far away, and then disintegrated the body so they couldn't be revivified (all non revivify spells to bring back the dead were banned). This feels like an impossible situation, was this fair of the DM?

SunburntDucky10

May it please the court. Rogue Bard v npc’s I’m playing rogue bard. I’m in my first campaign with a bunch of guys who have played together many times and they’ve made their previous campaigns cannon. I wasn’t a part of those so when I go ask anyone for information about people I don’t know, my DM always responds with something along the lines of “ Have you been living under a rock!?! Such disrespect you have for the heroes! Be gone pleb!!” And I never find out much in story. Like I wasn’t there.. I’ve even made my character 17 so it could fit the timeline. But I still get scolded every time. Am I in the wrong? How am I supposed to gather info? And wouldn’t my base charisma help keep them from getting super mad? Thanks, Kelsey

Dorothy Cooper

Early in our campaign, there was a misunderstanding of what NPCs had asked my players to do which led to them pulling a scheme pretending to be corrupt guards arresting their party member to the point of beating him up. Later, in one of their home towns I went to great length establishing how the guards were Very Bad News (think Deadeye talking about Grimhawk) and they... did the same thing. I am pretty sure they will try and find opportunities to try this "let's pretend to be guards arresting out friend" scheme again till it works, should I just make an opportunity for it to happen or?

Michael Millar

May it please the court. I was running a game for my friends in which they were tasked with recruiting reinforcements to help defend a city from a demon army. One of my players upon returning in his airship with the backup decided his group would steer the ship at the army and jump out within the city causing the airship to plummet into the enemy forces. I agreed that this was awesome but he would have to make a save for each member that jumped out of the airship to see if they would survive the jump. I set the DC at 24 and after some bad rolling all but 2 of his reinforcements died from the jump. I even let his airship kill a general!!?? He to this day insists I was to harsh and the rule of cool should have prevailed but I think it was fair. What do you think?

jaydon

Haven’t been wronged just wanna say hi to the 2crew🔥

Sam72

Hi, judges! I've played in a three-shot called Battle of the Bands, and we were level 20 in our most recent session. At the end of the session, our DM said that the only way I could save my girlfriend (a hot vampire NPC who is our band manager), we would have to give her some of our magic. I was told to roll with double disadvantage, and the lowest I got was a 3--so the DM made us all delevel down to level 3! Now we're super weak and we're about to be mobbed by angry gnomes because we pissed them off (by killing some of them) while on level 20 power trips. Is this fair??

Marcus Heer

May it please the court. I have recently started playing in a campaign with a new DM. He struggles with the rules sometimes but everyone in the party helps him along. However, there is one thing he does that is super frustrating. When NPCs die he does not give the party any chance to save them. In the very first session our party spent two rounds of initiative trying to feed someone a health potion and they kept coming up with reasons the NPC couldn’t take it, such as the NPC drops the potion, or hes shaking too much and can’t get it to his mouth. It ended with two health potions broken on the ground. After expressing my concern with this encounter the DM went and killed another NPC like this. The NPC was a werewolf and was shot by a silver bullet. I used a magic item I had to summon a powerful spores Druid to heal him but the DM claimed that the Druid was not familiar enough with werewolf anatomy and that we couldn’t roll medicine checks on the werewolf because it’s too hard to bring a werewolf back from a silver bullet wound. Please settle this so our party doesn’t have to witness more unjust killings.

Meletios

May it please the court: I was DM and my players were in a minecart traveling too quickly to stop. My players had to make a strength check (DC/12) to pull an E-brake, and failed. My player rolled a nat 11, and subsequently his character died since the fall/ bludgeoning damage from the crash was great and he was at 3HP. He realized AFTER the session he never added his +1 modifier, and his character might be alive had he known. I offered to retcon and say they succeeded, but he disagreed, saying his character deserves death since he made the mistake. I argued that his character should be alive. Who is technically correct here? (Thanks guys! From a humble dnd player from N.J).

Andrew Worsham

I play as a tempest cleric in a campaign with a warforged who recently died. We have an artificer in our group but our DM said I wasn’t allowed to take his body and repurpose it for armor or other magical items. Is that fair?

Donny

May it please the court, did I mess up? I played a cleric in 4E that politely, but firmly, told a devil to leave my friend alone at a masquerade ball. I later found out that the player in question had worked something out with the soul-selling, but I still felt like I did the right thing because it was my first time really roleplaying and doing something the character, not the player, would do. Now, I am less sure. Did my RP go too far?

Miikra

May it please the court. Our party was going into our last session of a short high lvl campaign. We teleported to the keep of the evil necromancer to kill him and stop his ritual to gain ultimate power. The final encounter ended up being against the necromancer(who turned into some aberration) and an Ancient Dragon. We focused on the necromancer, spending a lot of resources, who eventually started flying and went invisible(but still participated in the combat). Any attempt to undo the invisibility was counterspelled and after failing to guess his location with AOEs, including Sunburst, we focused on the dragon. We eventually downed the dragon after losing 3/5 of our party and spent a round or two trying to find the necromancer with what little resources we had left. The necromancer eventually appeared and said his ritual was complete and killed us all. The DM later said the final fight was meant to be unwinnable and act as set up for the next campaign. The main fight/victory was supposed to be against the dragon and the necromancer was always going to live. The party was pretty bummed at that news and felt that it was a waste of time to fight an unwinnable fight. Honorable judges, were we justifiably miffed at being put into an unwinnable situation or does set up for the next campaign justify such a situation.

Dayna K Brown

May it please the court: Hi there, I'm a DM for a small group of friends and my younger brother. A while back I ran a holiday one-shot that all my players had requested and they got to make whatever characters they wanted (ex, the alcoholic warlock mall Santa named Naughty Toes). This one-shot was called the Mariah Carey Christmas Murder Escape House. It was an escape room where Mariah Carey was the BBEG and a Gingerbread Dragon, her legendary actions are singing whistle tones and a hot molasses breath weapon. In order to progress in the escape house, players had to solve the puzzle of the room they were in and then a door would open. One player wanted to use the spell Knock to unlock all the doors. And I, as the DM, said no since this wouldn't fit with the escape room vibes (and the party was figuring out the puzzles very quickly anyway). The player seemed put out and I feel like I messed up as a DM, especially since I didn't say no to the spell pre-session. Later, my brother and I got into an argument about DMs being unfair and he said I was being a rules lawyer, to which I pointed out that I had allowed his PC to shove a whole Mariah Carey portrait, frame and all, up his booty hole during the boss battle. Shall I be boiled in oil for not allowing the Knock spell and being a rules lawyer DM?

Joshua Daniels

Our Dm loves throwing weird Fey wild shenanigans at our party. Things like people getting trapped there for years and only be missing for days, or monkeys who steal body parts. One of the players, a warlock, made a deal with a fey in the feywild for a dope invisible horse. To buy it, he traded his memories of a pc he thought was done in the game, but when the pc returned we found out the Warlock wasn't able to make any new memories of him either. He pretty much had short term memory loss when it came to that PC. Most of the party thinks this is hilarious and alot of fun, but one of the players is upset and says he only traded his past memories what are your thoughts honorable judges?

Eric

May it please the court, During a session as a joke my character suggested we play the “quiet game” (Whoever stays quiet the longest wins). Both of The other party members immediately agreed and each bet 200 hold pieces on the game Which Lasted for well over an hour of all of our Actions being described over text messages, Eventually one of them cast invisibility which we looked up and revealed it had verbal components Which made him lose the quiet game. He argued that his character should have known not to use the spell because his character would’ve known it required him to speak but we argue that he already said he cast the spell and can’t undo it because he only realized after the fact It would’ve required him to speak. Where we correct to have made him lose, Or should we have allowed the game to continue because if character would’ve known not to cast the spell?

Just Some Guy

May it please the Crit: I would like to file a motion with the Crit, for the body itself to consider creation of a Crit Authorized LFG (Looking for Game) forum. As an avid Naddpole, I know how hard it can be to find a great game, and great party, and humbly request the creation of this specific forum to fall under the purview of the Supreme Crit, and create tons more DM Court submissions amongst Naddpoles themselves.

Alex aka Zol Ark

May it... not please the court!!! Yeah that’s goddamn right, I am being an unruly child! 😈😱😭 I am not here as a defendant but a perp and laying down my sins!!! We decided to do a new session after our dm asked if we wanted to play at a higher level and I was excited playing a higher level Magus and even with me being new to DND/Pathfinder I felt confident that I would do great! Session starts and we get through session 0-1 and it ends... how you may ask? Well our DM explains this decrepit room we are in and we see this pristine statue before us and when I get up from the floor I see this statue with my blurry vision and decided to flirt with the statue in my confusion (A/N: I accidentally did a Joey from friends moment on my first ever DnD game with this character and thought I do a callback moment), but little did we know this would be our downfall. After a brief exploration and a some history explained to us all we had to do is find a way out. One of the players decided to do a goof and destroy this PRISTINE statue as a battering ram, but no one was near to stop him and I did not have knowledge- Religion so I let him continue. The statue breaks and we all die. Apparently the statue was the reason was the reason we were in here and became the source of our immortality. Our dm left to clear his head and probably laugh it out. He tried to display the importance of this statue and we just didn’t get it until it was to late. I do not ask for pity... all I ask is for my punishment to be rad/hilarious... ☠️

Drew Fitzpatrick

May it please the court! My cleric used spirit guardians, which say take effect when a creature starts it's turn or enters the area on a turn. My DM has ruled when our bard uses an ability to make a foe move into the spirit guardian, it doesn't take effect immediately because it didn't willing enter the area of effect. I've accepted the ruling but appeal to the Supreme DM court.

Owen Rath

May it please the court: *note: this was a pathfinder campaign, not technically d&d, hope that’s okay My most recent campaign came to an end a few weeks ago, with a slight problem arising in the climax Going into the final fight with the BBEG, one of my fellow players started to actively work against us and ended up absorbing the evil power himself. This prompted the rest of us to try to kill him. I cast Fire Sneeze on him, which requires him to do Reflex and Fortitude saves, if not he is knocked prone. He failed both, so I told him he was knocked prone. HOWEVER he said that as soon as the fire hit him, his body melted away and out came an evil lich that lived in his mind (he had cleared this with the dm). I told him regardless he was knocked prone. He argued that because he was in a new form, he wasn’t affected by it. The DM ruled in his favor, much to my chagrin. I let it go but tbh it changed the outcome of the fight very slightly. Who was right? p.s. love you guys you should do a show in Cleveland once the world returns to normal

Owen Rath

I just realized how long my submission was, and I apologize

Alaina Moreno

May it Please the Court: The case of the pirate druid versus the dm and the druid. My character started out as a regular rogue pirate. I ended up multiclassing to pick up some skills as a druid because in our campaign we had a special item as a party that could only be used as a druid (and my character had spent some time at a covent for melora so it was a great harmony). However, one of our other players decided he was "bored" of playing a monk. The dm and the player killed off his monk and brought in a druid, who already came with a special item, "the staff of the woodlands" to equal what he had as the monk. During a quest, we were gifted another staff of the woodlands for helping out a local hermit. The other druid took the new staff and proclaimed he would be using both, which the dm allowed. In a peak of frustration, my pirate stole one of the staffs in the night. After the game, 2 of the other players, the druid and his real life brother, complained that stealing from the party was a major foul and asked the dm to take my staff away, which he did. Granted, I got a less powerful bow in exchange. But to this day I am extremely frustrated and actively avoid that player/character in game. Was I right to steal the staff for myself or were the other players justified in their indignation?

Tak Suga

Honourable judge and jury, may it please the court. I've been DMing a homebrewed urban fantasy campaign (a-la-Unsleeping-City) for a year. One of my players wanted to play a werewolf. So, I created a class, taking cues from a Matt Mercer class and one I found on reddit. I later realized that it's INCREDIBLY overpowered. I did the math, and if he played his turn right, at level 9 he can deal over 100 damage with four attacks, and heal for up to 20 hit points, on top of having resistance to all non-magical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. This isn't too bad, he truly does not know how to play. He can't remember any of his abilities, or what to add for attack modifiers, or even his damage dice for his attacks. The problem is, at least once every two sessions, he complains that he's ineffective in combat. I tried to break down his character abilities, even showed him my math and made him a written, point-for-point breakdown of how to pull it off. But he always loses the instructions, and forgets his abilities, so he's been asking to change them. To make them even more powerful. I let him once, increasing the size of his damage die under certain conditions, but he promptly forgot that too. I've been growing tired of telling him he can multiclass, change his class entirely, or maybe work harder on remembering his character, and having him refuse. He just wants to change his abilities to add absurd increases in power. Last session, I lost my temper and broke down why it was ridiculous, I lambasted him, I really womped him. He argued back, and the players told me I was harsh. I apologized immediately, but I don't think I was in the wrong, and I don't want to put in hours more work editing his suggestions to make them reasonable on top of preparing the campaign every week. He seems to think that because I apologized, he won the debate, and I'm going to change his class abilities. Should I suck it up and do it, suck it up and compromise, or tell him to kiss my glorious rump?

David Donnel

May it please the court. My bard, Dak Elfman, was chasing a bandit through the city of Waterdeep when the chase led Dak to burst onto a theatre stage during a play about a vampire. In order to blend in, Dak did a performance check to tried to sing a line “The Cooooouuunt’s loyal cheeeeefff spriiings iiiinto aaaction!”. My DM then said that the play wasn’t a musical and that I autofailed the check. I contended that I should’ve rolled with disadvantage at the most. Who is in the right here?!

Harri Lammi

The case of the diarrhetic mushrooms May it please the court In the second session of a campaign with new players, the group ventured down a wet underground cave illuminated by glowing turquoise mushrooms. One of my players, based on her real life habits, wanted to eat the mushrooms and I didn't want to stop her, although I did try to hint her to inspect the mushrooms first by asking along the lines of "you just want to eat random mushrooms you found?". My insinuations went unnoticed and she insisted on eating the mushrooms, to which I as DM decided to ask for a CON save to determine the effect which resulted in a Nat 1, oh no. I didn't want to punish the players as we're all quite new players and I didn't want this small thing to ruin our fun so in an attempt at humor I said that the mushrooms made the character violently shit herself and the stench gave her disadvantages on stealth rolls. Later on this resulted in a group of kobolds spotting the party and the fight lead to the death of a different player character. Now this player is complaining saying that I was being unfair and after defending myself he is even more upset that I didn't ask for a Nature check or similar with the mushrooms. Him being upset and not wanting to play unless I change what happened is bringing the group atmosphere down and others are starting to think that they don't want to play if I don't let him play; a compromise of a new character has not been accepted nor the explanation of "the dice tell their story" I now turn to the judges for their wisdom. Was I wrong in essentially having a player killed over a nat 1 when eating mushrooms? How can I de-escalate the situation without losing my group of players? This is my first time DMing and I want everyone to have fun yet I don't think I should be allowed to get bullied into submission whenever the players don't get what they want. May the Crit be among you, honorable judges

Philip Hurd

Honorable Judges, I have a query for you. In 2016 I started my first ever campaign based on literally nothing for I had zero DnD experience. Our party also of people who had never played quickly became murder hobos (you know as you do.) Anyway they went to the barracks of a small town and killed most of the guard while the rest of the guards ran to safety in the palace. The hobos long rested at the barracks and went to the Palace the next day on a "Peace Mission" The sorcerer casted dancing lights under the door, in his words "To put on a show." Am I wrong for having the palace guards then barricade the door seeing the dancing lights as a show of force?

Luke Lehman

Honorable Crit Justices, May it please the courts, My players arrived in a new city and were trying to gain information on whether an organization was loyal to the actual leader of the organization or the BBEG. One of the members was already a member of this organization, and while they were talking to the ranking officer of this city's outpost one of the players, without telling any of the other party that he had a plan. He loudly stated in a crowded room he was going to use the bathroom. He then hid in a stall where he waited for the first person to come where he would be able to get information from that person. His plan to get this information was to immediately murder them and take all the vital intelligence documents that he would be apparently bringing into the bathroom. After a minute a person went in, the player decided to jump onto the top of the door to the bathroom stall and pounce on him. I had him roll an acrobatics check which he rolled a 13 on, but since I didn't want the entire party to just be immediately murdered by an entire building of soldiers let him then roll for initiative instead of just immediately getting the drop on the person. He managed to kill the person, searched them and only found a letter from the persons daughter saying how much she loved her dad. After this instead of any attempt at covering up his tracks he used said letter to write an out of order sign on the bathroom and tried to break the lock so people couldn't get into the bathroom, a thieves tool check he rolled a 2 on (shout out to the 2 crew). The rest of the players were a mix of shock and confusion as to them this entire plan made absolutely no sense. This also derailed the plot as now the organization had to now investigate the crime seemingly committed by the person who once again LOUDLY DECLARED THEY WERE HEADING TO THE MURDER SCENE, instead of helping them... The player then complained that I was being too hard on him and that his rolls were bad and his plan SHOULD have worked. His character was eventually arrested and interrogated which further caused frustrations as he would complain to one of the other players about how his toilet murder plan should have worked and the fact that he was facing consequences was just me singling him out and being unfair. Am I wrong for not allowing a central organization in my campaign to not just be idiots and having this player face consequences?

Rory O'Sullivan

Esteemed council of critical rulings I present the case of booby the cowboy. While setting up the character sheet for our Western themed adventure an erroneous typo caused my character, Bobby "Leatherface" Logan, to briefly be called Booby. When the misnomer was brought to my attention I swiftly corrected course however the name has stuck and my grizzled gunslinger is now the boob of the party. If it please the court I ask that a ruling be handed down to correctly name my character going forward and if it does not please the court perhaps Bobby could be an honorary initiate to the band of boobs? Yours in faith, Rorkimaru

John Ballantyne

May it please the Court. I play an Echo Knight Dwarf, me and DM have an ongoing “passionate” disagreement over wether I can summon it in the air or not. The wording says “in an unoccupied space” 15 for from me. I take this as anywhere within 15 feet, my DM rules that it has to be on solid footing. Jake I would appreciate as a fellow echo knight your insight into this. Love the podcast, love you guys, and I know I’m right... haha

Gianni Pappas

So my Druid has a back story of when she was younger in an effort to be like her parents went on her own to practice medicine when she returned they were missing presumably being sold into the slave trade. Throughout the campaign I gave hints that her memories weren’t what she remembered (childhood filters) and it turned out they weren’t doctors but necromancers as well now rulers of the slave trade for their experiments and when she found them she learned that she was just a failed experiment of trying to put a soul into a newborns body. She insisted this wasn’t what she explained her parents to be but I argued that a child may not pick up on these clues and the trama of being abandoned may lead to some false memories being there. Am I in the wrong or a sick for changing what she believed to be her parents backstory (she lost them around 13)

Matthew Ajifu

TL;DR - I went from a PC in our game to the DM, which I inherited when our previous DM wasn't able to keep up with the schedule. Am I beholden to his shenanigan-acceptance level because we are "playing the same game"? Shenanigan-In-Question - Our DM allowed our druid to befriend a Giant Spider (Webster) which was treated as an animal companion (OP but fine since I was in the party). Since home base was in Waterdeep, it was determined that Webster would need a disguise since Giant Spiders are not a typical companion that you would see walking the streets of a super populated city. The Bard did a Nat-20 disguise roll to draw a cow on a big sheet that could be thrown over the spider so he would go undetected at night. Fast-forward to now with me as the DM. The party wants to continue to use the sheet (which has seen many battles) to continue the cow-charade. I posit that even the nat-20 disguise check wouldn't be enough to allow Webster to hang around in broad daylight since the proportions of cows and giant spiders are vastly different and the disguise is a big sheet with a beautifully rendered cow on it. As a player I absolutely loved the absurdity of it, but I am a much more strict DM. Am I beholden to the old DM's rulings?

Laney Bird

May it please the court, our DM created a tag along NPC minotaur named Chutney Cola, that 2 of our 3 PC's absolutely hate, so when the opportunity to spilt the party came those two pc's left (I being one of the two). While we were split up the PC and Chutney Cola got into a scuffle with some town guards and our DM decided that Chutney was going to talk his way out of this bad situation because he's a pro lawyer, which was all fine and well until the guards started to acquiesce without any sort of roll from Chutney, and please be aware that at this point Chutney had attacked several other guards. So I loudly inserted that it was not fair for Chutney to just get his way because the DM liked him as a character and wanted him to succeed. The DM did begrudgingly roll for persuasion after wards and got a 17 so freaking Chutney Cola still got his way, but was I over stepping by insisting a roll take place, especially since my character was not actually there to see the encounter?

jada

May it please the court My group was playing a sci-fi homebrew version of 5e. We were in a car chase, with the party in a van and the bad guys chasing on a motorcycle. I was playing a bard and cast dissonate whispers on the driver of the motorcycle. The driver failed the save and proceeded to jump off the motorcycle to run away. I argued that a rational person would stay on the motorcycle and then drive away instead of jumping off, meaning that the driver would have moved much further than her normal movement. The DM argued that the spell said "the creature's movement" so only the driver moved. Who was right?

DungeonMama

May it please the Court, I'm playing LMoP with a group of complete strangers. The DM and I are the only experienced players, and the others are brand new to D&D. During character creation the DM was very controlling, making choices for players that should have been theirs, and even making them feel like they had to change choices they'd already made. Ex: Our ranger wanted a crossbow, but DM insisted that the loading property meant she couldn't make two attacks so she should take a bow, which won't even matter because the module ends at level 5. He even did it with me, knowing I've been playing for four years. He questioned my choice of class/subclass, cantrips, starting weapon, and even where I put my ability scores, saying, "Clerics don't need Strength." It was incredibly uncomfortable, and if the other players weren't new, I'd leave the game, but I don't want them think that this is how a game of D&D is supposed to go. But they also haven't complained, so I don't know if they're unbothered, too shy/new to speak up (again, none of us know each other), or if I'm blowing this out of proportion. My questions: Should the DM be allowed to have this much control over the character creation process for new players or am I overreacting? Should I stay in this game to be their advocate or ditch the game entirely? I have a feeling talking to the DM won't accomplish much.

The Osee Pokemon Podcast

Hey, guys! Here's my case: I was part of a long term campaign where it was a 5e system based off One Piece. However, not quite as "Looney Toonsey" or followed anime logic. There were several things up between me and my DM, concerning about mechanics, storytelling, and character development. I felt I was wrongly left out for the simple reasoning that my character's whole plot and backstory tied into "late-game" without a single story-related bone thrown my character's way. Meanwhile, everyone else got either arc after arc of character development, backstory acknowledgement, or even at least a nod while I got nothing after 2.5 years of playing consistently every week. One player even being to romance the DM's self insert over time. My character, Burgh Elturts, is a Lawful Good, Domain of Life Cleric who believed that Science was the way to cure ailments and was a firm believer that the Gods were not real simply because he was a Turtle of Science and what he believed was what he saw. I believed that he was the "doctor" of this pirate crew. This later grew into a sort of facade, this fake atheistic bravado because he was scared that the gods did not care about the mortals on earth - turning to science for solace. My DM then homebrewed a Deck of Many things after he and I discussed about my character's belief and that doesn't work with the mechanics/theme of the Cleric. However, the Deck of Many Things turned out funky - and instead of implementing changes recommended by the players, they scrapped the whole encounter completely. I believe this could have been a moment where my character would have either changed Domains or even had a brief encounter with some magic. But still, nothing. After week after week, I felt that I was getting nothing and vocalized this to my DM. But opportunity after opportunity came and left after he assured me something would be thrown my way, so I decided to part from the party after giving my best effort to hang in there after I felt not as important to the table. Was I overreacting? Should I have just waited longer? Or should I have talked to him about changing the story, even though they seemed to have everything already planned out? I felt this would challenging him directly, and I did not want to make him feel threatened or insecure about his story. I did apologize to him for leaving, and informed him I wouldn't be returning. We are still great friends today, but I just want to make sure that this was at least somewhat justified on my part.

Dylan Fisher

May it please the court, I'm finishing up running my campaign after two years of DMing, and one of my players is taking up the reins so I get to play. After our penultimate session we were having a chat after the session and he dropped his plan for the next campaign. When it was time to level up using the milestone method he said we would find four potions and after drinking them we would level up, the rub is there are five players. He said it was to make us roleplay better and have better strategies in battle. I expressed my opinion that this was extremely unfair, and a bad idea but it seemed to fall on dear ears. What should I do?

Gafyn John

May it please the court, In my current campaign, we're playing Curse of Strahd and I play a Monk. Obviously you all know by now how OP monks can be but I've barely been using my Stunning Strike ability up to this point and haven't spammed it during any of the boss fights we've done up to this point. We've finally got to the point where we're fighting Strahd and the DM has said that Stunning Strike doesn't work on Strahd because he's a vampire and doesn't have nerves, there for he can't be stunned. The Players Handbook doesn't specify how Stunning Strike works and as far as I'm aware, there are very few things, if any that are immune to stunning strike. I'm 100% salty that he's nullified the best aspect of my character and essentially made me somewhat useless in the fight and also that at no point does it specify that Strahd is immune. Do I have a right to be salty that he's essentially made my character useless in the fight or is he right? And also, is there a compromise where I could go on a quest to make learn a different technique to use Stunning Strike Dragon Ball Z style or even a diety that could help me? (My character recently died and was brought back by the Raven Queen so maybe that's a way forward?)

Lungless

May it please The Court, My cowboy tiefling paladin Luke lassoed a Living Armor off of a balcony in Death House. The armor was knocked prone, and I was now standing 1 floor above it. I shot it with my hand crossbow. Rules as written state that I suffer disadvantage when attacking a prone creature with a ranged weapon. However I suggested that since I am above it, from my POV the splayed out creature would form a target that would be just as large and even easier to hit than if we were on the same level. My DM disagreed. Should this have been an exception to the rule? Or should I be pleading insanity instead. Thanks gang, love ya'll so much

Sam Ostrin

Your Honors, thank you for hearing my case. This is a quick one about the spell "Shield", may it please the court. I was being attacked by a tough boss and I casted shield to block an attack, however I did the math wrong and the bonus AC from shield was actually not enough to block the attack. I expected to just take the damage and get my shield back as if I had never said it, since it was a small mistake, but my DM insisted that I still had to use the spell and take the attack. Their explanation was that it was like in chess where once you touch the piece, you have to move it, and that at least I would still have the higher AC for the rest of the round. I protested a little but didn't want to make a big fuss out of it, so we just moved on. So, is this justifiable from my DM, or should I have gotten my spell slot back? I hope for justice from the Honorable Judges of the highest court in the land .

Zhade

May it please the court: our group has had several character and player changes, one player changed characters simply because the one he was playing went down a few times. This player also thinks he is the star of the show, a goliath rune knight fighter/paladin who doesn't wait for plans and instead rushes in headfirst and then complains when he's low on hp and spells because none of us are healers. How can I deal with this without making it too strained? -A kenku who is scared of doors

Ryan A

May it please the court: I've been running a campaign with my friends since September. There's a PC playing as a psi knight fighter. When Tasha's came out, we were all really excited for the changes, with our druid adopting the familiar feature from it. It also published psi knight with some changes, the change I missed was a change to how psi dice work. Instead of the die downgrading or upgrading by how well you roll, you're given a dice pool like most subclasses. I say we should switch to the published version, as I feel the UA version is a bit OP. He prefers the UA version, saying the Tasha's version wouldn't let him use his abilities as often. Who's right?

Harry Abrahams

If it pleases the court I'd like to present the following case(s) I've DM'd for a group for a few years now, we took 1 campaign from level 1 all the way to 20 and have now started a new campaign in the same world 500 years in the future. In this new campaign, I'm running into new issues with my players. The first case occurred in our very first session. The gnome wizard spent the session continually berating NPCs and even another player to line his pockets with gold. Even going so far as to attempt to swindle one of the notoriously good protectors of the realm out of gold and lying to a young girl running a shop for her father to drive the price of a spell component down. In both cases I let him roll Charisma checks to resolve the situation and both times he passed the DC resulting in him getting his way to some degree. 1) Should I have adjudicated the situation differently? 2) Should there be a punishment for treating NPCs like less than people? The second case I present is the case of the cantrip. This same player in character design during session zero decided to build a Transmutation wizard with only 1 damaging spell. He claimed he wanted to focus on mastering the magic for everyday use and support in combat. I told him that was fine but that he would effectively be handicapping himself. Since that session in every combat, he has tried to use nondamaging cantrips to cause harm in combat. Attempted shenanigans include using Mold Earth to dig a trench and bury an enemy alive as an action and using Prestidigitation to blind a foe with sparks. In each instance, I have ruled that these things can't happen and he has argued against this while at the table. My argument is that this is against the intent of the spells as they detail their own effects as harmless. Am I in the wrong? What is the limit of shenanigans?

Joel Steyer

May it please the court: I have a level 13 tiefling shadow monk named Kronos and my dm won’t let me use my monk ability (cloak of shadows) to turn invisible and also use ki points to cast pass without a trace before hand on myself to up my stealth. The ability says nothing about concentration just says if I cast a spell or attack. I agree that stacking both is ridiculous but Is he wrong? Should I be able to cast Pass without a Trace first and then hide in the shadows and turn invisible? Additionally: he let me use my shadow step ability to travel through windows of buildings. Since the ability only says line of sight, there wasn't anything specifically written about not going through them. Do you agree with my DM to allow it or would you have said no? Is the ability now OP? Will all buildings continue to have no windows because my DM regrets it? - a sneaky tiefling with a love of mischief

Marika Wasscher

If it pleases the court, my first foray into tabletop rpgs involves a matter of informed consent. I was introduced to my then boyfriend's friends and ttrpgs on the same day (although I don't remember if it was pathfinder or d&d 3.5) I was the only girl at a table of 6 or 7 men and the DM was describing a beautiful siren giving us a quest. (He described her very human looking and we weren't like in the water at the time) I rolled to seduce the siren to convince her to pay us more for her errand (lame move but I was young and new) anyway I rolled high and the DM is like "and then the tentacles come out" I was mad because I did and would not consent to tentacle sex. Especially in a room of strange men. That's too weird and too specific for comfort. Pw My boyfriend at the time was just like "well he's the DM."

Hopscotch

May it please the court, I bring forth a case regarding transparency between player and DM. Some friends and I got together for what was understood to be 5e but the DM kept enforcing rules that I was pretty sure were not 5e. I'd call him out of this and list the correct rules but he'd say I was wrong and we figured that he plays more often than us, so he'd know. This ended up with us having to forfeit attacks or movements that would have saved us a lot of grief and even being knocked out multiple times. After checking the rules later and asking if he was using maybe pathfinder rules or something, he said "oh I dunno, I just go with what feels right at the time" despite him previously saying that these were the official rules he was enforcing. He hasn't been invited for D&D since despite him asking about getting together. He's a good friend and I love him to death but I felt like I was being gaslit so that we couldn't womp him monsters. Are we dicks for not inviting him or is he a dick for using made up rules even after being called out? Edit: Jesus. I did try and keep that brief lol I hope that's not too much.

Tech Adept Crafts

If it please the court, article 711. As the teacher running our school games club on Fridays after school, I am DMing an introductory campaign for my daughters friends. It started as 6 Sisters of Moradin in a Van Helsing style crypt run. It is now 9 girls, only 2 of which had played before this campaign. This one shot to teach about DnD is now into its 8th session and they keep asking during the week if we are playing again on Friday. The problem lies in one of the players who is extremely pushy and then argues with me about what she should be allowed to do if I say no. She has never played before and doesn’t know the rules. My daughter and I been trying to dissuade her from doing stupid things but she refuses to listen. She has collected a large number of trophies from undead creatures they have killed and I have warmed that thee is probably enough parts thee now for me to create some form of golem within her bag. When I stopped her taking a cursed skull out of pit under a floor slab (due to it taking her and one of the other characters straining to hold the floor slab up) she made one of the new girls collect a skull for her. Long story short, the skulls were warded, holding the ghosts of evil doers the Order had banished over centuries. I sectrly made the girl who took the skull role for ghostly possession which she failed. Now, for role playing fun I allowed the girl to play the part of ghost who tried to protect “his” identity from the party. First girl wasn’t happy the other girl had something secret and tried everything to discover it. The ghost warmed her that if she continued she would shoot her with an arrow.... which she did. Now the original girl is pissed at her friend for shooting her. ALL the girls had warmed her to stop, but she got what she deserved in my opinion. Was I wrong to allow the second girl to play the ghost? Was I wrong to allow the shooting? Should I have just removed the first girl from the game in the first place (knowing that she is a family friend and her mum works with my wife...) Is there a better way to manage nine 13 year old girls??

Tech Adept Crafts

Sorry it’s not short. The short version is a bully got what they deserved.

James Lee

May it please the court, I am running a homebrew campaign for 3 PCs; a Barbarian, a Paladin and a Ranger, all level 11 with 2-3 magical items each. They have been trivializing my encounters (including dunking on a Kobold Press Young Adult Cave Dragon) through sheer brute force so later on in the campaign during a dungeon crawl I picked a one Boneclaw (CR12) and single Allip (CR5) as the dungeon boss and the Allip used Whispers of Madness to force the Barbarian to start murdering the other PCs (DC 14 Wis save btw) which eventually caused the party to be TPKed by the Barbarian. My players complained that the encounter was too hard. They killed the Boneclaw in 3 Turns btw. Was this encounter too hard and being a huge big baby bitch and taking it out on them or are they being unlucky big baby b*tches for failing multiple DC14 Wisdom saves?

Skillful Ferret

May it please the court, DM'ing my first session during an encounter a player used witch bolt (https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/witch-bolt) on a Blindheim who had jumped onto the horse that was pulling their carriage into town. I warned that the spell would ground itself through the horse and thus also harm the horse, but an argument was made that physics does not apply to spells because spells are magical and should only "form a sustained arc of lightning between you and the target" Was I right to insist physics applies to spells?

Jayson Gober

+I had a PC playing a Rogue. +The party was fighting at a campsite at night. +The rogue attacked and then used cunning action to hide behind a makeshift cooking station right in front of an yurt style tent. (I don't remember the exact roll but it was high.) +In the next round the captain of the men the party was fighting, emerged from the tent the rogue was hiding in front of behind the makeshift cooking station. +So it was tent, rogue, make shift cooking station. +Destite the fact that the rogue was literally sitting in 0% cover, right in front of the captain the player argued the captain should have to make a perception check to see him. +I disagreed arguing that the hide/steath roll did not apply to the captain as he came out to see the rogue hiding behind the cooking station from the guy he attacked on the other side. +PC said his roll was so high it should apply to anyone trying to see him. +I argue that hide/stealth is not invisibility and that it does not render you unseeable regardless of circumstance.

Clare Monahan

The Case of the Unlikely Uncle May it please the court, During the first session of a new campaign, the other players and I were tasked with infiltrating and finding evidence of the existence of an illegal underground fighting ring. We successfully obtained invitations but were unsure what we could find that would constitute evidence. One of my party members placed a bet, and upon winning, asked for a signed receipt of the transaction. When the bookie seemed surprised at being asked for a receipt for an illegal transaction, the player said that his uncle had recently been audited and he was trying to be careful in case the same thing happened to him. The dm set a high dc for the deception check. I then made the comment that since this character is a warforged, and thus was not born but made, it was unlikely that he would have an uncle. The dm heard me say this and imposed disadvantage on the role, causing the player to fail. This caused all the other players to get mad at me, saying that my character, a halfling paladin who fights for justice and equality, is racist against warforgeds. I am new to dnd and this is really messing with my enjoyment of the game, but the other players seem to be enjoying the joke, so I don’t want to ruin their fun. Was I wrong to make that comment? Or are the other, more experienced, players/the dm being unjust? I eagerly await your honorable judgement, Ajax Smith, halfling paladin

Lan Tolleson

May it please the court. My party's paladin is a FIEND for magic items!! Whenever the party gets to a new town, you know he's going to look for the nearest magic shop. Whenever I give him a new magic item, he's immediately out there looking for something more powerful before he can even break it in. Here is the most recent offending incident: My party recently defeated an evil wizard who stole an archfey's power and used it to try to take over the world. This marked the mid point of the campaign, and to celebrate, I gave my party some homebrew magic items, taking requests from them to craft something truly personal. The paladin asked for reach, so I gave him a morningstar on a long chain that dealt extra elemental damage. I called it Longbonk 2005. I sent him the item card, and he said, "this is cool, but I'd also take armor or something that gives me more resistance." First of all, ungrateful. Second of all, he is an aasimar with a brooch of shielding, so he is currently resistant to radiant, necrotic, and force damage. On top of that, he has 22 AC (due to some fuckery involving a feywild magic shop, prohibitively expensive +2 plate armor meant for him to come back to later, and a very lucky Deck of Many Things pull). So of course, I told him no. Under no circumstances would he get any of those things. I've since threatened to give him something super cursed if he keeps asking, but he has not let up with his incessant search for better gear. I ask you, honorable Supreme Crit Justices, am I being unreasonable in denying his requests, or should he be punished? Possibly with a triple sword? I rest my case.

Josh F

If it pleases the court, for context my players have found themselves in the middle of an underground territory dispute between a group of vampires and a group of slaad who have both claimed control over a city and are ruling mafia style. One of the party members got charmed by the vampires and was sent into the slaads territory as an informant. The case I'm presenting is a result of another player deciding to leave the game due to scheduling conflicts. They spoke to me the day before we were supposed to play and laid out his exit strategy for his character which involved him busting into the bar that was being used as a front and negotiating a hostage exchange using a low level croney the party had previously captured for info. Needless to say this plan was not only ill-fated but also comprimised the other party members. I explained this too the player and he amended his plans but still insisted on "rescuing" the other player. I did my best to give him the send off he wanted which resulted in multiple face plams from the other players at the table (he was not present for this game) as i had to rp his character trying to speak to an insane slaad as negotiations broke down and the informant player being outed. I eventually had to deus ex machina them out of there with the vampire ally they were working with showing up to avoid getting him or the party killed. A few days later the player contacted me and accused me of making his character look stupid. In the courts opinion, should i have honored my players last wishes or just ignored them and come up with something myself?

Henrik Olofsson

May it please the court! This horrific incident took place i the winter city of Piteå, Sweden, all but two decades ago. We were actually not playing d&d, instead we played a Swedish roleplaying game called Drakar och demoner (Dragons and demons). Even though the game mechanics is quite different than that of d&d, the DM's mandate and responsibility is the same. Therefore I see no reason why you can't pass verdict in this case. We had been playing for a looong time with the same characters, so that were on the verge of becoming too powerful (eqvivalent of d&d's level 20). We had not adressed this in the group, but I atleast, felt that it was almost time to retire my character. When it came to the final boss fight, the foe appeared unarmed, so we assumed he was a wizard of some sort. We initiated combat, but lost the dice roll. The boss continued with surgical precision, to cut us down one after the other. When we objected, asking what the hell he is using to cut us down with, our DM answered "it's a two dimensional sword. You can't see it because he is holding it with the edge towards you. Since you can't see it, you can't block it. And also...since it is not even an atom thick, no armor can protect you and it slices right through anything it hits" He said this, with a look on his face of pure malace, cuttung us all down to the last person, resulting in a total party kill. To this day, I do not know what led him to this act of utter savagery. I suspect, but can't prove, that he wanted to "retire" our characters for us. Had we openly adressed the issue prior to this night, things might have ended very differently. I humbly ask you to pass verdict. How much of an asshole-move is he guilty of, and is it even possible to come up with a suitable punishment? Do your worst.

Sydney

Thrice-honored crit justices, may it please the court: A while ago I was playing a low-level wizard. We were fighting a bunch of bug people, but I was slightly too far away, so I held my action to cast Scorching Ray for, and I quote, "whenever something evil comes in range." However, when they did, the DM told me the spell was wasted because the monsters were technically chaotic neutral. Am I being overdramatic or should I have just been more specific?

Victoria Shotts

Hello supreme crit justices! We play a campaign with our youngest (14 yr old) bro, who died using his DM given inspiration to escape being swallowed by the tree in the Sunless Citadel. He had rolled a Nat 1 using a d30 on his first strength check attempt to break free. Our DM (who picks on the kid anyway) ruled that because he critically failed on this specific dice, it was considered even worse than a normal die roll and therefore he would instantly be swallowed with no possible hope for saving. He literally almost made the kid cry because it seemed so unfair. He also revealed later that normally one would have been slowly consumed over multiple rounds. I personally was very perturbed that using inspiration could auto kill a PC and that my brother n law (the DM) might indeed be a giant ahole. Is this a normal rule, or just being cruel? Thank you for your time.

Luke Shealy

Hello honorable crit judges I played a one-shot where my friends and I were all wizards in a final test for our wizard school and we were in a setting where Sorcerors were treated as outcasts because they naturally had magic and that was seen as uncontrollable and dangerous and so it was illegal to work with them. But our DM purposefully put a sorceror in the dungeon that we were in and had neglected to tell us that detail about the world Lore and so none of us thought to ask even though our characters should have known. At the end we ended up working with the sorceror and the session ended with us returning to the school and then the headmaster said we were to be tried for our crime. There are no hard feelings harbored to this day but I still feel that the DM should have told us the information so we could have at least made the choice of whether or not to work with this guy.

Zack

Honorable arbiters of crit based justice I beseech you for your wisdom. Years ago in my first college session I shot a fellow player in the back as he was about to kill some goblin refugees. This was our first session and I my backstory had a hidden facet that I was actually supporting the refugees cause (known by the DM of course). In my defense his character later abandoned the party for zealot inquisitor he fell in love with at first sight and became the big bad of the campaign. This said I feel guilt years later. Was I in the right? Is it ever justified to do pvp session one? I humbly ask for your ruling and shall accept any sentence you issue with grim acceptance

H-Train

ok this is completely off topic, but why does emily like rock lee so much????? he literally lives in a world where you can do shit like “turn your eye into a magic wheel that sends people into a torture dimension” and “shoot laser balls out of your hands” and instead of doing any of that cool shit he decided he wanted to learn how to punch and that’s it???? and it only ever proves useful against one guy who’s notable for having the super power of “pocket sand”. emily, explain yourself

Evan Roberts

In a Star Wars adaptation of dnd, I played a jedi (of course). We came to a steel door with no apparent way in, so I said I wanted to cut through with my lightsaber. The DM obviously didn’t want this to happen, and he set a high DC, which I agreed to. I failed, with an 18 on the die, total of more than 20. Another party member (a tiny 3 foot Jawa) said he wanted to try to kick the door down. The DM rolled his eyes but allowed him to try. He rolled a nat 20, and the DM said it worked, and we busted in. Later the Dm told us we weren’t supposed to be able to get in, but a nat 20 was an instant success. I argued that no matter what, a kick shouldn’t have been able to do more than an actual lightsaber. Does a nat 20 mean instant success, no matter what?

Ryan Budde

I've played a character in a few different low-level mini-campaigns that never went beyond 3 sessions. The character has died twice. Is it ok to play a character in a new setting if they have canonically died in a different setting? How many sessions before a death should "stick?" Any general guidelines for when a character should be retired?

CJ Rasmusson

May it please the court. Our party was fighting a necromancer and the doctor he was paying for a steady supply of corpses to experiment on. During the fight, we blinded the doctor, but the DM ruled that because of his familiarity with the location (it was his office/house) that he could run past all of us, up a flight of stairs, then lock himself in his room, all in one turn (we were playing Pathfinder, so he used all three actions to move). What do you think? Was the dm just trying to avoid getting whomped? Or is it reasonable that a blinded man could navigate a room full of enemies, two flights of stairs, then into his panic room?

I Had Something For This

May it please the court - I am a DM bringing a case against myself. In a previous session, a mechanical dragon had just been finished, activated, and sent to destroy the region as the party arrived in the big boss final section of the dungeon. Scared of a TPK, they decided to backtrack and find another way into the room. Between sessions, I retconned this event so that the dragon will "activate" during their fight. I cleared it with them, but still feel slightly guilty. What are your thoughts on changing events of a previous session after the fact, if it's in service of a more compelling story further into the campaign?

Charles Augustus Stahl

Honorable judges Tanner, Murphy, Axeford and judge/bailiff Hurwitz, If it pleases the court, may I present The Dispel Discord: Earlier in our campaign, my party and I were taking a long rest in a small, only slightly ominous village in the middle of a cursed forest. Unsurprisingly, we awoke in the middle of the night to an unholy wailing, and rushed outside to see townsfolk walking mindlessly into the woods. Specters were attacking, and charming people to abandon their homes to their doom! Our DM then asked us to make wisdom checks, as we heard the wailing and had to resist it. Unfortunately, out monk failed and was taken over by this dark energy and forced to use his turn to attack us. On my turn, I, a fire and brimstone souther preacher, decided to cast Dispel Magic on the effect controlling our monk friend. This sparked a *heated* debate, in which the DM and a fellow player, who was also our rules lawyer, argued that it would not work, because the ability check that dispel magic requires a target to pass is affected by the targeted spell’s level. E.g. a 4th level spell requires a check of 10+ 4. Because the effect DID NOT have a spell level, they said it was not able to be dispelled. I argued that the rules as written state that dispel magic can target a creature, object or effect. Effects don’t necessarily have spell levels. Did this mean dispel magic couldn’t be used on effects, even if it listed them as a target in the book? This led to a tense standoff between myself and the rules lawyer party member as we ferociously googled looking for answers, and almost ruined the session. We eventually made up and finished the fight, (we’re good friends who recognize that we’re both painfully stubborn), but to this day I still believe i’m right. I know that dispel magic is slightly broken, Murph even said so at some point, but this felt so cut and dry that I was disproportionately frustrated. The defense rests.

Oliver F.

If it may please the court, the case of Poison Immunity v. Paralyzed Condition: My 13th level Circle of Land druid is immune to poison thanks to a 10th level ability. When trekking through a cave, my druid got a Nat 1 on a nature check and walked straight into some roots that slimed them with a paralytic goo before dragging them away. The DM ruled that because the monster inflicted the Paralyzed condition, not the Poisoned condition, my druid was not immune to the effect—despite the DM agreeing that the paralytic plant goo could be classified as poison. (Note: the text of the Circle of Land ability only references immunity to general poison, not the Poisoned condition). I tried to appeal to the Rule of Cool because my druid’s poison immunity is rarely relevant and dealing with hostile plants seems right up a druid’s alley, but I was unsuccessful.

Dylan

May it please the court. My players were in a published module where there is a place that they can trade parts of their soul for incredible abilities like a temporary 26 strength score and at-will Command spells that invoke disadvantage on the saving throws. The module says that if they accept too many of these trades, their character becomes an evil NPC controlled by the DM and the module provides no solutions for what to do after this happens. The party’s Ranger and Bard became NPCs in this way, and I wrote a small side quest for the remaining two PCs, along with temporary characters for the players of the Ranger and Bard, to go fight their friends and get them back. Since NPCS have different skills than player characters, I boosted them a bit and made custom stat blocks for them to make it a challenging fight with unexpected skills and abilities. My players were upset when they got their character sheets back and they were the same as they were before they were made into NPCS. They kept the abilities they got for trading their souls, but not the additional abilities I added to make combat more interesting, and insisted I give them those abilities. Am I wrong for giving them a challenging fight and disappointing them when they didn’t get the new abilities? Thank you for your ruling.

Kaleb Rhodes

May it please the court... Just yesterday I was playing in a campaign and mid way through one of our players had to dip due to personal reasons, which obviously is ok and the DM made the ruling that we would keep going with the session. The DM changed the session tho and to account for the PC being inactive decided to play as that PC and then attacked our party. She rolled high on initiative and casted fireball rolling very high on the damage and instantly taking my player to 0, I rolled a death save which failed and on my next turn rolled a nat 1 thus I died. This DM then had an npc she had also been playing with to cast revivify on me even tho this npc had no lv 3 spell slots, DM hand waived it and now I feel like this interaction was cheap and had very little impact even tho it was an in-party fight. Is it fair to this? even if it was against that PC's character from what we know and then is it cheap to revive my character in that way? I honestly would have preferred to die.

Will P

May it please the court: I am a lawyer which has the perhaps unfortunate side effect of becoming a Rules Lawyer. I used to DM for my friends, but once I started work, one of my buds agreed to pick up the mantle. I may need to go forum shopping as many of the judges in this jurisdiction are concerned about having FUN, rather than following the most important pillar of DND adventuring: strict adherence to Rules. Anyways, settling into my role as player, we have a good time. But I can’t help myself with some of the rules negligence going on. Players forget that they don’t add proficiency bonus to damage, or don’t pay attention to the fact that a spell is concentration or has a casting time of 8 hours. Am I in the wrong for reminding them of the rules in the interest of balance. I’d say it’s about even with my reminders hurting or helping us. The DM appreciates it, as he likes to run a fairly tight rule-ship, but I did think one of my buds was bummed the other day when he realized his spell took a minute, not an action to cast. May gods have mercy on my soul.

Ninja Nissie

Honorable judges, here is my case. I was playing a one shot with online friends, and we had a newer friend DM this time. I had created a samurai-flavored barbarian, clad in a hakama kimono and katana-looking long sword. No shield. My intention was to wield my long sword two-handed like any proper anime samurai would. Now, in our first combat of the game, I rolled to hit successfully and then I mindlessly said I was going to roll a d10 for my long sword. Not one, but two rule mongers stopped me and said "Long swords are a d8! Not a d10." But I shot back that I was wielding it two-handed. They claimed I had to announce that I was wielding it two-handed BEFORE I rolled for my attack. The DM sided with them, and I rolled my d8 begrudgingly. Am I wrong to think that it was obvious I was intending to wield a longsword two-handedly? Do you think in a casual one-shot game players should still to be strict with the rules? How would you rule, your honors?

Andrew

If it appeases the court: Recently we had one of our worst sessions of the campaign so far. The energy was off, people showed up late, the plot was convoluted, Tabaxi Swashbucklers were being slut-shamed, and we had also been given an opportunity to rework our characters (due to an in-game event called The Anomaly). Due to having newish characters, a couple of us had iPads or computers out with our digital character sheets out. After talking with the DM, he now doesn’t want any screens at the table for future games as he thinks they take us out of the game. My girlfriend bucked back against it, but I kind of get where the DM is coming from. To screen or not to screen?

Kevin Alman

If it pleases the court. I am throwing myself on the mercy of this fair and just court. I run a small game with 3 other people and I had planned a session where I had the daughter of the innkeeper my PCs were staying at brought in with a poisonous bite on her. I had planned for them to find the source of the bite to have an antidote made for it. However the cleric in the group, my wife, decided that they would then pick their spells for the day and choose to switch in lesser restoration, which was not stocked before. These events happened after they already had breakfast so I felt that she should have already had their spells stocked for the day. So because of this I said the spell removed the poison but the bite had a curse that was still effecting the girl, so they would still have to find the cause of the bite to fully cure her. But now I feel like I took away this clever solution and I should have let her take advantage of this solid derailment. What do you think? Was I wrong to make this choice, or should I have let them womp me? I await your wise judgement.

Charlie Sainsbury

Your esteemed and honourable honours of the honourable court, my case is straightforward but may help to set an important precedent; After springing someone from the prison cell of a fortress, my party and I were fleeing with enemies in hot pursuit. It was night time so in order to maintain some stealth we were leading our horses through the woods away from the road. So far, so good. Shortly after this, however, we found ourselves cornered against a bend in the river with the enemy slowly closing in on us. Here is where my case arises. I asked the DM if I could cast the spell Water Walk on the whole party, *including our horses*, so we could escape across the river. The DM said I could *but* the horses probably wouldn’t follow us onto the water and if they did they would be confused and/or scared. Thus we would have to succeed on some challenging animal handling checks or the horses would make noise, give us away and generally slow us down significantly. We against this, saying horses don’t normally mind water and also that they probably weren’t smart enough to notice the difference in the surface they were walking on. The DM wouldn’t budge so we had to leave our horses and use our folding boat to escape downriver. We got away done in the end but having left our horses we were slower and more vulnerable for the travelling that followed. I maintain that the horses would have been fine walking on the water and look forward to being vindicated by the honourable court. Thanks from Melbourne, Charlie P.S the DM is my little brother and if you could refer to him as Flossy Pops I would be grateful

Tryston Cole the Loose Obtuse Goose

If it pleases the court, I recently started DMing for the first time for three of my friends and I need to know if I made a mistake or not. I based the first session on NADDPOD's first session in campaign one. My party consists of a 9 year old 6ft Locathah barbarian, a half elf ranger, and a black DragonBorn sorcerer. My players managed to convince a group of rowdy barbarians to settle their dispute over a drinking competition between the barbarian leader and our DragonBorn sorcerer instead of fighting. The DragonBorn was getting his ass completely handed to him so he decided to use his acid breath to fill two glasses and propose to the barbarian that they should raise the stakes by seeing who could drink the acid the fastest rolling a natural 1 on the persuasion check. I made it very clear that the barbarian, regardless of his low GPA as a child, has enough common sense to not drink a liquid that is melting the container that it is currently being held in. For whatever reason this upset my player and he argues that the barbarian wouldn't have had clear judgement as he had been drinking all day. The player had a fit saying that I'm probably just lazy and didn't want him killing a strong opponent so effortlessly. Should I have allowed the barbarian to drink the acid or is my player just being a douche?

Abe Boardman

May it please the court I am playing L6 dwarf life cleric named Dain, who has a +5 to wis. Recently, my DM has been acting like my character is OP. He has basically started blocking me from using all wisdom based checks. He also only allows one person to do checks that should be group checks. Also, I have +8 to insight and he has been really passive aggressive with me asking to do checks in conversation, especially with people who are suspicious. with my great insight always me who get volunteered to do the check, which is making me feel like I am excluding the other players, who are my friends and less experienced. Once, we entered a room in a dungeon, so naturally we asked to roll some check to see what was in it, but he flat out said there was nothing unusual in the room without asking for a roll. he then proceeds to reveal a puzzle in the room which could have been spotted with a roll. During the same session, we were in an encounter with statues that would only move if you were not looking at them. During the encounter our Warlock missed one of the statues with a eldritch blast and my dm decided that it would hit me, with no mention of this anytime during the intro to the campaign. It was not really a lot of damage, but I was still mad about it because this was completely out of the blue and I felt like he decided to hit me just because my character is powerful and he wanted to nerf me. Am I right to be mad at my Dm?

Beav

TAIL OR NO TAIL? May it Tickle the Court, I will keep it short: Do dragonborn have tails? If so, can they use them for minor shenanigan actions like pulling levels, stealing keys, or pushing buttons? As a DM, a particularly chaotic player constantly fucked me with their god-forsaken tail pranks on nearly all of my boss fights. I then discovered that in lots of fan art, many dragonborn are depicted as tailless. Please, settle this madness your honors (please pronounce the “h”, Jake)

D'ran Dana

Your honor, I once had the pleasure of playing in a homebrew campaign where the DM made homebrew legendary weapons that linked the players lore and class and ended up having significant meaning towards the end of the game. However I was not allowed to have a special weapon because I was "already an artificer" I would argue that limiting my access to the campaign this way is unjust. I trust the precedent set here on this pressing matter will hold strong in the face of injustice for years to come.

Nicholas Elmitt

May it please the court, Our DM recently got engaged and as a result we haven't played in months. I would like to play again. Could the court please intervene and dissolve this engagement? On behalf of Rokdag and the Glimmer boys.

David

To our honorable judges and the very capable bailiff Jake: I am currently playing with a group of old friends as a player. It’s been very fun and we love the adventure and humor integral to dnd but as we enter adult life some of our players have become less active in the sessions and role play. Here is our case, one such player (simba a tabaxi) doesn’t participate in the role play portion as much and often plays other games during our video sessions. As a punishment, our dm sort of... well honey trapped him. During a party scene while we were investigating a crime he was easily lured into a sex room with a bunch of other sub species of tabaxi. It was later revealed that these were a bunch of hairy men cosplaying as tabaxi wearing their pelts. He was very upset and felt betrayed but I think it shocked him into paying attention. Judges, do you support this drastic move by the dm to force attention? Even if it may truly traumatize the character and forever change them?

Jake Stockstill

Judges of the Supreme Crit, I would call out myself as a DM, as I worry that I was too harsh with an encounter. The party was traveling through some woods and ran into a very grouchy owlbear. Throughout the fight, the Druid of the party kept failing animal handling checks to calm the bear down, since they didn’t want to kill it (Emily I’m sure you feel it) and ended up getting swatted down a hill. I believe their highest roll was a 15-18, but I didn’t allow a success as I felt that owlbears are known to be peeved on a good day and this one was actively in combat. Was I too harsh, or was the owlbear right to whomp this druid?

Character Ark

When is the 5th playthrough of Metal City Mayhem?

Aslee Graves

I don't have any stories to share that aren't deeply horrific, but I want to say I appreciate you guys doing this for your community. <3

Melon Bread

May it please the court, I would like to submit the proposal that you have a session to review cases where DMs successfully adjudicated an issue to the satisfaction of mostly everyone. I think this court and the lower crit courts could benefit from the wealth of positive examples that exist in the DnD sphere.

Leah

If it may please the court, I have an issue with our DM continually killing us, no warning and off screen! We have been playing for about 2 years into the tomb of Annihilation module and we can loose a player seemingly out of nowhere. For example, one player died because they opened a box. No revivify, no death saves, no healing. Just dead. This has happened 5 times now and has resulted in a panic stricken party trembling our way through the tomb. We go through rooms so slowly now trying out the smallest thing not knowing what will slaughter us next. Now I can’t tell if we as the players are being too precious about this. It literally says annihilation in the title... My frustration is further fuelled by our DM getting annoyed at us for taking so long working our way through rooms! As if stepping through a doorway won’t trigger a swarm of locusts that munch through our bodies in one turn (another example of a player death). Am I being unreasonable to want more tone to at least know when we could die out of nowhere or is my DM fair and this is all part of the great tomb of annihilation??

Johnathon colin Rodaway

may it please the court, I was a level 13 storm herald barbarian called javik, i soaked up most of the damage dealt to the party but i couldn't do any real damage to any of the creatures or enemies that our dm put us up against as i still only had a basic +1 greatsword whislt the rest of the party were decked out in magic items and armour. When i brought the subject up at the table the dm told me that "the party has too many magic items, more than average in most games". This dm also considered healing potions "magic items". Was the dm right? And does my party having magic items mean that i can't?

Matthew Cloud

Hey y’all! So I’m playing as Tiefling Divine Soul Sorcerer, Big Zex (he’s like a cowboy but shoots spells out the ol six shooter). Anyways, me and my party are playing through the Curse of Strahd campaign and we’re fighting a coven of hags. All of us but our eldritch knight succeeded a stealth check before advancing to confront. We used the eldritch knight as the initially bait and then had the rest of our party engage. I stayed hidden for a little while up until one of the hags cast fireball, to which I used counterspell. But as I’m doing that, the hag casts counterspell. My question is, should the hag been able to know that someone (me) was casting counterspell if I was successfully hidden. My DM gave an explanation as to why it worked out like that but it still didn’t quite make sense with me being hidden. Any thoughts on this would be awesome! Love the new campaign and hope all is well!

Palmate Antlers

May it please the court, As a DM I have a player as a Forge Domain Cleric. At level 10 he already has 20 AC due to his abilities and feats and wants plate for 22 AC. He already has war caster for advantage on concentration checks if something manages to break through the wall. How do I stop the Spirit Guardians Mobile Fortress (SGMF) without my creatures for sure hitting the rest of the party every hit with crazy to hit bonuses? I don’t want to target one specific player, but he’s stream rolling encounters and other characters aren’t able to shine.

nick brown

Howdy y'all! Much love from Washington state. Here is my case; may it please the court. My players were fighting a lightning elemental (reskinned Air Myrmidon). One of my PCs (a monk) attempted to use a combination of his immovable rod and his water whip to try and ground the electricity in the elemental to the ground. I believed this to be incredibly creative and so I decided to let the elemental do a constitution save to determine how much damage it would take. The player agreed to this. I decided that if the monk was part of the circuit to ground the elemental, that he would also take the same amount of damage, if he failed his con save. My player seemed upset that he would take damage because his character was grounded and therefor wouldn't take any damage in real life. What do you guys think of my ruling? Did I wrong my players creative choice or did I do the encounter justice? Also, what are your thoughts on bringing elements of the real world into DnD? As a side note, the player who did this Is an electrical engineer so he knows his stuff. Thanks!

Katrina Dagenais

May it please the court, the case of the dangerous trap. My group and I just starting a new campaign that I'm DMing. In session 2, (level 2 characters) the party went into a dungeon and charged in, not sending the rogue in first and not checking for traps. The paladin then fell into a trap which ending up hitting him for about half his HP. The party thought this was unfair, but no one had said they were looking and none of their passive perceptions were high enough to see it. The paladin then essentially checked out of the session and I nerfed the rest of the dungeon to rush through it because the energy was so bad. I had story devices in place to bring back any characters that might have died that this player knew about due to our relationship outside of the game so I though a dangerous trap would be no big deal. Was I wrong to have a trap so dangerous? Should I have asked them to make a perception check even if they weren't thinking to check?

Rodolfo Marroquin

Hello from Ohio! Me and my friends love you guys hope you are having a great year so far, here is my case. My party was being attacked by 3 ships while out at sea. We quickly destroyed the two to our left and right leaving the third in front of us to our druid. She casted controll water and chose redirect flow to move the water outwards and Moses the sea. Our dm said that the ship would survive and just slowly float to the top once the water began to fill in. We said a ship that falls 100 feet into essentially a pit woth water at the bottom should die. We leave the decision in your hands.

Frank

May it please the court: I play a sorcerer and I took shape water as a cantrip, with the goal of creatively using it in combat. I used it as an action in battle to create an ice spear that would be hurled at one of the baddies. My DM ruled that in order to use the spell like this, I would need to cast it at first level. This, to my mind, makes the spell far less appealing and too costly, and now I’m stuck with a useless cantrip. This feels like a dm overstep, changing a core part of how spells work. Please throw down your justice.

Hidetaka Miyazaki turned my toilet into a poison swamp

Most Honourable Gentlepeople, I DM for a group of players who, at the time, were hatching a plan to rob one of the biggest banks in the kingdom. During the planning they came up against an obstacle where the only solution they could imagine was to shove the barbarian halfling into a bag of holding, equip said bag of holding onto the bard, polymorph said bard into a housefly and finally fly through into the building. After some amount of deliberation, I ruled that the bag of holding cannot polymorphed into a creature that small as the outside functions as a sort of portal, and it's physical dimensions can't be squashed without compromising the structure of the space inside. a.k.a the thought of being able to fit 90% of the party's damage output through any hole larger than an inch absolutely terrified me. Thankfully, the players respected the ruling, but the discussion is still brought up on a regular basis. I petition the - most illustrious - court to make a final ruling on this matter.

kody lanca

If it please the court. I played a Barbarian Orc pirate by the name of Jahrukk, he was killed fighting 8 dire Wolves while saving a halfling alongside he halfling companion. Jahrukk went down after slaying 5 of the Direwolves and my DM instant killed me. I believe that was wrong because he didn’t even give the two Halflings a chance to save Jahrukk and just claimed he was dead and dragged off to their lair. I would like to hear your views. Thank you

Alex Olsen

May it please the court. One of my players started looking up the stats of the monster that they were fighting mid-battle, and switched up his spell use to take advantages of the weaknesses he'd found. This seemed very meta-gamey and not really in the spirit of the game, but he argued that he'd paid for the Monster Manual so he should be allowed to use it. Am I wrong in thinking that was a bit dickish of him?

Liam Wright

May it please the court. The DM in a game I played in had our wood elf ranger have her bow break after she rolled a 1 to attack. After combat, she was told she had no way to repair the bow and would have to buy a new one. This has happened multiple times on a Nat 1, resulting in many bows breaking. I feel like her dropping the bow or hitting a teammate accidentally would have sufficed. This has caused the player to feel judged harshly and not want to play anymore. Is the DM too harsh?

Robin Moran

If it may please the court I approach the honorable jurors with an unjust play. I play as a Changeling Rogue and as one of my cantrips is True Strike. To is allowed me to use my action to gain a brief insight into my targets defences. My DM and I agreed that this insight would constitute HP or the AC of a target. Half way through the campaign my DM had started making me roll a D20 to see if I succeed or allowing the target to try to make a save. I argued that this is not how the spell works but for the sake of a pleasant atmosphere have given in. Please let me know if you think the DM's actions are fair. Thank you for your consideration, I eagerly await your ruling.

Katherine Clarke

In the first party I've ever DMed for, the good-aligned sorcerer knocked his bard friend unconscious and expressed no remorse. The bard (in and out of character) was clearly upset and talked thru it with another character. This upset the sorceror's player and led to a later conflict in which the bard punched the sorcerer for being disagreeable and he retaliated with a Shocking Grasp, nearly knocking her out again. As DM, I reached out to both to gage what went wrong, sought advice from other DMs, and ultimately ruled that we should add two future guidelines: Don't hit someone else in your party unless there is a very good reason and they okay it. Don't talk about another character (who isn't present to defend themselves) in a way you wouldn't want to hear your character talked about. Naturally both were unhappy and recently I conceded to let those guidelines slide at their request. Was there a better way I should have handled it? Was I wrong to place limits on both or either of them?

Ophelia Black

My normal D&D group is starting a new campaign. After listening to the Hexbuds arc, I was really excited to play a Monk... except that someone else is playing a Monk, so I was asked not to play the monk as it would "be anticlimactic." After deciding that I am choosing between either Barbarian, Warlock, or Druid, with a heavy emphasis on Storm Herald Barbarian, I was told to pick the druid, as "we don't have any healers and you usually play the healer." What should I do? Should I say fuck it and play a Monk anyways? Three of my last five characters that I've played in this group have been healers, and I just want to do something other than support!

Liam Jenkins

I am playing a Rune Knight fighter who wanted to reflavor as using more of a yeti feel than giant magic, and my DM said no because the flavor is inherent to the class (allegedly). After speaking with another player, I discovered he does not even allow changing the colors of spells if they were specified in older editions. Should I let this go, or fight it?

Taylor Colton

May it briefly please the courts, Would a potion of animal friendship allow a rogue and their level 5 party of real-life teens to turn an attacking T-Rex into an animal companion? I thought no, but my kid sibling and three other 15 year olds think otherwise. Fair judges I need your ruling, because the sad eyes are getting to me even over Zoom.

Will H

Not really sure if this counts as a trial, but I hope it may please the court! I am the former DM of a campaign that I have recently cut short. The main reason, among others, is that I don't think my players are really listening to what I am saying. We are playing online through Roll20 so I can understand why it might be difficult sometimes to concentrate on what is going on but after a brief description of how an encounter occurs or when I am waiting for the PCs to decide on a course of action, they would say something along the lines of "wait, what is happening?" or "wait, where are we?" immediately after passing the decision making to them. I wouldn't usually think much of it if it occurred a couple of times, but it is to the point of exhaustion. I can see some of my players looking off at other screens on their cameras, but say they are listening. Should I be texting them Murph style in private to talk about it? Because I feel as though my time is wasted and I am starting to not enjoy playing with my friends anymore.

Michael Coggins

Dear most Honourable Judges I humbly inquire for your opinions on my experience. I had a DM previously (I eventually left due to repeated disagreement) who once cursed my item (without talking to me about it) upon it being used to destroy an evil orb. The curse made it so that when I went to 0, I would be reincarnated as an Undead Ghoul... I was a Dwarf Paladin Neutral Good in a world where undead were entirely Evil and he forced me to become one. It was so out of theme and unusual, that 2 of my allies (both clerics) immediately tried to kill me when I woke up because I was undead and thus obviously evil now in their eyes. Was I overreacting or was that messed up? Cheers! Love you all, you've brought me great joy, helping me through hard times of Death and Divorce.

Amanda Diamond

If it would please the court, It seems to not only be questionable in my campaign but in others as well. Will you please settle the debate of- if you caste purify food and water on a cup of water from the ocean (salt water), can you drink the salt water? Thank you for your time

jaydon

If it may please the court, To spice up our characters, my dm game me special arrows I can shoot to teleport where they land or if I hit a creature it will swap places with them but I only had 3 a day and already used one. Another player was on a stage 130 ft away and my bow can shoot 150 ft without disadvantage and I also had the sharpshooter feat meaning I could shoot 600ft without disadvantage. He was on the stage without armor as the people who had captured him took his armor off so he only had an 11 ac and i add 9 to my shot but my dm had said that it’s not combat so I would have to roll a 15 check I rolled a 2 missed and now had to wait a turn (it only uses the arrow if I want it to) and now I am in a gods hand, as a reaction to me running. She brought me down from full to 8 health then grabbed me. I think this is where my character dies. Thank you for your time. Tell Lou, “he pretty cute doe”

Josh Hoffman

If it pleases the court, My character signed a contract for an Abandoned Ring of the Nine Hells that, among other things, allowed me to cast Wish once. I and my character being of the highest wit immediately said upon learning of this, "I wish I knew what Wish did." I told him it was a joke and out of character, but he counted it as my one Wish. Was I robbed or did I deserve this? Thank you for your time.

Liolie

May it please the court, I DM a group through Ghosts of Saltmarsh. In the last session, the party with the assistance of an NPC of my own design: a rogue/cleric of the Goddess of the Moon, began infiltrating the base of their enemies. The party's ranger cast 'Pass without Trace' on the party so they could enter sneakily. The party's rogue (Rixi) with the assistance of PWT managed to roll a 36 on her stealth, the highest roll achived so far in the campaign. But, this was quickly overshadowed by the NPC rolling a nat 20 for a total of 40 stealth. My players were enthusiastic about the high roll and unfortunately the rogue's also stellar roll was forgotten. Should I as the DM have not told them about the critical stealth roll to allow the rogue the spotlight, or lack thereof, or should have I stayed truthful and shared my good fortune with my friends? PS: I agree with Murph on his opinions on the Dungeons and Dragons movies.

Emily Abrahams

May it please the court, I'm a DM. How do I get my Aarokocra monk/rogue to stop talking about his cloaca and corkscrew shaped genitals (he's flavoured as a duck, whatever you do don't Google ruddy duck genitals). I have to deal with so much already and every time a new reference to his cloaca is made I want to vomit. The rest of my players love it and encourage this behaviour, can it be fixed? Help me please, An exhausted DM Sidebar: we are amazing friends, and we play for fun, but god help me they are so annoying sometimes.

Scott Feather

I'm a DM, there is a party of mine, all friends for a few years, with a dwarf. This player has an obsession with utilizing stonecunning. Any time we enter a tunnel, a room with pillars, a mountain, a rock, gravel underfoot, anything that could have the slightest relation to stone, he asks about it's history. After the 30th or 40th time, you can imagine this got quite annoying for me. Not only this, but the Dwarf is dissatisfied with the information I give him, which has declined in quality over time because how much history can anyone give you about stonework. It has gotten so out of hand that at one point his dwarf decided to try to start a physical relationship with the stone, resulting in a bruised peen after rolling a natural 1 on the check. How can I get him to stop asking about everything related to stone? The rest of the party is also getting annoyed, and I'm unsure how to handle this as ignoring or giving small amounts of information has not gotten the point across. May it please the court.

Aidan Tesselaar

I don't really know court talk so I'm going to get on with it. Two players had infiltrated a slaver ship by pretending to be guards there and convinced them to throw one of the slaves (npc they were trying to rescue) overboard as a cruel joke, where the other players were hiding in the water to rescue them. To add to the cruelty, one of the slavers pulled out his gun and started firing into the water for a laugh. My player asked to intimidate the guard to get his gun, so I asked him what he said. "I know where you sleep, give me your gun or I will shit in your bed". I thought this was honestly ridiculous and not going to frighten a hardened slaver who causes misery for a living. I said roll with disadvantage and set a high DC in my head. He rolled incredibly and with his +7 got in the 20s twice beating my DC. I knew that guard wouldn't hand over his gun so I decided that he would simply walk away disgusted. Rolling lower than a 15 and I would have had the two slavers turn on the player for that quip. This caused an argument, as the player said that he got two 20s and should therefore be successful. This is not the first time the player has said something unrealistic and ridiculous, but it is the first time they have rolled high enough to back it up

All Wen

May it please the court. I am playing a tempest cleric in a pirate-themed campaign. I was fighting a kraken priest and had possession of a magic item which it was trying to steal. In one turn, the kraken priest boarded our ship, hit me with a spell, and successfully grappled the magic item away from me with reach from 10ft away, using its tentacles. The following is the relevant wording for the first level feature Wrath of the Storm: “When a creature within 5 feet of you that you can see hits you with an attack, you can use your reaction to cause the creature to make a Dexterity saving throw. The creature takes 2d8 lightning or thunder damage (your choice) on a failed saving throw, and half as much damage on a successful one.” I argued that I should be able to use Wrath of the Storm, because the creature’s limbs were on me when it hit me with an attack, so therefore it was within 5ft. The DM disagreed but felt bad for me, so they let me use the feature. Judges, do I deserve punishment, or did I have any grounds to stand on when making this argument?

Mikkel Voigt

May it please the court. I see that my last case I was a bit too brief, and I feel like I got misunderstood a lot. - When I said that I loudly disagreed, I meant it more as a saying that I recognised the DMs desission, but that I disagreed with it, no wall was punched and I did not raise my voice. - When I said that the mood had died, i meant that after spending 20 minutes looking up the rule, since the warlock player did not remember where it was, it got more quiet, not because i said i disagreed with the DMs decision. - And regarding judge Axfords “He is on your team, why are you trying to rule against him”, if a player gets too powerful, the DM would have to balance with that player in mind and if the rest of us are less powerful, it would be bad for my “team” in the long run. I would just like to get a fair ruling without misunderstandings. My original case: “May it please the court! I was playing in a group with a warlock who said he had read in the player's handbook, that if he used an action to cast a cantrip he could then cast any 1st level or higher spell as a bonus action, this was after he had cast eldritch blast and darkness in the same round and I objected, we then found the rule he referred too, and the part he said that he could do it was "You can't cast another spell during the same turn, except for a cantrip with a casting time of 1 action", the DM agreed with him, and I know rule zero and all, but imagine if it was eldritch blast followed by a fire ball, but I loudly disagreed with the DM's ruling and I felt the mood had died a bit after our discussion, was I in the wrong to disregard rule zero?”

YesAnderson

May I please the court, I am a huge fan and DM for a bunch of friends. Last month I was with one of my players in the bedroom and she asked me to "go all out, just this once". Although I obviously got the reference I was completely thrown out of RP and failed my next CON save. Have any of you had a similar experience? How would you rule in this instance?

George Koors

Is it too late? DM question for Justice of the Crit Murph: I have a player in two of my campaigns who is a good pal. They also DM another campaign of their own. All is usually good, but sometimes this player really backseat DMs: tells other players what to do, tries to make rule interpretations before I do, and so on. Their PC in one game is a warlock and took an invocation that allows them to use polymorph. I have a house rule for polymorph as it can get pretty nuts (CR rating of the thing turned into must be half the player's level or lower, special exceptions made). They explicitly wanted to use this to change another PC into powerful things. The PC they wanted to change doesn't know the rules well and they have attempted to micromanage that player character before (the other PC is also a walock and this player has really tried to sorta play their character almost by really strongly suggesting actions). The pal also will disrupt combat re the rules as they see them, including trying to say 'X monster can't do that' and it just disrupts the flow of the game overall. I've talked with my pal about the invocation and am allowing them to switch, but the backseat DMing and second guessing is getting to me. I've even talked with the party about metagaming and that has made no changes. May it please the court to consider this circumstance.

garett144

May it please the court, This is more of a confession asking if me the DM made an encounter too hard or that I should accept that dice sometimes kill players. The party was level 4 and the encounter was that they had to reach the other side of a corridor (approx 200 feet). every turn there was a lair action on initiative 15 for 3 gelatinous cubes to fall on the 3 players who rolled the lowest on a luck check out of 6 players. They had the opportunity to dc12 dex check to avoid this and the cubes were modified to have no actual attacks, just the ability to try and engulf. This meant that once freed you could easily dash action away with no repercussion. With all the help actions, dex saves, strength saves, and attempted magic use our poor centaur just failed every luck roll. He got left behind to be dissolved and one player even scooped some of the gelatinous cube into a jar to keep as a party mascot...mr jiggles. I humbly ask the court, should I keep bearing the guilt of my first player death or accept that the dice were not on his side?

Jesse and Sawyer McKeown

If it pleases the court, I put forth the idea that you should be able to use insight on a letter. My DM disagrees and says that because you cannot hear the intonation of the words being written you cannot infer the state of mind of the writer. But I ask, can you not see if their hand shakes while writing? Perhaps they are nervous or afraid. Is one part of the letter written quickly and the other more flowing and calm? Could it be that they were simply rambling in the first part and came to their point and senses or perhaps 2 people wrote this same letter!? Can you not infer to the writer's state of mind with an insight check? Basically, there's a misunderstanding with an NPC that my PC wrote a letter to and my DM says that they would not be able to roll insight against my persuasion/deception (as they would in a face to face conversation) because it's in letter form and I simply disagree with that ruling.

Nathan Sawkins

May it please the court, I was playing in a campaign where our Druid got pregnant, it was in her back story. She proceeded to then give birth in the form of a bear. After turning back into a Human she claimed that her son would remain a bear and be a new companion, and potentially a mount for her. The DM claimed that because her magic was inspired by nature, then her son was also be a druid and turn back into a human.

Danny Summers

May it please the court, I have recently introduced my chaotic good Necromancer into our long running campaign. My new character gets along well with the party, however, my DM recently ruled that because certain PCs in the party are "Good" aligned, they cannot abide my PC's necromantic ways, and must attack her zombies on sight. I feel this makes it difficult for me to play my character at all, and question why I was allowed to make her in the first place. My lords, I defer to your wise judgement in this matter.