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Seeking Court Cases (Patreon)

Published:
2022-01-03 16:32:47
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Bailiff Jake here! Crit is almost in session so please comment your (BRIEF AKA a paragraph or two!) tales on this post and we will try your case.

May Justice Be Soon Served,

Jake

Comments

AnonymousDM

May it please the sage justices and dashing bailiff. This DM requests an emergency injunction in a time-sensitive case. I used to struggle balancing encounters, and my players got *way* too cocky. They’re getting into insane fights, even when I warn them it can be lethal now. They love their characters, now Lv. 5, but won’t even take Revivify to save em! Do I pull punches? Or let loose with the planned fight, likely killing most? Plaintiff seeks action before the coming session, in which they’ll begin by rolling initiative against a zombie horde they didn’t bother to hide from.

Eugene

Here ye here ye May it please the honorable justices and the more than less but not great bailiff. I have a DM versus player problem. So I have something that happened to my group and I a while ago but I just found out about the dungeons and dragons court. So my character had got killed by werewolves we are still a little bit triggered by them by the way. Before that my other player and I had used the marriage ritual to get the plus to AC and other benefits it gives. We discovered that when one person dies that is part of the ritual you can preform it again………… We just happened to have 3-4 scrolls of revivify and had a thought. We asked our dm if he would allow us to slit each other’s throats and die so we could always have the marriage ritual. I think we almost made our DM sick af he wasn’t a happy camper. Is it really that fucked up? Is it even more fucked up my friend and I had the idea at the same time. Sounds like true friendship to me.

Mackenzie Nelson

May it please the most high and mighty court. I present the case of the AaraCOCKra I’m currently running Curse of Strahd and my party loves to find humor in this dark setting. One of my PCs is playing a modification on an Aarakocra (sorry Murph) to fit the world of the module, a “Baatrakocra” if you will. He is playing a shadow monk and has literally broken my game due to the lack of sunlight, so I should have heeded the warnings. There is an ongoing bit that the Bat-man has had an erection for the past month. Recently they were in the main castle and were talking to statues whom they got to ask a question to and the Baatrakocra asked: “how do I get this problem with my dick to go away?” To which the statue replied: “I dunno man, I’ve been hard for centuries.” I was pretty proud of this but one of the other players has been complaining about the lack of seriousness in the party and that we didn’t accomplish much during the session. Personally, I think this bit stole the session and idk what more they could want entertainment wise. Should I refrain from buying into the party’s shenanigans to keep moving forward and maintain the spooky mood? I will humbly submit to any punishment you see fit.

Devin Gardner

Honorable and esteemed justices of the Supreme Crit, the dashing Justice Murph, the radiant Justice Axford, the handsome Justice Tanner, and the beautiful and mighty Bailiff Jake, I humbly come before you today seeking your incomparable wisdom on a most unpleasant incident that occurred 10 years ago. I was playing a dragonborn paladin in a chaotic evil campaign with "friends", and had dumped as much as I could into charisma. Another player, a real knob of the "um. actually" variety, was playing as what can only be described as a succubus from one of his favorite "animes". He had been causing us all headaches the entire campaign and I decided I'd had enough. He and I were offered 50 gold a pop for sets of organs, "no questions asked." Naturally, we went to the town orphanage that night. I used my charisma to lure the kids, and he did the dirty work. We ended up being paid 1000 gold. I say we; he took it all for himself because he said "I did all the work." I pulled the DM aside and asked if I could roll to steal the gold when his character went to sleep. He had me roll for it in the kitchen and asked the other player his passive perception. First he tried saying he used magic to lock the door, then he tried saying his character slept with one of her eyes open, and finally said that she kept the entire bag of 1000 gold coins in her bra and thus I couldn't steal it. This is AFTER I left his character 300 of the 1000 gold. Was I in the wrong? Did I do a bad by pulling the DM aside and robbing another player? Or would I have been justified in taking even more of the gold?

Kymberly King

Oh Great Bailiff and fantastic Judges! I would like to file an appeal do to ineffective assistance of council. My mother (we both played in this) posted the case of the monkey murder. She neglected to mention a few things and I can answer some of the judges qestion. 1) the rope and cans was 4 in off the ground. Dm was going to wave the dex Check cause all score were above 10. - the Barbarian requested the dex check. 2) the damage of the 60ft fall was deal and we were ready to move on. When the Barbarian interrupts with "what about my monkey?" -dm was ready to wave this when he begins to argue about the backpack. If you choose to uphold the previous ruling I will release the monkey unto the dms conversation Pit. Ps. -The monkey it's self was not the probem. It was the Barbarian having the monkey.t he team was worried about CawCaw level care. Which we were right about. The monkey only lasted about one session. -Murph. My mother and I can't get over you saying "oh. No. Dot kill the monkey. -Emily. We will always have a seat at our table for you.

Robert Aronowitz

May it please the court, the whole court, even Bailiff Jake I call this case: Roc v Wall of Force As a party we were foreshadowed with a MASSIVE bird in the area that the DM did such a great job teasing that we wanted NOTHING to do with a fight at our current level. We avoided an encounter with its babies, snuck to a structure to hunker down for the afternoon to wait for it to leave, we even sent a sac of meat decoy on a horse in the other direction when we finally did leave, but lo and behold it still came after us. With some clever thinking our wizard used wall of force to create an impenetrable sphere around it and our DM wasn’t having it. It turned into a big debate. The wizard argued that even though it is such massive creature he has a high enough intelligence to know that he could time the wing flaps for when it wasn’t at full extension. That way, as the wording of wall of force is written, anything that occupies where the wall ends up can be pushed to one side or the other. Well he created a sphere and chose to push it on the inside of that sphere. With much disdain and minimal fanfare, we were eventually let to escape by trapping that sessions big monster in a giant sphere but it still continues to be a subject for debate. So what’s the thought here Supreme Crits? Were we right to get away with this, or should we be Roc food?

Arwyn Robinson

No case today! Just wanted to say hi and thanks for all the great content. Can't wait to see you guys in Seattle! ❤️

Olivia Hill

Dear respectable Crit justices and honourable balif Jake, I recently played for the first time (I've been listening to D&D podcasts since y'all started this so it was exciting). It was a one-shot that a friend of a boyfriend of a friend hosted and I was super excited. I maybe spent too much time planning out backstory because I was told I'd have help finishing the stats at the meeting. Which is great bc I have no idea how to build a balanced character for a surprise one shot 😂 The boyfriend of aforementioned friend was really upset with me and the two other newbies that were invited because we hadn't mapped out our stats and everything out ahead of time... Do I deserve jail time? What could I have done differently?

Tyler Jackson

Dear honorable justices and give acknowledgement to the bailiff as he sees fit and desirable. A few years ago, the party I was in was trying to escape down a collapsing hallway. My human Oath of Vengeance Paladin had Misty Step (a bonus action) and I had 90 feet to go. I wanted to use my movement and a dash action to cover 60 feet, the use my Misty Step bonus action to teleport the rest of the way. The DM and another member of the party said that’s not how Misty step works, and that I couldn’t use it that way. I took a little bit of damage but ultimately survived so I moved past it. To this day I think I should have been able to clear it since it is a teleportation spell using a second level spell slot. Have I misinterpreted the spell? I leave it in your capable hands.

Riley Wesson

I don't have a case but I do have a confession that has been eating at my soul. I was playing in a campaign that my friend was DMing for the first time recently, and I'd stowed away in the bowels of a ship and cast invisibility on myself, saying I'd like to look around. My friend said that I "basically have advantage on anything since I'm invisible", which I kept in mind going forward. Later I said I wanted to search the sleeping quarters of the ship, rolling an investigation check. It wasn't explicitly said, but due to my DM's previous words I rolled with advantage, rolling a natural 1 and a natural 20. In a moment of uncertainty and possibly sin, I told her I'd rolled a nat 20, catching her off guard as she certainly hadn't expected me to find anything of value. As a result I found a chest filled with vials that I snuck off the ship through a variety of checks and turned out to be 40 air elementals kept in individual vials. At that point it was too good to fess up and turn back, so I sat on my natural 20 that I rolled with potentially uncalled-for advantage. Am I in the wrong? Have I eternally damned myself to rolls with disadvantage? Can the light of Dice Christ ever properly shine on me again? Please cleanse me of my sins so I can once again roll with a clean conscience.

Alex DiFiore

~~TRENT UPDATE~~ Most esteemed judges! Before I got a chance to tell Trent that our story got featured on naddpod, one of my friends sent me a naddpod subReddit post FROM TRENT. Again, he’s new to dnd and not a naddpole. Trent begged for sympathy from the naddpod community as he proceeded to tell a ludicrously incorrect description of what happened, painting me as a bumbling idiot dm who was extraordinarily unreasonable to all the pc’s. The post got over 300 upvotes and 60 comments. Most of the comments were people slandering my real life name (while trent’s identity remained confidential) and demanding a mistrial, while some knew that Trent was clearly lying and acting exactly as I had described him. The next night, Trent texted me, “Hey did you see the latest Jake and Amir”. We don’t text and never talked about Jake and Amir before. I said no but I will soon. The Reddit post was mysteriously deleted by the next day. Hope you enjoyed the Trent update! P.S. I was sent the Reddit post the same day I asked a girl out on a date and it ruined my mood for the date. Trent strikes again.

Joseph Swenson

May it please the powerful justices and that bailiff, I guess. I have been DMing a campaign over the course of 3 years. Fairly recently we had a player leave the campaign due to, let's say, personal reasons. One of my players asked if his girlfriend could join the campaign. I did my diligence, ran her thru the gauntlet of questions to see if she'd be a decent fit for the party's vibe. I accepted her, and informed the other players. My girlfriend, who is the brains of this party tbh, doesn't care for the person irl and has expressed deep hatred for this lady joining the campaign. Should I have done this differently? Should I keep the player and run a trial session? Or am I doomed to run a campaign for evil folk?

CatTorpedo

May it please the court, and I guess the bailiff as well, I recently began dming a new campaign which I described as Miyazaki-like, magic realist and Lynchian in tone. I planned an encounter in which a merchant character (a homebrewed Ghost enemy) was nearly untouchable and would dissapate on the first successful hit. However, the player in the encounter complained that they were owed a 'successful' fight, given they had recently had to retreat in a total party defeat. I felt that it would've been inkeeping with the tone, but as a new dm, I'm worried I'm not making the game satisfying for them. Can you rule either way?

Kyle Conrad

May it please the outstanding justices and incredible bailiff: I am a first time player with a first time DM, and I made the critical mistake of splitting the (level 2) party during a nighttime stakeout. Combat ensued, resulting in me rolling 3 failing death saves in a row. The DM was able to bring in an NPC to cast Revivify, but I contested that the NPC had no reason to even own the diamonds needed, let alone a reason to use them on a person they just met. Should I have stayed dead as a consequence of my own actions? I humbly submit to your judgment.

Tyler

Hello honorable supreme crit justices and lowly bailiff Hurwitz. Today, may it please the court, I bring you the case of players v DM’s girlfriend. We had a player drop from a long running campaign for personal reasons, and because our DM wanted to keep the party at 4 players he asked his girlfriend to join. None of us had any problem with it and we were all excited to play with a new player, but the issue was that his girlfriend had played D&D before and was iffy on whether or not she liked it. Our group is very RP heavy and get very in character so for someone who was unsure whether or not she even likes D&D she was kind of thrown to the wolves. We get into the session and run into her character trying to steal a chicken from a farmer. We resolve the incident and begin trying to have a conversation with her character. After asking for her name, where she is from, and other background details we came to find out she didn’t have any of that information prepared, the only thing she had ready was that she wanted a chicken. The DM and his gf went into a separate discord channel for about 20 minutes to discuss backstory and after that time our DM returned and said “She does not want to play anymore”. The rest of the session had an awkward air to it and was super uncomfortable. Are we as players at fault for scaring her off with being too into the RP or is our DM and his gf at fault here for not being prepared for the session?

jenavieve

Honorable justices and. uh. bailiff. I present the case of the leash kid. My players were exploring a forest that was broken in time. They were encountering different things from different times and places. One of these encounters was a child named Teddy who had been abandoned and was living in the forest for years. They actually took to Teddy and he is now one of their favorite NPCs. Teddy has started adventuring with them and has a fair number of uses. However one player, insists that Teddy be kept on a leash. This is brought up every session how it would be safer for him. At first I had no problem with this banter, but they are starting to create a divide in the party about the ethics of keeping a child on a leash. Do I side with the freedom fighters and make Teddy fight the leash idea? Or do I side with the child-walkers and have Teddy be okay with being on a leash? His personality could go either way. I would just have him agree with the party but the party is split?

Josh the Alchemist

May it please the ever-wise and just court and the magnificent calves of the bailiff, I bring to you the case of the forced multiclass. A few months ago, I was playing a hexblood circle of stars druid who was raised in the woods Tarzan style. He only received tutoring by the mysterious lady who came at night and, later, by the deity of night that helped him become a druid. The lady turned out to be the hag who made him a hexblood. Much later, my character attempted to contact the lady to try and help solve a problem the party had with a local governor who was trying to take the lands belonging to natives for their resources. In contacting her, my DM said I had made some kind of bargain and I had to take a warlock level next time we leveled up. I took it, but I wasn't happy about it, and soon retired the character that I'd spent so much time investing my energy into. I play a cleric now, but I miss Rian dearly and I'm hoping for some justice for the poor druid.

Jacob Daigrepont

May it please the honorable justices and the lowly insect of a bailiff. I was a DM for multiple friends who had just begun playing dnd or had little knowledge of the game. In a first encounter with some bullywogs the group would have died if I didn't lie on how the frogs crit multiple times on multiple party members. This was because the party wanted to use flanking and I explained the enemies would be able to use it too. After around a year of playing I told my party of what happened and they were furious at me for lying even though now they love the campaign. So I ask am I in the wrong or right. I await your answers.

Chloe Louise

Honourable justices and equally honourable bailiff, I present the case of Overpowered Familiar. I am a new DM DMing my second campaign with slightly more people than the first, with the first campaign being put on hold in favour of more PCs. In the first campaign on the very first session I let my bard do an animal handling check on a direwolf who was supposed to attack them, and the check landed so well I let the direwolf become her animal companion. This threw off the balance of any combat encounters and I still haven't been able to make a challenging enough encounter. In my newer campaign with more people, I had the players role backstory from Xanathars guide if they wished. One of my players got in her backstory that she had a wish granted as a child, and the player had wished for a talking dog. I let this happen, on the account the dog just be for roleplay purposes. However, we have large breaks between sessions and they are mostly newer players, so she has asked a few times if her dog can help out with combat. Keep in mind the party already has 5pcs so it's pretty large already. Am I right to refuse her the added help or is my past experience with familiars clouding my judgement?

Mike Corace .

Lore Lords of Justice and the absolute Dimepiece Bailiff, I am in need of in-game legal counsel. My Eladrin Paladin made a deal with a hag to help control his lycanthropy. My end of the deal was to mess with a wizard who had wronged the hag. Well I found the wizard, and he's not a bad dude. BUT did split his soul and now the other half of him IS a bad guy! If I kill this other half, do you think I'll be in the clear, legally speaking? I just want to know if I have ground to stand on here

Baron Breakfast

May it please the benevolent judges and super cool bailiff. One of my players is running a one shot so I can take a DM break at the end of the month. He has never DM’ed before, but he is very confident, so confident in fact that he is encouraging us to push the rules to the limit and make the wildest level 10 characters possible. My question is whether I should follow his instructions and make a wild character, or should I go easy on him as it is his first time DM’ing. Out of interest, what level 10 characters would you make in this instance? Thank you for your wisdom.

Ryan Gallagher

May it please the honorable and benevolent justices as well as the average bailiff. While clearing a dungeon in the Ghosts of Saltmarsh our party’s ranger was attacked by a swarm of bugs. The bugs were resistant to most types of physical damage and were difficult to kill for 3 level 2 characters. As the swarm of bugs whittled away the ranger’s HP to 1 point, he tried to light them on fire while they were on his body which the DM said brought him to 0. The party’s Druid then used ice knife to kill the bugs and crit with a nat 20 but the exploding effect of the ice knife was said to take all 3 of the rangers death saving throws because it was a crit hit. Because we were so low level, nobody had revivify or raise dead to bring him back. Was this a fair PC killing or an overreach by the DM? I humbly await your ruling.

Paxicon

To the august Justices of the Supreme Crit and also Tuckers Roommate Jake: In my game, the players were forced by a highly bureaucratic copper dragon to fill in forms in triplicate, while it tried to distract them with mesmerizing vacation pictures from the Wyrmpeaks, scattered their papers with wing-flapping and distracted them with idle chit chat. They needed 3 successes to fill in the forms correctly within 5 turns, only 2 out of 5 players succeeded and the dragon gave these two their reward - a 15 minute tuition session with the professor of divination at the magic university the dragon was employed at. The remaining 3 players were outside the room and I did my best to make it interesting for them, with some plot relevant stuff being revealed to them while the others met the professor, however at least one of them stills brings it up as unfair. Should I have altered the rules of the challenge to make it fully group based or is party splitting okay, if some members don't make the relevant checks? /Patrik

David Goertsen

Dear supreme crit justices and the neutral baliff jake. My players have collectively decided that the warforged druid of the party named Worf Orfed has a monster schlong because of an ill timed by another player. Being a gracious and clever DM, I decided to let the dice tell the story, and let him roll a d12 (which they used guidance on) to determine the length of his hog. Against all odds, he got an eleven. Now, all of my encounters are sidetracked because my players can't stop giggling about the massive member. How do I fix this?

Michael Kessler

To the honorable Supreme Crit Justices and Bailiff, I present: The case of the missing hands. My warlock recently acquired the artifact "Hand of Vecna" from a recurring vendor called Mr. Takeaway. I had to trade both of my normal hands to acquire the artifact, leaving me with effectively one hand after attunement. Next level, as a genie, I learn Wish. Originally I had planned on wishing for a simulacrum of my character, but I now have a problem. The simulacrum wouldn't have hands, and therefore wouldn't be able to cast spells. Should I petition my DM to let me form the simulacrum with a functional hand, or do I have to settle for casting it on the echo knight so he can have up to 16 attacks in one round? I humbly await your judgement.

Gabriel Felix

May it please the court featuring Jake, I dm for a group of 4, with one of them being newer to dnd than the rest. In a recent battle the newer player was killed, but revivified. I adapted into my campaign Murphs rules of rolling to be revivified. The player was rolling poorly, so I gave them advantage if the other players were doing something to help. I didn't want my new player to have a sour taste of dnd so early after they've put alot of work into their character, which resulted in me giving them about 3 rounds of advantage when it was said and done . Benevolent court, was i in the wrong? Should I have let the die tell their tale? I await your judgement.

Tim Ankenman

Your honors and the bailiff of whom I extend a moderate amount of honor to, I humbly bring to you the case of my marriage. I started my first campaign as a DM not long ago with my wife and her friends who moved across the country. I put a lot of work into building the world based on the Theros book and making a fun adventure out of it. Unfortunately, we made it two sessions before she told me she does not enjoy playing from a distance and doesn’t want to continue and thus our DND has been canceled. Do I need a new wife? In all seriousness, should I just continue without her or postpone until we can all get together again sometime?

DOOFINIUS

Dear crit justices and honorable balif jake if it may please the court i present my case, im playing a druid for the first time and overlooked the dont like metal. I had metal armor as a starting armor and didnt realize til seisson started i asked my dm if we could reflavor as extra thick padding or pelts from animals, our forever dm who helped set up the campaign said absolutely not you picked a spellcaster live with being squishy. My problem is i overlooked not liking metal and with a dex of 11 i have no + to my ac so i sit at a 12. We are already too deep in and my character has entirely too much tied into campaign now after a few seissons so im unable to change anything. Should my dm have allowed the flavor or should i suck it up as my first time playing a spellcaster and take this as a learning experience.

Fish Harlan

Duely Respected Justices and Beloved Bailiff Jake, I bring to you the case of Too Many Magic Items. I DM a campaign where magic items are fairly common, though more powerful ones are more rare. Whenever the players find a magic shop, I allow them the option to buy a random magic item for 300gp once a day. I have a series of rolling tables as well as a list of hand-picked and personalized magic items for them, like weapons that compliment class abilities or extra healing items. The problem is this: I worry I've made the magic items too easily accessible and have made my players too powerful. On several occasions, I've had to stop my players from doing anything too crazy with these items. For example, our cleric wanted to use an item that gives one free daily casting of Glyph of Warding to destroy an underwater Black Market by breaking the dome it sits in, because it would have almost certainly killed him and the rest of the party, along with everyone else in the market. Am I right to occasionally limit the use of their items? Should I start giving enemies crazy powerful items to compensate? I await firm but fair judgment.

Zoe the Smallest

Honourable bailiff Jake, and lowly justices, may it please the court. I present to you the case of the Dangerous Soup. I was a player witnessing these events. My party and I were searching a house when my party member happened across some cans of soup. They took a can of soup, a ghost appeared as a result, and we battled the ghost. The player's in-game dad (one of the other party members) decided the soup was dangerous and - through a higher strength check roll - wrestled the soup from the player. That player then argued that it should have been a different check or something, then proceeded to lock themselves in a bedroom (in-game) and became upset irl for the rest of the session. Were they justified for arguing for a different check, or were the circumstances fair?

DowdMusic

May it please the illustrious judges and the stalwart bailiff, I come to you as a humble DM who gave their PCs too many toys to play with. I run a high-level campaign in which the party had recently received a large payout for their endeavors. One of my players decided that instead of spending all of his hard-earned loot on weapons, armor or magic items he wanted to buy two things. One - a bag of holding and Two - as many fire bombs as he could possibly fit into the bag. He spent about 100K gold on bombs - an obscene amount of money he has been saving up for dozens of sessions. For a while there was a bomb or four and things were fine. Then in one particularly dire encounter the PC with a bag full of bombs flew above the big bad cleric and proceeded to turn his bag of holding inside out.When the bombs hit the cumulative blast damage was over 3400! I made the whole party make saves to try to shield themselves from the explosion and several got seriously injured by the blast even though they were far away. The local environment, and all of the remaining enemies were decimated. I am now concerned that this is going to be something that the party wants to use again. I set up the rules of this world and told them they could have bombs, but 3K+ damage is ridiculous. The problem though is that my players love it. They love to just blow shit up and I don't want to take that away from them.This leaves me questioning what to do. Should I nerf their bombs? Should I just plan for this nonsense and make encounters too spread out for a single nuke attack, or have a 2nd wave of baddies? Or I was I wrong to let them do this in the first place and now my players have toys that simply cannot be put back in the box?

Joe Lenton

May it please the court’s honourable justices and dutiful bailiff, this case concerns the troublesome buttermaker. We played a non-DND game to help our friend learn a new system. Set in a magical community college, ripe for creative play, one player decided that his character Chad’s main thing was that he liked to make and eat butter. He grew up making butter, smelled of butter all the time and would derail the game to make jokes about butter. Eventually this character was expelled from the group at prom after being incredibly rude to the one NPC who tolerated him, and we all montaged having a great prom without him. The player tried to reason with us when we did this as he said he was intentionally playing the type of guy you would hate in high school, but we mainly did it because we wanted to stop talking about butter. Were we right to expel this character from our game when the end of session was around the corner anyway? I leave it to the mercy of the court.

Jor Elare

May it please the crit and the vascular, fighter-prone bailiff. May I present to you case of the overprepped DM. I got into DnD by listening to yours and other's podcasts. Since I go overboard about my hobbies, I built several PCs before I ever even approached my friends about playing. Pages of backstories, multiclass opportunities, the works. Fast forward to what all prospective players realize, you likely need to DM if you want to start a campaign. So I naturally created a homebrew pantheon of deities, a religion that worships them, multiple world governments and organizations vying for power, and put all of my PCs into the world as NPCs. My problem is this, my players are new to RP and I am not anywhere near good enough to organically reveal the depth of the world and characters. Also, my players won't take notes. This leads to a lot of big reveals feeling confusing and angering my players at times. ( e.g One of their benefactors betrays them as he is part of a doom cult) Am I at fault for overcomplicating this world for them, or do they need to put more effort into their roles? I prostrate myself before the crit, swearing on Dice Christ to submit to your judgement

Abner Herrera

Dearest, darlingest bailiff, I am a first time DM, and I am guilty of fudging my rolls and bending the rules, bc I apparently have great rollers luck. My players are also fairly new and I don't want to discourage them with imminent death. An example; in our first session, my brother got downed by a giant rat and rolled a 1 on his second death save, so I had said it didn't count because the way he rolled was kinda iffy. I await judgement; but if this is a Dice Christ issue, just let me know how many Hail Faeries to repent with.

BeuligXander

May it please the Honorable Justices, Jake I guess, and Emily: I am the DM, and in my campaign, the Warlock went on a date with a random made-up-on-the-spot NPC. Worth noting, we had not established at this point any boundaries on relationships in game, I'll accept my punishment for that. The date was going well, although never got out of the NPC's apartment, as the Warlock's patron became increasingly jealous, eventually possessing a rug and smothering them for a moment, then possessing the NPC. While the player played very well into this and seemed to be going along with it totally willingly, I could kind of tell they were a little put off when the NPC tried to kiss them. I did a hard cut to another player (this was during a 3-way party split initiative based encounter) and that was that. Should I not have gone that far? It's honestly the first time I tried doing something like this and thought it was working, but I bend to your judgement.

Ophelia Black

Hello people of the court, as I do not believe in class, you are equal. A while ago, my dm planned a fight against a kraken in the middle of the ocean. One of my favorite kinds of D&D is the boat rules. Because of this, my dm told me that I had full over the party’s boat (currently controlled by an NPC). Well, the combat comes and goes and we barely escape the Kraken thanks to some quick thinking with the boat. The DM pulls me aside after the game and tells me that I ruined the combat by “using the boat wrong” and that “the NPC wouldn’t have done that”. It’s been a couple years since then and this still haunts me. Did I actually do wrong or is my DM an asshole? My friends really don’t wanna get involved cause that DM sucks for a bunch of other reasons, so we’ve never really talked it out.

Muqtadaa Miandara

Honored Justices Murphy, Axford, Tanner, and any potential guest judges, as well as Bailiff Hurwitz who's... fine, I guess. I present the case of the DM who took advantage of a player's Wish spell. I am the DM of a two year long campaign. Our party is nearly at level 11, and we are currently in the Feywild, where I've warned my players to be careful of how they interact with the local denizens for fear of making and breaking their word, which is magically enforced by the nature of the Feywild itself. Not too far back, a player of mine (human fighter/rogue) retrieved a Genie's lamp, and our dwarven party member (battle-master) had recently succumbed to vampirism. The human player planned to summon the genie, and wish away the vampirism. I planned from the beginning to allow it, because I had no problem with this whole setup - but in the RP, my players sympathized with the Genie, and the holder of the lamp said verbatim, "I wish you could be free of your servitude", after hearing of the horrors the Genie had been forced to endure. I felt I had no choice, and I told the player his wish had been used to free the Genie. Some of my players were outraged, and although the player who said the wish felt it was justified, I have doubted since that it was the right move. I ended up making the Genie the player's friend, and the Genie bestowed upon him the equivalent of a luck point flavored as the Genie's favor, but I still get needled for being a hard-nosed DM by other players for taking advantage of the phrasing of the moment. Tell me, honored justices, did I overstep? Did I steal the glory of my player's wish? I humbly await your judgment.

ThatManGareth

May it please the figure-painting bailiff Jake, Now presenting the case of Sorcerer v. DM We have our first encounter with the main villain of our campaign, former DM party member, a fighter turned Warlock. The party noticed the villain first, so my sorcerer used zone of silence. The DM claims the villain noticed the lack of background noise (Torches crackling, water dripping, ect.) and knew something was up immediately so we didn't get a surprise round. My sorcerer then casts phantasmal killer spell (3.5e version) Villain crit fails the first save and fails the second save by 1, so is instantly killed. Our DM claims villain had a nearly endless supply of clones using the Clone spell. We neither get experience nor loot because we didn't destroy the soul and the body disintegrated when we tried to inspect it. Please help settle something we still razz him for to this day. I eagerly await the Justice of the Crit, The Plaintiff Sorcerer.

Resteasy

May it please the court, I present a case of fire and water. My party were in the middle of guarding a ship in port that was being attacked from below the surface by a giant slime. As a sorcerer I asked my kind and benevolent DM if I could use my fire breath spell to spit a jet of fire into the water and create a jet of boiling water to damage the core of the slime below the surface. He said that I could certainly try and when i did he said that the fire touched the surface of the water and sizzled but nothing else. Our beloved pet npc ratkiller then swam directly into the slime to attack the core and was subsequently melted into a gooey mess and died, ending the battle. I ask the court and loquacious Dm’s for their ruling on this matter. Should my DM have stated outright that my attack strategy had no chance of working before using my turn. Am I in fact a fool of a catfolk for attempting to force the elements to work in the opposite way they should? My lack of making hot water placed a beloved friend into hot water and it left a slimey acidic taste in my mouth.

Nicolas Lee

May it please the honorable court and that nasty little bailiff, My brother has been a PC in multiple campaigns that I have run and across all he has committed a common and disruptive offense – dropping large animals from great heights on top of my enemy NPCs. The issue started in a 3.5 campaign where his go-to opening turn was using Summon Nature's ally to summon porpoises 60 feet above my enemies, he even used a feat to increase the heights from which he could drop them. When I ruled that he couldn't summon aquatic animals to the land, he then started summoning triceratopses instead. Unfortunately, my brother is also a PhD researcher in evolutionary biology and he knows the exact weights of many animals. The sum result of these shenanigans was a whopping 140 d6 to my NPCs every turn. The problem got so bad that I started creating enemies that wore armor on top of their heads or otherwise had resistance to this specific sort of attack which was a bit immersion breaking. We have since moved our games to a 5e setting where it seems that summoned creatures have slightly more reasonable weight restrictions, but I still live in constant fear of him finding a way to bring this "tactic" back into our games. Am I wrong to suggest that summoned creatures that cannot fly must be summoned on the ground, or should I continue to create BBEGs with emergency adamantium parasols? I graciously accept any ruling.

Nick Lerche

What if you gave him disadvantage on sneaking due to the sound of his hog scraping the ground, unless he rolls it up beforehand? Or the new BBEG is Wrong Jeremy the Hoglord?

Kristen with-a-K

If it pleases the justices and most excellent bailiff. I bring you the case of the "we're out of game so let's discuss mid-combat battle tactics" email chain. We are running a game of Descent into Avernus and were in the middle of combat with a group of mobs while a second group of mobs was 1 to 2 turns from reaching us. We ended the session mid-combat and planned to pick it up the next week dealing with that next wave. During the downtime, one of our key players (and a longtime DM) emailed the other PCs with notes about combat, spell usage, etc and wanted to go over plans to fight the next wave when they arrived. My feeling is that, as we were in combat when the session ended, the characters would not have been able to coordinate that kind of detailed information in just 2 rounds. The remaining players, however, went whole hog on the email making all kinds of crazy plans. When the next session came, the other players and the email author utilized what they discussed but I abstained. Should the players be able to make full battle plans outside of the game while the characters are mid-combat or should they all be thrown from the bridge into the abyss?

Rachael

Greeting honorable judges and charismatic Bailiff Jake. I am getting ready for my first time DMing running the Wild Beyond the Witchlight module. My boyfriend is going to be one of the PC’s and he has told me that he wants to build an Aarakocra Gunslinger fighter (which is already insane), but he wants to also do the voice of the Foghorn Leghorn character from Loony Toons for his character. I don’t mind some silliness, but this just feels extreme and like it might be distracting? Am I overthinking it, or should I at least ask him to change the voice of the character?? I await your just verdict. Rachael

Fia (but not Boginya)

Oh great and magnanimous Justices and incredibly slightly above average bailiff, I bring you the case of the Balor and the Drug Cocktail. In the campaign I am running we had a session where my party was at a fancy party filled with all the most important people in the city they are currently in. As the DM this was my way of having them interact with some of the bad guys they were dealing with outside of fighting them. However during the party two of my players, a monk and a peace cleric, decided to find a bathtub and go do drugs. Some good rolls (25+ to find a bathtub and Nat 20 stealth check to not be seen) they were tubbing it up and doing drugs. For the drugs I took the effects from the Blue Mana Inn, one stat drops to 1, another stat goes up to 30. The Cleric had his intelligence drop to 1 and his constitution go to 30, so he was dumb as fuck but felt invicible, and he decided they should kill all the guests at the party. The monk agreed and they went down to the party. This is when the monk pulled out an amulet, that they had gotten earlier in the campaign with the spirit of a powerful demon inside it. The amulet was meant to be like a lesser Wish spell but with the downside of needing to give into the demon a bit. The Monk put it on and asked for the power to kill everyone at the party, and I decided to give them the power of a Balor Demon, so they went into combat as a Balor against all these enemies. The Monk ended up killing 10+ people before they were stopped, while the Clerics drugs wore off. Afterwards I had guards arrest the Monk, and got the player to roll a new character, but said they could break the Monk out of prison if they wanted, but the party was sad to see the Monk go. Was me arresting the Monk too harsh? Should I have found a different form of consequences for the Monk?

Ray Carter

MAY IT PLEASE the honourable, powerful members of the court, I have a case that happened long ago but still grinds my gears, sticks in my craw, gets my goat, and tangles up my shoelaces- DM vs player (I think???) It was the second game I had ever run, and started as a one-shot for a few friends. I built a city and ran a simple session. The players beat an Evil Lady at the centre of an Evil Plan, then I rewarded the players handsomely at the end, because, fuck it! It's a one-shot! Let's make them feel good! They took possession of Evil Lady's house and were left with a sort of 'happily ever after'. Not long after, the players said they'd like to play again, in the same world with the same characters, so we turned the sitting into a campaign. A while in, I had Evil Lady's higher ups send eviction notices and foreshadowed the threat of people trying to kick them out of the fancy house they were squatting in- I thought it might be a nice way to spur them into action against this organisation in order to keep their house, or get them to find out more about the factions in the world. However, one of my players was NOT happy, saying that once I had given them something, it was unfair to take it away from them. Justices, was this a dick move on my part? I think I could have made it a bit clearer what was on the table in terms of ways I could challenge them, or what sort of game they wanted to play... but how can a game be any fun if you have nothing to fight for? I've had a number of other cases with people being disinclined/kind of refusing to engage with things I've got planned out, so it's actually really put me off DMing and made me feel really insecure. Would love to know about some more ways to get people engaged in things without it seeming unfair and without completely avoiding any sense of threat!

MacMillan Leslie

May it please the court and also the Dashing Bailiff, I come to you with the case of the missing character. At then end of a years long campaign that concluded with a modified Out Of The Abyss, my character, a one armed Kalashtar fencer named KataTash was marked for death. It's important to note the spirit that lived in her head as a Kalashtar spoke with her, was her best friend, and manifested a spiritual fencing arm when combat began. In a ritual to weaken a souped up demon lord, she sacrificed herself, the rules were, if we kill the demon lord she dies too. We defeated the demon lord, she got her last words, and then she was sucked in to a mysterious portal and killed. In that moment she was separated from the spirit in her head which flew off as my DM put it "somewhere". Her last words were "WAIT!" since she didn't know she would be separated from him in death. I proceeded to ask my DM where KataTash went? Surely she would have some sort of consciousness even if she went to some kind of awful hell plane, but apparently not. My DM wouldn't tell me where she went and has not to this day after much asking. That was 3 years ago. Now with the campaign long over I just want closure for my character. Should my DM have to tell me where she went, or is it within their power to leave me wondering forever more? I lay myself at the courts mercy.

Trisha (Trash Bags) Bagby

Honorable Bailiff and gracious justices, I come to you seeking punishment for a new DM's foolishness (it's me I'm the new DM). I allowed my level 1 characters to roll for their stats, and my ranger rolled an 18 for Dex (they literally rolled 3 6's and a 1). They picked Tabaxi as their race, and Tabaxi get a +2 to dex as a racial feature. So, at level 1, this character has a 20 dex. There are similar rolls that happened in this character creation session but this was the most hard-hitting. I'm merely toying with the idea of giving them a cursed item or ailment in order to balance my players' stats until they reach a higher level. Is this a punishable offence? If so, I accept my punishment for even the mere consideration, whether it be by law or divine means.

Rachael

P.S. I’m going to the Minneapolis show on Saturday and I’m super excited to see you guys live!

Austin Mejdrich

To the esteemed Supreme Crit Justices and the enterprising Bailiff Jake, and may it please the Court, I present the case of the Hidden Thief. A few of my players were engaged in a midnight, rooftop fight against a few rogues from the Thieves’ Guild they were attempting to infiltrate. One of the enemy rogues was hiding behind a chimney granting them total cover, but had previously fired a shot at one of the PCs before going back into cover, so the party was aware of their general location. One of my players, also a rogue, rolled a natural 20 on a perception check to find the enemy from a distance, so I said that they saw a piece of the enemy rogue’s cloak blow out from behind the chimney so they knew where they were. However, I did not allow my player to actually shoot the enemy as they were fully behind the chimney. Said player was upset with me and said she should be able to attack because she was able to spot the enemy. Should I have allowed my player to attack the enemy rogue as an extended reward of the Natural 20, or was I right to uphold the rules of total cover?

Evolet Harris

May this please the court, not you bailiff. Sorry,sorry. So I run a campaign with my 4 friends, and one girl was playing this "perfect" woman. The woman was a artificer elf, which I loved until I heard her character. She was rich (which I was okay with) and had very good charisma. But then she started getting entitled. After failing a charisma check, she thought she was entitled to succeeding and it took me 30 minutes to say that she can't just choose to win or not. Then she started roleplaying killing all the monsters without rolling and all my other players couldn't stand her. I decided that a witch would cast a spell on her and she would be cursed to become a different person with a worse life so that she would learn (I planned on removing it next session). She got mad and trashed my house. Am I in the wrong here? I need help Judges (Also bailiff I guess.)

Flando Maltrizian

Forgive me Dungeon Father's, I have sinned. I am a forever DM and it has been 18 months since my last PC. I currently run 3 weekly games across 3 different systems. Recently, though, I bought a new superhero focused game and I have been gathering a different group of friends for a fourth game. I feel like I'm already risking burnout at 3, and that I don't have enough free nights in a week, but the high of DMing is too sweet. Please tell me not to do this, or give me some kind of penance for this sin.

Valori Waggoner

May it please the estimable and wise Judges and the hardworking and obsequious bailiff. I bring not a case of wrongdoing, but a question. How can I best show appreciation to my DMs for the amazing job they do? Just telling them how much I enjoy playing with them doesn't seem like enough. I cast myself upon the mercy of the court and am prepared to endure punishment for bringing a non-criminal case and wasting the court's time.

Adam

May it please the most honorable justices and that eye candy of a bailiff. 6 years ago, I was DM'ing my first full campaign. One of my players was brand new to the game and as the campaign went on, she was simply not dealing the same damage as the other PC's who were more experienced. I could tell it bothered her, so I gave her a powerful magic dagger that could fly, deal 6d6 Force damage and she could control with her mind as a reaction. The next session I found she had been doing her sneak attack damage wrong the whole time and now with her new dagger she was unstoppable, taking down a hill giant in one turn at level 6. I then pulled her aside, apologized and retconned the dagger to only deal 2d6 as a bonus action instead. I still feel terrible that I retconned the dagger only 1 session after giving it to her. Was I wrong to do this? I lay my head at your feet and await judgement.

Empersands

May it please the Court, the esteemed Justices, and the aggressively mediocre Bailiff, My d&d party recently ran a pirate-themed two-shot, with my best friend DMing. He has never been very strict with rules, and he added a few NPCs to each group of pirates in order to make up for our lack of crew, however, some of these NPCs had strange and unexplained abilities. For example, one NPC had the ability to bring people back on board the ship as a reaction after someone was thrown overboard. Even after our barbarian spent his turn trying to knock someone off the ship, the DM would simply bring them back on board. When asked how these abilities worked and where they came from, he simply replied “homebrew”. This made me uncomfortable, but I did not press further. Normally, he tells us if home-brew mechanics are going to be implemented into a game, but this time we were given no warning. 
Was I wrong for questioning his methods? Should I have let the game carry on or should I have pressed further? 
 I wait patiently for your guidance. - Em

Ya Boi Troy

Good day noble justices and heroic bailiff, I come to you today with a case against my DM. I am a wizard with the spell Tiny Hut. My crew and I are currently on an island that is the base of the goddess of frost. The DM informed us that her magic keeps it so cold if we take a short rest we will only regain our CON modifier. I mentioned it that the temperature in the tiny hut is controlled. He then said it was more the magic of the place and less the actual temperature. I understood and we moved on. However another party member had a ring of warmth witch gives you resistance to cold which negated the effect of the island for them. So I ask this; if the magic of the ring worked should the magic of tiny hut also have worked. I leave this matter if your benevolent hands. Thank you for your time.

Dave 3D Art

May it please the court, I have had a debate with a few colleagues of mine about the Soulknife Rogue subclass. Specifically the 9th level Psychic teleportation feature. Could the feature be uses to teleport through glass without breaking said glass? Or would the glass just stop the knife teleportation? Glass is immune to psychic damage. My colleague thinks the glass would stop the knife, and limit teleportation. I think it would go right through, and allow a soulknife to have a very handy way to enter buildings. I am at the mercy of the court.

Caitrin

May it please the mighty court and the baliff with exceptional taste in cases. My submission is a simple one: can a character climb while holding a one handed weapon? My rogue/ranger Shrike had taken a potion of climbing and had been hastened by our wizard, so she had 50 ft of movement. When I climbed atop a building to get to a ranged combatant, my DM ruled that I would have to use my extra Hastened action to pull my weapon back out after presumably putting it away to climb the 20 ft up the building. With a Potion of Climbing and Haste in the mix, I appealed to be able to take extra movement to climb while keeping my one handed weapon out, slowing me down a bit, but still letting me get an extra attack, but my DM disagreed. Should I have been allowed to do so? Thank you, benevolent Crits.

Jacob Heiss

I had a paladin, named Seventeen, who was downed in a battle between two ships fighting with some dragonborn pirates. The dragonborn on their other ship decided to use their breath weapon to hit our entire ship with fire breath. Because I was down Seventeen automatically failed the dex saving throw to avoid being hit. However, because multiple dragonborn were attacking the ship I argued that each one should count as a sepereate damage source and cause Sev to die. My DM said that it would only count for one even though we had previously been rolling seperate saves for each attack. After a bit of argurement I relented and only took the one source of damage. This hasn't felt right with me since, and I still think about it a year later. Was I right to argue that my character should have died to those attacks?

Dave 3D Art

It's not a funny problem, but considering our honourable Jake has played one, what do they think?

steven higgins

To the All powerful Justices, and somewhat powerful bailiff. I need to know if I should be punished for blindly following the dice Christ, or my player who "happend" to catch a look at something I rolled behind the DM screen. Last year I was just starting to DM and had six players at the table with me. (also new to dnd) Because of this the table was a little cramped and one of our party memeber was sitting directly to my right. I Had created a monk police force to try to keep my players in line while traversing a city. Our murder hobo wizard tried to push an officer out a window while being questioned. A fight broke out and our Rouge who was the only experienced player, who brought her character from another campaign she previously played in. got knocked unconscious. the monk still had both furry of blows hits left. so I rolled think that I would be able to just say they missed. However I rolled a 19 and a nat 20. Before I could say anything our warlock sitting to the right of me at the table saw my rolls and started to laughing. Because he say my rolls I went with them and said she had taken two death saves. then failed her third and lost her character of two campaigns. At the time I was a new DM and had forgot about non lethal damage. I ask should I have lied about my rolls or followed Dice chrsit. Or should my player not have been looking at what I was rolling. Please let me know your decision, as I wait your harsh but fair punishment.

Zach Brown

May it please the honourable justices and the classy bailiff. In my campaign one of my PCs ate a magic mushroom and it’s side effect caused him to disappear into an astral plain whenever he went down. So I gave him an ultimatum either he can make a save to come back unconscious or he could roll all his death saves as his action and on a success and come back at full health. He chose the later option. He ended up failing his death saves in the last campaign and instead of giving him a way to save his character I had his evil patron take his body over and released him into the world. Basically I’m asking if I should’ve gave him a final save to have the character come back unconscious?

Gumbercules

May it please the court, the bailiff, and any personal injury lawyers hanging around in the lobby. A question regarding fall damage. I play a Gnome Bard, and our party was fighting a wizard riding atop a giant purple wurm. On my action, I dimension doored above the wizard with the intention of knocking him off the wurm. The DM ruled that I would need to be high enough and take fall damage to gain enough momentum to knock off the wizard, to which I very much agreed. The DM also rolled a check to see if the wizard remained in place. Since there was a chance of me wasting a turn if the wizard succeeded, I argued that the same fall damage I was going to take should also apply to the wizard. Ultimately this didn't matter, as I was successful, but this was a 5 minute back and forth discussion between the DM and I, and I want to know your ruling, in case a similar scenario were to ever come up again. Does a falling bard land hard, and is this gnome laughing matter?

ArmadillosKeepDigging

I would like to bring before the court the case of poor teamwork and the death of a beloved character. My party has one first time player who is generally terrible at teamwork. While we discuss how to handle a situation she will often charge in by herself without consulting anyone. This has resulted in her almost dying and needing healing pretty often. There have also been times where we try to tell her how we can work together to solve a problem and she says “no thanks I’m just going to do it my way,” and it fails. The situation finally culminated when we were entering a combat situation and she bailed out leaving us behind. We could’ve used her help and instead got absolutely whomped and my character died. I understand this may have some to do with alignment but how can players balance alignment and playing a character without ruining the game for others? I will honor the judgment of the respected court.

WunDarWun

We attempted to drown a man with a combination of Hold Person, a hard shove into a river (athletics check), and Mage Hand to push his sad bobbing head under the water. The man was the 2nd in command to the BBEG, and was a big deal. So the DM ruled that the 10lb. weight limit on Mage Hand meant we couldn't push his head under water. I call BS. what do the respendant justices rule?

Emily

To the most honorable, noble and cute justices and… the Ben Affleck bailiff with the sword. I come to the court with a question and hope that this can be resolved via solutions (and Murph’s maniac). I’m in a dnd campaign with my 3 buddies. That being said, two of the PC’s do NOT get along. The dynamic of these two PC’s are like an endangered bird and a feral cat in a room, alone. Think yugo as legolas and Yugo as a ranger. As two different people. It makes for fun adventures but also tense sessions and a few screaming fits. Our DM is doing their best but they’re at their wits end. My question is this: should we scrap the campaign, call a therapist or is there another solution we are all missing? PS: one of them doesn’t think it’s a problem. They think it’s a playful role play arguing (it’s not). The other one has the belief that it’s not causing problems actively. The DM wants to know my opinion on it and I’m of the belief that they should talk it out via RP but at the same time I would like to tell them to stop fighting so much.

Ella

To the Supreme Crit Justices and the mediocre Bailiff, I bring news of a total party kill from last week’s session. Our group of level five characters set out to catch a group of bandits and defeated them. With this mission complete and our hit points and spell slots drained, the DM then informed us that it was time for the final boss battle and that there would be no time for any kind of rest or healing. This resulted in a very short and anticlimactic boss fight, and several angry players. Is the DM to blame for not allowing us to heal and rest before the boss fight, or should the players have stepped up and got creative without any spell slots or hit points to help?

PineappleLiar

Justices of the Court and their esteemed whipping boy Bailiff, my I present to you the case of the Extreme Power Creep. Ever since around 15th level to 21st in my most recent campaign, the abilities of both the party and the enemies have reached insane levels of strength. To give you reference, in one particular combat I was able to do more than 5000 points of damage IN ONE TURN. This has, at least in my opinion, negatively effected the overall combat experience; set up for every combat takes forever, and most of the time it only lasts for one round, as the entire party has such a high damage output no one can survive anything. The main issue is that I believe this high power level is the DM’s favorite part of the game; he spends a lot of time on building absolutely busted stuff for both us and our enemies. Should I choose to not look this gift horse in the mouth, and just work within the power creep, or, if the DM is in the wrong, how do we salvage the current campaign without just shrugging some shoulders and starting something new?

Steven Hoffart

To the stalwart bailiff Jake, steward of the house of crit and the honorable justices, may it please the court: I play a Yuanti Druid with a snake like tail instead of legs. We were looking for a magic amulet stolen, but we were sure by who yet. In order to see if a person in the tavern had the amulet we were looking for, my character planned to "walk" by and trip, tipping the table, and grabbing the amulet in the chaos. My DM let me go through with the plan but when I went to roll to pretend this was an accident they said I automatically fail because you can't trip a snake. My defense is that the upright weight of a human-like torso could topple over like a human tripping. Is my DM correct in making this plan dead on arrival, or should I have been allowed to roll for it?

Russell Harwood

May it please the supreme and almighty justices and bailiff I ask for your judgement on a case concerning my significant other and Dice Christ. My SO and I were on a long road trip and we decided that we could have some fun and download an app that rolls a D20 for you. We thought it would be fun to use it to settle old petty disagreements/fun arguments we’ve had with each other (eg. “does candy corn suck or is it good?” “You said this not this.”) We both agreed that we would agree with whatever ruling the dice came to and we also determined that if you were on the more petty side of the argument you would have a less likely chance to win, in the sense that the dice would need to roll between 1-5 or 15-20 for you to win. So we do the first roll about candy corn being awful or good and I took awful. The dice rule in my favor. My SO and I both get a laugh out of this, However, my SO seemed hesitant to accept the ruling but she eventually relented. Candy corn is finally acknowledged as the awful candy it is. Next I ask for for a petty roll for an argument we had about when and where something was said. I always make a bigger deal about this so I too the petty penalty. I would need between 1-5 to succeed. A five is rolled. My SO seems to suspect something is wrong and she refuses to accept the ruling at first, but eventually she relents. We roll again and I decide to take an even dumber request/proposal, that I can lightly slap her boobs whenever I want in private and vice versa is he wins the roll. Due to me bringing it up we determine that I need between an 18-20 for me to obtain the coveted boobie slap pass and she needs between 1-17 for her to obtain it. Nat 20. I am cackling at this point but My SO is furious at this and now claims the app was rigged and she then decides to download a separate d20 roller to test Dice Christ’s might. And as we all know Dice Christ is all powerful. a nat 20 is rolled. She loses it and finally claims “fuck Dice Christ! I’m Dice Atheist” My question is how can I save her from Dice Christ’s wrath or is she now a lost soul condemned to forever rolling nat 1s? And also should I take this as a sign that dice Christ approves of my boobie slapping? I submit myself to the court

Grayson Murphy

May it please the court and everyone who serves them. I’m currently having a problem with this player who during combat, simply hides the whole time. He says his character is a scared kid. I did make the campaign about these kids. (Mainly to test the idea, rework it and then launch a full scale campaign where these same characters reunite as adults) His character is a wizard so when he hides the whole combat it messes with the entire balance of the encounter as I balance for 3 combatants, not 2. Am I being too harsh on this character and his story? Or to unfair to the other players?

Emily

PS I hope the honorable, most busty and healthy Justice Axford enjoys her two surprises from me.

Col998

Honorable justices. My DM allowed one of our players to use a wish spell to bring back his old PC (that had turned evil and became a secondary big bad) by rewriting reality so that never happened. This was 2 sessions before the final boss battle with a zombie dragon, and he played it as his original PC rather than his new one. We did a bunch of funny bits with this, but I did feel the DM completely undercut the stakes of the (2 year long) campaign and made the final battle underwhelming. I’m all for fun rule changes, but am I wrong to have been rubbed the wrong way and peeved the DM did this to appease our most chaotic friend?

Jack M

Hello ye humble folks, we I mean Owls I mean Justices and Jake, What is the ruling for a DM talking too fast for you to cast shield, basically dm says “that’s a 19” mid battle knowing that will hit, and as our blade singer wizard was about to cast shield our dm said how much damage was dealt, normally we don’t allow shield to be cast after damage. Was the blade singer in the wrong for contemplating to long, or was the dm to hasty to get wasty? (I’d say it was about 4 seconds between dm announcing the roll and announcing damage, online session, mid battle for context)

Abigail Martin

To the benevolent Justices of the Court and their oafish Bailiff, may I present to you the case of the pet obsessed player. I’ve run two campaigns for this player so far, and these have been their first games. They’re wonderful at the game, but they have an obsession with making every creature and non human NPC their pet. Notably, when talking to a faerie dragon knight, they insisted on “taming him.” When I said “he’s just a guy,” they got upset and clocked out of the session. How do I crave my player’s need for a menagerie of pets?

Morgan

May it honor the whole supreme crit, but honor fellow salt being Murph twice; I’m DM for a group of friends I’ve known a long time, in a campaign set in an urban fantasy town in north Michigan. On the first session, our Tabaxi rogue that I reluctantly allowed be named “Che Stercheetah” pulled a gun out on the first person he saw, who happened to be the middle man for the party’s first business dealing. After about two minutes of the henchman floundering and basically saying he was just there to do his job, I ended up saying he had an extra bonus supply of cash that he paid the party higher than the amount he already stated he had. When asked why he pulled a gun on someone actively working with him, I was given the excuse “well we’re in Michigan right? My characters from the streets of Detroit, and he doesn’t care”. Was I a limp-wristed coward for rewarding this behaviour? Should I have had this behaviour go unrewarded, or even punished? Or, especially with less experienced players, should I just lean into the quick-violence skid, and just have them meet scumbags who deserve it? I seek the crits infinite wisdom.

NoLifeKitty

The lonely Lich To the honorable crit justices and the honorable and handsome bailiff, may it please the court. I submit to you a court case to be tried on letting cute lich friendships be left alone. During my and my partners first campaign her eladrin rouge (Nylah the faithless) rolled an exceptional crit to befriend a lich (after having already saved his life) and thus allowed our party to circumvent the last a part of a dungeon in Curse of Strahd. When leaving the dungeon after expressing how sad and alone the lich was my partner asked to stay in touch with the lich. Our DM (my brother, her brother in law) made a bit of a fuss about being in constant contact with a powerful lich of the realm, my partner argued that she simply wanted to stay in touch and be pen pals but the DM argued that she would meta game. My wife insisted that she simply wanted to make sure the lich wouldn’t be sad and alone again. Our DM compromised and gave the party three scrolls to communicate with the lich, my wife insists to this day that she simply wanted to be friends with the lich so he wouldn’t be lonely. Eventually the DM also claimed two of the three letters to ‘reunite the party’ after we defeated Strahd and took a few weeks off. Was my DM right to limit this for meta purposes or should rule of cool apply and my wife have a very OP but useless pen pal. Thank you for any swift and unbiased judgement. And thank you for all the amazing content.

Court Davies

May it please the sauciest of justices and even saucier bailiff, I was DMing a battle between the party and the BBEG in a climactic final encounter. Our wizard casted Otilukes Resilient sphere, enclosing the boss, bringing the fight to a halt. However, in an effort to try and keep the fight going, I had the boss cast misty step to escape the sphere. The wizard argued that no spell effects can pass through the barrier, and thus the misty step should have failed. I ruled that the nature of teleportation is somewhat ambiguous. Disappearing in one place and reappearing in another doesn't necessarily mean that an effect "passed through" the sphere, therefore the misty step succeeded. Was I wrong in my ruling? Or should our wizard teleport themselves to a better attitude? I throw myself to the mercy of the court!

Iryll Khris Patingo

May it please the court and may it please Jill's sidepiece. I was DMing a campaign where my players were trying to make some extra money in an underground fighting ring. All hell breaks loose after a demon that they've crossed in the past seeks revenge by rigging one of the solo fights to be his death sentence. After the other 3 players break the rules of the ring, and jump into the pit, the bloodthirsty masses jump in as well, turning the arena to a giant mosh pit that the party must maneuver around to defeat the towering demon. Our rogue manages to weave through the crowd and attacks the foe, and asks to use cunning action to hide amongst the crowd. I ruled to roll with disadvantage as she had no steady cover as the crowd was constantly moving but she was standing still, being the odd woman out to a towering 15 foot demon focusing her. She argued to roll with advantage because of the fact that the crowd made it harder for her to be seen since so much is happening. We compromised to a straight roll that lead to her failing the stealth check, and ultimately perishing in this encounter. While she is not salty about the whole situation, it is brought up from time to time, and with that I ask the court: Is her blood on my hands or am I justified in letting my demon win this bout of where's waldo?

Jacob Corona

May it tease the clit. In a recent session, the ranger's pet drake was swallowed alive by a giant invisible fish. When I cast Faerie Fire in the river to highlight the invisible creatures, the DM said that we still could not tell from the outlines which fish had swallowed it. The ranger argued that we would be able to see the drake's outline within the fish's larger outline. Who was right?

Tristan Belzer

May this please the all knowing and ultimately honorable court and the some knowing and mostly honorable bailiff. My party was investigating the murder of a religious leader in the main city of my DMs world. Throughout the campaign we have been based out of a pub, run and owned by our two Paladins, Thonk and Stonk. As we got too close to the truth, the BBEG sent a tabaxi monk to send us a message, by burning down our pub in the night. The goal of this was to displace us and take our resources as a end of Act 2 kind of move. However, Stonk the Paladin took offense to this, and argued that the DM should give us gold for burning down the pub, arguing that since Stonk was such a shrewd businessman, he’d have the pub insured. The DM obviously said no to this, claiming that since this was medieval setting, there are no insurance agents to make this a reality. Stonk struck back by sending the group an article about insurance practices in Ancient Rome, again arguing that the pub be insured. The DM said no again, arguing that it was never established that he insured the pub. Stonk then proceeded to ask every NPC about insurance and how to get it for the rest of the session, derailing our investigation to try to get his beloved pub insured. The DM eventually muted him in the discord and ended the session. My question, is insurance a logical part of a fantasy setting, or do we deserve our home/pub be burned without receiving a singular coin?

Luke S

May it please the raddest justices and the just as rad and qualified bailiff... After a battle with our campaigns BBEG, our party was for forced to find their way back to civilization. Throughout the journey the players were struck with multiple levels of exhaustion. Unable to find any substantial nourishment, one player decided to try eating tree bark to quell his hunger. The DM after "suggesting" that this was a bad idea agreed that he would need to do a series of checks to not only swallow but avoid choking on the bark. Lo and behold the player choked on the bark and died because of it. Furious, the player stood up from the table and ran outside demanding to prove that a normal human wouldn't choke on bark. After ripping a piece of bark off a tree and beginning to chew, the player unsurprisingly struggled to get it down and nearly choked. Flabbergasted by the display and in an attempt to quell tensions, the DM allowed the player to reroll one of his failed rolls. Miraculously the player succeeded and survived, but incurred another level of exhaustion given the struggle of swallowing the bark. The player would later die just a few miles from civilization thanks to his new level of exhaustion. I ask you, who was in the right? Should the DM have stuck to their judgment and not allowed the player to reroll or it unfair to have the player role not to choke? Should outside examples ever change judgment delivered by Dice Christ? We humbly await your judgment.

Mary H.

Dear respectable Crit justices and honourable balif Jake. The first time I played D&D, I made a lot of mistakes and the interpersonal dynamic of our group was a little messy to say the least. While fun was had and heroic adventure achieved, there was a lot of crap that was leveled at me and my character specifically it seemed, directly from the DM. The DM seemed to favor my friend and their character (and granted my friend and her character was SUPER COOL) over the other member of our party and myself. We were a party of 3PCs and 2 NPCs, one of whom was our party leader kind of, guiding us thru the DM's world and story. But as it was my first time playing, understanding that my choices and attitudes factored into the discomfort and miscommunication which occured, and wanting to give the benefit of the doubt to my DM, I have had a hard time definitively saying that the DM did something "wrong." So I submit the set up for our final battle for your consideration and analysis. We were level 6, (started at 3 and leveled up fast to finish the mini campaign) had just battled several minions outside of the BBEG's keep and then were attacked again by more minons and a Stone Giant. When we woke up for the Final Battle, the BBEG and 1 PC bantered while the other was in stasis (the Stone Giant had absorbed the rest of our party) and I was one level below, in a jail cell, without my spell components and no long rest. I spent the majority of the fight trying to escape from my jailer who was going to unleash another dangerous element to the big fight upstairs, while my friends duked it out with the BBEG and at least 2 minions. I felt sidelined, handicapped, and frustrated, spending 3 turns attacking a jail door b/c i had already used my 4th level spell slot that day so I couldn't Dimension Door, twice over b/c the guards had taken my spell components pouch! The DM later said that he had put me there so I could have a chance to stop a secondary monster from showing up and making the Main Battle more difficult for the party, his reasoning that I was just as vital as the other PCs. But judges, I was l trapped behind a cell door without all of my spells or hp, a full level below the BBEG and my friends exchanging battle banter. Am I right in thinking that my DM sidelined me? And conscious choice or not, is this a misstep worthy of punishment? Thank you for your consideration. You all honor us with your wisdom and wit.

Matthew Cheesman

May it honour the Court's High-Minded Justices, and may the sallow, sunken eyes of the downtrodden Bailiff look to the mighty bench and quiver. I present the case of the blind traveler: I entered the city in the underdark in my one-on-one campaign and I did not have darkvision. I found my way to the local school to attempt to find a child to be my guide. I eventually found one to take me to the castle. I arrived at the castle and the guards stopped me. What ensued was a 30 minute debate between my character and the guards concerning the fact that the king had no interest in seeing me. As one of the sole travellers from the surface, I think I should have been given an audience. I camped out on the steps for two nights and eventually the king would see me. Was I wrong to believe myself owed an audience with the local monarch?

David Moelker

If it pleases the court, and hopefully the Bailiff received my Bribe in the mail. In the spirit of keeping it short I will leave out all unimportant details. My friend offered to run a level 20 one shot and said he'd make it so we were super powerful. During the first encounter we were all disabled and killed. I was banished, and the other two players got stunned by a bunch of mages. So my question is simple, should a DM be out to beat the players asses in a encounter, or to make it fun. I humbly await your judgement P.S. it may be important to note that his girlfriend broke up with him half an hour before the game.

MJMM

May it please the court I play a Mercenary whose main reason for adventuring is to send money to his wife (Mala). During a quest in the Faewild a curse turned my male Bearfolk character into a female Water Genasi. On our way to reverse this we stopped in my home village to explain what happened to my wife, and with my rerolled Charsima and magical abilities wooed her and had a romantic evening. The next day before we left the DM tells us that my wife ran after us out of the village and said she preferred me this way. I argued with my DM (and are still arguing) that a couple of good charisma checks shouldn't erase the years of backstory relationship my character has with his wife. My DM argues my wife has been unhappy in our marriage for a while (a fact I didn't know) and that this makes for a better story. Do you think my DM is right and I should roll with this for the story? Or should my backstory of my Bearfolk wife guy mean more then one enchanting evening?

Thomas Troy

May it please the Honorable Crit and the other guy, I present to the court a curious quandary. My DM let a new player join our campaign 3/4th of the way through. When it came time to pick a race, the new player chose Centaur rather than something from the Player's Handbook like we suggested. This came at rather poor timing because we had just entered an Under Sea portion of the campaign. Thanks to some Amulets of Water Breathing we were able to swim down to some under water ruins. But this is where the question arose of "What does a Centaur even look like when it swims?" Does it kick his horsey legs and breath stroke with it's human arms? Does it kick all limbs in unison to propel itself forward? This conversation that I brought up embarrassed the new player to the point of letting a shark eat the Centaur so he could come back as a new character. Was I in the wrong for embarrassing this player for the sake of painting an accurate picture of the scene?

Alexander Robinson-Gabel

May it please the court and the 12 foot tall bailiff One of my campaigns has been in need of more people to play and our GM decided that posting the link to the discord and game description (ravenloft) in random youtube video comment sections would get us people. We had no idea we were in for the ride of our life. A guy who sounded maybe late 30s to 40s took interest and joined the game. He was very willing to learn how to use fantasy grounds (the VTT we use) and made a great noble character. We were all excited as it seemed like maybe his first time trying dnd I am normally INCREDIBLY chaotic. From fucking up the flow of time, to getting 2 different PCs I made killed in one session (I am not on character #7). Note that none of those deaths were on purpose and honestly I may have deserved one or 2. BUT this time I was sooooooo nice. I basically just walked up the the new character, facilitated introductions and even turned into an NPC for a second and said “I need help taking care of a dangerous priest who has been creating Frankenstein monsters from innocent people. Will you help me on my quest?” They asked the GM for an alignment roll (neither of us knew what that was but he kept asking for it). He said he was NOT trying to insight check me. That he was asking the GM to decide for him based on his alignment. We said he had to make that decision himself. He was neutral good I believe. He then kept asking the GM what his character would do based on previous knowledge. The GM obliged and said “ok so it’s a little bit of a lore dump but basically..” and was immediately cut off by “I don’t want any lore”. We were both stunned to silence and unsure of where to go next. After a GRUELING 15 minute convo about why me saying this guy cuts off faces SHOULD indicate the priest is bad. They finally agree to help. But not actually help. He said he would have his character follow me, then decide whether or not to help based on whatever new info came. At that point we said fuck it. We are still in the starting area in the middle of the road an hour and a half after starting. Sure whatever. The player then insisted his noble had to be coerced into letting us use their house because (despite the gm saying otherwise) they were NOT the head of their house. In the end they wound up just getting us a room at an inn Mind you the whole time he is asking the GM to make decisions for him when posed questions or situations, alignment checks and seemed overall unable to understand the concept of being a person with their own thoughts. (Despite having the concept or RP or making decisions for themselves repeatedly outlined). By the end we didn’t even care that he didn’t RP. We just wanted him to stop asking the GM about getting alignment checks every 9 minutes on anything anyone says (which we were STILL confused about because he COULDNT EXPLAIN WHAT HE MEANT) By the end me and the GM had to hop off and into a separate call where we had to discuss whether or not WE were the bad people or whether or not this was a lunatic sent from asmodeous himself. So I ask the court, are me and my GM guilty of trying too hard to get this guy to play a certain way or was he honestly as crazy as he made us feel.

Jules Popoff

I was recently invited into a tWBtWL campaign and something felt odd, a lot of the usual safety nets I'm used to weren't put in place and the DM seemed to revel in the thought of us failing at any task, common phrases were 'You could do that' and 'Oh I'm not stopping you' except he would be stalling the whole time and not actually addressing what we wanted to do. I decided I didn't like the vibe and announced during a one shot filler that it would be my swan song as I just wasn't feeling the play style. The DM got defensive and said he was used to playing with people 'his age' a topic he'd been deliberately dodgy about in the past. Upon pressing him it came out he was 16 and had lied to my friends who had invited me into this game in the first place. For context most of the rest of the group is in their 30's and understandably a few of us felt gross and had to bow out. I feel like I let the game draw out too long for all the warning signs. Am I right to be upset with this GM for deliberately concealing his age to join a group of adults?

Mitch

Dear Honorable Judges and Stalwart Bailiff, I have been running a western campaign for a while and one of my players is a centaur. The issue started when he chose the cavalier class, specifically with the feature Born to the saddle. He says that since he is mounted at all times, he should have advantage against falling at all times, and should always land on his feet if he falls less than 10 feet. I think this is ridiculous, and he should have to be riding a horse to gain these benefits. I offered to let him choose a different subclass, but he won't budge. Judges, who is right and who is wrong?

Birfolg the Firbolg

To the highly esteemed Supreme Crit Justices and the case reader guy who wears short shorts, may it please the court. Some time ago, I ran the Death House module as a grimdark campaign starter for two friends, an Aasimar Cleric named Krennic and an Eladrin Rune Knight named Luca. They were accompanied by a cowardly Halfling Bard NPC named Timothy Thistletoe to provide some support as Death House is a notoriously deadly module. In session 0 we made their characters and I made it clear this could be a deadly campaign. Everything was going great until they started the final battle versus a shambling mound flavored as a mass of flesh and screaming mouths. After a hard battle, the party had the BBEG on the ropes despite being low on hit points. Krennic, the Cleric, had the mound restrained with a re-skinned entangle spell manifesting as spectral chains. I rolled terribly for the monster and it was unable to break the restraint so all they had to do was stand back and finish from range. It was at this time that the cleric rushed in to finish the monster with a melee strike but was unable to land the final blow. Dumbfounded, I rolled with disadvantage for the monster...and hit the Krennic the Cleric, dropping him and absorbing him into the monster thus breaking the restrained condition. Everything went downhill after that. The rune warrior stood his ground for one more turn before fleeing but he was overtaken by the mound. The sole survivor was Timothy the cowardly halfling who fled as soon as Krennic went down. My friends still razz me for TPKing them on session 1 of a campaign although I still maintain that they did it to themselves since Krennic rushed the restrained monster. I prostrate myself before the beautiful legs of the course and trust in your evergreen wisdom on this matter: Was the TPK justified?

Jennifer Bowie

May it please the esteemed Crit Justices and the affable bailiff who keeps them in order ... mine is a request for counsel (perhaps a probate court consideration?) rather than for a ruling of law. While Justices Murphy and Axford may be best suited to enter their opinions, all advice is welcome. I've been married to my GM for going on 27 years. (Yes, 27 years.) We started playing 2nd edition D&D together in 1995 and have played weekly almost ever since (I'm not doing that math, but it's a lot of table time). We're currently playing first edition Pathfinder. He loves all of the "crunchy" rules. I enjoy role playing (colorful characters who end up being combat ineffective seem to be my specialty). Because I often leave the game table frustrated and annoyed with my GM over everything from 30-minute rules lawyer discussions with other players to my stymied NPC interaction attempts (and not just because Dice Christ hates all of my dice), I implore the court to share insights as to how the Justices maintain marital bliss at the game table. I thank the court for its time and attention.

barrowlight

May it please all the hot Crit and corpuscular Baliff, Before custom lineages, I built my characters based on min/maxing, and my last three characters have been on the beast side(shifter, lizardfolk, a Minotaur) and as a result, I’ve been accused of being a furry, and that these characters are my “fursona” and I wanna kiss all the other furries. Worst yet, I leaned into the bit and now my fiancé is convinced I love furries as well and keeps offering to wear a fur suit for me! My question to you, honourable Crit, do I deserve this treatment, my characters have been stacked as hell. Also, how do I get my fiancé to wear the suit without coming off too eager

Alexander Thomas Ruppert

May it please the court and the honorable baliff Jake. I present the case of the Forest Gnome. During character creation for a campaign, my DM and I disagreed about the versatility of the "Speak with small beasts" ability for the Forest Gnome. The ability states that "Through sounds and gestures, you may communicate simple ideas with small or smaller beast". When discussing how the ability could be used, my DM said that these small animals would only be able to communicate single or two word responses. Responses like "yes, food" "scary, there" and "something ahead" were used. My argument was that simple ideas could extend slightly further than that. I interpreted the ability as a less useful "speak with animals" in which I could ask the small animals simple questions and receive simple, but more specific answers than what the DM said. I know the DM has the final say, but I think he was nerfing the characters' Rules As Written ability. I lay myself at the court's feet for judgement.

Eva Vasileiadou

May it please the honorable justices and that other guy So typically the friend of my best friend dms campaigns that last about two months each, and it was my fourth campaign ever when my best friend decided he wanted to dm a session. He had been planning it for a month or so and was super excited to show us all, and I was also really excited to see what story he would paint for us, given that he is an extremely creative and imaginative person. Personally, I thought he was doing an amazing job, and fell in love with the story he created, but four sessions in, he began to get noticeably discouraged at how much work he had to put in for each session, given that our previous dm showed up to each session with nothing prepared and wrote unbelievably amazing campaigns completely improvised. On top of that, he was preparing to move for college soon, so he decided to just cancel the entire campaign. I, who loved the campaign, and was also pretty new to dnd and had never had this happen before, was very upset that I would not see my character have a satisfying ending to her story. To be fair, I get unreasonably sentimentally attached to inanimate objects and/or fictional characters, so much so that I kept my first car, Eugene, until my brakes stopped working, along with many, many other problems, and despite my mom offering to buy me a new car, it took three times of me skidding into a busy intersection for me to agree to get rid of him. In addition, we had been friends for ten years already at the time, and another reason why I was so attached to the campaign was that it was excuse to spend more time with him before he left. I begged my friend to at least have a final session to finish off our stories, and after much convincing, he finally agreed, and he gathered us all, just to hold a 30 minute session where he killed all of our characters in really shitty ways, including the party’s pet dog. When the session was over, I took him aside, telling him that I was shocked and disappointed with the ending, and that it seemed really out of character for him to do that, to which he basically shrugged and said that I had gotten what I had asked for. Was I selfish to ask for him to prepare one final session when he clearly was in a very stressful time in his life, preparing for such a serious lifestyle change of moving away for college, or should he have at least taken the time to plan out just one single session to give the campaign the ending that it deserved?

Josh

May it please the court and the Bailiff however the vibe is on the day. I present to you the case of the dust mix-up I was in a stealth like mission in which the party had to infiltrate a party to gain information. At one point we had been discovered and me thinking quickly decided to pull out our invisibility powder and throw it over the whole party. However my DM asked me if I was checking carefully in our bags as I was looking for the powder and said it would take an action to find I argued I should be able to roll an investigation check and with an 18 believed I had found the powder However after throwing it over our team my DM narrated how we all began coughing and choking and we’re not invisible at all. It turns out my 18 check was not high enough and instead of grabbing the invisibility powder I had instead thrown Dust of Sneezing and Choking. My issue is that my DM only told me the dc was higher than 18 after I threw the powder. I humbly await the court preceding.

Ryan Boshart

May it please the court and our tireless bailiff, my party recently came into an Experience Points conundrum: While adventuring in the Underdark towards a lost city, our party faced off against 2 Djinnis that stopped us in our tracks. I cast banishment at a 5th level on my initiative to target both elemental creatures; both of them failed their saving throw, being sent back to their plane of origin for good and ending the encounter during the first round. As my PC is a Genasi Wizard with an Intelligence score of 20, it was not disputed that this move was cheap or considered metagaming. When the session ended and our DM tallied our Experience, he did not include the 2 elementals that I banished, quote: "It feels weird to reward the whole group for defeating a pair of CR11 monsters with a single spell before they even moved". We've since had several more great sessions, but I throw myself before the court; should a party get the experience points for creatively and quickly ending an encounter?

Spam Jackal

Dice Christ Confession: Please d4-give me for I have sinned. I was playing a rogue in a one shot. I had mistakenly thought dodge was part of cunning action, and had kept doing it. It both didn’t matter until the final combat, when an attack would’ve brought me down missed instead. At that point, I had realized my mistake but kept doing it anyway since my DM hadn’t noticed. I fall prostrate and await my penance. Edit: Previous version had *disengage*, I meant to say dodge

Tim S.

May it please the deific Crit Justices and the beatific Bailiff, I must know if my party and DM should face justice for unknowingly feeding our rogue to a gelatinous cube and not helping him due to our characters not having player knowledge. Our party was pretending to bring our rogue to this evil warlord and had him in chains he could break out of (see the Star Wars Chewbacca precedent). Our plan was to let him do some reconnaissance while we distracted the warlord with pleasantries. Our barbarian was allowed to take the rogue to the dungeon while the rest of us talked with the warlord, and each prison cell was a shallow pit. Both barbarian and rogue failed their Perception checks at this point, and the barbarian unknowingly threw the rogue into the cell with a Gelatinous Ooze before returning to the audience chamber with us. Our rogue was quickly engulfed by the ooze and could not call for help. Since our plan was to wait for a signal from the rogue, all we as players could do was helplessly chat up the warlord while the rogue slowly died from acid damage. The DM tried to give the rogue outs but the dice were not in his favor at all. I as a Cleric even asked if I could receive some divine inspiration to check on the rogue, but I failed my religion check. The rogue died unceremoniously. Is there anything we could have done differently? This was years ago and we are all more experienced now, but the player is still salty about it to this day and brings up how we abandoned him. Extra Evidence: Adding insult to injury for the rogue, the warlord was actually making some really good points, and we eventually were convinced to join him.

Stephen Burns

May it please the honorable justices and Jake. I bring you the case of a T-Rex in the basement. I am the DM to a druid who loves to polymorph himself and others into fun animals. The party was fighting a couple monsters in the basement of an inn. I had already established the ceilings were 15 feet high for another player. The druid on his turn polymorphs into a T-Rex, which is a huge sized beast. A huge sized creature takes up 15x15 feet. I told the player he would have disadvantage with his tail attack, but his bite he could roll normally. I thought the space was a tight fit for a T-Rex to begin with and it would be difficult for him to swing his tail around with out damaging other players or the building. He argued that a T-Rex isn't cube shaped and would not actually take up all of the 15x15 ft space in all directions. He thought the T-Rex should have some maneuverability within his 15ft space. Was I fair in giving this Mighty Morphin player disadvantage?

mira

May it please the court and the wonderful bailiff: I recently had a bit of a “friend breakup” with my roommate, who moved out on me without any notice. She was integral to our group dnd campaign, which I DM. I decided that her character had to be killed off (this is kind of the only thing that will make sense for the story) but my friends in the party have saved her life not once, not twice, but thrice. I was not going to fudge rolls or play her badly, but now I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to kill her character, because my party is hell bent on keeping her alive. They KNOW that I’m trying to get her out of the story, but their characters would want to keep her character alive. Am I being unfair, trying to kill her? Or are my players being unfair by not giving me the sweet release of killing off my ex-best friends character, and thus making me play her for the rest of the campaign? I humbly await your wise judgement.

Eric Wills

Your honors and the big buff bailiff boy, I present the case of medicine vs magic. I am running a campaign consisting of my very academically smart cousins and mutual friends where their characters are all half siblings to a very promiscuous elf bard father. In one of the earlier sessions I had them battling some funguses that resembled a beholder. On death it explodes and after a failed constitution save it infects characters with a disease that kills in some amount of time unless cured. My players argued that if they cast purify food and drink on the rations that they were carrying something about “the blood brain barrier” because of medical science the now purified food should cure the whole party of the disease. I resisted because by their own logic, if in real life I ate a steak that had been treated with antibiotics, that I would not be cured of pneumonia or some other deadly disease. After much arguing over the real life medical science and 2 of the players quoting their medical training as a real life nurse, and chiropractor. I let them make a medicine/arcana check to use the spell in a way that it was not designed to do. It failed. They continued to argue with me till I pulled the “I’m the DM” trump card. They eventually used the Paladin’s lay on hands ability to cure the disease of those infected. I would have let it go… but they continue to try and use “real life science” to both under-power my encounters and overpower their abilities. Am I wrong to pull the DM card or do I need to go back to school and get more science education so I can properly argue with my players. I await the courts verdict…

Just adopted a male bearded dragon and had to name it. So welcome to the family CHASE LIZ-ARD-SON.

May it please the Supreme Crit Justices and the bottom-feeding Anglerfish of a baliff, In a recent campaign arc finale I DM'd, the party fought against a lackey of the BBEG. Through this leg of the campaign, I described evidence that this lackey left behind to make him seem inept and cowardly, including throwing bones of sacrificed creatures into a shallow hole and needing a condescending step-by-step list of tasks from the BBEG, telling the lackey to not screw up or be a coward. In the battle, I had this lackey cast Black Tentacles, a Concentration spell, trapping three of the players in the difficult terrain and needing to pass DEX saves against bludgeoning damage. The Ranger hit the lackey with an arrow, who went down, but the tentacles remained. I told the Ranger to roll Insight, which he succeeded. I told him the lackey was scared and playing possum and pretending to be dead, but the Ranger accused me of not wanting to give up my precious tentacles and the lackey going down meant he was down and concentration should be broken. Am I in the wrong? Should I have stopped the effects of the tentacles, or is my player just trying to shenanigan their way out of trouble?

ChromaticMars

If it may please the gracious and benevolent Justices... And Baliff Jake. During a character creation session, I argued with my DM about a possible Bee Keeper Druid going into wild shape as a giant bee and laying eggs to build a giant bee swarm army (or even normal sized bees). My argument was that when an animal lays an egg it’s not considered a birth because it’s not fertilized, and that laying eggs is more like a menstration or ovulation, so my little bee body could lay eggs as long as it’s ovulating, even timing my ovulation specifically to wild shape into a Bee and lay as many eggs for as long as I can, BUT the special thing with bees is that non-fertilized Eggs still become worker drone bees that follow and take care of the Queen (aka their Mommy bee me). So would you rule that I indeed can become a Bee Keeper Druid can form a Giant Swarm of Bees Army?

Katie Chin

Forgive me Dice Fathers, High Priestess, and Bishop Jake for I have sinned. This is my confession. Back when I DM'd my first campaign, I had the party enter a goblin dungeon that had a climb check. Every time they climbed up or down, I'd have them make the climb check and if they failed, they'd take fall damage. This happened a few times until their level 1 characters were hurt enough to not survive the eventual goblin encounter and they were TPK'd. I had the fight be non- lethal so the adventure continued with them captured, but my sin was that I knew they all had rope in their packs and purposefully didn't remind them. This was even though their characters would know, it would have saved them all the frustration, and they were all new to d&d as well. In retrospect, i now know being a DM isn't about being against the party at least in this meta sense, but the days of my young recklessness still weigh heavy in my heart. I await the word of Dice Christ.

Dylan C

I love how much jack stresses the breif part

Bryan Holt

To the honorable justices and the beefy bailiff. I created grenades of animate objects as a warlock, borrowing some power from my patron the baba yaga (May she not take us this night). I discussed their creation with the dungeon master, who approved them over chat. I was told that if I wanted to create a potion that had a spell effect I would just spend the amount of gold that it would cost to build a scroll and that they would be used by other players. During a challangeing fight with a half dragon the grenades helped to tilt the action economy towards us players. I then was penalized by the DM because according to him it would have been impossible to calculate how much the jukebox machine in the corner could turn the tide of battle. My grenades were taken as were my XP for the fight. Justices, was it right for them to perloin my potions? Was I a Min Max Menace?

Salil

Not sure if this is a court case or Dice Christ confession, but here goes. May it please the court and the bailiff who makes amazing wallets. I have 3 PCs in my game, Art the Artificer, Lizzy the Rogue (with a level of bard) and Dan the Paladin (with a level of Hexblade). During our sessions, Art's character is frequently picked on by the other two PCs. They've left him to die at an angry mob, done intimidation checks against him, and even deliberately tried to mess up his investigation checks by trying to sneak up on him and distract him. When we had a guest PC join us for a session, even he noticed it. It also might have to do with the fact that some of the PCs will drink wine (half to full bottle per session) and occasionally have edibles while we are playing. I haven't tried to intervene since 1. We remain friends outside the game and 2. The wine/edibles make them do CRAZY stuff, which has made for some entertaining encounters. If it helps with the decision making, Art and Lizzy are dating IRL and have been for several years, before I even met them. As the DM, should I be doing more to prevent this behavior, either the picking on Art in game or the consumption of substances during the game? I await your judgement and hope to redeem myself in the eyes of the Court and Dice Christ.

Dustin Colwell

Dearly beloved Judges and Baliff. I was DMing a fantasy campaign and one of my players changed alignments to evil through magical means. This player took it to an extreme, murdering every townsperson bartender and child they saw, to the horror of the party. I argued with them that even Hitler or Darth Vader could TALK to people sometimes without murdering them. The player insisted this is what evil meant. So later when the entire party was arrested for their actions. I denied the evil player a cool escape scene they attempted (because I was petty and annoyed by them) and made the rest of the party come rescue them. They were since cured of their evil curse but I still wonder if I was too harsh, making them sit alone while the rest of the party escaped and freed them. I submit myself to your judgements.

InkTank

Dear knowledgable Supreme Crit Justices and the thickly quadded, yet humble Bailiff/s - my fledgling DND group desperately need your advice. Our group is new and inexperienced but our DM (who volunteered so the rest of us could play) has been rewarded for his noble sacrifice with the HIGHEST possible blessing from Dice Christ. His rolls are incredible! Godlike even. We play online so all dice rolls are visible to all and impossible to fudge, and yet we barely scrape through nearly every combat. Hits, Crits and maximum damage are all our DM seems able to throw! Our poor characters are ambushed, sniped and clobbered unconscious in seconds, as we whiff our spells and miss our attacks. It is, honestly, very hilarious and every encounter is exhilarating as it comes down to the wire in insane clutches. I worry however that our games are stressing our DM as he struggles desperately to pull his punches so he won’t TPK us, for fear of tarnishing our groups first campaign. I seek the courts advice. How can we get our DM to blaspheme in the eyes of Dice Christ so his rolls return to normal, and he may finally DM in peace?

Beav

A MODIFIED DICE DILEMMA Forgive me justices, for i may have sinned. I know there is no separation of church and state in this court, so i lay before you a potential transgression. I am conflicted regarding a bbeg I’ve designed for a homebrew campaign that takes place in a magical New York City in the 1920’s. The ultimate villain is a mastermind halfling gangster by the name of “Lucky La Flora” who has trapped the god of luck in a gem and constantly siphons their power. In addition to several other feats and abilities, I had originally decided to represent this aspect of “godlike luck” by making all of his rolls with a modified d20. It is not weighted but does not contain a 1 or a 2 and instead has two 19’s and two 20’s on it. However, my conscious is beginning to eat at me as my players draw closer to the final battle. So your Honors, i ask you: Am i spitting in the face of dice christ if i chose to roll with this powerful d20 or is this, in fact, a rad mechanic? Please guide me in this moral quandary.

SoupLightning

May it please the court and thoroughly satisfy Baliff Jake so much so that he doesn't think about his divorce with Jill for Trevor. This is the bloodthirsty players vs the DM I was Dming a game for some friends and their friends who were not new to D&D but who were new to taking the RPing aspect seriously. We had 2 lawful good paladins, an evil sorcerer. And a chaotic neutral bard. The party sought out the mayor of the town after discovering a cult they suspected of being the bad guys. The guards told them the mayor was busy but could see them in an hour and the party should come back. The party decided to slaughter all the guards and meet the mayor right away. The party almost killed all the guards but was unable to stop a guard from rining the alarm which turned the fight into a much harder battle. Nearly defeated, the bard tried to persuade the guards they were good guys. I told the bard this would be very hard as they had killed so many already and with no real cause other than being told they couldnt see the mayor right away. I rolled insight for the guard behind the DM screen and the bard used cutting words to reduce its total. Initially i said the persuasion roll passed because the numbers but said that guard is convinced but not all the guards. My party was mad at me for not letting the persuasion roll resolve the fight. And after the session ended they wouldnt play with me again. Was it fair for me to rule this way or were my players right to be upset. I await your humble guidance. -Soup

Matt Kilsby

Dice Christ Confession: Deck of Many Things Edition I've been feeling some post-fudging guilt and regret over this flagrant rejection of Dice Christ's whims. I'm running my first ever campaign for my friends and finally got round to throwing the DoMT at them. One player decided to draw 3. I knew he wouldn't stop at one, his name is Tinynonce McBeardshagger which gives you an idea of his general vibe. I had reduced the deck to 20 and assigned a number to each so all they had to do was roll a D20 and I'd tell them the card and its effects. Card 1 - Jester - "You gain 10,000 XP". So far so lucky. Card 2 - Idiot - "Permanently reduce your Intelligence by 1d4 + 1". OH NO. Tinynonce's intelligence was already a heavy dump stat at 6. He rolled a 3, making his new intelligence score 2. Barely sentient, he's basically a plant with a shield now. Card 3 - Talons - "Every magic item you wear or carry disintegrates." This is wear the fudging occured. Reading this, it just felt too savage, too cruel, and too far from fun to take his wits and ALL his sick items in the span of 2 minutes, so I just picked what was next on the list: "Throne: You gain proficiency in the Persuasion skill, and you double your Proficiency Bonus on checks made with that skill." This seemed like a reasonable fudge as it's not too amazing. But it does mean that somehow he's basically a sack of potatoes with all the guile and persuasiveness of a master businessman. Did I do the right thing?? I felt at the time it would ruin the fun too much, but in hindsight, he did choose to pick that many cards, knowing how bad the outcomes could be. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes etc. Please judge me as you see fit, O acolytes of Dice Christ. I await your righteous verdict.

An_Armed_Bear

May it please the court, I present the case of the Dwarven Diamond Dilemma. In a campaign I played in, our party discovered that the dwarven city we had been allied with throughout the campaign was creating artificial scarcity with diamonds. It turned out they a mines full of the stuff under their city but pretended there were very few to drive prices up. While the players understood this was just meant to be a riff on the real-life diamond market, the revelation still mortified some of our characters since diamonds can be used for life-saving magic, and we wanted to do something about it. However, the whole thing was sort of brushed over for laughs by our DM and we continued working with the dwarves the rest of the campaign despite our characters' grievances. Were we right to want to shift gears to a monopoly-busting sidequest, or were just we taking the whole thing too seriously?

Kayla Holmes

Your Honours Axford, Tanner and Murphy and Mr. Hurwitz, I bring to you the case of the Notorious Nap. I play a half-elf, half-orc warlock who has the fey ancestry racial trait (ie magic can't put you to sleep). We were inching our way towards a major time-sensitive battle and running low on HP and spell slots, so a member of the party cast Catnap to give us a tighter short rest. However, our DM stated that since my character (and another member of the party) cannot be put to sleep by magical means, the spell would not affect us. This led to pretty heavy debate about sleep vs "unconscious." Eventually we dropped it and went on without a rest, but it's still something I think about daily and intensive Googling has been fruitless. For further context, the battle went very poorly and a member of the party was True Polymorphed into a needle (she was a straw-inspired summer Eladrin named Haystack) after a counterspell-off and stolen by the BBEG--we have yet to recover our beloved pun-fodder. While I respect our DM's authority, I still kind of begrudge not having the chance to come in with a clutch counter-counter-counterspell so I am turning to the court and humbly await your ruling.

Quinn Campagna

Most Honorable and Supreme Justices, and Lowly but Built Bailiff, may it please the court, I don't have a case, but I would like to submit an amicus brief to several previous cases, namely "The Players v. a Sailing Ship" and "The Players v. a Flying Ship," and a new question to consider in the case. For context, I am a physics graduate student and a DM. The main question of these two cases hinges on the reference frame of a spell. In physics, there is no absolute reference frame for the universe. In other words, there is no objective "grid" that one can measure distance/movement in relation to. It must always be in reference to something else. So, for example, we generally use the Earth as our reference frame, and measure distance relative to a point on the Earth's surface. Therefore, one would think that a spellcaster could choose this as the reference frame of their spell. However, the mechanics of spellcasting in D&D seem to imply a set reference, namely that of the spellcaster at the time of casting the spell. First, all spells with a casting range specify that the range is some distance away from the caster, implying that the caster sits at the origin of this "grid." Second, if we consider a spell like Silence cast on solid, unmoving terrain, I think everyone would agree that the spell effect would remain in place even if the caster moves. This implies that once the spell is cast, it remains in the same reference frame. Now, let's return to the cases in question. If our spellcaster is standing on a moving ship, their reference frame is moving with the ship. This would mean that once Silence is cast, it would continue to travel in the same direction and with the same speed as the ship, even if the caster moves, falls overboard, etc. This now brings up another question: if the ship changes speed or direction, will the spell effect then diverge from the ship? I would argue yes, but I would love to hear an opinion from our honorable justices

Matthew Millions

May it please the noble Crit Justices and the gutterborn bailiff. I present the case of The Guest Player Manslaughter. A few years ago I was running a campaign for a group of co-workers. On a particular session when they were meeting with an adult green dragon, we had a guest player join at the request of the party. The guest had never played D&D before and about 5 minutes into the game he cast moon-beam on the dragon mid-conversation. Now, I had foreshadowed that the dragon was dangerous, cunning, and short-tempered so he naturally retaliated to this action with a breath attack (meant to be a warning blow). However, it ended up doing so much damage that it insta-killed one of the core players of the campaign. Both him and the guest were absolutely devastated. Looking at the anguish on his face, I decided to undo fate and say that he was merely unconscious. They ended up reasoning with the dragon and he went on to live a long adventuring life. Was I right to let him live? Or should we have accepted the consequences that dice christ intended for my folly.

Ben D

Dear most Honorable Justices Axford, Tanner, and Murphy, and also Jake, I guess; may it please the court. This is a player vs dm case, in which I claim a spell was unnecessarily nerfed. My 3rd level centaur bard attempted to cast Skywrite to alert the town of a concert he was holding. The dm then asked me to roll to see if it worked, even though the spell does not ask for a roll. I pass the check but the dm tells me that that is how he'll rule the spell moving forward. It is a 2nd level spell, the highest at my level, and I chose my spells specifically to support a performer-type bard. I never used it again and swapped it out at the next level, despite it being a spell I was excited about using. Was my dm right to nerf the spell? Could it be gamebreaking? Or was I wronged. I'll leave it to the court.

Jack Kwatinetz

May it please the court, the whole court, and nothing but the court, so help me dice christ. My PC is a Bard and during an encounter with a Nightwalker, I used the spell Dissonant Whispers. As part of the effects of failing the saving throw the affected creature "must immediately use its reaction, if available, to move as far as its speed allows away from you." My DM argued that because Nightwalkers are immune to the fear condition, that this part of the effect would not happen. However, from my point of view the Nightwalker should still need to move away from my character, since there is no mention of the fear condition in the description of the spell, just that the creature should move away. Was I correct that the full effect of the spell should have occurred or did my DM make the right call?

Miller Wrenn

To the esteemed justices and charming bailiff, I present to you the case of “Mortent” rolls. My partner and I have a new kitten, named Mort, who loves playing with D20s. For one session, we decided to give him a D20 to roll twice and use them like portent rolls available to the whole party for the session. His first official roll was a nat20! That session went wonderfully but now the party wants Mortent rolls every week. We tried again last week and, lo and behold, Mort rolled another natural 20. I told the group that while I am emotionally in support of the kitten portent rolls, I needed the advice of legal counsel before adding it to the laws of the table. Justices, is my kitten going to break my game or shall I draft an amendment for my table’s Bill of Dice?

Con

I can already hear Emily defending this lmao

Tripp Gustin

May it please the most honorable justices and the semi-honorable bailiff, I beseech thee for your wisdom and judgment. My youth-pastor-flavored paladin (Ezekiel) accidentally came into possession of the Ring of Winter, an item that grants great icy power but apparently has mind-altering effects. After critically failing a save to resist its evil influences, he became subtly corrupted. I tried to honor it in roleplay by having my corny well-meaning straight-edge goofball slowly evolve into a bro-y self-righteous evangelical asshole (with literal frosted tips) who became convinced of his own unassailable brand of righteous justice. This subplot culminated in an encounter between our party and a faction of morally-dubious NPCs we had fought with before, but which we had an uneasy truce with. Ezekiel already distrusted them before his Ice-King-esque transformation, so after some tense words he started blasting away at them with his ring's crazy ice powers. However, our party's wizard really liked those NPCs, so he attempted to stop Ezekiel's high-level ice blast via a counterspell, got outrolled, then chronal shifted that roll to make it stick. It was a cool moment despite the butting heads, but I think IRL emotions got a bit heated as well, and I am worried that it colored my judgment. A huge chaotic battle broke out, during the course of which the wizard misty stepped behind a wall near several of the NPCs. I reasoned that Ezekiel would not be able to see where he had teleported to, so he blasted the whole area with a cone of cold, downing most of the NPCs but the wizard as well. This led to the unconscious wizard getting teleported away by the surviving NPCs, splitting the party and setting up a rescue mission for a future session. Ezekiel was eventually freed from the ring's influence thanks to the power of friendship, but he feels guilty for what he did and to be honest so do I. Was I wrong to hurt a fellow party member in the heat of the moment or was this just good roleplay? Ezekiel lays himself at the mercy of Dice Christ, and the Jesus one too.

garett144

May it please the court and especially Caldwell because this is some Looney Toons shenanigans. I present the case of the jokerfied golem. In this campaign I was playing a rune knight goliath, my cousin joined as a guest character for one session but instead of rolling a character he used a clay golem stat block. During a purple worm fight an attack from the worm did something screwy to him and he started attacking all of us. Upon a 22 insight check all the DM gave me was "he just looks angry" what it was was an enrage mechanic in the golem player. Kinda miffed that thats what a 22 got me i decided to hold down the golem and carve his face into a smile to see if that stopped him. It didn't. Was I being salty at the DM, or was my interpretation of "he just looks angry" fair? In the end we all had a laugh at this so there are no hard feelings.

Hannah & Pedro

I humbly offer my case before the court of cool and the bailiff of badassery. *ka-chow* First time DM, I've been running a campaign for 2 first-time players and 1 semi-experienced player since April that's part CandleKeep Mysteries and mostly homebrewing. Being my first time I've reached out to DM friends for advice, most of whom being incredibly helpful. One DM friend wanted to join my campaign while my players were lvl5, and I agreed. He knew they needed a support-based PC, someone who could heal... so he made an Owlfolk Oath of Conquest Paladin multiclassed with a Fiend Warlock. With no context or backstory it quickly became clear this was a metabuild and he had no intention of playing a support role, going so far as to run away during a fight against a Mossy Horror while another PC was almost down. While I love chaos his shenanigans upset my PCs; asking irrelevant questions and requesting magic items from NPCs, folding laundry in a presumably haunted mansion while a dying man's screams echo around the party, telling other players to give him help actions, and even shopping online during gameplay- forcing us to pause and fill him in on missed details. More offensively, there was something suspicious about his consistently amazing rolls and after some digging I found that he had given himself the Rouge skill "Reliable Talent". I've talked to him about his etiquette/metagaming and he denies it all, insisting that he is simply "more experienced". He's told the party he keeps the group chat muted and has missed most sessions, effectively ghosting us. After the last missed session texting the chat saying he'd slept through his alarm, then texting me separately to insist I make a PC AND THAT HE TAKES OVER DMING THE GAME. I'm at a loss. My players want me to just boot him and I'm not opposed to that. How do I gently and tactfully address this? He brings more frustration than fun, and my players are honestly relieved when he fails to show up for our scheduled games. He even admits to cheating at UNO, who tf cheats at UNO??? Additional context for proposed boot: he's a creep to my youngest player, who is also my sister. He regularly messages her on Insta (same day as missing a game) and comments on her modeling pics. He's been a friend for years but my patience is being tested if not gone. I ask the court for their expertise and empathy, and appreciate their efforts in fostering a helpful and wholesome community for all. -Hannah (she/her)

Ally W

To the honorable judges and the perfectly adequate bailiff Jake. I present the case of the foggy forest mask. During a session last night, my party and I were in a spooky foggy forest. While in a clearing, we discovered 2 dead people and a mask on the ground near them. Another party member did detect magic on the mask, and was told it's "natural magic". I wanted a closer look, so my DM let me do an investigation check. I got a nat 20 and my DM said "it's just a mask". Since it was just a mask, I decided to put it on for fun, and nothing happened. Later that night, our party took a long rest. My DM said I was plagued with nightmares, likely from the mask that I put on, and I didn't get any sleep. Because of this, I got no benefits of a long rest, and I would suffer a level of exhaustion the next day. I was heated because now I’m at a clear disadvantage from the rest of my party, with minimal health, spell slots, and almost no touch hands (I’m a paladin), and now a level of exhaustion and we're in the middle of a sketchy forest. I feel my DM should have at least warned me when I was going to put on the mask that with a Nat 20 I would know that putting it on is probably a bad idea. Am I right in being upset? Or should I just accept what my DM gave me? I accept any and all rulings from the court. Thank you!

Nicolas P.

Instead I offer a confession. Forgive me Dice Christ, for I have committed dice fudgery against one of my players. I was running a gnoll encounter and my player’s Warforged Battle Master was going one on one with a flind (AKA Deeprag). They used their disarming attack three times and it saved on the first two. On the last one however, I rolled one below the DC needed, but in a moment of hubris, I lied and said the flind passed the save. I selfishly put myself above my players and their cool abilities. Please find it in your heart to forgive me.

Ally W

additional context: we rolled high enough that we learned that the 2 dead people in the clearing died from maybe animal attacks (physical wounds, scratches, bites).

Chris Coppel

To the Honorable Crit Justices and the Steadfast Bailiff. I present the case of the Body Swapping Witch I’m currently in a campaign where the DM and myself are the only ones who have played before. Recently, we had a fight against a particularly devious Bog Witch. The party had gotten the witch low, and in an act of desperation, she cast a homebrew spell (Soul Exchange) on my character. I failed my save and our souls switched bodies. This wasn’t clear to my fellow party members who proceeded to immediately use a summoned water elemental to envelop the witch (me), rendering me unable to speak and then viciously murder me before they understood what had happened. My only grievance in this otherwise hilarious situation is that my DM did not allow me to make death saves when I went down. We discussed afterwards, and his stance was that since I was in the body of the witch, I was treated like an NPC and not entitled to death saves and, if I had been allowed to roll, it would have ruined the fun(!?) surprise for the party. He also thought that my death was just a good lesson for the new players about the stakes in the campaign. Am I wrong to be salty about this or is it the DM who deserves punishment? I humbly request your judgement. P.S. After realizing what happened, the party killed the witch (in my body), took the body to town to have it resurrected… which brought the witch’s soul back into my body. She then escaped.

DnDiplomacy

May it please the esteemed crit justices and most diligent and not at all lowly bailiff, I present the case of the baffling teeth. Our DM very kindly planned a hogliday treat: a festive session! I was so excited, until I realised she based it on The Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. I knew at this point that it was my mission not to spoil it for anyone else. Early on, we came across some teeth scattered under the missing Hogfather's chair. A group member examined them, used the identify spell on them, and eventually scooped them into their pocket. We then walked round and round the feasting hall looking for clues. I tried to gently guide with: "do you think the teeth might be a clue?", "Why do you think the teeth are all different?", "Do you think these are linked to the kidnapping?", "Who would be carrying teeth?", and, eventually (in exasperation) "could it be the tooth fairy?" Despite best efforts, we didn't get anywhere and actually ended up stuck in the dining hall before abandoning the game. Should I just have said I read the book and forced them to hunt down the tooth fairy? Or was I right to let them make their own (arguably terrible) choices as I knew the story?

Kate G

May it please the court, and the bailiff if he so feels up to it. My crew has been in a cowboy adventure campaign for over a year now with few issues. In one of the last sessions, our DM - Ethan - told us our wagons were damaged, our horses were hurt, and we couldn't continue without fixing the issues. So, we went somewhere to do that. Ffour sessions later he told us it would be ten thousand dollars (we use dollars instead of gold) in repairs and replacements. Our group had less than one thousand between all six of us. Any solution we offered was responded to with a reason why it wouldn't work, so we took the only option that he agreed to and aligned with a merchant alliance that would give us supplies and pay our posse. It would be less than we had before so we had to consolidate our posse. We talked to them about what was happening, rolled a 21 on persuasion, and they *all* left. All 10 of them. Including one that our barbarian has been romancing for the latter half of the campaign. The barbarian pulled the posse member aside to try to convince him to stay and rolled a Nat20 on persuasion...he still left. At the end of the next session (people were pretty down and not interacting a whole bunch), our DM loudly complained that nobody wants to have rp asides with any NPC's anymore and he was upset because it made him feel like he was doing something wrong. We were flabbergasted and argued that we have been interacting with them for months, but right now we felt a little screwed over. Our barbarian brought up the Nat20 and even mentioned that they knew it wasn't an auto success, but at the moment, it felt like having rolled it meant nothing. Our DM replied, "it meant I felt bad!" It has been a few weeks and nobody really wants to play because we feel like we got cornered into a choice and then berated for the result. Are we being too sensitive about this?  - Eli

Skorpiac Creations

To the venerable Justices and my very favourite Bailiff, I present to you The Case Of The NPC Main Character. Our DM is basing our 1st campaign on a book he’s writing. The more we play, the more it’s becoming obvious that the entire campaign we’re playing is focused around his uber powerful NPC secret princess character that we rescued in the first session, who’s basically become another party member. Our players have begun to feel like glorified escorts on her journey, and combat has revealed we’re clearly of a much lower level than she. Our DM also tends to get a little sulky during the times we forget the NPC when role playing with other players at the table, and makes us feel guilty afterwards when he points out no one asked for the NPC’s opinion, or shared the loot with them etc. We’re feeling a little railroaded at this point, but the DM is clearly very protective of his story and also a little sensitive to feedback, so we’re wondering what the most diplomatic means to approach this is. Are we being selfish or ungrateful here, or are we justified in feeling perturbed by feeling like side characters in a book he’s writing about his own main character? I humbly await your wisdom and judgement. - Skor

Tucker Collins

Esteemed wielders of Justice’s Hammer, I DM for a party with 2 wizards (scribe & bladesinger), a wildfire druid and a paladin (12 to 14 year olds, my kids and their two friends). They just reached level 6 in the Theros setting. At the entrance to the next dungeon was a simple puzzle where they had to cut themselves with a ceremonial dagger in order to see & enter the arcane doorway to the dungeon. Meanwhile, a dust devil and a bunch or scarabs were attacking the party and the dust devil was trying to throw people away from the dagger. The paladin - the only armored character, with nearly double the HP of the scribe attacked and kiled 2 of the 7 hp scarabs, running as far away from the dust devil as he could. The bladesinger went to retrieve the dagger on their turn, before being thrown by the dust devil in the opposite direction from the party, dagger and doorway. The bladesinger missed the DC by 1, and would have succeeded if the paladin (who has +9 strength save) had gone to the front instead because of aura of protection. The paladin never attacked the dust devil in 4 rounds while the casters whittled it down and killed the other scarabs. I told the paladin player that someone was going to end up dead if he kept fighting that way, and he admitted to having messaged the scribe player that he was being the worst paladin during that fight. I don’t have a goal of killing anyone, but my concern is that CRs are finnicky, and a hard encounter where the tank is letting the wizards take hits is going to become deadly. The dust devil encounter was easy - the next encounters are hard, and the boss is deadly already. And they cannot rest in the dungeon or they will be ejected. Was I reasonable to call the player out? Should I be adjusting the CR of encounters to account for someone playing badly? Is it worth the lesson is someone else dies due to his poor choices? I respect your ruling.

Sydney

Esteemed Bailiff and those other guys I guess: I play a Human Druid named Ratface, using the Circle of Stars subclass. One of the features of this subclass is that it lets you use the Guiding Bolt spell, which is not normally a Druid spell. In the very first combat of the campaign, I cast Guiding Bolt on one of the enemies. The DM immediately called me on using a spell that wasn’t on my class. I told him that my subclass gave me that ability, and he responded that, and I quote, “went against the design philosophy of 5e”, and that I wouldn’t be allowed to use it. This went back and forth for a bit before I finally just asked to change my subclass, before the DM again responded no, saying that I would be able to use my other subclass features so it was fine. I ended up just continuing to play Ratface as Stars, and she’s become a very cool character, but I still feel as though an injustice was done, even in spite of the fact the DM makes fun of me for this every once in a while. I leave my case at the mercy of the court.

David Moore

All is well. Disengage is one of the three options of Cunning Action: Disengage, Hide, Dash. ✅

Spam Jackal

My mistake, I meant to say *Dodge*

Donny

To the venerable Justices of the Supreme Crit and the Legendary Bailiff, I have been trying to schedule a game session with my group for months. The problem is trifold: none of my players are willing to meet if all 5 of us cannot make it to the table, two of us cannot male it to the physical table because of COVID, and one of us refuses to play at all online, denying the rest of us access to the virtual table. It has gotten so bad that I am considering running an online campaign for the 3 people in the group who aren't luddites. Esteemed justices and bailiff, am I wrong to set up a new game, or am I right to try and find a solution to our problem? I humbly accept your verdict.

Trent Dowling

Honorable Supreme Crit Justices and Jake “the bailiffiscent” Hurwitz, may it please the court. I am the DM of a 5 month long campaign in the Ravnica setting. Everyone is new to the game and TTRPG’s in general but have recently grown into their characters and RP is becoming one of their favorite parts of the hobby. Sadly I fear this excitement for RP has turned and bit me in the ass. A couples sessions ago the 3 player characters, freshly level 8, woke up to find a small Fungal fairy named Mildew watching them. With him being 6inches tall and goofy as hell the party immediately fell in love with him, perhaps a little too much. The chaotic stupid monk decided that Mildew would be his and he would be his mildew who shall permanently reside in his pocket. Mildew obviously had some objections but this attempt to monopolize Mildew drew the ire from the Druid and ranger who both IMMEDIATELY decided that mildews freedom was worth killing their friend over. Cut to my first PvP, with the Druid swinging on the monk while the ranger hid the poor fairy from the monks prison pockets. This lead to a few unfortunate Nat 20s on both sides and a near total party suicide. My question is as follows. Was the player wrong for trying to make a little fungus friend all his own? Or did the zeal of impromptu fungal freedom fighters take it a step too far. Perhaps I am at fault for introducing a guy, just too silly and little for them to handle. I await your decision and may Mildew have mercy on us all

teethknight

May it please The Supreme Crit Justices and Bailiff Jake; I present the case of the dmpc deal of doom. This is the first campaign I've DM'ed. Earlier in the campaign they were attacked by wereboar bandits and convinced the sole survivor to join them. Several sessions later the party encountered a devil that tried to entice the party into a deal in return for a powerful magic item. One of the three warlocks came up with a scheme to outwit the fiend. Through persuasion checks they convinced the wereboar, Oozywog, to take the deal and give them the item. The fiend had stated "the item belongs to the one who takes the deal." I had the warlock roll insight on the contract, they rolled low, and went through with the deal. Oozywog became a low level barbarian and gave the magic item to the warlock, who later discovered that they were unable to attune to the item. The player didn't protest but I could tell they were pretty frustrated. The character decided to hold onto the item in case Oozywog dies later. My question is, did I give them a fair chance or should I have rewarded the creativity?

Nicolas R

To the congregation of Dice Christ, I beg forgiveness, and seek guidance. I've had a set of dragon engraved dice for my entire decade of playing this game. I never owned another set of dice until last year my girlfriend got me another set on our first anniversary. The dragon dice mean a lot to me, but there is one problem. They are bloodthirsty. I regularly feel the need to fudge damage rolls to prevent tpks, and to my greatest shame, sometimes I do. I would trust my dice and just let it happen, but I've put so much work into this campaign. At the beginning I built a 10+ page homebrew system that let's the players build their own monster companion and have been updating it over the course of the campaign. But my dice crave only blood, on the second encounter (lv. 2) they rolled 3 crits in a row and only missed 2 times the whole session. Help me. I've lost the light of dice christ and know not which path to walk.

Posey Mehta

To the esteemed Justices and perfectly mediocre Bailiff, I present the case of Signor Efreeti's Wall of Fire, may it please the court. For our group's secret Santa one-shot, I was gifted a character equipped with a magic item that allowed me to summon an Efreeti, which I promptly did. He was a well dressed Italian gentleman called Signor Efreeti. The one-shot culminated in our characters attempting to disrupt a ritual by destroying 12 beacons all situated in and around the Globe theatre in London. Signor Efreeti almost immediately significantly fucked up our DM's plans by summoning a fire elemental that used its movement to destroy 5 beacons in one dash action by passing through them. On his next turn, I decided to complete the whomping by positionining Signor Efreeti in the air to catch another 5 beacons (in a conveniently straight line) in a wall of fire. Although some of the beacons were inside the theatre and others were outside, Signor Efreeti definitely had line of sight because he was flying in the air and the Globe is famously open air. Our DM, however, ruled that Signor Efreeti's Wall of Fire couldn't pass through walls, and therefore it couldn't destroy the beacons. We argued that the Globe is a wood-frame structure so, if anything, Wall of Fire would be more powerful but were, alas, overruled. As a partial result of this ruling, our party ended up TPKing in a decidedly non-festive brutal massacre that left us all rather subdued and surprised. And so we beseech the court: was our DM wrong to rule that Signor Efreeti's Wall of Fire couldn't pass through walls and, in doing so, turn the tables on a potentially epic whomping?

David Moore

Honorable justices and handsome bailiff, Jake. May it please the court. I present the case: "Lich vs. Globe of Invulnerability". I DM'd our final battle this summer, My wizard player (level 15) had a simulacrum who cast globe of invulnerability first round. And the Wizard stood hand in hand with his simulacrum casting spells while protected from within the globe. The Lich attempted to counter spell the wizard's offensive spells and they informed me (with a fat grin) that you can't counterspell through the globe. This made me sweat, since I didn't realize this... But in the moment, I made the call that the Lich would have known this property of the Globe of Invulnerability and wouldn't have counterspelled, and instead the Lich dimension doored to enter melee with the wizard. This PC then said "shouldn't the lich have wasted their spell since I tricked you into counterspelling?" And I claimed that it was me, the DM they tricked but not the Lich who is a spell-casting mastermind. I was legitimately proud of my player for pulling one over on me (it was a great move), but didn't want to shortchange the threat of this final fight. Was I wrong to ret-con my Liches spells to be more effective? I'm afraid it took the wind out of my player's sails.

Jay Gutierrez

I was asked to join in an online campaign with the hook of it being a cyberpunk style campaign. I quickly came up with a warforge barbarian and was excited to show it to my DM. Only to be told no and that the warforge race “wouldn’t fit the theme”. Being a team player I quickly reskinned him to be a Goliath. Upon session 1, it was clear that the cyberpunk elements had been dropped in favor of a vanilla fantasy story (they didn’t even have sprite). After a few sessions of attempting to bring water to the hometown, it became clear that the DM was railroading us along this story and kept shutting down player decisions. This was no longer anything I had agreed to when I signed on to join the group. After scheduling amongst the party became more difficult to organize I simply decided to tell the DM i no longer want to play and was met with general frustration with me and the way I had been playing my character. Am I the asshole for bailing on this group?

BassToad

Honorable Justices and Brave Baillif, I bring to the court the case of The Party v. Caliban the Horror. In the first session of a pirate themed campaign I played a Storm Sorcerer that I was very excited to finally play. Our party consisted of 5 total, including a Bard named "Caliban The Horror". Caliban's antics directly caused the death of 4 characters, including mine. On first entry of the dungeon, Caliban ran off to a room no one else could see into, as we were playing on roll20. We heard screams and ran in to save him from the giant hermit crab that knocked him out. Our rescue caused one party member to get killed instantly by the Crab. In the final room, the treasure was guarded by a ghost who wanted to possess one of us and join us on our quest. Caliban in a secret chat with the DM decided to let this happen to himself and reveal his true nature; Caliban was a Changeling. He took on the appearance of the ghost and a fight broke out. With the help of the ghost, Caliban killed two of the party members (one of which was the player who's character got cut in half by the Crab). Myself, dragging the other still living unconscious party member out of the final room traded the treasure for our lives, and Caliban escaped the dungeon. We chased him, and due to an athletics contest that I don't agree with the ruling on, Caliban was able to take an attack against my character, rolling a Critical hit and dealing exactly enough damage to kill him outright. I was pretty pissed off. The player graciously elected to do non lethal damage to me, but now whenever we're playing he will make comments about how I'd "never get mad about a character dying" and other similar jabs. I don't hate this player but do I deserve to get razzed about him killing my character? I don't think so but I don't want to cause any problems by saying something about it. In the end we killed Caliban and dumped his body in the ocean so I feel like everything is square. I thank you for your time and mercy. P.S. his new character is a tiefling wizard named Hemlock Sholmes, who has an alternate personality named Lessiarty. He switches between the two by jumping into the ocean.

A Peeling STicker

Howdy most Honorable Judges and Nearly as Honorable Bailiff. I come to you with the case of No Spooning. I'm currently playing a Warforged Bard called RAM-C. My DM and I have a long running joke where I will always IRL do atleast one thing my PC does. (Cook a feast, learn archery,etc.) So I proposed that RAM-C's instrument would be the Spoons and his Washboard Abs. The DM said Only if I learned how to played the Spoons. And I did! However when the session came he denied it since the Spoons aren't a real instrument, and he thought I was kidding. Should I die on this Spooning Hill or pickup like the clarinet? Thanks, Sticker

Faeborn Saga

May it please the court, even the lowly-but-still-alright-with-me bailiff Jake, I present to you the case of A God in a Box. Last year, I finished DMing a 2-year campaign that ended well. However, there is a moment that remains a shadow (a dark stain if you will) on the whole experience. The party at the time was aboard an enemy ship, captained by a disgraced elven noble and his elven lover, Telga, an evil sorceress hell-bent on becoming a lich. (I used Drow Matron Mother stats with different spells.) She was secretly in possession of an evil, sentient book hidden away in a chest in her room, a book created by the god of death, the overall bbeg of the campaign. One of the party members, Ramen, a rogue/fighter, decided to have a private chat with Telga in her chambers. He attacked, casting Silence through his bow, a homebrew magic item. At the time, the bow was worded so it caused an effect like Silence, but a spell was not actually “cast” and therefore couldn’t be countered. After that, he grappled her, pinned her, and began making attacks, with her unable to do anything about it. She couldn't move (grappled), and Silence prevented her from using spells. Panicking, as this was the big bad for this arc of the campaign, I fear I may have cheated my way out of it. The sentient evil book rested in a chest not too far away. The book itself cast a Dominate Monster spell on Ramen, which he failed. With Silence dropped, Telga stood and opened a door to a demiplane and sent Ramen through it. After that, she gathered some of her belongings and teleported away. After this, the player brought back an old character, and the stakes of the plot became higher. Suddenly, it became a race to find Telga and bargain with her to get their boy back. Eventually they encountered Telga again, and the barbarian/warlock killed her before she could re-open the demiplane. Only a divine intervention was then able to bring Ramen back. So, Justices of the Court, though no feelings were hurt (the player was super on board after), and the campaign went on smoothly, I still feel I may have been in the wrong. Is it okay to bend the rules for story’s sake, or should I have let my player womp me?

Kyle Cardinal

Magnificent crit justices and miniature bailiff, Jake (Hardwon painting party reference). I bring before the multiple crimes of another player at my bimonthly D&D game in Oregon. I am slightly hoping players judge Wilson is in attendance. May it please the court: My friend Enoch started a campaign six months ago and invited me to make a character (Uther the hobgoblin artificer artillerist pirate). As a dm myself I was very excited to roll a character. At the first session however I didn’t know if I could see myself being invested long term due to the behavior of one player, Jeremiah . He made a tortle fighter samurai named Mo with a blue bandanna. Clearly a Leonardo reference which is great. The first crime is this player gives Mo a character voice where he clears his throat loudly and speaks in a racist stereotyped Asian voice (think the city wok character in South Park). Jer is a white male and even though I’ve called out it’s racist and the ninja turtles sound like west coast surfers. The second crime is that Jer has been absent since the first session until the last one. His character has just been following our party around. At the last session Jer continued to use the racist voice, but unfortunately committed other crimes as follows. while our party was on a side quest to find a dragon we sought shelter from a blizzard in an iron mine. There we got jumped by three wendigos and wanted to leave the cave. - argued for 20min with the party about taking a short rest vs long rest in a iron mine filled with monsters. Everyone was team short rest but him. It got to the point where he was yelling at our tabaxi lore bard trying to explain song of rest to him. - on three accounts referred to Enoch’s wife, gabby’s breastmilk as “boob juice” when enoch took a break to feed his baby girl. - refused to leave the iron mine with the party even though our dm said the dragon wasn’t there. It wasn’t until our dm said,”cmon man.” That his character joined us. - made a joke that he hasn’t seen the nye ball drop since his balls dropped at 13. - The final crime was he brought his ten year old son to this session and our dm even made his son a character so he could be involved. The worst part is his son was over Jeremiah’s behavior at the table. Do I need to sidebar with my dm about this other player? Not that it matters but I’m also driving from Portland, Oregon to a small town called Newberg for these sessions. It’s about a 40-50min drive depending on traffic.

Whitney Ahn

May it please the ever honorable court, and also Jake I guess. I was recently DMing a session where one character had cast darkness on my baddies, but in such a way that they were on the edge of the darkness, and our hexblade, who was within attack of opportunity range, was not within the darkness. I had them take an opportunity attack with disadvantage because I couldn't be bothered to Google and they were already prone so they had disadvantage anyway, but one of my players after the session showed me something in the rulebook that said you can only take opportunity attacks against creatures you can see. The question before the court is thus: Could the baddies see the hexblade when the baddies were in magical darkness, but the hexblade was not? I nervously await your judgement.

Yeeha532

May it please the court, the all knowing judges and the hard working under appreciated Baylif. A case of Player Vs Players. I'm a player in my first campaign playing a wood elf Monster slayer Ranger (Fergus), along side a rogue Tiefling (Lucious) a human paladin(Mira) and a spider riding goblin shaman(Grotfang) (ranger/cleric). We're level 4 and just completed the first town/village of our adventure. The first big bad is dead, most of the Orphans survived and a pit fighter boss has legged it with all our cash. At this convenient point, our fantastic DM gave us the choice to either continue the campaign or call this a practice now done, roll new and begin something else. Now believe it or not the drugged up goblin shaman has been the easiest character to work with, the rogue and paladin can never agree on a path. The rogue is eye roillingy classic rogue, which wouldn't be so bad apart from trying to turn npcs against the rest of the party to get more gold, items etc. And a paladin that's so lawful good it's stupid, won't pull a sword in an obvious battle because she must convince everyone to stop fighting, or walk around a dangerous town without weapons or armour because she wants to look pretty, essentially my character is constantly having to baby sit/ un bugger the situations they put us in. Its often less what shall the party do and what do I (they) want to do. This is where I throw my self upon your mercy. When everyone was given the choice to carry on with campaign or stop we all said continue, our DM has built such a rich, amazing, if somewhat brutal world/story. However I added a caviat that whilst Id love our collective story to continue, could some of the characters tone down some of their personality excess so we can work as a party. Was I wrong to ask people to play differently? I'll add I believe the DM gave us the opportunity to start again is because he realised the party was dysfunctional. Yeeha, a Scott living in England 🇬🇧

Andrew Silverman

May it please the court, and the underpaid Bayliff. Many years ago I was playing in an old friend's Curse of Strahd campaign. Me and two other players who all had only played dnd twice at that point started the campaign together and in the beginning, it was going great. In the second session, however, two other people who were friends with the dm wanted to try dnd for the first time. Our dm decided to bring them in where we were in the game we were currently running. None of this bothered me until we encounter Strahd for the first time that session. I attempt to sneak over and spy on the vampire only to be caught and have my eyes ripped out (no saving throw of any kind). At first, I was upset about this sudden change to my character, but I was also excited to try roleplaying a blind character. Unfortunately, that day may never come because rather than aiding me the new players that had never played before decided it would be funny to throw a spear at my head while I was grappled and killed me instantly. Those players then left the session early and my dm decided to never run that campaign again. I to this day believe my dm could have done something to prevent my untimely murder leading to the collapse of our entire campaign, or at very least continue with a new character and just not let those other people play in the future. P.S. Maybe worth noting I am no longer friends with any of those people including the dm.

Paul Deichmann

Oh praise be Melora and all her scramble boys! Hear my case. I play with a group I like quite a lot, once a week. However, I may have a work obligation come up which would mean I would be 3 hours late to our sessions on the regular. The sessions are often 5 hours, so I could still join them for the end. I am working up the courage to ask if the DM would allow shared control of my PC--so for those hours I'm not there, the DM or one of the players would play my character. The group's been together for several months now, so they know the character well. Would you permit such shenanigans at your table? Any other advice for how I could stay with the group rather than lose the party forever? Or do you think I should just make a clean break? You honor me!

BBQDaddy

May it please the court, this will not be brief, but it will be bananas. Settle in for the tale of Stinky, Boofer, and Gronk. Some friends from college recently got together over zoom to play a Christmas themed one-shot using some mechanics from Dungeons and Doggies. We all played lost dogs trying to find their way home in the snow; I was Stinky, a basset hound bard in a camo dog jacket, we also had Boofer, a malamute fighter, and Gronk, a saint bernard oath of devotion paladin who had an elaborate backstory of being an evil-fighting adventurer's companion. We ended up finding the north pole, so we went to look for Santa to fly us home in his sleigh. However, something was out of control at the pole. While investigating, our DM explained that whoever wore the hat WAS Santa, as per Tim Allen's Santa Clause rules, and after reading through a bunch of Santa biographies (including one where Sandra Bullock briefly held the mantle in the 90's) we learned that Krampus had forcibly become the new Santa and was using the power of children's belief for evil. After five hours, we defeated Krampus with the help of Rudolph and an elf named Sugar Plum Gary. We rejoiced, and the elves decided to democratically elect the next Santa. Gronk immediately nominated himself, citing that he couldn't trust anyone else to wield the power of Santa. We sort of rolled our eyes good naturedly and chuckled, and Boofer nominated Sandra Bullock. Our DM asked us all to vote, and then rolled to see who each of the elves and reindeer voted for. Sandra Bullock won. She was teleported to the north pole to accept the hat and become Sandra Claus. Until after, again, a five hour session, at 12:30 in the morning, Gronk said he wouldn't let that happen. He began a relentless PVP to KILL Sandra Bullock and take the hat, after casting Sanctuary on himself. We shouted that this was NOT good boy behavior, and that he was rejecting democracy - one of the NPCs called it some "real January 6th shit." Gronk didn't care. He kept saying that "we were making him do this." Our DM, the only person who had work in the morning, tried persuading him by saying that he'd never be able to see his owner again, and even tried communing with a deity (Stephen Sondheim, RIP) to convince Gronk that Sandra would be a virtuous and benevolent Santa. Gronk didn't budge, so our DM had to look up stat blocks for Santa mid-session. He seemed weirdly invincible for a level 5 character, until I looked up sanctuary and found out he should have been making concentration rolls every time we did damage - something that was left out when he read us the spell. Our DM made him roll for it and he lost concentration. Our DM immediately paralyzed him and stuffed him in Santa's sleigh to be dropped off at home. Gronk was relentless. He shouted that he would just come right back, so Sandra Claus had to cast Plane Shift on him. As we yelled for him to be sent to hell, our benevolent DM sent Gronk to the middle of nowhere on the material plane instead. We wrapped up the session at about 2 in the morning, after Gronk narrated an entire scene about how he was in a tavern in the middle of nowhere plotting to come back. My question for the judges: was our DM wrong in not sending him to hell?

Ken

May it please Bailiff Jake and his lowly judges. I am beginning my own campaign, as a new dm. The setting is fairly modern, with the use of phones and automobiles. My players are starting off as level 1 applicants for an arbitration office (essentially state sanctioned adventurers/crime investigators). They will essentially be detectives in a sense. Two of my players wanted to play Kalashtar, one being a shadow sorcerer and the other a whispers bard. I also did some tweaking on the Kalashtar that instead of the Quori spirits connected to them, they are undead spirits. Both themes of the characters, on paper, are very similar. But knowing each character and their background, they would be wildly different characters. The bard kalashtar upon finding out the other player would be also a dark death themed character did not like the idea of two similar classes and races being played. This lead to an argument being started by the bard where the rest of the players could see it trying to convince the sorcerer to change his whole character because he was "already married" to his character concept. A lot of accusing of stealing and intentionally stepping on his concept. The sorcerer absolutely refused to change and me and my players tried to convince the bard that it would be fine and he should just continue on. He was adamant that he had to kill his character and then mourn his death before he even thinks of making a character. He eventually made another character which essentially a dog of the state (a homebrewed dog race) that would commit police brutality. I immediately vetoed that, and he then made a human fighter because he was no longer emotionally in it to make another character per his words. So my question to the court is: was he overreacting or is it fair to be upset in a situation like this? And should I have just made my player maintain his original character just so he could actually see how different they were, rather than letting him create what was a retaliatory character?

DonutHoo

May it please the Supreme Justices and give the bailiff a fresh beverage. I bring to you today the case of the exploding steam pipe. As the DM, I ran the party through a chase scene through some bustling market streets. Essentially, the villain they were chasing Dimension Door'd up to the roof of a building and the challenge was to find a way up three stories as fast as possible. The party's Arcane Trickster rogue had a plan. He asked if there were any pipes hanging off the walls. I said yes, assuming he wanted to climb it. He did not. Instead, he took the pipe off the wall and used Ray of Frost to freeze one end of the pipe and plug the other end with burning hands, hoping that the resulting buildup of steam would explode out the frozen end and rocket him up to the top. He had already used actions to set this up without consulting his fellow players or me, the DM, to confirm whether this might be viable or not and I was under the impression that the ice would melt far before any steam would build up. His fellow players suggested multiple alternatives but he was INVESTED in this steam pipe. In the end, I asked for an Arcana roll. He rolled a middling number, 14-15, which was alright at there level and I decided to have it work and get him to the second floor to move the encounter along, with the caveat that I rolled a ton of damage on him as he had an explosion happen right next to him that knocked him into the side of the building. I rolled low and he was generally okay but this event set a precedent for the rest of the campaign and plans like this became the norm for the remaining two and a half years this ran. I ask you today justices. Was I too kind? Too rough? Should this have fizzled horribly? I await your judgement and fierce punishment.

Maddy Cancro

Sorry for the delay in submitting, had to get permission from the DM to bring a case in her name. My friend DMed for the first time, and ran a Mamma Mia-inspired campaign that lasted four sessions. She intentionally invited three people to play who only ever get to DM so they’d have a chance to play for once (and also me, who has never DMed, but loves Mamma Mia). One of the players chose to play a tabaxi drunken monk. The mechanics were very cool and I was excited to play with them. However, this player was such a contrarian about every single thing, that it really got in the way of playing. The DM felt uncomfortable telling this player off, and repeatedly asked after the first few sessions if this player was having fun and they always said they were having a blast, but it was really distracting as a player to have to constantly convince this player to participate in the campaign, and to double check with the DM that things this player decided were true actually fit with the world. During the campaign, the other two DMs-turned-players seemed more invested in engaging with the challenges, but repeatedly made it all more complicated than it needed to be. They seemed surprised by a bunch of the solutions I figured out from my knowledge of the movies and ABBA lyrics. At the end of the campaign, I was really proud of my friend for her wonderful campaign, and disappointed in the other players for making it so much more difficult than it needed to be, and said so. I told the other players that they maybe needed to learn how to get out of DM mode and become better players (with some more pointed remarks at the contrarian about being part of a team). Should I have just been quiet, and happy to come to the end of a fun and successful campaign, or was it okay for me to call them out?

Tyler Walker

May it please court and the godly bailiff. I am in a fully online play by post campaign where everyone submits their responses and actions throughout the day over discord. This leads to splitting the party a lot when we know only a few will be active for a certain part of a quest. My big issue was with a chase scene between our rouge and an orc, the rogue took off to catch up to an orc spying on us and just the rogue was asked to roll initiative. I told the DM I (A warlock with Eldritch Blast) would be running behind and shooting at the orc as it was dashing away. I knew eventually the orc would run out of my range but not for 4 rounds. The DM ignored my requests to shoot the orc and would not let me join initiative even though my PC was fully aware of the situation. This lead the orc to give away our position and cause future issues. The DM later explained he felt it was more dramatic to have a 1-1 encounter with the rouge but that doesn’t change the fact my PC was there and should’ve been able to help. This has happened multiple times where the DM ignored request from other PCs during tense moments that lead to further difficulties. Should the DM be able to pause PCs for spotlights or should we all get our chance to help in important moments?

Lorelei and Kyra Newly Weds

Mediocre Baliff Jake, Supreme Crits AxFord and Tanner, and City Pigeon! I bring to you not a case against a single player but against Wizards Of the Coast for their creation of the tortle playable race. My party has had 3 separate Tortle players and each has met a similar fate. The first was Dungle a Razorback Wild Magic sorcerer that liked to steal small animals and put them in his shell, he died after thunderclapping a Roc claiming "don't worry guys I know what this is" (to be fair he was under the impression it was a boulder because he missed the DM say it looked at us). However the second Tortle was played by someone no longer in the group, he played Aunt Jemima who was a Soft shell Tortle who like himself tried to steal some relics from a key plot point for the one session he showed up for which ended up getting him killed, resurrected, then almost killed again if not for the session ending and his departure. Finally during a sub campaign we had just cleared a tunnel of undead and we're making our way to freeze a forming draco lich of sorts with a frost bomb. The bomb was designed to go off by twisting it one click per minute on the countdown. I assumed this and jokingly went to poke it with my monk when the tortle whos name I believe was Girth grabbed and twisted it, when the DM asked how many times he said once. Before I could say or do anything with it in hand the DM had the bomb maker Express his concern and we made haste up stairs we failed to destroy the pillars needed to trap the dragon before the bomb went off and we failed our mission which is now an issue for the DM who hasn't planned on us failing. So with this I ask you, do you not get the sensation to act silly when playing a Tortle. There are other ways of playing tortles but aside from Loxodon there are no less easy to goof around as races as the tortle. I leave this with your beautiful minds and bird mind. Thank you

Caleb Treaster

Hahahaha I really hope they pick this one and dunk this player in the trash

Alexander McArthur

May it please the Honorable Crit Justices and the bailiff in the short chair. A few years ago when I was new to DMing, I gave my players the option to pick a magic item for their characters to start out with as a “signature” item, with the only requirement being it was cleared by me first. Most picked purely flavored items like an endless jug of alcohol, a ring to make the hafling seem taller, etc. one player, however, asked for a ring of dispel magic, saying he would be ok with it only having 2-3 charges and only working on spells 3rd level or below. Seeing this as fair, I initially agreed. At the first session when everyone found out the different magic items the party had, one of my other players immediately said that I needed to revoke the ring. He had DM’d for the ring user before, and apparently in that game, he got a ring of dispel magic, attached it to a bow, and shot large objects through it that had been reduced using the enlarge/reduce spell. The ring user argued that since the objects passed through the ring, they would then go back to their normal size, but be flying at arrow speed, essentially giving him a bow that was also a siege weapon. I immediately banned the ring, made him choose a new item, and to this day it is not allowed at the table. My question to the court is, would passing through a ring of dispel magic negate a spell like enlarge/reduce, creating the effect like my player argued, or was he wrong? Additionally, Justice Murph, would you have banned the ring outright, or allowed him to keep it and instead punish the character with the probably consequences that come with trying to pull Looney Toons Bullshit using magic?

Kyle Cardinal

I know I’m double posting but my reason is to submit another segment of the show alongside D&D judges court and the church of dice Christ. Now my post earlier didn’t need a ruling on any mechanics. It did however request a ruling on an individuals behavior at the table. This unfortunately is common in posts here to D&D court and this realization got me thinking about what other courts require a level of decorum and manners and it hit me, a royal court. So I’d like to readdress my request for ruling but to the D&D Noble Court of The Lady of the Crit, Axford, Lord Paramount of the DM Screen, Murphy, Knight of Goofs, Tanner…and Jester Jake

Brandon Van Gelder

May it please the court. I play a 13th level gnome barbarian with the tavern brawler feat and a belt of fire giant strength, which give me proficiency with improvised weapons and a +7 strength modifier, respectively. Another player(a 13th level fighter) and I came up with a maneuver where he holds his action to attack, then on my turn I use my action to hurl him at an enemy. Our dm seems to hate this move for some reason, but allows it under the condition that the fighter only makes a single attack after landing, adding my rage bonus to the damage. Initially, I argued that he should get his usual 3 attacks, since he holds his action for this and I sacrifice my two attacks to throw him with my action, but our dm would not yield. We still love the move and irritating our dm is amusing to us, so we still do it from time to time even though it is essentially a waste of both of our turns and always hilariously underwhelming. Should the fighter be allowed to use all of his attacks in this situation? Or is our dm right not to allow these shenanigans? I humbly await your judgement.

ZZYZZXX

To the honorable bailiff and the others I come with you with both a confession and a case rolled Up in 1 In my first ever game playing dnd I noticed that the dm was using the dungeon boss actions incorrectly but was too worried about it being my first game to say anything. We had placed ball bearings on the floor by the entrance of the ogres lair and when he ran out to fight us he fell prone slipping on them The dm then played that the ogres entire action was spend standing up instead of half movement so we naturally whomped them as they fell a lot. Was I wrong to not speak up to correct the dm even thought it was my first game? I throw myself at the mercy of the court

tacticalgrandma

“The worst part is that his son” you could have stopped it there, my heart broke for whoever’s unlucky enough the be born to that dad

Troy Mumme

May it please the court and also Jake, the bailiff. I come to you with a possible case of DMUI, DMing under the influence. I was running dungeoun crawl where the party comes across a magical farm deep underground that is guarded by giant monsterous farmer guarding his property with a shotgun. The party decides its better to sneak into the farmhouse and avoid him. When they got inside, they find his wife, Aristatalia Klampet, holding a baby and looking scared. The bard decides to use suggestion and tells her “Go into the bedroom and take care of your child the best you can”. I, as the DM, said that she goes into the other room and screams For her husband to come help. The party argued that she wouldn’t do that while under suggestion. But i wouldnt budge. The DMUI comes into this because i was 5 hazy IPAs into this game already and would not listen to their pleas. Was this a bad decision brought on by alcohol? I await your supreme decision.

mugabi rubamba

If it may please the esteemed judges and that other guy, I present the case of the high flying tabaxi monk I am the DM for my very first campaign and while I love my friends, I’m pretty sure I let them get too powerful during character creation, specifically my tabaxi monk. Even though I had him reroll his stat rolls TWICE, he must be loved by dice Christ cause he started the campaign with a 16 in strength and a 17 in dexterity, which he used to build a champion fighter focused on grappling, which is important. While my party is fighting a vampire illusion wizard inside of a magic school’s library, the monk asked if he could grapple the vamp, who was currently 30 ft away and flying 40 ft in the air, if he climbed up on one of the bookcases I said was 20 ft high and jumped from there. I told him yes, but first he would have to get a 25 or higher on a acrobatics or athletics check, forgetting that he adds +12 to acrobatics. So his tabaxi rolled a 29, grappled my bad guy, and prevented him for using spells with sommatic components, and was unable to bite him or break out as I was rolling like shit. My question is, should I have made the DC harder or changed the check, or is this tabaxi destined to fly high and grapple the world?

Roger

If it may please the court and the exalted baliff Jake: I come to you today with the case of the reactable reaction. Our party has been playing for several modules but recently the DM has been ruling that counterspell can't react to counterspell because it's a reaction which according to him would not be able to be reacted to. I'm an old school MTG player and remember the mechanic where interrupts were faster than instants but even that doesn't seem to apply since as long as the caster has a reaction they should be able to spend it to counter the counter. This has complicated several recent encounters so I plead the court gives our party some closure.

GREYFOX!!!!!

Dearest bailiff and the mightily council I do not have a case for you, but I would like to submit something cool that is happening in my life that is DnD related. My therapist is starting a group DnD/therapy session that I will be participating in. He is a professional DM in his own right and has been pushing for the therapeutic benefits that DnD or table too roleplaying can provide. I'm super excited that I will get to play DND cause I haven't played much. Just wanted to share this cool thing that I get to be a part of and maybe spread awareness on how this game we all love is being used in new ways to help people on their mental health journeys!

GREYFOX!!!!!

Your DM is wrong and you are right to think of this in terms of magic the gathering because, the action economy of both games is similar. It works like a stack of effects where the last effect supersede the next. Wizard fire balls BBG counter spells Sorcerer aka Maverice counter spells the counter. His spell is at the top the of the stack and thus takes priority. He causes the BBG spell to fizzle or to not happen. So the fireball isn't disrupted.

GREYFOX!!!!!

Kill them and then have a necromancer bring back their beloved characters to fight their new ones.

CarpeLiam

May it please the court and give a golden mic to the bailiff, I present the case of the Shadowfell Paladin V the Comedy Steed. I (the player) made a Dragonborn Paladin / Warlock multiclass that is indebted to the same Deity. Null (the dragon god that lives in shadowfell )has two personalities: one benevolent, and one evil. My Paladin worships the good side but owes a debt to the evil side. Herein lies my problem. When I cast the signature Paladin spell “find steed”, the DM always gives me a goofy giant animal from the feywild instead of a more traditional, thematic companion that would better jive with my backstory. Thus far, the steeds that I have summoned have arrived as a giant snail, a pink, glowing seahorse, a Saint Bernard with a New York accent, and a moose named Marvin Moosechief. (A play on “mischief”) Being a usual DM myself, I never protested. The other players always enjoyed the silliness , and it’s become something of a running joke. For the sake of the game, I always played into it, but I longed for a cooler beast of burden. I’ve asked the DM out of character why my steeds are always so silly, and if I could ever get a more traditional one. He responded that since my character was aligned to a deity that is neither good nor evil, the steed that showed up would be of neutral alignment, and since the options for steeds in the spell are either celestials, fiends, or Fey, I was stuck with the whimsical beasts of the feywild. I ask the court: should I have pressed harder for a regular horse, or am I resigned to a campaign where my signature spell is a punchline?

Jack L

May it please the Court and tickle the Bailiff, I present the case of the loosely defined homebrew. As a DM I like to occasionally branch out into running short campaigns in genres that don’t always fit perfectly with D&D 5e rules like old west or space adventure, but rather than try and get everyone to learn a new system or do a full overhaul myself for just a few sessions, I tell my players the setting and ask them to make characters and play in a way that fits the setting, while still using 5e rules. Most of my players go along with it well but one constantly gets rubbed the wrong way if I shoot down things that are rule legal but break the setting mood or ruin large chunks of the adventure by solving problems with non-setting appropriate methods. My question to you is should my player be more willing to accept on the fly rulings I make under the “go with the setting” guidance, or should I be more loose in allowing actions that I didn’t outlaw, but have a chance of breaking the overall mood of the adventure?

Deadstar1146

My it please the court and the awesome bailiff, I present the case of wrongly placing of another king my brothers, and my girlfriend are in a campaign that we have no memory of anything and two of us were dressed in royal colors and my brother is a High Elf and assumes that he is king and barged into the castle and said he is king, the dm told him to make a deception roll and he rolled really high and deceived the Castle guards and staff, my brother, the dm, was mad at this and said that it was only the first session that he can't rise to power right away and started to rewrite the story so that he wasn't king, I await for your response Crit Justices and Amazing Bailiff

Peter Mundell

To the crit justices, the [insert adjective here] bailiff, and the absent jury. I come here today seeking justice for a case that has ruined one of D&D’s greatest monsters for me. In my first campaign, I played an Oath of Glory half-elf Paladin named Winnie. He didn’t want to be a hero, but was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and chosen by his god to do so. We were a group of four level 6 adventurers, who had been given too much power in terms of how busted the action economy had become. Our DM allowed for all cantrips to be bonus actions, said that two attacks actually meant two actions, and our reaction was essentially a second turn. He also never used multiattack, legendary actions, lair actions, or legendary resistances for the monsters he used. Naturally, with such a broken action economy, we whomped him in almost a single round every time. I even offered to help & show him how to better structure encounters, but he turned down my offer. Instead, tired of feeling whomped, he put our level 6 party on a ship and sent out a max-HP Kraken on us. I argued this was insane and that we could not kill a Kraken. He, and even my fellow party members, said it would be fine. I continued to argue and eventually the DM relented. The campaign fizzled out shortly after this catastrophe. Since then I have found new friends to play with. They all know the story of the Kraken DM. Please, fair people of the court, help us find justice so I can maybe, once again someday, be able to fight a Kraken in a fair fight.

Dylan W

May it please the Church. To Dice Pope Murphy, Cardinals Axford and Tanner, and Pope Hat Dry Clean Guy Hurwitz. I come into your chamber today seeking forgiveness from Dice Christ for my sins as DM. In a two year campaign with friends we finally got to the lair of the BBEG (a modified ancient silver dragon stat block that I modeled off of Blue Eyes White Dragon, yes from Yu-Gi-Oh). The party had gotten through the previous castle crawl bruised but relatively unscathed save the Aasimar Cleric who died in the fight with the BBEG's right hand man. She was resurrected as a Triton and excited to play her reflavored character in the big battle, but on turn one she was hit with a paralyzing breath that she spent the ENTIRE battle stricken from. Turn after turn I was panicking! This was the final fight and my player was taken out of it! I had them roll with advantage at some point and I even think I temporarily lowered the DC, but saving was never in the cards. O Dice Christ, was I wrong to not realize the DC was too high from the get go for a player to ever save? Was I misrepresenting the will of Dice Christ? I lay my head down for the judgement of the church.

Dean

Honorable Judges and adequate Bailiff, I give you the case of the Finger Crossing BBEG. In a recent session, my party was fighting a group of high level NPCs, and it became clear we were outmatched. Our cleric used a home brewed teleportation item our DM made that had a mishap, and my barbarian ended up getting left behind. When this happened, the DM ended initiative and had the NPC we all knew to be the BBEG step out of a back room. The exit was blocked by a few enemies, so I was trying to figure out a way to escape, cause this definitely wasn’t an enemy I could deal with on my own. Some threats were exchanged, and after a few minutes the BBEG gave my character a choice: join her organization and help overthrow the government, or she’d give me a 5 minute head start before they hunted me down. I assumed this was the DM giving me a potential way out, so I told her I would never join her, and then I turned to walk out. She took an opportunity attack against me, hit, then we rolled initiative. She ended up taking me down before my turn, and I hoped the DM was going to give me some prison break adventure as another option, but instead my character was just killed. After the session I talked with the DM, and she said the BBEG was never going to let me leave, no matter what she said, and had me roll a new character. Am I right in thinking the DM was giving me a way out of the impossible situation and that the death was unfair, or was the DM right to have the BBEG lie to and kill my character?

Sean

Honorable Judges and fancy bailiff. I have a simple one for you I had a player who wanted to multi-class barbarian and rogue go into a rage grapple and use the advantage to sneak attack. Rules as written allow this so I allowed it too but it always felt kinda weird. Should I have riled that rage and sneak attack aren’t compatible?

tacticalgrandma

This is a p common multiclass. They are being misleading if they’re claiming they can grapple & attack on the same turn (unless they have 5 levels of barb). But reckless attack to guarantee sneak attack is common. It’s not overpowered really, since it requires the player to use finesse weapons which mean you can’t use more barb-synergistic greatswords or greataxes. They also have to use their strength stat for the attacks, which means they have to worry about increasing Strength, Dex, & Con. It sounds like your players having fun with it too.

tacticalgrandma

You’re not entitled to anyone dming for you. You said this guy put a ton of work into his games while seemingly not having fun w it. He handled it immaturely, but you were really insensitive. Write a short story abt your character’s epilogue & apologize to your friend and thank him for running the game as long as he did.

tacticalgrandma

Druids can use shields, you may come across items like a cloak of protection in your campaign, & next asi you can increase your dex (including by taking a feat that gives you a +1 to dex, like Skill Expert)

Eva Vasileiadou

LMFAO that was way more blunt a response than I was expecting. I can see where you're coming from, but I was literally 15; I didn't feel "entitled" for him to dm, it was that for a freshman/sophmore in high school, college seemed like an overarching abyss of losing your friends, so I was just scared that he would go to college and leave us all behind, and I didn't want one of the last memories I had with him to end poorly (which now it is four years later, and that's exactly what happened, and it still upsets me).

tacticalgrandma

? Why didn’t get the okay from your players before you told her she was accepted?

tacticalgrandma

Kyle, your dm was being nice to you. Either say thank you & move on, or let him know you’d prefer this character to die (& thank him for being nice to you). Come on now Kyle.

MK

Dearest Most Honorable Justices (and also the bailiff I guess). May it please the court: I'm a brand new DM who only played 3 sessions as a PC before jumping into DMing. I'm running a homebrew campaign for some good friends. One of the players in my party (a friend for nearly 9 years) has played quite a bit and has mostly DM'd in the past. Oftentimes when we are playing he'll correct me on rules or mechanics - especially in combat. While sometimes this is nice and helpful, it can also be frustrating. It's reached a point where he will call me out or correct me on things that I homebrewed because they aren't RAW. Because he has more experience than me I almost always go along with what he says, even if that means giving up on a cool mechanic or encounter that I made up myself. My question is this: how do I push back on a player (and close friend) with more experience than me in a way that doesn't make me sound like a dick? I want things to be fun for everyone and keep play moving at a good pace but I also don't want to be steamrolled.

tacticalgrandma

I mean yes boot him from the game but also really sad you didn’t boot him from your life when he insisted on making your sister feel uncomfortable (I’m assuming you told him to stop). I’d feel awful if any of my family stayed friends with someone who made me unsafe.

tacticalgrandma

It’s. It’s an official class. That’s fucking such a dick move, jfc

tacticalgrandma

Yes, you clearly didn’t like the player’s character, so you passive-aggressively shamed them for it. To the point where this dude let a character he was clearly excited to play die, bc his table was being dicks about it. If you were in his shoes, & you were at a table that didn’t like Variant Humans or Half Elves or whatever & gave you this treatment bc of it, how would you feel?

tacticalgrandma

Oh man, did not make the high school connection! I’m sorry things broke bad with your friend, but it’s completely understandable given how new & tense the circumstances were. Don’t beat yourself up about it, & definitely don’t let me being dumb make you feel bad! Also, if you do want closure for that character, one of my groups decided to all write our characters’ epilogues after our dm abruptly left. It was really fun & a good send off to those characters!

Ajax0fSpartax

Dear Benevolent Justices and Great hair having Bailiff, My case is not one of player vs DM, but one where I am debating the ethics and possibility of a shenanigan that I want to pull. I am playing an earth genasi Draconic sorcerer/Astral self monk (they use their ki to pull magic from dragon scale fossils within the plates of shale stone that are part of their body) and I had the idea to twin spell mold earth to create a pit under someone, have them fall in, then refill the hole in the same turn, effectively either killing or restraining them, my question is if this is possible, or even ethically ok to do. Sincerely, Shale the Earth Genasi

Hannah & Pedro

@tacticalgrandma while booting him from the game and irl would seem the simplest option, there's complexity I can't explain in a single comment. She and I are incredibly close and it's less feeling unsafe, moreso the awkwardness/annoyance of him not getting the repeated message, and the inability to "read the room". He and I have been involved in several projects/events over the years as we're both very active in the same communities, there's additional compounding factors and a history of mental health conditions. While they're not an excuse, it's something I have to keep in mind.

Eugene

Here ye here ye May it please the honorable justices and the more than less but not great bailiff. I have a DM versus player problem. So I have something that happened to my group and I a while ago but I just found out about the dungeons and dragons court. So my character had got killed by werewolves we are still a little bit triggered by them by the way. Before that my other player and I had used the marriage ritual to get the plus to AC and other benefits it gives. We discovered that when one person dies that is part of the ritual you can preform it again………… We just happened to have 3-4 scrolls of revivify and had a thought. We asked our dm if he would allow us to slit each other’s throats and die so we could always have the marriage ritual. I think we almost made our DM sick af he wasn’t a happy camper. Is it really that fucked up? Is it even more fucked up my friend and I had the idea at the same time. Sounds like true friendship to me.

CP

Merciful justices and understanding bailiff: This is an event that happened a year ago, but still mildly haunts my dreams. Our DM took a week off, and I ended up being the replacement DM that week. During the course of a battle, our fighter (the normal DM's son in real life) was bitten by a vampire. I relayed this information back to the DM as part of a "What you missed" email. Between sessions, our regular DM announced that our characters had leveled up to level 6. I had my character (Lore bard) take the spell Revivify. The following week we fought a major battle, and the fighter was killed. The fighter player was sad (his first character death), but I (happily) announced that I was bringing him back with Revivify. The DM mentioned after the session that he had planned to make his son's character a vampire after his death, based on the bite. The DM quit for "unrelated reasons" after that. I wish I hadn't cast the spell. Please grant me a merciful punishment for my foolishness.

Sarah Schooler

To the high priestess and priest of dicechrist, alterman Murph, and organist Jake, I have a confession. I am a monk with two druid levels in circle of the moon, so I can wildshape to cr one creatures. Since I took these levels, for over 7 months, I have been using my character proficiency bonus for wildshape attacks and skill checks because I thought that's how wildshape worked, making my wildshape significantly better. Once my party corrected me, I have apologized and attoned to my dm and party, and now I am seeking forgiveness from dicechrist. Please resolve me of my sins.

Jack H

May it please the kangaroo court of misfit justices and the sniveling bailiff who enables their corruption. Our party was at a magical tree that required us to solve a riddle to advance to the boss fight. The riddle went as follows: Take Note. I cast a spell that affects the masses I am the whisper you hear among the branches When with many, I face scrutiny. But when alone, I’ve been mastered. After much thinking, I realized that the perfect answer to the riddle was a fart. It satisfied every line of the riddle. A fart is, in fact, a whisper that affects the masses and is scrutinized among others. Everyone knows a fart is mastered when alone. However, our DM did not accept this answer and eventually gave us a hint which led to the real answer, A Song. This brought the party into a frenzy as we felt that fart was a more appropriate solution than a song. My question to you is, should a DM accept a creative answer to a riddle?

heavy harry

Hey guys and Mt. Sexy pants bailiff, I DM a group who've been through multiple extravagant multi-session one shots, and one of my players (who is a good friend of mine) continuously interrupts me when I'm ruling. He'll either give false information to more inexperienced players (and I'll have to correct him) or tell me what skill check I should use while I'm considering what skill to have a player roll. I'm being driven bananas and am considering starting a group where the player in question is not involved, but it's weird because he is a close friend. After every session my wife consoles me and says, "you did a good job dealing with Simon's bullshit," but I still don't have the communication skills to deal with this person (who is not named Simon) directly. How does one deal with a player who constantly interjects and has no actual knowledge of the game? I'm a banana.

SinnerVirtue

Greetings honored justices and bebearded bailiff. I started a new game recently and will be playing an arcane trickster rogue named Precocious Jones. He's a washed up changeling acto who's contractually obligated to assume the form of a 12-year-old halfling. As an arcane trickster, I wanted his costar to be his familiar; an adorable octopus who rides on his shoulder and is constantly smoking. My DM said if my familiar is an octopus then she won't breathe in land. I still maintain that a magically summoned talking octopus should be able to breath air, but reluctantly made her an owl instead. Am I wrong to be a little upset, even if an owl is more useful than an octopus?

Marcus Heer

May it please… you guys. Every month I have submitted my case to the crit. A simple question about rope burn damage from a dragon. But this time is different. I am turning myself in. I am a long time forever DM who has never watched any of the lord of the ring movies. Some of my friends have told me that it’s a crime that I haven’t watched these movies and I agree, but one of my dnd PC regulars says that I really don’t have to watch them and that they aren’t super fantastic. He said “they are a long movie about walking.” In my opinion I believe that THIS is the real crime. A dnd player who dislikes lord of the rings. But I leave it to the crit to decide which is the bigger crime. A DM who has never watched, or a player who dislikes.

ShrimplyAwesome

May it please the Crit, may it please the mostly honorable justices and the occasionally sassy bailiff. I present the case of "The goliath who couldn't". I ran a Dragon of Icespire Peak campaign a while back. During one of the sessions our path of the totem goliath barbarian decided to go off alone and try to summon the dragon to negotiate with it in order to tie up a loose end to do with another party member accidentally murdering the town masters brother. i explained to this player that white dragons are the most bestial of the chromatics and their chances where very slim at best. they insisted. after having them hunt boars for bait to lure the dragon i rolled with disadvantage to see if the dragon was in the area, knowing this player would likely die if it showed, it was. I gave them 2 charisma checks, they passed the first well enough to survive the encounter if they had just left it there, however they continued and a nat 1 ensued. i didn't have the dragon finish them off and gave them death saves, unfortunately they failed and the character is no longer with us. I still feel bad about this to this day. should i have just said no to this players death wish or at least killed them with the rest of the party around. The whole situation at least led to a very emotional funeral session.

William Bowen

If it please the honorable justices and the super cool tree hugging bailiff, I bring the case of the too good sword boy characters. For years I was only a DM but now my fiancee runs games for me, so I am allowed to pursue my true passion: playing magical sword boys (eldritch knight, bladesigner, college of sword bard, sorc/pal, etc). The problem is that I have a favorite spell: Shield, and my AC inevitably gets too high for my DM, up into the mid 20s. Last fight, with bladesigning and haste and shield, my Bladesingers AC hit 28 and my DM had enough. She banned Shield from her table. At first I was appalled but now I am merely a little upset. It does mean potentially losing my concentration more often and potentially getting 1 shot as i often build squishy characters with no HP. I am fine with the ruling as I won't go against my DM but how do the justices feel about banning the spell Shield to prevent very high armor classes? Thanks a lot and I am very hyped to return to Bohomia.

Alastair Stevans

If it pleases the court. Honorable judges and middling bailiff. Was I wrong and what is my punishment? For a Christmas session I had planned a fun game where my party had to plan a Christmas party. Collect presents from evil elves, fight off awakened snowmen and collect a Christmas tree (roper stats). Things were going great until the end boss. They were level 5 at the time and I had come up with an idea that in hindsight was a bit cruel. Santa turned up and scolded the party for stealing presents, trees and a Christmas goose. They were naughty and had to fight. What the party didn't know was that santa had lich stats. My concept was that santa would kill the party quickly except 1. They would be given a Christmas wish, which i correctly assumed they would use to revive their friends. However when the fight started it was much harder to kill them and they got very frustrated when they realised that this fight was unwinnable. By the time I actually killed my first player they were already frustrated and mad. One of my players characters committed suicide because he knew it was a pointless venture. When I eventually got down to the last player, everyone was pissed. Even after being revived and gifted in game and irl presents from me, the mood had soured. Was I an asshole for playing this long con prank or was my players too quick to assume I had turned into a murder hobo dm at Christmas

Ace

May it please the court, the most esteemed judges and the not-so humble bailiff Jake, I present the case of the teenager meta-gamer. I run an isekai-style home game with my older brother, two of my best friends and one of their younger brothers where they all play themselves in a fantasy setting. We all played for the first time in months recently since we are on break from college, and an NPC, previously a DMPC who adventured with the party was polymorphed into a young red shadow dragon and forced to fight the party. He was killed in the fight and when my brother, who was closest to the NPC requested that the younger brother who was lord of the castle they were in, and has cleric levels help him he said he wouldn't because "it's just an NPC," and "he was on my kill list anyway." My brother, furious attacked him and put him down making death saves. He was quickly healed by an attendant, and the guards arrested my brother, but there was much argument at the table afterwards. The meta-gamer has expressed this kind of sentiment before, and claims that since he knows so much about 5e lore and mechanics, and I had intended for them to be able to make strategic use of that knowledge in game, then his reaction would be to treat anyone from this setting as a random NPC, since he would genuinely believe he is in some kind of game world. This is the second time this has happened, as an NPC Cleric who accompanied the party during their first session was killed, and the NPC argument led to a fight then too. How should I deal with this borderline psychopath at my table? I am definitely changing his alignment from Neutral good, but is there more I should do to prevent future arguments, or is he right as he claims to live as though he believes he is in a game, even though he has a wife and a castle in this world. P.S. I am planning on having his wife leave him because I can't stand the thought of even his fictional character having sex with some poor woman who he thinks of as a measly NPC.

Madison Black

May it please the court, the judges, and the bailiff, I present the case of the frost giant frat party. My party was sent by an all-powerful wizard to collect some supplies to brew a batch of beer. One of these supplies included hops grown on the mountain by the frost giants. The frost giants were partiers and made a deal with my party to provide some hops should we beat them in 3 out of 4 games. Two of these games were beer pong and flip cup, which required sleight of hand checks and con saves. I argued that my character, a college of lore bard who is employed as a professor, should be allowed to use a performance check instead of a sleight of hand check because these games are just as much about showing off and putting on a performance as they are about dex skills. My party agreed, but the dm did not. We still won the games, got the hops, and brewed the beer, but I still contend that party/drinking games should allow for performance checks in place of sleight of hand, especially for a professor who has certainly been in this environment before!

Mountain_Dad

May it please The Highest of courts, The most Valiant and honored Judges Axford, Murphy and Tanner, and the Steadfast Bailiff Jake. I come to you as a player who is accepting his fate as a Campaign runner (former, i have learned my lesson in campaigns since), and ask humbly for your judgement. in my first Campaign i played as a Dragonborn Barbarian, and was a hot headed rotten teen who get upset when he rolls bad. i had multiple bad rolls, and decided about 40 minutes in, that my character would enter a bloodrage, kill the main NPC and 3 other critical characters, and my partner. yes, it was a dick move. but i come before this court asking for mercy. thankfully it was a one shot with my wife and long time friend, but the story never escapes a new campaign if my wife or that friend are arround.

Annie Saenger

To the ever effervescent justices, ye powers that be, and to the not-insignificantly glowing bailiff: I come to you with what might be a case and might be a confession, depending on how you rule. I work at a game store running RPGs. One campaign I run is set in a human empire of my own creation that is super religious and against both magic and whatever else they consider wild or untamed. During a crackdown where the govt officials were looking for all the magical residents of the capital city and trying to take them into custody, one of the PCs, a wood elf Druid committed to protecting the wild forests, decided to get a head start before the rest of the party woke up by visiting a covered market and warning the magical folks there to get out. This player had been struggling with staying engaged (we’re virtual) and with moments where his character took damage so I decided to give the character a nice walk through the city and a special moment in the market, finding meditation in the hustle and bustle. But instead the player proceeded to tell me that he wanted his character to call lightning down on the rickety wooden and canvas roof above the underground market. I pointed out that this would light the roof on fire, he said ok. I mentioned that the roof, being noticeably unstable, would have a good likelihood of falling down on the many innocent people below. He said he still wanted to do it. I gave him as many outs as I could, mentioning individual npcs and even children who were going to be hurt. The other players tried to stop him. Nothing would sway him - since his character was chaotic, he was committed. Finally I lost my patience and let him do it, and I didn’t pull any punches with the consequences. A lot of innocent people were hurt and killed, including npcs that the party had met. Others were taken into custody for the act of terror that this player had committed. The other player characters (and the other players) also didn’t pull punches in their reactions when they found out what had happened, and there was enough tension that I stopped everything and we had A Meeting about all the feelings. As a DM, I pride myself on providing realistic consequences to my players’ actions - I believe it’s part of giving them agency in the game. But as a paid DM, I don’t know if I should have softened the blow and given him what he wanted. I love challenging my players’ strategic ability and their ethical and moral logic, but did I go too far? (Also I’m so sorry this is so long, I am not good at being concise but I love all of work and trust in the judgment of the court implicitly)

Steve Herrera

Can you dispel Divine Intervention? Hello great and wise justices and the most amazing bailiff. My Party was playing a Level 20 one shot with brand new characters where we tried to save Christmas from Orcus. We were getting our collective asses kicked when one of party members who was playing a cleric used divine intervention and succeeded. We got buffs that the DM gave us(full health, resistance to damage and plus 10 AC) and the tide started to turn. Then around two turns later the DM uses Orcus and casts a dispel magic on the divine intervention and took all we gained away. It was difficult DC but it felt kind of petty. Without the buffs we eventually had a TPK and did not save Christmas. Can you even dispel divine intervention or was our DM being overzealous when it came to the power of Orcus. I leave the decision in the Court’s capable hands. Thanks for your time.

Jerry Flint (edited)

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2026-09-05 07:00 (Calinus) May it please the court and my fellow dwarven bailiff. I offer to you the case of the Murderous Gesticulation: Playing AD&D 2nd Edition a couple of decades ago we had consequences for critical failures on rolls that generally ended up as a dropped weapon or accidentally hitting a teammate. We were near the end of the adventure and winning the battle with the BBEG when I (a Dwarven Fighter) swung my axe for a killing blow while physically making a downward chopping motion with my hands to emphasize the attack. I rolled a 1. Instead of dropping my weapon or tripping and falling prone, however, I was informed that my axe blade had fallen off while it was overhead and DECAPITATED my still healthy dwarf. Cure light wounds wasn't exactly going to work. The DM also stated at the time that the sole reason for my characters death was my pantomime followed by a crit fail and that had I "just swung normally" he wouldn't have been instakilled. We ended the campaign at the end of that adventure and moved on without hard feelings, but the experience has lived in a dark corner of my mind since. Should flavor be punishable by perma-death or did the DM lash out unnecessarily?
2022-01-06 15:07 (Calinus) May it please the court and my fellow dwarven bailiff. I offer to you the case of the Murderous Gesticulation: Playing AD&D 2nd Edition a couple of decades ago we had consequences for critical failures on rolls that generally ended up as a dropped weapon or accidentally hitting a teammate. We were near the end of the adventure and winning the battle with the BBEG when I (a Dwarven Fighter) swung my axe for a killing blow while physically making a downward chopping motion with my hands to emphasize the attack. I rolled a 1. Instead of dropping my weapon or tripping and falling prone, however, I was informed that my axe blade had fallen off while it was overhead and DECAPITATED my still healthy dwarf. Cure light wounds wasn't exactly going to work. The DM also stated at the time that the sole reason for my characters death was my pantomime followed by a crit fail and that had I "just swung normally" he wouldn't have been instakilled. We ended the campaign at the end of that adventure and moved on without hard feelings, but the experience has lived in a dark corner of my mind since. Should flavor be punishable by perma-death or did the DM lash out unnecessarily?

(Calinus) May it please the court and my fellow dwarven bailiff. I offer to you the case of the Murderous Gesticulation: Playing AD&D 2nd Edition a couple of decades ago we had consequences for critical failures on rolls that generally ended up as a dropped weapon or accidentally hitting a teammate. We were near the end of the adventure and winning the battle with the BBEG when I (a Dwarven Fighter) swung my axe for a killing blow while physically making a downward chopping motion with my hands to emphasize the attack. I rolled a 1. Instead of dropping my weapon or tripping and falling prone, however, I was informed that my axe blade had fallen off while it was overhead and DECAPITATED my still healthy dwarf. Cure light wounds wasn't exactly going to work. The DM also stated at the time that the sole reason for my characters death was my pantomime followed by a crit fail and that had I "just swung normally" he wouldn't have been instakilled. We ended the campaign at the end of that adventure and moved on without hard feelings, but the experience has lived in a dark corner of my mind since. Should flavor be punishable by perma-death or did the DM lash out unnecessarily?

Figgy the Cat

Dear most admirable judges and most undesirable Ballif. I come not for your judgement but for the judgement of dice christ. I have committed a sin of leaving the discord before the game was over. My friends dm invited me on his stream for 3 episodes. However, this was at the end of the 50 episodes, so it was mainly role-playing their loves, who would become the time God and the build up for this long arching game. I knew nothing both in game and out and felt lost the whole time. So the 3rd session I made up a story of how my friend got stuck in the snow and I needed to get them out, I went to play volleyball instead. Getting stuck in the snow the next day too. Was I being impatient in how late I was brought in the game? Should I have kept playing even though I knew nothing and was about 7-10 levels below the others, never saw any conflict though.

Sarah

I am neither a judge nor a bailiff, but I have thoughts about how to handle this from the perspective of your DM. I think instead of focusing on how to beat your AC so much, there are other ways she might want to try to make sure you’re taking your fair share of damage. 1) Tempt/force you to use your reaction on something else (i.e. tempt an attack of opportunity, use effects or conditions that disallow reactions such as a slow spell or the stunned condition). 2) Put the ball in your court and make you roll a saving throw. You can do this with things like lair actions, environmental effects, and many spells/abilities.

Josh Meier

Josh M. Writes: May it please the 3 Titans of Owl Bear Egg Wealth Justices and Poor Eggless Baliff, I Humbly prostrate my lowsome self before you as I have gravely sinned against Dice Christ and my fellow PC's. I DM'd my first campaign for a few of my friends 2 years ago which took the party to a decrepit overgrown chapel courtyard where they faced off against a hag and a shambling mound. During the battle 3 of the PCs used their turns to set up what I would call thee sickest of combo moves, One player got launched in the air by another PC who pierced his sword into the head of the shambling mound and hung with his sword plunged, then another PC cast heat metal on the blade to burn it from the inside. They all rolled well on their checks on attacks. This is where my sin begins: looking up the stats of the shambling mound, it is described to have resistance to fire. Me trying to be "by the book" told my PCs that this shambling mound takes no fire damage and only piercing as it is unaffected by the heat/fire. They seemed a little disappointed but shook it off and the game continued. After the game I realized I was ashamed for not giving them additional damage or anything for their sick planned out combo, and on top of that I realized that fire resistance does not mean fire immunity so I should have taken damage. To this day I cringe at my mistake and live a life of DM shame. Oh crit justices, I kiss they dirt at your feet seeking penance for my grave error.

Ali Dunn

To my beloved justices and my interesting bailiff. I am “living” in Boston while my husband is a travel nurse here. I am being a very good PC but I still managed to get COVID + the day of your show here. I’ve never been more excited for something and now those hopes are adorable little COVID viruses. Crit justices and the bailiff guy, I submit myself for sadness sentencing.

Phil B (edited)

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2026-09-05 07:00 Good afternoon tough-but-fair Court Justices and Executioner Jake. I wish to sentence my first ever DM for manslaughter. His reckless actions led to the premature deaths of our groups interest in D&D, and I believe he should be sentenced in kind. Following the stories that 5E was so beginner-friendly, some friends and I decided to finally try out D&D. We all bought the Players Handbook and thoroughly studied the rules, and then a friend of a friend offered to DM. The DM asserted that he had decades of experience - he used to run 2E and 3E games at conventions - so learning and running 5E would be simple. I present my evidence from our first two sessions: 1. When a friend introduced his rogue, covered in scars from underground fights, the DM quickly stopped him: "You have 0 experience. you've never been in a fight in your life. those scars must be from something else" 2. I built a high AC Paladin to be a tank. The DM ignored 5e rules, and every attack was a contested roll between attacker and defender. Everyone had a 50% chance to hit, regardless of stats 3. He gave us a sort of "pokedex" so we could figure out monster stats. We bought him the Monster Manual to help since he still hadn't gotten around to learning 5E. The next session, he handed us two printed stat sheets with THAC0 and other deprecated stats. 4. After one session of telling us everything we missed by not being curious enough, he set up several traps the next session to penalize our curiosity. I know you will do what's right and respect the memory of my friends (or at least, their lost interest in D&D) and sentence that DM accordingly. -Phil
2022-01-08 17:53 Good afternoon tough-but-fair Court Justices and Executioner Jake. I wish to sentence my first ever DM for manslaughter. His reckless actions led to the premature deaths of our groups interest in D&D, and I believe he should be sentenced in kind. Following the stories that 5E was so beginner-friendly, some friends and I decided to finally try out D&D. We all bought the Players Handbook and thoroughly studied the rules, and then a friend of a friend offered to DM. The DM asserted that he had decades of experience - he used to run 2E and 3E games at conventions - so learning and running 5E would be simple. I present my evidence from our first two sessions: 1. When a friend introduced his rogue, covered in scars from underground fights, the DM quickly stopped him: "You have 0 experience. you've never been in a fight in your life. those scars must be from something else" 2. I built a high AC Paladin to be a tank. The DM ignored 5e rules, and every attack was a contested roll between attacker and defender. Everyone had a 50% chance to hit, regardless of stats 3. He gave us a sort of "pokedex" so we could figure out monster stats. We bought him the Monster Manual to help since he still hadn't gotten around to learning 5E. The next session, he handed us two printed stat sheets with THAC0 and other deprecated stats. 4. After one session of telling us everything we missed by not being curious enough, he set up several traps the next session to penalize our curiosity. I know you will do what's right and respect the memory of my friends (or at least, their lost interest in D&D) and sentence that DM accordingly. -Phil

Good afternoon tough-but-fair Court Justices and Executioner Jake. I wish to sentence my first ever DM for manslaughter. His reckless actions led to the premature deaths of our groups interest in D&D, and I believe he should be sentenced in kind. Following the stories that 5E was so beginner-friendly, some friends and I decided to finally try out D&D. We all bought the Players Handbook and thoroughly studied the rules, and then a friend of a friend offered to DM. The DM asserted that he had decades of experience - he used to run 2E and 3E games at conventions - so learning and running 5E would be simple. I present my evidence from our first two sessions: 1. When a friend introduced his rogue, covered in scars from underground fights, the DM quickly stopped him: "You have 0 experience. you've never been in a fight in your life. those scars must be from something else" 2. I built a high AC Paladin to be a tank. The DM ignored 5e rules, and every attack was a contested roll between attacker and defender. Everyone had a 50% chance to hit, regardless of stats 3. He gave us a sort of "pokedex" so we could figure out monster stats. We bought him the Monster Manual to help since he still hadn't gotten around to learning 5E. The next session, he handed us two printed stat sheets with THAC0 and other deprecated stats. 4. After one session of telling us everything we missed by not being curious enough, he set up several traps the next session to penalize our curiosity. I know you will do what's right and respect the memory of my friends (or at least, their lost interest in D&D) and sentence that DM accordingly. -Phil

Victoria Shotts

Seems to me divine intervention is a "skill" and not magic..... I'd like to know the "official" answer to this haha

Victoria Shotts

This 100% just sounds rough, I'm sorry ... We're definitely wired to tell ourselves negative stories about situations we're going through. It could be that they were worried you were a real threat or maybe they really did intend for you to have your own side battle. I'm curious if they ever had the second bad guy show up ever?

Mary H.

Thanks, I appreciate that. The second bad guy was a monster called a Bodak, and I tried to keep it from making it upstairs but didn't mange it. I was playing a bard without Viscous Mockery, so I definitely was not faultless in it. 🙄😅

Richard Spoehr

May it please the court and the lowly bailiff Jake, In my house game, I have a house rule that when a player kills an enemy on a critical hit, they get to break the laws of physics vis-a-vis Mortal Kombat, to add a little bit of extra video-gamey type fun to combat. The main bad guy for the entire campaign that I had lined up for them was a lich that had shown up early to test the party's strength. I wasn't worried about the prospect of the party killing the lich, as the lich's soul returns to its phylactery and eventually allows him to respawn. However, in the fight, one of my players landed the killing blow with his axe on the lich with a critical hit, and declared "I hit him so hard that I shatter his soul, thus permanently killing the lich." I wasn't particularly keen on this for a number of reasons, but my ruling was that he was attempting to break the laws of metaphysics and magic, and thus his physical axe wasn't capable of destroying the lich's soul. An argument ensued but the player eventually reluctantly agreed. I bring this issue before the court. Here are a few additional factors to consider: 1) The arguing player in question does have a track record of getting mopey when he doesn't get his way 2) The arguing player is also an experienced DM, and knows about a lich's phylactery. But his Barbarian with an 8 intelligence definitely doesn't. This was definitely him metagaming. That said, the argument kind of brought down the mood after what was a cool fight. Was I being too harsh on my players or was I justified in sticking to my guns? I accept whatever judgment the court has to offer. All the best, Rich S

Ben Hummel

The Rules Lawyers v. Their DM (me) To the Supreme Crit Justices and their loyal bailiff: May it please the Court. I am a DM for a group of fellow law students. The game itself has gone on since we started law school nearly two and a half years ago, and has evolved quite a lot. Recently, the party of lvl 12 PC’s came upon a modern day fantasy town (think: Elmville of Fantasy High). Rather than engage with anything remotely interesting, the party immediately asked if there was a courthouse in town, and held themselves out as lawyers in order to make gold. After some panicked law practice and trial mechanics creation on my part, they enjoyed successful careers as fantasy attorneys. The Rogue has established herself a booming criminal defense practice, the Warlock works quietly in trusts & estates, the Wizard works in intellectual property for the many arcane technologies coming out of this town, and the Bard represents musical and acting talent as an agent. All of them have made staggering amounts of gold due to their collective strange choice to focus on charisma and intelligence. But this is where it gets interesting. None of these characters canonically have passed this jurisdiction’s bar exam, or gone to law school. They’re all engaging in the unauthorized practice of law, which is a crime. Not to mention the Rogue is a literal criminal, the Wizard steals ideas to make his own inventions, the Bard sleeps with his clients, and the Warlock has committed tax fraud at least once. Where there are lawyers, there must be character & fitness inquiries. This fictional jurisdiction’s board of bar examiners has cracked down on the PCs’ firm, and now my PCs are all mad at me because they’re being audited, sued, and have had their names dragged in the dirt by the press. Their firm will likely never recover if they lose at this character & fitness hearing, and they stand to lose a lot of gold due to judgments and fines. Did I take it too far by creating the fictional regulatory body for lawyers to spoil their fun, or are these players crumbling under a burden of their own creation? Warmly, Ben H.