This post is certainly not intended to make people angry or start some sort of online war. I will go out of my way to say that I'm not a "strict" DM by any means and I have in the past found D&D a bit restrictive both as a player and a DM so I tend to run games loosely. Right now I'm running a game for 4 players using 2024 rules and they are currently all level 4. The players are just about to open a tomb which has a warning on it about it containing a "warrior" which is basically me hinting that there is an encounter in the tomb. I want the encounter to be challenging because the tomb holds a vital piece of information to the story The last encounter I built for them was according to the builder "deadly" but they cleared it with ease. I find the whole challenge rating thing incredibly confusing, even more so because we are not using XP. Any encounter builder that I have used has said "this might TPK the party" and it just does not have that effect. I'm not trying to TPK the party, but I do want them to feel challenged and feel potential danger. It's incredibly frustrating and something I really dislike about D&D. Rant over.... Advice welcome

I use AI a lot for RPGs, in my case DnD 5e. I’m confident some of you hate AI and for good reasons. Some may be unaware. We may know people who let it replace their own creativity. I brainstorm with it. For example, we had Session -1 last week. It my first time facilitating it and I’m sure it needs inprovement. We developed factions. Well…we developed a ton of ideas for factions. I will use one as an example. The players feel done, so I want to organize their faction ideas into something cohesive and then ask them to edit it (we need one more short Session -1) So I said to AI, “Now let’s create factions. I’ll give you the notes from Session -1 and then let’s discuss the faction. Discuss! I don’t need you to create a faction for me.” Then I gave it these notes: The world is a little bit like Harry Potter, with some people that know about magic and most people do not. - This faction wants everyone to know about magic, wants to expose magic and make it public. They want power and to control it - They are hunting the party. Opposed to the magic group and the cleric group that dislikes use of magic not sanctioned by the gods. They are working behind the scenes — working with the assassin’s guild. It’s a network of cells, not centralized AI asked about their motivation, what they thought was wrong with the world, and what their methods were. Also, why are they hunting the party? Finally, it asked how united or decentralize the cells are. I used voice-to-text to give it a long answer in response to everything it provided. 1. It clearly didn’t understand my notes because my notes are out of context. So I explained them. 2. It asked a lot of really good questions and made some suggestion suggestions. 3. I disagreed with a lot of the suggestions, liked some of them, but the best part was that it launched my own creativity. I know all the other background for this world and the probing questions and ideas allowed me to really think about what the players wanted.

Hey, gang! Thought I’d start a separate discussion about putting NPCs in danger, and other ways to raise the stakes of a combat (or other) encounter. Monster of the Week has “bystanders,” although not much advice on using them in ways that aren’t heavy-handed. Tips? Ideas? How have you used bystanders or recurring NPCs to raise the stakes?

Working on developing my first campaign. Looking for general advice on how to tie it all together, have appreciate the advice I have received so far but I feel like I needed to make some sort of general plot concept to start to look into those resources more. This is long so no need to read or reply but if you have the time and interest I appreciate it! I mostly want to know if my general plot actually makes sense in some way outside my own mind! Started with Dragons of Stormwreck Isle DnD starter set with the idea of having a time portal appear at the end. PC’s include Paladin Aasimar-goal is to find his grandfather (or more likely information) who was allegedly carried away from the island by a dragon a long time ago Tabaxi Rogue-No clear goal yet but following the will of Bast, ((ancient Egyptian goddess of home, domesticity, fertility, childbirth, and protection)) was suggested here to help her find a powerful form of catnip Sword-wielding human Wizard-being chased by a Wizards guild because they don’t like him pursuing training in sword fighting etc. Guild is called The Trust of the Song Warlock with a patron called the Deity Moander, which I’m just learning is an actual deity in DnD materials. Warlock wants to find some dirt on his patron so he can no longer be manipulated by him. How can you find dirt on a deity? Or am I missing something? Can they just kill him in a future time period? Sorcerer-occassionally when he rolls on the wild magic table he gets pulled to the elemental plane, so he would like some type of power to stop doing this. and/or maybe learn additional wizard magic more easily. The idea is they have just defeated a dragon (in a clifftop observatory) that wanted to perform a magic ritual during a celestial event, they have gotten rumors of some type of time portal potentially opening up during this event. So the next scene would be they’re in the observatory with the dead dragon, and they see the celestial event cause the observatory and telescope to glow and they see someone appear holding a large staff. This is a wizard human named Ebeneezer holding a time staff (I found online has certain stats etc.)

I know Dnd 5.5e is not popular with a lot of folks, just wondering why. Also curious what systems are your favorites and why? I'm in my first year of ttrpg-ing and don't feel I can take on learning a new system yet but I'm just wondering in this group what factors influence your likes and dislikes about various systems. I have played some independent systems at conventions and enjoyed them, and I do like the combat mechanics of Pathfinder, but Dnd is really big where I live and I already have a lot of the physical materials so I'm pretty invested in it for awhile. Open to any thoughts though, thanks!