me: hey, make sure to give me your characters backstory so i can include it in the campaign, don’t worry about sending too much or making it too detailed the more you send me the more I can work in about their past
As a writer, you should try to give your villains plausible motivations, backstories, etc. A villain is much more interesting if they think they’re the hero of their own story.
As a DM, this is still great advice in theory but in practice you should ABSOLUTELY NEVER DO THIS because your players will discover your villains’ tragic backstory, look at their motivation and find it sound, and end up adopting the villains, going rogue from the Celestial Intervention Agency to avenge the wrongs done said villains and ensure their freedom, accidentally kidnapping the President, and plunging Gallifrey into a civil war.
New form of joke: telling someone to roll an ability check for something that obviously doesn’t need that type of check
“I wanna see if this dead body is anyone we recognize” “Roll an acrobatics check”
You say joke, but I like to use it as an opportunity to genuinely fuck with players. “I want to see if the dead body is anyone we know.” “Roll acrobatics.” “11?” “The body seizes you by the wrists and lunges at your throat with its teeth, howling like a demon. You are grappled. Roll initiative.”
Or, “I want to check the chest for traps.” “Roll performance.” “Okay, uh. 17…?” “You start whistling quietly while you go about tapping, poking, and examining the sides of the chest. It’s a pretty catchy tune you picked up a couple days ago from the bard.” “Alright, neat, and the chest?” “The chest starts humming along.”
OH MY GOSH THAT SECOND ONE IS A RLLY GOOD IDEA
Ah, a new twist on the classic “We laugh, they laugh, the table laughs, we kill the table”
The heroes must solve the final obstacle – they must solve ancient, eldritch ruins left behind by the Elder Gods. The GM hands a picture of the ruins to the players. It’s a timed calculus test photocopied from a textbook.
we’re all sitting in the tavern, minding our own business, and then we hear a bleat so loud it destroys the glass in the windows and ale goes everywhere. the dm sits this down on the board
Speaking of the D&D Monster Manual, I love how the metallic dragons are good-aligned but still inherently dragons, so all the worst qualities of the evil chromatic dragons are just kind of twisted into bizarre eccentricities. Metallic dragons seem sort of like weird aliens that have vaguely heard of what it means to be a Cheerful and Jovial Friend but don’t quite have the hang of it yet.
Brass dragons are so dedicated to conversation that if someone tries to cut off a conversation with them early, they’ll breathe sleep gas at them, bury them up to their neck in sand, wait for them to wake up, then keep idly chatting until they’ve hit their quota of small-talk, at which point they’ll happily let them go. Copper dragons can be mortally offended if people don’t laugh at their jokes. I love it.
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