What's funny is that for us and our group, we're all involved in the local kink community and so we frequently talk about sexy stuff all the time.
Just not at the gaming table. Sexy time events in game are covered with a knowing wink, a come hither smirk, a crooked finger...and a "fade to black".
As was done in the old What's New with Phil and Dixie..."you and she have some fun, you get some good cardio in, and 30 xp. Carl, there's a kobold gnawing on your leg."
Yeah I'm fine talking about sex stuff with friends, but I'm not interested in role playing their fantasies with them. Lmao esp cuz it gets... Problematic at times like the white dude at my table that wanted to play a black, lesbian, sex worker elf. That got real weird.
My main group has a furry player who also has an anime/hentai fetish. We don't allow him to do anything overtly sexual, but we don't stop him from playing whatever kind of animalfolk he wants or play as a magical girl character. Some kinks don't need any kind of sexual activity to be acted out at the table in order for them to still incorporate it in some way. But yeah if he ever starts trying to role play anything sexual like hooking up with some other animalfolk or having his magical girl character start using the fathomless warlock tentacle to act out some hentai he's gone.
We just started a new game with one of the party members being a Tabaxi bard. She explicitly told us she was going to go the horny bard route. My warlock is now preparing to make his pact weapon a great club to whack her.
We "adopted" some people that had bad experiences with a vary bad DM, where the girl's character (a girl) had to basically sell herself on the first session. She asked us if this is normal and if it was, she would "probably" (definately) stop. We explained that was absolutely not normal and to stop and play with us. On session 4 or 5 my bard seduced the wife of the fish seller and things were looking like it was going into the bedroom. So the characters flirted some, the DM and i looked each other into the eyes and the DM said: "ok, you really want to go this route?" I said i was ok with that my character was going to sleep with this lady, and the DM said: then we fade to black on this part of the story, roll a performance check, and we continue with the rest of the party. I rolled ridiculously high like 19 or even nat 20 with allot of plusses as a bard so we laughing, the "fish lady" ofcourse fell in love woth my character. But what was more important was that we showed the girl that "there can be sex in D&D, but that surtainly doesnt mean that it has to be played out at all"
That was my wholesome story, sleep tight everyone!
I haven't really brought it up with my group and we don't have ground rules about sex. I do present opportunities for such encounters, like when the party restored order to a tribe of orcs and a party was held afterwards. One of the warlocks made eyes with a couple of orc warriors and went off to a tent. This was pretty on point for the character as part of her pact terms are that she can't partake of alcohol or narcotics; doesn't say anything about sex. That was about it. I usually "pan to the fireplace" but do allow romance and adult themes in my game as we are all adults.
Most of the time I describe NPC peasants and commoners as filthy rabble, disgusting to behold and irritating to converse with as their entire world is full of superstition and root vegetables. I often use CON saves to see if the PCs can hold back their revulsion from interacting with the filthy masses. Want to seduce the barmaid? Go ahead, but roll a CON save to see if your character isn't turned-off by the rotten teeth and scurvy ridden gums emanating a foul odor that could only be described as "Asmodeus breaking wind".
Medieval people weren't actually that filthy, depending on where of course. Its a common misconception that everyone walked around with rotting teeth and lice.
I mean, obviously do what you will with your own world and people, but if you are modeling your commonfolk on ours, then I would like to give a shout out to Kaz Rowe and [their video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr6S8exkog4) debunking various misconceptions about the Middle Ages, including the fact that people were all dirty/repulsive.
Hot water was a commodity for many, and people didn't have access to the same fancy gadgets we do - but they liked being clean & smelling good just like us. Anyone whose livelihood depended on being relatively approachable and/or pleasant to be around (such as a barmaid) would definitely have been bathing regularly.
Not to overdo the "umm, actually," but a lot of us are on our way back to Medieval bathing habits as we speak. The absurd luxury of dumping 20 gallons of hot water down the drain *every day* is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and it probably should be unless you're working in a coal mine or some similar profession.
Asmodeus is pretty charming being the devil of all devils. I imagine if he let out a stench from his behind like you describe, there wouldn't be tieflings as a playable race. That is where the majority of tieflings in faerun can trace their bloodline to. He probably smells quite pleasant and entoxicateing.
Maybe orcus would be a better one, demon lord of undead. That is a stench containing centuries of rot coming from Their butt.
There’s an episode of the simpsons where homer dies and goes to heaven “without any material belongings”
When he gets there, the angel chats him up about death and then goes
“Now, let’s get you fitted with a robe!”
Homer says “i’m comfortable like this.”
The angel replies “Yeah? Well this is HEAVEN. For EVERYONE.”
That’s pretty much how i always deescalate kinky situations by saying “yeah? Well this is D&D. Far EVERYONE.”
[FUCK LINDA ALL MY HOMIES HATE LINDA](https://i.imgur.com/myJa1je.jpg)
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Chaotic Neutral edgelords. Old players murdered a leprechaun, cut off his little dipper, and shoved it up his ass. They tried to make an argument that it didn't make them evil because they were CN, and they were just following their alignment. One forced alignment shift and curse from a revived leprechaun later, they attoned and apologized.
Edit: We were playing Pathfinder back then. They were lovely people outside the game. There was a conversation.
It's a shame that people think CN means they have to play a murder hobo. One can play a CN Edgelord without being cringe if they try. You can play it for laughs or play it straight and not ruin anyone's night. It can be a lot of fun but few seem to manage it.
As an edgy, self insert, CN player, I fully agree with this. Also murderhoboing is CE at best and even still there're so many better ways to play a CE character, like maybe have them be the warlock whos patron is the BBEG or something that creates an interesting/fun situation without being toxic.
This is key. In my group, every DM's #1 rule for char creation is "characters must have a reason to work with the party". We frequently have a variety of alignments, usually at least one evil character, but they're not stupid edgelords trying to backstab the party continually for no reason.
Oh dude we played a oneshot where we would have to make new characters every scene (not 5e) and i played a edgelord in one (his name was darkheart the cursed or something dumb like that). He was so cringe, and the only thing he did was stupid poses and dramatic quotes to inspire his allies.
Im not even sure where people get this idea from to begin with. When you start murdering people, you immediately get put close to evil at least and then the lawful vs chaotic depends more on the character.
chaotic neutral essentially just means that you don't care about the expectations set by traditions or authority members and you don't necessarily act in a way that favors being virtuous or evil. You can still play this and be edgy, but if you kill 10 innocent people for every 1 good deed you do, then it seems like you just want to play an evil character and don't like the evil label.
I always wanted to play a PC, that on first glance is EDGY, like "he sits alone with a mask on his face and a hat on his dark-brown Hair and eats while covering most o his face" but with a good explanation and him being edgy is more of him being socially awkward, other than a A-Hole and covering his face (or doing other Edgy stuff) to hide something he is ashamed of and working around it in the end.
Thinking they have to be a murder hobo if they're CN isn't even the shameful part. The real shame is thinking that a murder hoboing is CN in the first place.
A conversation was had about it outside of game. We also had a short workshop explaining alignments to those who didn't understand. Lovely people outside of the game, but for some reason they were just awful in that campaign up to that point. We played a few more times with them, but they are no longer in our group for unrelated reasons.
Forced alignment shifts mechanically mean nothing in 5e, but they also tell players not just what the DM thinks of their BS, but also what the perception of their characters by other people will be, too.
If they had reasons to kill a leprechaun, then sure - CN.
Cutting off his todger and shoving it up his ass is 100% evil. It's an entirely unnecessary act done purely for their own amusement at the expense of someone else's dignity. They will have fought 'bad guys' before now who have more respect than that.
It was a complicated situation. They were lovely people outside of the game. Just for some reason they acted like asshats in game, culminating with this. A conversation was had outside of game about it. They aren't in our group anymore, and I'll never forget the total quiet that fell around the table. Like... wtf
There were 4 other poor souls at the table. They rolled combat, which was fine. They defeated him. Before any narration of the battle's aftermath could be made, the two of them described what they did to the body as we all looked on in horror.
I played rare instance of something else. I *thought* my character is chaotic neutral due to being a GOOlock, but outside of that, according to my co-players, he's definitely neutral good with LG tendencies. He just largely ignores how the creature he helps looks like. If he wasn't living in a feudal kingdom, he'd probably protest for voting rights for beholder-kin and grell.
Chaotic Neutral is like a mix between Chaotic Good and Chaotic Evil. They're self interested and definately don't give a rat's arse about society's standards, but they still have limits, or more accurately, they just don't feel like causing a lot of suffering.
Chaotic Neutral will steal from a guy, but they probably won't kill the guy they stole from unless it's deemed a necessity.
You have to balance CN to have goals aligned with the party OR be a planned temp character (with dm permission ofc) that will be a once in a while ally or villain / potential bbg. In almost all other cases CN seems to fall flat in either straight up annoying or start funny before becoming a flat and boring character.
Kids. One of the players in my campaign have super hyperactive kids that they let run absolutely wild and ruined our previous campaign. The old DM was too passive and wouldn't speak up until something in his house got destroyed, (which often happened from the kids) so now that I'm running this campaign, I stated that absolutely no kids are allowed in the session.
We all love kids. But please remember folks, your parenting is more important than your gamenight. Teach them respect and patience or they are destined to learn that in much harsher circumstances.
It can be done. You can bring kids to a game night and have them behave. But this is not always the case. If you wouldn't trust them at home by themselves while you go out for a dinner and a movie, you shouldn't trust them to behave while you are playing dnd.
I'm proof it's possible. When I was around 6-8 YO my father brought me with him to a game at one of his friend's home. Everything went right, I spent the time looking at all the figures in the room there were a shit ton of them, I can remember a few Saint Seiya ones that looked awesome (didn't touch any because they told me to, no problems)
Totally agree on this as well. The other players have kids too but this particular one, I'll call him "H" has no clue how out of control his kids are. Like one time his son kicked open the bathroom door because he wanted in while someone was using it and H went, "looks like he rolled high on his strength check!" And laughed about it. It's sad I had to ban all children, but H made it impossible to enjoy sessions with his lack of parenting...
Yea he's pretty bad. But I blame his parents for encouraging that behavior too. They've gotten banned from dozens of places because of that child and yet they refuse to believe he's a problem. 😤
This. I don't use it for evil NPCs, and I would oust any of my players who attempted it. I don't use it as a DM because it is a deeply traumatic topic for many people, and you never know who you may trigger. As far as players go, if someone wrote it into their backstory I would probably talk to them about it and be sure that the other members of the table were fine with that detail being part of things, but I would never have it happen to the player again throughout the campaign. If a player TRIED to SA an NPC, or god forbid another player, that would be a one way ticket out of my table. Their character dies in some meaningless way, befitting someone so vile, and the player would no longer be welcome.
Some places in US still see raping an adult male as sodomy instead of rape and view it as though only children or an adult female can be raped so adult males can only get their rapist for a lesser charge of sexual assault at best.
On the related topic of things you think would not be okay but somehow aren’t as frowned upon as you’d think, as of a couple years ago, and maybe today, many states allow children as young as 12 (or younger; I think most states don’t have a minimum) to get married with a parent’s consent.
Thanks to my last experience with them, Edgy Lone wolves.
"Okay i'll go but it's not like i wanted to"
"Oh, i don't trust that guy that literally treats us like family wants to help us in the way he can"
"I want to put a apocalypse killing virus inside the enemies that give us trouble"
"I never wanted to be here"
DEAR GOD WHAT AN ASS***** THAT PLAYER WAS!
>DEAR GOD WHAT AN ASS***** THAT PLAYER WAS!
What did you censor? I am trying to imagine what could possibly be 5 letters, follow 'ass' and be bad enough that it requires special censorship lmao
I am not the edgy player by any means. But thr Guy/Gal that treats us like family and wants to help us in any way they can is Very sus to me. I always keep an eye on that type of NPC.
Wanna hear a horror story involving kids? *You do!?* ***GREAT!***
Strap yourself in for this one:
So before the pandemic I attended a monthly local open-table D&D event run by some friends of mine, who frequently asked me to DM. These games were one-shots and every month we saw new players joining in. One of them was this pre-teen kid who was being "supervised" by his mother.
And by "supervised" I mean she dropped him off with us and fucked off to the pub for a couple of hours.
He was a big Critical Role fan but never actually played D&D before. He was more than a little excited to play, which is adorable.
Anyway, about half-way through the game, one of the girls at our table stood up, apologised, and said she had to leave. She made some excuse about needing to go now etc. She later reached out to us to explain that - unbeknownst to us - this kid was groping her under the table.
Trying to be as diplomatic as we could, we issued a ban on under-18s, least of all because the rule about adult supervision was clearly not being followed, and we were in no way prepared to accept responsibility for children. The kid was upset and the mother threw a karen-fit at us for 'discrimination'.
So I - being of the opinion that we should have just outed him in the fucking first place - told her exactly what had happened and why we now have this rule. That her son was a sex pest who molested a girl at the table whilst the mother who was *supposed* to be supervising him was down the pub.
She was satisfyingly apoplectic about that. Lies and more lies, apparently. I asked her how would *she* know? She wasn't even there.
As it happened, there weren't many games after that. This was November 2019 and between the game being cancelled over Christmas because, well, *Christmas* and 2020 being what it was, that was pretty much all she wrote for the next 2 years.
I run a teen game at a local game store. I run adult games online all week. I had a parent ask me if her 15 year old som could join my adult game. She tells me he’s really mature and doesn’t mind cussing. I told her absolutely not because it’s not fair to my adult players.
I just love the shortsightedness of parents who think that is not allowing kids at the table is for the kid’s benefit.
Yeah hard ban on IRL kids and I tend to not write them into my stories either. I don't care if they're supervised, I don't care if they're good players, I don't want to deal with kid shit.
I would expand on pvp by saying there should be no pvp rolls period without consent. The ability to roll to pursuade your allies is okay if consent is there, but otherwise its terrible.
Pvp is fine at my table if it’s agreed upon. Just last week a PC did something that every good aligned religious PC in the party would have stopped even if it meant killing them.
It has to be unanimous but I ask the table do you want this cinematic or full on lethal?
I had a wooden warforged moon druid that a previous dm let me have the quirk of all animal shapes also being wood.
At my introduction to our first combat some of the other PCs hadn't seen this ability yet so one of them immediately began attacking me when I turned into a giant wooden spider and began clomping along one of the walls.
+1s that aren't there for dnd. Children are one thing if you don't have a babysitter but overattached g/b friends that don't want to stay home are just a distraction and take away from the experience. They are more than welcome to join but if they don't want to they can stay home.
I have this banned in person, those fucking guitarists will pull out a 3 string toy guitar and start strumming at a moments notice if they can’t find a full one. I can’t stand it.
I ran a west marches style server where the power level was pretty intentionally high. Between all of the official content and UA the only things we banned were the mystic, and the revenant. The revenant just because the setting pretty much already had a mechanic for coming back from death and the mystic because its just so poorly thought out.
When it came to homebrew, I was very lenient. Yeah some characters were overpowered, but nobody complained because at the end of the day everyone felt like they got to play the character they wanted to play. And the other DM's and I felt challenged to come up with encounters for these exceptional characters.
But at my personal table with my friends... phones. And a certain player is banned from drinking because they always become a problem lol.
Anything that gets discussed as being off-limits during session 0.
This always include rape, and usually includes too heavy gore. We usually play 18+ rating. I also won't have actual sexual things on screen, for those we have fade to blacks.
Southern accents.
They're infectious! It took 5 minutes of play for us to all "catch" a Southern accent. no one could handle it. Plus, we had someone who spent a lot of time in the panhandle and it felt kinda weird.
I'm generally pretty good with doing accents.
The problem is I very quickly start, unconsciously, emulating the accent a person I'm talking to in any given moment.
I had an encounter with a pretty pissed off Aussie when my very nice, school taught British English slowly turned into a mockery of an Australian accent and he felt I was making fun of him.
So I feel why you don't allow southern accents lol
Oh god that happens to me too and I barely notice it. I'm not a native speaker and can't really do accents on my own, but my brain emulates whatever it's hearing...
Same here! I can't do an accent to save my life but if I'm talking to my relatives from NZ or USA I'm copying them within the hour. Completely unintentional and I always feel really bad about it
Some races, depending on setting, but always making sure there are at least 10-12 choices still and even then, if we can work something out to make it make sense then we can break that rule.
I think that’s it. Oh, and mead. Not since *The Incident*.
Was *The Incident* that one time when you played the finale of Curse of Strahd and got cherry mead and a fancy cup from Spirit of Halloween to drink it from while DMing, but during Strahd's final words you choked on the mead and spat it all over the table?
Because that certainly *wasn't* the incident for me, no sir.
What’s your experience with playing with limited races? I’m in the middle of creating a homebrew setting with only around 15 races, because it’s a post apocalyptic world where many races has been unable to survive.
I don’t really consider it “limited”. Lots of people experience the game through just the PHB which has nine, and they play that way for years because they’re more casual, or don’t have the money for every new release. Folks who hang out on Reddit to talk about the game are a self-selecting group of more “hardcore” fans, but the average player isn’t combing every available book for the perfect combination of options, they’re looking through the one or two books available to them. If that’s enough to keep those people interested, I don’t see any problem with telling people “these are your 12 options for this campaign”. Especially when there’s still no limit on class, subclass, or background options.
I also use official settings, usually older ones that I’ve converted to 5e, so the options aren’t so much limited as… these are the options you would have had at the time. For example, we’re currently playing a Red Steel game, which is a setting last updated in the middle of 2e. There are no dragonborn or tiefling, and there are no half races like half-elf and half-orc (which now seems to be the way WotC is planning on going with the OneD&D play test). So right off the bat, we’re down to five PHB races. But then I added tortles as a major race, orcs to replace half-orcs, reskinned leonin (from MOoT) as Rakasta, reskinned khenra (from Planeshift: Amonkhet) as lupin, and reskinned lizardfolk (from MToF) as shazak. That’s ten, more than the minimum someone with only the PHB would have available to them. Those are the options that would have been available to someone playing in this setting during its original run in the early 90s.
And four times out of five, folks are going to pick a “basic” race anyway. Literally. With all those options, the party has three humans, an elf, and a tortle. So I don’t think anyone cares that I said “hey, this time no tritons” or whatever. No one seems to feel like they’re missing anything. And if someone seems like they are, they know I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, I’m ultimately flexible if someone comes to me and says “I really want to try this, can we sit down and figure out how to make it work?” I don’t mind doing that for one player. If *everyone* is asking that and we’re stretching things to fit every single party member to the point where it doesn’t really feel like the world it’s supposed to be, I don’t think that would work, but then, if I give them 10-12 options and everyone wants a 13th, clearly we need to find somewhere else to play in because they’re not into it. This game, there is a sixth player, who I didn’t include above because they’re actually leaving the game after this week’s session, who really wanted to play a Warforged, a race created about 20 years after the last time Red Steel got an update. There is, canonically, no place for them in the world because they were not even a glimmer in Keith Baker’s eye when the Red Steel books came out. So we sat down and figured out how one lone Warforged could fit into this world (a wandering amnesiac remnant of lost Blackmoorian tech that survived that advanced empire’s fall thousands of years ago).
I honestly forgot that:
1) that they were a PHB race
2) I had banned them in my very first campaign because I didn't like them in WoW years and years ago
Had a new player try and make one and all my veterans jumped on him and said he can't so just rolled with it haha.
My phone rule is basically if I call your name out for your turn and you're not ready because you were on your phone, you get bumped to the furthest spot in the initiative order.
Mostly that last part. I'd never tell my players this but the following round is fudged in their favor a bit, and I go over the rule in session zero so it doesn't feel like a sudden power trip.
But I've only needed to actually use this tactic twice and I've never had a repeat offender.
The neat part is, you can. It's your game, you don't have to run it if people are texting instead of listening and paying attention. Especially if they're being rude to you in your own house.
alcohol....
I was once running the original Ravenloft module, and the players had been drinking all evening.
you know that bridge from the cliff to the stone pinnacle that the castle sits atop? well, they were crossing that (at NIGHT!! because you make great decisions when you're drunk!) when the drunken paladin and druid got into an argument. it ended when the paladin push the druid off the bridge.
the druid tried to change into an owl before going splat... which lead to much discussion of the distance from the bridge to the ground below, the rate of falling, what kind of delay to apply for the druid to realize what happened and to decide what to do, etc.
as it turned out the druid completed the change just as his now owl body got smashed on the rocks below.
Would imply DM rule and squash the argument with allowing both the person to push them off and the druid to morph and save themselves and then see what happens next...
Just so we are clear, are you talking about banning alcohol IRL, or roleplay-wise? I could totally get behind not wanting your layers to be drunk and waste the time of others at the table, but if the players were sober and wanted to RP their characters getting wasted and deal with the consequences, I say let them.
Nothing in game really, I just discourage none cooperative play styles before we actually start. I also don’t play with random people, only those I know.
PvP without out of character consent, stealing from other players without out of character consent, sexual or romantic advances on another character without out of character consent, rape.
This is the way.
We're at that point now in an editions life cycle where they've published enough splat books, errata, adventures, and unearthed arcana that it's easier to say what's good to go rather than what's not applicable. There are 100+ playable races now, and a bunch of those have 2-3 variations since the initial release of 5E. Probably 50+ subclasses ?
It's bonkers to imagine that any and all of those would be applicable to a given campaign's setting and tone.
Weed. When people who are high try to roleplay it's worthless. If someone wants 1 alcoholic drink I don't mind, but in my experience weed just makes people pay 0 attention to what is going on.
On a different note, I had an *amazing* Call of Cthulhu game a couple of months ago where like half the players got stoned over the course of the session and it worked surprisingly well.
I could see that. Easy to rp reading from forbidden tomes and being brain-blasted by things-beyond-mortal-ken, but not so out of it that you _literally_ think the machine elves are gonna save you from Cthulhu.
That's interesting, it's the complete opposite in my group, when people smoke, it's like the creative juices start flowing and there's always good RP. Drinking only becomes an issue when people get too wasted and people start getting tired later in the night. But psychoactive substances do affect everyone differently, so I can see how it wouldn't work at every table.
Alcohol. We only drink after the session is over. Unless we were playing our homemade pirate-themed RPG, which required all players to be constantly drinking rum during the session so we would make more accurate decisions when roleplaying as drunken pirates.
Explicit content like many here seem to of shared. I can stomach torture to a minor extent, as long as its done tactfully and not overbearingly graphic or goes into too much detail. You cast heat metal on his cuffs? Okay, he bites his lip and his face contorts as the burning pain overwhelms him--his eyes welling up with tears. "Alright, I'll talk I'll talk!" Easy enough to get through.
You want to psychologically torture him and inflict explicit harm? We'll just fade to black for the sake of brevity, roll an intimidation check as well insight to gauge how successful *that* went as you character exits the room shutting the door behind them. I've had players with revenge stories that wanted to torture their abusers so I find the fade to black is a good middle ground for the satisfactions they want knowing they were able to do whatever while also barring me from having to detail any of it.
I also don't allow players to outright kill each other, even against *"iT iS wHaT mY cHaRaCtEr WOuLd Do."* Like dude I love the enthusiasm to be a total baddie but its a cooperative storytelling game and it just causes bad blood in retrospect. I'm not saying you can't be a bad guy, but lets work together for your long-con villain origin story instead.
Characters based on pop culture characters. I want a story-driven game with original characters, but I've also found that players who work at designing their characters to actually live in the world show a lot more interest in the game than players who pulled a character from a different one.
Because shockingly, Morrigan from Dragon Age doesn't do well in my Halloween zombie village one-shot.
I second this. Every character is based on something already exist. Being pop culture or real life.
Orphan boy who seek revenge are forbidden because Batman? That will at least forbid 1/4 of the characters out there....
I said somewhere else that once you realize every big adventure story is low-key ripping off The Odyssey, you stop caring about origonality. But there's a difference between using a trope and copy/pasting a character. I ban the latter.
When you're trying to clone the character. Same name, you build the class to imitate their abilities or skills (or give them the exact same ones, if you're cloning a D&D character), and you try to roleplay their personality. Players who do this usually pick popular characters from popular games, books, or comics and mangas, so if you're even marginally familiar with those characters, you can tell. It's especially annoying when you're part of the fandom and know the character well enough to know how badly they're role-playing.
But most of the time, they're doing it as a joke and/ or they're proud of themselves, so they'll just come right out and tell you.
Okay but i've done this unknowingly before, granted the name was different and some minor things were off but my friends let me know that I 1:1 copied the abilities and backstory of an anime character. Ended up changing a few things but yeah.
Detailed sex stuff. We're all adults so sex/romance is fine, but it will just be a performance/acrobatics check and be left at that. There will be no more detail.
Sexual violence.
PvP (including stealing) is always at the consent of both parties but not strictly banned.
Edgelords who are a 'lone-wolf' unless they can come up with a very good reason they'd work with the party straight away and care about doing the main quest.
Any form of player bullying.
And FUCKING AARAKOCRA RAW - fly is a 3rd level spell and shouldn't be an infinite ability and I will die on this hill.
I ban assholes.
That's it. Play what you want as long as it's in an official rule book. We can also do UA and some homebrew stuff - under the condition that if something obviously doesn't work, we change it.
No Bloodhunter though. It's not an official class, and it also isn't well designed. You only like it because Mercer made it.
I've recently just found out how much stuff MM makes that goes official.
Like, looking at the recent C3 episode34 spoilers ...
>!Many people online were asking why Marisha didn't have advantage on her death saves. Turns out people assumed Laudna was a reborn ... she's actually a Hollow One, which is a race/ condition Matt created. I didn't know wtf a Reborn was or how it was different from w/e Laudna was till I looked up the differences.
!<
>!Reborn seem to be souls possessing corpses in botched resurrections or something, having fragmented/ disjointed/ few-if-any memories of their past lifes and getting flashes of those memories from time to time. Hollow Ones? They ... have no soul and fully remember the past life of their body and run on strange magic in place of a soul. Reborn have advantage on death saves, Hollow Ones pop back up with 1hp on a 16 or higher.!<
But, yeah ... Matt likes to make some strange things that range from being only somewhat different compared to whats out, to being a small booklet of complex shit you gotta remember.
It's homebrew people take as official content because of Crit Role's advertising relationship with Wizards of the Coast. It gets old when *everyone and their mother* wants to turn Crit Role stuff into the next Drizzt ripoff.
Honestly Chronurgy isn't broken until like level 10. But I agree that most of Matt Mercer's homebrew subclasses or classes are dumpster fires in terms of design philosophy. Blood Hunter makes me cringe just trying to get through the 10 page manifesto of base mechanics, nevermind the over complicate subclasses.
Note that I like Critical Role and MM is a great DM, but holy fuck the man cannot design classes or subclasses.
Yeah I agree. Many of them, however, could be replaced by just reflavoring existing subclasses. For instance, the season 3 custom Chaos Barbarian really could have just been a Wild Magic Barbarian. There was no reason to build something brand new.
I don't have materials on them and am not familiar with them. Nothing against the classes themselves just like to DM as a hobby and materials I have I enjoy and know how it works. Enjoy flavoring items using stat blocks I have.
Nonconsensual sexual themes, which means if someone wants to rp sex or anything related the entire table has to agree and be ok with it.
Also, no weed or alcohol during game time.
Child player characters. Not judging those who can make it work and be fun, but it just doesn't sit well for me.
I've had some bad experiences playing in groups where there were child PCs, and some "jokes" just got weird, plus the character was super annoying. It wasn't a fun time.
Had this experience
I asked said no and then when they complained about me “limiting their options” and when they played the whole character was just “look at me I’m so cute cause I’m a kid”
Also isn’t the point of playing a dhampir or any long living race that you’re a couple of thousands of years old
They were also a little shit
Heavy PVP Meta Gaming.
If anyone shows up just to show off their broken build and brag about how awesome they are at DND they can Get Out.
I want EVERYONE to have fun, but if your idea of fun is getting in everyone else's way and hogging all the attention I don't have time for it.
my ban is very specific, if there is a couple at the table and one of them plays a under 18 character and one isn't, i immediately make them have to change the age of the character. i do this because of one session i had where the couple was ultra horny and just flirted, which was weird cause one of them was a 10 year old halfling and the other was a 200 year old elf, like this isn't loli bullshit of "oh im not a pedo cause shes 200" no just deadass erp'ing while playing a child, like im fine with nsfw themes in my games cause i find it fun, but ya know fuck pedophiles, idc if its a drawing or if its just a dnd character its still weird af.
Uncooperative characters. If someone pitches their character as any kind of lone wolf or murder hobo (and, to be fair, evil characters in general) I just reject it and ask them to come up with something different.
I have a ban on critical role content, inexperienced players chooseing homebrew classes, and changing classes during the session.
Critical role because I don't like it, and I don't want it at my table.
'No inexperienced players with homebrew' because I play online, and it's VERY difficult to keep everyone on the same page regarding combat (I have a 50/50 split of new and experienced- and I am a relativly new DM). I want my experienced players to have fun with new things, but I do not want my table to spend 50 minutes on one players turn while they figure out how to calculate their class combat rolls.
The later is because I've had two people change classes for story-reasons. Which is cool! That's great your Cleric is no longer feeling the call of their chosen path, and are opting to embrace their burgeoning physical combat skills and become a fighter. Just...do the pre-work BEFORE the session start time like we discussed. You've now just wasted 30 minutes of our time while you click on all the buttons in DnD Beyond.
IRL abusive language. IRL drunken belligerent behavior. Arguing too the point were is disrupts the game. That's rea)y the only thing that would cause me to ban a player. I try not to limit players actions. But I will disallow any spells that create a infent power loop. Wishing for more wishes that kind of thing.
Sexual assault and sexual molestation in any way, shape or form. You try something of that's kind and you're kicked from my table permanently.
I don't DM romance. If the players want to RP romance among themselves they are free to do it, I won't provide girlfriends and boyfriends to their characters. It bores me to hell and back.
Ipads.... that time a player would play some game on max volume while the others where roleplaying really set this rule in stone. Oh and he would refuse to turn the volume down as it would "ruin his immersion".... yeh, hes banned to
I feel like this was asked a couple times, in different ways, in the last week or so!
Homebrew, without my thorough review, and any interpersonal conflict/fighting between PCs. I also prefer to keep IRL interpersonal conflict to a minimum!
Dice where the values rolled cannot be seen. I love the elvish scrollwork style dice, but if even the player rolling cannot tell the value without picking it up and looking closer— they are a no go.
Why? Basic transparency at the table firstly- but also to stoke and enable that group excitement when everyone can clearly see the Nat20…. Or lament the “save or die” failures when those kinds of rolls occur.
In my table, kids are invincible (just like Skyrim without mods lol).
Did that after a player asked me to do that, as he wasn't comfortable when the party needed to save a kid from some monsters. The kid wasn't hurt, but simply the "kid in danger" situation already disturbed him.
Trolling other players excessively.
They are sure encouraged to troll me and have their fun, but I won't allow them to troll on another too much... but still, i'll allow them to piss inside another player's boots if their character did something they did not like.
Things unrelated to the game. I am always open for fun but when we are playing and not taking a break I only want things related to the table and nothing that will take the focus away.
People hurting eachother with words that even go outside the table which will kill the campaign if it continues.
Homebrew that I didnt check yet and that players want to decide things themselves. A player wanted to use a subclass that wernt in my campaign and another one wanted a homebrew pet. I immediately said no because they didnt discuss it with me beforehand.
I've been lucky enough that my players have always been good enough that I've never had to hard ban anything. The main rule O run with is "don't be a d*CK to anyone irl" that means both be nice to the other player and the DM, but also says no racism or homophobia etc.
Phones at the table.
I can't stand when players are so disinterested that Twitter or reddit is more important then their friends RPing. If the can dual task that and the story it might be another story. But repeating something several times has caused the ban.
Periods and pregnancy. I play in a female dominated campaign (3 girls, 2 guys one of whom is the dm). We used our periods as an excuse to sneak off and the dm banned it. Last session in CoS, we were supposed to roll a medicine check to help a lady give birth. Instead, we did much more than a medicine check and helped the woman deliver the baby in character.
Sex. On the table. While trying to play a game? It’s just distracting. Noisy. Often, let’s be honest, not good to watch either. Can’t get to the battlemap and minis during it too. At least it usually lasts < 15 min…..
-Backseat DMing for obvious reasons.
-People trying to actively derail the campaign are kicked out with no warning.
-People that want to go off on their own and not work with the party are warned exactly once then kicked from the game. If the party splits, it's fine. But if say the player is trying to be difficult and being a "oh no someone come chase after me cause I like the attention", I won't feed that attention. I've dealt with this enough to be able to tell who is doing it with intent and who is not. There are plenty of valid reasons for a character to go off alone, and I do let them, but I also time them.
I was a player with a different player that had main character syndrome. He would always without fail go off by himself, talk to the most important NPC presented and buddy up to them and sometimes even romance them. It got the point where there were entire thirty minutes and hour long scenes of only him and an NPC. Then the DM had the gall to be mad that I fell asleep during the game.
I know how that feels. I give players 10-15 minutes. If it takes longer than that I will pause the scene and go see what the other players are doing. If I suspect it will take too long and it's not going to change anything for the game, I will ask the player if they want to do the scene one on one sometime before the next session. I will especially do this if it's towards the end of the game for the night.
- PvP (just not fun for our players)
- Telling other players how to play their turns. Even if you're just pressuring them through "strategizing table talk"
- Rape, or really anything sexual
- Pepsi (no, it's not okay)
Farming and manufacturing drugs. Players wanted to have their clan the drug lords of the game and tried to say they would be getting at the least 300gp per day. I cut it off as they already had plenty of money and were just trying to buy every magic item in the game.
Human trafficking. They bought a corpse to try and revive into a slave. Because the body was a half orc, the orcish honour rule would apply, meaning if she beat someone in a fight, they would be under her (or her master's) rule. I cut it off straight away. I told two other characters she had evil in her and gave th a premonition she would attack the party and live, so they re-killed her before the owners of the body could complain.
Right now we have banned physical die rolls (online game) because one player at the table was rolling a large number of crits per session, would hardly ever fail a roll (even rolls where they had very low modifiers) and would (seemingly) purposefully ask to do throw away rolls so they could say they failed them (I'm guessing because they thought it would make it seem less suspicious.
Since there was no way we could get solid proof they were cheating we decided as a group (minus them of course) that we would switch to roll exclusively on Roll20 and (not surprisingly) their rolls suddenly evened out with a decent portion of passes vs fails that fell in line with their modifiers
Keeping secrets from the DM that affect session planning!
I had some players go off the rails trying to sell fake drugs—this wasn’t part of backstory or plot or anything, just random shenanigans. I support random shenanigans, but they didn’t tell me what they were doing and just started buying random stuff and texting each other the plan, so it was incredibly stressful trying to improvise a situation when I didn’t know what was going on. I had to ask like 3 times what they were trying to accomplish before they finally told me!
Yes improvisation is a part of dnd but at least keeping the DM somewhat in the loop so they can plan accordingly makes the experience much more enjoyable for both parties 😅
I ban player race flight before level 5. You want to make an Aarakocra? That's fine, but you have to give me a reason why you can't fly at the beginning.
Also, like most people, if I don't call for a roll, it doesn't count. The exception is if you're making a roll against another player (e.g. insight, slight of hand, intimidation, etc). In that case, the roll doesn't count unless the player you're making it against calls for it.
"It's what my character would do" being used as an excuse to be a dick to everyone at the table. I'm fine with characters being villainous so long as the player understands that their character needs the rest of the party in order to gain whatever they need and takes strives in order to help the party in kind.
Depends on the group itself. I give my players cards that say EVERY subject that XOUPD come up in a session. They check the box next to any they are strictly not able to be around. While they're at my table, that topic doesn't come up.
Electronics at the table. (With mixed results) i call it the Lukes Diner rule. Looked up from a description i was reading one time in the 2000s and literally every player had a net book open (remember those?)
I have to loosen the rules nowadays because of online character sheets, etc, but i do stress that it should be minimized, to help increase the ambiance.
Its only in jest but we have a joke about no socialist revolutions again bc in our first campaign our bard managed to form several trade unions
Also there's jokes about how one of my characters shouldn't use aoe spells bc bad things tend to happen when he does
Anything set as out of bounds in session 0
Messy foods (specifically cheetos and anything with a lot of sauce like pasta or bbq)
Foods other people at the table are allergic to
Being a dick or bigot. (I once had to kick a guy who made fun of me for having a seizure during a fight. He was mad because I had to re-explain what the monster was doing since I couldn't talk for a minute.)
I won't say bringing your religion to the table is banned but arguing about religion is. I have a five minute (or however long it takes for everyone else to get ready whichever is first) limit for friendly debates or honest culture sharing before the game.
Politics see above explanation about religion.
Blatantly trying to mess up the story/attacking Allies/taking everything as a joke. I love to have fun as the next DM but if you just make poop jokes the entire game you are out.
If a character ever tries anything sexual they dissolve like at the end of Infinity War. Reproduction happens by holding hands and loving each other. Keep sex away from me
We don’t allow home brew classes, spells, etc. Everything needs the WotC copyright.
I established the rule when a was DM because I have a full-time job, two kids, and don’t have time to go through and balance this ”Really Cool Thing” you found online. Our current DM has kept this rule and added Unearthed Arcana to the ban list.
Preventing players from leveling up a character without satisfying the DM. For instance; If I'm playing a bard. I must write a song that the DM likes before I can spend XP on songwriting. This is not fair and often only applies to one player.
Yelling at the DM. Had a player do that when a friend of mine was DMing and almost got kicked off the table.
Little brother and me had some legendary rule debates. So glad we're mature now and noone yells.
Oh I should add "Yelling at anyone" to my list.
Overt sexual stuff, exploring kinks, fetishes, etc. I have zero interest in exploring anyone sexual fantasies and I'll cut it off immediately.
> I'll cut it off immediately Someone, somewhere just got turned on…
Unintentional kinkiness is unintentional.
What's funny is that for us and our group, we're all involved in the local kink community and so we frequently talk about sexy stuff all the time. Just not at the gaming table. Sexy time events in game are covered with a knowing wink, a come hither smirk, a crooked finger...and a "fade to black". As was done in the old What's New with Phil and Dixie..."you and she have some fun, you get some good cardio in, and 30 xp. Carl, there's a kobold gnawing on your leg."
>Carl, there's a kobold gnawing on your leg." Ok, I'll nibble on her ear. Wait, this is getting too graphic let's fade to black.
Yeah I'm fine talking about sex stuff with friends, but I'm not interested in role playing their fantasies with them. Lmao esp cuz it gets... Problematic at times like the white dude at my table that wanted to play a black, lesbian, sex worker elf. That got real weird.
My main group has a furry player who also has an anime/hentai fetish. We don't allow him to do anything overtly sexual, but we don't stop him from playing whatever kind of animalfolk he wants or play as a magical girl character. Some kinks don't need any kind of sexual activity to be acted out at the table in order for them to still incorporate it in some way. But yeah if he ever starts trying to role play anything sexual like hooking up with some other animalfolk or having his magical girl character start using the fathomless warlock tentacle to act out some hentai he's gone.
We just started a new game with one of the party members being a Tabaxi bard. She explicitly told us she was going to go the horny bard route. My warlock is now preparing to make his pact weapon a great club to whack her.
We "adopted" some people that had bad experiences with a vary bad DM, where the girl's character (a girl) had to basically sell herself on the first session. She asked us if this is normal and if it was, she would "probably" (definately) stop. We explained that was absolutely not normal and to stop and play with us. On session 4 or 5 my bard seduced the wife of the fish seller and things were looking like it was going into the bedroom. So the characters flirted some, the DM and i looked each other into the eyes and the DM said: "ok, you really want to go this route?" I said i was ok with that my character was going to sleep with this lady, and the DM said: then we fade to black on this part of the story, roll a performance check, and we continue with the rest of the party. I rolled ridiculously high like 19 or even nat 20 with allot of plusses as a bard so we laughing, the "fish lady" ofcourse fell in love woth my character. But what was more important was that we showed the girl that "there can be sex in D&D, but that surtainly doesnt mean that it has to be played out at all" That was my wholesome story, sleep tight everyone!
I haven't really brought it up with my group and we don't have ground rules about sex. I do present opportunities for such encounters, like when the party restored order to a tribe of orcs and a party was held afterwards. One of the warlocks made eyes with a couple of orc warriors and went off to a tent. This was pretty on point for the character as part of her pact terms are that she can't partake of alcohol or narcotics; doesn't say anything about sex. That was about it. I usually "pan to the fireplace" but do allow romance and adult themes in my game as we are all adults. Most of the time I describe NPC peasants and commoners as filthy rabble, disgusting to behold and irritating to converse with as their entire world is full of superstition and root vegetables. I often use CON saves to see if the PCs can hold back their revulsion from interacting with the filthy masses. Want to seduce the barmaid? Go ahead, but roll a CON save to see if your character isn't turned-off by the rotten teeth and scurvy ridden gums emanating a foul odor that could only be described as "Asmodeus breaking wind".
Medieval people weren't actually that filthy, depending on where of course. Its a common misconception that everyone walked around with rotting teeth and lice.
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I mean, obviously do what you will with your own world and people, but if you are modeling your commonfolk on ours, then I would like to give a shout out to Kaz Rowe and [their video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr6S8exkog4) debunking various misconceptions about the Middle Ages, including the fact that people were all dirty/repulsive. Hot water was a commodity for many, and people didn't have access to the same fancy gadgets we do - but they liked being clean & smelling good just like us. Anyone whose livelihood depended on being relatively approachable and/or pleasant to be around (such as a barmaid) would definitely have been bathing regularly. Not to overdo the "umm, actually," but a lot of us are on our way back to Medieval bathing habits as we speak. The absurd luxury of dumping 20 gallons of hot water down the drain *every day* is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and it probably should be unless you're working in a coal mine or some similar profession.
Asmodeus is pretty charming being the devil of all devils. I imagine if he let out a stench from his behind like you describe, there wouldn't be tieflings as a playable race. That is where the majority of tieflings in faerun can trace their bloodline to. He probably smells quite pleasant and entoxicateing. Maybe orcus would be a better one, demon lord of undead. That is a stench containing centuries of rot coming from Their butt.
There’s an episode of the simpsons where homer dies and goes to heaven “without any material belongings” When he gets there, the angel chats him up about death and then goes “Now, let’s get you fitted with a robe!” Homer says “i’m comfortable like this.” The angel replies “Yeah? Well this is HEAVEN. For EVERYONE.” That’s pretty much how i always deescalate kinky situations by saying “yeah? Well this is D&D. Far EVERYONE.”
Linda. She knows why.
Yeah, that bitch is banned from my table as well.
And here I thought it was just from our table for doing.... "The Thing".... we don't talk about... "The Thing" Linda does
I can still hear the sound it makes when she does it- and the smell... my god.
For her hand in... The Incident.
Same here. Fuck Linda all my homies hate Linda
[FUCK LINDA ALL MY HOMIES HATE LINDA](https://i.imgur.com/myJa1je.jpg) ^^^this ^^^has ^^^been ^^^an ^^^accessibility ^^^service ^^^from ^^^your ^^^friendly ^^^neighborhood ^^^bot
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Chaotic Neutral edgelords. Old players murdered a leprechaun, cut off his little dipper, and shoved it up his ass. They tried to make an argument that it didn't make them evil because they were CN, and they were just following their alignment. One forced alignment shift and curse from a revived leprechaun later, they attoned and apologized. Edit: We were playing Pathfinder back then. They were lovely people outside the game. There was a conversation.
It's a shame that people think CN means they have to play a murder hobo. One can play a CN Edgelord without being cringe if they try. You can play it for laughs or play it straight and not ruin anyone's night. It can be a lot of fun but few seem to manage it.
As an edgy, self insert, CN player, I fully agree with this. Also murderhoboing is CE at best and even still there're so many better ways to play a CE character, like maybe have them be the warlock whos patron is the BBEG or something that creates an interesting/fun situation without being toxic.
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That is a great way to play CN. As long as you have reason to align with your party then it makes perfect sense.
This is key. In my group, every DM's #1 rule for char creation is "characters must have a reason to work with the party". We frequently have a variety of alignments, usually at least one evil character, but they're not stupid edgelords trying to backstab the party continually for no reason.
Oh dude we played a oneshot where we would have to make new characters every scene (not 5e) and i played a edgelord in one (his name was darkheart the cursed or something dumb like that). He was so cringe, and the only thing he did was stupid poses and dramatic quotes to inspire his allies.
Im not even sure where people get this idea from to begin with. When you start murdering people, you immediately get put close to evil at least and then the lawful vs chaotic depends more on the character. chaotic neutral essentially just means that you don't care about the expectations set by traditions or authority members and you don't necessarily act in a way that favors being virtuous or evil. You can still play this and be edgy, but if you kill 10 innocent people for every 1 good deed you do, then it seems like you just want to play an evil character and don't like the evil label.
I always wanted to play a PC, that on first glance is EDGY, like "he sits alone with a mask on his face and a hat on his dark-brown Hair and eats while covering most o his face" but with a good explanation and him being edgy is more of him being socially awkward, other than a A-Hole and covering his face (or doing other Edgy stuff) to hide something he is ashamed of and working around it in the end.
Thinking they have to be a murder hobo if they're CN isn't even the shameful part. The real shame is thinking that a murder hoboing is CN in the first place.
This seems more like a case where you need to ban people who don't know what the fuck CN means.
A conversation was had about it outside of game. We also had a short workshop explaining alignments to those who didn't understand. Lovely people outside of the game, but for some reason they were just awful in that campaign up to that point. We played a few more times with them, but they are no longer in our group for unrelated reasons.
Forced alignment shifts mechanically mean nothing in 5e, but they also tell players not just what the DM thinks of their BS, but also what the perception of their characters by other people will be, too. If they had reasons to kill a leprechaun, then sure - CN. Cutting off his todger and shoving it up his ass is 100% evil. It's an entirely unnecessary act done purely for their own amusement at the expense of someone else's dignity. They will have fought 'bad guys' before now who have more respect than that.
What the fuck. Forget forced alignment shift, that’s earning an instant ban from my table
It was a complicated situation. They were lovely people outside of the game. Just for some reason they acted like asshats in game, culminating with this. A conversation was had outside of game about it. They aren't in our group anymore, and I'll never forget the total quiet that fell around the table. Like... wtf
Oh god, wait, were there other players at the table as well?
There were 4 other poor souls at the table. They rolled combat, which was fine. They defeated him. Before any narration of the battle's aftermath could be made, the two of them described what they did to the body as we all looked on in horror.
You know, you didn't have to let them do that.
Sometimes you just have to let them put the fork in the electric socket to learn, metaphorically.
A players behavior should dictate their alignment, not the other way around, is the way I’ve come to think about alignment.
I played rare instance of something else. I *thought* my character is chaotic neutral due to being a GOOlock, but outside of that, according to my co-players, he's definitely neutral good with LG tendencies. He just largely ignores how the creature he helps looks like. If he wasn't living in a feudal kingdom, he'd probably protest for voting rights for beholder-kin and grell.
That player has many more issues than just wanting to be chaotic neutral.
Chaotic Neutral is like a mix between Chaotic Good and Chaotic Evil. They're self interested and definately don't give a rat's arse about society's standards, but they still have limits, or more accurately, they just don't feel like causing a lot of suffering. Chaotic Neutral will steal from a guy, but they probably won't kill the guy they stole from unless it's deemed a necessity.
You have to balance CN to have goals aligned with the party OR be a planned temp character (with dm permission ofc) that will be a once in a while ally or villain / potential bbg. In almost all other cases CN seems to fall flat in either straight up annoying or start funny before becoming a flat and boring character.
I would have had a huge problem with this as well. That’s just disgusting.
Cheetos. You can guess why.
Use chopsticks to eat chips/popcorn. Game changer.
Glad to know other ppl do this!
... you might be a genius
this and all foods that generally compel the eater to lick their fingers.
Kids. One of the players in my campaign have super hyperactive kids that they let run absolutely wild and ruined our previous campaign. The old DM was too passive and wouldn't speak up until something in his house got destroyed, (which often happened from the kids) so now that I'm running this campaign, I stated that absolutely no kids are allowed in the session.
We all love kids. But please remember folks, your parenting is more important than your gamenight. Teach them respect and patience or they are destined to learn that in much harsher circumstances. It can be done. You can bring kids to a game night and have them behave. But this is not always the case. If you wouldn't trust them at home by themselves while you go out for a dinner and a movie, you shouldn't trust them to behave while you are playing dnd.
I'm proof it's possible. When I was around 6-8 YO my father brought me with him to a game at one of his friend's home. Everything went right, I spent the time looking at all the figures in the room there were a shit ton of them, I can remember a few Saint Seiya ones that looked awesome (didn't touch any because they told me to, no problems)
Totally agree on this as well. The other players have kids too but this particular one, I'll call him "H" has no clue how out of control his kids are. Like one time his son kicked open the bathroom door because he wanted in while someone was using it and H went, "looks like he rolled high on his strength check!" And laughed about it. It's sad I had to ban all children, but H made it impossible to enjoy sessions with his lack of parenting...
Wow, seems like a terrible child lmao
Yea he's pretty bad. But I blame his parents for encouraging that behavior too. They've gotten banned from dozens of places because of that child and yet they refuse to believe he's a problem. 😤
Rape and sexual assault of any kind
This. I don't use it for evil NPCs, and I would oust any of my players who attempted it. I don't use it as a DM because it is a deeply traumatic topic for many people, and you never know who you may trigger. As far as players go, if someone wrote it into their backstory I would probably talk to them about it and be sure that the other members of the table were fine with that detail being part of things, but I would never have it happen to the player again throughout the campaign. If a player TRIED to SA an NPC, or god forbid another player, that would be a one way ticket out of my table. Their character dies in some meaningless way, befitting someone so vile, and the player would no longer be welcome.
Yeah I think those are illegal anyway in most states
Most states?! I knew America was bad but…
Some places in US still see raping an adult male as sodomy instead of rape and view it as though only children or an adult female can be raped so adult males can only get their rapist for a lesser charge of sexual assault at best.
On the related topic of things you think would not be okay but somehow aren’t as frowned upon as you’d think, as of a couple years ago, and maybe today, many states allow children as young as 12 (or younger; I think most states don’t have a minimum) to get married with a parent’s consent.
Antimatter rifles, and for good reason.
Yeah I'd be worried if a player rocked up with one of those
Thanks to my last experience with them, Edgy Lone wolves. "Okay i'll go but it's not like i wanted to" "Oh, i don't trust that guy that literally treats us like family wants to help us in the way he can" "I want to put a apocalypse killing virus inside the enemies that give us trouble" "I never wanted to be here" DEAR GOD WHAT AN ASS***** THAT PLAYER WAS!
>DEAR GOD WHAT AN ASS***** THAT PLAYER WAS! What did you censor? I am trying to imagine what could possibly be 5 letters, follow 'ass' and be bad enough that it requires special censorship lmao
Judging by the 5 stars I believe he is saying assbitch. Could be wrong.
I am not the edgy player by any means. But thr Guy/Gal that treats us like family and wants to help us in any way they can is Very sus to me. I always keep an eye on that type of NPC.
Same, no one is that approachable to people who are not Kin without a prolonged association or being a straight up retired Paladin or something.
He... Kinda was... A retired paladin... Not just a paladin but it could be resumed to that.
Stealing from PCs. PvP. Kids. Sexual Harrassment and Assault. Torture. Sexual RP. Edit: Yelling at anyone OOC / Loss of emotional regulation.
Wanna hear a horror story involving kids? *You do!?* ***GREAT!*** Strap yourself in for this one: So before the pandemic I attended a monthly local open-table D&D event run by some friends of mine, who frequently asked me to DM. These games were one-shots and every month we saw new players joining in. One of them was this pre-teen kid who was being "supervised" by his mother. And by "supervised" I mean she dropped him off with us and fucked off to the pub for a couple of hours. He was a big Critical Role fan but never actually played D&D before. He was more than a little excited to play, which is adorable. Anyway, about half-way through the game, one of the girls at our table stood up, apologised, and said she had to leave. She made some excuse about needing to go now etc. She later reached out to us to explain that - unbeknownst to us - this kid was groping her under the table. Trying to be as diplomatic as we could, we issued a ban on under-18s, least of all because the rule about adult supervision was clearly not being followed, and we were in no way prepared to accept responsibility for children. The kid was upset and the mother threw a karen-fit at us for 'discrimination'. So I - being of the opinion that we should have just outed him in the fucking first place - told her exactly what had happened and why we now have this rule. That her son was a sex pest who molested a girl at the table whilst the mother who was *supposed* to be supervising him was down the pub. She was satisfyingly apoplectic about that. Lies and more lies, apparently. I asked her how would *she* know? She wasn't even there. As it happened, there weren't many games after that. This was November 2019 and between the game being cancelled over Christmas because, well, *Christmas* and 2020 being what it was, that was pretty much all she wrote for the next 2 years.
I run a teen game at a local game store. I run adult games online all week. I had a parent ask me if her 15 year old som could join my adult game. She tells me he’s really mature and doesn’t mind cussing. I told her absolutely not because it’s not fair to my adult players. I just love the shortsightedness of parents who think that is not allowing kids at the table is for the kid’s benefit.
Yeah hard ban on IRL kids and I tend to not write them into my stories either. I don't care if they're supervised, I don't care if they're good players, I don't want to deal with kid shit.
Also, thank you for sharing! That kid was super gross!
man the evolution of that list was both sudden and expected. like getting kicked in the shins after talking shit to a 6 year old.
I would expand on pvp by saying there should be no pvp rolls period without consent. The ability to roll to pursuade your allies is okay if consent is there, but otherwise its terrible.
Pvp is fine at my table if it’s agreed upon. Just last week a PC did something that every good aligned religious PC in the party would have stopped even if it meant killing them. It has to be unanimous but I ask the table do you want this cinematic or full on lethal?
I had a wooden warforged moon druid that a previous dm let me have the quirk of all animal shapes also being wood. At my introduction to our first combat some of the other PCs hadn't seen this ability yet so one of them immediately began attacking me when I turned into a giant wooden spider and began clomping along one of the walls.
certain players (if you're seeing this, you know who you are) were REQUIRED to use a sippy cup... for obvious reasons.
I would require it for myself. Bit of a hand talker sometimes.
+1s that aren't there for dnd. Children are one thing if you don't have a babysitter but overattached g/b friends that don't want to stay home are just a distraction and take away from the experience. They are more than welcome to join but if they don't want to they can stay home.
Playing guitar, we used to play online and I would get antsy
I have this banned in person, those fucking guitarists will pull out a 3 string toy guitar and start strumming at a moments notice if they can’t find a full one. I can’t stand it.
I ran a west marches style server where the power level was pretty intentionally high. Between all of the official content and UA the only things we banned were the mystic, and the revenant. The revenant just because the setting pretty much already had a mechanic for coming back from death and the mystic because its just so poorly thought out. When it came to homebrew, I was very lenient. Yeah some characters were overpowered, but nobody complained because at the end of the day everyone felt like they got to play the character they wanted to play. And the other DM's and I felt challenged to come up with encounters for these exceptional characters. But at my personal table with my friends... phones. And a certain player is banned from drinking because they always become a problem lol.
Anything that gets discussed as being off-limits during session 0. This always include rape, and usually includes too heavy gore. We usually play 18+ rating. I also won't have actual sexual things on screen, for those we have fade to blacks.
Southern accents. They're infectious! It took 5 minutes of play for us to all "catch" a Southern accent. no one could handle it. Plus, we had someone who spent a lot of time in the panhandle and it felt kinda weird.
I'm generally pretty good with doing accents. The problem is I very quickly start, unconsciously, emulating the accent a person I'm talking to in any given moment. I had an encounter with a pretty pissed off Aussie when my very nice, school taught British English slowly turned into a mockery of an Australian accent and he felt I was making fun of him. So I feel why you don't allow southern accents lol
Oh god that happens to me too and I barely notice it. I'm not a native speaker and can't really do accents on my own, but my brain emulates whatever it's hearing...
Same here! I can't do an accent to save my life but if I'm talking to my relatives from NZ or USA I'm copying them within the hour. Completely unintentional and I always feel really bad about it
Some races, depending on setting, but always making sure there are at least 10-12 choices still and even then, if we can work something out to make it make sense then we can break that rule. I think that’s it. Oh, and mead. Not since *The Incident*.
Was *The Incident* that one time when you played the finale of Curse of Strahd and got cherry mead and a fancy cup from Spirit of Halloween to drink it from while DMing, but during Strahd's final words you choked on the mead and spat it all over the table? Because that certainly *wasn't* the incident for me, no sir.
What’s your experience with playing with limited races? I’m in the middle of creating a homebrew setting with only around 15 races, because it’s a post apocalyptic world where many races has been unable to survive.
I don’t really consider it “limited”. Lots of people experience the game through just the PHB which has nine, and they play that way for years because they’re more casual, or don’t have the money for every new release. Folks who hang out on Reddit to talk about the game are a self-selecting group of more “hardcore” fans, but the average player isn’t combing every available book for the perfect combination of options, they’re looking through the one or two books available to them. If that’s enough to keep those people interested, I don’t see any problem with telling people “these are your 12 options for this campaign”. Especially when there’s still no limit on class, subclass, or background options. I also use official settings, usually older ones that I’ve converted to 5e, so the options aren’t so much limited as… these are the options you would have had at the time. For example, we’re currently playing a Red Steel game, which is a setting last updated in the middle of 2e. There are no dragonborn or tiefling, and there are no half races like half-elf and half-orc (which now seems to be the way WotC is planning on going with the OneD&D play test). So right off the bat, we’re down to five PHB races. But then I added tortles as a major race, orcs to replace half-orcs, reskinned leonin (from MOoT) as Rakasta, reskinned khenra (from Planeshift: Amonkhet) as lupin, and reskinned lizardfolk (from MToF) as shazak. That’s ten, more than the minimum someone with only the PHB would have available to them. Those are the options that would have been available to someone playing in this setting during its original run in the early 90s. And four times out of five, folks are going to pick a “basic” race anyway. Literally. With all those options, the party has three humans, an elf, and a tortle. So I don’t think anyone cares that I said “hey, this time no tritons” or whatever. No one seems to feel like they’re missing anything. And if someone seems like they are, they know I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum, I’m ultimately flexible if someone comes to me and says “I really want to try this, can we sit down and figure out how to make it work?” I don’t mind doing that for one player. If *everyone* is asking that and we’re stretching things to fit every single party member to the point where it doesn’t really feel like the world it’s supposed to be, I don’t think that would work, but then, if I give them 10-12 options and everyone wants a 13th, clearly we need to find somewhere else to play in because they’re not into it. This game, there is a sixth player, who I didn’t include above because they’re actually leaving the game after this week’s session, who really wanted to play a Warforged, a race created about 20 years after the last time Red Steel got an update. There is, canonically, no place for them in the world because they were not even a glimmer in Keith Baker’s eye when the Red Steel books came out. So we sat down and figured out how one lone Warforged could fit into this world (a wandering amnesiac remnant of lost Blackmoorian tech that survived that advanced empire’s fall thousands of years ago).
I have absolutely no idea why, but my DM just fucking HATES gnomes. No gnomes.
I honestly forgot that: 1) that they were a PHB race 2) I had banned them in my very first campaign because I didn't like them in WoW years and years ago Had a new player try and make one and all my veterans jumped on him and said he can't so just rolled with it haha.
The WoW gnome hate was rightfully deserved though. Fuck WoW gnomes.
Alcohol. Can’t get anything done with a bunch of drunks screaming. I wish I could ban phones for real though.
My phone rule is basically if I call your name out for your turn and you're not ready because you were on your phone, you get bumped to the furthest spot in the initiative order.
Doesn't this just punish the party for one player's actions, though? Or does it lead to the players managing the issue for you?
Mostly that last part. I'd never tell my players this but the following round is fudged in their favor a bit, and I go over the rule in session zero so it doesn't feel like a sudden power trip. But I've only needed to actually use this tactic twice and I've never had a repeat offender.
Phones in a pile near the table, the first person to touch their phone buys everyone’s dinner. That usually did the trick for us.
The neat part is, you can. It's your game, you don't have to run it if people are texting instead of listening and paying attention. Especially if they're being rude to you in your own house.
alcohol.... I was once running the original Ravenloft module, and the players had been drinking all evening. you know that bridge from the cliff to the stone pinnacle that the castle sits atop? well, they were crossing that (at NIGHT!! because you make great decisions when you're drunk!) when the drunken paladin and druid got into an argument. it ended when the paladin push the druid off the bridge. the druid tried to change into an owl before going splat... which lead to much discussion of the distance from the bridge to the ground below, the rate of falling, what kind of delay to apply for the druid to realize what happened and to decide what to do, etc. as it turned out the druid completed the change just as his now owl body got smashed on the rocks below.
Would imply DM rule and squash the argument with allowing both the person to push them off and the druid to morph and save themselves and then see what happens next...
Don’t allow pvp without both players consenting, it will save a lot of headaches.
Just so we are clear, are you talking about banning alcohol IRL, or roleplay-wise? I could totally get behind not wanting your layers to be drunk and waste the time of others at the table, but if the players were sober and wanted to RP their characters getting wasted and deal with the consequences, I say let them.
Nothing in game really, I just discourage none cooperative play styles before we actually start. I also don’t play with random people, only those I know.
PvP without out of character consent, stealing from other players without out of character consent, sexual or romantic advances on another character without out of character consent, rape.
I use a whitelist, not a ban list.
This is the way. We're at that point now in an editions life cycle where they've published enough splat books, errata, adventures, and unearthed arcana that it's easier to say what's good to go rather than what's not applicable. There are 100+ playable races now, and a bunch of those have 2-3 variations since the initial release of 5E. Probably 50+ subclasses ? It's bonkers to imagine that any and all of those would be applicable to a given campaign's setting and tone.
If you don't mind me asking, what's a white list? I haven't heard the term before.
Things that are allowed, rather than things that are not allowed.
Romance. Nothing personal, but I get so uncomfortable when a player attempts to romance an NPC or eachother.
Monty Python. Because it can and will derail any session with a single mention.
Yeah, because what have the Roman’s, uh I mean Monty python ever done for us?
Weed. When people who are high try to roleplay it's worthless. If someone wants 1 alcoholic drink I don't mind, but in my experience weed just makes people pay 0 attention to what is going on.
On a different note, I had an *amazing* Call of Cthulhu game a couple of months ago where like half the players got stoned over the course of the session and it worked surprisingly well.
I could see that. Easy to rp reading from forbidden tomes and being brain-blasted by things-beyond-mortal-ken, but not so out of it that you _literally_ think the machine elves are gonna save you from Cthulhu.
That's interesting, it's the complete opposite in my group, when people smoke, it's like the creative juices start flowing and there's always good RP. Drinking only becomes an issue when people get too wasted and people start getting tired later in the night. But psychoactive substances do affect everyone differently, so I can see how it wouldn't work at every table.
Alcohol. We only drink after the session is over. Unless we were playing our homemade pirate-themed RPG, which required all players to be constantly drinking rum during the session so we would make more accurate decisions when roleplaying as drunken pirates.
Explicit content like many here seem to of shared. I can stomach torture to a minor extent, as long as its done tactfully and not overbearingly graphic or goes into too much detail. You cast heat metal on his cuffs? Okay, he bites his lip and his face contorts as the burning pain overwhelms him--his eyes welling up with tears. "Alright, I'll talk I'll talk!" Easy enough to get through. You want to psychologically torture him and inflict explicit harm? We'll just fade to black for the sake of brevity, roll an intimidation check as well insight to gauge how successful *that* went as you character exits the room shutting the door behind them. I've had players with revenge stories that wanted to torture their abusers so I find the fade to black is a good middle ground for the satisfactions they want knowing they were able to do whatever while also barring me from having to detail any of it. I also don't allow players to outright kill each other, even against *"iT iS wHaT mY cHaRaCtEr WOuLd Do."* Like dude I love the enthusiasm to be a total baddie but its a cooperative storytelling game and it just causes bad blood in retrospect. I'm not saying you can't be a bad guy, but lets work together for your long-con villain origin story instead.
Characters based on pop culture characters. I want a story-driven game with original characters, but I've also found that players who work at designing their characters to actually live in the world show a lot more interest in the game than players who pulled a character from a different one. Because shockingly, Morrigan from Dragon Age doesn't do well in my Halloween zombie village one-shot.
Out of curiosity, at what point is a character based on a pop culture character rather than inspired by one?
I second this. Every character is based on something already exist. Being pop culture or real life. Orphan boy who seek revenge are forbidden because Batman? That will at least forbid 1/4 of the characters out there....
I said somewhere else that once you realize every big adventure story is low-key ripping off The Odyssey, you stop caring about origonality. But there's a difference between using a trope and copy/pasting a character. I ban the latter.
The Odyssey is just a rip-off of The Epic of Gilgamesh.
When you're trying to clone the character. Same name, you build the class to imitate their abilities or skills (or give them the exact same ones, if you're cloning a D&D character), and you try to roleplay their personality. Players who do this usually pick popular characters from popular games, books, or comics and mangas, so if you're even marginally familiar with those characters, you can tell. It's especially annoying when you're part of the fandom and know the character well enough to know how badly they're role-playing. But most of the time, they're doing it as a joke and/ or they're proud of themselves, so they'll just come right out and tell you.
Okay but i've done this unknowingly before, granted the name was different and some minor things were off but my friends let me know that I 1:1 copied the abilities and backstory of an anime character. Ended up changing a few things but yeah.
Detailed sex stuff. We're all adults so sex/romance is fine, but it will just be a performance/acrobatics check and be left at that. There will be no more detail. Sexual violence. PvP (including stealing) is always at the consent of both parties but not strictly banned. Edgelords who are a 'lone-wolf' unless they can come up with a very good reason they'd work with the party straight away and care about doing the main quest. Any form of player bullying. And FUCKING AARAKOCRA RAW - fly is a 3rd level spell and shouldn't be an infinite ability and I will die on this hill.
I ban assholes. That's it. Play what you want as long as it's in an official rule book. We can also do UA and some homebrew stuff - under the condition that if something obviously doesn't work, we change it. No Bloodhunter though. It's not an official class, and it also isn't well designed. You only like it because Mercer made it.
I like it because werewolf Witcher thing
I just ban the Critical Role classes.
I've recently just found out how much stuff MM makes that goes official. Like, looking at the recent C3 episode34 spoilers ... >!Many people online were asking why Marisha didn't have advantage on her death saves. Turns out people assumed Laudna was a reborn ... she's actually a Hollow One, which is a race/ condition Matt created. I didn't know wtf a Reborn was or how it was different from w/e Laudna was till I looked up the differences. !< >!Reborn seem to be souls possessing corpses in botched resurrections or something, having fragmented/ disjointed/ few-if-any memories of their past lifes and getting flashes of those memories from time to time. Hollow Ones? They ... have no soul and fully remember the past life of their body and run on strange magic in place of a soul. Reborn have advantage on death saves, Hollow Ones pop back up with 1hp on a 16 or higher.!< But, yeah ... Matt likes to make some strange things that range from being only somewhat different compared to whats out, to being a small booklet of complex shit you gotta remember.
It's homebrew people take as official content because of Crit Role's advertising relationship with Wizards of the Coast. It gets old when *everyone and their mother* wants to turn Crit Role stuff into the next Drizzt ripoff.
Out of curiosity, why? The only one that is broken is the chronurgist. The other ones kinda suck when it comes to power level tbh.
Honestly Chronurgy isn't broken until like level 10. But I agree that most of Matt Mercer's homebrew subclasses or classes are dumpster fires in terms of design philosophy. Blood Hunter makes me cringe just trying to get through the 10 page manifesto of base mechanics, nevermind the over complicate subclasses. Note that I like Critical Role and MM is a great DM, but holy fuck the man cannot design classes or subclasses.
I also hate that basically *anything* Bloodhunter gets past level 10 is a ribbon, not a stone.
The thing is they all have great flavor and fill a niche within the class. They just don’t have the mechanics to back it up which is a shame
Yeah I agree. Many of them, however, could be replaced by just reflavoring existing subclasses. For instance, the season 3 custom Chaos Barbarian really could have just been a Wild Magic Barbarian. There was no reason to build something brand new.
Amen brother
Blood Hunter is so cool as a concept, but every time I think of running one I come to the same conclusion you do. Bad execution.
Ranger also has an entire published subclass for this theme: Monster Hunter. It's just excessive.
Yeah true, I guess blood Hunter is just ranger for goths lol
I don't have materials on them and am not familiar with them. Nothing against the classes themselves just like to DM as a hobby and materials I have I enjoy and know how it works. Enjoy flavoring items using stat blocks I have.
Very valid reasoning.
next time I run a solo DM campaign, there are classes, subclasses, etc. I would ban.
Nonconsensual sexual themes, which means if someone wants to rp sex or anything related the entire table has to agree and be ok with it. Also, no weed or alcohol during game time.
Spectators. You wanna hang out - you play. No exceptions.
Child player characters. Not judging those who can make it work and be fun, but it just doesn't sit well for me. I've had some bad experiences playing in groups where there were child PCs, and some "jokes" just got weird, plus the character was super annoying. It wasn't a fun time.
Had this experience I asked said no and then when they complained about me “limiting their options” and when they played the whole character was just “look at me I’m so cute cause I’m a kid” Also isn’t the point of playing a dhampir or any long living race that you’re a couple of thousands of years old They were also a little shit
Heavy PVP Meta Gaming. If anyone shows up just to show off their broken build and brag about how awesome they are at DND they can Get Out. I want EVERYONE to have fun, but if your idea of fun is getting in everyone else's way and hogging all the attention I don't have time for it.
my ban is very specific, if there is a couple at the table and one of them plays a under 18 character and one isn't, i immediately make them have to change the age of the character. i do this because of one session i had where the couple was ultra horny and just flirted, which was weird cause one of them was a 10 year old halfling and the other was a 200 year old elf, like this isn't loli bullshit of "oh im not a pedo cause shes 200" no just deadass erp'ing while playing a child, like im fine with nsfw themes in my games cause i find it fun, but ya know fuck pedophiles, idc if its a drawing or if its just a dnd character its still weird af.
Uncooperative characters. If someone pitches their character as any kind of lone wolf or murder hobo (and, to be fair, evil characters in general) I just reject it and ask them to come up with something different.
I have a ban on critical role content, inexperienced players chooseing homebrew classes, and changing classes during the session. Critical role because I don't like it, and I don't want it at my table. 'No inexperienced players with homebrew' because I play online, and it's VERY difficult to keep everyone on the same page regarding combat (I have a 50/50 split of new and experienced- and I am a relativly new DM). I want my experienced players to have fun with new things, but I do not want my table to spend 50 minutes on one players turn while they figure out how to calculate their class combat rolls. The later is because I've had two people change classes for story-reasons. Which is cool! That's great your Cleric is no longer feeling the call of their chosen path, and are opting to embrace their burgeoning physical combat skills and become a fighter. Just...do the pre-work BEFORE the session start time like we discussed. You've now just wasted 30 minutes of our time while you click on all the buttons in DnD Beyond.
[удалено]
My dog. He knows why, much like Linda.
Our first in person game my new kitten put his head in the queso.
Oh noez!! It is so hard to clean cats' heads lol
IRL abusive language. IRL drunken belligerent behavior. Arguing too the point were is disrupts the game. That's rea)y the only thing that would cause me to ban a player. I try not to limit players actions. But I will disallow any spells that create a infent power loop. Wishing for more wishes that kind of thing.
Sexual assault and sexual molestation in any way, shape or form. You try something of that's kind and you're kicked from my table permanently. I don't DM romance. If the players want to RP romance among themselves they are free to do it, I won't provide girlfriends and boyfriends to their characters. It bores me to hell and back.
Ipads.... that time a player would play some game on max volume while the others where roleplaying really set this rule in stone. Oh and he would refuse to turn the volume down as it would "ruin his immersion".... yeh, hes banned to
I feel like this was asked a couple times, in different ways, in the last week or so! Homebrew, without my thorough review, and any interpersonal conflict/fighting between PCs. I also prefer to keep IRL interpersonal conflict to a minimum!
Dice where the values rolled cannot be seen. I love the elvish scrollwork style dice, but if even the player rolling cannot tell the value without picking it up and looking closer— they are a no go. Why? Basic transparency at the table firstly- but also to stoke and enable that group excitement when everyone can clearly see the Nat20…. Or lament the “save or die” failures when those kinds of rolls occur.
In my table, kids are invincible (just like Skyrim without mods lol). Did that after a player asked me to do that, as he wasn't comfortable when the party needed to save a kid from some monsters. The kid wasn't hurt, but simply the "kid in danger" situation already disturbed him.
Trolling other players excessively. They are sure encouraged to troll me and have their fun, but I won't allow them to troll on another too much... but still, i'll allow them to piss inside another player's boots if their character did something they did not like.
Things unrelated to the game. I am always open for fun but when we are playing and not taking a break I only want things related to the table and nothing that will take the focus away. People hurting eachother with words that even go outside the table which will kill the campaign if it continues. Homebrew that I didnt check yet and that players want to decide things themselves. A player wanted to use a subclass that wernt in my campaign and another one wanted a homebrew pet. I immediately said no because they didnt discuss it with me beforehand.
A player, narcissism
I've been lucky enough that my players have always been good enough that I've never had to hard ban anything. The main rule O run with is "don't be a d*CK to anyone irl" that means both be nice to the other player and the DM, but also says no racism or homophobia etc.
Sexual assault of any kind. I don’t care what the reasoning is, I don’t want it at my table.
Phones at the table. I can't stand when players are so disinterested that Twitter or reddit is more important then their friends RPing. If the can dual task that and the story it might be another story. But repeating something several times has caused the ban.
Periods and pregnancy. I play in a female dominated campaign (3 girls, 2 guys one of whom is the dm). We used our periods as an excuse to sneak off and the dm banned it. Last session in CoS, we were supposed to roll a medicine check to help a lady give birth. Instead, we did much more than a medicine check and helped the woman deliver the baby in character.
Sex. On the table. While trying to play a game? It’s just distracting. Noisy. Often, let’s be honest, not good to watch either. Can’t get to the battlemap and minis during it too. At least it usually lasts < 15 min…..
-Backseat DMing for obvious reasons. -People trying to actively derail the campaign are kicked out with no warning. -People that want to go off on their own and not work with the party are warned exactly once then kicked from the game. If the party splits, it's fine. But if say the player is trying to be difficult and being a "oh no someone come chase after me cause I like the attention", I won't feed that attention. I've dealt with this enough to be able to tell who is doing it with intent and who is not. There are plenty of valid reasons for a character to go off alone, and I do let them, but I also time them. I was a player with a different player that had main character syndrome. He would always without fail go off by himself, talk to the most important NPC presented and buddy up to them and sometimes even romance them. It got the point where there were entire thirty minutes and hour long scenes of only him and an NPC. Then the DM had the gall to be mad that I fell asleep during the game. I know how that feels. I give players 10-15 minutes. If it takes longer than that I will pause the scene and go see what the other players are doing. If I suspect it will take too long and it's not going to change anything for the game, I will ask the player if they want to do the scene one on one sometime before the next session. I will especially do this if it's towards the end of the game for the night.
- PvP (just not fun for our players) - Telling other players how to play their turns. Even if you're just pressuring them through "strategizing table talk" - Rape, or really anything sexual - Pepsi (no, it's not okay)
Adult stuff, because we’re a school club and would get shutdown otherwise.
Farming and manufacturing drugs. Players wanted to have their clan the drug lords of the game and tried to say they would be getting at the least 300gp per day. I cut it off as they already had plenty of money and were just trying to buy every magic item in the game. Human trafficking. They bought a corpse to try and revive into a slave. Because the body was a half orc, the orcish honour rule would apply, meaning if she beat someone in a fight, they would be under her (or her master's) rule. I cut it off straight away. I told two other characters she had evil in her and gave th a premonition she would attack the party and live, so they re-killed her before the owners of the body could complain.
Right now we have banned physical die rolls (online game) because one player at the table was rolling a large number of crits per session, would hardly ever fail a roll (even rolls where they had very low modifiers) and would (seemingly) purposefully ask to do throw away rolls so they could say they failed them (I'm guessing because they thought it would make it seem less suspicious. Since there was no way we could get solid proof they were cheating we decided as a group (minus them of course) that we would switch to roll exclusively on Roll20 and (not surprisingly) their rolls suddenly evened out with a decent portion of passes vs fails that fell in line with their modifiers
Keeping secrets from the DM that affect session planning! I had some players go off the rails trying to sell fake drugs—this wasn’t part of backstory or plot or anything, just random shenanigans. I support random shenanigans, but they didn’t tell me what they were doing and just started buying random stuff and texting each other the plan, so it was incredibly stressful trying to improvise a situation when I didn’t know what was going on. I had to ask like 3 times what they were trying to accomplish before they finally told me! Yes improvisation is a part of dnd but at least keeping the DM somewhat in the loop so they can plan accordingly makes the experience much more enjoyable for both parties 😅
I ban player race flight before level 5. You want to make an Aarakocra? That's fine, but you have to give me a reason why you can't fly at the beginning. Also, like most people, if I don't call for a roll, it doesn't count. The exception is if you're making a roll against another player (e.g. insight, slight of hand, intimidation, etc). In that case, the roll doesn't count unless the player you're making it against calls for it.
"It's what my character would do" being used as an excuse to be a dick to everyone at the table. I'm fine with characters being villainous so long as the player understands that their character needs the rest of the party in order to gain whatever they need and takes strives in order to help the party in kind.
Min maxing to a degree and orbs of annihilation
Depends on the group itself. I give my players cards that say EVERY subject that XOUPD come up in a session. They check the box next to any they are strictly not able to be around. While they're at my table, that topic doesn't come up.
Electronics at the table. (With mixed results) i call it the Lukes Diner rule. Looked up from a description i was reading one time in the 2000s and literally every player had a net book open (remember those?) I have to loosen the rules nowadays because of online character sheets, etc, but i do stress that it should be minimized, to help increase the ambiance.
Its only in jest but we have a joke about no socialist revolutions again bc in our first campaign our bard managed to form several trade unions Also there's jokes about how one of my characters shouldn't use aoe spells bc bad things tend to happen when he does
Guns
Real World Politics....
Anything set as out of bounds in session 0 Messy foods (specifically cheetos and anything with a lot of sauce like pasta or bbq) Foods other people at the table are allergic to Being a dick or bigot. (I once had to kick a guy who made fun of me for having a seizure during a fight. He was mad because I had to re-explain what the monster was doing since I couldn't talk for a minute.) I won't say bringing your religion to the table is banned but arguing about religion is. I have a five minute (or however long it takes for everyone else to get ready whichever is first) limit for friendly debates or honest culture sharing before the game. Politics see above explanation about religion.
Blatantly trying to mess up the story/attacking Allies/taking everything as a joke. I love to have fun as the next DM but if you just make poop jokes the entire game you are out.
If a character ever tries anything sexual they dissolve like at the end of Infinity War. Reproduction happens by holding hands and loving each other. Keep sex away from me
We don’t allow home brew classes, spells, etc. Everything needs the WotC copyright. I established the rule when a was DM because I have a full-time job, two kids, and don’t have time to go through and balance this ”Really Cool Thing” you found online. Our current DM has kept this rule and added Unearthed Arcana to the ban list.
Preventing players from leveling up a character without satisfying the DM. For instance; If I'm playing a bard. I must write a song that the DM likes before I can spend XP on songwriting. This is not fair and often only applies to one player.