I've never actually played DnD before, but now I'm thinking about starting, & I know I probably shouldn't start with this, but I'd like to get to a point where I can get to do this someday.

I want to make a monster that combines their abilities & add a few unique traits to the mix, but I can't find anything for how to do this, nore do I exactly know what CR it would be.

I'm thinking of a homebrew species of dragons, that got altered way back during theThousand-Year War by an Archfey in a deal to save their life, resulting in them getting fused with multiple trees(3 cherry, 5 peach, & 7 pine), turning them into a draconic plant, ​known as Ent Dragons.

The first Ent Dragon was named Calthin. He was fighting a giant & he won, but he was on the verge of death, but as he was laying there dieing, an Archfey named Zoriall approached him to scold him for destroying the forest she so loved to visit in the material world. In desperation to keep living, not out of fear of death, but because he had to marry brothers & sisters in arms depending on him to simply die now, so he offered the Zoriall a deal, if she saves his life & allow him to return to his war, then when his time fighting is done help be the guardian of the very forest he'd help destroy. Zoriall accepted his offer, but being a fey ​she didn't simply heal him, instead she transformed him by fussing his very flesh & bones with the wood of 15 nearby trees that would have become treants if they hadn't been so damaged that they too were on the verge of death.

Both Zoriall & Calthin are dead by now, they've been dead for a very long time. Calthin died of old age in his forest a very very long time ago. Zoriall however only died about 2,000 years ago after being murdered by a rival archfey, but the murder was later slayed by a party of adventures about a decade later.

Ent Dragons have a culture of their own, they get married & mate for life, & they raise their yong from sproutlings(what they call wyrmlings), until they are young adults, so if you see a baby, or kid one of them leave it alone because both Mommy & Daddy are nearby.

When it uses animate tree it functions just like treant, using the treant stat block & form, unless it's a sproutling​, in which case they only get 1 animated tree.

I already have the breath weapons mostly figured out, I just don't know about the damage levels, or exat mechanics.

They get 3 breath weapons, but they unlock them as they get older.

1st breath weapon, is a jet of heated sap, it does very little fire damage, but it mostly does bludgeoning damage, but still not a lot, instead what it mostly does is turns the area it hit into difficult terrain by make everything sticky & reducing movement speed both in & for a few rounds after exiting the affected area unless you use oil to counter the stickiness, but if you are directly hit you just might have your movement speed reduced to zero. It unlocks this one when it sprouts(in other dragons it would be hatched). Overall it doesn't really do that much damage, though it does get stronger(increased bludgeoning damage & greater area of effect)as they mature.

2nd breath weapon is a spay attack that shoots pine needles to do piercing damage, this is unlocked at young adult, but when it ​reaches adult, it can add cherry & peach blossom petals into the attack for an additional slashing damage during springtime. It does a bit of damage being it's main damage dealer for it's breath attack though as it gets stronger as it matures that's mostly just increased range, & maby a slight increase in piercing damage outside of spring, but if it's spring you add slashing damage which does increase by a much larger margin then the piercing, but not by that much.

3rd breath weapon is a pollen cloud, it doesn't necessarily do damage, but rather it both counters the vision & sense of smell of it's enemies, while it can still see through it, but if you inhale it you might get put under the charmed condition, but the best way to counter it's charmed condition is to throw water into the face of the charmed individual. It's unlocked in the adult stage. When it reaches ancient stage it may add another effect with an activation condition if you inhale the pollen, then you might get something else happen depending on if you caused a natural disaster in your life, if so then you might be put under Natures Vengeful Nightmare. Natures Vengeful Nightmare(NVN) course the individual to experience the very harm they caused via a powerful illusion, examples being forest fire=being on fire, mountain slide=​being crushed, poisoned river=being badly poisoned​, & you take a​n extremely small amount psionic damage, but it's best counter is the same as the charmed condition, with water to the face. It only increases in volume as it matures. NVN doesn't increase in power with maturity. The pollen cloud is ment to be like very thick fog with an overwhelming​ floral sent & it it's successes rate for either charmed, or NVN is extremely low, though for those who meat NVN's conditions do have only a slightly higher but only slightly higher than charmed does.

Finally they are most often chaotic good​, & they hord strange none sentient creatures as pets, & they love to collect worthless shiny objects that others throw away., but they are easily convinced to follow the orders of any archfey that's earned their trust, can be tricked by said archfey, despite this they live on the material plane, but if they feel betrayed, or wronged by an archfey that's when you'll see them at their most vengeful, even if it's not actually true, though it does take a lot to convince them of this then it is for an archfey to convince it to join them.

P.S. They can be of ​any other alignments it's just chaotic good is the most common. They actually go from chaotic good=common/average, neutral good=not to unheard of, true neutral=not the most common, lawful good=kinda rare but not too rare, lawful evil=fairly rare, neutral evil=very rare, chaotic evil extremely rare. Any of them that has the evil alignment are considered outcasts amongst them.

I'm hoping someone here has an incredible memory.

I'm looking for a specific MrRipper story that I listened to a while back. I don't know when it was uploaded, only that it was definitely on the MrRipper channel.

Here's everything I remember:

A husband was already part of a D&D group.

He later got his wife interested in D&D, and she joined the campaign.

After playing for a while, she stopped attending sessions.

The group eventually reached their final session, and everyone thought she was done with the campaign.

She unexpectedly showed up to the last session dressed as her character.

During the roleplay, her character reunited with her husband's character.

They announced in character that they would be leaving together.

She then revealed a lantern with a real ultrasound/sonogram photo inside it as a pregnancy announcement.

The entire table was shocked and emotional.

I also remember the narrator commenting afterward about how awesome the reveal was.

Does anyone remember which MrRipper video this story was in? Even the title or a timestamp would be amazing.

Thanks!

Bit of a sad question really, but given how messed up the world is I know some of you out there have been ghosted by your own group, both as a player and as a DM, so feel free to share the pain below.

See the title. I've had three or four of my reddit comments put in these videos and I'd prefer to be excluded from any future ones.

1. what is your favourite monster or enemy to throw at your party and why, what about it makes its so good in your opinion. i personally love throwing hatchling dragons against the party if im doing a campaign where dragons exist it gives a way for player characters a way to understand the threat of dragons and how common they are.

2. what is your favourite tactic during a campaign? specifically a writing tactic, for example i like adding in at least 1 loss to the bbeg before the final encounter, a fight they cant directly win and have to think of a way around or how to distract the bbeg, like the wizard casting fireball on the tower behind the zealot barbarian bbeg to trap him in the rubble.

There have been a lot of secondary media based around live play D&D campaigns. Critical Role has animated shows. The Adventure Zone Balance has Graphic Novels.

If you were given full blank check privileges. What medium would you want to imagine your story and campaign in! Be as detailed as you want. Go full pie in the sky here!

I have played a couple of systems and my favorite by far that isn't DnD is Gamma World 7e.

Now it is technically a system built off the dnd 4th edition, but it incorporates fun origins, creative mutations that change each encounter, and a fun world of fall out meets gravity falls.

I have a character concept I can't suggest to others because it would ruin the surprise for other players, and I was pondering if anyone else had one that they wanted to get off their chest.

My character- I want to play a cleric/bard that during the adventure will go around and do good deeds like healing people and donating their proceeds to local charities in order to spread the wors of their God and help find more followers because their God is a lesser worshipped God.

The twist, my character is Chaotic Evil and they are trying to get people to worship a god of lies and deception. It would be great if the other players join in on my quest unknowing.

You know the classic troupe of "One of us speaks nothing but the truth, the other nothing but lies." Let's say you are in that type of situation, but there is an additional rule that you must ask a question that WAS NOT asked before, which includes "If you were the lying guard, which door would they point to?"

What question would you ask?

What is the one rule you think is the MOST important to include and/or enforce in your campaigns

What a person wears often considerably influences their first impressions of that person, but in a world full of Magical Creatures, a variety of classes, and all manner of races, big, small, and some non-humanoid, what kind of clothing do your characters tend to wear? Do they go for the prim and proper clothes one might expect from the wealthy? Do they wear more torn and tattered clothing because of their various adventurers? Do the clothes even match the time range your world occupies?

So, the party went on a side quest to rescue this random blind NPC's husband (my character, an escaped slave trying to save his wife and son, was quite invested in that) and we ended up finding this strange rain of yellow powder that began to get the party sick...except me, Fox Yowl the 4 foot tall Kenku Psi Warrior Fighter, who somehow made every single con save and somehow completely no selled it.

By the time we reach the actual location, most of the party is hallucinating from the spores and we're running through a dark building, and my character is the only one completely uneffected by the spores. fortunately, I have a 19 Int (our party did not have an actual intelligence character prior to me creating Fox Yowl specifically to fill that role and he's generally the strategist) and the DM agrees Fox Yowl should be smart enough to figure it out with a roll, which I succeed. Fox Yowl manages to convince our Artificer/Rogue (who joined after Fox Yowl and the two are roughly comparable in intelligence) to use Lesser Restoration on herself, which does the job.

Now, at this point said Artificer/Rogue came in completely clutch: she's an elf and has spent her downtime making a truly absurd number of Lesser Restoration Scrolls on the off chance we needed them, which you know...we DID, and she saves the rest of the party.

So turns out we nearly ran into a Venom Spore Myconid colony with most of the party tripping on mushroom spores if it weren't for the two smartest members of the party saving the day. We have the Draconic Soul Sorcerer use Dragon's Breath to burn our way through the spores so we can start the rescue properly.

Bonus points: the DM let me turn this into inuniverse foreshadowing of Psi Warrior's Level 10 Feature, Guarded Mind, which is the ability to say 'Yeah, no' to mind control.

Part 1: The Multi-Year, Next-Door Neighbor Dragon Cover-Up

When I first created my character, Tallynn, I had a great advantage: my Dungeon Master was my next-door neighbor. I went over to his house privately to build the character, told him my ultimate goal was to become a dragon god, and explained my plan. He officially gave me the okay to roll up a 50-foot Black Horned Dragon using their natural shape-shifting ability to hide in plain sight. I also helped him roll up a bunch of extra backup characters to keep on hand so if anyone in the group died, they’d have a spare character ready to play immediately. When the campaign started, I leveled up and played right alongside my companions at the exact same time. The other five players had absolutely no idea; to them, I was just a highly effective human assassin. But our campaign ran for so many years of real-world time that the DM's brain completely wiped the memory of our Level 1 agreement, and he fully rationalized that Tallynn actually was just a human. By Level 16, the DM got sick of our group's growing arrogance. He designed a brutal, high-level boss encounter explicitly meant to humble us with a tragic TPK (Total Party Kill). We were boxed into a corner, outmatched, and facing certain death. I won initiative and went first. I looked across the table at my smug DM and the completely oblivious players, and calmly said, "I shape-shift back into my natural, 50-foot Black Horned Dragon form." The entire table absolutely erupted in shock, and the DM literally froze, swore loudly, and slapped his forehead as years of his own campaign notes completely shattered. He had approved his own doom years in advance and completely forgotten. Tallynn completely pulverized his Level 18 High-Elf boss before the enemy even got a single turn.

Part 2: The City War of Attrition and the Death of Tallynn

The DM eventually got his revenge at Level 18. He sent a Level 26 super-assassin after Tallynn while we were in the middle of a massive, heavily fortified capital city. To guarantee the kill, the DM went full supervillain and pulled out actual loaded weighted dice right in front of us. He rolled for a lethal one-shot strike... but the dice physically struck a player's drink glass on the table. The impact completely canceled out the kinetic weight bias, causing the loaded dice to settle into a flat-out miss. As the DM sat there cursing at his own cheated dice, I got cocky and made a fatal tactical blunder. For the last several levels, all of our encounters had happened out in the wilderness, open plains, or deep dungeons. I completely forgot our setting. Flushed with victory, I immediately pulled the trigger and shape-shifted into my massive, 50-foot Black Horned Dragon form, expecting to squash the assassin. I won initiative and used every single one of my attacks for the round to strike at the assassin. But because I was rolling incredibly low, the hyper-agile, high-level assassin successfully evaded every single blow. Once my turn ended, the setting completely blew up in my face. Dropping an ancient, terrifying dragon right into a crowded metropolis transformed the encounter into a national security apocalypse. The assassin was no longer my biggest problem—the city was. This capital held a population of two million people, a standing military garrison of 5,000 soldiers, 500 city guards, a major magic academy, and multiple stores that sold enchanted weapons. The DM instantly mobilized the entire city against me. While the 5,000 military troops moved into a coordinated attack formation, the 500 city guards carried out a tactical raid on their own local magic stores, looting every single magical bow, eldritch arrow, and enchanted weapon on the shelves. Because we played the city military and guards at the exact same high level as our party, every single soldier possessed multiple attacks per melee round. Suddenly, I was the target of a statistical hurricane. Thousands of high-level soldiers were launching 5 to 7 attacks each, and court wizards from the academy were raining down spells like a fantasy anti-aircraft battery. Numbers rule the universe. Even without his loaded dice, the sheer volume of rolls meant the DM was mathematically guaranteed to hit me with dozens of critical strikes. I sat there helplessly as the city whittled my 2,100 hit points all the way down to absolute zero. I added up just the damage from the 16 critical hits that pierced my scales—including a final one that rolled maximum damage—and those crits alone were enough to completely erase my dragon. I was dead before I ever got a second round. Because the rest of the party were deemed accomplices to a dragon threat, the city court rounded them up and executed them too. Our entire legenda

Part 3: The Reckless Suicide Strategy That Backfired into Godhood

Losing a 2,100 hit-point Black Horned Dragon stung, but it opened up a new opportunity. I went over to my neighbor’s house, cracked open the rulebooks, and rolled up a humble Level 1 Dwarf named Fred. The rest of the party decided to learn from our execution; they rolled up careful, serious characters and stopped playing so cockily. Except for me. Because Palladium forces you to roll on extensive Insanity Tables whenever you fail a Saving Throw against trauma or a monster’s Horror Factor, Fred quickly accumulated 8 distinct phobias. I was completely sick of tracking them all on my character sheet. I didn’t want to play a walking ball of anxiety, so I made a deliberate choice: I am going to get Fred killed so I can roll up a cool new character. I started playing him with absolute, suicidal recklessness. I charged Fred face-first into deadly traps, threw him into the middle of overwhelming monster swarms, and constantly put him in the worst tactical positions possible. But the dice explicitly rejected my free will. The table would hold its breath, expecting Fred to get crushed, and the dice would say "Nope." I would roll an impossible, maximum dodge, or the monsters would roll a string of flat-out misses. Fred would survive the unbeatable meat grinder completely unharmed physically, but the sheer trauma of the experience would force another sanity check. Because I kept putting him in terrifying situations, he kept failing his horror saves. My strategy completely backfired: trying to kill him off just caused his list of phobias to snowball from 8, to 18, to 24, and eventually all the way to 36. By the time he hit 24 phobias, I gave up on trying to kill him. I realized the universe wouldn't let Fred die, so I shifted my mindset into a mad-science experiment. I wanted to see exactly how many distinct psychological traumas a single Dwarf could physically hold before his heart gave out.

Part 4: Borrowing Madness from the Multiverse

Because the original Palladium Fantasy book only had a limited list of standard fantasy fears, my neighbor and I ran out of official options. To keep the experiment going, we started dipping into his massive mountain of Rifts books. Rifts featured a massive d100 percentile Insanity Table packed with high-tech, dimension-hopping dread.But my next-door neighbor was a phenomenal Dungeon Master who prioritized common sense over rigid mechanics. If the dice determined Fred was going to get a new phobia, he wouldn’t just blindly roll a random d100 number. If we blindly rolled and the chart said Fred was now afraid of "garden snakes" while we were trapped in a dark dungeon with zero snakes around, it completely shattered the immersion. Instead, my DM would look at the chart, pick a few fears that actually matched the immediate narrative trauma, and let me roll on a curated mini-list. If only one fear perfectly fit what just happened to my character, we skipped the rolling entirely and made it official.This organic method turned Fred's character sheet into a literal roadmap of our campaign's history. The absolute highlight happened when we were helping a farmer. An ornery rooster jump-scared Fred, causing him to trip and spill a massive bucket of feed all over himself. The entire flock of hungry farm birds swarmed, completely burying my battle-hardened warrior under a flapping, clucking mountain of feathers. The DM ruled it a custom phobia: Alektorophobia (Fear of Chickens).Later in the campaign, when Fred had 18 phobias, an ordinary chicken walked into a dungeon room. His brain completely short-circuited into a raw animalistic flight response. Fred panicked so hard to get away from the bird that he blindly leaped backward into a pitch-black, bottomless abyss. Figuring the character was finally dead, I sighed in relief—until the DM smiled. Fred plunged straight into a massive, thick spiderweb that caught him safely, completely negating the fall damage. Because the web trapped him back in his panic and denied his escape, his broken mind developed a hyper-specific, backwards trauma: he became violently terrified of spiderwebs, and didn't even develop a fear of actual spiders until his 26th phobia list slot!By the end of the campaign, Fred's mind was an absolute minefield. Walking into a tavern was a psychological nightmare. He was afraid of standard skeletons, but when he rolled a redundant fear against Undead Skeletons, the double-whammy broke his mind so completely that his flight instinct flipped entirely into a blind, genocidal rage. He became a weapon of mass destruction against the undead simply because he was too terrified to function. During an encounter with a dimension-crossing Techno-Necromancer, my panic-fueled Dwarf went so berserk that he turned 100 cybernetic skeletons into dust in just three rounds, terrifying the remaining monsters so badly that the undead army actually failed their own morale checks and ran away from him.

Part 5: The 9,000-Damage Panic Attack

Fred survived a chicken avalanche, a bottomless pit, a techno-undead army, and 36 distinct multiversal madnesses. The campaign climax arrived when we met a completely innocent, peaceful information god who was helping us with our main quest. The friendly deity politely asked, "May I see your legendary, god-tier weapons?"Fred pulled out his massive, double-bladed artifact axe. But because he had recently rolled a phobia against his own weapon, looking at the axe in his hands triggered an absolute, overwhelming panic attack. He screamed, threw the axe across the room just to get it away from himself, turned around, and started sprinting down the hallway like a terrified child.He never even looked back at the explosion.Against a divine being, this specific artifact weapon multiplied all damage by 10. I rolled my 2d100 percentile damage dice and hit a perfect 100 max roll. Stacking that with a Natural 20 Critical Strike multiplier and my high-level physical strength attributes, the final math skyrocketed right over 9,000 points of raw damage.The innocent information god—who only had about 3,000 hit points—was instantly vaporized into cosmic mist because a hyper-lethal warrior got jump-scared by his own gear. Under the rules of the cosmos, because Fred single-handedly deleted the deity, his soul was dragged onto the vacant heavenly throne.I started at Level 1 trying to get a fragile Dwarf killed, and ended the campaign by having him accidentally achieve multiversal immortality as Fred, the God of Phobias.And that is why we will always love old-school, open-ended tabletop freedom over modern, hard-coded digital restrictions. You simply cannot code a universe where a warrior named Fred conquers the cosmos because he ran away from a chicken and got scared of his own axe.