Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with a Quintessential Gnoll Playable Race and Racial Feats
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted bite into creating a new character option for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons with the gnoll. Gnolls occupy an unusual space among humanoid races of the Material Plane. Their demonic origins as mutated hyenas transformed in the wake of the demon lord Yeenoghu’s rampages puts them closer to fiends than humanoids and indeed the 5E D&D team expressed as much not too long ago. But it’s not difficult at all to reimagine these classic creatures whether as regular humanoids with traces of demonic blood in a fraction of their population like in Eberron or simply as hyenalike humanoids without any connection to demonic influence. At any rate you can check out Dave and Ted’s discussion and find their take on gnolls as a playable race for 5E D&D and for a bonus a couple of gnoll racial feats if you want to play the quintessential gnoll character in your next game.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with Flair in This New Wizard Arcane Tradition
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted spread their wings and come up with a new Arcane Tradition for wizards in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Order of the Peacock began with a funny meme and Dave came to our video planning meeting pitch in hand for a new subclass. Nerdarchy’s experience at D&D In A Castle 2019 already gave us a head start with all the research we did for our triple connected epic campaign, so let’s get into it and show off the plumage of this Order of the Peacock wizard subclass for 5E D&D.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with a Primal Draconic New Playable Race
Hey folks! The idea of a draconic playable race for Dungeons & Dragons has been favorite of mine since the days when Dragonlance introduced me to draconians (which we could not play). There were also weredragons, half dragons, and even a race of dragon centaurs my friends and I made. Comic books and science fiction also presented many concepts of the dragon man. Dragonborn finally codified this idea into a playable race for characters in fourth edition D&D and finally we had something in official rules to allow players to engage the fantasy of playing some sort of dragon. Two articles in Dragon #182 and #183 introduced young me to the concept of the primal, elemental, nasty linnorm, based not on the more fairy tale versions of dragons we see commonly in D&D but on the sorts of draconic beasts from Scandinavian tales. It is from these very different dragons I developed the wyrmkyne for 5E D&D.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with a Crafty Vulpin New Playable Race
So, what does the fox say? Actually, we’re not going there. Today we’re coming at you with a new idea for a playable race in your fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons games, regardless of setting. You know how you just wish you had some help whenever you lose something, whether it’s your keys, your work badge or possibly yourself after you took that wrong turn? Wouldn’t it be cool if there were some sort of planar race to help you out? Now there is! Let’s meet the vulpin, a humanoid fox race for 5E D&D.
Play Your Next 5E D&D Game with a Friendly Octopod New Playable Race and Feats
Hey folks! With my current fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign being an island hopping nautical adventure I got to thinking of new character options. I also love squid and octopus and all manner of cephalopods so naturally I decided to design a humanoid octopus playable race for 5E D&D. The oomquar present the opportunity to play a character with a very alien vibe and many built in roleplaying options. As one of these tentacled denizens of the deep your character faces the fear of aberrations and other strange monsters while having the opportunity to dispel these prejudices and preconceptions. Oomquar easily fit into any coastal or nautical campaign and can even venture further afield though they will be uncomfortable and cranky (roleplay!).
RPG Guide to Practical Character Optimization — Part 3
Part 1 of this guide to character optimization for tabletop roleplaying games goes over some general guidelines and touches on a few key points of the practical optimization process. You can check that out here. In Part 2 we covered optimizing your RPG characters for combat, a significant part of many games. You can find that part here. In this last part I’ll share general tips and tricks for approaching optimizing while maintaining a well balanced character for both in the game and your fellow players.
RPG Guide to Practical Character Optimization — Part 2
Part 1 of this guide to character optimization for tabletop roleplaying games goes over some general guidelines and touches on a few key points of the practical optimization process. You can check that out here. Now we’ll dive headfirst into combat.
RPG Guide to Practical Character Optimization — Part 1
Hail and well met! I thought I’d share with you all something that’s been on my mind for a while and that’s the concept of character optimization in tabletop roleplaying games. I’ll occasionally refer to third edition (v. 3.5) Dungeons & Dragons because it’s one of the systems I’m the most familiar with (it’s also the system I’ve been using for most of the games I run nowadays). My intention is for this guide’s content to include such systems as GURPS, old or new World of Darkness, Rolemaster and so on. There are so many great systems out there it’ll make your head spin. Anyway, onto the show and the first of three parts of my collected thoughts on what it means to optimize in RPGs.
Adventure Beneath the Waves With This New Aquatic Race for 5E D&D
Salutations, nerds! Today, rather than my usual babble I have a playable race for you that should be compatible with Wizard’s Wake, one of the titles over at Nerdarchy the Store or really any other seafaring kind of adventure for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. So without further ado, I present to you, the Thylocanthus, an new playable aquatic race for 5E D&D characters. These seafolk would fit right into the tropical Gylathacean Isles where the magical wreckage of Wizard’s Wake rests amid gorgeous tropical islands or any aquatic underwater adventures. Perhaps they could work with the Order of the Golden Quill or immerse themselves in the goings on around Saltmarsh.
Holiest 5E D&D Character? Mythic Odysseys of Theros Says Hold My Kykeon
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted channel divinity to come up with the holiest character in fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons to answer a community request. We returned to the Character Build Guide series we haven’t created for in a while and developed the Holy Paragon, a 5E D&D character leaning all the way into their divine nature. But now Mythic Odysseys of Theros released digitally and if you really want to play a character devoted to the gods, look no further. I’ve been incredibly excited about MOoT since we stumbled upon the release prior to the announcement and I looked through the whole hotly anticipated book this morning. I’m blown away.
Suffuse Your 5E D&D Campaign with 5 Color Mana Spellcasting
When Fil Kearney saw Wizards of the Coast creating settings and material for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons straight from the planes of Magic: The Gathering like many other players he anticipated the classic five color mana system wouldn’t be far behind. But after six Plane Shift releases plus Guildmasters Guide to Ravnica officially incorporating the worlds of M:TG to 5E D&D magic in the two games remains distinct without any crossover. So like any creative gamer Fil set out to develop his own 5 Color Mana system. Tap Untap Burn is a robust system for incorporating Magic’s classic color wheel into 5E D&D and Fil poured a tremendous amount of work into this to excite longtime Magic fans as well as 5E D&D players without any knowledge of the seminal trading card game. So let’s get into it and see what you can add to your games.
Adventures for 0th Level Characters in 5E D&D
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted take on a community request for how to run 0th level characters and adventures for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. During the early playtest stages of 5E D&D when it was called D&D Next I recall a starter adventure designed with decision points and prompts. This gives me some ideas to start from and explore another way to structure a 0th level adventure for 5E D&D, so let’s get into it.
Get Pumped for the 5E D&D Muscle Wizard
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted get swole with the Muscle Mage, a quirky character concept for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. The concept of a wizard more into physical fitness than academic research sounds like a blast to explore during play and makes me think of two different ways to represent this idea as a 5E D&D character. Things might get weird here but we’re talking about a wizard more inclined to punch monsters in the face than stand in the back casting fireball so we’re starting from an unusual place anyway. Time to flex my imagination and get into it with two versions of a 5E D&D muscle wizard.
Roleplaying Your Dump Stat in 5E D&D
Salutations, nerds! Today we’re coming at fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons from a player’s perspective looking specifically at how to play to your dump stat in a way that doesn’t ruin your fun. If we’re doing standard array for ability scores everybody has an 8 they must put somewhere. If we’re doing point buy it’s totally possible to have no dump stat at all but I’ve found in my experience more often than not you end up with more dump stats than you would have otherwise because people will sacrifice points out of more things to get those sweet 18’s out of the gate. The thing is, very rarely do you actually see people playing to the ability score they’ve dumped. I’m sure you’ve seen this too, where someone takes 8 in Intelligence and Wisdom so they can have good Strength and Dexterity but they never show the drawbacks of those low ability score in action. So today we’re going to talk about little ways you can show your 5E D&D dump stat through your roleplaying. Ready? Buckle up, let’s go.
Prepare for Extreme Adventurers League with this 5E D&D Character Build
Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel we create a lot of video content. There’s thousands of videos celebrating our passion for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games. (But yes, mostly D&D. We love the game!) One of our favorite videos to make are the Adventurers League Character Build Guides. We come up with a character concept and put it together soup to nuts. Along the way we explain why particular choices get made, building a character from 1st-20th level. Mechanical elements certainly factor heavily into decision making but practical reasoning and roleplaying share equal importance. For a little inside baseball it is almost always the latter ideas where a CBG begins. At the moment we’ve got 32 CBGs over at Dungeon Masters Guild, all pay what you want. Nine of them have achieved copper bestseller or better status, and there’s also four other PWYW products over there, which are encounters or adventures you can drop right into your 5E D&D game. Today I’m here to share one of my favorite CBGs, one I’ve been playing in a wonderfully fun game run by Esper the Bard on his YouTube channel.
