Terror Island writing tip: Specify that characters have names. This makes them more relatable. (That’s the title text for that comic.)

I’m imagining something like:

Player: I ask the NPC for his name.

GM: He tells you his name.

There’s also online fantasy name generators. Which basically just do that, but you don’t need to bother with tables.

Elppin is a valid Troll name.

I like this version better, though I admit it’s less relevant to the meme.

Depends on the magic. Fireball was used in the seventh through fourteenth centuries, so that’s not anachronistic. But if you want to do elemental transmutation, that wasn’t discovered until 1896. You could have it in steampunk.

That’s still way more imaginative than anything I can do.

That’s what all of it is. They just started naming everything after D&D monsters because they play D&D.

I’ve heard stories about players finding clues that the DM never intended to leave. Either stuff that wasn’t supposed to be important or plot holes. I think it might be good to have a rule that if the players find a certain amount of evidence, then regardless of the intended answer, they’re right. Honestly, I think it might be fun to not have an intended solution, and just keep making up details until they find enough plot holes.

I’d think of it as once to set up Chekhov’s gun, and once to use it. I think that’s a good rule, but it should be clarified in session zero.

Also, if anything depends on the environment, you don’t need rules like this and you can directly control it to make sure it doesn’t happen often enough to get boring.

Legally, they can’t keep you from publishing 5e content. You can even publish the 5e rules in their entirety so long as you change all the wording and pictures. I think they can keep you from publishing stuff involving their settings and characters, but you can still use their system.

If you trust the guy telling you this, you can just ask him which door leads to certain doom. If not, you have no way of knowing if you’re in a knights and knaves puzzle.

A common explanation is that there’s easy ways to ward against guns. But now we’re just doing Rowling’s job for her. Honestly, probably better than letting her do it.

Technically that was “life”. It’s just that conceptually it was hitpoints.

I probably would have had them mention a few people with that name, just to make sure they know you’re not abiding by the One-Steve Limit.

Reminds me of in DM of the Rings, when they thought they won after killing Saruman.

Is the answer Fly?

It’s clearly not a priority if they’re only just doing it in 5e. They expect most players to play in a crapsack world and leave it a crapsack world. After all, if it wasn’t a crapsack world there’d be no need for heroes, and they want a persistent world instead of having it always end after the players finish their campaign and fix it.

They don’t even have stats for the gods. The only way players could win in a way that fixes the cosmology involves heavy homebrew.

I think when they said “the good guys will eventually win” they meant like stopping this particular big bad from doing whatever they’re trying to do. Not that they’ll replace the gods, make sure every afterlife is paradise, and find a cruelty-free alternative to the Wall of the Faithless.

So in short, it’s a crapsack world, and campaigns rarely involve fixing it?

There was a campaign that Puffin Forest did where there was a treaty between celestials and fiends that was stolen reigniting the war with the intent that the upper planes would win. But the guy who did that was the antagonist. The players were trying to preserve the status quo.

I’ve heard campaigns don’t usually make it to a very high level. How often do you kill the evil gods and free the souls in the lower planes?