Welcome, Adventurer!

Your choices matter! I enjoy seeing how your characters interact with the world, then thinking through the impact and how the world changes in response to your actions. Whether the campaign uses official content, homebrew content, or a mixture of both, I invite you to participate in creating a living world together. "Yes and", excitement to see each other have cool moments, and understanding that when the group has fun, we each have fun, are important at this table.

About Jay the DM

I’ve been DMing RPGs since I drew grids on my LEGO baseplates and crafted terrains to tell stories with my brother, and invented a pen-and-paper RPG to play with my friends on the playground. But growing up in an anti-D&D household, it wasn’t until 5E that I ventured into the official world of tabletop RPGs. I quickly fell in love with it just as I expected, and began DMing 5E a few years ago.

My style is generally Rules as Written (RAW) with some Rules as Intended (RAI) and sometimes Rule of Cool. If you’re trying to make a peasant railgun or use RAW to exploit RAI, that’s not the type of play I enjoy. If you are trying to follow the rules but occasionally get them wrong, we’ll try to remind each other quickly if possible. I definitely won’t always remember every rule 100% perfectly 100% of the time, so if I need to make a ruling we’ll go with Rule Zero, and then we can get deeper into a rules examination after the session.

Rule Zero, also known as GM fiat, is the common RPG rule that the GM has the ultimate say in all rules matters and can thus introduce new rules or exceptions to rules, or abolish old ones at their leisure. To put simply, it means the GM is like the god of the game.

Character Death - I’m not playing to kill you. I’m not playing to beat you. I’m playing to have a good time with you. I like seeing your character pull off a clutch success, but that is only significant when there are stakes. So your character may die, or suffer serious consequences. It’s part of my job to balance and to make sure you can gauge the stakes - so if there’s an encounter where I expect you to be in a combat, I’ve balanced it and if the dice don’t go your way, you might die. If you’re meeting with the Lord of a city in her hall surrounded by 200 loyal soldiers and you decide to attack the Lord...don’t expect that to be a balanced combat.

I also make most rolls in the open, because I want you to know that the multiattack that knocked you out and gave you a failed death save, or the BBEG’s failed saving throw, were fair - not me pulling punches or picking on your character.

POC/Female/LGBTQ-Friendly. I've played with and DMed for people of all kinds of genders, sexualities, ethnicities, and nationalities, and this is a welcoming table.

Characters & Leveling

-All published content is allowed if it is setting appropriate. Any other published content needs to be preapproved. UA needs pre-approval - current UA will usually be approved, but any UA that was revised needs to be the current version (which might be in a newer official publication).

-You will have full access to ALL DNDBeyond content for character creation.

-Use standard array OR point buy OR we can use a group array rolled together if the entire group wants.

-We will be using milestone leveling.

-Feats can always be chosen instead of an ASI at the designated levels for your class. -Additionally, you can train toward Earned Feats that are geared toward making your character unique, not combat optimization.

• Let me know in advance what feat your character would like to earn, and I’ll let you know if it is approved.

• Combat-optimizing feats such as Great Weapon Master generally won’t be allowed. Non-optimized feats to develop your character’s identity, such as Actor (if you are not a charisma caster) can be earned.

• As a rare exception to the general rule, if your character is not optimized, you may be able to earn a feat that has a combat benefit.

• Multiclassing may require reworking a feat if it boosted that class’s stat.

• Roleplaying your character’s pursuit of the talents reflected in a feat may accelerate your progress, especially if roleplayed at a cost/when not “optimal.”

• Remember these are a bonus in addition to your normal ASI/feat to help you make your character unique, so don’t feel bad that you can’t take Sentinel for your Echo Knight or whatever! You can still do that when you reach an ASI level.

Player Behavior

In addition to the standard “don’t be a jerk” stuff that I hope doesn’t need to be spelled out in a list of rules, no player-versus-player stuff is allowed, unless both parties agree for story reasons. That means the goliath barbarian can’t drag the gnome rogue off unless the player allows it. No dice rolling needed if the player doesn’t want to go along. Note that this is different from the character - your character may not want to be dragged off or have detect thoughts cast on them, but you as a player like the story beat, so you’re OK with it. This covers theft, spells, attacks, etc.

This should go without saying, but it’s not always as obvious as one might think. In the fiction we’re creating, you’re an adventuring party. If you’re a loner who doesn’t care about the group or anyone else, why are you in the adventuring group? It’s your responsibility to have a character who has a reason/desire to be part of the group. This doesn’t mean your whole group has to be good-aligned, but it’s quite challenging to play an “evil” character without that turning into conflict between players. I’ve seen it done well on occasion, and it’s OK for characters to have conflict, as long as the players are all having fun.

“Fade to black” is as sexually explicit as we’ll ever get.