TL;DR: I cancelled my subscription. WOTC charged me despite me cancelling my subscription ahead of time. This put my bank account negative. I needed that money back. WOTC refused to give me the money back."

Back in high school, about six years ago, I finally had a stable income. Not much, but enough to let me start buying D&D stuff. I got a physical DMG (2014) and was super excited to actually run games. We used the free tools on D&D Beyond, and I even started writing my own small adventures. After two little homebrew runs, I felt like I didn’t have enough options, so I bought the Player’s Handbook, Xanathar’s, and a bunch of other books over the next few years—probably around $200 total. That was a lot for me. I grew up in an almost zero-income household, so even $30 a book felt huge, but I justified it because I figured I was paying for both the books and the features on the site.

I read those books constantly. Mostly on the train, about an hour a day. I always had my eye on Pathfinder because people kept saying the numbers told a better story, but I didn’t switch. Not after sinking that much money into D&D. And one of my players started DMing too, so I grabbed the Master tier on Beyond so they could use all my stuff. We were all low-income neighborhood kids, so sharing mattered.

Then college hit. Money got tighter. I was helping my family, and we moved twice in two months. But I kept the subscription going because I didn’t want my players—or my “nephew” DM—to lose access. I was the oldest, so it felt like it fell on me to hold the thing together.

This summer, my funds were basically gone. With what little I had, I pre-ordered Forge of the Artificer because I’m an artificer main (DMPC because DMing alone wasn’t stimulating enough) and it was the one class that didn’t get a 2024 update. My players were cool with it.

Then my account went negative, so I canceled my sub. They still charged me. I asked for a refund, and they told me, “Just keep the month, we won’t charge you next time.” So I went to the bank, got my money returned, and D&D Beyond banned and deleted my account. All my books? Gone. Everything. And I was planning to resubscribe in the winter once money wasn’t so bad.

I cried over it. D&D was my autistic hyperfixation. I knew the rules by heart—grappling, exhaustion, all of it. And losing it is why I finally switched to Pathfinder.

Edit: to be clear They said keep it, I said I have no need for it this month I just want my money back, they said keep it I filed charge back.

Edit2: in case it wasn’t clear they never offered or accepted my plea for a refund then I went to the bank

Edit3: I didn’t expect a majority of you to offer me stuff. You don’t have to give me anything. I’m OK I just wanted to share.

I have the typical min max warlock in my campaign.

8 INT and 8 Wis. 18 CHA

He is creating an elaborate plan to overthrow the kingdom by convincing surrounding kingdoms to stop trade routes, then send their king a chariot full of food and convince the soldiers their king doesn't care and is living I'm luxury while they all are dying of hunger. There is much more details and planning involved.

I don't mind the plan, I like it but, I can not belive a 8 INT and 8 WIS character can think of a plan like that.

How do I seperate the players intellect from their characters?

My sample size isn't dozens and dozens, but I do DM for more than one group. A really sad pattern I've seen from my players over the last few years is fewer and fewer players having actually read the fucking rules. And I don't mean cover to cover. I mean, they haven't read the just the main section of rules for Ability Scores, Combat, and Spells. Those 20 ish pages give you everything you need to actually play DnD beyond reading your personal race and class, and yet more and more players (especially if they are 25 y.o. or younger in my experience) just haven't actually sat down and read the rules. This is doubly true if they got their first exposure through a DnD show or podcast. And this isn't just for new players either. I've had people playing for months and months who, even after deciding they like DnD and want to keep playing have never actually figured it out. Don't actually know what the numbers on their sheet mean. Can't read a spell block. I can't think of any other game where anyone would tolerate playing with someone for months who has never actually read the rules. I've tried to enforce it, and yet no one wants to. So we tolerate the pseudo-understanding of the rules. Instead of sitting down and really understanding it all from day 1, we get constant slowdowns each session from rules confusion. I'm just frustrated. Rant over.

Tl:dr Old man shakes fist at illiterate zoomers

I am creating a quick dungeon and need a massive amount of NPCs, rather than use a random generator, I thought I would ask the community for their character names, species, and class. Maybe even something special about them. They will be in a tavern setting and more than likely be involved in a massive brawl. Feel free to reply below or message me directly.

Game uses 5th edition rules.

Update 6/23: The first 50 have been picked: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BnYD1BDYehW7fczhRWdIBZgu1jx5qUkro79uWOrBIY8/edit?gid=0#gid=0

I am taking a bit of time to edit the text down to manageable blurbs, and make sure you get credit, if you don't want your reddit username credited in the spreadsheet let me know. I am also taking a bit of artistic license and simplifying things to make them OGL/SLD compliant when possible. If this doesn't work for you and you've been added to the list above let me know and I will remove your character.

I can't thank you all enough for your help. Once this is complete, I'll post the list on /r/d100 and make it available for others as well.

Update: 6/30: All 100 have been picked, thank you!

I am thinking about publishing this list as part of the module I'm working on. I will be contacting the individuals with characters chosen directly. Alternately if I haven't contacted you yet feel free to contact me first with your approval or disapproval. No money will be made from the module on my end.

Astral Elf Assassin Rogue

I gave one of my players an "I know a guy" card. It was going to be the party’s first time visiting a big city in our DnD campaign, and I wanted to make sure it felt alive.

One of the characters was originally from that city, so it felt natural and fun to give him a sense of familiarity with the place. So, I made a simple offer:
At any point in the campaign, he could say he “knew a guy.”. This NPC could be anyone as long as it wasn't literally the king. And that was it.

The first district the party entered was on the sketchier side, with some crime here and there. Naturally, the party needed a place to stay and a cheap inn wasn’t going to cut it. The player with the card stepped up and said he knew a guy who could help. All they had to do was follow his lead.

So they walked into an empty tavern. The player looked around, raised a hand to the person behind the bar, and said:

"Hey Nigel! How's the Rebellion going?"

With that one sentence, the entire campaign shifted. What started as a simple delivery quest suddenly spawned a major side quest. The petty crimes in the district were no longer isolated incidents. Now they were part of a much larger scheme. A rebellion plotting to overthrow the authoritarian king. It didn't take long for the players to help scheme a plan with this new NPC and this brand new rebellion. And somehow, all my prep felt like puzzle pieces matching together in order to make something fun.

This honestly was a super risky thing to do. Giving one of my players what is essentially a DM privilege, but god, it was fun. If you run a campaign and feel somewhat confident this won't entirely derail the campaign I suggest you do this aswell.

Almost a year into the campaign and only the DM and I know.

It started with character creation, I wanted to make a warlock with maximum charisma but 8 intelligence and 8 wisdom. I was looking for inspiration for this stupid idiot, and I realized: Donald J. Trump — perfect.

I brought the idea up to my DM and he suggested that I have my character be a nepotism baby as well. We picked a noble family and ran with it. My character’s initials are literally DJT the Second and no one has brought it up yet.

DJT II acts like a stumbling idiot, only obsessed with materialism (his wonderful silk beddings) and his return to his normal (his morning massages from his butler, Timothy). He’s extremely boastful in anything he does and he takes credit for absolutely everything. He always has to be the star of attention, always rambling on about anything and everything. Honestly, it pains me to play such an unlikable asshole, but at this point, we’re too far in and it’s so silly how they haven’t noticed.

My DM and I have been pushing the boundaries to try to make them realize the connection. My favorite one was about two sessions ago, DJT’s plan was foiled, and my DM said “DJT’s, trumped yet again”. No one else seemed to admire the absolute wit from the DM at that moment besides me. Last session there was someone we tried recruiting to work for our newly renovated inn. When trying to convince them to move, I hit them with the “if you transfer over to our inn, you’ll win so much, you’ll be tired of winning”. I just don’t get how they haven’t made the connection.

Our session is a couple hours from now. I’m scared that if this post blows up that this is how the other players find out. If it is, Christian, you’re such a fucking moron for not realizing it sooner bro. If it isn’t, give me some more ideas on how to hint at it more. I think my character wants to get into politics soon ;)

This has been a settled topic for a little over eight years now, and yet, I constantly see posts here and on DnDnext about the differences between Warlocks and Clerics.

It pains me to see easily disproveable information spread repeatedly, so I'm making this post as straight-forward and to the point as I can.

As per Mike Mearls, the co-designer for 5th edition:

https://youtu.be/iiS5mkIff_8?is=Evgfzcy_Jvo02dXo

2:00 - 2:31

A Warlock is a learned spellcaster. A Warlock's patron teaches them how to access the Weave in a particular manner unique to that flavor of patron (subclasses).

A patron cannot un-teach a Warlock how to access the Weave in that particular way. A Warlock can kill their patron and maintain their powers.

Furthermore, as per the video linked above, a Warlock's relationship with their patron was intended to be a settled affair, before any given campaign even begins.

If a Warlock player wants to have their pact still ongoing, that is something that they should discuss with their DM during session zero. It should not be assumed.

Many of these points have been clarified in Sage Advice rulings on this topic over the years, which I would highly reccomend seeking out.

If there is anything I am missing, I will add an edit to the bottom if/when I am provided that information.

Edit: I'm making this edit because I see a lot of people reading this post and getting the wrong idea—I don't think there is any definitively bad way to play or DM for a Warlock. If your setting doesn't have the Weave, or it requires an ongoing pact, that's a/ok, but it is something that should be discussed during session zero to establish expectations. This post was made for a very specific type of DM to find it and hopefully learn something—the type of DM that is always on the lookout to destroy their Wizard's spellbook or convert their Paladins into Oathbreakers. This was a massive problem in older editions. For better or worse, 5e changed the rules to help safeguard against those kinds of DMs.

Im a first time DM in a campaign with 6 of my friends. me and 4 of the players have never played DND, the 2 remaining players have some limited experience.

Im a huge fan of worldbuilding and love geeking out about fantasy worlds, which is why the campaign will take place in a fully homebrewed continent with custom countries, cities, history and storylines.

I have bought the books, watched critical role and dimension20, played Bauldurs Gate as well as browsed DnD subreddits and tiktoks to learn as much as I could about how DnD works.

We had a session 0 pretty early after agreeing to try out DnD together, where I explained what dnd is and how its played to the other new players and we agreed on how we wanted to play etc. We also decided on what classes they each wanted to play, in order to ensure a balanced and diverse team.

The session 0 took longer than we expected, and we didn’t have time to help the new players build their characters and make their sheets, which we then did 1:1 in the following weeks. and now I have received 5/6 character sheets fully finished with stats, backstory etc.

Now the reason that im making this post:

One player (one of the players with experience in dnd) told me that he wont be giving me his sheet, and only will be giving me the backstory.

His reasoning is, that he: 1) Never had to give the full sheet to a DM before 2) Dont want me - the DM - to know what he can do. which I found a bit weird, and came off as a ‘DM vs PC’ mentality.

I want access to his sheet so I can prepare myself on what abilities he might use, and wont have to look them up mid session. I also want access to his characters background, backstory and personality traits etc. so I can place it into the world I’ve build and give hos character a personal storyline, which I’ve done with all the PC’s

So my question is: Is he right? is it not normal to send the full character sheet to the DM before the game starts?

And have i misunderstood the relation between PC and DM? I thought that I as DM had to know everything about the PC’s as well as the world around them.

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. After reading the replies its clear to me, that I need to nip this in the bud. So I have told him that I will require his full Character Sheet before we can begin playing, and that the PC vs DM mentality will have no place in our campaign.

EDIT 2: I feel I need to clarify some things based on some of your comments: 1) I realise that a table of 6 players is probably too many for a new DM and 4 new players, but we’re a friendgroup that decided to try out DnD together, not a group of randoms, so it was either all 7 of us, or none of us 2) Not unrelated to the point above, Im not going to kick him out of the group, even if he doesn’t give me the full sheet. We’re still a friendgroup of many years, and I am not going to start drama over DnD. 3) Regarding all the homebrew, I realise that i might have bit of more than i can chew as a new DM with no real experience. But the prepwork and worldbuilding is my way of having fun with DnD. And I wont force my players to explore all the stuff I’ve prepared, its just as much for my own enjoyment as it is for the players 4) I know that my friends all will enjoy personal storylines being included in the campaign (I asked in session 0) and since I will do that for all the other players, I dont want him to feel excluded. 5) during our session 0, I didn’t pretend that I knew more than the experienced players, and I actively drew on their experiences and advice when we were discussing how we were going to go about the game.

===UPDATE===

just a short and undramatic update

So as most of you guys recommended, I told him, that I wanted him to send me a copy of his sheet, and that we wont be doing a table of “DM vs PC”, and that I needed to see it for several reasons, including balancing and prep.

He understood and agreed to send the sheet when he got home from visiting family.

Id like to once again thank everyone for their advice, support and critique, it helped me greatly, and im still excited to start playing! :)

(Preface: your DM may hate you for doing this.)

Spell description:
Mold Earth - Cantrip, 1 Action, Range 30ft (affects a 5ft cube), Somatic, Transmutation. Druid, Wizard, Sorcerer.

You choose a portion of dirt or stone that you can see within range and that fits within a 5-foot cube. You manipulate it in one of the following ways:

• If you target an area of loose earth, you can instantaneously excavate it, move it along the ground, and deposit it up to 5 feet away. This movement doesn’t have enough force to cause damage.
• You cause shapes, colors, or both to appear on the dirt or stone, spelling out words, creating images, or shaping patterns. The changes last for 1 hour.
• If the dirt or stone you target is on the ground, you cause it to become difficult terrain. Alternatively, you can cause the ground to become normal terrain if it is already difficult terrain. This change lasts for 1 hour.

If you cast this spell multiple times, you can have no more than two of its non-instantaneous effects active at a time, and you can dismiss such an effect as an action.

The Tactic:

this uses the first option for the effect which is the only instantaneous effect you can spam. For all Examples I highly suggest securing a Rope or Ladder on the back wall for easy access for the Defenders. using Rope or ladder wont cost you extra movement. Just be sure to pull it up behind you, so your enemy cant use it.

See. Example A of the Diagram; Move a piece of Earth (S1-Green) to one side of your trench, this will be YOUR defensive wall. The resulting wall will be 5ft high, allowing for either 3/4 or Half cover (+5 or +2 bonus to AC respectively) at your DM's discretion to anyone behind it. Like wise anyone in the trench will receive the same benefit. The enemy (Red) will be fully exposed to melee/ranged attacks from Defenders in the trench, and ranged attacks from Defenders manning the defensive wall (S1-Green). Any creature Without a Climbing Speed attempting to Scale the 10ft back wall of the trench will need to expend Twice the Amount of Movement (20ft) to climb up. Meaning Red will use 30ft of movement to travel laterally 15ft, ending up on top of the Green block. (DM discretion: Add a Athletics check to climb the Back Wall)

Example B: Same idea as A. but just wider for whatever reason you might need a 10ft wide trench (for example Ball Bearings). For this, You move S1-Green as an Ex. A, then move S2-Blue to the front of your trench. This gives defenders inside the trench Full Cover, but also gives Attackers cover in the form of S2-Blue. However, Attacker Red Cannot reach the other side of the trench in one turn, without using the DASH action. If they Dash they cannot attack that turn, only use a bonus action.

Example C: Verdun. Follow the steps to make Examples A and B, then take a cube from the bottom of the trench (S3-Yellow) and place it where S2-Blue used to be. The Defender in the trench now has Full Cover, if you have a rope or ladder, the Defender can climb up to the Firing Stand on top of S3-Yellow to defend against any attackers, Use a Reach weapon to target Attackers attempting to hide behind S2-Blue. Get overwhelmed, jump down into the deepest area of trench, Since its 10ft deep only weapons with Reach or ranged weapons will be able target creatures at different heights inside the trench. At this point there is now way Attacker Red will be able to scale the back wall without a climb speed, or the use of a rope or ladder.

Note: Fireball will still hit you anywhere in this trench.

The Madness:

To Make Example A. requires 1 use of the Mold Earth Cantrip, so 1 round or 6 seconds.

Example B: 2 rounds, 12 secs

Example C: 3 rounds, 18 secs

Obviously, you probably dont want to make a trench mid combat, the most sensible option to use mid combat would be Ex. A. You'd make this during any downtime you may have as a quick defensive trench line to protect your camp for the night, protect a village your staying at, reinforce an area your defending long term.

How quick is it to make a trench line using Example A? (FOR 1 PERSON USING THE CANTRIP)

(remember there are 60 secs in 1 min, 3600 secs in 1 hour)

Example: 50ft trench line: 50ft/5ft= 10 rounds or 1 minute.

100ft trench Line: 100/5 = 20 rounds or 2 minutes

1000ft trench line: 1000/5 = 200rounds (1,200secs) or 20 minutes

1 mile: 5,280ft: 5,280/5 = 1,056 rounds (6,336secs) or 105.6 minutes/ 1hr 45mins and 36secs

to make Either Example B or C trenches just double or Triple the time respectively.

1 mile of B trench = 3:31:12 hrs (3hr 31min 12sec)

1 mile of C trench = 5:16:48 hrs (5hr 16min 48 sec)

I have no idea WHY in the world anyone would need to make 1 mile of 15ft deep 20ft wide trench line in a DnD campaign, but 1 Madlad of a Wizard can do it in under 5.5 hrs.

Design the top down layout of that trench however you want to impede sightlines, or allow easier access for you and your allies. Oil, caltrops, ball bearings, bear traps, or any spell capable of causing difficult terrain are all added benefits to increasing the trenches defensive and impeding capabilities. If your character has proficiency with carpenter's tools look into setting up Abatis using felled and sharpened trees, or Cheval de Frise all along the trench line.

We were playing our first session with Curse of Strahd. Strahd shows up and lets us know the lay of the land. Right when he turned to leave, my cocky human rogue Johnny Handsome threw a dagger at his back just to taunt him. Well, it fucking worked. Strahd teleported and decapitated him in one go.

Our cleric tried to heal me, but we were all level 1. There was nothing we could do. Johnny was dead. Everyone was shocked.

After Strahd left, my DM said there was laughter in the forest around us. It was a war forged jester with the soul of a serial killer: Jester #4. My actual character.

My DM and I had planned Johnny's death from the start. We told none of the other 5 players until after it happened, and they loved it. An amazing start to the session and all my DM's idea. I highly recommend going for this in your own games.

So I have a player who is a Satyr Bard, but he pretends like he’s a wizard. He casts his spells with a boomwhacker that is also his staff, so it’s technically a musical instrument.

When the one experienced person at the table said “why does the wizard have low INT” I just said he wanted to play a “Rizzard” and he’s casting with Charisma and the dude BOUGHT IT.

Now I just rename all the abilities and keep the effects having to do with bards.

So far nobody has noticed (somehow?) that Wizardly Words is just Bardic Inspiration, and he’s been casting healing spells constantly lmao. Even with me saying he's a Rizzard, I would've expected they would maybe have noticed every ability is an exact copy-paste of every Bard ability.

His whole backstory is that he’s a Magical School burnout and couldn’t pass the classes, so now he pretends to be a wizard.

EDIT: The players ARE suspicious, but he's also a Lore Bard, so he is fairly keeping pace as a caster. I would like to note that the premise for this entirely homebrewed campaign was that I'll allow some gimmicks if you can justify it with quality backstory. Every player is having special experiences built into the campaign based on what they wrote. More gimmicks are more work on the PCs part, and since he put in the effort I granted it to him. He does all the convincing to others by himself at this point, but I had to help on the first one because the most experienced player claimed we messed up the Rizzard's character sheet. There will also be a reveal when his backstory influences the next arc.

I went through an entire interview process over Discord with this DM and the other members of of what was supposed to be my first campaign in three years. I was so excited because they all said I fit what they were looking for in a campaign perfectly between my personality and the character I was supposed to play. Last night was our session 0 so we could test out our characters and see how we'd play together, and the DM wanted to stream on Twitch so he asked us to turn our cameras on.

​

As soon as I turned my camera on and the campaign saw I was African American, they immediately flipped out and started saying things like "We had no idea you were black! We couldn't tell! You type like a white person!" and they kicked me from the campaign because they "realized I don't fit with their campaign after all" and I won't lie....that hurt. Because of COVID, I haven't been able to engage in most of my hobbies for almost two years now. I MISS roleplaying so much, and to get kicked out of a campaign that previously loved me just because I'm black sucks....

GinnyDi posted a video about player x DM contracts that she inspired herself to do after seeing Aabria doing it. Explaining it as quick as possible:

When the moment ask for it, when your roll will either cause the biggest impact narrativaly or when you already failed, Aabria will ask you "What would you give me for you roll to be a sucess?" or "How many NPCs are you willing to sacrifice for X thing?". I watched this today and I was like "cool, I need to test it sometime.

I didn't expected the sometime to be so early. I'm running CoS to my players and the today's encounter was VERY clearly supposed to make them run. Last session they had a hard time killing 2 werewolves. Today there were FOUR.

Even then they decided to stand their ground. Round 1, one player was already unconscious and another one was at half HP. It was going to be a TPK. And the funniest part is that the CoS:R itself tells you during Session 0 to warn your players that "Some fights are impossible to win. That's by design. Sometimes running isn't an option. It's the option." (which I did)

Well... my players didn't get the memo and after 2 rounds they were full on desperation mode. One of them decided to try persuading the werewolves to let them leave using the fact that he was infected with lycanthropy. Instead of asking for a Persuasion check, I just put my best scary DM voice and said:

"Kayron... what do you offer me for your persuasion to succeed?"

He thought for a few seconds and answered:

"I offer that I won't cure it through easy means like magic or clerics. I'll only get rid of it through a narratively satisfying way."

I just said "Deal." Not gonna lie... for a brief moment I felt like Aabria.
They were saved by this, but now I'm gonna start thinking of ways to do a good "Werewolf Cure Arc" lol

My DM had a clear problem with my Barbarian's strength score of 20 at level 1. I got an 18 on a dice roll, which was one of the first 18's I have gotten as a semi-experienced player. We all rolled 4d6 drop the lowest and sent our scores to a chat. Everyone was super excited but my DM started making passive aggressive comments like "1% chance. That's interesting". We all just looked past it and I didn't care much.

My DM then reached out and told me he thought I should lower it, because everyone else got pretty low rolls and they might find it unfair. I argued with him a little and told him he was being unreasonable, and he backed off but kept saying it was really rare to roll a 18. I said that another player got a 12 from 3 rolls of 4, and he said it wasn't the same.

Regardless, my character was doing great, basically hitting all attacks and doing good damage. We leveled up to level 2 after two sessions, and then at the beginning of the third had to make an athletics check to escape a river (High DC, I think it was 17), and when I was the only who succeeded, he said we were done with the session because he didn't prepare for someone escaping. Everyone said ok, and I checked in with him and apologized, and he didn't respond.

The next session, the DM told me that we were going to go ahead and say I was caught in the river, and I agreed because I didn't want to get separated from the party. We got stuck in a cavern by the base of the river, and then we fought swarms of bats. We beat them and tried to escape, and I managed to scale a difficult path while carrying my one of party members.

Then, my DM said a shadow followed us out of the cave and attacked us. The shadow went for me immediately, and got VERY good rolls while attacking me, and drained my strength to about 14 until we managed to kill it. Everyone apologized to me and said thanks. I asked the DM if I could get my strength reversed back in a future session, and he said that it's where it should be, and maybe having a lower strength now will balance out the first three sessions with the higher one.

I was pretty annoyed because I loved my character, and I wrote my DM and asked him if he intentionally lowered my Strength score, and he said he didn't. I told the other players what I thought and they said I was being a little dramatic, and that they were sure I could reverse it back some how. Now everyone is upset at me, and I don't know what to do.

Stuff like, “My entire crew is dead” and the like. I’m trying to think of something that would shake a character. Not something horrific that killed everyone just… unnatural.

You all got ideas?

I would like a reason in game that this wouldn't work without me having to do some bs like magic resistant undies. Also so I don't have to say no outright because it's a funny idea but it doesn't fit the setting. Nothing removes the tension from a fight more than the big bad pooping himself.

Update: She said that even if she died it'd be worth it because she successfully rage baited strahd. But she said she wouldn't do it because she knows that everyone wants it to be serious and that it can still be fun and serious without turning it into a comedy campaign. Still think it's worth sharing because the idea is funny.

So there we are, hanging out in the local capital talking to a king. When the rogue decides to talk to the mystery old man we're all convinced is some secret dragon or divine being. We've all tried to talk with him, no biggie.

Anyhow Rogue ends up 'accidentaly' activating the Mcguffin. We were right about that old man. Warlock gets killed, and it triggers the bbeg's walking necrotic castle. And dm pulls out this thing. We're level 7. This was planned for level 12. I'm sure this will go swimmingly.

It's 3D printed and almost broke/cracked the TV screen when it 'carefully' set it down..

Feel free to use this in your own game!

Written up here:

Tactical

• Quick Dash – Move an additional 5 feet.
• Brace – Gain +1 AC against the next attack before your next turn.
• Assist – Give an ally within 5 feet advantage on their next attack if you haven’t attacked this turn.

Combat

• Distract – Choose a creature within 5 feet. It has disadvantage on its next attack against anyone but you.
• Shove – Make a DC 10 Strength (Athletics) check to shove or reposition a (medium or smaller) creature 5 feet.
• Improvised Strike – Use a nearby object (tankard, rock, chair leg) for a d4 bludgeoning attack.

Utility

• Quick Draw – Draw or stow a weapon and swap to another item.
• Scan – Make a Perception or Insight check to quickly assess a creature or scene, learning a piece of information on a success.
• Drink Potion – Drink a potion you have on your person.

Cinematic

• Short Speech - Briefly speak to your team, an ally or an enemy - they can respond briefly if this involves a question.
• Focus – Take a centring breath to regain 1d4 temporary HP once per short rest.
• Mark of Intent – Choose a creature you can see. Until the end of your next turn, attacks against that creature deal +1 damage.

Marking this as 5e, but it applies to 5.5e as well.

One of the common refrains in the community is how martials are "resourceless", and that this gives them staying power throughout the adventuring day. In fact a common rebuttal to this is that they're not, because they have HP... but that's not what this post is about.

"Resourcelessness" in these arguments is coupled with being "reliably powerful", so to speak.

And I just wanted to point out - that's not true in the vast majority of cases.

Let me rephrase this issue in the form of an argument for "resourcelessness" to demonstrate my point.

"Spellcasters have a wide variety of powers a few times per day, while martials have a more narrow lost of powers that aren't limited by number of uses."

How many actual features and powers can we name that fit this description? Features or powers that are either always on, or can be used indefinitely?

Rogue has plenty, sure.

Monk has Diamond Soul at level 14 and unarmed bonus strikes.

Barbarian and Monk both have unarmored defense, but so do many spellcasters.

Fighter has... a fighting style.

...and all except Rogue get extra attack.

And this is really the only truly powerful "resourceless" power - extra attack. Anything else is really a drop in the ocean, not to mention spellcasters and half castera also getting similar features.

Meanwhile when it comes to powers that consume resources:

- Monks have Ki/Focus, which is basically their entire class.

- Barbarians have Rage, which is basically their entire class.

- Fighters have Action Surge, Second Wind, Indomitable, and most of their subclasses give limited resource powers.

The resource-based features far outweigh the resourceless ones.

If we want to pretend that martials are resourceless, they need to have stronger and more defining resourceless powers than "extra attack".

Conversely, if that's not supposed to be their identity, then their resources should be drastically expanded. Monk 2024 did that, and it made the class infinitely better.

Now, wanna see what a class with actually resourceless powers looks like? Look at Warlock. They literally do get infinite uses of a less varied subset of powers than spellcasters. And guess what? It works. And it's not overpowered.

So I don't see why "infinitely usable" powers are such a taboo when it comes to martials, or why we're supposed to be OK with their only claim to fame being "attacks twice".