141
votes
Accepted
Why does dandwiki have a poor reputation?
There are really two problems:
Zero quality control. Anyone can add anything they want, and since there is no vetting, the overwhelming majority of it is bad. This becomes a vicious circle where the ...
- 361k
56
votes
How to play when you have little experience and speech difficulties?
Going to post about my experiences as a web GM for several years now and try to answer your questions. 90% of my players have probably never heard my voice.
If you want to learn D&D or any other ...
- 2,185
50
votes
Why does dandwiki have a poor reputation?
It contains lots of homebrew.
The site hosts pages and pages of homebrew races, classes, feats, spells, etc. Far, far more than the amount of official content on the site. Take a look at the list ...
- 12.9k
40
votes
Accepted
Is the Sage Advice Compendium considered a 1st-party resource?
As the "Official Rulings" section at the start of the Sage Advice Compendium states:
Official rulings on how to interpret rules are made here in the Sage Advice Compendium. The public ...
- 50.3k
32
votes
Accepted
Will chaos (or other problems) result from letting my players use Open5e.com instead of the WOTC collection of books?
Yes, it's likely to create problems and highly likely to create chaos
Open5e.com content mainly comes from various third party publishers, the only official content on there is the basic set of core ...
- 11.5k
28
votes
Accepted
Is D&D Beyond an official rules source?
(Preface: The below answer was initially written before WOTC's acquisition of D&D Beyond on 2022-04-13. I assume the acquisition would not make my conclusion of 'treat the digital sourcebooks as ...
- 19.4k
27
votes
Accepted
Can the original WotC-published SRD RTF files be found anywhere?
The Internet Archive has a deliberate Collection of the original WotC SRD RTF files in its library, separately from the web-archiving project of the Wayback Machine.
(Although the Wayback Machine is ...
- 421
24
votes
Accepted
What happened to EN World's D&D Lifeboat?
Enworld Lifeboat is gone... But the content remains!
The Lifeboat Subforum on Enworld was merged with the main "Charop" forum where posts have prefix tags for editions. All of the curated lifeboat ...
- 41.2k
20
votes
Why does dandwiki have a poor reputation?
The biggest problem with "dandwiki" is that it is named "D&D Wiki" instead of "D&D Homebrew Wiki (that also has pages for publications/products and SRD content)."
I have been a somewhat ...
- 201
20
votes
Accepted
Contradictory parts of D&D Beyond: which is official?
There is no official order of precedence, but you should probably trust the "book" pages over the generic listings
D&D Beyond is meant to be an accurate representation of all official 5e material,...
- 66.5k
18
votes
Is there a body of academic theory (particularly conferences and journals) on role-playing games?
Begin your research with former site moderator Brian Ballsun-Stanton.
Brian Ballsun-Stanton is a former moderator of this site, and he is an accomplished philosopher and sociologist. His profile links ...
- 154k
17
votes
How do I help newbies generate characters without being in person?
Let them know where the free resources are
This answer has all the link information you need for the basic rules, SRD, etc.
Provide pre-generated characters;
Let them choose from a pool of ...
- 144k
16
votes
How do I help newbies generate characters without being in person?
Reduce the decision making for the new players. Ask them in general terms how they would prefer to handle combat - melee vs ranged, weapons or magic, and so on. Then create the detailed characters for ...
- 1,594
16
votes
Will chaos (or other problems) result from letting my players use Open5e.com instead of the WOTC collection of books?
How much do you trust your players?
You can make fundamentally broken characters using WotC rules with no 3rd party content. Doing so with 3rd party content is also possible.
If you trust your ...
- 16.4k
15
votes
Can the original WotC-published SRD RTF files be found anywhere?
Yes, thanks to the Wayback Machine (at least for now)
Fortunately it doesn't seem that Wizard's robots.txt policies or anything else have precluded the SRD page and downloads from being archived by ...
- 66.5k
15
votes
Is Most Excellent Adventure available anywhere other than 1d4 chan?
Using the wayback machine on that link gives a page with a link to a google drive document.
- 189
14
votes
How are materials on DMs Guild classified?
Most of the content is unofficial, but there are ways to differentiate them
There are "four" types of products published in the Guild: unofficial content, AL-legal content, content released ...
- 6,010
14
votes
How to map out and run an encounter set in a predominantly vertical area online?
Use isometric projection map, for example:
Roll20 has a wiki page on how to use them: https://wiki.roll20.net/Isometric_Maps_in_Roll20
But if you're willing to use alternative applications, there ...
- 644
14
votes
Accepted
Are there any 'official' templates used for writing out adventures in D&D 5e?
Dungeon Masters Guild has a section dedicated to resources for DMG creators. In particular there is an official template you can download for free along with artwork you can use for DMs Guild products,...
- 1,985
13
votes
Accepted
What was the source of this Magic Items PDF found on Wizards' website?
It's a 3.0-era free download from the WotC site
Though I originally thought it might be from an article or web enhancement for a 3rd-edition D&D book (thanks to its rules wording and use of the 3....
- 9,802
12
votes
Accepted
Website where people contribute descriptions of NPCs, items, cities and so on
This sounds like Strolen's Citadel. It's community-driven, strongly categorised and searchable in the ways you describe, and does have community contests.
- 244k
12
votes
Accepted
Are there any online guides, official or unofficial, to help create new classes?
The official guide can be located here, I will expand a bit on it below, for reference, I have made 3 custom classes before:https://media.wizards.com/2015/downloads/dnd/UA3_ClassDesignVariants.pdf
...
- 710
11
votes
How much of the 5e resources can be found online?
D&D Beyond is the official digital source.
For free you can access the Basic Rules; this includes races, classes, archetypes, monsters, Unearthed Arcana, etc, everything you need to run a game. ...
- 22.1k
11
votes
How to play when you have little experience and speech difficulties?
About 15 years ago, I was in a group with a player who was mute some of the time (no idea why, but I think he kept having surgery for his vocal cords). During his mute phases, he would communicate ...
- 3,449
11
votes
Where can I find a current list of touch-range spells?
Use D&D Beyond's spell archive
You can filter by class, source, etc. and then sort those by Range to find all the touch spells.
Searches will be limited to freely available materials unless you ...
- 126k
11
votes
Where did the writing-focused roleplaying forums go?
This is likely part of a general trend towards reduced use of words and increased use of other media (sound, visuals, etc.).
Before there were forums, there were BBS and FIDOnet and Usenet, which ...
- 2,945
11
votes
Accepted
Is Most Excellent Adventure available anywhere other than 1d4 chan?
The first draft of the game came from this thread, post No.18410350 by Anonymous on 03/21/12 (Wed) at 21:25.
That post contains a link to the google drive document, and the other posts in that thread ...
- 13.7k
10
votes
When did the Dungeons and Dragons Insider service exist?
Started around June 2008; stopped being actively supported in August 2014; fully shut down on January 1, 2020
Start Date
I believe June 2008 was when D&D Insider started. At least, that's when ...
- 2,666
9
votes
How to play when you have little experience and speech difficulties?
The roll20 solution
I have DM'd (that is, run) games on roll20 where a player can't verbally communicate because of a technical issue — typically, a problem with the microphone or internet ...
- 26.1k
9
votes
Is there an online tool that can calculate advantage/disadvantage versus arbitrary dice probability?
The most widely used is AnyDice.
It has options for most situations that come up with dice: rolling multiple, taking the highest value, counting dice rolling above a threshold and others.
Its main ...
- 61.9k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible