N00bs and a DM Walk into a Tavern...

Yes their ultimate intentions can be totally unknown but it can be relatively easy to determine what sorts of characteristics the being responds to if you have a high charisma. One of the skills under charisma is persuasion, in order to effectively persuade someone you need to be able to recognize what they would listen to. That's essentially what this is.

Correct me if I’m wrong but

Wizard: The ones who studied/crammed for the test

Warlock: The ones who made a deal with that shady person/one of the professors or who has a scary lawyer the school is a afraid of

Sorcerer: Somehow they pass without studying, they seem to the answers instinctively

Cleric: Gets along well with the teachers, who hook them up with guidance and pointers. One of their parents might be a teacher.

Druid: Runs study groups, finds the previous exams and studies off of them, finds the answers in the grafitti on their chair. Probably a stoner.

Paladin: The athlete. The teachers love them and/or don’t want to mess with theirsporting career so they treat them like they treat clerics

Eldritch Knight: Another athlete. You’d think they’re a straight up jock but they actually do study

Arcane Trickster: The shady one who steals the answers off of professors and sells them

- the oracle is a teachers pet and gets all the boons the cleric does without asking for them

- the arcanist studies a bit and has a knack for the subject matter.

-the bloodrager is a gifted student and an athlete

-the warpriest is pretty much the same as the paladin

-the summoner has that one friend in the next grade thats taken the test before

-magus is the same as eldritch knight

-witch is the same as warlock

-skald is a band kid who also does athletics

-the hunter hangs out with the stoners and does track and field

-shaman is mostly the same as the druid

1: A rather large candy cane appears in your hand, adorned with a big red bow. It may be used once as a weapon as a bonus action. 1D4, bludgeoning.

2: A sprig of Mistletoe floats above your head. It will not go away until you kiss someone underneath it.:

3: A snow cloud floats above your head, causing a blizzard in the area. Anyone within a 9 ft. square, including you, takes 1d6 cold damage.

4: Your nose begins to glow red, much akin to the light cantrip. The stats are the same if you are in a dark space.

5: You shoot roasted chestnuts out of your hand instead of your intended spell. Everyone within a 10 ft cone must make a DC 10 dexterity saving throw to avoid being it with one. Any character that misses takes 1HP damage.

6: A tiny, ethereal, A Capella choir is appears on your shoulders for 1d20 minutes, singing Christmas Carols. Disadvantage on stealth checks, however, it sounds rather pretty.

7: You suddenly are adorned with a very ugly Christmas sweater.

8: You cannot help but jollily say “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” once every 30 minutes for 1d20 hours.

9: You are suddenly adorned with jingle bells. Disadvantage on stealth checks until they are removed.

10: Any object (including creatures) within a 20ft cone is suddenly decorated with lights, ornaments, and bows in a festive manner. It may be removed by hand.

11: You can only speak in Christmas music lyrics for 1d10 minutes.

12: Your intended target is transformed into a sprig of holly for 1d6 minutes.

13: Every time you laugh, you must laugh like Santa for 12 hours.

14: Your spell turns your intended target into a Christmas Tree for 1d6 minutes.

15: Your spell backfires and you create a heavenly light that blinds you for 2 minutes.

16:You make a hippopotamus, adorned with gift bows, appear.

17: You turn the closest large plant into a beautiful, red sleigh.

18: Your intended target is frozen over into an ice sculpture shaped like an angel.

19: Your intended target must make a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw or a giant teddy bear falls atop of them from the sky. On a failed throw, the target takes 2HP damage, but gets to keep the bear.

People seemed to like the previous list, so I thought I’d make some more.

Honorary Titles (courtesy of Vlad)

Free passage aboard any vessel in the fleet

A scroll of any spell the court wizard can cast

A manual outlining the fundamentals of the local language

A portion of land with a fixer-upper of a keep

The finest hound from the kennels

A large, unidentified, jewel encrusted egg

The captain of the guard as a retainer

A map detailing the location of a mythic treasure

The book of vile darkness

A willow extract that cures headaches

Access to a library where PCs can find a book that will give them a +2 bonus on any one knowledge check should they spend a few hours searching and reading among its tomes (cannot be retried until player has put at least one more rank in that skill)

A painting/statue of a subject of their choice

Access to a restricted area or person (thieves guild fence, head alchemist, the prisons, etc)

10-25% discount on any items in a store

Permission to court/marry a family member without the family taking action against it

Approval to teleport to this (or the NPCs) location at any time, should they need a quick check in or a place to hide. If its a place, the NPC will ensure that the area is stocked with bed rolls, water and basic food, as well as a couple healing items, once a week.

A broken artifact and a rumor of where it can be reforged

A new, trained, animal companion

The friendship, loyalty, and trust of an NPC

A +2 bonus (diplomacy or the like) on any negotiations of rewards to be given from this NPC, or anyone in the NPC’s social network  

I’ve got a few of these on my blog as well. I’ve started calling them Community Lists (and I will add that tag to the older lists someday, I promise).

Find him and bring him back.

Their younger sister wants to pay you off to kill him so she can rule.

I decided to make a list of DM stuff that I personally use or think are important to know when it comes to being a DM. So here’s my list:

Medieval Fantasy City Generator: This generator is now my LIFE. It generates incredibly complex cities with good customization. (Thanks to plantkat for sharing this site in their post here)

Naming Your Towns/Cities: Now that you’ve made your city, time to name it and give it some character! This post contains lots of great information.

Index Cards Rule: Fuckyeahdnd shared a SUPER convenient way of keeping track of turns and HP in combat. I use this system now for every single session I run.

Tricks & Traps: I am AWFUL at coming up with good Dungeon traps and challenges, this PDF includes some incredible ideas. The original poster, Courtney C. Campbell also runs a blog where they share tons of great stuff. (Thanks to we-are-rogue for sharing the PDF in their post here)

Playing Different Types of Characters: Writeinspiration has a masterpost on how to write/play lots of different types of characters.

Unique NPC Jobs: Lauraharrisbooks wrote a list of different Fantasy Jobs which can help populate your world with some unique characters! Another similar post by Thewritershandbook also covers Common Occupations in the Middle Ages. 

Developing Characters by Threes: Monticusrex’s method of creating characters help you really flesh out who they are. Useful for Players and DM’s.

Troublesome Players? Speak Up: Dicebound brings up an incredibly great point. If someone is being a jerk, speak up and call them out. This is especially important and relevant now to crush awful behavior before it even has a chance to show it’s ugly face.

List of D&D Resources: And finally, pretty much anything you might need for D&D.  (Character stuff, spells, online communities/ways to play, etc..) A lot of people contributed to this post but thank you Mushroomancy for posting the original list.

Donjon: And finally, this site is a great resource for looking up Spells and Monsters along with tons of other generators. Not every single Spell or Monster is on here, but most are listed.

they’re these neat birds that build these fancy installations called “bowers” as part of their courtship rituals; they typically involve hoarding a whole bunch of similarly-colored things they think look neat and building a fancy nest-thingy and clearing an area of the forest. for example:

which all look neat!

usually the stuff they take is just random neat-colored but worthless things they find nearby, but sometimes it’s like:

anyways! so my first thought is, you know what hoards cool-looking, often expensive stuff for some mysterious reason?

dragons!

so my first idea was going to be dragons whose hoarding behavior is basically bower-making.

but then it occurred to me: dragon lairs are pretty often, like, elaborate dungeons, involving a bunch of other species collaborating and stuff.

so my second thought is that to dragons, both the hoard and the rest of the lair are all descendants of this elaborate courtship ritual that they had many generations ago; that, in essence, they construct this elaborate micro-society around themselves at least partly because it makes them feel Nice in the same way that bowerbirds probably feel Nice making their bowers

and basically the difference between “good” and “evil” dragons tends to have to do with whether and which humans are included in their bower-society.

in a number of settings, dragons are able to shapeshift. in this context, this ability would come in handy as part of how they maintain their bower-societies

dragons spend their adolescence (their first few-centuries-to-a-millenium, let’s say) roaming about the land, shapeshifting constantly, taking various roles in the societies they encounter, learning how different types of groups think and work etc…

dragon bowers are often functionally small city-states (or sometimes even just normal states for very very old dragons) but sometimes dragons bower with various other social groups, like corporations, academic institutions, professional associations, unions, religious orders, social or artistic scenes, or even just simple bureaucracies…

while it is not uncommon for dragons to set themselves up as straight-up rulers of their bower-societies, many dragons prefer to set themselves up to have more indirect power over their bower. It is more common, for example, for them to accumulate political power by powering vast and quickly vital public-works projects with their extensive magic.

societies that have had a dragon as a part of them for a long time have a tendency to develop significantly more elaborate political models, often with rather strange ideological combinations (like, weird royalty-democracy mixes or systems of systems of castes with rules that just go on and on) and mixtures of species that otherwise would only very rarely interact. this is thought to make the bower-society more attractive to other dragons.

if the bower isn’t challenging enough, powerful females will snub it, (or worse, dismantle it) and only weak females will complete the quest to the final chamber. which is all very well for greasy young juvenile males with hardly a lake of lava to their name! 

i would assume many bower-dragon females are heterosexual but panromantic, as the relationships they form with other sentients on their quests to vanquish the males of their species could prove vital to their reproductive success. 

dragons start out in the “adventurer” sex and only switch to the “bowering” sex after having “vanquished” other dragons a few times; they then go through a special “vanquishing” where they sort of co-rule their mate’s domain for a while while they physically shift to a “bowering” sex and then go rule their own domain. Then they stay “bowering” until an adventurer dismantles their bower too many times, or they decide they’ve been snubbed too much.

consequently, within dragon society, there would be much spilling of ink (or whatever they use, i think they might just singe text into paper…) about dragons in nontraditional relationships, including:

Questions about relationships between bowering dragons, e.g: - traditionalist dragons insisting that a proper bower is a bower that is disjoint from other dragons’ bowers   vs. - dragons who think so long as bowers don’t interact directly with one another they’re ok (so, a dragon bowering with a university system overlapping with some other dragon’s city-state bower would be ok)  vs. - dragons who build elaborate co-bowers (e.g. two dragons bowering with rival political parties, or three dragons setting up an elaborate shin-megami-tensei-ish chaos/neutral/order system, or dragons literally constructing governments with multiple co-equal branches each of which is bowered by a different dragon)  vs. - dragons that bower together and also mate together (so scandalous!)

Questions about when/how much exactly one should shift sex, e.g.: - controversy over dragons that just never stop being “adventurers” (or just adventure for “too long” whatever that means) - controversy over dragons that just never stop bowering (or just bower for “too long” or “too much given how much they’re spurned” whatever that means)

Questions about mating and raising children: - controversy over adventuring dragons mating with each-other and raising their kids on the go - controversy over bowering dragons mating with each-other, possibly communally raising their kids. - controversy over how adventuring dragons are supposed to help raise their kids (are they supposed to come back once they’ve hatched? are they supposed to, if they’re still adventurers, come back to show them the ropes once they’re adolescent?)

and so on and so forth. These might also be part of cultural differences between dragons from different places/planes/dimensions/etc…

(i like also the idea that which sex is “male” and which is “female” is a source of much debate among humans)

I would also like to point out that (whether or not you agree with the sequential hermaphroditism idea) these ideas mean that there’s a very real possibility that non-dragon adventurers thrwarting bowering dragons could be misunderstood by the dragon as the adventurers coming on to them…

Finally: 

if you seem to constantly be fighting but not killing/thwarting the plans of various dragons, it might be worth it to check that one of your party members isn’t themselves a dragon.

I’m pretty sure that after a while the folk wisdom would be that the adventuring scene is “mostly dragons trying to fuck each other”. people might also start to think of adventurer’s pubs as basically dragon cruising spots.

Oh! Or the “merchants” and “merchant caravans” could actually be composed of the elderly dragons past their mating prime and the young who aren’t sexually mature–so it would be a case of the “grandparents,” so to speak, showing their grandkids the ropes and pointing out good and bad examples of adventuring and bowering tactics so that they get a chance to develop their own style. The specific trade routes they take could also be sure to intersect with the bowers and hangout spots specific to the children’s parents so that all the families can catch up with one another.

What people hear: I’m a gigantic fucking nerd

So… I’m a nerd who is starting to get into tabletop RPG games.  I love dice and always have so since I am so new I don’t have a use for dice yet but I still love them and want to play with them, I am offering these.