Cases, Please!
Added 2025-09-17 00:24:13 +0000 UTCGreetings! Bailiff Jake here to inform you that the Supreme Crit is convening on the morrow. Please submit your brief (I do beg!) grievance and/or table top drama on this thread and we will bring you swift justice!
Comments
I'm procrastinating my own homework right now by reading Court submissions and while I do not have the authority of the court I would advise you to stop rescheduling. You were not wrong. Some people are not good at scheduling and these are some of them.
Jordanne Stahl
2025-10-01 15:15:24 +0000 UTCTo the great and honourable judges and the new guy who was in an episode of 8-bit book club that one time. I come to you with a problem of D&D etiquette. Recently, I agreed to run a D&D one shot for a group of friends. Only one of these players have I ever DM'd for before and the other two have only played a small handful of times. We have been trying to run this game for months and have had numerous scheduling issues which has led one these friends to begin complaining and saying things like "D&D never happens" or "we'll never actually play" etc, which really brings the mood down when were trying to organize a date. Finally, we organized a day months in advance. That fateful day was supposed to be today. I had asked everyone to book it off and make sure they either had the day off work or any school work done before the day and since we had so long to plan it I figured it should be easy enough to clear our schedules. I was wrong. Despite me booking the day off work and ensuring any due dates were met for my school work, my friend who was always complaining about how "we weren't going to play" decided to buy a movie ticket to a show that would start while we were planning to play. I found this out last night and just kind of accepted it and said we'd need to move the session. Which led to this friend getting mad at me, telling me I should've run it as a two shot instead to accommodate his movie. I explained I work two jobs and am in university and don't really have time nor do I want the pressure of running another session. What shocked me was that another member of the party joined in and agreed that it was in fact my fault for not reminding my players earlier that we had D&D scheduled. Justices, I ask you, was I wrong? Should I have just run it as a two shot? Should I even bother rescheduling? I throw myself at your mercy.
Tyson
2025-09-24 16:29:19 +0000 UTCTo the sweet and tangy judges of the court and the slightly sour bailiff snake, I present the case of Chat D&D. I DM a campaign for my partner and two of our close friends. Our friends are new to dnd, but have taken to it well and we all are having a ton of fun fighting kobolds, exploring the under dark, and booty calling my inherently hot npc’s. My case arises from one of my pc’s (the sorcerer) penchant for feeding her backstory/ my descriptions into ChatGPT. I am no artist and so when introducing new sigils or designs emblazoned throughout the world she feeds my descriptions into her computer pal and churns out a soulless often dull image of what I imagined. The kicker is her husband, the cleric PC, is a full blown graphic designer and talented artist. He often sketches down what I’m describing real time and produces an image seemingly pulled from the depths of my own mind for us all to reference. She even feeds her whole backstory into ChatGPT and asks to essentially monologue the gruel poured forth for us all to listen. I am no hater of collaboration, even going so far as to ask them multiple times to msg me about things like this so I can include them. My question is, should I outright ban this use of ai at the table? I’ve been pretty outright with my hatred for it as a concept and a product and the fact that she hasn’t yet picked up on the fact that I want nothing to do with ai seems a bit silly. I don’t want to single her out and make her feel uncomfortable or anything, but I also want her to understand that there’s a difference between collaborative storytelling and just a edgy YA hack of an AI monologue. P.S. I thought the problem would disappear after AI literally took her dream job away from her at a design company, but she has since used it twice in the weeks following.
Mik
2025-09-24 14:53:37 +0000 UTCTo the bone dry justices and the slightly soggy bailiff, I bring to you the case of the OP spider. I’ll cut straight to the point. It was our final session. I was playing an Elven Warlock named Alanis, as it is a dope ass name and whoever came up with it is quite cool. We were trying to finish up the quest we were given and had ended up in a field equidistant from a wizard tower (our end goal) and a random city. So we determine to go to the tower. This was apparently contrary to what the dm had planed. The DM groaned a bit about us not going to his cool city, then got a funny look in his eye and narrated my character’s shoe getting stuck in the mud. So I narrate taking my foot out, pulling out the shoe, and then putting my foot back in. SURPRISE! In the shoe was a spider that then bit me and poisoned me without a save. That poison PARALYZED ME INSTANTLY and the DM was adamant that I would be unable to move for the next three days. And that’s how the campaign ended. A full year of play finished with my character paralyzed in the mud with no story arcs completed. So I ask you this, was the DM right to “railroad” us in such a way? All in all it doesn’t really matter, this is just a thing that will come to mind every once in a while and I’ll get pissed off all over again. I await your response. PS: I have many examples of this dm being……interesting in his rulings but that is a case for another day
Rebecca
2025-09-21 22:16:24 +0000 UTCHeavenly Disciples of Dice Christ, I come with a confession. I fear I have traumatised my baby sister. A couple of years ago, I DM-ed a campaign for a bunch of my younger siblings. It was a fun one, but we had to cut it short due to some table disagreements (my brother’s only contributions to the game were yelling: “I am a catgirl! bend to my will!” and making fart noises, while my youngest sister scrolled Tiktok). A couple of months ago, me and my middle sister decided to give DnD another shot. Justices… please understand. I was very excited to play again. Whereas our first campaign was a wacky, sweaty adventure, our second turned into grimdark political intrigue, rife with intricate lore, betrayal, mystery and survival horror. Suffice it to say, it got a little away from me. Out of the 16 sessions that we played, my sister cried exactly 8 times (we counted). One time, I had revealed a twist that had her weeping so loudly (and for so long), I was worried our neighbours might come check on us. The other time, one of my descriptions literally gave her a nightmare. She is now extremely paranoid and believes I’m out to get her beloved NPCs. Nevertheless, my sister loves playing together and is always asking me when we can play next. Still, I worry about her hydration levels. Venerable priests, please, forgive my brutal ways and cleanse me! I promise to take it down a notch.
Branchy
2025-09-19 09:09:50 +0000 UTCTo the usually unerring judges, but not actually THAT bad (and that's what makes it so funny) bailiff Jake. I bring you the case of the jester's justice. Years ago, my group was playing Strahd. I was the party bard, and a silly one at that, but also the party face, making charisma checks that brought us many non-combat advantages. That brings us to the social situation in question. We had previously encountered werewolves enough times that one of our party members had become one. On talking to the mayor of a town, signs led my character to suspect that the mayor himself might be a werewolf. My attempts to use charisma to get the truth out of him failed. Letting this failure get to my character's head, I decided to play a funny prank. I juggled knives to impress the mayor and then pretended to slip and throw one. My logic was that a werewolf might heal faster, and we could uncover his supernatural nature. In response to his fury, I teleported outside his window and read his mind to confirm that he was, in fact, hiding his wound to hide that he's a werewolf. Judges, nobody liked that. My party, frustrated with these antics, had no interest in making excuses, doused me in wine, and called me a drunk. The mayor was furious and had me put in the stockades. I respectably took my punishment for the good of my party, but things continued! At least one of my party members was thrilled for animal excrement to be thrown at me in the stockades, and they continued to rib me in ways that felt more sincerely mean-spirited than building on the comedy of the situation. The session ended with me not just embarrassed in-game, but feeling upset in real life at how much my party members doubled down. Judges, were my party members in the clear to let out their frustrations on my bard, or should my accepting my punishment as it was have been enough to sate their lust for jester's justice? (PS - This is the only major social snafu that happened in years of playing with this group. I explained how I felt afterwards, the party members in question apologized, and we all admitted to getting lost in the tank between character feelings and IRL feelings. We're all good friends who generally know how to communicate like adults.)
Isaiah Everin
2025-09-18 23:16:26 +0000 UTC
