What are /r/PCAcademy's favorite Products & Services?

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As a DM who puts a lot into my PCs backstories, I think it is important to remember why you make the backstory to begin with.

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Talk to your DM about it and see what they want from a PC backstory, it is totally possible that you are overthinking it.

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For me, the backstory serves one big purpose above all others, to tie you to the world the campaign takes place in.

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This can be in the form of a lot of things:

• A friendly NPC from the past
• An antagonist NPC
• A faction they have a relationship with , either positive or negative
• A specific location that they have ties to

It doesn't take 5 pages to do this, but it does take some back and forth with your DM.

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I would strongly recommend you to take a look at The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide by James D'Amato. It has a number of prompts that attack building a PC backstory from a number of different angles. I am sure you could find something that would help you. I use a lot of these prompts with my PCs to help them form their backstories.

You could maybe use it as a grappling hook (as that could count as climbing) but the tying up enemies part is definitely a rope of entanglement. https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Rope%20of%20Entanglement#content

Reasonable enough, thank you for your input! :)

I was certainly debating her age as well, I just wanted it to be accentuated that she had to grow up fast and I thought it would be comical to see an 11 year old girl bossing around grown men.

In terms of her age, I was already worried about her being too young and you sort of made the decision to make her older easier. I just wanted to hyperbolize that she had to grow up fast but also that she’s young and a badass. The black market thing was also hyperbolic, I mean to say more like the Freedome Fighters from ATLA to where it’s a rag-tag group of young adults who rob and sell things illegally.

Thank you for the time you put into your response, it’s much appreciated!

This one is the dominant app in my group. Since it's free and unlicensed a lot of the specific text is changed, so some of the rules require disambiguation through looking it up online.

I have Fifth Edition Character Sheet on my phone. It's a very cheap one time payment, and has most of the stuff you'd want in a character builder, though the interface isn't the prettiest.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wgkammerer.testgui.basiccharactersheet.app

This one just has everything and only costs a few bucks to buy for unlocking auto leveling. You can back up your sheets to google drive too.

I use it every week

If you just want the race/class/subclass information, download the 'dnd character' app, by 'the dungeon developer'. I'd never replace having the books with it, but it's a good reference. Oh qnd it's free

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dungeondev.a5echaracter

Absolutely right. It also just occurred to me that you’d have to also deal with the sunlight sensitivity. Now I’m not aware of an existing AL legal magic item that would help you get around this, but given that the Goggles of Night ( https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Goggles%20of%20Night#content ) exist, I wouldn’t think it would be that big a stretch for your DM to allow you to find similar items but inverse that allow you to function normally in bright light.

I'd say your first try should be to pull out a folding boat and if that fails because of fuckery, go for the raft.

Do you have any idea how the creature was controlled by the ship captain? Maybe some badass animal handling checks are needed to convince this sea-ox to turn on it's previous captors and that you'd be of help in that endeavor?

If you're on Android I absolutely love this app. It does everything. Usually up to date with UA, allows for custom content, manages all the calculations for you, and has a ton of content already in it

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blastervla.ddencountergenerator

What device were you planning on using?

I have experimented a bit with apps for inventory management, which take care of the coins, weight and items part. The best one I've found for me is for Android

I have to say that I have reverted to pencil and paper, because the fiddling with digital stuff distracted me quite a bit from the game.

For the same reason I'm taking notes using a good looking hardcover notebook, pen and pencil: if you have a decent handwriting I've found that just using a couple of different styles/colors for different things can help a great deal in looking up stuff later. For example, magic items are in pencil for me, NPC or location names go in upper case pen, descriptions are in cursive pen, ecc. Plus I can sketch things on the fly as the DM is describing them (like portions of dungeons, or objects, like a weird obelisk). Which is something that might be hard to do with a smartphone or tablet, depending on your equipment.

Something else to consider is the space on the gaming table. Not everyone has space to place a laptop or a big tablet, especially if the DM and maybe other players are using one.

Basically just being organized with a notebook and a pencil and pen can do the job imho.

That being said, I think the most important thing here is to use something easy, whatever that is for you. You should be able to use it without effort during the sessions and be able to consult it later on without having to decipher too much