✨Divas and Devils💃 - A D&D Dating Sim || 🏳️‍🌈 Romance

Creating your character

Divas & Devils is based around a simple premise—the nobility of Barwa feel you aren't important enough to deserve an invitation to the winter ball. When you're building your character, I want you to ask yourself why the nobility would turn you away! Is your character simply a member of the overlooked lower classes, or have they slighted the king or nobility in some way? Perhaps they are a noble, but they hail from a city so far that they aren't recognized? These are example ideas—feel free to build on one or come up with your own! Before the official start of the game, I will host a session zero where we'll brainstorm ideas for fifth-level characters, then build them together using 2014 rules. You'll want to bring ideas for a name, a class, and a species. You're free to use whichever character sheet software you'd like, or just paper and pencil :) If you're a new player who doesn't know what any of that means, don't worry! I'll do a step-by-step walkthrough of D&DBeyond's free character creator the first time we meet. For players who are more experienced or have made characters before, you're free to use classes and species from any officially published source books that use the 2014 ruleset, including the customization options in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. All I ask is that you be mindful of the game's romantic tone.

Preparing for the session

This game will be hosted over Discord. If you aren't familiar, Discord is a voice and video calling platform that will allow us to play face-to-face. You'll be able to join once you sign up for the game. We'll also be using the Roll20 VTT (Virtual Tabletop) for the game's maps. You'll want to make a (free) account before we meet, if you do not already have one. If you don't have a preferred way to make characters (it's totally okay not to!), I recommend D&DBeyond. I find that site is the easiest to navigate for character creation.

What Vi brings to the table

This game places a heavy emphasis on social interaction over combat. In Barwa, you will encounter a web of fantastical characters and locations to engage with as you desire. I tend to use character voices for the NPCs in my games. This doesn't necessarily mean an accent (it usually doesn't), but vocal quality can often help distinguish different characters. Plus, I like to have fun with it! As a player, there's no expectation at my table that you must do a character voice as well, but I do my best to create a safe environment for you to try one out if you'd like. When we use our virtual tabletop, you can expect handmade maps created using Inkarnate. I do not use AI in the creation of any of my maps, nor do I use AI-generated assets for any token art. I request that my players also not use any generative AI tools in the creation of characters or character art that they use for this game. As a GM you can expect me to be fair. This game will largely stick to D&D's rules as written, because I find that limits and restrictions often spur creativity. When this isn't the case, I can be flexible, but I will never bend the rules in a way that doesn't lean in the players' favor.

Homebrew rules

In this setting, the hells are very different from most other D&D settings. Rather than a layered nine hells, five infernal maidens rule different "organs" of a colossal underworld serpent. As such, different lineages of tieflings have unique damage resistances and innate spells available. If you're interested in playing a tiefling in this game, let me know and I can provide more information! I also use the common house rule that drinking a potion is a bonus action, but administering a potion to another creature still takes an action.

How Vi creates a safe table

During our session zero, we'll build a Lines and Veils document as a group. Lines and Veils is a technique for managing trauma triggers and sensitive content at the game table. Creating this document will provide the groundwork for our safety system—it'll let me and your fellow players know what content to avoid. Safety isn't just something that happens before the first session, though. During gameplay, we'll take a few steps to make sure everyone is comfortable. Our group will pause for a routine break at the midpoint of each session, but I also have an open door policy. Open door means you're free to step away from the table at any point, for any reason, without any explanation, and without any judgement. We'll also use an X, N, O system to manage triggering content that might not have come up during the creation of our Lines and Veils discussion. What this means is that, at any point in our sessions, you can discreetly send me an indication of your comfort level with the content at the table. Since this game is romance oriented, these safety tools are extra important! Note that we'll be using the classic "fade to black" method to avoid any depictions of explicit sex.