Stupid D&D tricks

[Fish]

I admit it: I'm a RPG fanatic from way back. I played all kinds of genres, although I was too cheap to invest in various rule books, because I was always the Game Master (or Dungeon Master if you prefer). AD&D, GURPS, V&V, Paranoia, Top Secret, Call of Cthulhu, Boot Hill, you name it. Like everybody else who has played the game, any game, I have lots of stories to tell about amazing adventures, incredible improvisations, great scenarios, and clever players outwitting impossible odds.

But forget that now. Tell me your stories of the stupidest players you ever had, the most boneheaded moves you ever saw in a game, the klutziest characters ever to grace the bone heap in the Tomb of Horrors.

I'm not talking about bad dice rolls. I'm not talking about unfortunate saving throws or evil traps. I'm speaking of times when the player commits an incredibly thick-headed lack of judgement that subjects the character to a cruel injustice or an untimely death.

My favorite mishaps came from one, count him, one player. We called him GODAG, for Good Ol' Dead-And-Gone.

(D&D game)
Me: "You come to a river."
Doug: "I'll look around for a bridge."
GODAG: "I jump in and swim across."
Me: "Really? Okay. Your armor is too heavy. You sink to the bottom and die."

(spy game)
Me: "The snipers continue to fire at your truck. The engine stops running and is now on fire."
Everyone else: "Get out of the truck and take cover."
GODAG: "I try to fix the engine."

(sci-fi game, in planes vs. tanks battle)
Me: "Joe and GODAG, your planes are both hit. You've each lost control and you're going down."
GODAG: "I jump out of the plane."
Joe: "I bail out of the plane."
GODAG: "I go back and get my parachute."

(Old West game, at the poker table with desperadoes)
Me, rolling dice: "You have lost all your money."
GODAG: "I'll put my guns on the table."
Me: "Really? You reach for your guns?"
GODAG: "Yeah, I'll bet my guns."
Me: "The other poker players see you reaching for your guns and shoot you."

Don't get the wrong idea: I'm not a capricious GM who kills off players for fun. I really tried to give him every opportunity to do something useful. In the end, what we got was entertainment value.

I'm sorry if this thread is started in a bad location; I'm not really sure where it fits in best.

[nightshadea]

The time i bought a guard dog in ad&d .... we ran out of food and well ,,,,,,

as for bad dice rolls same game we were fighting a bunch of goblins in a random attack

everyone else was down ....... all i needed was to hit the fool i only needed a 3 or higher

I roll .....

I hit my self ,,,,,,, rolled a one

All i needed was not to hit over 5

I hiit a 20

The one time I could of been the hero i choke .... I felt like charlie brown calling himself the goat lying in the baseball field

[Horseflesh]

I once played a Drow that had been banished from his [royal] family (my alignment had changed to neutral good from fooling around with an unidentified helm). Hooked up with the rest of my non-Drow party and we head into Waterdeep. We decide to hit a few bars to pick up on local gossip. My more experienced friend tells me to keep my hood low.

I order a drink, then throw back my hood to guzzle it. The bar goes completely silent and my friend is staring slack-jawed at me from across the room.

Fast-forward past all the dice rolls -- we escape through a second story window to a neighboring roof. The first floor of the bar is completely engulfed in flames (my idea of a distraction gone wrong). We hoof it to the docks where a ship is waiting for us with our quest-giver NPC.

For some reason the ship has a catapult mounted on the deck and several barrels of oil. I decide that giant molatov cocktails are the order of the day for the few ships that are pursuing us. In my excitement I grossly misjudge the distance and set a large portion of the docks on fire. [Sigh]

From then on my party nicknames me Pyro. The NPC later turns out to be a vampire who makes me his pet.

Yeah, that's me, Pyro the Drow elf-ghoul.

[Oy Vey]

Heh... Let's see... there was the fighter who died when a succubus... well, drained... his fortitude beyond 0

A lv. 3 thief who tried to stuff a mercurial broadsword (naked blade) into a borrowed (from the local thieves' guild, of course) bag of holding...

A wild mage, caught in the forest alone against a knight in full plate who tried to summon a rust monster

[Bryan Ekers]

I once played an AD&D character in a campaign whose DM allowed humans to have 19 strength (he knew how to kill players anytime he wanted, so it didn't matter) and was in a small low-level party with another novice fighter, two 3rd-level clerics and a bard. Yes, a bard. The guy wanted to play a bard. He had no idea what a bard was, but he wanted to play one.

As we creep through the dungeon, we find a door, listen carefully, then bust it down. Arrows come flying at us so I charge into the room, dodge to the side so I'm not standing in the doorway like a complete idiot, then charge, bastard sword a-singing. The other fighter follows me and we have a grand old time.

Meanwhile, the bard decides he wants to shoot arrows back at the attackers. Never mind that he can't actually see them, never mind that in order to get off a shot he has to stand in the doorway like a complete idiot, he's gonna shoot back, damnit! The DM tries to dissaude him with a bit of bullshit, telling the bard that you can't keep a bow strung all the time, because the wood would warp, and unless the bard specifically strung his bow before entering today's dungeon, firing back is not an option.

"So I'll string my bow," declared the bard. And he does, or at least tries to. The arrows shot at the bard (who is still standing in the doorway like a complete idiot) have a random chance of hitting the clerics, who are trying to keep line-of-sight on me so I can benefit from various Prayer spells and whatnot. Their spells are continually disrupted and wasted by piddling arrow hits and soon I am knocked out and taken prisoner, as is the entire party, and we are tossed into cells. I end up bunking with the arrow-riddled corpse of the idiot bard.

I am annoyed, needless to say. Having been stripped of my armor, weapons and a ring +1, I decide to memorably improvise. I rip the bard's leg off, reasoning that a human femur is a very strong bone and can serve as an adequate club. I am rewarded by shocked silence around the table, though my jail-break (and my character) are both short-lived.

That was when I was playing. A few years later when I was DMing, I let the players have all kinds of goofy stuff (I was building up toward a plot twist in which the Paladin's warhorse is lost and presumed dead, but later reappears as a pegasus) so long as it was interesting. One of them picked up a helm of brilliance and they went hunting for some wizard or whatever. After a major fiasco, the dwarf with the helm and the wizard faced each other across a field. She threw purple ray at him, he threw fireball at her and the initiative rolls tied. Net result: he vanished into another dimension, and she lost two saving throws and blew up.

Now THAT was memorable.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

A friend of mine got into D&D when it first came out. We had some trouble fully understanding the game, but we gave it a shot nonetheless. We ended up with a player who became a starving naked fighter riding a giant chicken until being eaten by a gelatinous cube. We didn't play much after that.

[glee]

My mate George is a tremendous roleplaying enthusiast.

He turns up on time, runs his fair share of dungeons (which are always entertaining) and has many fine ideas, plus a great sense of humour.

When he is playing a Fighter, there is no more stout ally.
When playing a Thief, there is no more daring scout.
When he plays a Cleric, you will get full healing, no matter what the risk to himself.

But when he plays an MU, especially one with Fireball... :eek:

Episode one (The Very Real Menace)

We are in a narrow long corridor, with a low roof. The Paladin has detected evil around a bend up ahead, so the party is on full alert. George's MU is being protected by my character (I'm also keeping an eye on the rear).
Some nasty looking other-world beings come round the corner, snarling away.
The fighters engage, smoothly blocking the corridor.
The cleric begins casting healing and protecting spells.
Without hesitation, George's MU starts the syllables of his favourite spell.
My character instantly calculates just how far the fireball will extend down a corridor 10 feet wide by 10 feet high. (I make it 330 feet in all the monsters are about 20 feet away!)
I push the MU, disturbing his concentration.
The player who thanked me most was George, who pointed out ruefully that his familiar would have been in the blast area!
(The DM later added that the beings were fire-resistant anyway...)

Episode two (Attack of the Clowns)

So we're on Dinosaur Island. A dangerous place, particularly with local tribesman having successfully snatched our food supplies. The Paladin looks the Druid in the eye and says we must kill one animal for food.
The Druid reluctantly agrees.
So the Thief sneaks up on a herd of small dinosaurs, sets a tripwire, and we prepare to swiftly dispatch lunch.
I think you know what is coming next!
Without hesitation, George's MU starts the syllables of his favourite spell.
He'll kill and injure most of the grazing herd.
This time it's the Druid who gives him a whack with the flat of a scimitar.

[BraheSilver]

While playing Rifts (mostly apocalyptic sci-fi with magic) a couple of players driving from Chicago to San Antonio decided to stop at a sleepy village in the midwest. Unfortuately, the one at the wheel at the time left the cruise control on for most of the trip, and didn't realize that merely taking his foot off the gas wouldn't slow the vehicle down.

Cruising down the main street of this one-horse town at a sedate 80 mph, he looks for a suitable space to screech to a halt without wrecking anything, and picks the nice fenced-off field behind the nearby church.

Since his pilot automobile skill is the bare minimum to turn the car on without hurting himself, he fails miserably... and plows through the church. This slows him down enough to keep from flipping over as he jerks the wheel to the side halfway through and bursts out the other wall into the aforementioned field. A few wild doughnuts later, they come to a stop and discover that the "empty field" was the town's cemetary, and now deep ruts tear through sacred burial grounds, at times deep enough to have flung parts of bodies out around the area.

The townsfolk were not amused, to say the least.

[BraheSilver]

While playing Rifts (mostly apocalyptic sci-fi with magic) a couple of players driving from Chicago to San Antonio decided to stop at a sleepy village in the midwest. Unfortuately, the one at the wheel at the time left the cruise control on for most of the trip, and didn't realize that merely taking his foot off the gas wouldn't slow the vehicle down.

Cruising down the main street of this one-horse town at a sedate 80 mph, he looks for a suitable space to screech to a halt without wrecking anything, and picks the nice fenced-off field behind the nearby church.

Since his pilot automobile skill is the bare minimum to turn the car on without hurting himself, he fails miserably... and plows through the church. This slows him down enough to keep from flipping over as he jerks the wheel to the side halfway through and bursts out the other wall into the aforementioned field. A few wild doughnuts later, they come to a stop and discover that the "empty field" was the town's cemetary, and now deep ruts tear through sacred burial grounds, at times deep enough to have flung parts of bodies out around the area.

The townsfolk were not amused, to say the least.

[D_Odds]

Playing the Avengers in the pitiful Marvel Super Heroes RPG, I was Hercules. Should have been an easy battle against whomever. Needed to roll 16 or better on a D100 to hit. Missed 5 straight times. After that, Jeeves wanted to spar with me.

First time with a group in AD&D. I was my favorite - a 1/2elf mage/thief. This group would describe how they were set up for a good 5-7 minutes before opening any door, most of which were empty. I got bored, walked up to a door as they were setting up, opened it. Who knew it was the occupied room (not done on purpose either)?

Old Champions campaign, I'm a Firestorm-type character, with transmutation powers. Knocked into Toys'R'Us. It was a display of Voltron toys. I always wanted to see them come together like the cartoon (GM was nice because of the visuals as this was really pushing the parameters of the power).

Another old Champions campaign: Another player and I both have energy protectors with paranormal strength (not quite super). We're both quite powerful with our energy, but our strength was useless against most supervillians. Yet both of us always went charging into battle fist first. He was fun, as he was one of the few I've played with who wanted to play the character, not the numbers.

[glee]

Originally posted by D_Odds
First time with a group in AD&D. I was my favorite - a 1/2elf mage/thief. This group would describe how they were set up for a good 5-7 minutes before opening any door, most of which were empty. I got bored, walked up to a door as they were setting up, opened it. Who knew it was the occupied room (not done on purpose either)?


But surely they only need to have the door-opening discussion once?

[Wikkit]

Absurd Notions (http://www.absurdnotions.org/) by Kevin Pease has had a bunch of RPG strips recently. I've never RPGed, and I think they're pretty good.

Along with the strips, there's been discussion in the Absurd Notions Forum (http://atp.cx/absurdnotions/). Here are some comments from one thread (http://atp.cx/absurdnotions/viewtopic.php?topic=116&forum=1&start=15):

"Oh, while we're on the subject of roleplaying running gags, I wanted to add that in one D&D campaign dating back to high school, whenever our group went into any place of business -- be it an inn, a bar, a blacksmith's or even an apothecary -- it was invariably run by a dwarf with an English accent. One time we pointed this out to the DM and he was quite put out. Not the most imaginative lad around." -- Craig J. Quack

[Wikkit]

I was going to post a couple more from that thread (it's a good one) but I hit enter and it posted my reply rather than moving down a line. So just go check out that thread.

[Dragonblink]

Well, there was that time the ogre slipped on a squirrel (!) and hit a tree ... and the time my mage gave everyone food poisoning ...

[TigoleBitties]

I had a few in Shadowrun including some highlights as:

-A mage shooting a Maglock in a GAS chamber that has big stickers that say FLAMMIBLE GAS ENVIROMENT as the klaxons warning that GAS has been released and is rapidly filling up with HIGHLY FLAMMIBLE GAS (the gms words pretty much)

Mage shot anyway, spark, and 3 floors of a research facility go WHOOMP. He did not last long after that

-A arguement on how long a guy can be dragged along 'skiing' on hard leather boots against wet pavement from the back of a cargo van he shot a grappeling hook on to. He managed to throw a few saves by sheer luck but then got into real trouble as he tried to be a jackass and take a curve instead of getting on the 'easy way out' the GM offered. GM had him pinwheel into a parked car then land on a gang of very grumpy Trolls who stomped what was not broken very broken.

-A witty guy who decided to get offended and in the face of a cop IN HIS OWN PRECINCT. The GM decided to make him a example as he had "Mr Chip on his shoulder" proceed to be buggered against his will by some guys in the holding cell after being handcuffed. This guy deserved it on sheer stupidity to want to wave around a gun at all times

[Tengu]

There was the time my Bard/Mage (who liked to fight with a pair of knives) stabbed a Hellhound in the head. ::Kaboomie!:: He enjoyed the flight...the landing sucked, though. (He lived, but...ow.)

Then when my Halfling Rogue tryed to grab a handful of coins from a magically protected fountain of gold. She enjoyed the flight, too. Didn't mind the landing, either.

[Patricinus Scriblerus]

One of my favourites : My DM was describing a cobat setting that we had stumbled into. We were out numbered and as the dice were rolled apparently out gunned. As things went from bad to worse We found ourselves cut off with one door as a means of escape. It was of course locked. Our only thief pipes up and says " I try to pick the lock". The DM at this point reminds him of the melee going on around him. Our little thief insists. The DM basically got up and dropped a 25 piece jigsaw puzzle in front of him and told him " Here, you put this puzzle together while I beat you with a baseball bat. If you can finish it before I beat you senseless, we'll say that you get a shot at picking the lock"

Our thief got the hint.

[Siege]

I haven't RPG'd since moving back to Pittsburgh, but this brings back some memories. Back in Hawaii, I played with a group of guys who had an exception GM. Among other things, he let this happen to me.

We were playing Cthulu, and he had given us a setup like the movie The Abyss where we were on an experimental deep sea oil drilling platform. My character had a sword cane and was starting to develop a form of paranoia involving Deep Ones. Sure enough, she was attacked by something which came out moon pool. She starts flailing away with her sword cane, getting in good shots, but it takes a lot of killing. Finally, after a certain amount of die rolling and screaming of "Die! Die! Die!", the creature is lying dead at her feet. At this point, our GM looks at me and says, "By the way, why didn't you use the bang stick in your other hand?" Well at least it suited the character as well as the real life person to have completely forgotten it.
:o

In a different Cthulu scenario, our GM decided he'd gotten sick of a couple of people's shoot-em-up approach, so he taught us a lesson. We woke up one morning and found ourselves puppies. Then kittens. Then parrots, trying like mad to dial our patron's phone number before we got found out (we didn't succeed). Finally, we were all baby guppies. "Along comes Momma Guppy. What do you do?" To his disappointment, I think, we all went and hid at the bottom of the fishtank. I forget how the scenario ended, but it was a bit of ludicrous fun. Ravenwood (our GM), I miss you still!

CJ

[sau_chitnis]

is d&d a gctual game or is it a name given to a vast group of RPGs. I always wanted to know that. If D&D is a game how much is it???

JeDi 0nLiNe

[glee]

Originally posted by sau_chitnis
is d&d a actual game or is it a name given to a vast group of RPGs. I always wanted to know that. If D&D is a game how much is it???

JeDi 0nLiNe

D&D stands for the Dungeons and Dragons game.
There'll be a thread on this site which goes into the history.
Basically it was invented in the mid 70's as Dungeons and Dragons. Then came Basic Dungeons and Dragons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Edition 2, and now there's Dungeons and Dragons Edition 3.

There are many other roleplaying games, but Dungeons and Dragons is the Daddy. (I hope that means what I think it does!)

You can get computer games based on Dungeons and Dragons - Pool of Radiance, Baldur's Gate.
If you want to play face-to-face, you don't need the rules to start, just a referee (known as the Dungeon Master) and some other players.
Perhaps a local game/model shop has an advert.
Or if you give your approximate location, one of us might have a suggestion. (I'm in the UK myself).

[Ranchoth]

...I seem to recall a thread here that described a hapless player in a superhero RPG surviving an explosion in a subway car (Through some "Creative" interpretations of the game rules by the other sympathetic players), but being left singed, and wearing only a pair of armored gauntlets.

I've looked all over for that thread, but I'm afraid it was erased during one of the times the message board was down. A pity. It recounted an impromptu Elf-lynching, as well. THAT was interesting. :eek:


Ranchoth

[Blind Guardian]

I've been gaming for the past 8 years or so, both as a player and as a GM. Sadly, I can't think of one story of staggering idiocy at the moment. I've contracted a cold that is kicking my ass mercilessly at the moment, so I'm not really in top form. I will say however, that there's a very good reason why the announcement that somebody had come up with a plan in one of my gaming groups was immediately followed by another player asking (in a bad "We don't need no stinkin' badges accent), "Eez it a bad plan, boss?" The proper response was, "Oh, de very worst, Pepe, de very worst!"

None of us could remember how exactly that started, but it was a fixture of our gaming sessions...and we did manage to come up with some plans that were an offense to logic and common sense. Why do they always seem like good ideas at the time?

Anyway, in lieu of my own amusing tales of gross incompetence, I'd like to share the following link (http://archive.dumpshock.com/CLUE/) with you. The author has an archive of stories in the same vein as this thread. I laughed until my ribs hurt the first time I read this.

[Knowed Out]

Probably my worst blunder was when I played Call of Cthulhu years ago. I was playing a Professor of Architecture at Miskatonic, and the "villain" of the campaign was Dr. Isreal Fiskeman, head of the Science Department. He'd be there foiling our investigations by casting spells and whatnot. My character got jealous, and wanted a spell of his own, and finally came across one for summoning dimensional shamblers.

After a disaster which led me to flee to my home and lock myself in, I kept hearing these strange noises outside, and was convinced that monsters were trying to break in and grab me, so I brought out the Summon Dimensional Shambler scroll and started reading from it. The GM then asks me, "Do you have the Control spell?" I said "What Control spell?"

2nd worst D&D session I was in --- joined a group that explored Tomb of Horrors. These were some serious Freudian cases involved here....the GM had a female paladin NPC accompany the party, and she basically held their hands for them and pointed out any traps they were about to stumble across. At one point the session was held up for 20 minutes as one of the players was arguing with the GM over taking 2D6 damage from falling debris when he kicked down a door. We got all the way to the end where the Demi Lich was located (because the female paladin had the power to teleport us there), and as we were discussing what to do, the GM said that the female paladin (that's what he called her, too. No name, just the "female paladin") went ahead and hit the thing with her Sword of Disentegration while we were arguing and killed it.

First worst --- I sat in on a session where the player next to me showed me his sheet and all his stats were 25s. I said "How'd you get all 25s?" He said "wishes." I said "I thought wishes only gave you a tenth of a stat point." He said "That's right!" It was because the corps group of players were worshippers of Ishtar, and she liked them so much she gave them 7 wishes a day. I said that was bogus. Another one of the cor eplayers agreed, saying they should only have 3 wishes a day. I was gone soon afterwards.

[Maeglin]

This example is short and sweet. High level campaign set in the Dark Sun milieu. We decided to give my own campaign world a bit of a break so I could do some more development.

We had all read the Dark Sun novels (we were 15, so sue us). Naturally there was a mul gladiator in the party, and naturally he was a melee monster. And wore a full harness of braxat plate mail.

Braxats are large, powerful, and stupid, yet they are a threat even to a relatively high-level party when they travel in groups.

And a group is exactly what the party found, minding its own business. The general vote was to ignore them and move on. But the gladiator wanted a fight. So he charged. Naturally the rest of the group backed him up.

What he evidently forgot about was his armor.

Maeglin: So you are going to charge into a party of braxat wearing their skin as armor?
Gladiator: Sure, why not?

I was nice, I really was. He had nearly 200 hp, and he dealt out a staggering amount of damage.

He was dead within two or three rounds.

[Steve Wright]

Old FASA Star Trek campaign. Landing party is in trouble on a colony world; colonists have tied them up and are field-testing illegal drugs on them. Caitian PC has a bad reaction to the drugs (it doesn't help that all the Caitians in the campaign were played as if "Caitian" was synonymous with "Kzinti") - in the resulting confusion, a PC briefly grabs a communicator and gets the beginnings of a distress call off to their starship.

So, how does the highly trained, highly professional Starfleet executive officer, currently on the bridge, respond to the abortive distress call? Beam down a security team? Run sensor scans? No....

"Phaser banks! Wide angle fire! Stun the ENTIRE colony!"

(The subsequent board of enquiry was fun.)

[Hamish]

Betwen the ages of 10 and 14, I was a very bad dungeonmaster to several groups of bad players.

Aside from the usual Monty-Haul campaign stuff (never gave much thought to how a party of four was carrying around over 3 billion pieces of gold bullion...), I presided over several incidents so spectacularly awful, I'm almost ashamed to brag about them here :D

For instance, my party killed several of the gods described in the original Legends and Lore. I think they were third-level when Loki went down.

My parties always ran out of rations the first night of the campaign, and nobody would mention it ever again.

By far the best (worst?), though, was one time when I rolled the random encounter "sheep." One of the party members -- and this was a first-level party of a new campaign -- decided to butcher them for extra XP. At 12 years old, it didn't occur to me that the sheep would run, or at least need a morale check.

I had the sheep attack back in full force. The entire party was wiped out.

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

In junior high, I remember the game in which we killed a giant rattlesnake. As we were searching for a lair (hey, even snakes like shiny treasure, right?), the thief said, "I inject myself with the rattlesnake's poison."

"What?!" we all said.

"Just a little bit of it," he insisted. "I want to build up an immunity to rattlesnake venom."

*****

I trust, however, that you've all heard the inimitable tale of the Head of Vecna (http://home.hiwaay.net/~srberry/gurps/Vecna.html)? If you haven't, go read it now. It's the funniest stupid player story EVAR!!

Daniel

[Balance]

Originally posted by Patricinus Scriblerus
Our only thief pipes up and says " I try to pick the lock". The DM at this point reminds him of the melee going on around him. Our little thief insists. The DM basically got up and dropped a 25 piece jigsaw puzzle in front of him and told him " Here, you put this puzzle together while I beat you with a baseball bat. If you can finish it before I beat you senseless, we'll say that you get a shot at picking the lock"
I think your DM was being unreasonable here. I've picked multiple, heavily trapped locks in the middle of a melee. I'm not talking tabletop either--it was in a LARP. We were outnumbered by nastier things than kobalds, too--unlimited regenerating gargoyles and werewolves were the order of the day. My team formed a defensive rank behind me while I sprawled in the dirt and picked the locks.I only took about three hits the whole time--strategy works.

As for my own stories--
In a battle with Lloth (yes, that Lloth):
The cavalier has our ranger skewered on his lance (Lloth was controlling the ranger) and storm giant strength. He decided that flinging the ranger at the Spider Queen was an interesting, if not actually good, idea.
Cavalier: "He's wearing +2 armor. Does that give me a to-hit bonus?"

Later in the same fight, the cavalier is considering a strategic withdrawal (via a Rod of Sanctuary):
Cavalier: "Where's the ranger?"
Cleric: "Your mount is standing in him."
Cavalier: "Oops."

When he finally used the Rod, he accidentally left two of us behind--a renegade drow fighter-mage and an out-of-spells druid against a (very battered) avatar. We won--just barely--and beat the crap out of the cavalier when he came back, besides.

Then of course, there was the fighter who took a dump on an altar to Lathander in our low-level silly campaign. That campaign also boasted a badly-wounded 2nd level priest chasing a squad of 4th-level drow fighters (sheer dumb luck let him get away with it).

[GargoyleWB]

I DM'd with this one player that was just neck-wringingly frustrating. His character, a brawny meat-headed fighter, was obsessed with the possibility of there being hidden treasure. He would search everything in every room we went into no matter how mundane.

Me: You are walking thru a pasture
Barzon: Are there haystacks?
Me: Umm, sure...
Barzon: I go search the haystacks for treasure
Me: It's a big pasture, over a hundred haystacks
Barzon: That's ok, we search them all.
Rest of party: *groan* No, you search take the three days to search them, we're riding on, you can catch up with us at the dungeon.

And on like that.

The worst was when the party entered an inn for the night and sent Barzon to stable the horses.

Barzon: I put our horses in a stall. Are there others there?
Me: Yes, the inn is very busy, probably a dozen horses.
Barzon: I take out my sword and kill them all.
Me: WHAT?
Barzon: I kill them. Treasure you know.
Me: What are you talking about.
Barzon: Hidden treasure. Innkeepers will feed gems to the horses to hide them.
Me: Come again?
Barzon: Gems, they really do that. They stuff gems into a sheeps bladder, then make the horses swallow it, that way they can get them through the city gates without the tax collectors noticing. Just like cocaine smuggling at the airport you know?
Me: Oh god....
Barzon: Cool. Yiaaaghhhhh! *a few moments later* Did I find any gems?

[Max Torque]

A long time ago, Johnny Angel posted the finest RPG story I've ever read (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=20301), the story of the Mighty Honknar. Look on his story, and marvel in awe:

Many of the incidents of our previous campaigns become the legends of our current campaign. The touchstone of all of them is the story of Mighty Honknar.

Honknar, and his fellow adventurers whose names have been lost in the mists of memory, ventured out from the Keep on the Borderlands to explore the Caves of Chaos. They were attacked by stirges in the forrest. The only survivor was Honknar. He buried his comrades and went back to the keep with their stuff. He sold what he could, but kept several weapons, and went to the inn and recruited more adventurers.

With a new party, he set out once more for the Caves of Chaos. And once more they were attacked, this time by kobolds. With a fearsome shout, Honknar reached for his two handed sword and unsheathed it with a mighty metalic shinnng and it slipped from his grip and went tumbling into the forrest and landed in the underbrush. But mighty Honknar didn't blink. He shouted to the kobolds, "See that? I didn't need that to kick your ass!" Whereupon he reached across his back and drew his deadly long sword, which he immediately lost his grip on, sending it flying into the advancing kobolds ranks, but no where near close enough to hit one of them. "See that one?" he cried, "Hell, you can have that one!"

All this time, Honknar's companions are fighting and dying at the hands of the kobolds, but thinning the enemy's ranks as well, so that by the time Honknar got out his sturdy mace there was only him and one battered kobold left standing on the field of battle. Honknar rasied his mace to smash down on the kobold, but lost his grip on it and it landed somewhere behind him, and he shouted, "I sure as hell don't need this to kick your ass!" Whereupon, Honknar headbutted the kobold, and it died.

Mighty Honknar buried his companions, collected their equipment and returned to the keep. He sold whatever he could, but kept most of the weapons, knowing full well how important it was to be well stocked. At the inn, he called out for a new party. Some of the adventurers hanging around suggested that it was too dangerous. After all, his party had been wiped out twice. But Honknar showed them how much money he'd made in so short a time, and a handful of lusty souls greedily signed up.

And so he was off again to the Caves of Chaos, where his party was attacked by stirges once more. He held firmly to his weapon, as he missed, missed and missed again, one stirge after another. But the stirges could not seem to miss him at all, and each stirge that stung him did as little damage as it could possibly do. By the time he had routed them from his back, his face, his neck and his other regions, he found himself once more the sole surviving member of his party, and was barely surviving himself.

When Honknar returned to the keep, the pool of potential party members at the inn had begun to be quite suspicious. To allay their suspicions, Honknar pulled off his chainmail shirt and showed them the horrible stirge scars. And so another brave band agreed to join him.

Into the woods they went, and upon hearing the buzzing of the stirges Mighty Honknar shouted, "Hit the ground, men, and cover your necks!" as he drew his broad sword, which he lost his grip on and it spun off into the trees. As the stirges closed in, he unstrapped his powerful two-handed axe from his back, reared it back and slipped from his hands, beheading the priest behind him. The stirges overwhelmed him and though their stingers scarcely managed to do any damage, their numbers overwhelmed him until finally, Mighty Honknar went down gurgling his own blood.

That is why at temples of Tempest, or on tapestries across the realm you may see the image of a powerful, powerful man beset with stirges. And the tapestry bears the sad refrain recanted every night at taverns and campfires, and wherever adventures gather, "Fors Honknarus Descendit" -- reminding us that if Mighty Honknar can die, so can we.

[rjung]

Originally posted by Wikkit
Absurd Notions (http://www.absurdnotions.org/) by Kevin Pease has had a bunch of RPG strips recently. I've never RPGed, and I think they're pretty good.
<hijack>

Check out Dork Tower, (http://www.dorktower.com/) if you're interested in RPG humor. It's not entirely RPG-based, but it's consistently funny, and you don't need any knowledge of any of the games to enjoy the humor. Nothing knocks a bunch of wanna-be Star Wars characters out of character faster than the opportunity to massacre Jar-Jar Binks, for instance... ;)

</hijack>

[psiekier]

Originally posted by Fish
But forget that now. Tell me your stories of the stupidest players you ever had, the most boneheaded moves you ever saw in a game, the klutziest characters ever to grace the bone heap in the Tomb of Horrors.

I'm not talking about bad dice rolls. I'm not talking about unfortunate saving throws or evil traps. I'm speaking of times when the player commits an incredibly thick-headed lack of judgement that subjects the character to a cruel injustice or an untimely death.My players generally liked me as the Dungeon Master because I told a good story and allowed plenty of hack-n-slash, as long as the party new what they were dealing with.

One thing about D&D is that I sometimes found it unreasonable to come up with a back story; why were the characters together, and wouldn't they be better off doing other things? This was especially true since two of the players insisted on being evil, and often found themselves at odds with the clueless Ranger played by one of the other players.

After they had been hired to retrieve a powerful magic sword (which they did), they found themselves in the good graces of the local royalty, and enjoyed some fine times before needing additional employment.

Knowing of their heroics, a band of retiring merchants hired our heroes to escort them south to a large port city. From there, the heroes would sail with the merchants to an island with a small town where the merchants would live out the rest of their lives fat and happy, and the heroes would be well-paid and respected. In addition, a neighbouring island was the setting for an already-published AD&D module, so I had their next adventure in mind.

Once they reached the island, they decided to mutiny. They killed the hapless merchants and murdered most of the crew. The PC's managed to flee the enraged townsfolk and remaining crew under the cover of an illusion created by an NPC Illusionist whom the (evil) Magician had charmed into helping them.

They took a small launch and escaped around the back side of the island with much of the merchants' wealth.

Unfortunately, now they're stranded on this island. It's too far to journey in anything less than a serious sailing vessel. The Illusionist, having been captured by the townsfolk after the charm spell wore off, spilled the beans, and gave vivid descriptions of the other party members via her magic.

... so now they're hunted men on an island, and have no way off.

Since Wes, the Ranger, felt that his character would really want to leave the party, he wanted a new character: a Monk. Not that I think that monks belonged in my setting, but we figured he might be a one-off weirdo.

I then hatched a brilliant plan to get the game back on track: the PC's took their small boat to a nearby island which they were sure was uninhabited. I placed a small band of pirates there, and set it up so the characters might have a chance to overwhelm them and take their ship. As a bonus, the pirates had a prisoner: the aforementioned Monk! Were the players to free him, he'd join their party and they'd have enough warm bodies to crew the pirate's small vessel and return to the mainland.

The campaign ended when the PC's attacked that night. The Ranger and Thief moved in to attack the sentries while the (evil) Warrior and (evil) Magician were to back them up. The evil players backed off, leaving the hapless Ranger and Thief to their doom, and with over half the party dead, there was no point in continuing the storyline.

What a bunch of losers!

[Sengkelat]

My character was in a party that needed to meet up with our contact in enemy territory. We found someone, in a crowded city, who appeared to have somehow kidnapped or otherwise done away with our contact, so we subdued him and began to interrogate him. Obviously, we didn't want to kill him, so I threatened him by pointing a gun at his thigh. Then I realized that that would make too much noise, so I put a pillow up to the gun.

GM: "He refuses to talk."
Me: "Okay, I pull the trigger. The pillow will muffle the sound."
GM: "He screams! He screams bloody murder! The whole city can hear it!"
Me: "Wait! I mean...Err...crap."


In a friend's game with only two players:

GM: "You're a ways outside town. You need supplies, but you're low on money. You see a hobbit boy, riding a sheep by a stream."

Player1: "I go up to the boy and demand he give me all his money."

GM: "Uh, okay, he says you're bad men and he's going to tell his dad. he starts riding away."

Player1: "Oh no! I shoot the sheep out from under him!" [rolls dice]

GM: "You missed the sheep, and [rolls] you hit the boy. He's dead."

Player2: "Uh...we get some rope and tie rocks around his neck and throw him in the stream to hide the evidence."

GM: "The stream isn't really deep here, you discover, when you throw him in. A foot is still sticking out of the water. A Hobbit man appears around the bend. 'Now where's that son of mine...Oh no my son's drowning!"

Player2: "We can't let him find out! I attack with my sword!" [rolls]

GM: "Okay, he's dead too now..."

[Sengkelat]

My character was in a party that needed to meet up with our contact in enemy territory. We found someone, in a crowded city, who appeared to have somehow kidnapped or otherwise done away with our contact, so we subdued him and began to interrogate him. Obviously, we didn't want to kill him, so I threatened him by pointing a gun at his thigh. Then I realized that that would make too much noise, so I put a pillow up to the gun.

GM: "He refuses to talk."
Me: "Okay, I pull the trigger. The pillow will muffle the sound."
GM: "He screams! He screams bloody murder! The whole city can hear it!"
Me: "Wait! I mean...Err...crap."


In a friend's game with only two players:

GM: "You're a ways outside town. You need supplies, but you're low on money. You see a hobbit boy, riding a sheep by a stream."

Player1: "I go up to the boy and demand he give me all his money."

GM: "Uh, okay, he says you're bad men and he's going to tell his dad. he starts riding away."

Player1: "Oh no! I shoot the sheep out from under him!" [rolls dice]

GM: "You missed the sheep, and [rolls] you hit the boy. He's dead."

Player2: "Uh...we get some rope and tie rocks around his neck and throw him in the stream to hide the evidence."

GM: "The stream isn't really deep here, you discover, when you throw him in. A foot is still sticking out of the water. A Hobbit man appears around the bend. 'Now where's that son of mine...Oh no my son's drowning!"

Player2: "We can't let him find out! I attack with my sword!" [rolls]

GM: "Okay, he's dead too now..."

[slortar]

I was in a group of power-mad Champions gamers once. Everyone concentrated mostly on making indestructible combat gods (myself included :) ). On our very first adventure we realized...none of us could do more than run. To get from place to place we all had to pile into our archer's jeep or call a cab...

[culturegeek]

My very first D&D character was half human, half "Leopard Man" (character was female but this was 2nd Edition, so...), and the first session had us in a bar. I took exception to something another patron said (something about my tail, I believe) and decided I was going to start a bar brawl. Ooh, first combat ever. Look sharp. Okay, we're starting with nothing, so I want to arm myself, right?

So I asked what a broken beer bottle does and, the DM said 1d4. However, this was a level 1 character and I rolled poorly. I ended up damaging myself instead.

Did I mention my character was half Leopard Man? Guess what the claws she already had were capable of doing. Yep, 1d4. :smack:
Survived, but in light of the quality of my strategic thinking, I can't really claim credit for that.

[Czarcasm]

Casting teleportation spell for travel from IMHO to The Game Room.

[Chimera]

When we are low level, there is a reason I name my horse "Emergency Rations". ;)

A couple of years back, same campaign, I was set to run an NPC Wizard along with my Bard, just because the GM had a lot of other things to do. Well, most members of the party had some basic fire resistance, and we were fighting two bad guys and getting our asses kicked, so I dropped a fireball on top of the group hoping we'd survive and they wouldn't.

Turned out they were actually Devils and had more fire resistance than us. :smack:

Also turned out that I rolled exceptionally well on the damage roll and dropped every member of the party except the fighter. :smack: :smack: :smack:

The GM sped up the deliverance by the local wizards guild that was planned for a couple of rounds later if we hadn't won by then (on the basis that we were wrecking the town with the battle).

A couple of sessions back, we were trying to get into a place in the War of the Burning Sky campaign setting, but were getting peppered by archers atop a tower. Our party Warlock (the player's characters are often a little suicidal, this being his fourth character in this campaign) ran into the tower, up the stairs, threw open the trap door....

And got absolutely murdered in one volley of arrows.

He fell to the bottom of the tower, where I was just walking in the door. Fortunately for him, I was able to pull off Elegy Unwritten* and restore him to life.

* 4th Edition, Bard Utility, Daily, 22nd level. Immediate Interrupt, An ally within 5 squares of you dies. They regain HP as if they had spent a healing surge, can stand up and move 2 squares as a free action. Very much a Monty Python-ish "I'm not dead yet!" power.

[Jophiel]

I was GM'ing a Battletech game once where the two players were going head to head. In the first game, Mike finds a reinforced concrete building, hops up on top in a lightweight mech and uses his vantage point to unleash fiery death upon Ken.

The second match, Ken finds a building and decides to emulate this by jumping up on top. A wooden building. He falls through the two floors and crashes into the basement, damaging both of his mech's legs. Then Mike blows the crap out of the building, collapsing it on Ken. Then Mike sets it on fire and jumps on it. Then Ken stopped playing.

[Moonlitherial]

These situations are usually my husband's characters and it was always his dwarves too.
We were in Underdark and came upon a massive cavern with a large castle in the middle. Fires could be seen, torches and guards seen patrolling past the arrow slits and a large wooden gate in the center of the front wall. There are 6 of us and this castle must hold several hundred.

While were huddled in an alcove outside the cavern discussing what to do the dwarf gets bored. We’re used to that, normally he just wanders away and we find him sharpening his axe on a squirrel or something but apparently he couldn’t find anything to amuse himself with so he marched up and knocked on the front door.
This was a packaged adventure and the DM actually brought it out to show us the line in the adventure which read “The most colossally stupid thing the PC’s can do is knock on the door” I believe we left him to his fate that day and travelled in the opposite direction.


Not quite in the spirit of the OP, but my favourite D&D memory:
We were travelling through a forest and one of our party members started having cursed dreams. This resulted in him being convinced that the trees were trying to take over the world and were going to attack. Each day his ravings got worse and soon the jests we were making weren’t enough to counteract the irritation his behaviour was causing. So we plotted. The three women in the party went out on a hunt for berries as we were setting up camp for the night. What we were really doing was piling fallen leaves. Lots and lots of them. We left them wrapped in our cloaks just outside of the camp.

Pat wasn’t sleeping very well and he had this flying broom instead of a horse, so during the night he would sleep lying on his stomach with the broom underneath him. A couple hours before dawn I was on watch and I woke up the other two women. We slipped to our cloaks and carried them as quietly as possible to where Pat had finally fallen asleep. In unison we all flipped open the cloaks covering him with leaves while one of them muttered “The trees shall rise and humans shall fall as the leaves do”.
Pat woke up and screamed like a little girl. He didn’t stop screaming until he was about 40’ in the air above our heads while we rolled in the leaves laughing. He didn’t speak to us for WEEKS.

[Gedd]

Let's just say my friend didn't realize the gold dragon was there to advance the plot by giving them a new quest and not there to (attempt to) kill . . .

The same guy also learned that if you are going to accuse the head of the King's guards of being a traitor in public it would be a good idea to have some evidence.

[The_Peyote_Coyote]

I was in a Shadowrun campaign playing a troll detective who was also an eco-terrorist and a poet (no shit, I recited haiku to the bemusement of the other players). I won't describe all the machinations, but I tricked the Los Angeles police into raiding the booby-trapped cache of a rival gang. The ensuing explosion destroyed a solid block of LA plus quite a few cops. Mr. Johnson didn't reward me like he did the others, but I didn't care.

[GargoyleWB]

Characters got to higher level (9) to where they could get their own stronghold. I (as the DM) had them draw up their own plan view drawings of their compound.

Our fighter's fortress, completely unbeknownst to any of us initially, looked *exactly* like a front view of Daffy Duck's face when turned upside down. The eyes were round bastions topped with guard towers, his collar was the front gate, his beak was an ornate shrine/fountain thing, and the tuft of hair on top of his head was a secret escape path through the main wall.

The conversation went something like this...

*Me setting the map in front of the players, them seeing it upside down from their perspective for the first time*

Me: "...and here's Lord Badgeworth's keep..."
Other Player 1: "His what?"
Other Player 2: "What's that?"
Badgeworth *proudly* "My castle!"
1: "Looks like a duck"
2: "Woah, it does!"
1: "Are you serious? What is that?"
2: "Duck Keep! Duckstone! Fort duck!"
1: "Nice beak!"
B: "That's a fountain! Guys, come on..."
1: "The Roost! The Nest! "
Me: "You know...with that gate it looks like Daffy..."
2: "Wabbit season!"
B: "Quit it guys, it does not!"

...and so on for an endless night of hilarity.

[Hoopy Frood]

This was a 3rd Ed. D&D campaign I was in about 10 years ago or so.

I was a human wizard. There was also a human rogue, a human fighter, a dwarf cleric, and a human monk. The cleric is played by a first-time tabletop player. The rest of us have varying levels of experience (the rogue and the DM had significant amounts). While walking through the forest, we see a huge beetle-like creature (i.e. 9 squares in size) eating foliage and heading in our general direction. We roll init.

Rogue goes first. Then me. Then the cleric. Then the rest of the party.

Rogue: I full move out of its path.

Me: Same here. (Note: I would have done this regardless of the rogue's decision. After all, this thing is clearly not a carnivore, and even if an omnivore, is unlikely to find us particularly tasty when it has ample foliage to choose from.)

Cleric: I pull out my crossbow and shoot at it.

Let's see....Two experienced members of your party decide not to attack the apparently harmless (when not enraged) large bug, and rather than follow their lead, you decide to piss the thing off? :smack:

Needless to say, the rest of the party decided that climbing trees was probably best at this point. The beetle ended up trying to shake us out of them after he managed to knock the cleric to -9 and stable. (The DM actually showed us the real role. It was something like 43 points of damage from a full-round attack on the cleric, which will outright kill any 1st level player out there. The DM was teaching the newbie a lesson about discretion and valor.) Eventually the beetle gave up and moved on after the rest of us tried pathetically to actually do something useful in a clearly outmatched fight while not engaging the beast directly.

We came to discover through the campaign that this player's mistakes came from more than just inexperience. Flash forward a few months real time....

There is an army of orcs marching on a town we are having some downtime in. This is entirely the party's fault. Some of it was a result of us changing history accidentally and causing orcs to spread where they weren't supposed to be. (Note that our characters were not aware of this, being in an area none of them were originally from.) However, the real issue was the result of the actions of the Cleric and the Monk. The town was alarmed by the appearance of Orcs in the general area, since it was a bit of a new thing. (Oops! Our bad!) I don't quite recall how the DM was handling this history change in the grand scheme of people's minds, but they needed extra help on watch. Our party agreed to help out the town, and the cleric and the monk were on watch one night. A small orc rading party hits the town, and the cleric and monk make short work of them without telling anyone a thing. Not the town officials. Not even the rest of the party. Two days later the orc army marches on the town. Turns out the leader of the rading party was orc chieftain's son. And it was some initiation ritual that he was supposed to perform as he transitioned into adulthood and to the status of being able to take over for his father should his father die. The Chieftain addresses the town that they will pay for the murder of his son. No one has a clue what's going on, including most of the party, other than of course the Cleric and the Monk who might have a clue but still never thought of actually letting anyone else know about the skirmish a couple nights back. (And they were both Lawful Good alignment.)

On top of this, the chieftain has a child from the town attached to his shield as a human shield. The chieftain calls out the entire town as cowards and how he will destroy the town and everyone in it. Our party tells the townsfolk to start getting the children out of town while we confront the leader to buy some time. As we walk up to him, our cleric decides to cast a ray touch attack spell at the Chieftain (I forget which one), thinking that he'll show the Chieftain who's boss. Now the rules don't say what exactly happens when another person is attached to an object a target of a ray attack is carrying, but our DM ruled that he killed the kid and did some damage to the Chieftain. The chieftain is impressed that humans would sacrifice their own this way, so he actually gains some respect for the cleric. However, it doesn't really stop an entire orc infantry from attacking the town. As the townsfolk hold them off, they tell us to lead the children to safety, which amazingly enough we manage to accomplish without losing a single one. Yes, an entire town other than children wiped out by the indirect actions of our party.

Flash forward a few weeks real time....

Our DM decides that the good powers that be want to send us a message. It is delivered to us via the ghost of the boy who was killed by our cleric. The DM is doing this as a way for the cleric to get closure as well as give us an adventure hook. The idea is that the ghost will also be our guide as an NPC. Our cleric is the one the kid addresses specifically as we hear the message. So here we have a completely benign spirit of a child who is trying to help us, and the cleric has a chance to redeem himself. So what does he do? He casts Cure Serious Wounds on the poor thing. (For those who don't know, cure spells on undead do the exact opposite to what they do on the living.) The spirit shrieks in pain as its soul is violently ripped out of it's formless shell and banished to whatever afterlife was prepared for it, rather than moving on peacefully when its task (and our new one) was complete, as the DM had intended.

:smack::smack::smack:

[KidScruffy]

Love the stories so far!

A little background on mine. I was DMing a thieves-only campaign, a very open-ended campaign where the party did whatever they wanted and I did a lot of improvising. We occasionally traded off DMing, although I was it 99% of the time. I did have my own character, a halfling thief, that accompanied the party.

In a previous session, the bad guys had kidnapped my halfling thief...
The party, quite a bit later, discovers the location of one of the bad guys' camps, and proceed to sneak in. Primary objective is to assassinate the leader, and recover the halfling thief if he happens to be there.

The group splits up, as was common. One of the party members sneaks into a tent, and hears snoring coming from two sleeping bags. One of the sleeping bags is occupied by someone not quite human sized...
You probably guessed it, the thief stabs into both sleeping bags, slaying both of the "bad guys" in their sleep. The rest of the party, great role-players they are, don't say a word, knowing full well what was happening, as they watch their companion kill my kidnapped halfling thief in his sleep... He discovers his mistake when he goes to loot the bodies and finds my character tied up in a sleeping bag. He did get a lot of flak for that...for the rest of the campaign, and beyond. No flak from me, though, I knew full well the risks... :)

[Chronos]

How'd I miss this thread the first time around?

The first incident that comes to mind:
"You can't seem to open the trap door in the floor. It appears to be stuck."
"OK, I jump up and down on the door."
"You jump up and down on it!?"
"Yeah, to get it unstuck."

Well, it did work. And I'm almost certain that the player did actually know better, and that it ws just honest role-playing of a low-Wis character.

My regular group also had our own version of "Good Ol' Dead and Gone". One guy's character, in the very first adventure, ended up quite thoroughly dead from flaming arrows in a sewer prepped with Greek fire floating on the water, and only got revived through direct deus ex machina intervention. The next adventure, in the big battle, she ended up at negative HP, and just barely survived. The adventure after that, everyone else in the party managed to go completely unscathed (even the two third-level characters who stumbled into a fight by themselves against a powerful 9 HD demon), except for this character, who was knocked down to 1 HP (yes, exactly 1 HP, and no DM fudging necessary) from contact with a powerful and evil intelligent weapon.

[mlees]

Temple of Elemental Evil (paper/pen module), AD&D.

DM: "You see a small, shallow bowl of a fowl smelling liquid sitting on the [either altar or alchemists lab table]."

Player/Thief: "I use my wand of detect magic on the bowl."

DM: "It doesn't glow at all." [No magic present.] "What do you do next?"

Player/Thief: "Why, I drink it, of course! What superpower did I just get?"

DM: "I dunno... how 'bout you roll a d20 and we'll see?"

Player/Thief: "A '7'. Good! 7's a lucky number!"

Well anywho, it was poison he drank.

[ShadowFacts]

Several years ago I was GMing a new campaign with my usual crew of players, one of whom was known to be...impulsive. I've got a huge campaign planned that will probably take at least a year to get through. It starts in a major city that is controlled by a dictatorial "police state" regime. Anyway...

The very first thing that happens in the entire campaign is the party wakes up one morning in the inn they are lodging at to discover the corpse of a guy. He had been stabbed in the chest and was lying in a pool of blood in the hall outside their room.

Impulsive Player: I drag the body into our room.
Other players: What? Why would you... No!
Me: OK, you drag the corpse into your room. You now have a dead body in the room and a large blood trail from the hallway into your room.
Impulsive Player: Oh. :smack:
Other players: Grrrrrrrr. :mad:

:D

[Miller]

I used to play with this kid who I'll call Jon, because that's his real name, and if he somehow finds this post, he's going to know I'm talking about him anyway, so why fuck around?

Jon's problem was pretty simple: he never saw a problem that he couldn't use violence to solve, and he never really paid attention to what other players were doing, so he'd often act in ways that spectacularly sabotaged what they were trying to do.

Case in point: I was running a bunch of players through an adventure in the Dark Matter setting for the Alternity system - essentially, an X-Files kind of set-up.

The players have a strange artifact from a mysterious civilization that they need identified. The artifact defies rational scientific explanation, but there's a fringey scientist, largely discredited by the mainstream scientific establishment, who specializes in artifacts from this supposed civilization. As it happens, there's a New Age expo going on in town at the time, and the psychic has a tent there. The party goes to the expo, and finds the guy. This is purely a "research" encounter: they party isn't expected to fight, the guy is completely honest with them, and eager to help them out. It's basically a way to dump some exposition on the party, and get them pointed at the next part of the module.

So, four of the party members walk in and start talking to the guy.

Jon says, "I'll sneak around the back of the tent."

:dubious: "Okay..."

The party continues talking to the helpful and knowledgeable NPC.

Jon: "I take out my knife and make a cut in the back of the tent, big enough to crawl through."

"Um... alright. Make a stealth check. You succeed? Okay, you sneak into the tent unobserved."

The rest of the party keeps talking to the guy. They're just about to find out the big secret they need to continue on the adventure, when Jon's master plan is finally put into effect:

"I grab the guy from behind, put my knife to his throat, and growl, "Tell us what we want to know, or I'll slit your throat!"

Naturally, the guy freaks out and screams his head off. The rest of the party immediately swings into action, and beats Jon's character unconscious. The police show up, and they disavow any knowledge of this clearly unbalanced vagrant who attacked this poor gentleman for no reason, and wasn't it fortunate that they happened to be there to save his life?

The NPC certainly thought so, and gave them some valuable magic trinkets related to the ancient civilization that he had collected during his studies. Jon's character is carted off to the pokey for the night. He's released on bail the next day. The judge sets the bail at, "How much money is written on your character sheet?" I got some good mileage over the next couple of sessions, by making Jon have to beg money off the rest of the party for pretty much everything he wanted his character to do.

*****

More recently, I've been running campaigns set in the Pathfinder setting, a 3rd edition, third party D&D variant that was released when the official D&D game converted to the 4th edition. Last year, I ran through the Second Darkness campaign, which concerns a plot by a drow priestess to drop an asteroid onto the elven capital, an act that, incidentally, will probably also kill off about 70% of all life on the surface of the planet.

About halfway through the campaign, the party has to infiltrate a drow city to find more information about the priestess, the ritual she's using to draw down an asteroid, and most importantly, where the hell she is so they can put a stop to the spell.

They find out that the noble house ruled by this particular drow priestess has abandoned the city, shuttering its estates, and decampin en masse to wherever the ritual is being conducted. Naturally enough, the party decides that they need to explore this abandoned estate for the information they need.

Except, they don't. The module doesn't cover the abandoned estate at all - all the action takes place in a different drow noble house altogether, one run by a rival who's more interested in sabotaging her enemy's schemes then destroying the surface elves, and who ends up as a very uneasy ally to the party. I don't have anything planned for the abandoned estate at all, and the party wants to go there right now.

So, okay, I just need to make the place as obviously dangerous as possible, so they get the message that this place is too dangerous for them, and they need to go after one of the actual adventure hooks I'd been dangling in front of them. The courtyard is patrolled by four iron golems - one iron golem is more than a match for the party at this point. One of the PCs is a barbarian, though, and iron golems are slow by nature, so he starts leading the golems on a merry chase around the courtyard. While the rest of the party tries to find some stealthy manner of entry. Which, of course, does not exist. The door to the stables is trapped by a fireball trap, which the party learns the hard way. The trap automatically resets after being triggered, which they also learn the hard way. And that's just an empty outbuilding: the front gate to the estate is so heavily wrapped with malicious enchantments that the party mage can't even identify everything that's woven into it. There's a large pile of drow corpses in front of it to testify to the danger of the doorway: dozens of them, in various states of decay, from all the expeditions sent by the other drow houses to try to find some way into the estate.

The rest of the party, badly singed from their experience with the stable, get the hint, and start retreating out of the compound. But not the barbarian! With all but one of the party having retreated off the map, he makes a run for the pile of corpses. With a quartet of iron golems in close pursuit, he stands about twenty feet away from the enormous, explicitly trapped doors, that have clearly killed dozens of people on several different occasions, and throws the corpse at the doors.

He later explained that he thought that he could safely trigger the (ninth level spell) traps on the doors by throwing a corpse at them, and then just open the door. Never mind that the trap they found on the stables had about three times that range, and automatically reset. Obviously, the traps on the main doors are going to be less effective than that, right?

His one stroke of luck was that the prismatic spray that hit him simply banished him from this plane of existence, rather than, say, disintegrating him. His character eventually found his way back to the party, but in the meantime, I made him play one of the NPCs for a couple of sessions.

*****

Last week, in my current campaign, one of the players was a little casual with a scroll of sunburst, and accidentally blinded half the party. This wasn't actually that bad of a move: they were fighting vampires, the existence of whom had been heavily foreshadowed, and so he had prepared two castings of Remove Blindness, expecting exactly this circumstance. Unfortunately, he blinded three PCs, so one of the party members spent the entire combat hiding under a table. This party member, incidentally, was an evil-aligned tiefling sorceress.

After the party left the dungeon, the tiefling lured the cleric back to her hotel room, where she bound, mutilated, and ultimately killed the cleric, then carved up her corpse and sold her for stew meat. Which is about where the adventure ended for the day.

Next session is this Sunday. I can not wait to see what happens next! :)

[santiago42]

I had a spare period with 3 other gamers in junior high school, so we decided to start a Gamma World adveture. Mr X decides he wants to play a mutated creature, but can't think of any specific one.

DM- Why don't you play a mutated bozo?

Mr X- Great idea, what's that?:smack:

Starting a Top Secret campaign, one player anounces he wants to play a "defective Russian.":smack:

During a Battletech game, our unit arrived in a town just before an enemy unit arrived from the other side of town. Our scout mech slipped into a warehouse and waited to let the enemy unit pass by. He turned and asked me, the company commander:

Mr Y-Should I come out now?

Me-Yes, Y, come out and be proud in your homosexuality!!

Can't understad why Y didn't like me.

[Panurge]

When we played our first D&D scenario (the one with the rust monster included in the old Basic set IIRC) we set a timer clock whenever the dwarf or elf were searching for hidden doors, waited 5 minutes per section of wall (or however long the rules stated) while reading comics, rolled a dice and followed the result.

This only happened the very first time, though. I can't remember who of us came up with the brilliant insight that we could simply pretend that time went by.

[Chipacabra]

In an old 2nd edition campaign I ran, the party was investigating rumors of unsavory activities at the temple to the evil gods. Now, this temple was actually a legal organization in this particular neutral-evil metropolis. The idea was the priests didn't so much worship the evil gods as placate them on behalf of the city.

This temple being officially sanctioned and all, the party decides to, for once in their lives, try cunning to get in and find what they're looking for. They walk right up to the front door and knock politely. When an old priest comes and asks what they want, they confer for a moment, and then attempt: "We're architecture students. We hear you have some lovely columns. May we look at them?"

After I pick myself up from the floor, I let them make some charisma checks, which they pass to a startling degree. So now this old evil priest is flattered that today's youth appreciate a good column, why in his day they didn't have this Neo-Nerrakian nonsense, nosirree, when this temple was built they APPRECIATED aesthetics. He leads them on a tour through the temple, rambling endlessly, the happiest evil priest you ever did see.

After about 20 minutes of this, the party's cleric gets bored. So this cleric, this lawful good dwarven cleric, this worshipper of the dwarven goddess of hearth and home, draws her warhammer when the priest's back is turned, and splatters the fellow in his own temple's indoor garden.

"What? He's evil, isn't he?"

The party had to flee the city as fugitives after that. So much for the urban campaign I had planned...


The same party, later on, are exploring a tunnel that leads to an otherwise sealed crypt. The tunnel was fairly recently bored out by some burrowing creature or other, so it's mostly just dirt all around. As they're about to turn a corner, they hear a strange noise from the ceiling, like a very faint hissing or scratching. They examine the area closely, can't see any sort of traps. Detect magic reveals nothing. Eventually the fighter just closes his eyes and jumps past that spot. Nothing happens. Other party members carefully walk past. Nothing happens. Finally the cleric, who has only just regained favor (and spells) from her goddess, creeps past, clutching her warhammer at the ready. ... Nothing happens.

This, for some reason, infuriates her. Determined to make SOMETHING happen, she stands directly under the noise, and throws her warhammer as hard as she can at the ceiling.

A cascade of dirt pours onto her... along with a swarm of fire ants whose nest she just punctured. Damage done: 1HP, a minor attack penalty due to itchiness, and the endless laughter of her party.

Later, the wraith at the end of the dungeon inflicted exactly enough damage to kill her, just before the party finished it off. If she had just left those fire ants alone, she'd have survived...

[Redwing]

So we're playing Shadowrun. I was new to the system, and wanted to learn the way it handled magic, and it was suggested that a play a sorcerer adept. I have silly resources, and too many force points; I'm also slightly dumber than wall paint. I'm paired with our stealther, and friends with the troll.

My tutorial in magic has consisted of "use these against physical people, and these fire spells against magically active."

We're raiding a warehouse to find out what this Chinese gang was building up to for the New Year. The plan's simple, stealth group goes in, looks around, leaves. The rest of us will hit the front door hard if a distraction is needed, and do a quick fade while everyone runs around in a panic. Things go wrong, the stealth team botches (how does a levitating guy fail to move silently? Hits his head on the door.) recovers, botches again, and calls for help. The troll grabs the garage door that's the main entrance, lifts, gets shot in the head, peers through the bullet hole in the door he's holding up to see who shot him (he's a troll), that's when the mages inside cut loose. The troll drops.

So, my character is scared for the stealther, and pissed off about the damage done to his friend; he does what dumb, frightened, angry violent people do: hits the mages with the most powerful attack he can, which you recall would be fire based. What would powerful Chinese gangs be warehousing in preparation for the New Year, that no one had managed to actually find out? Fireworks.

[Chronos]

Quoth Chipacabra:
This temple being officially sanctioned and all, the party decides to, for once in their lives, try cunning to get in and find what they're looking for. They walk right up to the front door and knock politely. When an old priest comes and asks what they want, they confer for a moment, and then attempt: "We're architecture students. We hear you have some lovely columns. May we look at them?"That's remarkably similar to how my gnome got access to the city sewers, complete with maps. Except in that case nobody minded if we killed the odd otyugh.

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

A Wall of fire, formed into a circle, makes a good defense.

Unless...you are standing on a frozen lake....

[The_Peyote_Coyote]

Panurge mentioned rust monsters. A long time ago, we were playing in a 1st edition campaign. He sicced a rust monster on us and sat back to smirk. When I told him my monk was attacking it with a quarterstaff, the look on his face was priceless.

[Kobal2]

Not D&D (both happened during the same session of Warhammer RPG), but my gaming group still quotes both of these regularly:

DM: (long, confusing description of the place we landed in)
PC: Wait, are the stables to the east or north ? Why don't you draw us a map or something ?
DM: Oh, all right, there, there, there... *hastily draws a map*
PC: ... I can't make heads or tails of your map.
DM: *exasperated* That's normal, It's night time, you don't see anything anyway !

---

A bit later:
Dwarf PC: Alright, I want to play poker with these guys.
DM: No problem, roll gambling.
PC: I have 55% in gambling. I roll 62.
DM: *rolls dice behind screen, improvises distractedly because the rest of the party's actually furthering the plot* OK, you lose some coin, but not much, the leader only beat you barely. Like, you have something like a fullhouse Jacks on Tens, and he's got Queens on Ladies*.
PC: ... I pull out my pickaxe.
DM: OK...wait, WHAT ?
PC: Down where I'm from, we don't like cheats.
DM: Bwuh ?
Cue the Dorf getting beaten senseless, and the party being evicted from the city... Lesson learned: don't add unnecessary details to your descriptions ! :)

---

Vampire:Dark Ages campaign, the players are still human but doing nasty work for the local (vampire) lord. The scenario is geared to tug at their heartstrings, make them question what they've been mindlessly doing over the last few sessions. They're in a ruined monastery which has become an impromptu leper colony, and their current mission is to carry a coffin (with a vamp inside, naturally, though the characters don't know that even if the players do) down into the crypt below.
One character, played by the girl in the group, is ghastly afraid of rats and opts to remain topside to stand watch. Seizing the opportunity for some quality mind fuckery, I improvise and have one of the lepers beg food from her; then give her a baby, begging her to take care of him and take him far away from this accursed place.
PC: Is the baby alive ?
DM: Yup. He seems healthy, if underfed.
PC: OK. I nod and shoo the leper away.
DM: She looks relieved and thanks you profusely.
PC: Yeah, OK. When she's not looking, I go and toss it into the woods.
*whole table just stares at her, jaws dropping*
PC: What ?! It's not mine.

* (In French, the Q card can be called either Reine (queen) or Dame (lady))

[Bryan Ekers]

I saw this thread and thought "Oh, cool, I'll tell them the bard story."


Then I realized I'd already told it in this thread... nine years ago.

[Lute Skywatcher]

Not mine but something I remembered reading years ago: Attack of the Gazebo (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=2449072&postcount=19).

[The_Peyote_Coyote]

But Bryan, isn't a zombie thread perfect for D&D?

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Not mine but something I remembered reading years ago: Attack of the Gazebo (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=2449072&postcount=19).Here's the original story, I think. (http://www.duke.edu/web/DRAGO/humor/gazebo.html)

[Chronos]

But Bryan, isn't a zombie thread perfect for D&D? Not necessarily. We could have a ghoul thread, or a wight thread, or a mummy thread, or a ghast thread, or...

And even if we do decide on zombies, which kind? The traditional Animate Dead Zombie, or go old-school for a Juju Zombie, or maybe if we want to be wild and crazy about it, a Necrocarnum Zombie? Or then of course, there's always the Zombie Dragon, which, true to the spirit of dragons, never really seems to think any of the rules apply to it, in any version?

[soulmurk]

Some years ago we tired of playing Marvel Superheroes and decided to have a Marvel Supervillains campaign instead, much to the chagrin of the GM.

My friend played a character who had Probability Manipulation as his power, and that was pretty much it. Marvel was a d100 system and PM, in game terms, allowed for the percentile dice to be switched to be more favorable for the owner of the power (i.e. rolling a 2 and an 8 on two ten-sided dice was an 82 for him, a 28 against him) so we decided that to raise some capital for our criminal activity we'd head to Las Vegas and cheat our way to a fortune.

Suffice it to say, the powers that be did not like our winning ways and sought to stop us from continuing to participate in their games of chance and just as things looked their most grim, my friend suddenly remembered he had a shotgun tied to his back. He'd recently acquired it and had strung it across his back for later use but had forgotten all about it, as had we all.

The GM, shocked by his oversight in allowing us to frequent a major casino all the while openly brandishing a firearm, was forced to rationalize it by saying that his power to manipulate probability had caused everyone to completely miss the weapon because it was so prominently displayed that the probability of missing it was about nil.

Things quickly turned in our favor upon this realization and to this day whenever one of our gaming group has a "Eureka!" moment we instead say, "Wait a minute, I've got a shotgun on my back!"

---

I used to enjoy devising odd traps and defenses for my campaigns and reached what I thought was my pinnacle in an underground approach to the stronghold of an illusionist and a necromancer who'd partnered up for nefarious purposes that the party sought to destroy.

After several rooms with illusion based traps, like one where it appeared that the floor had a large pit with spikes at the bottom--which was an illusion, the trap was that it was actually solid ground and if they attempted to jump over it they landed on what appeared to be solid ground but was actually a pit with large spikes at the bottom--the party entered a large cavern with no visible ceiling or floor and only a single foot wide stone walkway bridging the 100' or so gap.

Wary of illusions they slowly made their way across the walkway, meticulously assuring that the walkway was solid and had gotten about halfway across when from the cavern walls a few secret doors opened and previously undetected cannons launched zombies who tried to grapple them as they flew past.

They managed to avoid being tackled into the abyss with the first volley and most of the party decided the prudent thing to do was to drop to the walkway, making themselves smaller targets, and shimmying onward to get to the other side as soon as possible. Except for the rogue who was positively convinced that the zombies were just illusions (who ever heard of a zombie cannon?), and believed his suspicions were confirmed when a moment later the same zombies that had just shot by and fell into the darkness fell out of the sky and whizzed past them.

The zombies were very real, and the room was part of a small, circular pocket dimension. The others realized something to this effect quite quickly, but the rogue, insistent on proving his theory correct to his party, allowed himself to be hit by the next volley of zombies, which of course knocked him off the bridge and into a freefall.

Eventually he extricated himself from the zombie's grasp and thought it a great idea to, after a few passes building up tremendous speed, try to throw his grappling hook to catch the rock bridge and stop his descent. The rest of the party had by this point made it all the way across and were feverishly checking their spell lists to see if anyone had a feather fall spell or something similar and calculating if they could time the spell right to affect him before he fell out of range, but before anyone could figure out a way he tried his plan.

I gave him some pretty heavy negative modifiers to his roll, but he made it clean. Natural 20. He timed it perfectly and the hook wrapped around the bridge and found purchase. I made him make a penalized strength check to maintain his grip once the rope went taut, which he also made clean. Another natural 20. Quite amazed at his luck and kind of secretly rooting for his success at this point, regardless of how his own stupidity got him into this mess, I made him make one more roll; a not-so-heavily penalized constitution check to see how his arms held up from the enormous force of stopping suddenly. He rolled a 1.

He and his ripped off arms are, so far as I know, still falling.

[jayjay]

Not necessarily. We could have a ghoul thread, or a wight thread, or a mummy thread, or a ghast thread, or...

And what about the huecuvas?! Won't somebody think of the huecuvas?!

[Double Foolscap]

My regular DM likes to give us scenarios that allow us to be creative, which tends to bite him and us in the arse.

Scenario 1: Ars Magica campaign, so think wizards in twelfth century Europe. We're trying to find out information about a minor royal who is currently sleeping in her tower bedroom of the local castle.

I (a Norse forestry wizard) turned into my falcon form, and the Illusionist made herself invisible and cast a spell on me to make me look like a duck. Our reasoning was that a duck would elicit less comment wandering around a castle. We made it to the door of her tower, which was being guarded by two guys who were sent to sleep by the Illusionist's magic bell. I then used my wood alteration powers to get through the door. So far, so sneaky.

I then reasoned that we could get some info out of the princess if I was disguised as one of her guards. I slit his throat, steal his clothes, and then realise two things:
1) I could have dressed up by magic
2) I don't speak the same language as the princess. This also comes into play when we try reading her letters.

So in the end, the proceeds of that mission was one dead guard and the name of the princess which was the only bit of the letters we could read.


Scenario 2: Same game, we needed to navigate a castle without being detected.
Solution: We all become invisible.
Problem: Only one of us knows the way.
Solution: Leader carries a stick that we can follow.
Problem: Guards decide to investigate floating stick :smack:

Later problem: door in the way.
Mage 1: Stick head through using wood magic.
Mage 2: Hang onto Mage 1 to also see through the door, causing him to panic and lash out.
Mage 3: Try the handle.
Mage 4: Panic at Mage 2's cries, set fire to the door, leaving a pile of ash and Mage 4 holding a door handle.

We didn't always work well as a team, to put it lightly.


Scenario 3: Warhammer 40k universe, trying to solve a murder. We have a suspect and a shiruken from the corpse.

My idea was to meet with the suspect and get shot by him so we could compare weapons. I would meet with him just for a chat in a restaurant, out Techpriest (the toughest character) shoots at him, gets shot and escapes, I claim ignorance and leave.

This plan would have worked perfectly had he not had three cloaked bodyguards with him, and the Techpriest and I hadn't bothered to tell the combat characters from our party to come with us to provide backup. We barely escaped with our lives, although I did manage to miss the suspect at point blank range and waste the band behind him. Oops.

Scenario 4: Warhammer Fantasy, narrow corridor, combat going on at one end. Ranged combat character decides to shoot down the corridor, misses by the right margin to shoot one of the party - me. Hits me in the neck for massive damage, and five minutes into that campaign I'm rolling a new character.

Scenario 5: Warhammer Fantasy. Our party is split up and thrown in adjacent dungeon cells. Three of us can escape through a secret tunnel in one of the cells, leaving one character behind. She sweet-talks the guard to give her the keys, and escapes into the castle. Her escape plan from there is to cross the courtyard full of guards, climb up the ramparts, and climb down the walls and cliff to the river below.

After she completed all this, sustaining a fair bit of damage, I asked her why she didn't use the same tunnel the rest of us did.

[Balance]

And even if we do decide on zombies, which kind? The traditional Animate Dead Zombie, or go old-school for a Juju Zombie, or maybe if we want to be wild and crazy about it, a Necrocarnum Zombie? Or then of course, there's always the Zombie Dragon, which, true to the spirit of dragons, never really seems to think any of the rules apply to it, in any version?
What about the Yellow Musk Zombie? Okay, so it's technically not undead, but it's still a rotting walking corpse, and I think that earns it some representation. Won't somebody think of the the yellow musk zombies?

[Miller]

My regular DM likes to give us scenarios that allow us to be creative, which tends to bite him and us in the arse.

Scenario 1: Ars Magica campaign, so think wizards in twelfth century Europe. We're trying to find out information about a minor royal who is currently sleeping in her tower bedroom of the local castle.

I (a Norse forestry wizard) turned into my falcon form, and the Illusionist made herself invisible and cast a spell on me to make me look like a duck. Our reasoning was that a duck would elicit less comment wandering around a castle. We made it to the door of her tower, which was being guarded by two guys who were sent to sleep by the Illusionist's magic bell. I then used my wood alteration powers to get through the door. So far, so sneaky.

I then reasoned that we could get some info out of the princess if I was disguised as one of her guards. I slit his throat, steal his clothes, and then realise two things:
1) I could have dressed up by magic
2) I don't speak the same language as the princess. This also comes into play when we try reading her letters.

So in the end, the proceeds of that mission was one dead guard and the name of the princess which was the only bit of the letters we could read.

I was really hoping this story would end with, "And that's when we remembered we were still disguised as ducks."

On a similar note, I was in a CyberPunk adventure once, where our party of bad-ass corporate cyber-ronin were hired to rub some guy out. Our characters were hard-core. Armed to the teeth, boosted, jacked, enhanced, and ready to absolutely murder the fuck out of any poor sumbitch who made the mistake of getting in our way.

When we prepared to go find our target, we realized that we'd made one minor oversight. Amongst our gang of highly skilled assassins, there was not one person who knew how to drive a car. Nor did any of us own one.

We ended up having to take a bus to the hit.

[Lumpy]

One of our players (whom I will refer to as "dumbass") had a dwarven smith character. Now as I'm sure you know, even a run-of-the-mill dwarven smith can craft stuff that makes most human master craftsmen weep with envy. And although carrying an anvil and forge around wasn't practical, he could do miracles with even a basic smithy and some stock iron. So he was in charge of repairing all our armor and weapons, except for the high-end enchanted stuff. He saved us a large amount of money and in fact most of the time no one else could have matched his work anyway.

After a couple of heavy battles we'd retreated to the nearest town to spend our loot and get some healing and repair work done, resupply, etc. So he asks around where there's a smithy he can rent out, and receives a rude shock: in that town blacksmithing is totally controlled by a powerful guild (backed by the town despot), and only members in good standing are allowed to practice the craft. Now I'm still not sure if dumbass was simply staying in character or if he really meant it, but he became absolutely furious that these humans could tell HIM he wasn't qualified to be a swordsmith! When he was told that the only way a non-citizen of the town could be certified by the guild was to apprentice to a town blacksmith, he said fine that's what he'd do.

We tried to explain that apprenticeship is typically a 20-25 year process, starting in boyhood where you spend several years doing scut work like chopping firewood, hauling water and sweeping the shop before you're even allow to touch the forge. But he would have none of it. When our party was finally ready to set out on a new campaign, he actually stayed behind so he could get that certification. So off we went and had adventures while every so often the GM would have him role 2D10 and announce things like "today you dug a new latrine behind the smithy". After three sessions of this he happened to roll double-0, and the GM announced that a band of giants had attacked the town and that one of them had stepped on him, and he was now dead.

Epilogue: At one point I got three Wishes, and in hindsight I wish I'd asked for his dwarve to become my undead thrall, just so I could forbid his character to do all the dumbass shit he used to.

[Balance]

This one is on my brother.

My very first D&D campaign was played with my older brother and his friends. I was eight years old, and they were teenagers; my brother basically got stuck babysitting on game night. To keep me occupied, he had me roll up a character and join them, and steered me toward making a fighter, because it was simple. He promptly killed off the character with a trap that dumped him amongst a bunch of wraiths. (We mostly got along, but we did have our moments.) I didn't sulk, just asked if I could roll up another character to join them next time. He agreed, then forgot about it.

I spent the rest of the week poring over the rulebooks. Next time, I showed up with a magic user. He had Magic Missile prepared, a dagger, ragged leather clothing (not armor, just clothing), and a list of miscellaneous junk from the equipment tables and a list of stuff Bro had made up for shops in town. I offered a brief description to the rest of the party, drawing the comment that my guy looked like a down-at-the-heels thief, which is exactly what I wanted. Bro glanced at my sheet, but didn't pay too much attention. I was eight, after all; how cheesy could I have made a first-level magic-user?

He found out later.

The whole way through the dungeon, I saved my Magic Missile. Instead, I slunk around, trying to get behind things to backstab them (which anyone got bonuses for back then). The other players kept teasing me about playing a thief.

"I'm not a thief, I'm a wizard!"

Finally, we faced the Big Bad of the dungeon, who happened to be a wizard. While the party engaged his guards, I finally trotted out my one spell of the day and missiled him for trivial damage. Of course, Bro knew that meant I was out of spells (and it was logical enough that the bad guy would, too), so he shrugged me off in favor of the real threat, and paid only minimal attention to me thereafter.

So, I ran away. Back to the door, at least, then turned aside behind the curtains lining the walls. Bro was busy with the combat, and told me to just mark my movements on the map. He didn't even make me roll Dex checks as I snuck all the way to the other side of the room.

"I'm using this," I said, pointing to an item on my sheet.
"Okay, whatever."

He finally took notice as I moved in to backstab the wizard...but still. A backstab from a magic-user with a dagger is nothing, right? And the wizard was busy getting ready to nuke the party, who were rather beaten up and had been pushed back into fireball formation.

Stab. Connect. Double damage from the backstab is a whopping 4 points.

"Okay," Bro said, "Now he's pissed at you. He turns and starts casting."
"He'd better make his save first."
"...what save?"
"Save versus poison at -4 or die."
"What?!"

I pointed to the crossed-out line on my character sheet that showed I'd spent most of my starting gold on a vial of really nasty poison. Bro swelled up like a toad and rolled for the save...and failed it badly. Dead bad guy. Mission accomplished. The party praised my guy as the greatest thief ever.

"Wizard!"

I was really hoping this story would end with, "And that's when we remembered we were still disguised as ducks."
Had I been their DM, someone would have decided that a duck dinner was a grand idea. Hijinks would have ensued.

[Odesio]

From a game of Deadlands I ran last year. A game set in the American Old West with steampunk Mad Scientist, undead gunslingers and Baptist Preachers with powers given to them by the lord.

Setup: The PCs are fighting a bunch of wendigos (think cannibalistic Chewbaccas) in an effort to save the lives of a bunch of town folk on a burning train at a station. In Deadlands, each player has a number of poker chips that can be used for thinks to mitigating damage and re-rolling dice. This last part is very important to the story.

Odesio: Okay, you approaching the burning train and a bunch of furry creatures leap towards you shrieking terribly! Everyone make a Guts (Fear) check!

Player with Death Wish: I fail.

Helpful Player: Dude, spend a chip and re-roll.

PDW: Nah.

Odesio: You panic at the sight of the fearsome beast and flee into the woods.

PDW: I want to run towards the caboose I don't want to run into the woods.

Odesio: You failed your Guts check. You're running away from the creatures in a blind panic. People in a blind panic do not get to make strategic choices.

<Some time passes as the player runs deeper into the woods failing to spend chips on Guts checks until he finally passes. Now he is confronted by a wendigo that chased him through the forest.>

Odesio: The Wendigo charges you, it rakes its claws down your chest as it slams into you. You take a Heavy Wound.

Helpful Player: Dude, spend some chips to get rid of those wounds.

PDW: Nah, Odesio's not going to kill me.

Helpful Player: You're going to die if you don't spend chips.

PDW: He won't kill me in a fight with mooks. He'll just capture me or something.

Odesio: Okay, your attack missed and the creature attacks you again. <roll> You are incapacitated. Do you spend any chips?

PDW: No.

Odesio: Everything fades to black.

<Other players finish killing the wedigos at the train station and come looking for their friend in the woods.>

Odesio: You find pieces of him strewn throughout the woods. You have the feeling there should be more meat on his body but large chunks of him are missing.

PDW: I can't believe you killed me!

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

I was really hoping this story would end with, "And that's when we remembered we were still disguised as ducks."

On a similar note, I was in a CyberPunk adventure once, where our party of bad-ass corporate cyber-ronin were hired to rub some guy out. Our characters were hard-core. Armed to the teeth, boosted, jacked, enhanced, and ready to absolutely murder the fuck out of any poor sumbitch who made the mistake of getting in our way.

When we prepared to go find our target, we realized that we'd made one minor oversight. Amongst our gang of highly skilled assassins, there was not one person who knew how to drive a car. Nor did any of us own one.

We ended up having to take a bus to the hit.

You didn't think to carjack a ride?

:dubious::smack:

[aruvqan]

Back in 87 or so a guy that hung out at CHQ in Norfolk with us was writing some sort of game, not sure which system he was really using. he called it Warbots and Death Machines. This being a military town, we had Navy, Marines and Army. Usually stuff shook out it was usually Navy vs Army with the Marines quibbling between fellow ground pounders or their rides ... :D

In my little circle, I had a Naval officer that I was on and off dating as moral support =), the guy that ended up as my first husband, and a friend who was on hold waiting to get into boot for army. Our opposition was 2 guys that taught at the Naval Warfare group there, and an Army officer from Fort Story. We had been discussing microarmor while playing AD&D off and on for a few months, then it shakes out into a game challenge. Kenny and John tell them they are picking me to round out the 3 man team since they had 3 and they wanted the sides to be equal. Premise is 2 hammers slammers type mercenary groups both landing on the same planet. In the middle is a crashed freighter full of supplies headed towards the war zone and both of us are running low on parts and ammo. We are given our startup budget and told what the scenario will be.

So the guys give me the budget to work with, and we consult the books. We end up with 3 scout vehicles, 2 units of jump armored scouts to be spotters and an array of roughly stalins organs loaded with lovely ordinance. I also buy the required repair and maintenance and logistics peeps and supplies.

The infamous day arrives. We set up on the big table in front. Us on one side, with an array of subs and drinks from the sub shop next door, and a bunch of miniatures in boxes. The other guys show up with an array of subs and drinks from the sub shop next door, and an array of miniatures in much few boxes.

We each take our sides of the tables and set up our base camp, and there is a random paper shape representing the dirt dart freighter. We do it partly on paper and partly on the table, since we both know the freighter is there and our camps are in place, those are on the board. we flip a coin for first turn and we win. I tell our fearless GM that I roll out my scout cars, and the katyusha crews are gratified to see that they can in fact reach every point on the table from the camp. \o/ Scout cars get to the assigned zones and it is now the OPFOR turn. GM and OPFOR discuss their first turn. My next turn is the katyushas opening up, and bouncing out my scouts to just past the halfway point, which the GM notes that I can now see pretty much all of their Mechs. Nice big stompy *expensive* and delicate mechs. So the OPFOR dutifully set out their nice stompy mechs, grumbling that they do not understand why they are the only ones set up on the boards ... :D My next turn involves my cute little well stealthed scouts calling in airstrikes on every single one of their mechs.

*pop*

Much grumbling ensues because a gurrrl beat these big bad war college trained tactics teaching ossifers ... with ww2 tactics.

Not my fault they blew their budget buying expensive mechas instead of thinking tactically.


And then there is the time I killed a boy and his dog ...

Another experimental game, oddly enough preSG1 ... premise is that 1 in 10 million people have this mental quirk to be able to open alien gates. These gates open onto a system of roads that lead through wormholes between planets. So, you get drafted by the government to go explore.

So off our little band of intrepid people go, with assorted military hardware, loaded in a LAV to check out the next planet in the portal system. It is roughly like Baja - desert, dry, somewhat broken ground with hills, and villages in the valleys between the rough ground.

So several of us are exploring, and knowing that there are hostiles in area, we are nervous. So I hear scrabbly sounds along a road we found, and I shoot in a grenade at what looks like a sentry with guard dog :smack: Technically he was a sentry, but he had brought his puppy along and was taking a break and walking the pooch ... we should have jumped him, and questioned him as he was more neutral and drafted by the aliens who moved in and were taking the planet over.

I always wondered if he went on to write for SG1

[Miller]

You didn't think to carjack a ride?

:dubious::smack:

Since none of us could drive, it wouldn't have done us much good, would it?

[Chronos]

Quoth Balance:My very first D&D campaign was played with my older brother and his friends. I was eight years old, and they were teenagers; my brother basically got stuck babysitting on game night. To keep me occupied, he had me roll up a character and join them, and steered me toward making a fighter, because it was simple. He promptly killed off the character with a trap that dumped him amongst a bunch of wraiths. (We mostly got along, but we did have our moments.) I didn't sulk, just asked if I could roll up another character to join them next time. He agreed, then forgot about it.
I've heard this one before (http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0017.html).

[Stowed Bob]

Was in the Night Below campaign. Our thief was looting the wizard's shop in Thurmaster I think it was. He was using a bag he found laying around, shoving all kinds of sparkly things in the bag. After a while, he noticed the bag wasn't getting heavier. He looked inside and saw it was empty. Confused, he turned it inside out. It was a bag of devouring.

It exploded, but there was two problems. The first was the explosion was amplified by the other magical items still in the shop. The second was there was portals open to several adjoining cities. The explosion used these handy gates to travel to those towns and devour them as well.

By the time it was over, the only settlement still standing was a farming community in the swamp. The cities and their surrounding areas became magically irradiated regions of weirdness. The thief's intelligent short sword, for example, had enlarged and managed to gain some appendage-like outgrowths from objects melded to it and was in the process of enslaving those not dead when the survivors of the party was stumbling blindly past it, looking for safety.

[Chronos]

You'd think a bag like that, lying around in a place like that, would be clearly labeled to prevent just such an outcome.

[Ranchoth]

You'd think a bag like that, lying around in a place like that, would be clearly labeled to prevent just such an outcome.

"See, kids? Because of me, now they have a warning!"

[Bosda Di'Chi of Tricor]

You didn't think to carjack a ride?

:dubious::smack:

Since none of us could drive, it wouldn't have done us much good, would it?

When you 'jack, you get a car and a chauffeur.

[Hoopy Frood]

Quoth Balance:I've heard this one before (http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0017.html).

I can't believe I haven't seen that before.

Especially since I followed DM of the Rings from practically the beginning and this is clearly an homage to it.

[Balance]

Quoth Balance:I've heard this one before (http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0017.html).
Meesa take offense at that.

:p

[Lumpy]

It's never come up in the campaigns I've played, but- turning a bag of holding inside out is a big no-no?

[Chronos]

I can't believe I haven't seen that before.

Especially since I followed DM of the Rings from practically the beginning and this is clearly an homage to it. Darths and Droids is, in my opinion, much better than DM of the Rings, because the DM is actually fairly competent, and the party much less dysfunctional.

It's also willing to play around with the story a lot more. What shows up on-screen is the same, but the story behind it diverges quite significantly.

[Ranchoth]

When you 'jack, you get a car and a chauffeur.

A chauffeur...and a witness. One you'll have to pay off, or keep yourselves disgui...

::struggles to hold straight face::

::bursts out laughing::

Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, I couldn't keep it up. :D

[Scuba_Ben]

It's never come up in the campaigns I've played, but- turning a bag of holding inside out is a big no-no?

One, a BoH opens into nilspace which you do NOT want intersecting in an unbounded fashion with realspace, and two, the incident in question was described as a bag of devouring. Although I've never heard of a BoD going BOOM. (I'm more used to the Bad Stuff from putting a wand of cancellation into a BoH. BOOM indeed.)

[Chronos]

In Third Edition (and probably Fourth), if you turn a Bag of Holding inside-out, all that happens is it empties out and stops functioning. And while there are a few vague hints about bad consequences to putting one extradimensional space into another, it's never spelled out except for the specific combination of Bag of Holding and Portable Hole. In Second Edition, though, any layering of extradimensional spaces caused a planar rift if you were lucky, and while the effect of turning a Bag of Holding inside-out was undefined (i.e., left up to the DM), it was generally considered to be Not Good.

[Stowed Bob]

In Second Edition, though, any layering of extradimensional spaces caused a planar rift if you were lucky, and while the effect of turning a Bag of Holding inside-out was undefined (i.e., left up to the DM), it was generally considered to be Not Good.

It was a second edition game and as you noted, everything is ultimately up to the DM's discretion. What do the rules say about Bags of Devouring, which was what he used?

I believe he opted for the stereotypical explosion because it was easiest and the thief was acting alone, leaving the rest of the group to wait for their turn. He only recognized the peculiar details of the store when he was calculating the severity of the explosion. Otherwise he would have preferred something else to not gut out most of the settings and unused quests.

[Airk]

I saw this thread and thought "Oh, cool, I'll tell them the bard story."


Then I realized I'd already told it in this thread... nine years ago.

If it makes you feel better, I thought that was mean. :P I mean, seriously, the DM made him stop to string his bow? In a dungeon? Because he didn't explicitly say he was stringing it before he went into the DANGEROUS DUNGEON? This is a perfect example of the "pants rule" - I daresay you never said that YOUR character put on his pants that morning, so... he's not wearing pants? :P

[Kobal2]

When we prepared to go find our target, we realized that we'd made one minor oversight. Amongst our gang of highly skilled assassins, there was not one person who knew how to drive a car. Nor did any of us own one.

We ended up having to take a bus to the hit.

Heh, reminds me of a one-shot Berlin XVIII scenario. We were in a high-speed chase of some gang members or other, trying to shoot out their wheels but mostly failing because our best shot was driving. The character riding shotgun has enough, and in perfect action movie cliché decides to switch places with the driver mid-ride. So far so good.

DM: the chase leads you across a highway overpass. Traffic is packed at this time of the day, and the bad guys bob and weave like crazy between bystander cars.
Player 1: OK, I stop shooting, can't risk hitting a civilian.
DM: Good idea. Player 2, you're having trouble following them through traffic. Roll driving.
Player 2: Ok... oh, I don't have driving.
DM: ... really ? Well, just roll then, I guess.
Player 2: ... botch.

So he crashed the car into the guardrail and over the side of the bridge, killing us all in a flaming wreck.

Which still wasn't his dumbest move in the scenario - earlier, during a fire fight both us and the bad guys were taking potshots at each other across a park, all hidden behind cover and not achieving much of anything except putting a lot of lead in the air and wrecking the place. We decide that one of us is going to make a dash across open ground to draw fire, allowing the rest of the squad to flank the bad guys. We draw straws and Player 2 is the decoy.
He decides to race across the square yelling : "THIS IS A DIVERSIOOOOOON !", reasoning that the enemy wouldn't believe him and he would have their whole attention. Except they didn't buy such a retarded move and shot us all to hell as we emerged from cover. So Player 2 ended up being the flanking force by himself :p

[Chronos]

He decides to race across the square yelling : "THIS IS A DIVERSIOOOOOON !", reasoning that the enemy wouldn't believe him and he would have their whole attention. Except they didn't buy such a retarded move and shot us all to hell as we emerged from cover. So Player 2 ended up being the flanking force by himself Reminds me of the time we planned to sneak up on the bandits and catch them by surprise. Except that the party thief's idea of "sneaking up" was to skip (literally) right down the middle of the road, wearing bright-colored clothes, while whistling loudly and off-key. The dice gods must have loved such a display of brazenness, too, because it actually worked.

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

If it makes you feel better, I thought that was mean. :P I mean, seriously, the DM made him stop to string his bow? In a dungeon? Because he didn't explicitly say he was stringing it before he went into the DANGEROUS DUNGEON? This is a perfect example of the "pants rule" - I daresay you never said that YOUR character put on his pants that morning, so... he's not wearing pants? :PI thought I didn't have any stories to contribute, but then you had to go and mention pants.

Anyway, an Internet friend of mine designed the awesome game Old School Hack (http://www.oldschoolhack.net/). It can be played a lot of different ways, but we tend to play it with a high level of absurdity. (Briefly, it's like a very rules-light homage to original D&D, with some modern rules concepts thrown in; most of the rules you'll need are printed on your character sheet).

My favorite one-shot character was an elf whose schtick was a desperate need to prove himself and was constantly getting people to dare him to do stupidly dangerous things, or else doing them without prompting. Think Jackass-level stupid. My brother was playing a Thief whose schtick was that he'd escaped from prison and was still wearing his stripy prison uniform; his most pressing goal was getting a set of normal clothes.

We proceeded through the adventure following our schtick--him moaning at the fact that everything we fought was an animal or otherwise naked, me climbing on top of (obviously about-to-animate) statues and defacing them, etc. People kept daring me to do dumb stuff, and I gleefully kept doing it.

In the fourth or fifth battle, against skeletons wearing only rotting rags, he got sick of waiting for clothed enemies, so he dared me to fight naked. I shot him a look of pure poison, and spent my next round disrobing. Oh, his glee, as he readied himself to steal my pants!

When I could act again, though, I started fighting with pants, using the Elf schtick of awesome fighting maneuvers: I whipped the pants around to lasso skeletons then flung them into the room's convenient abyssal portal. At the end of the fight, I put the clothes back on and smirked at the poor thief.

[Chronos]

I thought I didn't have any stories to contribute, but then you had to go and mention pants.You could have ended there and it'd have already been a great story.

[Johnny Angel]

Back in the day, some of you may recall, a mage had a hard going for the first few levels. None of these at-will attacks. Once you blew your one magic missile or burning-hands for the day, you might as well tumble for the +4 AC while the rest of the party fights.

I had a mage named Xerox (because said I could have the Copy spell for free), who went through the Salt Marsh trilogy with several other adventurers. Xerox was very proud to speak Draconic (this was back before every caster was expected to know the language), so when the party ran into a for-real dragon, Xerox tried to negotiate with it. He continued to try it as battle ensued. It was within an ace of being an outright party kill, with the wizard tumbling the whole time and trying to negotiate in Draconic. After the NPC elf had been bitten in half and the rest of the party was down to the hit point their mama gave them, Xerox got fed up with it, stopped tumbling, and let fly with his dagger.

One point of damage. The dragon shuddered and expired. From then on, Xerox always introduced himself as Xerox, the Dragonslayer.

[The Other Waldo Pepper]

Once you blew your one magic missile or burning-hands for the day, you might as well tumble for the +4 AC while the rest of the party fights.

IIRC, the term of choice was "a sleep spell on legs". ;)

[Chronos]

Wait, you were low enough level that it was still hard going for a mage, and you fought a dragon?

[paperbackwriter]

Perhaps the NPC dragonsnack was supposed to be the DM's way of evening things up?

Edited to add:
Back the AD&D I was one of those guys that had a gnome illusionist, which, if anything, were even worse than magic-users at low levels. The first dungeon our DM sent us into after getting the party together was full of, you guessed it, undead. The party immediately nicknamed my character "Swordbait" That was bad enough when it was skeletons and zombies, but then the ghouls (or was it ghasts? or maybe ghosts?) showed up. I spent the rest of that dungeon strapped to the back of the fighter's pack.

[The Other Waldo Pepper]

Back the AD&D I was one of those guys that had a gnome illusionist, which, if anything, were even worse than magic-users at low levels. The first dungeon our DM sent us into after getting the party together was full of, you guessed it, undead. The party immediately nicknamed my character "Swordbait" That was bad enough when it was skeletons and zombies, but then the ghouls (or was it ghasts? or maybe ghosts?) showed up. I spent the rest of that dungeon strapped to the back of the fighter's pack.

2E solved that problem by letting gnome illusionists -- and only gnome illusionists -- sucker even the undead with freakishly realistic illusions starting at first level, while casting more spells per day than a vanilla magic-user. But in 1E? Yeah, that's ugly. Did things improve for you on the second adventure?

[Johnny Angel]

Wait, you were low enough level that it was still hard going for a mage, and you fought a dragon?
It was a coral dragon wyrmling. At that point in the module trilogy I don't think we could have been more than 2nd level.

[GargoyleWB]

Wait, you were low enough level that it was still hard going for a mage, and you fought a dragon?

Reminds me of an epic dragon battle my party had. Epic, until the finishing move...a sling stone from the party druid with nothing left to use.

The DM's dramatic sound effects sealed it.

player: I roll...a hit! Argh, 1 point of damage.
DM: Doink! Woowooowoowooowoooowoooooo......plop. You killed it.

[Scuba_Ben]

You could have ended there and it'd have already been a great story.

True, that. But then we wouldn't have heard the tale of LHoD's pants-fu.

[paperbackwriter]

2E solved that problem by letting gnome illusionists -- and only gnome illusionists -- sucker even the undead with freakishly realistic illusions starting at first level, while casting more spells per day than a vanilla magic-user. But in 1E? Yeah, that's ugly. Did things improve for you on the second adventure?
I never played 2E and sort of missed everything until 3.5, so I did not know that. No things did not improve for me much. Once we got back to town, that same fighter made the mistake of challenging the gate guards when we were (apparently) supposed to bribe them. It wasn't TPK, but since said fighter was turned to shish-kabob while my major contribution to the party was in increasing his encumbrance....

I rolled up a paladin instead.

[Chronos]

2E solved that problem by letting gnome illusionists -- and only gnome illusionists -- sucker even the undead with freakishly realistic illusions starting at first level, while casting more spells per day than a vanilla magic-user. 2e specialists got more spells per day than regular wizards (only 1 more per day of each level, but it was still enough of a difference that everyone starting at low levels specialized, and it still wasn't really enough), but I don't remember anything about gnome illusionists and undead. Although, for that matter, I also don't remember undead having any special advantage against illusions to begin with, and in fact the low-level ones were disadvantaged by being stupid.

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Two more stories, both based on my running the same scene in the same module:

A friend wrote the awesome first-level adventure Of Sound Mind (http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_5978.html) for 3E. I ran it at DragonCon one year, and one of my pick-up-game players changed the way I see gaming. Our group traditionally had been extremely cautious planner-types, sometimes spending an entire session planning a single combat.

So when the PCs encountered a pile of severed heads near a doorway that suddenly opened their eyes and shrieked (a burglar alarm for a nearby evil cleric), I expected them to back up, cast Detect Evil, poke at the heads with a 10' pole, etc. etc. for several minutes.

"I pick up one of the heads," declared this new player, "tuck it under my arm like a football, and take off running." He chucked it into the nearest river, neatly ending the encounter, and I realized that being on the opposite end of the planning spectrum could be tremendous fun.

A few years later I ran the same adventure for my (then) 7-year-old triplet cousins, after Thanksgiving dinner. When we reached the severed head scene, I decided that severed heads were a little too gory for the crowd, so on the fly I changed it to a pile of dolls that suddenly opened their eyes and began to shriek. Good change, I thought--until the next morning when one of them came downstairs and started happily recounting to her mother her dreams about shrieking dolls. That's when I realized that yes, there actually IS something creepier in the world than screaming severed heads.

[Askance]

D&D party is walking along the usual stone corridor:

DM: you see a wooden door in the left-hand wall
Thief: I listen, if I hear nothing I open it
DM: you hear nothing, the door opens towards you. Looking through the doorway, you see a set of stairs ...
Bored Impulsive Player: I go running up them!
DM: .. going downwards.
BIP:AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ...... [plop]

Omnes: laugh to the point of helplessness

[The Other Waldo Pepper]

2e specialists got more spells per day than regular wizards (only 1 more per day of each level, but it was still enough of a difference that everyone starting at low levels specialized, and it still wasn't really enough), but I don't remember anything about gnome illusionists and undead. Although, for that matter, I also don't remember undead having any special advantage against illusions to begin with, and in fact the low-level ones were disadvantaged by being stupid.

COMPLETE BOOK OF GNOMES AND HALFLINGS. "Any gnomish illusionist can elect to be an Imagemaker ... all creatures -- even those not normally susceptible to illusion -- can be taken in by the creations of the Imagemaker. However, creatures that would not normally be fooled by illusions do not suffer the -2 penalty when they attempt to disbelieve ... In addition, the Imagemaker's skill is such that the images he or she creates last longer than those cast by a non-specializing illusionist. Illusions that do not require concentration have their duration doubled when cast by an Imagemaker. Illusions requiring concentration last for 2-12 rounds after the caster ceases concentrating." Plus, y'know, free Ventriloquism proficiency.

[Gedd]

This is a D&D story that also shows how awesome my wife is :)

Another couple had convinced her to play and I was the DM; I was running the Sunless Citadel. They came to a part where they heard goblins (or something similar) in a room and where trying to decide what to do. My wife recalled that I had mentioned a room earlier had some elf pudding in it.

Me: “So?” It was part of the built in description of a random storage room.
Her: “Is elf pudding slippery?”
Me: [Letting the Gods of the Dice decide . . . I roll a 20.] “Yeah, it’s fairly slick.”

They make awesome move silent checks and dump a barrel of (at least this brand) very slippery elf pudding right out side of the room. They make a bunch of noise and as the goblins (maybe they were kobolds) come out all but one falls and is cut down. One was able to make an attack and failed.

I had to give them some bonus xp for creativity.

I have no idea if the slipperiness of elf pudding in the D&D world is established or not, but flexibility is one of the awesome parts of RPGs.

[Lumpy]

Is it made by elves, or out of... :D

[jayjay]

Is it made by elves, or out of... :D

See, I was envisioning a really unusual deadly pudding variant...

[mlees]

In Soviet Russia, the pudding eats you!

[Gedd]

Is it made by elves, or out of... :D

I had wondered that too. I don't remember what the conclusion was though. Just that is smells bad and aparently requires a balance check DC 20 to walk in at a normal pace.

See, I was envisioning a really unusual deadly pudding variant...

That would be an awesome idea! The slime "wakes up" when the first goblin steps on in . . . and it gets mad.

They were only level 1 characters though, so any slime probably would have done them in. They were already in debt with the local temple for healing them after their first trip into the dungeon. They decided to have the rogue climb down the rope and then light a torch. He got jumped by a few rats while he was realizing they forgot any kind of tinderbox.

[Bosstone]

The elf pudding is why any wizard or sorcerer worth their salt takes Grease as a level 1 known spell.

[by-tor]

In a Sci-Fi game the mission was simply to land on a planet, release a bio weapon (which was in a suitcase) and get away. So, the player, lands, checks into a fancy futuristic hotel and the first thing he does is ask the hotel's main computer to scan his suitcase and tell him what is in it. The computer does so, then locks down the room and calls the authorities. Quarantine and extermination followed.

[Chronos]

Did the players know that that was their mission, or were they being blindly manipulated into it?

[by-tor]

Oh, he knew his mission. I am not sure why he wanted the case scanned. Paranoia?

[jayjay]

Oh, he knew his mission. I am not sure why he wanted the case scanned. Paranoia?

Well, if it was Paranoia, then it ended exactly like it's supposed to...

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

I assume he died satisfied he hadn't been double-crossed.

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

The elf pudding is why any wizard or sorcerer worth their salt takes Grease as a level 1 known spell.
Indeed. I have another long, ridiculous story involving flying camels, a grease spell, and half a dozen ghouls plummeting to their deaths. It all seemed very reasonable at the time.

[KidScruffy]

Here's a trick that I used as a player one time, that I kind of regretted, but kind of not since my character wasn't "broken" by any stretch.

I can't even remember at this point which rule set it was... 2nd ed? 3rd? 3.5? Probably 2nd or 3rd. Anyhow, my character was a super high Con. dwarf berserker, with fairly high HP. In one particularly brutal encounter, he got level drained by a vampire...like 6 or 8 levels, pretty significant. The rule for level drain at the time that we used, was you actually lost those levels and... since no one remembers what HP they rolled each level, you un-roll for each level you lost. I did so, and rolled very low. As I recall, I had to re-earn those levels the hard way (we didn't have a cleric with...heal? regeneration? whatever it was), and each time I gained a level, I rolled super high again. So by the time I got back to the level I started at, I had HPs way over the maximum possible.

The reason I say he wasn't broken is that he was somewhat gimped as a character, STR wasn't that high, didn't have good equipment...all he had was an insane amount of hit points.

I think the rules I used actually existed at the time, but of course if I had it to do over, I'd do something a little more reasonable. Not that level drain has even existed in D&D for a while.

[Miller]

I think the rules I used actually existed at the time, but of course if I had it to do over, I'd do something a little more reasonable. Not that level drain has even existed in D&D for a while.

There's still level drain in 3.x. It works differently, though - you don't actually lose a level, you gain a "negative" level. Each negative level a character has gives them (IIRC) a cumulative -1 on most rolls, and -5 to you max HP. They can be cured through use of a Restoration spell. It doesn't change your characters actual level, or effect how many XP you have.

[Chronos]

But if the negative level isn't Restored or worn off after 24 hours, then you have to make a Fort save or really actually lose the level and drop XP, just like old school.

And I wouldn't exactly call that a "trick you used", unless you were controlling the dice. It could just as easily have gone the other way, with you ending up with an impossibly low number of HP. You just got lucky, in a notably peculiar way.

[Askance]

Does anyone remember the "create water" spell from the original (paper) D&D set? The rule said that it created a given volume of water, which doubled for each level the Mage was ... someone calculated that a level 60 (IIRC) Mage could create a large enough sphere of water to undergo spontaneous fusion, that is to say turn into a star.

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

That's awesome, Askance.

In high school, I ran a game in which low-level PCs (like 5th level) found a decanter of endless water. Throw-away magic item, I thought.

Not so. The party wizard attached it securely to his staff and called it Stick. He made me devise rules for using it on its geyser setting as a weapon, and it was his main form of non-spell attack thereafter. What's more, he convinced me that if he cast feather-fall, he would be light enough to be propelled around by Stick, and he rode it like a witch's broom.

I have fond memories of his fighting ogres in a slaver's arena, swooping overhead and drenching the crowd while the furious ogres threw things at him.

[CandidGamera]

The Decanter of Endless Water is one of my favorite D&D magical items of all time.

I once warned someone that they shouldn't have their character piss off my elf, if they wanted to keep their castle, because he has a decanter of endless water and is effectively immortal. Erosion's a bitch. :D

[Chronos]

[b]This-- is my splash-stick.[/Bruce Campbell]

[jayjay]

[b]This-- is my splash-stick.[/Bruce Campbell]

Flume-stick, obviously.

[Gedd]

Decanter of Endless Water + Eternal Torch (it's called something like that) = steam powered whatever-you-want.

Creativity is the bane of every DM.

[Chronos]

OK, jayjay, I like your version better.

[Hoopy Frood]

Decanter of Endless Water + Eternal Torch (it's called something like that) = steam powered whatever-you-want.

Creativity is the bane of every DM.

Except the everburning torch--at least in later editions--is nothing but a "Continual Light" spell cast on an object that resembles a torch. It produces no heat since it doesn't rely on combustion. Really you can make an everburning torch out of anything, but usually one used small objects such as sticks or coins because "Continual Light" was a spell that actually cost you pricy spell components to cast, and there are times where you want to extinguish the torch non-magically. In which case you typically put it in your backpack.

[Miller]

Even if it were like a regular torch that never burned out, a single torch doesn't generate that much heat. I doubt you'd be able to generate much steam using one. Certainly, it won't heat water fast enough that a decanter of endless water would be necessary. It'd probably work against you, really, since the constant addition of fresh, cold water would work to keep the temperature of the water you're trying to boil down.

[aruvqan]

Call woodland animal and fireball. Evil druid BBQ.

[soulmurk]

Even if it were like a regular torch that never burned out, a single torch doesn't generate that much heat. I doubt you'd be able to generate much steam using one. Certainly, it won't heat water fast enough that a decanter of endless water would be necessary. It'd probably work against you, really, since the constant addition of fresh, cold water would work to keep the temperature of the water you're trying to boil down.

Logic is the bane of every player.

[Malacandra]

Besides, a Decanter on the "geyser" setting would be better employed to drive a Pelton wheel or a turbine, rather than provide water for a steam engine. :D

[Kobal2]

The elf pudding is why any wizard or sorcerer worth their salt takes Grease as a level 1 known spell.

In the party I'm running with currently, our Sorc completes his level 1 Grease with level 2 Create Pit. Oh, what pranks he plays. I keep telling him to take Explosive Runes at level 3 to complete the trifecta :p

Does anyone remember the "create water" spell from the original (paper) D&D set? The rule said that it created a given volume of water, which doubled for each level the Mage was ... someone calculated that a level 60 (IIRC) Mage could create a large enough sphere of water to undergo spontaneous fusion, that is to say turn into a star.

Heh, I looked into that spell during the creation of my new character since my arcane trickster got gibbed, and I giggled like a schoolgirl. We're playing Pathfinder. That level 0 cantrip creates 2 gallons water per caster level, so 16 just at the level we're at (60 litres for us metric users). Here's where it gets funny: in Pathfinder, there's no limit to how many cantrips a spellslinger can cast per diem (this to give wizards something to do at low levels).
My druid is going to be his own Decanter of Endless Water/portable flood. I can fill a 5 foot cube per ~3 minutes ! Now to compute the total volume of the fortress we're storming next Sunday... :)

Reminds me of an epic dragon battle my party had. Epic, until the finishing move...a sling stone from the party druid with nothing left to use.

Our cleric is turning into a past master at this. I think that, over the last few adventures, she's killed 3/4th of all bosses or tougher than usual creatures we've faced with her puny 1d4, no strength bonus, no enchantment Star Knife (which is sort of a hand held shuriken or something equally silly). She comes in when she's out of spells (or the bad guy comes at her when the fighter's dying, whichever comes first), and always manages to cherry tap the bad guy to death.

The most memorable one was, yup, a green dragon, similarly reduced to 1 HP.

---

One more story, but this one is more of an "asshole DM" story than player stupidity or cleverness.

We're playing Deadlands, which if you don't know is what happens when spaghetti westerns meet the Call of Cthulu. One of the players in the group is a gunslinger who's very, very fond of chucking dynamite around, lighting it on his half-chewed cigar and uttering his catchphrase: "Short fuse, boys !".
He also happens to be a Harrowed - Harrowed are undead that look and feel absolutely normal, except they've got a trickster evil spirit in them. In mechanical terms, Harrowed characters have some juicy extra powers, but in trade a few times per scenario the DM can try and roll against that player to direct his actions for him for a short time. Fun times.

Note that the other players had no idea of this: they were new to the setting (in fact, I had only allowed the last one to be a Harrowed to handwave away his own, extensive knowledge of it), their characters are greenhorns from the East Coast and besides the spirit hasn't been much trouble so far - he did try setting them up for a murder trial/lynching once, but since the whole town was full of cannibals planning to eat them anyway it didn't matter overly much. As for the Harrow himself, while the player of course knew, the character isn't aware he died at some point.
Point is: for all they know, the gunslinger is just any old gritty pyro sumbitch.

Flash forward, and they're exploring a spooky old abandoned mine that's been trouble lately, the reason being it's a portal to the spirit world so lots of bad juju tends to come out. They have no idea of this either - they just go in and figure they'll get to the bottom of things once they're there, as usual.
At one point, they take a rickety elevator down a mineshaft, which breaks under their weight and comes tumbling down. All of them scream and crash except the gunslinger who manages to jump out in time. He starts looking for a rope in his pack to either lift them back up or come down safely with them.
Meanwhile, at the bottom, while the Indian tries to fix the kid who broke a leg, the party's scout is dismayed that there's nothing for him to do (their lantern broke in the crash).

PC: What do I see ?
Me: Lots and lots of black. There's no light at all.
PC: I really can't see anything ?
Me: You're at the bottom of a mine shaft. You have no source of light. What do you expect ?
PC: well can't I at least hear something ?
Me: Mmmm... why not ?
*I roll dice behind the screen. I smile, roll some more*
Me: You do hear something. It's faint and echo-ey and coming from above. It goes: "Short fuse, boys !". Then there's some light...

Nah, they didn't die. But they wondered what the hell had just happened for quite some time :p.
The amusing part is that I had planned none of this - I only got the idea because when I rolled the scout's perception for him, one of the dice landed right in front of the part of the DM screen that deals with Harrows ;)

[Kobal2]

Reminds me of the time we planned to sneak up on the bandits and catch them by surprise. Except that the party thief's idea of "sneaking up" was to skip (literally) right down the middle of the road, wearing bright-colored clothes, while whistling loudly and off-key. The dice gods must have loved such a display of brazenness, too, because it actually worked.

Oh, the dice gods.

There was this one-shot 7th Seas scenario. The players have rescued a kidnapped damsel in distress and are bringing her back to her father. Along the way, the party's lewd monk is trying, and failing, to subtly put the moves on her (failing mostly because she's secretly the one who set up her own kidnapping and is fairly goddamn pissed at them for fouling it up).
Growing increasingly frustrated by his lack of success, on the last day of the trip the monk goes:

PC: Ok, I tell her: "Look lady, let's quit playing around: I have a huge cock, and we've only got 30 minutes of coach time left before you're back to your father. Use it or lose it."
Me: What, seriously ?!
PC: Oh yeah. I get to roll Seduction, right ?
Me: Yeah, whatever. Difficulty 50 (in a game where "Impossible" is 35 IIRC).

Long story short, this is why now, when we try to beat the odds, we whisper to the dice: "53".

[Lumpy]

"Look lady, let's quit playing around: I have a huge cock, and we've only got 30 minutesIt's surprising (1.) How often guys with big cocks resort to this strategem, and (2.) How often it works :p

[Chronos]

How does dice rolling in that game work that a 35 is "practically impossible" but a 53 can still happen with the blessing of the dice gods? Is it something like "whenever you roll a 10, reroll and add"?

And does "monk" mean kung fu monk, or European-style monk?

It would have been even funnier, though, if he had rolled a 49:
"She sticks her hand down your pants and grabs. 'Huge? I've had plenty that were bigger than that. That's tiny!'"

And I have a friend who once, while similarly blessed by the dice, managed to seduce Tiamat. But I didn't see that one myself, and I don't remember all the details.

[Kobal2]

How does dice rolling in that game work that a 35 is "practically impossible" but a 53 can still happen with the blessing of the dice gods? Is it something like "whenever you roll a 10, reroll and add"?

Yup, 7th Sea uses (or used, I think they've gone d20 now) a system similar to Legend of the Five Rings, you roll Attribute + Skill dice, keep Attribute dice and add them up. If you roll a 10, add it and reroll it. Bastard rolled 3 tens in a row.

And does "monk" mean kung fu monk, or European-style monk?

European style - 7th Sea is a swashbuckling RPG set in something like Europe.

[Molesworth 2]

I was in an AD&D tournament back in the early '80s when I was 12. We were in the last few minutes of the final session of the last day, and really pressed for time as we tried to complete that section of the module (we'd failed to complete any of the previous sections).

We didn't manage to finish though, because the 10yo kid brother of one of my friends was on the team. He wasted about three of our final five precious minutes because he couldn't decide whether he wanted to attack the water weird we were fighting with his +3 sword, or whether he'd rather attack with his +1 dagger. *facepalm*

[Gedd]

Logic is the bane of every player.

Darn right. I had a group come across a caravan that had just been ambushed. They determined they could repair a wagon and take it with them, even picking what of the remaining stuff to put in it. Quote the DM, “Got draft animals?”

---
We were playing a random scenario in college and the DM had given us each a Wish spell. (That can be very bad). Our group’s Bard was mad at me for making fun of his songs; based on how he had been rolling, they must have been pretty bad. He finally decided he had taken enough and used his Wish to turn me into a newt.

Well I like to be an optimist and put myself to good use. I would sneak into caves and rooms and tell our Druid what was in them, and even made a distraction for a patrol once.

The DM decided the Bard’s level was only enough for the Wish spell to last for a few days so yes, in fact, I got better.

I also got some bonus XP and a nifty “talk to newts” ability.

[aruvqan]

I was playing a halfling assassin/thief combo and snuck up behind a frost giant and critted 3 times in a row, and the damned gm did not want to give me a valid kill on the damned giant ... because i was so small compared to the giant. Asshat. Next game, the GM was playing his normal asshole fighter type, and he had a unicorn that someone as a joke snuck up and gelded, and he rolled crits, so I determined that the unicorns HP were all in its balls and it died. So much for his money making idea <evil grin>

Don't peeve the GM

[jayjay]

Don't peeve the GM

Rocks fall, everyone dies (http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp05032002.shtml)

[Double Foolscap]

Darn right. I had a group come across a caravan that had just been ambushed. They determined they could repair a wagon and take it with them, even picking what of the remaining stuff to put in it. Quote the DM, “Got draft animals?”


We had a similar problem in D&D once. I came up with the idea of yoking the Dwarf and the Druid (wildshaped into a bear) together.

It worked, and we made good time on that journey :D

[Kobal2]

Remembered another one.

This was an evil 2-man party (demons, technically), set in today's world, and their very first mission fresh out of Hell was to assassinate the local mayor, with one twist: their boss wants to send a message, so it's got to be done in public.
Now, I don't know if it's the words I used, or if they misunderstood, or if they just wanted to have a laugh, but they didn't understand "public" in just any old way. The scenario expected them to simply gun down the guy during a public rally, or on church steps after mass.

This is not what they did.
What they did was, the day before the rally they raided a medieval museum to get hold of a cavalry lance. To that spear they tied the flag of the local soccer team (Why ?! Beats me). On the day of the rally, they nicked a motorcycle, one of them got to driving it while the other sat back with the spear, charged the podium and jousted the guy before deliberately crashing the bike into the press corps & cameras (both had some innate damage & fire protection, so the crash was no big). They then hoofed it before the cops could react, singing "We are the Champions" as they went.

It was public all right. I have no idea what message was sent, but was it ever sent.

[smiling bandit]

Yup, 7th Sea uses (or used, I think they've gone d20 now) a system similar to Legend of the Five Rings, you roll Attribute + Skill dice, keep Attribute dice and add them up. If you roll a 10, add it and reroll it. Bastard rolled 3 tens in a row.

I think 7th Sea is still it's old system. I never saw any d20 version, anyway.

Speaking of which, we had some amazing swings of luck and insanity in our Legend fo the Five Rings game. Such as the pacifistic Shugenja (wizard/shaman) who, in the very first session, instantly torched a bandit. She'd meant to give him a stern warning. However she kept rolling and rolling... and rolling.

The description of the flame exploding out of every orifice of his body was as disgusting as it was impressive. And my character never once believed that shugenja wasn't ridiculously powerful again.

[Chronos]

I'll always think of that style of rolling as arquebus rolling, since that's how the damage from an arquebus (a primitive firearm) worked in 2nd edition D&D.

Speaking of which, I once had to remind a DM that D&D considers smoke powder a magic item, when an NPC tried to use an arquebus in a wild magic zone.

[Tristan]

I am not a great roleplayer, as a rule, but I had some memorable moments.

2nd ed AD&D. I was playing Tarxis, the thief. Probably 4th level, MAYBE 5th. We were up against a dragon, myself, an evil magic user, a fighter, a ranger.... I think that was it. We were holding our own, but not doing a lot. I was bored with the game, and the people playing, and I made a grand attack that consisted of a run, and a slide under the beast, using my short sword to geld that bastid (lizards don't have external genitals, you say? Shut up, I say. Good think my DM was an idiot.) on the move, and pop out behind him to make a solid run.

This is suicide, as I'd rather just go play Sega at this point.

I start my run. Dragon proceeds to 1- Breath attack (missed), 2- Bite (missed), 3- a body slam (missed!!), and finally a swipe with the tail (missed). My luck that day was prodigious. Some fast talking on the GM convinced him that the dragon was going to go into shock and bleed to death.

I miss gaming, sometimes. I really do.

[Gedd]

I am not a great roleplayer, as a rule, but I had some memorable moments.

2nd ed AD&D. I was playing Tarxis, the thief. Probably 4th level, MAYBE 5th. We were up against a dragon, myself, an evil magic user, a fighter, a ranger.... I think that was it. We were holding our own, but not doing a lot. I was bored with the game, and the people playing, and I made a grand attack that consisted of a run, and a slide under the beast, using my short sword to geld that bastid (lizards don't have external genitals, you say? Shut up, I say. Good think my DM was an idiot.) on the move, and pop out behind him to make a solid run.

This is suicide, as I'd rather just go play Sega at this point.

I start my run. Dragon proceeds to 1- Breath attack (missed), 2- Bite (missed), 3- a body slam (missed!!), and finally a swipe with the tail (missed). My luck that day was prodigious. Some fast talking on the GM convinced him that the dragon was going to go into shock and bleed to death.

I miss gaming, sometimes. I really do.

Great option for a name there: Tarxis the Dragon Snipper.

Ehh, I'm sure someone can think of one better than that.

[jayjay]

Great option for a name there: Tarxis the Dragon Snipper.

Ehh, I'm sure someone can think of one better than that.

Tarxis the Dragon-Spayer.

Okay, technically, it was a male dragon and those don't get spayed, but it's too good to pass up on a technicality.

[CandidGamera]

Dragon-Fixer. I mean, come on.

[Double Foolscap]

Tarxis, the Bris of Death.

[jayjay]

Tarxis, the Bris of Death.

Actually, he'd be the mohel. What he DID would be the bris.

[Double Foolscap]

In that case, it could be a name for the attack. Thanks for the tip (as the mohel said to the pleased family).

[StusBlues]

A friend of mine got into D&D when it first came out. We had some trouble fully understanding the game, but we gave it a shot nonetheless. We ended up with a player who became a starving naked fighter riding a giant chicken until being eaten by a gelatinous cube. We didn't play much after that.

I hate to feed the zombies, but this may be the funniest thing I've ever read.

[Oakminster]

I start my run. Dragon proceeds to 1- Breath attack (missed),

How can a breath attack miss? It's a big-ass area effect. As a DM, I'd allow a save for half damage, with potential further reductions for other magical defensive effects, but dragon breath just doesn't miss in my game.

[Bosstone]

How can a breath attack miss? It's a big-ass area effect. As a DM, I'd allow a save for half damage, with potential further reductions for other magical defensive effects, but dragon breath just doesn't miss in my game.He said 2nd Ed, and I don't know what specific rules it uses, but in 3E the saving throw for area effect attack was usually Reflex Half, including breath weapons. Rogues then got a class ability called Evasion, which allows the Rogue to take no damage on a successful Reflex throw that would normally deal half damage.

Provided the 2nd Ed rules are at all similar, this is completely legal.

ETA: On rereading I think I see what you're saying, but Tristan didn't say that the GM rolled a 1 on the breath weapon or anything, only that it missed. A successful saving throw would make a breath weapon miss (strictly speaking, the Rogue would avoid the breath, the breath wouldn't be misaimed, but it amounts to the same thing).

[mlees]

The dragon breathed right in front of himself, but the rogue had already scampered out of the way.

Lonely Mountain Oysters, anyone?

[Gedd]

ETA: On rereading I think I see what you're saying, but Tristan didn't say that the GM rolled a 1 on the breath weapon or anything, only that it missed. A successful saving throw would make a breath weapon miss (strictly speaking, the Rogue would avoid the breath, the breath wouldn't be misaimed, but it amounts to the same thing).

So how would the DM describe what happens when a dragon rolls a 1 for a breath attack? He inhaled instead of exhaling?

[mlees]

So how would the DM describe what happens when a dragon rolls a 1 for a breath attack? He inhaled instead of exhaling?

The dragon thought the rogue was gonna zig, when he actually zagged.

[Bosstone]

So how would the DM describe what happens when a dragon rolls a 1 for a breath attack? He inhaled instead of exhaling?He doesn't roll. What happens with an area attack like a breath weapon is the GM describes the area in which it's happening and tells the players to make a Reflex check. The breath weapon has a particular difficulty the players have to meet. If they don't meet it, they take full damage. If they do meet it, they take half (or none, depending on the situation).

There's situations in D&D where the attack isn't guaranteed and the attacker has to make a roll to hit, and there's situations where it is guaranteed and the defenders have to make a roll to avoid.

[Chronos]

I don't think there was any way, by the books, for a dragon to attempt to zorch someone with a breath weapon but to fail to do any damage at all, in 2nd edition. That said, "by the books" didn't have as much meaning in 2nd edition as in 3rd, and houserules were abundant.

And incidentally, Firefox's spellchecker actually recognizes "zorch".

Oh, and even if dragons don't have external genitals, they would have to have an opening of some sort in their armor at that spot, which would mean a vulnerability to some extent.

[E-Sabbath]

In the various flavors of 3e, if a weapon does not deal damage, then sneak attacks/poisons/extra damage effects generally do not take effect.

This is sometimes a handy thing to know.

[Tristan]

The biggest factor there is probably the fact that my DM was an idiot, and probably did not actually know the rules for breath weapons. Just as when we tried playing a Ravenloft game, he didn't read about how magic works differently, he just made it up as he went along, usually having spells have their opposite effect.

Any half competent GM would have roasted me in my fitted black tunic, to be sure.

The same GM, in a different campaign, let me force a black dragon to fill up a rain cloud with acid, then make it rain high powered acid all over Kendermore, thus damn near extinguishing that particular race. Then I belly landed it on a marching column of Draconians.

[Chronos]

No right-thinking DM would object to any plan which results in the extinction of the Kender.

[MHaye]

In the various flavors of 3e, if a weapon does not deal damage, then sneak attacks/poisons/extra damage effects generally do not take effect.Not quite true, I'm afraid.

Sneak Attack increases the damage done by the weapon. You roll it all at one and add it up, then see whether it beats DR and so on. It's not contingent on the blow actually dealing damage. Other precision damage effects work the same way.

Poison yes, but only if the poison works on injury.

Stories?

I was DMing a game in 1E days, running the Temple of Elemental Evil at the games club I went to then. The players had just entered the second level of the dungeon proper, and were exploring the SW corner. Greywrinke the third level Magic User wandered off from the party, found a secret door and went through it and opened the next door he came to.

Eight bugbears looked up and grabbed weapons. (He was not wearing any Temple symbols). He spoke.

"Hello lads! Boy have I god good news for you.

I run Greywrinkle's Dating Agency, specialising in finding only the finest females for you ..."

When we'd recovered, I decided that they'd let him get away and bring back some "friends" for the bugbears. Needless to say they were very angry when said friends turned out to be adventurers in armour. They were all, shortly, dead.

[CandidGamera]

I don't think there was any way, by the books, for a dragon to attempt to zorch someone with a breath weapon but to fail to do any damage at all, in 2nd edition. That said, "by the books" didn't have as much meaning in 2nd edition as in 3rd, and houserules were abundant.

Well, there was one. I know because it happened to me in a convention game once. We'd bumped into a dragon, and the party scurried for cover, except for the doddering old wizard I was playing, who couldn't get out of the blast area in time - but HAD cast Fire Shield. Appropriate element Fire Shield + Successful Save = surprisingly hale Wizard.

[The Other Waldo Pepper]

I don't think there was any way, by the books, for a dragon to attempt to zorch someone with a breath weapon but to fail to do any damage at all, in 2nd edition.

It was a skill in 2E's HIGH LEVEL CAMPAIGNS book, for any Thief or Bard who'd made it to 11th level or better. (And, as per 2E's COMPLETE BARD'S HANDBOOK, a Bard could even do it at 1st level by going the Jongleur route: a dedicated tumbler who eschews songs and musical instruments to focus on juggling while tightrope-walking can acrobatically dodge lightning bolts and breath weapons for no damage with a good enough saving throw.)

[Chronos]

Well, there was one. I know because it happened to me in a convention game once. We'd bumped into a dragon, and the party scurried for cover, except for the doddering old wizard I was playing, who couldn't get out of the blast area in time - but HAD cast Fire Shield. Appropriate element Fire Shield + Successful Save = surprisingly hale Wizard. I meant, no way for it to happen randomly: There are, of course, a variety of spells and magic items which would do the trick.

[CandidGamera]

I meant, no way for it to happen randomly: There are, of course, a variety of spells and magic items which would do the trick.

Right. And there's not really enough detail in the original account to figure out the 'why' or if there was no 'why' and it was just an error.

[mlees]

Right. And there's not really enough detail in the original account to figure out the 'why' or if there was no 'why' and it was just an error.

For that matter, the DM can modify or ignore rules as they see fit. I think it says so in the Dungeon Masters Guide. The whole point of the game is to have fun.

I DM'd a little. I would slap down "rules lawyers" if they got too uppity.

One example was a falling rock trap. Some buddy/chucklehead/player did the math and declared that he had the hit points to soak up the bowling ball sized rocks dropping from overhead, and further declared that, since he was effectively unkillable by this trap, there was no need to protect himself (ignore the trap, in other words). I declared that since he was making no effort to dodge or otherwise protect his noggin, these rocks automatically crit in dramatic fashion. I let him have a do-over.

[Intergalactic Gladiator]

Back in Jr. high, one of my friends had some mazes and towns that he drew up for us to go through. Derek was some kind of a warrior or something, I don't remember his exact class.

GM: You walk into the shop and a small dwarf waves and says "Oh hello there!"

Derek: I shoot him with my crossbow!

GM: You kill the shopkeeper.

Word got out among the dwarves that someone shot one of their own and the eventually game devolved into Derek running around shooting all the shopkeepers and/or dwarves on sight.

[paperbackwriter]

I don't remember his exact class. I wouldn't hazard a guess, but his alignment sounds like chaotic stupid....

[CandidGamera]

For that matter, the DM can modify or ignore rules as they see fit. I think it says so in the Dungeon Masters Guide. The whole point of the game is to have fun.

I DM'd a little. I would slap down "rules lawyers" if they got too uppity.

One example was a falling rock trap. Some buddy/chucklehead/player did the math and declared that he had the hit points to soak up the bowling ball sized rocks dropping from overhead, and further declared that, since he was effectively unkillable by this trap, there was no need to protect himself (ignore the trap, in other words). I declared that since he was making no effort to dodge or otherwise protect his noggin, these rocks automatically crit in dramatic fashion. I let him have a do-over.

The GM constantly shifting the floor under your feet isn't a recipe for "fun", for anyone other than the sadistic GM. The GM has the power to modify the rules, but it should be applied consistently, and with advance warning to the players - otherwise, you're better off running a game for sock puppets.

[Gedd]

I don't think there was any way, by the books, for a dragon to attempt to zorch someone with a breath weapon but to fail to do any damage at all, in 2nd edition. That said, "by the books" didn't have as much meaning in 2nd edition as in 3rd, and houserules were abundant.

And incidentally, Firefox's spellchecker actually recognizes "zorch".

Oh, and even if dragons don't have external genitals, they would have to have an opening of some sort in their armor at that spot, which would mean a vulnerability to some extent.

So that's what the bare patch was on Smaug's underside!

[mlees]

The GM constantly shifting the floor under your feet isn't a recipe for "fun", for anyone other than the sadistic GM. The GM has the power to modify the rules, but it should be applied consistently, and with advance warning to the players - otherwise, you're better off running a game for sock puppets.

My players had fun. *shrug*

[Kobal2]

The GM constantly shifting the floor under your feet isn't a recipe for "fun", for anyone other than the sadistic GM. The GM has the power to modify the rules, but it should be applied consistently, and with advance warning to the players - otherwise, you're better off running a game for sock puppets.

I disagree. "modifying the rules, but apply them consistently" is just setting up a new set of rules to be gamed & lawyered. It doesn't address the seminal problem, just transposes or delays it.
I much rather keep my players ignorant of the rules entirely whenever possible. No gaming a system you don't know, and no bringing up page 128 §4 sub-clause 6 either. When that's not possible, I fall back to rule number one: dice are there to make noise behind the DM screen. Then you say whatever you goddamn please and makes for a good story.

[Scuba_Ben]

Kobal2, have you ever GM'd Paranoia? "Keep the players ignorant of the rules" is practically the GM's cardinal rule in that game.

[jayjay]

Kobal2, have you ever GM'd Paranoia? "Keep the players ignorant of the rules" is practically the GM's cardinal rule in that game.

Well...the rules, the plot, what they might know, what they should know, anything which might actually help this clone survive, anything their counter-troubleshooter clone might be doing to take their spot, etc.

[Scuba_Ben]

Friend jayjay, you seem to know quite a bit about Paranoia. What color is your security clearance, friend?

[jayjay]

Friend jayjay, you seem to know quite a bit about Paranoia. What color is your security clearance, friend?

I'm afraid that's information outside of your security clearance, Citizen. Please report to a Termination Booth for unseemly curiosity. Have a nice daycycle...or at least whatever you have left of it.

[soulmurk]

I disagree. "modifying the rules, but apply them consistently" is just setting up a new set of rules to be gamed & lawyered. It doesn't address the seminal problem, just transposes or delays it.
I much rather keep my players ignorant of the rules entirely whenever possible. No gaming a system you don't know, and no bringing up page 128 §4 sub-clause 6 either. When that's not possible, I fall back to rule number one: dice are there to make noise behind the DM screen. Then you say whatever you goddamn please and makes for a good story.

The seminal problem isn't that some players like to be rules lawyers, it's how the DM handles it.

It's possible to be a rules lawyer and still be pragmatic enough to know that the rules are just guidelines and not binding, just as it's possible to tell a good story that's fun to play and remains within the rules. As long as the interpretations consistently adhere to an internal logic, there shouldn't be an issue, and if there is then it may just be a case of incompatible players. It happens sometimes.

That said, anyone who blatantly disregards their characters safety by doing something incredibly stupid or blatantly metagames like the guy above with the falling rocks deserves whatever they get.

[Scuba_Ben]

I'm afraid that's information outside of your security clearance, Citizen. Please report to a Termination Booth for unseemly curiosity. Have a nice daycycle...or at least whatever you have left of it.

Very well, Jayja-Y. I'll go to a Termination Booth as soon as I locate one that is operational... and accessible... and open late this daycycle... and after I finish my current task list... and after I see to my Computer-issued equipment, making certain that it is all in good condition for my next clone... oh yes, I have to return these bots to PLC, I'll go put them in numerical order and guide them down...

Yes, in Paranoia stupid delaying tricks sometimes work.

[Chronos]

In 3rd edition D&D, at least, they explicitly had Rule Zero, which basically said that the DM could modify any rule in any way at any time. So if anyone tries to rules-lawyer you, you're perfectly justified in rules-lawyering back that you're following the rules exactly and to the letter, and that he shouldn't complain.

That said, it makes for a bad game to over-apply that. You can ignore the dice occasionally, but do it too much, and your players will realize that you're railroading them. Ideally, if you prepared the adventure well, you'd never need to roll the dice "just for noise". Now, obviously, perfect game design never happens, and you will occasionally need to fudge the dice to patch something. But you should still strive to minimize it.

[GargoyleWB]

...
One example was a falling rock trap. Some buddy/chucklehead/player did the math and declared that he had the hit points to soak up the bowling ball sized rocks dropping from overhead, and further declared that, since he was effectively unkillable by this trap, there was no need to protect himself (ignore the trap, in other words). I declared that since he was making no effort to dodge or otherwise protect his noggin, these rocks automatically crit in dramatic fashion. I let him have a do-over.

Similar to a player I had that walked into a lair full of kobolds confident that his AC was unhittable since it exceeded even the natural 20 (1st ed AD&D).

Player: I'm just going to walk straight to their treasure room, they can't touch me.
DM: The kobolds swarm you...
Player: ok. Still walking.
DM: They climb over you, screaming and pounding on you. You soon have over a dozen hanging off of you...
Player: ok. I'm strong enough to carry them. Still walking...
DM: A kobold on your neck raises his dagger...
Player: Ha. Still walking...
DM: And slides it slowly through the eyeslits of your plate mail visor...
Player:...um, what?
DM:...and stabs and stabs. So this will be on the critical hit table *makes ominous dice rolls behind screen*...
Player: Hey! But they can't...
DM:...You stumble, blinded and bleeding, frantically trying to throw off the kobold...

[Miller]

I disagree. "modifying the rules, but apply them consistently" is just setting up a new set of rules to be gamed & lawyered. It doesn't address the seminal problem, just transposes or delays it.
I much rather keep my players ignorant of the rules entirely whenever possible. No gaming a system you don't know, and no bringing up page 128 §4 sub-clause 6 either. When that's not possible, I fall back to rule number one: dice are there to make noise behind the DM screen. Then you say whatever you goddamn please and makes for a good story.

Right. It's important to remember that the dice in an RPG are an abstraction of a (more or less) realistic situation, and baked into that abstraction is the assumption that the character is actively trying to avoid being harmed. If a high level fighter sticks his head into a lit cannon, he's going to die. I don't care how many hit points the character has, or how many damage dice the cannon deals. The cannon's damage was calculated under the assumption that the target is going to try to dodge, or find cover, or do something to avoid taking a direct hit from a fifteen pound ball of iron moving hundreds of miles an hour. If the character isn't taking those precautions, then the damage dice are irrelevant. There's no way any human being can survive that situation, regardless of how many times he's killed something by sticking it with a bit of sharpened steel.

[Chronos]

Unless he's O-Chul, of course.

But yeah, I don't really have any objection to a DM squishing a character that's acting suicidally.

[CandidGamera]

I disagree. "modifying the rules, but apply them consistently" is just setting up a new set of rules to be gamed & lawyered. It doesn't address the seminal problem, just transposes or delays it.
I much rather keep my players ignorant of the rules entirely whenever possible. No gaming a system you don't know, and no bringing up page 128 §4 sub-clause 6 either. When that's not possible, I fall back to rule number one: dice are there to make noise behind the DM screen. Then you say whatever you goddamn please and makes for a good story.

And that's about as good a summary of 'How Not to Run a Game' as I've ever seen. Kudos. But hey, as long as you keep finding players willing to be treated like barely-tolerated nuisances necessary for you to get your 'story' out, more power to you.

[Zeriel]

And that's about as good a summary of 'How Not to Run a Game' as I've ever seen. Kudos. But hey, as long as you keep finding players willing to be treated like barely-tolerated nuisances necessary for you to get your 'story' out, more power to you.

Alternately, that's a great way to run a game, if everyone is collectively trying to tell an awesome story regardless of whether the dice technically had them dying ignobly in chapter two twenty sessions back.

With certain gamers, "perceived risk" that never actualizes generates as much interest as "actual risk". It's all about knowing your troupe.

And sometimes, you have to fight a rules-lawyering nitwit. Because your gaming group is heavily infected with Geek Social Fallacy #1, for example, and you can't just get rid of him.

[CandidGamera]

Alternately, that's a great way to run a game, if everyone is collectively trying to tell an awesome story regardless of whether the dice technically had them dying ignobly in chapter two twenty sessions back.

It's hard to work on something collectively if your GM thinks you should purposefully be kept ignorant of the rules of the road. In other words, your theory would be fine if it ended up being "Our Story", but in every case I've ever seen where the GM runs this way, it's HIS Story that he's interested in. Railroading, GMPCs, and other badness ensue. Because anything goes so long as it makes HIS story better.

[Kobal2]

The point you're missing, in your haste to be condescending, is that it's not about my story, but our story. My players are not barely tolerated nuisances, they're partners in story telling. They act their story, I weave something around it, we produce something that alternatively kicks ass, makes us laugh, is just silly enough or is Serious Business (haha, only not really, only Serious).

And my point was not that they should shut up and soldier to my petty diktats and act like I want them to, but that ultimately, and for most intensive porpoises, rules get in the way of getting good time and/or story done.
Stats, character sheets and Byzantine grappling rules are a useful tool to get a framework and/or a more precise idea of who the character is if the player doesn't have a very specific thing in mind (or is not so good at wirting/explaining who the person they have in their mind is, since not all players are professional writers) ; or of what's happening if neither side has a good idea of it ; or generating a result/situation when it doesn't really matter either way. But that's all it is: a tool.
Their character isn't just a stat block, and it's limiting to hold that stat block, or the falling damage chart, or the busted waist size equatio (aaaah, Rolemaster...) as a limiting factor that denies the game going this or that way that would be interesting. Or a enabling factor to go somewhere stupid, as the case may be (see: "I don't care about 100 kobolds ganging me because they can't hit me, I keep walking").

When everyone has a decent idea of who their character is, what they can or cannot do, what they want to accomplish, what weaknesses they've arbitrarily given themselves to make shit interesting and so forth, then page 128 §4 sub-clause 6 is wholly unnecessary. Either let them do it, let them do it with some reserves, or say no because X. Simple.
Why want to be at the mercy of a dice roll, an unbalanced power or a badly thought-out rule going either way ? Feeling forced to say yes when you don't want to, or no when you want to say yes, is an exercise in frustration no matter which side of the GM screen you are.

The 53 story illustrates this perfectly: it's amusing to tell, but it's also retarded. In fact, it's amusing because it's retarded. The NPC had no reason to say yes whatsoever. I evidently did not intend her to say yes. The player didn't expect her to say yes, he was just having a laugh during an otherwise low-adrenaline part of the game. Her saying yes broke much of the dramatic tension of the scenario, because you can't really take a minor villain seriously who sucked your cock on a lark half an hour ago.
But I had officially set a difficulty, high and unreachable as it seemed, and the dice said "haha, fuck you" so I had no choice but to go with them. Which while not positively ruining the story really took something from it in the end. I try to avoid making that mistake again.

Bottomline: it's about creative control - the GM and the players should have it. Not the dice, not the rule book, not whoever wrote the scenario.

ETA: Hmm. Would have had more punch if written 2 posts ago. Work on conciseness required :)

[Zeriel]

It's hard to work on something collectively if your GM thinks you should purposefully be kept ignorant of the rules of the road. In other words, your theory would be fine if it ended up being "Our Story", but in every case I've ever seen where the GM runs this way, it's HIS Story that he's interested in. Railroading, GMPCs, and other badness ensue. Because anything goes so long as it makes HIS story better.

*nods* Hence, "It's all about knowing your troupe."

I've had GMs akin to what you've described. They're much less common in my experience than "the one guy who you can't uninvite who has every sourcebook memorized and is trying to use one of those infinite power builds like you see on the Dragon online forums every other day". The only way to fight these guys is to not show them the target they're aiming for, if it's socially unacceptable to just throw them out or educate them about what an RPG actually is (which is obviously the best response).

The vast majority of GMs I've experienced are firmly committed to the ideal of "Our Story", and the ones that aren't are generally so bad at it that everyone quits after two sessions anyway.

[mlees]

You make it sound like you are assuming that this dictatorial style was something occuring on a daily basis. It doesn't, not at least with the players I have gamed with. We all just want to have fun.

But there's a difference between coming up with a clever solution to a problem, and a player using a loophole within the rules to achieve a unreasonable result.

One example would be jumping from a cliff. It used to be that falling damage was 1d6 per 10 feet of height fallen, maxed out somewhere [due to terminal velocity, I guess]. A player calculates that now that he has 125hp (more than 20d6 maxed), he can jump from any height and live, and precedes to do so, bypassing "in game" content, and acting out of character in an unreasonable way.

How would the character know what his "hit points" was? What max falling damage was? Why would he avoid falling or jumping off the castle wall all his life, only to start now?

Another example of using player knowledge that the character wouldn't have, for example: The 2nd edition had a lot of odd critters in the "Fiend Folio", some of whom needed special methods to kill. The player owns a copy of the "Fiend Folio", and based on his own knowledge of the data within the book, uses that in game. For example, let's say that a critter can only be killed (permanently) by severing the head with a silver weapon blessed by a [good aligned] priest. The player does this on the first encounter. A DM who feels that the character would not know this is free to prevent this from taking place in that encounter.

The DM needs to keep the game interesting for all players, and must balance "risk" (making the stories "challenging"), "reward", and "fun".

My problem was always the "reward" department. The characters ended up being veritable walking magic item shops. "Reward" is hard to balance, and make the next challenges even tougher to plan out.

[Chronos]

None of that is fixed by "the dice exist to make noise behind the screen", though. And as for situations like that "impossible" roll of 53, well, ridiculously unlikely things do happen in life. If you shun the dice and just decide on your own whether things work, then you're inevitably going to fall into one of two traps: Either the longshots never work, which is going to feel unrealistic to your players, or on the rare occasions where you do let the longshots work, it's going to feel like you're railroading the game.

[mlees]

Are you directing that comment to me, Chronos?

Would you let a player jump from any height, at will, because it was impossible for them to now die in the fall?

[Oakminster]

Similar to a player I had that walked into a lair full of kobolds confident that his AC was unhittable since it exceeded even the natural 20 (1st ed AD&D).

Player: I'm just going to walk straight to their treasure room, they can't touch me.
DM: The kobolds swarm you...
Player: ok. Still walking.
DM: They climb over you, screaming and pounding on you. You soon have over a dozen hanging off of you...
Player: ok. I'm strong enough to carry them. Still walking...
DM: A kobold on your neck raises his dagger...
Player: Ha. Still walking...
DM: And slides it slowly through the eyeslits of your plate mail visor...
Player:...um, what?
DM:...and stabs and stabs. So this will be on the critical hit table *makes ominous dice rolls behind screen*...
Player: Hey! But they can't...
DM:...You stumble, blinded and bleeding, frantically trying to throw off the kobold...

I was sorta on the flip side of something like this once. My 1st Edition Ranger Lord wanted to interrogate a goblin sentry, so I snuck up on him and tackled him. Unfortunately for me, 1Ed Rangers get +1 damage per level to all giant class creatures, which includes goblins. DM made me roll to hit. Natural 20. Roll a d6 to see if it was critical (house rule)--yup, critical tackle on the goblin. 10th level Ranger Lord with percentile strength (18/74% I think). Less than 1 hit die goblin. Damage was 1d6 + 4 (strength bonus) + 10 (ranger bonus) X 2 (for critical hit). Squished Goblin. Oops.
:cool:

[CandidGamera]

*nods* Hence, "It's all about knowing your troupe."

I've had GMs akin to what you've described. They're much less common in my experience than "the one guy who you can't uninvite who has every sourcebook memorized and is trying to use one of those infinite power builds like you see on the Dragon online forums every other day". The only way to fight these guys is to not show them the target they're aiming for, if it's socially unacceptable to just throw them out or educate them about what an RPG actually is (which is obviously the best response).

The vast majority of GMs I've experienced are firmly committed to the ideal of "Our Story", and the ones that aren't are generally so bad at it that everyone quits after two sessions anyway.

The solution to Rules Lawyers is knowing the rules better than they do. If they bring up an obscure loophole that produces results against common sense, you say 'no', and rule consistently on that point. if they think of something clever in the rules that gives them a reasonable advantage and that doesn't cross over the OOC/IC knowledge line, let'em have it.

[CandidGamera]

You make it sound like you are assuming that this dictatorial style was something occuring on a daily basis. It doesn't, not at least with the players I have gamed with. We all just want to have fun.

But there's a difference between coming up with a clever solution to a problem, and a player using a loophole within the rules to achieve a unreasonable result.

One example would be jumping from a cliff. It used to be that falling damage was 1d6 per 10 feet of height fallen, maxed out somewhere [due to terminal velocity, I guess]. A player calculates that now that he has 125hp (more than 20d6 maxed), he can jump from any height and live, and precedes to do so, bypassing "in game" content, and acting out of character in an unreasonable way.

You're describing metagaming, and that's a little different from (but related to) rules lawyering. The solution to that metagaming is "Your character doesn't know that. He is pretty sure he'd die if he tried it, in fact." Then if the Rules Lawyer wants to dig in his heels and jump, let him - and dock him all his experience points for poor roleplaying. Preferably right before he lands, so he has many fewer hitpoints to survive the fall with.

[smiling bandit]

One example was a falling rock trap. Some buddy/chucklehead/player did the math and declared that he had the hit points to soak up the bowling ball sized rocks dropping from overhead, and further declared that, since he was effectively unkillable by this trap, there was no need to protect himself (ignore the trap, in other words). I declared that since he was making no effort to dodge or otherwise protect his noggin, these rocks automatically crit in dramatic fashion. I let him have a do-over.

While I wouldn't condemn you, you ought to make clear how thigns work in your game. There's no particular reason a character with oodles of hit points wouldn't consider some normally-lethal menace a pitiful, pale shadow of a threat. I generally say that if I'm going to accept hit points, the players may cosider them, too. If I want a critical wounds or location-based damage system, then things become different.

Edit: What I mean to say is, if I intend to run a world where people can be astoundingly tough, then I would use hit poitns or something like it. If not, I find a different system.

[Zeriel]

The solution to Rules Lawyers is knowing the rules better than they do. If they bring up an obscure loophole that produces results against common sense, you say 'no', and rule consistently on that point. if they think of something clever in the rules that gives them a reasonable advantage and that doesn't cross over the OOC/IC knowledge line, let'em have it.

Meh, or I could just wing it to produce sensible results and have fun with a lot less time and money spent on obscure sourcebooks.

My troupe has been coming back every week for over a decade at this point, that's all the proof I personally need to justify my methods. :cool:

While I wouldn't condemn you, you ought to make clear how thigns work in your game. There's no particular reason a character with oodles of hit points wouldn't consider some normally-lethal menace a pitiful, pale shadow of a threat. I generally say that if I'm going to accept hit points, the players may cosider them, too. If I want a critical wounds or location-based damage system, then things become different.

I generally try to give a speech to new players that basically points out that I consider "hit points" to be an abstraction that combines toughness, luck, and combat expertise--right before I point out the house rules that make non-combat lethal damage proportional to HP rather than a fixed die roll.

[Chronos]

Would you let a player jump from any height, at will, because it was impossible for them to now die in the fall? No, of course not. But that has nothing to do with fudging dice rolls, and if you've got players pulling things like that, then fudging dice rolls won't fix the problem.

[mlees]

No, of course not. But that has nothing to do with fudging dice rolls, and if you've got players pulling things like that, then fudging dice rolls won't fix the problem.

I never mentioned fudging dice rolls, or making noises behind the GM screen. That was someone else. That's why I'm not sure if your comments were directed at me, specifically.

[Kobal2]

None of that is fixed by "the dice exist to make noise behind the screen", though. And as for situations like that "impossible" roll of 53, well, ridiculously unlikely things do happen in life. If you shun the dice and just decide on your own whether things work, then you're inevitably going to fall into one of two traps: Either the longshots never work, which is going to feel unrealistic to your players, or on the rare occasions where you do let the longshots work, it's going to feel like you're railroading the game.

Yes and no. It's a matter of judging the consequences of the longshot working, as well. Sometimes (hell, oftentimes), the longshot takes a steaming dump over what would have been fun.
Like when the cleric hits with his DC 10 Mace of Disruption and your big bad evil recurring Vampire villain guy is supposed to pop instantly because you happened to roll a 1 and the long epic confrontation you'd planned turns into "Weell... he's dead, guys, I guess. So, umm... you loot him ?" then not only are you, as the DM, shortchanged the opportunity to show off your cool prepared fight scene (you know, the one with the 4 different stages, each with its own soundtrack, its resonance with the overarching themes of the campaign and the internal turmoils of each character in turn ?), but so are the players who came to your place on a Saturday night to find out and live out the big climactic payoff of all the villain-plans-ruining they'd been doing for the last two months and...just... pop goes the bad guy.
Well, there's always the Xbox, guys ? Yeah, no. Like, screw your Mace of Disruption, dude. Totally rolled nat' 20 behind the screen.

And sometimes, the longshot is all kinds of badass and believable and you just roll with it. Sometimes you even engineer the longshot to happen because fuck it, they came up with a plan so ridiculous it just has to work and you're not going to let the stupid dice tell you it failed because it only had 0.05% chances of actually working.
But now that we've established that it's OK to fudge the rules occasionally, why not fudge them all the time ? Why have rules at all, except as a vestigial limb of that time, way back when, when D&D (no A yet) was supposed to be a tabletop wargame ? Once again, when it doesn't really matter either way, sure, roll if you want to, whatever. But when it does matter, screw the dice up their sneering little statistically improbable arses.

Now, I admit that there is also a beauty to be found, and fun to be had, in running "old skool", tactical RPGing sessions with 5-foot square mats, 40x60 rooms with limestone walls and three Minotaurs in the middle, count all the pluses but don't forget the Power Attack, gain 250 XP from the orc encounter etc...
But it's not the same game and, in my experience, the two kinds don't mesh all that well. It's nigh-impossible to maintain dramatic tension and mood when the descriptions and banter come to a screeching halt courtesy of the 3 hour rolling-then-sitting-on-your-hands extravaganza that is every skirmish in every combat system ever, or when one guy has a long verbal joust with an NPC and the next guy just goes "I roll Diplomacy, what info does he give me ?". It's also not possible to describe a turn-based combat and keep it fresh and interesting before it quickly devolving into "you hit it with your sword. It looks *roll* a bit hurt. NEXT !". Least I've never seen it happen, nevermind managing it myself.

Finally, it's also a rare thing to have players who enjoy both types of gameplay equally at the same time ; which is to say that plenty of players like both but good luck matching the moods and expectations of all of them at once this Saturday. The solution there is to clearly run one or the other from day 1 and if they don't feel like it, well, It's OK, they don't have to come this time.
Which in my mind is leagues better than them coming only to get bored or annoyed and derailing the game for everyone else, be it by rules-lawyering what's supposed to be a storytelling oeuvre majeure, or insisting on twenty minutes of flowery roleplay when everyone else is rolling initiative, bitch.

[Chronos]

I never mentioned fudging dice rolls, or making noises behind the GM screen. That was someone else. That's why I'm not sure if your comments were directed at me, specifically. Oh. I was really just addressing it to the conversation as a whole.

And Kobal2, if you don't want to risk the vampire getting zapped on the first turn by the cleric's Mace of Disruption, then it's your responsibility to make sure that's not possible. Either don't give the cleric the mace to begin with, or have the vampire sunder it immediately, or have him cast a Positive Energy Protection spell beforehand, or make sure he has a means of staying outside of melee range.

But you also shouldn't really be too worried about the possibility of something like that, because most of the greatest RPG stories come from something completely unexpected happening. Just take a look through this thread: You won't hear anyone saying "And then we got to the BBEG, and he was a vampire, and after a long, grueling fight, we finally managed to wear him down. It was so epic, the DM even had a soundtrack for it!". But if the cleric had managed to off him with a single hit from his Mace of Disruption, your players would still be talking about it today.

[Zeriel]

Just take a look through this thread: You won't hear anyone saying "And then we got to the BBEG, and he was a vampire, and after a long, grueling fight, we finally managed to wear him down. It was so epic, the DM even had a soundtrack for it!". But if the cleric had managed to off him with a single hit from his Mace of Disruption, your players would still be talking about it today.

In my experience, splitting the difference is where the magic happens.

A random lucky crit offs the big bad in one anticlimactic round? Feeeeh.
Worse, the opposite--my +3 enchanted shield, the most powerful magical artifact I own, being shattered by a critical fail on a shield bash against a no-name minion-class orc? Double feh.
The DM takes away my crit because he's got this totally staged encounter? Triple feh.

On the other hand, my harrier/marksman character takes five sessions, on a hunch that we're fighting an oni, to amass a white jade arrowhead, carve it into a masterwork arrow, craft a brand-new masterwork bow, get a void magician shugenja to bless and empower it all, then wait (and forego xp) for 10ish combat rounds until the Oni appears, THEN hit a bunch of "tens reroll and add" to get a cumulative 170hp of damage (and a one-shot kill by nearly triple!) on 7 damage dice?

Yeah, I still talk about that shot. And the demon hunter still talks about hurling her ancestral axe into the oni's chest as it's getting sucked back into the netherworld just to say she laid a hit on the damn thing, too. It was the perfect combo of DM scripting something epic COMBINED with luck and player prep to derail a portion of the epicness.

[Lumpy]

In one game I participated in, we agreed that assigning a 5% chance to a spectacularly lucky or unlucky result was unrealistic, so we made it a house rule that on D20 rolls, 1 or 20 meant you rolled again to see whether your luck was merely remarkable or downright miraculous. (For example, we agreed that without either magic/fate or extremely high skill stats, Bard the Bowman would have had to roll 20 twice to hit a fast moving aerial target the size of a quarter :) )

[Kobal2]

Oh. I was really just addressing it to the conversation as a whole.

And Kobal2, if you don't want to risk the vampire getting zapped on the first turn by the cleric's Mace of Disruption, then it's your responsibility to make sure that's not possible. Either don't give the cleric the mace to begin with, or have the vampire sunder it immediately, or have him cast a Positive Energy Protection spell beforehand, or make sure he has a means of staying outside of melee range.

Meh. I'd rather get bogged down in figuring out what works and doesn't work with my scenario from a storytelling & characterization perspective, how to work in specific elements for each player and each character and planning out the 5 billion "Hmm, what if they do this ?" sub-cases - of course, they'll do something I hadn't planned anyway, of course ;) - and fighting writer's block than getting bogged down in rule supplements and picayune mechanical miscellanea. You only get so many hours of prep time per session, and at some point the effort/result ratio becomes a turnoff. Burnout lies that way.

Besides, it's a mug's game. Just as certainly as a group of PCs worth their salt will concoct a plan that is at the same time fiendishly clever, borderline retarded and coming completely out of left field ; a good munchkin will figure out a way to turn my planned challenge into so much mush, spot an angle I haven't covered, an obscure spell I overlooked or a doodad/ally/domain/owed favour I had handed them 12 sessions ago that I clean forgot about. They've got 3-to-6 brains chock full of deviousness and build optimization, I've only got the one and it's not that good at figuring out mechanical loopholes anyway. Rolling with the punches is for suckers, I'm rigging this fight until I don't get punched in the first place.

If they do set out, as in Zeriel's story, to make an intelligent and concerted in-character effort to wreck my boss's shit, then by all means they should get a chance to wreck his shit good and proper. Wrecking his shit by coincidental whim of the dice ? That's not satisfying for anyone, I don't think.

Which is where "alternate presents" and "damn the rules" come in - because it's not always as easy as fudging the dice, but it goes without saying that the vampire who's killed the countless hopeful would-be vampire slayers whose corpses you've been stumbling upon all night had cast Protection From Whatever Cheap Fuckery You Were Doing off-screen. You would have known this had you cast a detection spell first. But since you didn't and I'm an outstanding liar, you can't prove I'm full of crap. He taunts you for your trouble.
Or it turns out you were fighting a Simulacrum/projected image/polymorphed minion all along and the real vampire makes a dramatic-er entrance right about now. He taunts you for your trouble.
Or he's not really a vampire, but some weirdass creature from a third party splatbook that happens to look like one, but really isn't, it's a Demi Fiendish Draco Direlich, honest. Those are not disruptable. He taunts you for your trouble.
Or he's simply too old and powerful an undead to be one-shot zapped by your puny mace and I take away a bunch of hitpoints and/or a layer of buffs behind the scenes instead. He winces, but finds it in him to taunt you for your troubles. Etc, etc...
As long as you can't catch me in a blatant lie storytelling device, as long as I'm not guilty of total cheese myself, and as long as I can get you to really hate that smug vampire jerk, then game on brother. What do you do now ?

Works both ways, too. If Not-Sam Spade bollocked his Search roll or didn't think to look under the pillow for the evil figurine that was hidden there, well, maybe it was in the cupboard he's searching now all along. Schrödinger's Clue, as it were. I'm not going to make it easy for you, but I won't let you stumble around that stupid crime scene and getting increasingly pissed for half the evening either. Nor will I be waiting on you to have the right idea as written in my scenario or to get the non-crappy roll or tangential hook you're stubbornly not giving me to work with today. We've got other things on the to do list for tonight, folks.
Get Clue, ponder Clue, make up harebrained theory to explain Clue, follow insane theory like it makes sense, watch the DM frantically try to connect his dots with your dots: that's the fun part. Figuring the exact brand of insane troll logic the DM expects you to follow and clicking every metaphorical pixel before he rewards you with Clue, that's playing an old Sierra adventure game. And rolling until Clue happens, well, that's playing a particularly cheap slot machine.

Now, you can't always get away with that sort of thing all of the time. As with all confidence tricks creative endeavours, you can't let yourself fall into a recognizable pattern or let them suss out which pocket you're hiding the rabbit in. Every clever trick goes stale if you keep on using it, and that they will whinge about. And sometimes you even have to hand them the bullshit unsatisfying win, if only to throw them off your scent or remind them why they don't want the bullshit unsatisfying win in the first place.
But as long as you can make them believe the shell game is legit, I say cheat your ass off whenever and however it makes things more interesting. That's why there's a DM screen in the first place.

Besides, players are willing dupes most of the time: suspension of disbelief is not just for the movies and as mentioned before, you're only doing all this to make the story you all deserve together. If they do think the shit you just pulled was complete bullshit, or if they suss out where you hid the rabbit, they'll let you know.

But you also shouldn't really be too worried about the possibility of something like that, because most of the greatest RPG stories come from something completely unexpected happening. Just take a look through this thread: You won't hear anyone saying "And then we got to the BBEG, and he was a vampire, and after a long, grueling fight, we finally managed to wear him down. It was so epic, the DM even had a soundtrack for it!". But if the cleric had managed to off him with a single hit from his Mace of Disruption, your players would still be talking about it today.In case you haven't noticed, this thread is called "stupid D&D tricks", not "your most awesome RPG moments" or "your fondest RPG memories" ;).
Of course fuck ups, over the top silliness and plain :eek: moments are memorable, and they always make for a good time when recounting them - but that doesn't mean they're always a good time at the time they're happening, or that it's the only thing players keep from their games. It's like life that way.

[Zeriel]

In case you haven't noticed, this thread is called "stupid D&D tricks", not "your most awesome RPG moments" or "your fondest RPG memories" ;).

S'why I didn't go into too much detail with the oni-slaying (I think I put it on the TVTropes Crowning Moment of RPG Awesome page though, when it happened. =P).

From the same (Legend of the Five Rings) game, and riffing on the discussion:

So the group has been trying to figure out why there's very little evidence for the motives of the bandit group we've been hunting, and we have an idea that the group has supernatural help, when we stumble upon evidence that the point man handling the coverups is an actual honest-to-god ninja (which, in this world, is a full-blown evil spirit of trickery, deception, and death). Naturally, it's a red herring thrown by the bandits to blow us off the scent.

Except it's too good, and our void magician botched a detect roll, and we have two dedicated demon hunters in the party anyway and a specialized anti-ninja operative. We are on this ninja case like stink on shit.

What was supposed to be a red herring, after the DM finished privately pulling his hair out, turned into a real ninja that materialized in his notes midway through the second session of serious anti-ninja work, and I think we took a good 5-7 sessions to resolve the whole damn thing and run it to ground.

After which, the DM took a deep breath and said, "You realize I was mostly winging that, there wasn't any damn ninja originally, but you were ALL so EARNEST about it..."

Yeah, it was awesome.

[Kobal2]

Well, speaking of L5R, and riffing on the theme, there was this time my players seemed to be doing everything in their power to keep me from making Clue happen.

There was a murder to solve during a tense inter-Clan winter stiffly polite diplomatic shindig slash give-us-an-excuse-to-invade-you-next-Spring-I-double-doggy-dare-you. Big official cut from top-knot to belt in his private quarters. Guards suspiciously off duty that night, incriminating evidence up to the rafters, lords on both sides take the matter as a personal slight, Words are Had. War is brewing even if the fact that it's a total setup is plainly obvious to everyone. So, pretty high stakes, especially since I had players from both Clans involved who were not particularly fond of the idea of having to maybe slice each other up over this pile of crap.

But they manage to thoroughly cock things up from the get go. First they piss off the local magistrate, who bars them from interrogating possible suspects & witnesses further. Instead of, oh, I don't know, politely asking the local lord to overrule him (or to give them permission to investigate the crime on their own on account of their impressive "special inter-Clan task force, Jade Magistrate approved" credentials), they decide to go behind everyone's backs and investigate the crime scene on their own through the power of bluffing their way past the dim guards. And get nicked by the not so dim after all guards, of course, what did they expect ?!
Finally, their Shugenja gives me a ray of hope: he decides to use that overpowered spell they get, the bane of every L5R DM : Speak with Kami. Hallefuckingluja.

Did I mention that spell is the bane of every L5R DM ? Now, for all of you not familiar with that game, L5R is based in large part on Japanese mythology, including the Shinto belief that most everything has a conscious spirit in it. Old trees, hot springs, bamboo groves, castles, swords, the wind: you name it, there's a spirit for that. And shugenjas (read: wizards) can summon them anywhere, anytime to chew the fat.
I don't need to tell y'all that asking the supernatural, omnipresent genus loci what's what kinda cheapens any serious investigation. So what happens is that you, the DM, have to find ways to curtail the disproportionate power of that particular class feature that *every* Shugenja gets at rank 0, some more clever than others. You have to. So over the scenarios, you arbitrarily decide that the earth spirit can only describe a guy's shoes (albeit in great details !) for example. Or that this particular kami is feeling mischievious today and feeds them bullshit, or requires them to play elaborate games before... not giving them answers haha ! Or he's pissed at being rung like a common manservant and simply refuses to speak unless they perform some arbitrary mollifying tasks and rituals (which may or may not involve shrubberies). Anything that comes to mind to a) not have to simply hand the shugenja all the keys to your scenario but b) not completely write off that power, else the shug' will whinge. Sometimes, thankfully, the shugenja himself is kind enough to make up reasons not to use his I Win button.

But that one time Speak with Kami was my own precious little get out of jail free card, and that air kami turned out to be the most observant, loquacious son of a gust of wind you have ever met. It puts every neat little Clue they missed so far in a neat bundle, wraps a ceremonial bow around the lot and serves on an ancestral silver platter. No no, really, no rice ball necessary, it's more than happy to help.

So of course, after all these months of being dicked around by a railroading DM self-important to downright useless supernatural entities, they assumed this one was being much too suspiciously helpful, disregarded everything and bitched at me for once again denying them one of their on-paper legit investigation tools. What's worse, when later they happened upon some of those same Clues by other means, *they assumed it was the kami messing with them some more* and tossed them aside. Again.

So, um, yeah, sometimes Clan wars happen. Can't be helped, I guess.

[Balance]

Which is where "alternate presents" and "damn the rules" come in - because it's not always as easy as fudging the dice, but it goes without saying that the vampire who's killed the countless hopeful would-be vampire slayers whose corpses you've been stumbling upon all night had cast Protection From Whatever Cheap Fuckery You Were Doing off-screen. You would have known this had you cast a detection spell first. But since you didn't and I'm an outstanding liar, you can't prove I'm full of crap. He taunts you for your trouble.
Or it turns out you were fighting a Simulacrum/projected image/polymorphed minion all along and the real vampire makes a dramatic-er entrance right about now. He taunts you for your trouble.
Or he's not really a vampire, but some weirdass creature from a third party splatbook that happens to look like one, but really isn't, it's a Demi Fiendish Draco Direlich, honest. Those are not disruptable. He taunts you for your trouble.
Or he's simply too old and powerful an undead to be one-shot zapped by your puny mace and I take away a bunch of hitpoints and/or a layer of buffs behind the scenes instead. He winces, but finds it in him to taunt you for your troubles. Etc, etc...
As long as you can't catch me in a blatant lie storytelling device, as long as I'm not guilty of total cheese myself, and as long as I can get you to really hate that smug vampire jerk, then game on brother. What do you do now ?
Better still, you let the sudden kill work, then demonstrate to the players that the vamp wasn't the real problem--it was his plan, which is still in motion without him, or even just a side effect.

To that specific case, in one high-level campaign, the DM had a master vampire we'd pissed off assault our stronghold. He misdirected our magical wards, sent a small force of mindless undead out as a distraction, then infiltrated with everything he had that could become invisible/intangible/ethereal/whatever. The first PC he encountered was my (Oriental Adventures) monk, who was puttering around in a clichéd fashion in the conservatory. Since my monk was alone, the vamp figured he'd pick me off himself while keeping his minions hidden. Unfortunately for him, I made my check to notice him, and as he materialized to attack...

"Improvised throwing weapon, ash bonsai tree. Called shot, heart. -8 to hit."
"You're kidding."
"Nope."
"Roll it."
"Natural 20."
"<sigh> You hurl the potted plant at the shroud of coalescing mist. Even as the vampire's form solidifies, an ash stake (backed by several pounds of dirt and fancifully painted ceramic) slams into his chest, piercing his evil heart. A look of disbelief twists his face as he crumbles into bone fragments and grave-mould. The other chill presences retreat at once, scattering in all directions."

The DM rolled with it by deciding that (since we had no idea how many minions the vamp had), there was now a small army of suddenly masterless undead, including a pack of free vampires, attacking everything in sight or rushing to hide themselves in our town. Instead of a pitched battle, we spent the rest of the session rescuing townsfolk from the lesser types, then he built the hook into a series of searches and mysteries as we tracked down the remaining vamps (who soon had minions of their own, of course). My abrupt defeat of the BBG for the piece turned a one-night battle into an arc that lasted a couple of months.


Another classic one that I've read about involves a mid-level party hired to take out a bunch of kobolds in a nearby cave. Of course, they felt kobolds were beneath them, and moreover, that they likely had no worthwhile loot, so they weren't inclined to go crawling through the tunnels. Instead, the mage used a Wizard Eye (or some such spell) to map the place, crunched some numbers, and figured out that he could basically fill the entire volume of the cave with a few well-placed fireball spells. So they essentially nuked the site from orbit, frying all the kobolds without warning. And, incidentally, torching a map and some other plot hooks. The DM was displeased, so rather than just coming up with another set of hooks, he sent a plague.

See, he decided that the cave was home to the entire local bat population, and the area was, consequently, now a bat-free zone. The insects the bats had helped keep in check, including mosquitoes infected with Goblin Fever, multiplied rapidly. An outraged druid consulted by the locals ensured that everyone knew whose fault the plague was, so the party had to salvage the situation. Thus, they got tasks like capturing replacement bats alive and unharmed from widely separated populations, petitioning a contrary old goblin shaman for advice on treating the disease, and so forth.

Once they had set things right, their "reward" was copies of the plot hooks they had burned. One of the townspeople "happened" to have found them among the belongings of a traveler who had died of the plague, and he decided that it would likely lead the PCs far away and into danger...which was exactly where he wanted them.

[CandidGamera]

Meh, or I could just wing it to produce sensible results and have fun with a lot less time and money spent on obscure sourcebooks.

.. you don't allow the inclusion of material from sourcebooks you don't own. I mean, that's just common sense.

[The Other Waldo Pepper]

Works both ways, too. If Not-Sam Spade bollocked his Search roll or didn't think to look under the pillow for the evil figurine that was hidden there, well, maybe it was in the cupboard he's searching now all along. Schrödinger's Clue, as it were. I'm not going to make it easy for you, but I won't let you stumble around that stupid crime scene and getting increasingly pissed for half the evening either. Nor will I be waiting on you to have the right idea as written in my scenario or to get the non-crappy roll or tangential hook you're stubbornly not giving me to work with today. We've got other things on the to do list for tonight, folks.

Get Clue, ponder Clue, make up harebrained theory to explain Clue, follow insane theory like it makes sense, watch the DM frantically try to connect his dots with your dots: that's the fun part. Figuring the exact brand of insane troll logic the DM expects you to follow and clicking every metaphorical pixel before he rewards you with Clue, that's playing an old Sierra adventure game.

I just wanted to mention the old DC HEROES rpg, where they built an entire adventure around this: the idea was -- do we need spoilers for a twenty-five year old module? If so, skip the rest of this post -- that an aging vigilante on the brink of retirement is staging a crime wave so the up-and-coming superheroes will band together as a team.

Problem is, the PCs might miss some of the planted clues and fail to connect the dots to the designated fall guys. So the aging vigilante tags along, ready to "succeed" if you and yours fail a crucial roll -- because he knew where each clue was before you searched the room or whatever, and so can get the adventure back on track at will. And if you metagamingly mistake that for a hands-on Game Master railroading it, you'll misinterpret the real clues about the character's impossible competence -- which, ironically, only appear if you screw up; if you roll well enough to find the planted evidence and draw the A->B->C->D conclusions and get the drop on those fall guys, the vigilante never does a damn thing to draw attention to himself!

[Zeriel]

.. you don't allow the inclusion of material from sourcebooks you don't own. I mean, that's just common sense.

For a number of reasons, that policy is not possible in my troupe.

For one, we tend to play a lot of mech/ship-heavy tactical games, and if a guy buys a mini and accompanying reference material from the appropriate line, I'm not going to tell him he wasted his $25 even if it DOES have capabilities that are inconvenient for the game I am running.

For another, we have a guy who writes his own games, and because of his hunger for knowing the state of the industry, he has a copy of nearly every book in every major RPG line and most of the indies. NONE of the rest of us buy books any more aside from the local equivalent of the base rules and/or players guide, we just borrow them from him.

[Double Foolscap]

New trick from this weekend's WFRP campaign. We were defending a tower (not ours, we were just looting it) from a band of goblins - they weren't that hard to fight in a balanced combat situation, but they were riding on wolves and there were a lot of them. We'd picked a few off with bows, but none of us were particularly proficient in archery and the goblins were getting in the odd shot here and there. We decided that we needed to take them out in close combat, but didn't really want to take on the wolves as well as the goblins, as they would have got massive outnumbering bonuses and we weren't that sure how powerful wolves were.

Our plan, like the best of plans, was simple and destructive. My companions feinted an attack on their base, and retreated back into the tower. The goblins followed into the main hallway, which opened into a central atrium. I was waiting on the upper landing with a barrel of lamp oil, which I dropped as soon as the goblins got near, chucking a lit torch down after it.

The GM fudged together rules for an improvised bomb, and ruled that on a 5 or a 6 the barrel would break open, and on anything else it would just bounce. He rolled a 6.

The resulting explosion killed all of the wolves and goblins over two or three rounds of burning agony. We had ducked into a side room so were merely badly hurt. We had to exit via the roof once the screaming had died down, because everything was on fire.

We also spent the first hour discussing what supplies we'd need for a three day hike and buying such exotic and rare loot as a tent and cutlery - I love the Warhammer settings :D

[soulmurk]

Now, I admit that there is also a beauty to be found, and fun to be had, in running "old skool", tactical RPGing sessions with 5-foot square mats, 40x60 rooms with limestone walls and three Minotaurs in the middle, count all the pluses but don't forget the Power Attack, gain 250 XP from the orc encounter etc...
But it's not the same game and, in my experience, the two kinds don't mesh all that well. It's nigh-impossible to maintain dramatic tension and mood when the descriptions and banter come to a screeching halt courtesy of the 3 hour rolling-then-sitting-on-your-hands extravaganza that is every skirmish in every combat system ever, or when one guy has a long verbal joust with an NPC and the next guy just goes "I roll Diplomacy, what info does he give me ?". It's also not possible to describe a turn-based combat and keep it fresh and interesting before it quickly devolving into "you hit it with your sword. It looks *roll* a bit hurt. NEXT !". Least I've never seen it happen, nevermind managing it myself.

Strongly disagree. I'm a tactical, by-the-books DM who uses a gaming mat and representative tokens/figurines, obsessively prepares ahead of time and meticulously tracks things like how many rounds that bless spell has left, etc, and our my gaming group... is not. We mesh well precisely because we don't allow those (exaggerated) things to happen.

Dramatic tension is a product of storytelling, and it's possible to be by-the-books and still tell a good story. They're not mutually exclusive.

Combat shouldn't be burdensome. Ours tend to flow pretty well because there's a specific initiative order which I write on the mat where all can see so everyone knows whose turn it is and who goes next. Everyone knows where everyone/thing else is by using the mat and figurines so we bypass the annoying questions like "How far away is X from me?" and "If I cast fireball, how many bad guys can I hit?" (I even have paper cut-outs for each different sized/shaped area effect that the player can lay out on the mat to see exactly what squares will be affected) that tend to bog down combats. And there is little hand-sitting because the combats are generally challenging so anyone not currently going is either paying attention to what everyone else is doing to see how it may impact their next move or else have their noses buried in a book preparing for their next turn.

Finally, it's also a rare thing to have players who enjoy both types of gameplay equally at the same time ; which is to say that plenty of players like both but good luck matching the moods and expectations of all of them at once this Saturday. The solution there is to clearly run one or the other from day 1 and if they don't feel like it, well, It's OK, they don't have to come this time.
Which in my mind is leagues better than them coming only to get bored or annoyed and derailing the game for everyone else, be it by rules-lawyering what's supposed to be a storytelling oeuvre majeure, or insisting on twenty minutes of flowery roleplay when everyone else is rolling initiative, bitch.

It's the DM's job to find the middle ground. It's not always possible, but in my experience it is far more often than it isn't.

[soulmurk]

Ah, here's a tip from this past weekend:

If you're an unarmored arcanist, never be so confident in the destructive power of your spells that you overlook the humble stirge.

Con drain's a bitch.

[Hogfather65]

in D&D - we had a thief who never checked for traps till he fell in one -

Player - 'walk N along corridor'
DM - 'you step on a loose tile which shatters and fall in a hole doing ?? damage'
Player - 'climb out north checking for traps'
DM - 'No trap'

Dumb - but the DM knew he always did this and though he would show him the why it was dumb by setting a trap after a trap - 'Hopefully he will see what happens if he detects a trap and pay more attention'

he never and for the first time he never checked and climbed out of 1 trap to trip the next and killed his thief - sounds corny but I suppose you had to be there and watch his thief he was prowd of die...

Also played a bit of GURPS - did a Red Dwarf adventure once - the guy who played the CAT was great - every time we passed a mirror we all had to drag him away - some times we spent more time on the mirrors than on the quest - he played it spot on but we never played it again.

[CandidGamera]

For a number of reasons, that policy is not possible in my troupe.

For one, we tend to play a lot of mech/ship-heavy tactical games, and if a guy buys a mini and accompanying reference material from the appropriate line, I'm not going to tell him he wasted his $25 even if it DOES have capabilities that are inconvenient for the game I am running.

For another, we have a guy who writes his own games, and because of his hunger for knowing the state of the industry, he has a copy of nearly every book in every major RPG line and most of the indies. NONE of the rest of us buy books any more aside from the local equivalent of the base rules and/or players guide, we just borrow them from him.

I don't follow mech/ship tactical games, so I have no idea what's practical for them or what isn't, but to take D&D as an example - if I own only the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual, then my players have those options - unless they want to gift me with another book..

[Zeriel]

I don't follow mech/ship tactical games, so I have no idea what's practical for them or what isn't, but to take D&D as an example - if I own only the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual, then my players have those options - unless they want to gift me with another book..

Like I said--the "problem" with the culture of my current (10+ years) gamer group is that M. buys ALL the splatbooks--he literally is up over eight of those Ikea 3' bookshelves packed solid with RPG books. Because he'll loan one out indefinitely with no complaints to anyone in the group, any splatbook M. owns is considered part of the communal library unless expressly banned.

If it works differently in your group, that's cool. I'm just objecting to your statements framing my long-term successful GM style as being the worst way to do things.

I don't follow mech/ship tactical games, so I have no idea what's practical for them or what isn't

Realistically? If a guy buys a legal mini it's hard to say "no, you can't use that" even if it has a power you didn't plan for--I had to rebalance EVERY encounter in my last Heavy Gear campaign on the strength of one person joining mid-stream and deciding she wanted a target designator on her scout mech (standard gear for that class, even). The previously well-constrained artillery mech synergized with that like a motherfucker and would have made hash out of a few encounters until I got a feel for it--instead, I ruled the artillerist had to take a penalty since he wasn't used to firing with a forward observer. Totally against the book rules. But at the same time, how else to solve it?
Disallowing a very common mech with a relatively common appendage?
Retroactively nerfing/disallowing artillery mechs, despite it being the character's baby that he'd lovingly customized?
Fudging the rules while I adapted WORKED, and it kept people happy, and it made sense in the context of the story we were telling.

[Chronos]

For one, we tend to play a lot of mech/ship-heavy tactical games, and if a guy buys a mini and accompanying reference material from the appropriate line, I'm not going to tell him he wasted his $25 even if it DOES have capabilities that are inconvenient for the game I am running.
I would just tell the guy before he spends his $25 that it's not going to be allowed unless he clears it with me first. If he still wants to buy it to use with another group, or just to look cool on his shelf, that's his business, but him buying something puts no constraint on me.

[Zeriel]

I would just tell the guy before he spends his $25 that it's not going to be allowed unless he clears it with me first. If he still wants to buy it to use with another group, or just to look cool on his shelf, that's his business, but him buying something puts no constraint on me.

*grins* It's a point of pride with me that I can make anything my players throw at me work as long as it fits setting and general power level.

Believing that will be true indefinitely might count as a stupid D&D trick all its own. :p

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Right. It's important to remember that the dice in an RPG are an abstraction of a (more or less) realistic situation, and baked into that abstraction is the assumption that the character is actively trying to avoid being harmed. If a high level fighter sticks his head into a lit cannon, he's going to die. I don't care how many hit points the character has, or how many damage dice the cannon deals. The cannon's damage was calculated under the assumption that the target is going to try to dodge, or find cover, or do something to avoid taking a direct hit from a fifteen pound ball of iron moving hundreds of miles an hour. If the character isn't taking those precautions, then the damage dice are irrelevant. There's no way any human being can survive that situation, regardless of how many times he's killed something by sticking it with a bit of sharpened steel.
I'd even opened up a new window to respond, but you wrote almost word-for-word what I wanted to say.

[CandidGamera]

Like I said--the "problem" with the culture of my current (10+ years) gamer group is that M. buys ALL the splatbooks--he literally is up over eight of those Ikea 3' bookshelves packed solid with RPG books. Because he'll loan one out indefinitely with no complaints to anyone in the group, any splatbook M. owns is considered part of the communal library unless expressly banned.

If it works differently in your group, that's cool. I'm just objecting to your statements framing my long-term successful GM style as being the worst way to do things.

In my group, I'm the guy with all the books. I'm not going to have my feelings hurt if someone else is running and tells me I can't use a particular prestige class.

Realistically? If a guy buys a legal mini it's hard to say "no, you can't use that" even if it has a power you didn't plan for--I had to rebalance EVERY encounter in my last Heavy Gear campaign on the strength of one person joining mid-stream and deciding she wanted a target designator on her scout mech (standard gear for that class, even). The previously well-constrained artillery mech synergized with that like a motherfucker and would have made hash out of a few encounters until I got a feel for it--instead, I ruled the artillerist had to take a penalty since he wasn't used to firing with a forward observer. Totally against the book rules. But at the same time, how else to solve it?
Disallowing a very common mech with a relatively common appendage?
Retroactively nerfing/disallowing artillery mechs, despite it being the character's baby that he'd lovingly customized?
Fudging the rules while I adapted WORKED, and it kept people happy, and it made sense in the context of the story we were telling.

Well, I see two things to address here. One, if this was the first time the situation came up, then making a houserule is not necessarily a bad thing - so long as you inform the players, it is applied consistently, and - if they were building based on assumptions that the default rules would apply - you allow them the opportunity to fix their character according to the new framework.

Two, if it's standard equipment for that class of mechs, it sounds like you should have actually planned for it.

[Bosstone]

Two, if it's standard equipment for that class of mechs, it sounds like you should have actually planned for it.Not necessarily. To put it in D&D terms, if the PCs involved are a Fighter, a Wizard, a Druid, and a Cleric, should you plan your dungeons assuming someone will have Trapfinding?

[Zeriel]

Not necessarily. To put it in D&D terms, if the PCs involved are a Fighter, a Wizard, a Druid, and a Cleric, should you plan your dungeons assuming someone will have Trapfinding?

That's roughly what happened. Imagine that party, and then halfway through the third dungeon a thief joins up and forces a rebalance.

Depends on how tightly you design your campaigns to your player group, too.

[Kobal2]

Not necessarily. To put it in D&D terms, if the PCs involved are a Fighter, a Wizard, a Druid, and a Cleric, should you plan your dungeons assuming someone will have Trapfinding?

Well, there's a Druid. You should definitely plan on him being able to do everything while out-damaging everyone and still finding the time to schmooze with dryads :D.

(remember, kids: if God hadn't intended you to be able to set off traps in hygienic, eco-friendly yet entertaining ways, He wouldn't have given you spontaneous Summon Nature's Ally I.)

[Oakminster]

(remember, kids: if God hadn't intended you to be able to set off traps in hygienic, eco-friendly yet entertaining ways, He wouldn't have given you spontaneous Summon Nature's Ally I.)

An AD&D 1ED druid probably isn't going to be willing to summon up an animal for disposable trap detector duty. And if he is, he may find he has considerable difficulty regaining his spells....in my game, anyway.

[Kobal2]

An AD&D 1ED druid probably isn't going to be willing to summon up an animal for disposable trap detector duty. And if he is, he may find he has considerable difficulty regaining his spells....in my game, anyway.

Depends. What kind of Druid is your Druid ? Not every one of them is a retarded elf-agenda hippie type, "oooh lookit the kawai deer, we must protect the trees !". Nature is nothing if not ruthless and hardcore. A Druid focusing more on "Nature in the service of Man" (which is the ultimate grounding principle of non-cuckoo real world ecology - not protecting the environment for its own sake, but because we need the environment in order to live in it), or even "Natural selection" aspects of his calling would have absolutely no trouble with conjuring up Fluffie the Hamster to go and see if that suspicious tile has an acid bath underneath.a
Fluffie dies ? Tough luck, but no big. Death is just a transitive state of being and an integral part of the grand wheel of life. Besides, is leading Fluffy to his death in order to save my life different from a lion killing a gazelle to save his ?
Fluffy lives ? Cool. That's one resourceful hamster. Good strong genes. Fit for breeding. Gotta respect that.

Or you can go more whacky: I currently play a druid who's along more traditional, "ooh lookit the kawai deer !" lines. Except that he's a Pathfinder Goblin, and as such he's culturally inclined to hate, fear and despise both dogs and horses. So he won't summon a bear to trigger the trap, that would be cruel and disrespectful and stuff. In fact he'll even have ethical/empathetical problems with summoning a bear to help him in combat - the bear might get hurt.
Dogs ? Summon 'em to torture them before you eat them alive. Filthy creatures. Off into the trap with you !

Which goes back to what I was saying in the OOTS thread: roleplaying comes in when trying to justify ridiculous stunts :D

Dramatic tension is a product of storytelling, and it's possible to be by-the-books and still tell a good story. They're not mutually exclusive.

Yes. And emphatic no.
It wholly depends on what one files under the "dramatic tension" header. In my experience, there's an intellectual sort of dramatic tension, which stems from engaging plots, interesting NPCs and so forth. This is the part where your players are stimulated by your story, rather than the plot just being there as a backdrop for action. They, as individuals, want to know where this is going.

And then there a wholly emotional, or instinctive maybe, sort of dramatic tension which is much harder to achieve. This is when your players are hanging from your lips like so many 10 year olds being told their bedtime story, not only listening to the words but believing them, being a part of them and experiencing feelings that are tied to the story and their in-game characters in spite of the fact that they're really 30-somethings chugging Diet Coke in a comfy living room.

I'm not sure I'm making myself very clear, here. To put it in other words: the first is like watching an interesting movie, the second is forgetting you're not in the movie.

The second kind is very, very hard to generate. I won't lie and tell you I can do it every session. It takes a lot of time and effort to make them forget who they are and where they stand, it's almost an exercise in hypnosis.
But when it does happen it is also very fragile. Any distraction will dispel that kind of weird, fugure, enthralled state ; be it a 5 minute break to order the pizza or, yes, a mechanical reminder that they're really 30-somethings playing make believe in a comfy living room. And that's where rules and dice screw things up, because as soon as tactical, 5-foot square, obscure combat manoeuvre tables are involved they're yanked out of it and into, as you say yourself, pondering tactical decisions, thinking about their next move in terms of rules and poring through rulebooks for their next tactical Eureka.

They're back to playing a game instead of being in the game's universe. The atmosphere is now quite dead. Good luck bringing it back once the Turn-Based Tactics part is over. You'll have to start over from scratch and, as I said before, it's already hard to get that mojo going at all in the first place.

It's very similar to those Japanese console RPGs where you take 3 steps, a battle happens out of nowhere that is set in a sort of alternate, limbo combat land ; and when you win you're taken back to the spot where you came from, all turned around and having half forgotten where you were going, never mind why you're here in the first place. In the end, you're either focusing on the story, in which case the random battles become an unwelcome distraction that you correct as soon as possible by using "no random monsters" items ; or you're more interested in your characters' stats and loot and numbers and strategy, and plot + cutscenes are just inconvenient and annoying.

But hey. If you do manage to mix and match successfully, more power to you. You're a better DM than I am.

[Balance]

An AD&D 1ED druid probably isn't going to be willing to summon up an animal for disposable trap detector duty. And if he is, he may find he has considerable difficulty regaining his spells....in my game, anyway.
In an old 2Ed campaign, we had a druid who, upon being informed that the whole plane was collapsing and there was no time to stop and loot, shapeshifted into a kangaroo and dove through a mound of random treasure, hoping to scoop some into her pouch without losing too much speed.

She also came across a Tooth of Dalver Nah that conferred the ability to Mass Animate Dead. She promptly knocked out one of her own teeth to put the relic in its place.

Yeah, the player was the girlfriend of one of the DMs, and only played when he was running the campaign.

[Chronos]

Quoth CandidGamera:
Two, if it's standard equipment for that class of mechs, it sounds like you should have actually planned for it. I'd go further than that: Artillery plus forward spotter is a standard enough combination that the game designers should have planned for it. Either there should be counterbalances already baked into the rules to keep that from being dominant, or it should actually be dominant, in which case you should be running into enemies using that same combo on a regular basis.

EDIT: There were Teeth of Dalver-Nah in 2nd edition? In 3rd, those are associated with Pact Magic, which (so far as I know) didn't exist in 2nd.

[Zeriel]

Quoth CandidGamera:I'd go further than that: Artillery plus forward spotter is a standard enough combination that the game designers should have planned for it. Either there should be counterbalances already baked into the rules to keep that from being dominant, or it should actually be dominant, in which case you should be running into enemies using that same combo on a regular basis.

Er, yeah, there were things in game to balance that. But not THAT game, because we had a bunch of melee and short-range mechs and one guy in a artillery mech and no spotter.

Just when I got enough scenarios planned and rolling smoothly taking into account the adjusted threat of artillery with fairly severe penalties, someone then joined with a targeting laser. *facepalm* Cue the rewrite of many of the battles.

[Balance]

EDIT: There were Teeth of Dalver-Nah in 2nd edition? In 3rd, those are associated with Pact Magic, which (so far as I know) didn't exist in 2nd.
Actually, now that you mention it (and I'm home with my books), the Teeth were in 1st Edition AD&D, though the campaign that one showed up in was mostly 2nd.
The Teeth of Dahlver-Nar: If any cleric was more powerful than the renowned Dahlver-Nar, histories do not tell us. The gods themselves gave special powers to him, and these have passed on to others by means of the great relics of Dahvler-Nar, his teeth. Each of the Teeth has some power, and if one charcter manages to gain a full quarter, half, or all of them, other grand benefits accrue. In order to gain the power of one of these teeth, however, the character must place it into his or her mouth, where it will graft itself in the place of a like missing tooth. The teeth can never be removed once so emplaced, short of the demise of the possessor. Their powers/effects are:

...and like all the 1st Edition artifacts and relics, what follows that description is a chart full of blanks, which the DM was supposed to fill (by die roll, whim, or plot demands) from tables of good and bad effects and powers, ranging from being able to Bless by touch or having acne to gaining the ability to simultaneously cast multiple spells or accidentally unleashing a demon that will devour his soul (no save) and use his body to try to kill all his friends and companions.

I think they've been retconned dragon teeth these days. Good luck fitting that set of dentures into a humanoid jaw.

[Chronos]

In 3rd, their precise origin is left somewhat vague, though they're definitely each associated with a different vestige (which, without going into more detail, are entities associated with pact magic). They come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and they can all fit into a humanoid jaw, but it does say that some of them will be quite prominent in such a setting. I think they're all considered minor artifacts, which means they're not world-warpingly powerful like major artifacts, and there may be multiples of them, but no living mortal knows how to make them.

[AlienVessels]

Not necessarily. To put it in D&D terms, if the PCs involved are a Fighter, a Wizard, a Druid, and a Cleric, should you plan your dungeons assuming someone will have Trapfinding?

Why not? Find Traps was a 2nd level Cleric spell.

Besides, IMO tailoring dungeons to the party ends up cropping out certain kinds of fun outcomes.

[CandidGamera]

That's roughly what happened. Imagine that party, and then halfway through the third dungeon a thief joins up and forces a rebalance.

Depends on how tightly you design your campaigns to your player group, too.

So he just showed up one day and sat down at the table, shoved his character sheet under your nose, and said "I'm joining the game right now, or else?"

[CandidGamera]

They're back to playing a game instead of being in the game's universe. The atmosphere is now quite dead. Good luck bringing it back once the Turn-Based Tactics part is over. You'll have to start over from scratch and, as I said before, it's already hard to get that mojo going at all in the first place.

Well, here, I think, is the disconnect. I play roleplaying games because they are games that involve roleplaying. If you and your friends want to sit around and tell stories at each other, more power to you, but it's not really a game at that point. I enjoy RPGs on both levels.

As for the claim that the dice hurt immersion - personally, my suspension of disbelief would be more hampered by my Mace of Disruption never managing to kill an important bad guy.

[Zeriel]

So he just showed up one day and sat down at the table, shoved his character sheet under your nose, and said "I'm joining the game right now, or else?"

Look, man. If you had a guy who was a regular in your games for 10 years but couldn't make it to this one because he's scheduled to work that day/time, and he shows up at your door 6-8 sessions into the campaign with an appropriate character sheet for what you've been doing and says "my shift got changed again, can I get in on this?", are you saying you WOULDN'T let the guy sit down and adapt your game to his presence?

This is a ROUTINE feature of DMing in my troupe.

As for the claim that the dice hurt immersion - personally, my suspension of disbelief would be more hampered by my Mace of Disruption never managing to kill an important bad guy.

I highly doubt it's "never", just "not on a balls-lucky first-round crit".

[CandidGamera]

Look, man. If you had a guy who was a regular in your games for 10 years but couldn't make it to this one because he's scheduled to work that day/time, and he shows up at your door 6-8 sessions into the campaign with an appropriate character sheet for what you've been doing and says "my shift got changed again, can I get in on this?", are you saying you WOULDN'T let the guy sit down and adapt your game to his presence?

This is a ROUTINE feature of DMing in my troupe.

I'd expect him to call ahead the day before. And even if something seems unbalanced with a 'surprise player' character for a session - so what? It's one session. You can plan for it the next session.

[Kobal2]

Look, man. If you had a guy who was a regular in your games for 10 years but couldn't make it to this one because he's scheduled to work that day/time, and he shows up at your door 6-8 sessions into the campaign with an appropriate character sheet for what you've been doing and says "my shift got changed again, can I get in on this?", are you saying you WOULDN'T let the guy sit down and adapt your game to his presence?

This is a ROUTINE feature of DMing in my troupe.

Yeah, schedule problems are pretty much impossible to avoid when you're trying to get half a dozen adults in the same room regularly, with their jobs and girlfriends and kids and so forth.

One of my mates managed to find a way around his frustrations at all the last-minute cancels by making it a part of the game itself and basically overbooking his sessions. We were playing an Unknown Armies-inspired homebrew game, with the twist that we were also in a sort of X-Files meets The A Team TV series, with beginning and end credits for each "episode" and so forth. He had like a dozen players all told, but rotated them in and out as chaotic schedules dictated so there were rarely more than 5 players at the table at any given time. The full roster was divided into a handful of core teams, each with their own plotlines that criss-crossed depending on who was "on screen" this week.

Sometimes it was hard to keep track of what the hell was going on (especially since, y'know, Unknown Armies. Incomprehensible confusing conspiracies is the name of the game), but I thought it was a pretty cool gimmick.

[Zeriel]

One of my mates managed to find a way around his frustrations at all the last-minute cancels by making it a part of the game itself and basically overbooking his sessions. We were playing an Unknown Armies-inspired homebrew game, with the twist that we were also in a sort of X-Files meets The A Team TV series, with beginning and end credits for each "episode" and so forth. He had like a dozen players all told, but rotated them in and out as chaotic schedules dictated so there were rarely more than 5 players at the table at any given time. The full roster was divided into a handful of core teams, each with their own plotlines that criss-crossed depending on who was "on screen" this week.

I tried that once in a Secret Ops-style Star Wars campaign, and ended up with a "season end" battle that was attended by 14 people in-character.

Uniformly regarded as the best single RPG session EVER by a majority of participants, I still never want to do it again. :D

I'd expect him to call ahead the day before. And even if something seems unbalanced with a 'surprise player' character for a session - so what? It's one session. You can plan for it the next session.

I swear to you, I am not making this up, a member of my troupe for stupid landlord+poverty reasons) does not have a cellphone, landline phone or home internet access. He just shows up, or not, unless he can get to the library during operating hours and send an e-mail.

This is why I protest generalizations about GM style.

[Unpronounceable]

Why not? Find Traps was a 2nd level Cleric spell.

Unfortunately, in 3 & 3.5, the Find Traps spell simply allows said cleric to use his cross-class Search skill. With only 2+int (dump stat for clerics) skill points per level, he's probably not putting too much into cross-class skills...it pretty much means he may have a 1 or 2-in-20 chance of finding said trap at best.

[Arrogance Ex Machina]

Today's stupid WHFRP tricks:

If you find an incredibly evil and malevolent artifact of great power, hitting it with a hammer very, very hard might deflect the strike back at you instead of destroying it. Looks like my sigmarite priest can almost kill himself in one blow ... almost.

Also, apparently just because a necromancer reanimated the dead legendary hero of a town and you killed both doesn't make it cool to loot the hero's armor and take it to the town's blacksmith for refitting so you can wear it. Oops.

[Chronos]

The 3.5 version also gives a significant bonus to the skill check. It's not enough at high levels, but it'll at least let you pinch-hit for a missing rogue at low levels.

[Unpronounceable]

Ah, yes, that's right...+caster level (max 10).

Of course, you still can't disarm them or anything.

[paperbackwriter]

For certain values of "disarm," what the meat shield is for, isn't it?

[Miller]

I'd expect him to call ahead the day before. And even if something seems unbalanced with a 'surprise player' character for a session - so what? It's one session. You can plan for it the next session.

See, for me, the primary draw of role playing is getting to hang out with my friends. I'd feel kinda shitty about myself if I told a friend he couldn't hang out with me, and a bunch of our mutual friends, because he didn't make a reservation early enough.

Mind, the way my role playing group functions like Zeriel's. We've got about a dozen people in the group, only about half of whom can make it to any given gaming session. Usually, it works out okay. Sometimes, everyone shows up at once, and I've got to run a game for as many as ten players. Sure, it slows the game waaaaay down. On the other hand, I get to spend an afternoon with a whole bunch of people I really like. Small price to pay, in my book.

[Chronos]

Well, I play RPGs because I like having good times with my friends. If the character one of them is using is making things less fun for everyone else, then something needs to be done about that. What, precisely, that something is depends, of course, on how the character is un-fun. The fix might be as simple as crossing off a single spell on a spell list, or it might be as drastic as having him roll up an entirely new character.

[CandidGamera]

I swear to you, I am not making this up, a member of my troupe for stupid landlord+poverty reasons) does not have a cellphone, landline phone or home internet access. He just shows up, or not, unless he can get to the library during operating hours and send an e-mail.

This is why I protest generalizations about GM style.

And even if something seems unbalanced with a 'surprise player' character for a session - so what? It's one session. You can plan for it the next session.

And this is why I covered that base.

[CandidGamera]

See, for me, the primary draw of role playing is getting to hang out with my friends. I'd feel kinda shitty about myself if I told a friend he couldn't hang out with me, and a bunch of our mutual friends, because he didn't make a reservation early enough.

I'd feel I had a pretty shitty friend if they dropped by unannounced and felt entitled to join in as a character I hadn't had a chance to review.

[Tengu]

On the topic of letting ridiculous dice rolls derail things...

In the first campaign I played with my current group (this was the same campaign where I got sent flying by an exploding Hellhound), in one battle, the GM had set us against a Displacer Beast...it was actually slightly too powerful for our party, nominally (there were 3 of us - my knife-fighting, illusion-and-force wizard/bard, a fire-evoker wizard, and a thief), but we should've been able to take it, even taking a bit of a beating.

First, maybe second round. Wizard comes up, firebombs it. The dice LOVE her. (And she got racial bonuses, due to fire-elemental heritage.) Fries the bastard. Boom, combat meant to take most of the night: over.

For the characters, it was a 'oh, yeah, we rock!' *shake booty* moment.
For the players, it was five minutes of uproarious laughter and material for teasing the GM for the next five years. (All it took was referring to a monster we were up against as a 'displacer beast' and you could make him go red, and crack everyone else up. But there's been a lot of change in the group since then, so the joke's died since only a couple of us get it any more, and we've mostly gotten over it, anyway.)

[Zeriel]

I'd feel I had a pretty shitty friend if they dropped by unannounced and felt entitled to join in as a character I hadn't had a chance to review.

I'm not going to tell you that your DMing style is pretty much the worst thing for feeling that way, though.

[CandidGamera]

I'm not going to tell you that your DMing style is pretty much the worst thing for feeling that way, though.

I wasn't talking about your feelings when I made my comments, either, so - what?

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

Stories about stupid D&D tricks in this thread: awesome.

Bitching about the DMing styles of people you'll never even play with anyway in this thread: losery.