Stupid D&D tricks

The Game Room
341

Oh, another funny albeit slightly mean-spirited trick I played on my players since last this thread died :

So I’m running a game with a player that sometimes pisses me off. The first problem is that he already knows the adventure (and has DM’d it himself) - he assured me when we started that it was some time ago, and that he could dissociate what he knows from what his character knows. Fair enough says I… but in practice his character sometimes has “insights” into where the loot is and so on, or which NPCs to question. Which, over time, can be grating, but I usually re-jigger the scenarios enough that it isn’t too bad and can throw some curveballs at him.
The second and main problem is that he’s a munchkin’s munchkin - in this case, he rolled a character that, in a campaign fairly focused on spying and thievery and ambushes so on, winds up with a passive Perception score in the mid-40s. So, basically, he walks into a room and knows where anything is hidden and there’s no point to there being traps at all as they might as well be painted in neon. Which is not very fun.

So I resolved to punish that.
The group is raiding a very ancient and powerful thieves’ guild’s HQ/treasure house. His “insights” draw them towards the saferoom - which they find empty. He shoots me a quizzical look, I just give him my best enigmatic smile. Then a little later they wind up in a hallway where he spots a fairly badly hidden secret door (that isn’t in the original scenario). He gets giddy because he figures that’s where the new treasure room is, and gets the party rogue to pick the lock. Beyond is a 5x5 room, with a better hidden secret door across from them. “we check that door for traps” he says. “OK. You don’t find any”. They open the door, which leads to… a 5x5 room with a still better hidden secret door across the room. “OK, I open the door”. Repeat a couple times until they are used to the pattern and stop searching for traps. Then the secret door opens… but the previous door immediately shuts down, magically turns into more wall, and a Cloudkill spell bursts from the center of the room. Uh oh. And they’re now in a 5x5 room with no secret door in front of them, but a gigantic metal Fort Knox-style one instead, with a lock that’s just as beefy. The rogue manages to open it, but they still have to spend a couple turns inside the Cloudkill, and no time to check for more traps. And find what else behind the door but a 5x5 room, the door they just took clanks shut and welds itself into the frame, new Cloudkill, new harsh door etc…
All in all they have to go through a semi-spiral of a dozen such gas chambers, and each time the Rogue has to finagle with the locks. They wouldn’t have made it, had the party’s monk (still in the original hallway) not eventually managed to kill the wall and pull them out. At the end of the gauntlet of 5x5 rooms and Cloudkills is a corridor leading to a gold-ish pedestal where a crystal ball rests on a velvet cushion. They go to it (this time checking for, and finding, the last trap, which would have crumbled the whole floor), pick it up - and the ball just goes “Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.”. Under it is a very old taunting message from the guild’s founder.

I mean, this is a thieves’ guild. They know how thieves think :). The actual loot they’d just thrown down the garden well throughout the years, it’s a simple Climb check to get it back. The group has kept the Taunting Fun Ball, finding it just about the most brilliant magic item ever, and even managed to trick some guards with it later on !

342

I’ve mainly been playing non-D&D style games of late, but I did have a Mage in a nWoD game create the equivalent of small nuclear weapons without resulting to vulgar magic, so we could nuke a demon lord.

I suppose the Star Wars game could also qualify, though. We hijacked a siege droid on Coruscant, in the Old Republic era. It was left over from the Sith Empire’s attack on the planet, though it was Republic aligned - but its programming had become corrupt. It would attack anything that came near it, and it was armed more heavily than some capital ships.

So we immediately decided to make use of it. We determined that it’s weakest fire arc was overhead - had our Jedi use Move Object to keep it from bringing its guns to bear, and dropped our own droid onto its back, where he cut through the armor with his tools, accessed the droid’s systems, and uploaded a copy of his own personality to overwrite the defective code.

Once we’d recruited the siege droid, we wired in a comlink to stay in touch, and set it to causing havoc for the Black Suns gang while we did some investigating.

Our main mission was to rescue a Senator’s daughter from the Black Suns, and we found her - in a fully armed shuttle on a protected pad in the middle of their territory, with lots of guards. We infiltrate, our noble bribes some folks, but the problem was it would be difficult to rush the cockpit where she was held without one of the kidnappers putting a gun to her head.

So we called in the siege droid, who started wrecking shit. All the criminals panic. I’d snuck up to the exterior of the shuttle as part of the maintenance crew, and used my skills to patch into the ship’s computer systems - re-writing their flight control codes so only I could start the ship.

About that time, the siege droid accidentally takes out a key support for the launch pad, so we all jump onto the shuttle, face to face with the kidnappers - and it goes into free fall. They can’t start the ship, and they are panicked.

Me : “Hi! This is your new captain speaking. If you’d like me to start the engines, kindly hand your weapons to the Jedi flight attendant, and we’ll get under way.”

343

Oooh Star Wars ! This was back in 2nd ed, when Ewoks had stupid good combat stats (they still might, for all I know).

So the group gets tasked with sabotaging a newfangled Star Destroyer that’s currently in space dry dock. They have multiple options to try and get on board, but are scared that too many new faces among the crew or strange incidents with the ground personnel might give the game away, and of course since the group has an Ewok and the Empire is super-racist, that’s a problem too. So they resolve that only one of them will get in, then find a way to bring the rest aboard. Having the best speachifying, the smuggler volunteers and gets hired as security detail on the ground, then hacks himself paperwork for a transfer on the ship. Then he hacks some more to get the group’s Lambda shuttle into the re-supply rotation. All fine so far.

Then they get caught while trying to climb into the ventilation ducts, which they planned on using to get into restricted areas. The patrol commander, understandably, wants to know what the hell they think they’re doing, and who the hell are they, and what is that (pointing to the Ewok) doing on his bloody ship ?!

Smuggler : They’re the uuuuuh new cleaning crew. Independent contractors.
Patrol guy : Oh really.
Smuggler : Ayup. Best in the business. What they do is, they shove him (the Ewok) into the air ducts, then blast compressed air after him. Ducts are squeaky clean after that !

I didn’t even have him roll for bluff, it was so good a story :slight_smile:

344

Playing D&D with my 5 year old. He we powerlevel his half-orc fighter to level ten with real life quests like being nice to his grandmother from out of town and cleaning up his room. Pretty much gains a level every play session but he knows its going to stop when he gets to level 10.

So finally he gets to level 10 and we are ready to go hunt down the horrible beasts that plague his lands (he now has a keep and a small army of men at arms). He has to go out and deal with a green dragon and he tries to make friends. I tell him that green dragons are known to be evil and he lectures me about bigotry and prejudice. So wtf am I supposed to do. I let him make a deal with the green dragon to join his army, rinse and repeat with all sorts of intelligent monsters. He conquers his neighboring kingdoms, assimilates all the orc clans into his army and pretty soon the elves and dwarves attack him for amassing an army of orcs and other assorted monsters despite the fact that his army hasn’t really done anything that human armies haven’t been doing (typical conquer your neighbor type stuff).

That’s when I realized how racist D&D was.

345

Well, because they are actually completely different species, not simply humans in other forms. This is a problem I have with very few players, who never seem to grok this and are upset that they can’t play a Troll adventurer and just hang out in the gnome bar with their buddies.

Green Dragons are evil. That’s the way they’re made. While they can be bargained with, they’re not going to be your friend, unless being so allows them to eat you later at their convenience. Orcs are foul, disgusting creatures, not downtrodden victims of racism who aren’t like they’re portrayed.

346

wow this thread was like one of the very first post (#2) I ever made on the board and it goes to show that no matter how great the online games get they cant replace the best element of the PNP games

the human element…with some moron sauce thrown in for fun …

Who makes star wars pnp games these days ? I know it was something like west end games or something but I remember they were bought out by someone

white wolf is owned by a pc game company whos trying to resurrect the vamp were and maeg games for pc and possibly mmorpg titles

and still to this day I never found a place that ran/runs shadow run games who owns the pnp rights these days (and battletech/MechWarrior)

347

West End had the license from about '87 up through 2000 or so. Then Wizards of the Coast acquired it, and released a game using a modified version of the d20 system they’d unveiled for D&D 3rd edition earlier that year. Three years ago, Fantasy Flight got the license, and came out with their own version.

348

Anyone ever run an utter, complete 100% crapsack realistic adventure? By that i mean…let’s say:

“Bob, the road collapses under you, you’ve caved in some kind of tunnel. Yes, maybe this is connected to that lich tomb of legend. Did you all bring torches? How about some shovels. No you can’t just go into the forest and try and find an entrance. Have you ever seen a REAL forest? plus it’s really getting dark. And if you’ll recall i told you all it was raining and you ignored me, so you’re all going to be rolling for hypothermia here soon.”

Party goes back to town. “No you can’t equip now, everyone is asleep.” In the morning. A shopkeep: “I don’t know where my supplier is…” The stagecoach hit that hole and are picking up the pieces.

Now hopefully the party has found a way to keep their mouth shut about all this…and a way to get in without drawing a bunch of attention.

And NO…no gelatinous cubes just hanging out in rooms. The tomb has to make some kind of sense.

edit: It may not sound like fun, but the interest would be in fantasy deconstruction, and more feudal politics than DnDing.

349

One of my DMs has a different tack : the weird ecology of the dungeon stay as per scenario, but he wants to make them feel like real places, not just a collection of fight rooms. So the mobs move about, flee to each other or bring reinforcements… When our party rests or 'ports out to sleep and recharge, they often get ambushed or find that the loot has disappeared along with its owners if they feel they can’t beat us. It’s pretty fun, and led to a great almost-party-wipe.

We were tasked with destroying an oni inside the pagoda it was sealed in. We enter the ground floor and find stairs going up and a huge hole in the floor that seems to go pretty far down. I urge the group to go up because while a hole in the ground can go for miles, a tower is at least a finite space - so assuming we shock 'n awe the upper floors, whatever’s in the cellars won’t have the time to hit us in the back and we’ll have a safe line of retreat. They, on the other hand, reason that the onis were probably the ones who blasted the hole in the first place, and that’s where we’ll find them. “Besides, who says the tower is really finite ? Maybe there’s a magic portal up there !” “… that’s very unlikely, though. Much less likely than tunnels going down for bloody ever” replies I. I’m still outvoted and down we go.

Turns out the rabbit hole is pretty deep.
We turn up in a huge cave that has its own tower in it, full of hobgoblins that snipe at us. We clean them, proceed forward, reach stairs going to to yet another building-within-a-cave, this time a big ass bastion and the gobs’ inside are prepared for a damn siege. We manage to clean up but start running low on spells and healing items. “C’mon, we can’t be far from the end, we shouldn’t turn back now !” says the majority. We proceed onwards and find some monk/ninjas that fuck our shit right up. We barely make it out with our lives, and thanks to the Terror spell I cast at half of them to give us some breathing room we know they’ll be back soon, very likely with friends in tow. Also the elf fighter/mage who was on the verge of dying has invis’d and ran away, we don’t know where. Good times.

We try and race back to maybe find some nook to rest in in the first cave… but find it is now full of giant spiders and magic-flinging dridder-like critters. See, those had been living in the pagoda and they were the ones who’d been sieging the hobgoblins. So when we plowed through the hobgoblin vanguard, they seized the opportunity to move their little tug-of-war forward. And now we hear the goblin scouts screeching from whence we came…
Long story short, we managed to barricade ourselves in an armory in the bastion for the night, thank the gods for silent image and a lenient DM.

Flash forward two sessions and we find ourselves delving into another tower full of evil. With stairs up and down on the ground floor. “A TOWER. IS. A. FINITE. SPACE !” I remind them. This time they heed my sensible advice.
On the last floor of the tower is a two-way portal to some evil plane :smack:.

350

OK, smash the portal and then go back down.

351

Yeah, I’ve had realistic consequences quite often for players and mostly it just results in whining and people saying they want things to be easier. :frowning:

352

Yeah, I do that in my games, too. I’ve got a player who makes it easy, though. He’s constantly sneaking off in the middle of combat to explore more of the dungeon. Then he almost invariably fails his stealth check, and drags the new monsters into the current encounter. One module, he ended up pulling half the dungeon into a single fight.

I’ve been on that campaign! Jade Regent, right? We did the tower before the underground (which went on forever). Our problem was convincing the wizard not to just start lobbing fireballs into the (clearly treasure-laden) webs that choked the tower interior. Actually, the real problem was having to convince him every round.

Round 1:
“Uh, I guess I’ll cast a fireball?”
“Dude, no! You’ll destroy all the loot!”
“Oh, right. Magic missle, then.”

Round 2:
“Can I have the fireball template?”
“Didn’t we just talk about this?”
“Oh, yeah.”

Round 3:
“If I put a fireball here…”
“ARGH!”

353

I don’t see any difference from any conversation between a typical wizard and his party there…

354

Yup !

355

So it’s in their genes? That sounds kinda racist. They might be different species but not so different that they cannot breed with humans. Remember, my kid was playing a half orc.

Orcs love their children as much as humans do, don’t they? Is it ok to slaughter orc babies?

Can green dragons raised in "good"environments become good?

Can a drow become a good ranger?

356

Two different playstyles. Certainly there’s the cartoonish/videogamish/Tolkienish approach of considering all creatures aligned by race. That can be fun, but is obviously not very applicable to the real world.

I once had a world in which ghuls (statwise orcs, but renamed for the world) were the sworn enemies of humans. After some years of nonaggression, a player really wanted to play a ghul cleric on a peace mission. She left her encampment to bring a message to the humans, a message of peace; but while she was gone, a human scouting party discovered her encampment and slaughtered the ghuls there.

The PC discovered the massacre when, in the marketplace, she saw bits of her companions being sold as traditional medicines or as magical components.

357

This was one of the major ideals of the Eberron Campaign Setting, that a creature’s alignment was up to that individual creature, regardless of species. (With some exceptions; some creatures, like demons, devils, aberrations, and undead were still “always evil”).

358

One fun trick was to overwhelm the party with beggers and orphans when they rode into a town all shiny and sparkling.

The inevitable result was either the party retreats or the town ends up being slaughtered/abandoned.

359

I remember playing a happy-go-lucky Bard in Planescape, the party goes to some god forsaken hovel in Sigil and I do coin tricks for the orphans there, play a little free music… Then suddenly I have an epiphany :

Me : “Errr, how assholish does my character look to them ? I mean, does my lute look posh ?”
DM : “It looks like a musical instrument.” (meaning : something frivolous you can’t eat and still could afford)
Me : “Oooooh… Hum, I’ll get closer to [the party’s half-orc fighter] then :smack:”

360

Our group usually doesn’t mind a little bit of meta-gaming. We think it’s not much fun to immediately be turned to stone becuase your character doesn’t recognize a basilisk from a monitor lizard. So all the more ironic is the following story:

Usually I’m the GM in our group, so I have a pretty good knowledge of all the monsters out there and their abilities. However, this particular time I was the player, and I rolled up a pretty decent Monk. His AC was through the roof, and he had a pretty good unarmed attack, even when blind-fighting.

So there we were, out adventuring, when we hear some rustling in the underbrush and a few seconds later out comes this rooster/turkey-hybrid beast charging at us.

I warn the group: “look out guys, I think this is a cockatrice, we all know what not to do, right?”

“Right!”, they chant in unison.

“Let me, I’ll handle this”, and before anyone can say anything I put on a blindfold and charge back. I take a flying leap and plant my heel right in the beast’s eyes. A natural 20, critical hit.

The other players watch in stunned silence, obviously too overcome by my sheer brilliance to speak. Being blindfolded, the GM rules that even though I have the blind-fighting feat, I lose my Dex and Wis bonus to AC for the beast’s first attack, since I just touched it. I shrug, “Sure mate, let the little beasty pick me before I go full kung-fu on it”. The GM rolls, he hits me. 2 damage, the GM tells me. I mock him for his puny attack. “Oh, and also roll me a Fortitue save.”

“Excuse me now?” I said, uncredulously. “Remember I’m blindfolded, yes?”

The GM nods, but insists, with a menacing smile. I roll: 11. My body stiffens and I’m turned to stone.

The other player’s are still stunned. “You do know that these beasts petrify on hit, right?”

I did not. I’m still living this down, 10 years later.