Useless magic items

You could then, theoretically, find some clothes and get a decent haircut. I’d recommend that.

In 1st or 2nd Edition AD&D, a normal character can’t swing any weapon more than once per minute. :wink:

This is anothe of those items I’d class as cursed, rather than useless. Bloody scary, too.

Interesting cursed items - either humourous or deathly serious - might be an interesting other thread, actually…

In AD&D, such an item would probably qualify as an *artifact: unique, really old, really powerful, and with really really bad side effects. (Plus, it gets a better saving throw against a rod of cancellation and can still operate inside an anti-magic shell.)

At the beginning of the campaign, the DM declared to us that there was a +5 item somewhere along the way. Being fairly low level characters (2-3), we thought this was pretty kickass.

So a ways into the campaign we cleared out this shack of some pretty tough creatures and someones casts detect magic. We figure there has to be some pretty good loot here, right? Only thing (besides our stuff we already had) that glows blue is the [clears throat] butter knife. [shock & disbelief] He then says, “Yeah, but its a 1d2”. He finds our facial expressions to be “priceless” in the midst of his laughter, and decides to reveal, “Oh by the way, this IS the +5 item”. One of us picks it up anyways, even thought the appraised value was practically nothing.

As it turns out it was our cunning assasin who turned in a more priceless moment when it occured to him that when attempting a backstab, a +5 butter knife is better than a +1 short sword.

I lost count of how many times the DM has rued that little joke…

HAJI wrote:

See, that’s what the DM gets for not understanding the math. Obviously, a +5 weapon has a 20% greater chance of hitting than the +1 weapon you’d normally give to low-level characters. More importantly, the average damage on 1d6+1 is 4.5, where the average damage on 1d2+5 is 6.5, with a minimum damage of 6. This isn’t rocket science. Hell, I flunked out of rocket science, and I can do this crap.

But I thought the +5 butter knife was only supposed to be +5 vs. butter! pout

Sure, Butter Knife +1, +5 vs. Butter. I can see some mage blowing a point of CON on that, sure. Don’t get me wrong. But that would have made the teaser a bit of a cheat, unless the DM then went on to send butter golems at the party. Butter elementals, perhaps? From the Elemental Plane of Butter, which is just a stone’s throw down the wormhole from the Elemental Plane of Flapjacks and Syrup.

Johnny Angel: You never know what substances a depraved DM will make golems out of.

I have cannabis golems in my campaign.

That’s trouble waiting to happen. Drop a fireball, and the next thing you know all the lembas wafers have been eaten.

Fire damages a cannabis golem, Johnny, but it doesn’t destroy them unless they’re low on hit points.

Still, it’s got to be a Special Defense of some sort. Use fire on the golem, and everyone in a 15’ radius has to make a CON save or mellow for 1d6 rounds.

Hell, Johnny, a cannabis golem can breath out a cone of super-concentrated marijuana smoke (I forget the exact dimensions) once every other round. Players caught within that smoke must save or be intoxicated. If a player is a partier, the save is -4.

But thank you for your suggestion. It just gave me a couple of evil ideas. :D:D:D:D

After all, what’s the first thing your party is liable to try?

I never try to predict what a party will try to do, Johnny. Years of experience have taught me that some players will think of stuff I wouldn’t dream of in a 100 years, and others can’t see something as obvious as the nose on Cyrano de Berganac’s face.

Cyrano de Berganac ?!

He was the cousin with the REALLY big nose.

I’ve had characters try to get stoned on hemp rope. I told them it wasn’t as strong as the regular stuff, so they smoked all 50 feet.

FWIW, the house rules for the campaign I’m currently playing in include a “Knowledge: Illicit Drugs” skill and a “Master of the Kama Sutra” Feat. Our elven rogue is seriously hooked on “krank”, a stimulant the dwarves cooked up specifically to turn the elves into addicts. On the plus side, he gets a major bonus to his speed after a hit.

If you want to take a hit of LSD in a D&D game, do you have to roll to hit?