Improptu story. Six players, four of us would DM at different times, but nobody had prepared anything. Since we’d just been victorious against a bunch of baddies, my brother Jay decided to DM the victory party. We split around, each going his own way, and each getting a bit of an individual story. The golem (our rules lawyer back then, now an actual lawyer; the nick was because his characters were more warriorator than human warrior) was about to get laid when we were attacked. A lot of mayhem, multiple holes in walls and ceilings and very few actual wounds later, the attacker had been turned into a tree and decorated with multiple colored lights turning round and round above its leafless crown (it was November).
We can still make each other break into grins by making a “round and round” gesture or saying “pretty lights”. The rules lawyer eventually got laid; none of his golems ever did…
Playtesting the first draft of rules for GURPS Supers, we came across the conflicting rules governing how much damage a falling object does when it hits something, and how much the falling object takes. As it turns out, it inflicts about ten times as much damage as it took. So, we surmised that the real method the Polish resistance used to destroy tanks in WWII wasn’t Molotov cocktails; they just jumped out of tall buildings onto them, wearing steel boots. Or, you could sink an aircraft carrier by dropping a 10-lb weight on it as it passed under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Once we pointed this out to the people at Steve Jackson Games, they changed the rules. Spoilsports.
Pity, the Molotov Boots tactic sounds fun Do you think it could be combined with cocktails?
(I’m not a pyromaniac, at least not compared with most of my college classmates, but when you’ve spent several years of college and decades of actual jobs learning how NOT to blow stuff, there are many times you wish you were allowed to)
Not really a hack, but I once threw a decanter of endless water into a portal to somewhere fatal. Apparently the decanter had a portal in it and the interaction between the two caused an explosion. Which was sort of good because we had been trapped in a set of rooms with no doors but thick stone walls.
I got yelled at a lot because, although we survived and ended up completely outside of the fortress, our mission had originally been to sneak in, rescue someone, and sneak out. The rescue had already been done. The sneak was pretty well done in. Also, I hadn’t put the matter up for discussion.
I halfway suspect that we survived because the GM was amused.
Had a magic-user character that successfully argued that there was no reason that he couldn’t create custom golem variants as long as the materials and magicky components were accounted for. So we ended up with things like:
Laundry golem
Thatch of blackberries golem
Spitoon golem
Gristle golem (addressed the weakness of bone and flesh golems respectively)
Pinecone golem
and so on. The impromptu comedy and rule-lawyering was more fun than the practical results.
The 1st-edition Teleportation had a chart for a d100 roll, and it was possible you could appear vertically as much as 100 feet above or below your destination. My friend Ken came up with this hack: in your lair, have a tower 200 feet tall with no floors. Have a big pile of straw at the bottom. 100 feet up, put a permanent illusion of a bullseye facing upwards and memorize that as your “Known Location.” That way, if you roll bad, the worst that will happen is that you fall 200 feet onto a big fluffy bed of straw.
He also decided he would have an ant colony, and he would spend each day berating them. That way, he’d have a colony of humble ants to step on artifacts and destroy them.
As a GM I hate most of those kind of hacks, I’ll allow some of the funniest one if it’s not a serious moment in the campaign, but I simply do no allow them otherwise, it makes no sense to me to say (for example) “An then Gandalf casted Summon Animal IV 10 meters above the Wich King and the chief of the Nazgul died under a 5 ton elephant”, since we are playing an epic fantasy game and not “Toon”.
We needed to break one of the party out of prison, and mostly being good guys (except the one who was arrested) we were trying to do it without killing any guards. We’d done pretty well using stealth and minor illusions to get past most of the guards, but finally came down to one guard standing in the final doorway between us and freedom.
So, the druid shape shifts into a house cat, and walks up between the guards legs, as cats do. And then he shapeshifted into a horse, as cats generally do not. The guard experienced a brief but meteoric rise into the lintel of the door, and from thence on to slumberland.
We were playing a campaign where we knew we were going up against vampires. A friend of mine insisted on outfitting his character with a +1 wooden sword, to basically stake the vamp with one shot. The DM made him roll a natural 20 to hit the vampire — and he did. The DM couldn’t believe it and made my friend roll a second natural 20. And he did it. The vamp was the big bad for this adventure and killing him completely hosed the campaign our DM had planned. He had to improvise, and we ended up fighting off a lot of bad beasties and getting hacked up pretty bad; our DM admitted this was done entirely out of spite for us messing with his plans.
For myself, I remember reading in Dragon magazine that a dwarf character could hide a wire saw in his beard, so next time I played a dwarf, I did the same. Came in handy too.
The last time I played 3.5, I played a Wizard like a Sorcerer. All memorized spells were attack spells. I convinced the group to set aside one share of treasure that would be used for all the wands and scrolls our party needed. About half got spent on happy sticks (wands of CLW), scrolls of minor restoration, neutralize poison and the like. The rest I spent on scrolls of all of the various non-attack spells I knew.
That way I could keep blasting away as long as I had spells, while at the same time having pretty much every conceivable non-attack spell at my finger tips on a scroll.
We used to cast Continual Light on pebbles or small gems and coat them in mud; when thrown the mud would break off and make a light bomb. Worked well from invisible characters who wished to light up the enemy.
A decanter of endless water set on geyser mode worked for finding nearby invisible enemies.
Not a hack, but a bad attempt: The old module “The Assassin’s Knot” set up a very funny mistake by the players: Two assassins were trying to infiltrate the island lair from the sea. They had a potion of oil of etherealness, which would allow them to enter the ethereal plane and sneak past walls to get inside with stealth. They rowed out to a spot near the shore, checked their gear, and split the potion (it was allowed in this game) so that each could use it. When ready, they both drank…
…forgetting that the oil was to be rubbed on, not drank.
I was generous in allowing them to make themselves regurgitate and smear the vomit all over themselves to allow the potion to work. After laughing my ass off.
Oh, remembered another stupid thing I pulled off : I was playing a goblin druid in Pathfinder. It wasn’t an evil character per se (he was Lawful Neutral, his shtick is/was that the tribe’s traditions Must Be Upheld, and the history Must Be Kept and Narrated. At the slightest provocation), but Pathfinder goblins just have a *thing *about dogs. And reading. The former are hateful creatures that must be tortured and killed because they bite and snarl and chase, while the latter is fearful stuff that’ll make your head asplode.
Anyway, to the point : “Create Food and Water” is a third level cleric spell wot druids don’t get. However, Summon Nature’s Ally can be gotten at druid level 1. Now, you know how a summoned creature that dies just pops out of existence ? However if you were to, say, summon a riding dog (which is on the Summon Nature’s Ally I list), cut off a leg or two but keep the mutt barely alive (and whining pitifully), *and *you didn’t overly mind hurriedly munching on raw dog flesh before the summoning spell’s duration ends, then your druid will never ever go hungry, even in the middle of an arctic wasteland !
I met a group of players whose GM allowed them to memorize a location 100 feet in the air, at the crossroads just outside their keep. He let them do it because he knew it would be good comedy: they were the most amazingly forgetful players he had ever met. They’d all decide to teleport home, group hug, and Teleport…
“Auugh! Falling! Where’s my potion of flight? Ahhh! Levitate! Hey, I have a potion of Diminution, I’ll grab you and then drink it!”
Usually, at least one character would pancake. A local Healer built a little shack at the crossroads because he knew every week or two the Singing Adventurers would be dropping in, usually in need of some serious healing.
One time, the last mage standing grabbed all the bodies of the rest of the party and teleported out, just as he was hit with a poisoned shuriken, which killed him. The entire party fell from the sky like dead turkeys. The Healer closed early that week.
Well, as I just noted, I think the limitation wasn’t there in the original 3rd Edition text of the spell. But I should point out that core D&D doesn’t have a fumble.
That’d be another Hack… one DM used the Arduin fumble charts on a natural 1. So, about a 1/40 chance every time your dice hit the table that you were going to get maimed.
To make amends for not realizing the TK trick no longer works in 3.5, here’s another (obsolete) classic from 3.0. Got a big nasty monster that could kill the whole party? Well, as long as its SR isn’t too high and it’s not immune to ability damage, you can resolve the matter in two touch attacks. Harm + the Rapier of Puncturing.
In 3.0, Harm reduces the target to 1d4 hit points, no save. The Rapier of Puncturing, three times per day, can drain 1d6 points of Con as a touch attack.
Single digit HP plus the sudden loss of one or more hit points per hit die is enough to drop most high level creatures. It actually gets more potent the more hit dice the target has.
Actually pulled this trick off in a game once, taking down an EL 27 Half-Dragon Dwarf Barbarian Warlord with my 19th level Ranger/Rogue (who kept Harm in an ioun stone of spell storing just to exploit this sort of situation.)
Emerged from stealth, tagged him with Harm in the surprise round, and won initiative, nailing him with the rapier as a follow-up. Used my cloak of flying to scamper away with his corpse before his followers even knew what had happened.
Do you think it could be combined with cocktails?