D&D thread
-
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
My dice hate me. In the entire session yesterday, only one spell hit its target. And when it hit, I rolled a 1 for damage.
My group has one player who hardly ever seems to roll well. It’s not that his characters have low stats or anything, it’s almost like he has trouble making even average dice rolls. This got distinctly weirder the couple of times when his character was played by someone else (guest player — give him the character of a regular who couldn’t make it) and the character performed a lot better …
You've got Wil Wheaton in your D&D group?
-
-
@Mason_Wheeler You are correct, of course. I'll blame my error on not properly paying attention to TDWTF as a result of being distracted by work.
-
@HardwareGeek Jesus, man. Get your priorities straight. Work can wait until your unread list is in single digits
-
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
You've got Wil Wheaton in your D&D group?
I wish … that way we would have another player so we might finally be able to get enough people together to actually play sometime in the near future :( Every week most of the group can’t make it so the rest also goes and finds something else to do instead — our last game session was a month and a half ago, and we’ve been playing the same adventure since late July. An RPGA adventure designed for a four-hour convention slot (though TBH, I don’t see how anyone could play that in four hours without rushing through every encounter etc. in about two seconds flat).
-
All of my Christmas presents were D&D-related — all one of them (so far). My son bought me a deck of spellbook cards. And my daughter bought me, when and if they get here, some stone d20s; one is labradorite and the other is a stone I'm not familiar with and don't remember the name of. Apparently, the seller either didn't realize they were Christmas gifts and needed to be shipped to arrive for Christmas or had too many orders and simply couldn't get them done. When they arrive, maybe they'll roll better than the ones I have now, which hate me.
-
@HardwareGeek my only Christmas activity was introducing some people to D&D. And (partially) making a dice rolling/storing box.
I like the spell cards, especially for newer players. Not so find of heavy dice, as they make lots of noise.
-
-
I should have asked for some dice for Christmas but I can foresee it getting quite expensive if I go down that road. Collecting things is pricey
-
@izzion said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
as they make lots of noise.
But that's the best part
You may want to use a glass as your dice cup, in that case.
-
@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
When they arrive, maybe they'll roll better than the ones I have now, which hate me.
-
@boomzilla Last week I killed my second character ever, in like 5 years (I'm the DM). Turns out when something crits you and deals 10d10 damage base (so 20d10 after doubling) and has the rider "if the damage reduces the character to 0 HP, they're dead dead", it rather hurts.
-
@Benjamin-Hall
Woah there Kaelas... 10-100 dmg per hit... did you make it ignore AC too for good measure?
-
@Benjamin-Hall Wow, what did you hit them with?!?
-
@izzion @Mason_Wheeler mind flayer got someone stunned and grappled. Then he bit, and crit. This means the player had
- A save to avoid getting stunned (mind blast)
- A chance to avoid getting grappled (hit his AC of 20)
- Another save to be unstunned before being grappled
- A second save to be unstunned after being grappled but before being bitten
- A second attack roll (this one crit)
Oh, and the mind flayer had 9 HP left at that point. One more good hit would have killed it...but the rest of the party was stuck because the player had (incautiously) blocked a doorway and the mind flayer was on the other side of it.
Oh, and the best part? He was the team cleric and the only one who could raise dead. Not that that would help when your brain gets sucked out through your nostrils and devoured....
-
@Benjamin-Hall Wow. So basically a perfect storm of suck crashing over the PC all at once.
I hope the player has better luck on the next char!
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall Wow. So basically a perfect storm of suck crashing over the PC all at once.
I hope the player has better luck on the next char!
That character had the worst luck all the time. No matter what his AC was, I'd hit him (and miss everyone else). Near the beginning, he went to 0 HP (unconscious, not dead) basically every session...or more than once. And I'm a low-difficulty DM--I don't do mega-ultra-hard fights. His luck just always sucked.
-
-
We had a special new year campaign over the winter holidays, where half the current group and half hired mercenaries went off to combat a nearby threat as a side story to the current long campaign.
Basically, some gnolls and corpse-eaters were trying to hasten the resurrection of Yeenoghu and we tried to prevent it. Which led to three days of many dead gnolls, my character almost getting killed by a necromancer and our mercenary managing to fumble badly enough to destory his broadsword as he went to save me.
Of course we failed at stopping the return of Yeenoghu. But our wizard figured that the hastened rsurrection meant he would have a power crystal that if we could smash would likely weaken him. So we went to scout the location to plan for the attack. Just saw some gnolls and decided to try smashing the crystal and running like hell before they would notice. They noticed. So we had 20 gnolls advancing on our position, and Yeenoghu arrived too. But we also got reinforcements by a group of hired NPC pirates where... half died in the first round. At least their captain managed to tank a bunch of gnolls. Then our mercenary tanked Yeenoghu while I shot him from afar. And managing a pinch ending, where in the final round our mercenary fainted after his replacement sword had been smashed to bits and I felled Yeenoghu with my final arrow.
And yesterday we went back to normal, meeting up with the other half of our normal party. who had been helping out cleaning up after the orc attack that ended the autumn season. After a guy mistook us for someone else we ended up in a bar fight when the person he was supposed to meet showed up. We managed to kill the enemy leader with gravity, which is the third time something like that happened. (Knocked her down a flight of stairs which ended up fatal.) Then we stole some inportant documents that were going to one of our enemies, just now we need to figure exactly what they're for. They are describing a "God-making ritual" apparently, but we're not sure what that means yet.
And we ended the day by getting attacked by a pack of wolves during the night, which chewed on my arm enough to make me fall down in pain.
-
So one of my parties ran a bit of a goofy side-quest. They met a dragon (young green, but not evil) named Samothraxas the Beautiful. I wanted to call him Narcixos, but they'd have caught on too fast. His big thing was that he's totally convinced he's the most beautiful creature around and hoards shiny surfaces/mirrors. Not evil as much as just totally self-absorbed and a bit cowardly.
He asked the party to go "liberate" a giant mirror from a nearby shipwreck swarming with kuo-toa (fish people). He'd do it himself, but he might chip a talon. The party arrived on site and decided to bribe the kuo-toa (who were searching for an idol) with drugs they'd acquired. As the test subject walked off in a happy daze toward the ocean, one party member said
Is he going to be ok? I don't want him to drown...
They managed to extract the mirror without combat (and managed to walk out with a chest of shinies as well).
Next time, they'll return the mirror to the dragon and find out that it's enchanted. In fact, it's possessed. By the spirit of a long-dead elven socialite. It functions as a (variant) Crystal Ball of Telepathy (can cast scrying at will and can talk to anyone within 30 feet of where it's pointed), but any attempt to see anything "serious" in it requires a DC 15 Charisma saving throw. The spirit's personality, in a phrase, is "queer eye for a straight guy." Super camp gay. Will talk fashion all day. Has lots of cutting words to say about people, especially about their fashion sense.
This group has already acquired a manticore cub as a pet after killing its parents (that's ok, they weren't friendly as this was the runt and more intelligent) as well as a weasel/ferret/mongoose spirit that some of them worship. It's a bit of a...strange...group.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
This group has already acquired a manticore cub as a pet after killing its parents (that's ok, they weren't friendly as this was the runt and more intelligent) as well as a weasel/ferret/mongoose spirit that some of them worship. It's a bit of a...strange...group.
I'm reading an ongoing story where the protagonist destroyed a timberwolf pack (in the process of preserving his life) only to find a cub in the remains. Took and domesticated it, now it's bigger than him and his peers are getting more anxious that it will "grow up" and start attacking everyone.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
This group has already acquired a manticore cub as a pet after killing its parents
Sounds like my group, where the healer adopted an owlbear cub after we killed its mother (who attacked us to defend its young when we got to close to their lair).
-
Once upon a time, I was staying with an Internet friend on the other side of the country, and since I met him through a Shadowrun mailing list, we naturally ended up playing that with his group. This group was pretty small (but still bigger than mine at the time), consisting as it did of the GM plus two players, who each played two characters so that the group would have a viable number to do typical adventures. I don’t remember what all the characters were, but those of one of the two players were basically clones of each other, though as I recall, one was a magician and the other a street samurai. Regardless, they were munchkins and hard to tell apart.
For the occasion, I joined this group with a kind of jack-of-all-trades dwarf who had a funky-coloured beard and always had with him one of those tubes-on-a-sling that engineering students at the time could be seen walking around with to carry drawings. I never let on to the other players what was in it, though (of course, I did tell the GM).
We get hired for a shadowrun to investigate some kind of cult, ending up investigating a spooky mansion where we conclude the central figure is a vampire. There’s silver cutlery lying about, and I thought I recalled that vampires were vulnerable to silver, so I decide to take some with me. My character had a silver allergy himself, but also a cyberarm, so I could hold the silver knife fine if I took some care. The gamemaster didn’t say anything, but after several hours during which this cutlery and its purpose were mentioned occasionally, was eventually unable to keep a straight face and burst out laughing before telling us that no, vampires aren’t vulnerable to silver but to wood. Oh well … I’ll keep it anyway because my character doesn’t know any better. The other two players ditched their silver tableware right away, though.
Anyway, we run around trying to get to the cult and its leader, during which time the two clones often make my character the butt of jokes, often involving the funky-coloured beard or the mysterious plastic tube-on-a-sling. It was fun for a bit, but I started getting rather fed up with the jokes after a while.
We eventually track down the cult to a warehouse, and it ends up as a big shoot-out (this is Shadowrun, after all) where we are outside and the cult is inside. Large doors on either side of the warehouse have been opened, and the vampire is on a kind of podium in the middle. The two clones are on one side, and I have my character deliberately move around the building to the other side, so I can have a shot through the open doors there. The other players seem to think this is a good idea (apparently not aware of the dangers of doing so in a firefight) and when I get there, I open my tube-on-a-sling and pull out a light anti-armour weapon. FX: other players getting excited
I’ve got a good shot at the vampire from where I am, but I’ve positioned myself very deliberately exactly opposite the clones from the vampire … and slip the gamemaster a note, “I’m aiming at the street sam.”
The GM tells me to roll my skill test, and I do well enough to hit the guy full on. The gamemaster says something along the lines of, “You fire your LAW, missing the vampire …” (FX: disappointed players) “… and then it flies straight on to hit the street samurai, who’s directly behind the vampire.” (FX: WTF!?!)
Now, both these clones carried about a dozen hand grenades each … The GM had to resort to using a dice roller on his computer to work out the damage from the explosion (as if that was still necessary, but he wanted to make clear how dead these guys were).
When the other players had gone home, he told me he was actually happy I’d done that, as he had been trying to find a way to tone down or kill the characters without getting the players up in arms against him. A guest player doing it for him, not to mention in a way that was in character, suited him just fine.
-
-
So my Tuesday school group just beat a boss. Specifically, this woman (their erstwhile employer) had become a meat-puppet for an extradimensional memetic thought-being that wanted to bring all of its kind into reality for the purpose of destroying everything that ever existed in all possible universes. IE a bad thing.
They defeated her and broke the possession, leaving the poor woman traumatized and withdrawn into herself (because having your mind jacked by timeless alien nightmares and feeling yourself do all sorts of unsavory things isn't exactly fun). So then the question arose--"now what." To which the party barbarian had the classic barbarian solution. Put her out of her misery by "axe"ing her a few things. The rest of the party demurred and restrained her while they found someone to provide therapy (or at least care) to the poor woman.
So what makes this interesting? The juxtaposition of the character with the player.
The character is a 7-foot-tall, poison-spitting dragonborn woman with a very large axe. To this point, the sum total of her social interactions in-game have been getting information out of a captured enemy by looming and polishing her axe while looking very hungry. Her first (and only) response to most situations is "can I hit it now?" Always the first to suggest violence, and eagerly so. Classic barbarian.
The player?
She's the youngest person (8th grade, although she's 15), the smallest person (at about 4'10"...maybe), and a quiet person who always has a smile for everyone. But her eyes light up like nothing else when it's time to make attack rolls. She chose the barbarian class immediately after hearing "they get really angry and hit things" despite having been dragged along to the group by her older brother. Just goes to show that inside some tiny, shy, quiet people are demons of rage waiting to be unleashed
Then the weirdest thing happened. The party refused to take any of the cash from the (very wealthy) person. Not even the pay they had been promised for the job they had completed. That, now, is really weird. Adventurers not looting everything in sight? What's up with that?
-
@Benjamin-Hall
Sounds like they need their party barbarian to axe them what the hell they're doing.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
goes to show that inside some tiny, shy, quiet people are demons of rage waiting to be unleashed
This is why you should treat those people with respect. If you manage to crack their mental control, you will be the focal point of years or decades of anger. It's a really interesting event to watch from the sidelines.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
the smallest person (at about 4'10"...maybe)
About average height for an American woman, then?
-
@Gurth no.
-
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
the smallest person (at about 4'10"...maybe)
About average height for an American woman, then?
in which century.....?! (because either that's a really old statistic or the average woman in my locality is significantly above the national average.... or there's a few women in my locality under a foot that i just never see but are part of the average.... but that seems unlikely.)
-
@Vixen said in D&D thread:
or there's a few women in my locality under a foot that i just never see but are part of the average.... but that seems unlikely.)
You might live in an area heavily populated by gnomes
-
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
the smallest person (at about 4'10"...maybe)
About average height for an American woman, then?
The reported average depends on the source, but the range seems to be between 5'3.8" and 5'4.6" (162–164 cm). 4'10" would be 147.3 cm; I don't know how that compares to the average for her age, but it's well below average for adults (which, of course, she isn't).
-
@HardwareGeek although at 15, women tend to be pretty close to their max height (while men keep growing for a bit). All this is on average. Her brother is like 2x her mass and probably about 5'10".
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek although at 15, women tend to be pretty close to their max height (while men keep growing for a bit). All this is on average. Her brother is like 2x her mass and probably about 5'10".
One of the students at the dojo I attend is an 18-year-old girl who stands about 5-foot-nothing. One time after class, instead of her mom picking her up, her older brother came and got her. I'm generally the tallest person in the room, and he towers over me; if he's not 7 feet he's pretty close.
This provoked quite a bit of incredulity from the rest of us; how could he possibly share the same DNA as her?!?
-
@Mason_Wheeler
Are you sure the milkman isn't involved?
-
hooooooo boy....
So..... Imma be honest?
Y'all try that with me Imma punch you in the head.
Then the dick.
Then the head again.
Then shove your entire dice bag up your ass.
Then quit the table and find myself a better GM.
-
@Vixen said in D&D thread:
I wonder, is this better or worse than the very first time I missed a session, not very long after I started playing RPGs, and when I got back the next week was told, “We got bored last week so we had our characters kill each other. Yours is dead too, make a new one.”? (I liked my character, though, so what I did was just take off the couple of levels I had gained and change the name by one or two letters.)
-
@Vixen said in D&D thread:
hooooooo boy....
So..... Imma be honest?
Y'all try that with me Imma punch you in the head.
Then the dick.
Then the head again.
Then shove your entire dice bag up your ass.
Then quit the table and find myself a better GM.
If a GM is going to literally rape a character they should have the decency to do it when they're there.
-
A friend of mine was doing a D&D campaign where her high-CHA character was frequently getting hit on by one of the other PCs, despite her making it clear she wasn't interested. At one point, they stopped for the night at an inn, and the would-be suitor party member followed her into her room and tried to get physical.
So she killed him.
The rest of the party members unanimously decided "serves him right!" and refused to ress him, and the player had to reroll a new character.
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
So she killed him.
Hmm..... That is likely what would have happened if I'd been at the session and that happened.
Present it to me as a fait accompli? Yeah you gonna get physically assaulted.
-
-
@Dragoon OK, I get most of those, but what does pizza have to do with anything?
-
@Dragoon said in D&D thread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFKI3TB62pc
(I know it's not relevant, but you posted black mage so this song started going through my head. Now it's going through yours.)
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@Dragoon OK, I get most of those, but what does pizza have to do with anything?
Yeah, no idea. Don't recall it from the comic either, but its been a few years since I read it all.
-
@Dragoon said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@Dragoon OK, I get most of those, but what does pizza have to do with anything?
Yeah, no idea. Don't recall it from the comic either, but its been a few years since I read it all.
IIRC (and it's likely i don't) it was explained by the author in a forum post asking about it with one word: "Concussion"
or is that my headcanon?....
either way it's my story and i'm sticking to it.
-
@Vixen
Works for me.
-
@Vixen said in D&D thread:
@Dragoon said in D&D thread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFKI3TB62pc
(I know it's not relevant, but you posted black mage so this song started going through my head. Now it's going through yours.)
Fun song! For further "can't un-hear it" points, consider that this is essentially Vivi's theme remixed in the style of "Mystic Mysidia", the theme of the mage town from FF4.
-
@Vixen said in D&D thread:
Now it's going through yours.
Nope. Because I don't do YT at work. And I probably won't listen when I get home, either.
-
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@Vixen said in D&D thread:
@Dragoon said in D&D thread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFKI3TB62pc
(I know it's not relevant, but you posted black mage so this song started going through my head. Now it's going through yours.)
Fun song! For further "can't un-hear it" points, consider that this is essentially Vivi's theme remixed in the style of "Mystic Mysidia", the theme of the mage town from FF4.
Doesn't surprise me. FF9 was all about homages to the earlier games
