D&D thread
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I've recently started playing dungeons and dragons, and thought it would be good to have a place people can share stories about their games.
I'm only 2 sessions in and already really enjoying the spontaneous stuff that comes out of playing. In our first battle, the paladin rolled a critical fail on his first attack, causing the head of his Warhammer to fly off and hit the monk in the head. Said monk was already a bit not all there after deciding it was better to jump off the walls of a keep than to climb down a rope.
After the battle, another party member with carpentry skills decided to try to mend the hammer. He got a natural 20, so purely by fluke created a masterpiece, additional damage and resistance to breaking. The monk who had been hit with it bought it and prayed to his god to put his holy mark on it. Another great roll meant the god not only gave the mark but imbued it with the ability to cast holy smite. The monk is now constantly hearing holy music, absent mindedly stroking his hammer and has eyes that stare off into the distance. How much of this is due to the religious experience and how much is down to the multiple blows to the head is debatable.
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My favourite one-shot session was the 300 wands story. Tl;dr the players are given a barrel of wands which each trigger one out of 10,000 random spell effects, but the effect isn't known until they use it. Tons of fun, and the nice thing is that many of the wands trigger effects that can be used to keep the campaign going (e.g. spawning monsters, destroying villages, summoning gods).
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For some entertaining stories as well as some advice, I'd say check out Spoony's Counter Monkey Youtube channel
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A couple of years ago, we were playing an AD&D campaign (second edition, from 1989 — modern RPGs don’t do much for me :) and one players character was a wild mage. For those not familiar with that edition and/or class, each time they cast a spell they have a 1-in-20 chance of getting a “wild surge” — that is, having to make a roll on this table.
The PCs are in some swamp, fighting a monster. The wild mage decides to cast magic missile at it, and gets a wild surge. He rolls 28:
10'x10' pit appears immediately in front of caster, 5' deep per level of the caster
Nowhere near as bad as it could have been, really, though the pit was pretty deep because he was something like level 7 or 8 at the time, IIRC.
Next turn, he tries magic missile once more. His 1-in-20 chance comes up again, and even more unbelievably, he rolls 28 again … while he’s still standing in exactly the same place!
On his action after that, he decided to take a careful step back from the precipice of a by now very deep pit with very soft, muddy edges.
During the same campaign, but before the above happened, the players were in this dungeon and ended up in a not overly large room whose door locked behind them. A couple of PCs were outside, but most were in the room. There, they ended up being attacked by some monsters (of course). The fight didn’t go too well, and then one of the players remembered she had a potion of fire breath. I, being the
GMDM™, explain she can take a small sip of it, a medium-sized sip, a big gulp, or down the whole bottle. Grinning ear to ear, she replies, “All of it!”
WWOOOOOSSHHH! Remember this isn’t a big room, so the cone of flames pretty much fills the whole space.
Me: “Everyone make a save vs. breath weapon.”
All the players succeed and so only take half damage.
All the players, except the one who used the potion … And as she was already wounded, and a mage, the full 5d10 damage wasn’t exactly survivable.
Oh, and the monsters had complete immunity to fire.
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@Gurth Sounds like someone got the Carolina Reaper special.
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A long time ago, in a town not very far away from where I am now, before D&D3 was even a thing, we decided to play an AD&D campaign. The players make their level 1 characters, one of them a human ranger. He rolls very poorly for his starting money and can buy no more than the following items:
- Long sword
- Breeches
- Shoes
- Cloak
Being the gracious
GMDM™ I am, I also allow him to have a piece of string to hold up his trousers. He stuffs the sword behind the string as well, so he doesn’t need to hold it in his hands all the time. Yes, really.After wandering around for a while, they encounter some or another monster. This is the first-ever combat these characters get involved in, and for his first-ever attack roll, the player gets a 1 …
“You grasp your sword, draw it out, swinging in a wide arc to hit the <whatever monster it was> and your breeches fall down to your ankles.”
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I just gone done with DMing my last session for the time being of my first ever campaign. It's only Lost Mine of Phandelver but we've had fun. We got maybe halfway through the module but I play at an organised club where we do things in six-week blocks and now my turn is over.
I put an aboleth in it! They fought it today and I had so much fun. It was only a little one - homebrewed aboleth spawn (babbyleth) designed to be level-appropriate. It charmed the fighter and then the rest of the party wore it down to single-figure HP and then the wizard put it to sleep and, not knowing just how battered it was, they retreated! The next part of the session was dealing with the fighter. He's fine now - he got to re-roll the wisdom save every time he took damage, or it would wear off after 24 hours. They finally beat him into making the save and also unconscious, about an hour before, unbeknown to them, it would have worn off. It was very funny.
From next week, we go back to my favourite campaign in my D&D career so far, and I could fill many posts about that campaign.
It started out set in the Forgotten Realms, but we failed a major quest relatively early on and now we're in a semi-homebrew setting called the Broken Realms. Last block we played this campaign we learned that as well as causing untold damage, many thousands of deaths, and ongoing hardship and suffering for many more across half of Faerun, we had also kicked off a slow-burn apocalypse.
We managed to avert that by undertaking another quest, which we succeeded by the skin of our teeth. That bag of 1000 ball bearings in the standard equipment list that no-one ever finds much of a use for, saved the world.
Then my character, who was the King of the Edgelords but I adored playing him and had positive feedback from the group and DM, wished himself out of existence in the middle of the night. Not just out of the future but the past as well. The rest of the party woke up with no memory of him, but a shadowy entity hovering over them. They attacked and destroyed it, but circumstantial evidence makes me think it wasn't actually hostile but actually would have been a way for them to get back at least some memories of him. But they blew it, which is actually very in-keeping with the themes and story of that character.
Now I play the person who the person he used to be would have become, had he not sold his soul, undergone a transformation of sorts, and taken on a new identity.
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@error This is very true.
I've been playing (mostly as a DM) for several years now. I run the D&D club at the school where I work, and have also had some other groups with friends, colleagues, and (just started) one with some random people I found online. The first real session is next week, where they'll meet the inhabitants of the town of Helvita, who are all insane in one way or another. They're exiles from the other factions, who have banded together.
- There's the town blacksmith, who can't say a single sentence without multiple vulgarities and/or horrific insults. Nice guy though.
- The village farm-leader (using construct labor in greenhouses due to the climate) is delusional--he sees everyone (especially the PCs) as having puppet strings with huge faces looming over them. He also only moves in 5' increments wherever he can.
- The gnomish engineer, Moon-man, is the one responsible for maintaining the constructs that make the town work. He's totally sane, except that he's building rockets to get to the smaller moon, where he believes that there are endless waves of beautiful, scantily-clad gnomish women waiting for him. His inventions tend to the...dramatically unstable.
- The brewer, Glug, is a half-ogre with questionable taste. His liquor has been known to cause actual pink elephants.
- Ol' One Eye is a goblin hunter/trapper, who is obsessed with hunting "dangerous creatures", including sapient ones.
- Etc.
This is a small village in the ruins of a huge city (~10 mile diameter) that was once the home of the most technologically-advanced group (mainly dwarves and gnomes) until it was destroyed 200 years ago. It's currently experiencing extremely cold weather--there's a glacier that formed about 45 miles away. Blame magic. The party gets there via Stargate and can't get back easily. So their main task is finding a way back and figuring out what's going on here.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
His liquor has been known to cause actual pink elephants.
Do you mean "actually cause drinkers to hallucinate pink elephants" or actually actual pink elephants?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
- The village farm-leader (using construct labor in greenhouses due to the climate) is delusional--he sees everyone (especially the PCs) as having puppet strings with huge faces looming over them. He also only moves in 5' increments wherever he can.
Ever played (or just read) Over the Edge? (Wait, there’s a third edition? Why doesn’t anybody tell me these things?)
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In (A)D&D, I always give starting characters a random magic item: they get to make the necessary rolls on the tables in the Dungeon Master’s Guide and get whatever comes out of those (unless it’s something that’s unusable to their character, like a fighter rolling a priest-only item, for example, in which case they get to re-roll).
One PC got a magical sword that was more intelligent than its owner. Luckily for him, after a while he got full control of it, but it was touch and go in the beginning whether the player was actually in charge.
Another rolled up Murlynd’s spoon, which immediately had him name his character Murlynd, as it was obviously his spoon.
When players are stuck for which gear they should buy, I sometimes suggest something like a drakkar, a war elephant or an apparatus of Kwalish. Guess what was rolled, for his previous character, by the player whose wild mage created a big pit in a swamp? And it even proved almost immediately useful, because I started that campaign with the PCs on a ship that got caught in a storm and shipwrecked them in a jungle inhabited by Mayan-like kobolds, so they actually got a relatively easy way off the wreck … Of course, in the jungle itself, it was somewhat less handy.
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Not (A)D&D, but what's a thread without a bit of derailing?
When playing Star Wars (D6, but it doesn't matter), I had fun creating weird planets. One that I was fond of was some kind of gaseous planet, based on the idea that the deeper you go, the denser the gas becomes, up to a point where it is dense enough that it becomes buoyant and you can effectively walk on it. With a good bit of hand-waving, I decided that the density gradient of the gas was such that objects of different densities would sink a tiny bit more or less (a few cm or m, nothing more). So you had this kind of mushy soil everywhere, you could sink through it by picking up stuff, or raising by dropping it. Kind of like a water world, except it was gas and the density gradient was such that you couldn't very well "swim" upwards or downwards more than a couple of meters.
This was (intentionally) used as a major plot point, as the best way to infiltrate an imperial base was to sink below it and then raise again.
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Yesterday we started a short campaign for the end of summer, where the DM gave us half-finished characters. Race, profession, basic backstory. I am an elven weaponmaster, part of the elite forces pretty much. And for my background I managed to roll the following: Famous criminal, known traitor and drug addict.
So I am supposed to be the "glorious leader" of this band of elven warriors, who are to investigate a prophecy. The other elven player is my former student, who looks up to me heavily. And then I also got 7 NPCs, of which one has died from unknown causes and another has got the same condition.
Our first fight was against bloodthirsty flying squirrels. Which all ended up with horrible damages, but the DM kept succeeding with the saving rolls against death even when the squirrels had got their bellies cut up with innards falling out. Also, one squirrel got stuck with its claws in another PC's shoulder so I had to pull it out of her, as it got killed before it was able to break loose on its own.
And as the first "boss fight" we got a giant bear, where my student did the most damage while I, the master, was doing a poor job. Got a crit and proceeded to roll mostly 1s and 2s for the damage, despite having unlimited 8d6 to roll.
A note about the system used: It uses d6, d10 and d100. Success is based off rolling under your skill and difficulty is measured in number of d6 used. Normal difficulty is 3d6, and if your skill is 10 you need to roll below 10 for success. Rolling two 1 in the initial roll is a crit, rolling two 6 is a fumble. Damage is done straightforward, though, so higher is better. Most rolls are also unlimited, so if you roll a 6 you reroll it along with another dice, meaning damage can get very high if very lucky. Also, for every 10 damage inflicted to the target there is a chance of a bonus effect. Getting a good bonus effect means you can inflict stuff like severing arteries or even body parts. Although with a risk of getting your weapon stuck in the enemy too (both good and bad).
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Not D&D but Shadowrun, but I suppose it fits to post a link to this very old page in this thread: The Dumb, the Stupid and the Unlucky.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Not D&D but Shadowrun, but I suppose it fits to post a link to this very old page in this thread: The Dumb, the Stupid and the Unlucky.
On that note, there's another good Shadowrun collection at The C.L.U.E. Files. It's an archive of an archive, but they're still good.
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I tend to play GURPS, but system aside the most epic fail was when the dwarf decided to rush through a shield wall to face off the attacking horde, jumped in the middle of the crowd and went for a whirlwind strike with his battle ax. Hit the first opponent but critically failed on the second glancing off the armor and losing grip on the ax which flies off into the sea of enemies as he is standing there, on the wrong side of the shield wall with no weapon in a circle of enemies he just tried to kill. Needless to say it didn't go well and he survived only because the mage could teleport his body out of the melee before someone took his head after he went down.
One of the best successes was running on the road and being attacked by a band of orcs daily, one character decides to challenge the chief to a one on one battle to protect the civilians and the chief agrees. He almost got the better of him until the chief takes off a foot and kills him. The chief then turns his back to the players cheering victory to his group when the archer takes aim, steadies and makes a critical shot to the back of his head, killing the orc instantly. Well that put the band off as they scatter into the woods to deal with the line of succession, allowing the group to get the civilians to the next major town in one piece.
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@e4tmyl33t said in D&D thread:
It's an archive of an archive
The Shadowrun Archive used to be probably the No. 1 SR site on the net, back when that was new — I remember it being hosted on interware.it because the guy who ran the site was (IIRC) one of the founders of that ISP. This seems to be an archive of that site, so it’s not really a backup of the backup.
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@Gurth I believe this is a backup of the archive.org backup of the site, so it IS a backup of the backup :)
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One — well, two more that were brought to memory by my group’s game session last weekend.
A few years ago, I GMed a short Deadlands campaign at the gaming club I’m in, with the original set of rules rather than the later d20 or Savage Worlds or Reloaded or whatever ones. In short, this is a Wild West-horror game — with the emphasis on the horror, though many people I’ve talked to didn’t realise this and figured its setting is more “D&D with cowboys and Indians”. Um … no, not quite.
Anyway, one of the players decided to buy ten sticks of dynamite for his character. In their first adventure, the players need to stop a train that contains all kinds of horrible monsters, so the dynamite guy places a stick below one of the rails, lights the fuse, and only then figures he needs to find cover from the explosion. He chooses the nearest building, which is an outhouse — as in “outdoor toilet”. On rolling for damage, I work out that the blast will easily reach this and blow it down … Luckily the wooden walls protected him a little, but he still needed to throw away most of his poker chips¹ to survive at all.
And then the train stopped at the station before the place where the player had blown up the track … Which he could easily have worked out for himself, given that there was a map of the whole town on the table in front of him when he decided where to place the dynamite and where to hide …
Another player made a gunslinger who wasn’t, shall we say, the friendliest person in town. He intentionally picked a number of hindrances (flaws) that made him an irritable, aggressive asshole. Then he died.
Now, in Deadlands, if your character dies, you draw a number of cards from a freshly shuffled deck — the more experienced you are with the horrors of the Weird West, the more cards. He only gets to draw one card.
He draws a joker.
It’s the black one.
Oh, nice … Our resident irritable, aggressive asshole just got resurrected with a manitou³ pulling his strings. That’s not going to improve his personality any …
After a little while, the character dominated the manitou entirely, to the point where the manitou simply couldn’t take control and cause havoc at all anymore. Not that this mattered, the character took care of that himself quite well, thankyouverymuch.
The players are investigating some supernatural happenings and have worked out that somebody living in a certain house in town may have some clues. Three of them go there after dark (why? beats me) and instead of knocking on the door and asking, try to find a good way to break in. They eventually break one of the windows at the front of the house and climb in — with difficulty because they can’t see where they’re going very well, it being dark and all. They end up shooting the woman they wanted to question because she came to see what the noise was, and somehow the players seem to have forgotten why they were actually there in the first place.
The gunfire of course attracts attention, and they have to flee. Not before they manage to get themselves spotted, though, and seeing as how their little group consisted of three out-of-towners, one of them an Indian, it’s not like they could hide very well. Luckily they didn’t need to hide for long, as the town was overrun by undead the next morning.
That undead invasion of course had to be fought off. The character with the dynamite, who by now had seven sticks remaining, took up position on a flat roof, together with the Indian. He laid his sticks of dynamite on the roof, and cut the fuses short so they’d explode a few seconds after throwing, to prevent anyone from running away or (worse) throwing it back.
The undead approach where they’re hiding.
The guy takes one of his dynamite sticks, lights the fuse, and throws it.
He rolls his dice.
The roll goes bust⁴ …
He raises the stick of dynamite to throw it, but doesn’t quite hold onto it tightly enough, so it slips from his fingers just as he’s got it over his shoulder …
Its three-second fuse burning, the stick falls to the ground.
Where there are six other sticks of dynamite.
¹ In Deadlands, players get a number of poker chips that they can use to improve their dice rolls and to reduce damage they take.
² The game also uses a deck of standard playing cards for various purposes.
³ An evil spirit.
⁴ Half or more of the dice roll a 1.
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I've never actually played Dungeons and Dragons, but a lot of tabletop rpgs, both as GM/DM and as a player. And with lots of time playing, there have been lots of hilarious moments.
One that comes to mind was when we played for a GM that was adamant that you have to play the character you created for play with him until dead, then you can create a new one. So this time, we're playing a game where you roll all or most of your base stats, which also determines how many skill points you can have, and what your skills will max out at. One guy that is entirely full of himself IRL wants to play a dashingly charming, beautiful, witty hero warrior assassin kinda character.
And the rolls for his character are the worst I've ever seen anyone roll that many die. He is super upset, because his character is dum, weak, fugly and everything else that is wrong with the world. He also gets some starter character flaws because he got really bad rolls for the character traits/flaws and only got bad ones. Like, children cry, animals hate him and people distrust him deeply for no reason at all.
The very antithesis of what he actually wanted to play. (But more in line with him as a real person)So, since the GM wont let him just start over, he decides to get himself killed as soon as possible. Only, the GM wont let him outright kill himself, because it would not be in line with his character traits, unless he comes up with a believable explanation for the suicidal act.
Well, the game starts and he picks fights with everything and everyone, and every single fucking time the die god sees fit to make him survive/kill and otherwise succeed at every dumb fucking thing he does. The GM isn't even trying to keep him alive, it just happens. Over and over.
Like, he attacks a savage bear that happens upon the party during the middle of the night when it's his watch, with his bare hands and crits the bear in the face, and all damage is unlimited 1d6, and the damage pretty much just caves the bears brains in on the first punch. By this tiny, dumb, unfit retard dressed in rags, and a cooking pot for a helmet that kept falling down over his eyes.
The player gets really frustrated every time, but the rest of the group screams in laughter at the absurd situations that just keep coming. And then, we fumble into the throne room with the king, guards and royal advisor where the actual epic quest is supposed to kick off, and this guy that has savaged everything in his path in a village idiot/drunk kind of way runs straight across the hall, grabs the advisor and stabs him.
Whereupon the illusion that the pit beast held falters, and the end boss for an epic questline ends up being de-masqued at the very fucking start of it all. So, he didn't even manage to get himself killed by the royal guards by attacking the royal advisor. The GM is dumbfounded and entirely lost for words at this point.
We kept playing with the characters for quite a while, and the guy eventually warmed up to his village idiot character. The luck ran out after some time, but he kept playing it the same way for a long time.
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@Carnage said in D&D thread:
Whereupon the illusion that the pit beast held falters, and the end boss for an epic questline ends up being de-masqued at the very fucking start of it all. So, he didn't even manage to get himself killed by the royal guards by attacking the royal advisor. The GM is dumbfounded and entirely lost for words at this point.
This, how often have we as GM's created something that with a simple decision at the beginning fo the game could nullify the entire story line? My latest one had this, Hey go save the little, innocent mute girl. Ignore that quest and well, the chaos gods come back without any trouble epic battle and fate of the world decided right up front, game over. Instead of course, they go save her, not realizing who she really is.
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@KattMan said in D&D thread:
@Carnage said in D&D thread:
Whereupon the illusion that the pit beast held falters, and the end boss for an epic questline ends up being de-masqued at the very fucking start of it all. So, he didn't even manage to get himself killed by the royal guards by attacking the royal advisor. The GM is dumbfounded and entirely lost for words at this point.
This, how often have we as GM's created something that with a simple decision at the beginning fo the game could nullify the entire story line? My latest one had this, Hey go save the little, innocent mute girl. Ignore that quest and well, the chaos gods come back without any trouble epic battle and fate of the world decided right up front, game over. Instead of course, they go save her, not realizing who she really is.
As a GM, I just move the story around a bit to fit the new chaotic changes from the player group.
After a few years you just learn to not care too much about your carefully scripted adventure but more see it as memory notes for shit that needs to happen and you needing to trick the player group into doing the needful somehow. With known players and group constellations, it's fairly easy.
Being a GM is a good way to learn how to read and manipulate people to do what you want.
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@Carnage Honestly, I don't plan stories. I plan carefully-balanced situations. Houses of cards, stacks of dominoes. It's all wired so that any outside disruption (as PCs are wont to do) will make it all start snowballing down. Somewhere. Somehow. Where it goes is totally unpredictable, but it will be a fun ride getting there. Once the players start meddling, the world will have to react to them and they will have to react to the world's reaction, and so it goes.
I learned this after my first groups took my plots and ran at right angles to reality at the first opportunity. No point in doing more than about a session's worth of detailed planning at a time--the rest of the planning time can be used to build the whole surrounding world in more clarity so that when they inevitably go somewhere you don't expect, there's stuff waiting for them. That way you get a reputation as being able to predict everything, even though you were actually totally blindsided.
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@Carnage said in D&D thread:
Like, he attacks a savage bear that happens upon the party during the middle of the night when it's his watch, with his bare hands and crits the bear in the face, and all damage is unlimited 1d6, and the damage pretty much just caves the bears brains in on the first punch.
That made me think nobody has yet posted the following in this thread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSynJyq2RRo
The sequels are OK, but this is definitely the best of the series.
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@Carnage said in D&D thread:
Being a GM is a good way to learn how to read and manipulate people to do what you want.
And listen to what the players think is going on, then change the story based on the ideas they unwittingly supply you with. They’re often better than what you thought up yourself.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Carnage said in D&D thread:
Being a GM is a good way to learn how to read and manipulate people to do what you want.
And listen to what the players think is going on, then change the story based on the ideas they unwittingly supply you with. They’re often better than what you thought up yourself.
Indeed, a properly induced paranoia does a lot of the imaginative work for tormenting your players.
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I played a couple games of Shadowrun once. The first one was a very short introductory thing where we had to respond to some kind of attack at a Stuffer Shack, which is the Shadowrun version of a 7-Eleven, as I understand it. One of the characters (a troll, I think) was examining some boxes of Pop-Tarts, with one box in each hand, different flavors, as if deciding which to buy when the attack occurred.
That character wanted to grab a weapon and respond immediately, but the DM told him, "You currently have a box of Pop-Tarts in each hand. It will take a full combat turn [or whatever] to lose them and equip a weapon."
So the troll decided to attack, using the boxes of Pop-Tarts as melee weapons, by trying to crush the attacker's head between them. The DM allowed it, and the attack did some mild damage, and that is the only thing I will ever be able to recall from that session.
(As an aside, I don't think I'd even blink an eye if I stepped into a 7-Eleven and saw a man wielding a submachine gun get smashed in the head with boxes of Pop-Tarts held by a troll. 7-Elevens are kind of like that.)
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
Once the players start meddling, the world will have to react to them and they will have to react to the world's reaction, and so it goes.
At the game club, one of the players in the short Shadowrun campaign I ran there some years ago remarked to me that he liked me as GM because I don’t say “no” to things players want to try. Apparently, the other GMs he’s played with do that when they feel a player’s actions will screw too much with the story they have in mind. I just tell them to roll some or another test, and then let the chips fall where they may.
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@mott555 said in D&D thread:
I played a couple games of Shadowrun once. The first one was a very short introductory thing where we had to respond to some kind of attack at a Stuffer Shack, which is the Shadowrun version of a 7-Eleven, as I understand it.
Yes. It sounds like you played Food Fight, the intro adventure in the original first-edition rulebook, and later also in the third-edition First Run and the fourth-edition quick-start rules. The plot, in as much as there is one, is that the PCs are in a convenience store that gets robbed by a gang.
That character wanted to grab a weapon and respond immediately, but the DM told him, "You currently have a box of Pop-Tarts in each hand. It will take a full combat turn [or whatever] to lose them and equip a weapon.”
Hmm … Free Action to drop the stuff from his hands, then a Simple Action to draw a weapon, and another Simple Action to fire a single shot in SA mode, or even a burst in BF mode. This can be done in a single combat phase. (In second- and third-edition rules anyway. Probably also in fourth, but I never played more of that than a little playtesting. Later editions … pfft, who cares?)
So the troll decided to attack, using the boxes of Pop-Tarts as melee weapons, by trying to crush the attacker's head between them. The DM allowed it, and the attack did some mild damage, and that is the only thing I will ever be able to recall from that session.
This, though, is cooler than drawing a gun and shooting the opponent :)
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Apparently, the other GMs he’s played with do that when they feel a player’s actions will screw too much with the story they have in mind. I just tell them to roll some or another test, and then let the chips fall where they may.
It depends a lot on, well, everything, humans being humans etc. In one of my group that was strongly focused towards building fun stories together, I did sometimes (as GM) tell players "no" because I thought we could get a funnier (more interesting etc.) story with a specific twist that I had in mind, and players followed my lead because they trusted me. At the end, we were so used to that style of play that we even ended playing without any real rules (nominally it was Amber, but we ignored most of it), with 2 GMs each handling part of the group in different rooms (or sometimes all together when we built up to some important scene), and GMs were just kind of slightly different players that could play several characters at once, but not necessarily the main arbiter of things.
Other groups that I was part of (either as GM or player) were much more focused on defeating the opposition, so telling them straight out "no" was something that we avoided as much as possible because it looked like (and was!) a cop-out. When I was GM'ing I was of the same school as @Benjamin-Hall, I built some scaffolding of characters and relationships and waited to see where things went from there, and almost never said no to players (probably a bit too much in that I was reluctant to let characters die so I probably sometimes allowed things that were too far out of the possible... oh well, we had fun!). Another GM was using a much more "constrained" style of play where he wouldn't be afraid to tell us "no", but he was very good at building complex situations and letting us figure out how to get out of it, so we just took "no" as meaning "if you go that way I'll have to improvise and it will be less fun than trying to solve the puzzle that I've planned" and went with it merrily (and died in the process, he had no qualms about killing characters!).
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@remi said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Apparently, the other GMs he’s played with do that when they feel a player’s actions will screw too much with the story they have in mind. I just tell them to roll some or another test, and then let the chips fall where they may.
It depends a lot on, well, everything, humans being humans etc. In one of my group that was strongly focused towards building fun stories together, I did sometimes (as GM) tell players "no" because I thought we could get a funnier (more interesting etc.) story with a specific twist that I had in mind, and players followed my lead because they trusted me. At the end, we were so used to that style of play that we even ended playing without any real rules (nominally it was Amber, but we ignored most of it), with 2 GMs each handling part of the group in different rooms (or sometimes all together when we built up to some important scene), and GMs were just kind of slightly different players that could play several characters at once, but not necessarily the main arbiter of things.
Other groups that I was part of (either as GM or player) were much more focused on defeating the opposition, so telling them straight out "no" was something that we avoided as much as possible because it looked like (and was!) a cop-out. When I was GM'ing I was of the same school as @Benjamin-Hall, I built some scaffolding of characters and relationships and waited to see where things went from there, and almost never said no to players (probably a bit too much in that I was reluctant to let characters die so I probably sometimes allowed things that were too far out of the possible... oh well, we had fun!). Another GM was using a much more "constrained" style of play where he wouldn't be afraid to tell us "no", but he was very good at building complex situations and letting us figure out how to get out of it, so we just took "no" as meaning "if you go that way I'll have to improvise and it will be less fun than trying to solve the puzzle that I've planned" and went with it merrily (and died in the process, he had no qualms about killing characters!).
About killing characters, I have no particular problems killing PCs, but I rather give them a hell of a fight and let them escape with a future limp as a gift as to make danger feel present.
One group I GMd for once in a while had a GM that pretty much let them one shot ancient dragons the size of mountain chains with a rusty dirk. When they first had me as a GM, and they found the first small demon faffing about in a cave, they all charged head first to get the kill and the exp. When the first three of them instantly ended up lying on the floor bleeding, they sortof got their shit together and actually used tactics and actually managed to kill the bugger, and got their not quite dead buddies back on their feet and kept on going.
When they found the next, slightly larger, actually armored and armed demon they were really fucking careful. :D
And after that fight, they were paranoid at everything they saw in the dungeon.I asked them about it after the short adventure ended, and they really enjoyed actually having the sense of danger there so I got invited more times to scare them. They were entirely in it for the fights though, so not much wiggle room for doing some character and intrigue and tension play with them, but they were a fun lot to watch when they played.
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@remi said in D&D thread:
It depends a lot on, well, everything, humans being humans etc. In one of my group that was strongly focused towards building fun stories together, I did sometimes (as GM) tell players "no" because I thought we could get a funnier (more interesting etc.) story with a specific twist that I had in mind, and players followed my lead because they trusted me.
It works in that case, yes. But if you say “no” because you want to religiously stick to the storyline you have in mind, then you’re probably causing less enjoyment rather than more.
@Carnage said in D&D thread:
About killing characters, I have no particular problems killing PCs, but I rather give them a hell of a fight and let them escape with a future limp as a gift as to make danger feel present.
On the one hand, I try to save the PCs but not be obvious about it — like toning down rolls by NPCs (made behind my GM screen) if I think they would hurt a PC too much and there’s still major parts of the adventure ahead. This is mainly because I want to see the story through, and it gets very hard to do that if all the PCs are seriously injured or dead.
On the other hand, if a player does something stupid when they should know better, then it’s on their own head and I don’t pull punches. If they get injured or die under those circumstances, well, they’ve only got themselves to blame.
That made me think of the end of the AD&D campaign with the wild mage and the fire-breather. The group was level 13–14 or so by now, and we were playing through the classic Dragon Mountain, mostly because I own a copy and wanted to run it. Before they even get to the mountain, there’s a whole book full of adventures, and we were nearing the end of that. The mountain itself takes up two additional books, IIRC.
They had to go into a vampire's tomb and, of course, fight him. After a while, this was going rather badly for them: several of the players were very low on hit points, or even unconscious. We used the optional rule that you went KO at 0 hp and then lost 1 hp per round (=per minute) until −10, when they died. I strongly suspect I had the opposition miss more than they actually did, and reduced their damage rolls a bit too — like I said, I try to keep PCs alive in the interest of the story.
The character who had earlier died from her own potion of fire breath had been resurrected afterward, so she was also in this fight. However, she took some bad hits and was down for the count to −10 — but still alive. Then the wild mage decides to cast a fireball at the vampire … completely ignoring the unconscious, but not-yet-dead PC(s?) in the room,¹ as well as one or two others who were still up and fighting. They all ate the full 10d6 damage, and I wasn’t about to fudge anything at all there even if I could have saved characters by doing so.
In the end, out of six or seven PCs in all (I don’t quite remember who were there), only the group’s druid escaped this fight alive, because she managed to run outside and shapechanged into a bird to fly away as fast as possible.
¹ The player of the unconscious character was the RL girlfriend of the player of the wild mage. I kind of wonder what happened after the rest of us left their house later that evening.
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@Carnage said in D&D thread:
And after that fight, they were paranoid at everything they saw in the dungeon.
That reminds me of my son's first campaign. One member of the party had died, and they decided (at my son's urging
, IIRC) to go to Hell to retrieve her soul. They enter Hell, and the DM tells my son to roll a perception check. Critical fail! Sothe groupmy son's character pretty much skips into Hell singing "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" — not literally, but utterly oblivious to anything. As you can imagine, that was not a good start to that phase of their adventure.I've never actually played, myself. My son and I created a character for me to help me stay awake while driving from Washington a few years ago, and recently recreated it, because none of what we did on the road got written down. (I remembered a lot of it, because it's basically the same kind of character I like to play in other games — roguelikes, Skyrim, etc.) My son wants to run a one-shot campaign for me, but so far, he hasn't come up with one that would work well for a novice player and level 1 character. It will be his first time DMing, too, when and if he comes up with one.
Edits based on corrections from my son.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
My son wants to run a one-shot campaign for me, but so far, he hasn't come up with one that would work well for a novice player and level 1 character. It will be his first time DMing, too, when and if he comes up with one.
There were a bunch of adventures for AD&D intended for a
GMDM™ and one player, all with titles of <class name> Challenge — Fighter’s Challenge, Wizard’s Challenge, etc.. These should be easy enough to adapt to more modern D&D editions by ignoring the printed monster stats and looking up the current equivalents instead.
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Any other Critical Role fans here? All I gotta say after watching the most recent episode (C2E72) is holy fucking shit, Fjord.
Also I've spent several months thinking what I did with my warlock character was just the coolest, so I am feeling extremely upstaged right now.
I finally got to play with my new character for more than half a session this week, although it was a shopping-and-planning-and-travelling session and we had to finish right as the first combat was about to start. I'm always going to be a bit sad about all the things I never got to do with the warlock, but I've finally come to terms with the fact that I ended his story, and I don't regret it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to enjoy playing the bard as much.
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@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
Also I've spent several months thinking what I did with my warlock character was just the coolest, so I am feeling extremely upstaged right now.
I think that if you don't believe that something you did (even if it was just killing a rodent of unusual size) was the coolest, you haven't fully enjoyed playing RPGs.
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PC death can be a lot of fun, even for the player.
Playing Pendragon, our characters were trying to chat up potential wives. I try my luck with a woman whose suitors have all died after being sent to war and (in keeping with RL) botch it (the GM spins it in a funny way). Later, we get sent to war... And in the first combat, my character takes a fatal blow (cue laughter around the table).
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
These should be easy enough to adapt to more modern D&D editions by ignoring the printed monster stats and looking up the current equivalents instead.
Thanks! That sounds perfect.
However, my son says, "I've only played 5e and don't know anything about earlier versions," so additional tips would be very welcome, perhaps starting with how to find those old challenges.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
However, my son says, "I've only played 5e and don't know anything about earlier versions," so additional tips would be very welcome
I’ve never played 5th edition (or 4th and barely any 3.5th, but a good deal of 3rd and a lot of AD&D 2nd) so maybe I’m not the best one to ask. However, it can’t be all that difficult: just reading one of these adventure will probably already tell him what needs changing. (I say this as someone with a lot of conversions between game systems under my belt: if you know the one you’re converting to well enough, you can usually make something up even if you don’t quite understand the original.)
perhaps starting with how to find those old challenges.
This directory has a lot of scanned PDFs of AD&D books, and here’s a bunch of AD&D adventures as PDFs. Both seem to have all the <Class> Challenge ones, by the looks of it.
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@remi said in D&D thread:
I think that if you don't believe that something you did (even if it was just killing a rodent of unusual size) was the coolest, you haven't fully enjoyed playing RPGs.
You just gotta build in an exception for when Vox Machina or the Mighty Nein did a similar thing, and did it better than you, at least if you're not also a professional actor. And Travis Willingham might even be the best actor of the bunch.
Anyway on reflection I don't think he wins it by that big a margin. It was definitely about 200% more badass and cooler in the moment, but in terms of what actually happened to the character, my version was more dramatic and poignant.
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...perhaps starting with how to find those old challenges.
Adding to what @Gurth said: they're also sold on DriveThruRPG if you feel like respecting the copyright law.
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@Parody Thanks. I sent that link to my son, too. Before your edit.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
@Parody Thanks. I sent that link to my son, too. Before your edit.
Yeah, sorry. I wasn't coming up with a good wording for "here's a generic link to the site" and "here's a convoluted search link that will probably put those specific modules at the top of the search results because for some stupid reason DTRPG doesn't let you only search titles".
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@Parody said in D&D thread:
Adding to what @Gurth said: they're also sold on DriveThruRPG if you feel like respecting the copyright law.
I hadn’t even considered AD&D books might be available on there … I kind of figured the only way to get them would be from bootleg scans, or second-hand games dealers for hardcopy versions of course (my preferred versions).
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Parody said in D&D thread:
Adding to what @Gurth said: they're also sold on DriveThruRPG if you feel like respecting the copyright law.
I hadn’t even considered AD&D books might be available on there … I kind of figured the only way to get them would be from bootleg scans, or second-hand games dealers for hardcopy versions of course (my preferred versions).
It doesn't help that we had close to 20 years of TSR/WotC/Hasbro not doing much of anything digitally while
college students with too much free timededicated gamers made digital versions of the books available via all sorts of file sharing systems. I was surprised when WotC started giving away some of the old modules and then made all sorts of stuff available via DriveThruRPG.It's unfortunate that this didn't convince WotC/Hasbro to do the same with their current lines. Compare to Paizo's Pathfinder 2nd that's releasing today: they'll be giving a free PDF of the new rulebooks to everyone at Gen Con who buys them in hardcover (or anyone else who subscribes to them on their website) and they have the PF2 Core Rulebook PDF priced at $15.
(I will note, though, that both WotC/Hasbro and Paizo have digital content available via more specialized platforms.)
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@Parody you can find most 1st party publications all the way back to AD&D 1e on dmsguild.com. WotC has been digitizing and publishing them there as official products for a while. Cheap, too. As PDFs, even.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
dmsguild.com
That's just DriveThruRPG with a different skin, FWIW.
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@Parody said in D&D thread:
It doesn't help that we had close to 20 years of TSR/WotC/Hasbro not doing much of anything digitally while
college students with too much free timededicated gamers made digital versions of the books available via all sorts of file sharing systems.More like close to 30 years. I still have some text files somewhere, that people had typed over from AD&D rulebooks and posted on BBSs in the early ’90s.
It's unfortunate that this didn't convince WotC/Hasbro to do the same with their current lines.
Yet they started out so well. In the back of the first print run of the D&D3 Player’s Handbook (from 2000) was a CD-ROM with a character generator, for example.
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Just got back from a hilarious and completely off piste session.
At the end of last session we got the hook for the next part of the quest. Our paladin had just leveled up and needed to go in the opposite direction to find a temple, the rest of the party stayed in town while he was gone.
We have two conmen who have decided to go into business together selling "hero juice" that's actually just piss. They agreed to an exclusivity contract with a townsperson, letting him sell it. They had no intention of keeping the exclusivity, but also didn't read the contract and got royally screwed over by it.
Another party member is a rogue who, due to a complicated back story, has a doll that houses the soul of his 20 year old daughter. The doll is roughly the same height as my gnome character and fully animated. I mentioned a few sessions back that it would be fun to do a romance plot between the gnome and the doll, and our GM absolutely ran with the idea. He's also decided that due to her soul being ripped from her body she's got a rapidly loosening trip on her sanity.
So, gnome meets doll. Gnome strikes up conversation. Doll immediately starts flirting hard and within minutes is dragging gnome to her father's house. She has no... orifices but has a hand so is going at it to the point of pain and refuses to stop. My gnome eventually pushes her off, casts fog cloud, gathers up his clothes and makes a run for it. The doll's father is just coming back from creating a new body for his daughter and sees me running naked out of his house. I don't stop when he calls me so he shoots me in the back with an arrow. I lead a bit of a chase through the alleys before collapsing from the shock and pain. He questions me, and when he doesn't like my answers wriggles the arrow in my wound. Eventually, he pulls the arrow out. A natural 1 on a constitution check means the shock stops my heart, and if it wasn't for the cleric having seen everything, shoring me up and taking me to the infirmary I'd have been rolling a new character.
3 hour session, zero storyline completed. Great fun
