D&D players will always come up with the most bizarre, workable solutions to problems when you least expect it.
In one game I ran, the party needed to find a magical artifact and didn’t have any idea where it was at all. So they decided to use Commune to figure it out – but Commune as a spell only lets you ask yes or no questions, and get an answer out of it. So they took a map of the continent, drew a line down half of it, and asked “Is the artifact on this half of the map?”. They then continued, narrowing the artifact’s location down further and further, until they were able to pinpoint the exact building in question.
This reminds me of the last campaign I was in, when my husband played a Telepathic Psion. When we were coming up with our inventories at the beginning of the game, everyone else is putting down normal shit like horses, packs, travel provisions, money.
My husband asked for a bear trap.
The DM (who happened to be coolkidmitch) asked him what the hell he could possibly need a bear trap for, to which my husband only said, “You’ll see.” After about twenty minutes of figuring out what this bear trap would weigh, the skill my husband would have to roll in order to use it, and a bunch of other minutiae, my husband had a bear trap in his inventory.
Now, all of us kind of forgot about the bear trap while we were adventuring along on our escort quest (during which my husband’s Psion regularly tried to convince one of our employers that there was a golden acorn/tree of life/fountain of youth/whatever the fuck in the forest so she would wander off and get herself eaten by bears – she was really rude) until we run into a situation where we’ve been surprised by the locals and nobody can draw a weapon without causing a real problem.
My husband pulls the bear trap out of his saddlebag, holds it out to the nearest goon, and says the goon needs to roll a will check. When asked why the goon needs to roll a will check, my husband calmly replies, “He’s being offered the fanciest hat he’s ever seen in his life, and he really wants to put it on.”
Moment of silence around the gaming table as all of us realize that my husband is trying to end the encounter by convincing a goon to put a bear trap on his head like a hat.
The goon failed the will check.
I gotta share The Grand Show story now.
So my D&D campaign is comprised of four newbies, one guy with a lot of tabletop experience, and me, the newbie DM. The crew is trying to break into a walled manor, in part to find out if the Lord inside had anything to do with some culty plot shenanigans (P.S: he was dead the whole time, so no one would have detected them from inside the wall regardless).
I am very explicit to them about the fact that they are trying to break into the Lord’s manor, in the middle of the day, across from the main thoroughfare of the town, with no cover or disguise of any kind, and they are all level 2 – so no teleportation, invisibility, illusions – nothing. They do not heed my warnings, and our gnome paladin and halfling rogue toss a grappling hook over the wall and start to climb it. Meanwhile the other three in the party – a totally inconspicuous group consisting of a dragonborn with a cat, a tiefling in a chainmail bikini, a half-vampire warlock with a mask and a swordcane, and an NPC satyr who was along for the ride – are just hanging out below the wall watching.
After a minute I say, “behind you, you notice that a crowd of about ten or twelve peasants have gathered and are whispering in worried voices. You notice two guards approaching from down the road.”
Halfling rogue – one of the more-or-less newbies of the crew – whips around and immediately shouts “WELCOME TO THE GRAND SHOW!”, and scores an excellent deception roll. Dragonborn starts making his cat do tricks and rolls a sick animal handling check. Tiefling cleric begins pole-dancing on her spear and also rolls high. The warlock starts doing special effects with Minor Illusion and rolls ok. They nudge the satyr into playing music for them, who crits his performance check and charms half the audience as a result. The paladin, from the top of the wall, starts juggling his hammers and midway through throws one at the window of the Lord’s manor, breaking it so they can get in.
I was already going to give them that, and then nearly every last fucking NPC rolled an insight check of less than 10. So the group also made 10 gold for their “busking” and got into the manor completely unhindered. o/ goddamnit.
Roleplaying in general = epic
@listener-blue all i can think of is the damn squid babies
Running a campaign making use of the Sandstorm book for 3.5. Which is a desert environment and monster supplement book. So, the campaign is going well for an evil game. All the players are doing their shenanigans.
Most of them are following the plot but a player who regretted their CE character was given an option to reroll a new one as a cleric of storms. I figure I’ll give him a leg up and allow it. This is how the story of “Money Rain” Began.
So, rolling random treasure as they’re all level 8 or so. You can get some really silly ass results on the random treasure table. One of the enemies they killed happened to have a collection of 100,000 gold… In copper coins. All of it in copper coins. 10 million fucking pennies. So, the players, utilizing several extradimensional storage spaces have this ocean of pennies on hand to try and later convert it into a sensible currency like adamantine ingots or something.
One of the things they’ve been doing is cooperating with this cult, not so much as members but as “consultants.” Well, they were asked to help pacify this town and make it ready for the cult… Problem is they’re a group of 6 ne’er do wells versus a town of 3,500 people… That’s when the storm cleric goes, “well, I can make and generate a hurricane.” And that’s when the psion of the asks, “Can that include tornados and high speed winds?” I made the mistake of saying, “Yes.”
They then go on a twenty minute explanation and spend most of that doing various physics calculations. What is their grand plan for utilizing a force 3 hurricane in the desert? MONEY. FUCKING. RAIN. They decide to dump all 10 million copper into a pile and have tornadoes suck it up. After some quick math on the square and cubic footage of the town… They can get something like 9 coins per cubic foot of space for something like 10 rounds. And so it hailed pennies. More, and more and more. People immediately sought shelter because these things were doing almost 1 lethal point of damage from flying around at above terminal velocity. Then the weight on houses started collapsing roofs…
All told they ended up killing around 25% of the city, critical injuring another 30%, and left every single family with at least one casualty.
god damn money rain.
This post gets better everytime it crosses my dash
I was once in a campaign where a player convinced the DM to let her play a cleric of herself. As in, her character was firmly convinced that she was a god, and believed it so fervently that she could pray to herself every night to get spells. (The rules allow this, sort of! You can be a cleric of a cause instead of a god, so she decided her cause was “being a god.”)
By the end of the second session the entire party had joined her religion. By the end of the next session, thanks to a couple of natural 20s by her and the bard, an entire village had declared her their patron god.
This was a level three character.
At level six she took the Leadership feat, and shit really hit the fan. By the end of the campaign the DM had given up, and the whole setting had dissolved into religious warfare between her followers and the followers of the traditional gods.
A while later, starting another campaign with the same DM:
Player: Can I play a cleric of myself?
DM: After what happened last time? Hell no.
Player: Nonono, I don’t mean a character who’s a cleric of herself, I mean a character who’s a cleric of myself. Me. [Player’s name].
DM: *long pause* Nope, I’m done, who wants to take over DMing?
