Fake War Stories

I was playing in a campaign where the GM was very new to the system and was running a 2e campaign in a 4e setting with 3.5e rules.

As you can see its a recipe for disaster, but moving on from that.

Our DM decided to give each individual player 200k in gold. Fatal mistake. Everyone went out and bought stat tomes, major magic items that supplemented their powers, etc.

I went out and bought about 20 minor magic items and still had enough gold to buy an armada of ships, arm them with golden cannons, and take over the world. DM doesn’t like this. (He kills my character and takes my magic items with a giant evil turnip later. But that’s a different story.)

We were sent to investigate a tomb in some necro town where the graveyard was 3/4 of the city. We entered the tomb and generally found nothing. We were on our way out when we noticed something strange.

“Guys, where’d the front door go?”

Fireball explodes 10 feet away from us. We all turn around and look at the wizard standing on the other side of the room. We lose sight of him as smoke fills the room in a thick cloud.

INITIATIVE! I go first because of high dex and a nat 20.

Me: “I use my cape of mounteback.”

DM: “You can only use it on yourself.”

Me: “Actually…”

Effect of a 9th lv caster casting dimension door

(Dimension door: you can transport a number of creatures with you equal to 1/3 your CL)

Me: “I touch the other 3 members of my party and teleport them 500 ft towards town.”

The DM was mad that I’d foiled his plot so he decided to get the town mad at us, arrest us, then let us go because there was no real reason to hold us captive.

You know its a good day when your magic item saves the entire party.

(Submitted by mrevand6)

Pathfinder campaign, running for a few months, and we’re on the final session plowing our way through the final few rooms until we get to the boss (the Carrion King.) I’ve got a Barbarian who was planned out to be a lot more interesting than he ended up being in practice. Our rogue is a multiclassed Barbarian as well with an INT score that doesn’t really break the bank, but he’d always done a good job of finding traps for us.

So we’re descending this long, Guggenheim-style staircase-room with no railings and a deep chasm in the center when we’re all hit with complicated, DM-created trap that opens with a blinding spell.

Everyone saves except for the gnome sorcerer, but no one has evasion, so while most of us are blind for three rounds, the sorcerer is blind for nine minutes.

The blinded party (along with the fifteen meat-shields we had just rescued) is then hit with the second part of the trap: a wire which yanks us all together like in a Looney Tunes short.

Being in the center of the uncomfortable heap (and with the sorcerer wedged up against my buttcheeks) I roll a great strength check to break our bonds from the inside, unwittingly sending several meat shields over the edge of the staircase and onto the waiting up-turned spears of the pair of gnolls waiting below.

As the blind sorcerer starts clambering up my barbarian’s back for safety, the rest of us regain our sight and realize the third part of the trap: a magical-fire type of “fuse” flaring up in a spiral along the wall, and a sort of gunpowder showering down on everything from above. We have only a couple of rounds before the explosion hits, and the remaining NPCs we rescued are ignoring all fire safety and crowding the door we came through so that no one can get out.

The rogue jumps for it with his ring of featherfall, and my friend playing the sorcerer mentions that he, too, has a ring of featherfall, but no way of understanding what’s going on in his blinded and confused state.

In my first feeling of creative problem solving I’ve felt with my character in ages, I hatch a plan.

I run as far up the staircase as I can and ready an action to jump into the chasm while holding the sorcerer as soon as the fuse reaches its end, thus doing the action-movie thing and saving us from the explosion. The DM, who is a huge fan of this kind of playing, heartily approves. We wait…

And as soon as the fuse ends, I make my acrobatics roll.

1

The barbarian, holding onto the sorcerer, gets tangled in the aforementioned wire and slams them both into the side of the staircase as it explodes, the force of which blasts them across the room into another wall of fire on the other side, knocking the sorcerer into negative HP. At this point we reconvene a discussion of whether a gnome wearing a featherfall ring could sustain the barbarian carrying him, and the DM decides to make it a CON roll on the sorcerer’s part. The sorcerer’s player is a DM himself and knows to never take CON as a dump stat, so this should be ewasy enough.

1

The unconscious sorcerer dislocates his shoulder and the barbarian tumbles, barely catching himself on a flaming staircase, as the gnome drifts lazilly down, bleeding out and hanging from a sickeningly dislocated arm wearing the crucial ring. Once he lands, the rogue (who had dispactched the two gnolls at the bottom in this time) does a little bit of roleplaying and shouts that he attempts to heal the sorcerer, despite having no ranks in heal.

1

“The rogue attempts to kick the shoulder back into place. 3 damage.”

Thankfully the party cleric had made her own way down there by that point and saved the sorcerer at the last possible moment, but at this point we all turn to the DM, “What was the DC on that trap?”

“It was only 23! I didn’t want to make it to cruel, but he rolled a 21.”

“Oh shit,” says the rogue. “I forgot my +2 to trapfinding.”

One of my groups of players and their long-time characters (3-4 years) found themselves investigating strangeness in a region that they determined was caused by a spell caster. Wizard weather, crop failures, animals changed in form, all sorts of oddness.

In true murder hobo form, they climbed up to said spell caster’s mountain fortress and broke in through the cellar, confronting sladdi minions and weird monsters that were the result of various experiments. As they progressed through the place, they saw that he was:

1) obviously of much higher level/more powerful than the group, and;

2) not so much evil but rather a chaotic neutral mad scientist type.

Eventually they confronted the wizard in the grand hall of his fortress and found that he was willing to discuss the situation with them, asking them why they felt the need to break in, kill his pets, ruin his experiments, etc. The party spokesman started telling him how his experiments were having negative effects on the countryside, hurting the local farmers, etc.

There is a bit of heat in the discussion, with the wizard getting somewhat defensive and arguing about how his experiments are important and so on.

While this is going on, the guy playing the combat wizard looks at the party’s fighter tank, who simply shrugs.

The wizard then looks at me and says, “Fuck it. Fireball.”

What followed was a one-sided total party kill, as said high-level wizard and his minions responded to the unprovoked attack by tromping the group into goo.

Many adventures have passed with that group of players since then, but the phrase “Fuck it. Fireball” has never been surpassed in its infamy.

(Contributed by moonbiter via Metafilter)