Fake War Stories

Early in my first experience with D&D, our party was looking for a particular mine where orcs were doing some bad things.

I don’t know, who cares.

Anyway we came across two of the guards but kept our distance to stay noticed. We decided our best chance of finding the place was to listen in on their conversation. Unfortunately, all our Orcish speaking characters were too big and armored and terrible at espionage-related tasks to pull this off.

We debated a while until I had an idea: I asked our DM if I—a gnome bard (shut up)—could sneak over to them, listen extremely carefully, and come back and repeat the sounds I’d heard to the rest of the party for them to translate.

He glared a DM-glare at me and said simply: “I’m thinking of a number.”

I took the die in my hand and calmly rolled a natural 20 of pure destiny.

(submitted by brennathings)

We were playing an Exalted game where I was brought in at the last minute even though I didn’t know anything about the game or universe and nobody around was particularly good at explaining it.

But I was an Eclipse caste Solar which meant that my special ability was to create unbreakable vows with a handshake.

And also apparently that my charisma was through the roof.

I didn’t really see how this was going to have any use in whatever the hell we were doing, so when we met at the required tavern at the start I just wandered off over to the bar and started hitting on one of the women there.

After a while of this derail, the conversation sort of went like this:

GM: “Her boyfriend emerges from the men’s room and comes over, seeming very protective and possessive of her.”

ME: “Oh, hey, man! How’s it going?”

GM (as boyfriend): “ummm…”

ME: “I was just talking to your special ladyfriend here. She had great things to say about you.”

GM (as boyfriend): “um… okay. Good to know.”

ME: “Damn glad to meet you both. I don’t want to be in your hair, so I’ll let y’all be, but never let go of this one, okay? Lever let anything happen to her.”

GM (as boyfriend): “Okay. Will do.”

ME: “Promise me.”

GM (as boyfriend): “I promise…”

ME: “Shake on it?”

GM: “… are you really going to do this?”

ME: “Of course!”

GM: “The random man at the bar shakes your hand, setting on a flare of Solar presence which lights up the entire town as if it were mid-day. The formerly happy couple immediately feels the weight of an unbreakable promise fall upon them, while the entire bar, and really whole town, loses their collective shit at knowing that Solars are around.”

ME: “Oh. Do people not like Solars or something?”

GM: “NO! IMAGINE THAT!”

(via Navelgzer on Metafilter with permission)

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)

I think my only intriguing story was in World Tree (very strange but interesting furry RPG).

Improvisational magic is a crude, childish, style of magic with a hilariously complicated system of rolling. The game was big enough I had also been dubbed co-GM in charge of magic. Unfortunately, power leads to corruption, and I nudged the GM to use some suggested optional rules in the book that gave me a lot more flexibility.

Improv magic has one thing going for it: crude, simple spells at sometimes stunning levels of power. Being specialized in it, I could really up the ante.

So at some point a massive fight breaks out between about a dozen PCs and two dozen enemies. I try flexing my magical muscle by summoning FLAMING BEES!

Cause you know, the only thing to make this battle better would be bees!

I roll to see how much power I can eke out of the spell and score stupidly well. Then I roll for success and score even more stupidly well. I do the math, and I giggle and hand the GM the stats for Fire Bees.

They’re powered at 120 or so. 30 is the normal range.

For more fun, it was a quadratic spell such that higher power equals more powerful as well as more bees. The GM looks st the dozen or two FLAMING BEES OF DOOM (tm) I have and rolls for attack.

The bees instakill the enemy. Victory is declared as the enemy is routed by my one spell or chased off by giant flaming bees.

I gained a lot of followers that day :)

(Submitted by AngelWuff via MetaFilter)