Fake War Stories

(This was submitted by a group of gaming fans of our site who go by The Zoo. Thanks guys!)

Continuing from where mrevand6 left off from the giant demon turnip, the soulknife ran ahead and was promptly swallowed, ne’er to return. My cleric of JUSTICE AND VALOUR watched in mute horror as his comrade was devoured by this foul creature, and recompense for his life was demanded.

I drew my blade and said “Now we shall slay this fiend and avenge the life of our comrade!”.

My fellow cleric stated, “We need to run.”

The local bandito said “Naw.”

And the warlock simply looked on.

This turned into a 5 minute break, where we reconnoitered outside to plan/argue, as we were wont to.

Now, as you faithful readers may know, our DM was not the best one our group had played with. He railroaded like a fiend, refused to do his bookwork, and had a very rigid idea of how D&D was “supposed” to be like. To wit, my cleric had turned into a plot device, and I endured it with grace and serenity borne of patience (until he broke my master’s sword, but that is a rage story not fit for here).

Outside, I repeated my demand that we do battle in the name of our fallen friend and scrub this blight from the land! The other cleric, a weak, weedy fellow of perhaps questionable faith, again repeated that we could not win, we were exhausted from many battles up to this point, including a very bad run-in with 2 shambling mounds (we will never look down on plant monsters ever again), and I challenged his courage and made a discouraging remark about his testicles or lack thereoff (or something of the sort).

The bandito said it wasn’t his problem (it’s never his problem until shambling mounds show up ::grumble::) and the warlock continued to look.

I repeated that we will fight this beast or I will stand alone to fell it.

What I did not say was that due to my armor and the presentation I saw before, of the soulknife, the single fastest thing I had ever seen getting snapped up mid-run by this burrowing monster, I could not under any means functionally outrun it, and I could not fly. I literally had no choice but to stand and fight, or die fleeing.

The cleric finally relented, saying he had some ideas left, and with him, the bandito grudgingly agreed. With the majority rules, the warlock followed suit. I bounded back into the house, sat at the table, looked over my charater sheet, took stock of my spells, and waited.

What I didn’t know was that the rest of the group was still plotting outside…

Everyone comes back in, and sits down. The first thing the cleric does is cast the spell needed to give you wings on himself, then offers to hit me with it. I defer to giving it to the bandito, as he had some decent ranged ability (that never worked [OHHH NOOO~]), and the warlock again takes to the air.

I then sorta realized just how buggered I was.

Well, hell. I hit myself with some buffs, hulk the hell up, summoned 5 celestial badgers (love these guys, 1d4+1 baby), spread them out in a circle, and had them rage, stamping their feet to draw in the turnip.

It burrowed down, and the DM rolled a d6 to determine who got nommed. A badger got hit (thankfully), the group made some cursory attempts to pelt it from the air, while I activated my plan. I walked over to it, and grappled the damn thing, with all the badgers assisting. I proceed to then pin the creature, my grapple check sky high with the buff bonuses, keep it down for its round, release my part of the grapple, quick draw my longsword with both hands, and full bore power attack it.

Rolled to hit, rolled damage.

“30 damage,” I say, “is it dead?”.

“No”, replies the DM.

Rolled again, hit again, 36 damage, still alive. Quick Strike bracers, go. Attack again, hit again. “40 damage, is it dead?”.

“Yes, it’s dead…”.

“Good”.

I de-summon the badgers and sheath my sword as my comrades float down from the skies. I cut open the beast with my knife, hoping to recover my comrade’s remains for burial, and am told there is nothing inside, not even his metal/magic gear.

Taking this situation in silent stride, I quietly build a small shrine and pray for his soul to find salvation before looking towards a small hut that contained a gnawed upon corpse, the corpse’s journal detailing the creation of the monstrous plant we had slain and a few small baubles.

We burned the creature’s body, burned the ashes, then I called down divine fire to burn them once more just in case.

With the situation solved, we returned to the tree people, told them the creature that was killing their folk was dealt with, received their word they would leave the human settlements be, then got on our damn ship and left that accursed island behind.

This was about the time I came to realize that 3.5 D&D clerics are sorta busted.

I’m a long time supporter of a small and relatively unknown LARP called RISING. It’s a zombie survival larp, and the weekend events are always full of great stories I will cherish for the rest of my life. The story I’m about to tell is about something I did that was, as one of my fellow players called it, “legendarily failtacular”.

One quick lesson in RISING rules to explain the story. In this post-apocalyptic setting, one of the few medicines that can be used is steroids, and game physics dictates that someone dosed with them—for one swing—deals 5 times the damage. On the next swing, 4 times the damage and so on untill it wears off.

Example: if you can only do 1 damage in melee normally, if a doctor hits you with steroids, your next attack will be 5 damage, then 4, then 3, then 2, untill you’re back to 1 damage. This little syringe, I always noticed, was widely ignored as not that useful. But i found a sneaky way of using it, as this story will show.

I was a Marksman at this particular event (ranged attack specialist, firearms, etc. NOT a beefy melee fighter), and I tagged along with another group as I came alone that year. The wonderful DM liked to incorporate meal times into the game as to not break ambiance. So our first morning in the event, our groups got word that our food drop landed in the mountains nearby, an area we knew was “mountain man” territory.

Feeling remarkably hungry after a night of killing zombies I decided to follow along on the quest to get our food. A short hike brought us to a clearing where a mountain man on a 4 wheeler with our food crate strapped to the back was getting ready to ride off to his group.

A short bit of diplomatic back and forth got the mountain man to agree to let us have the crate provided we offered him something of equal value. An argument broke out in the group as to what all we could do without so we could have breakfast. Feeling a bit clever, I stopped the argument (this is all out of earshot of the mountain man, who was also one of the GMs), “Guys, stop! There’s no reason we have to lose a damn thing to this guy. We outnumber him and no one else is around! If we kill him quietly we can have the food AND his gear. At the low cost of FREE!”

This becomes the winning idea and then the conversation becomes how to do this dastardly deed without making alot of noise.

And then I had another epiphany.

“Hey doc, do you have a steroid? Good. Hit me with it.”

Then I drop my guns and pull my only melee weapon, a knife about the size of a bowie, “Hey dude, I have this knife. It’s a hunting knife, really sharp, good for skinning game, etc. Would that be a good trade?”

I don’t know what the guy was thinking, but he made it too easy.

“Well, I don’t know…bring it here and let me have it.”

So I held it out and when I got close enough I got a good grip and “let him have it”.

In 5 quick stabs I did 15 damage in a game where the average human has 1 hit point and the average zombie has 5 or 10.

Point is I don’t know how many points a “mountain man” had… but I know I’d done enough.

The GM looks at me just baffled, “are you SERIOUS?!?”

I grinned, very proud of myself, “Yup. Gotta love steroids. So I’m looting you.”

The GM quickly gets his head back in the game and says words that may as well have just been “you fucked up.” He smiled and said, “you hear a ticking noise.”

The mountain man, in fear of this exact scenario, booby trapped his 4 wheeler to EXPLODE in the event of his death. A little fact that I think should have been mentioned EARLIER… but I digress.

I turn, cuss, and run while the timer counts down. The 4 wheeler blows up taking our breakfast with it. Not only was I the bane of the breakfast table (until the GM showed pity and gave us food anyway), but I then became public enemy number 1 in the new plot where the mountain men declared war on our camp…

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)

One of our friends was really excited about the adventure he had spent all week preparing. So we all eagerly sat down to play.

After a rather interesting intro we faced off against a group of hobgoblins in a cave and dispatched them easily enough. All of a sudden, on a cliff above us however, appeared a drow priestess in full battle garb.

She declares us her slaves and starts casting.

*roll for initiative*

The initiative order is Thief (PC) > Priestess > rest of party.

The thief, who had his bow already in hand due to the fight with the hobgoblins, fires an arrow at the priestess.

*roll to hit*

“20! critical!”

So the DM asks: “Ok how much damage on that arrow, no sneak attack?”

Player rolls the die, and says: “8 points of damage…”

As the GM starts to write down the damage on his sheet, the player then adds, “but it doesn’t matter because she is dead.”

DM: “What do you mean she is dead? She has over 70 HP!”

Thief: “Well, maybe, but that was an Arrow of Slaying: +4 vs Drow”

…pause, DM blinks…

DM: “Let me see that sheet.”

Player hands Thief character sheet over to DM… DM reads character sheet… Then the DM crumples up his 6 sheets of adventure notes and tosses them over his shoulder and says: “Well, that’s that then. Adventure over.”

He also mutters “bastards” under his breath; we all grin.

It turns out the drow priestess was going to Charm us all and use us as her pawns in a large political power game in the Underdark and she was the key character in the adventure. Without her: no game.

We never did remember where the Thief got that Arrow of Slaying from, but it was on his sheet.

And from that day on, whenever we face an obviously important NPC or monster, someone will invariably look over his sheet and say: “I think I have an Arrow of Slaying for that.”

(via Vindaloo on MetaFilter)

Long ago, in the early 1980’s, our AD&D group was wandering through a dungeon and came upon some loot. Included was a vial with some indeterminate liquid in a very fancy container. We all passed it around, sniffed it, putting a drop on our finger, drop on the tongue, but we couldn’t reach a conclusion as to what was in it. Of course no one had any Identify spells - those were saved for the end of the adventure!

After a minute or so, our ever-impatient Chaotic player says “Fine! I drink the whole thing!”.

The DM blinks and says, “what?”

The player says “I drink it! Now what happens to me?”

The DM smiles, and starts laughing until he can barely breathe. When he calms down enough, he finally manages to say, “that was an Oil of Slipperiness!”

Which, of course, worked. Very well. A lesson in what happens when biology meets magic.

The player immediately had the entire contents of his digestive system, top to bottom, dump onto the floor. We all got a roll to see how fast we could jump back (we all made it out of the blast zone in time). The poor player’s armor was stained completely brown from the waist down.

For the next three days (until the DM finally took pity on him), everything that went in his mouth immediately came out the other end. He gave up wearing armor, leaving it all behind. We all had to make sure we were always upwind or far enough ahead of the smell.

I would like to say he learned from the experience, but I bet that the rest of us learned a lot more than he did!

I ran a long-term D&D campaign a while ago (3 years, 30 levels… no cleric), which led to a climactic fight through the Abyss to a face-off with the demon lord Yeenoghu.  They finally tracked him to his throne room, where he brandished his three-headed flail, a weapon that they had heard horrific stories of in regards to its ability to really, really hurt.  He reared his head back, howled a howl of defiance at the adventurers, and promptly lost initiative to the party’s sorceress.

Sorceress: “Casting a spell.  I wish his flail was up his ass.”

DM: “You, er… you what?”

Sorceress: “I wish his flail was up his ass.  Right up there.”

Spell resistance?  Sorceress rolls a natural 20 and breaks it.  Saving throw?  None.

So my big, bad demon lord spent his first turn forcefully removing his own dread weapon from his bunghole, damaging himself grievously in the process, while the party dogpiled him.