I decided to run the Waterdeep campaigns 1 after the other and while creating the digital characters one of the players said he wants an antimatter rifle, and because i knew he probably wouldn't play if he didn't have it, i let him. he only has 1 piece of ammo, so only 2 shots. he spent his first one fighting the intellect devourer in the Xanathar guild hideout, and killed him immediately. he goes through while conserving his last shot until we go down to the first level of undermountain, and he uses it on the person disguised as a vampire on the first level. i tell him that he wasted his shot on someone he could have punched to death and the look on his face is absolutely priceless. he was like
Just running a session from a home-brew campaign. One of my players, who recently got his own set of dice and wants to use them for everything, rolls a nat 1 to stealth past some goblins during a sneak attack. Everyone stops for a minute, then another player says 'wait, you didn't use your dice' - he had used one of the table's sets. He's like, oh yeah, phew, and rolls a nat 20.
Another funny story, it was during waterdeep dragon heist, and they had just gotten the tavern with the rival. They decided to kill the rival and the barbarian went of and killed them in their sleep, or at lest, tried to kill them. he rolled low on damage. (during all this the in-house paladin was in bed, trying to forget it ever happened. anyway, the barbarian was arrested but freed because he bribed the magistrate, and they started sell each other as slaves. Me during all this.
So... I was going through my first game with my friend as the DM, and another friend as a Dragonborn fighter named Unnamed. I was a Human Bard, and we were fighting a few goblins (We didn't do any of the preset campaigns, just went along with my friend's) when Unnamed took crit damage and landed on 3 Hit Points. I used one of my buff spells (forgot which one) and gave him some additional damage, and he decided to fight the last goblin by cutting off his toenail. He dealt 8 damage with a great sword and killed the goblin by cutting its overgrown nail. Perfect.
This was a long time ago (3rd Edition) and our party knew a big bad gnoll with a big sword was in his quarters. We kicked down the door and our wizard, who felt lucky after a high initiative roll decided to run in, jump on the table in front of the bad guy and use a spell. That all worked as he planned but the gnoll just took it like a champ.
On his turn, the wizard took the sword as a champ and bleeding all over the place. (he got lucky and was healed).
Our wizard learned a valuable lesson that day!
And i know, pretty basic story but when you are at the table with few friends and this shit happens, magical!
All right, here's a good one. First time DM, I'm just running a campaign with my husband for practice and fun. Original story and everything. This is a bit long, so bear with me.
He gets to a town called Devos, and he finds a little marketplace outside the inn. He's browsing the wares. Pretty basic; weapons, miscellaneous goods, and so on. As a key story element, there's a half-orc in the back selling creatures....namely, a wolf-looking thing crossed with a displaced beast. It speaks infernal, and so does Mordai, husband's tiefling. For fun, I threw another character into the marketplace; Rop. Rop sells rope. He's this weird, skinny crazy dude who literally only sells rope, and "Rop sells rope" is all he ever says. He was SUPPOSED to be minor. Just for a laugh. Nah, not in the cards.
My husband spends SO LONG trying to get this guy to say something else. He fails and Rop literally never says anything else. But he yells his tagline anytime someone says 'Rop' or 'Rope'. So that kind of turns into a joke.
And then it snowballs. Soon, this totally unimportant character is an obsession. And he gets so many more attributes....somehow, he can hear you say Rop or rope from anywhere in town, no matter how quietly you say it. He knows if you think it. And he'll shout his line in reply-- ROP SELLS ROPE! The whole town is aware of it. It's just an uncomfortable fact of life. Rop KNOWS, and that's that.
Eventually, Mordai wants to bust out this creature that speaks infernal (getting back to the main quest) and talk to it. But there are magical binds on the cage that he can't break. He just keeps trying at the binds, which aren't going anywhere, instead of trying other methods. He asks the creature for a hint; it indicates that Rop may be able to help.
Guys, my husband spent A FULL THIRTY MINUTES trying to convince this guy to help him. He also tried to physically lift him to bring him to the cage, but Rop used an unidentifiable magic to weigh himself down. Finally, Mordai bought all of Rop's rope. Instantly, the cage around the creature was gone, along with the magical barriers, and Rop has disappeared. You can hear a laughing in the sky, growing fainter until it, too, fades away.
So in summary, a totally useless character ended up being a god of mischief.
Perhaps more importantly, whenever anyone mentions rope now, my husband and I yell in unison, ROP SELLS ROPE!!!
And as a side-note, he got the half-orc out of the way to steal the creature by purchasing bowel-loosening herbs from the trader, and succeeding a persuasion check to get the tavern to cook them into some food. And then he convinced a passerby to give it to her. So while all this is happening, the half-orc is crapping herself silly just outside the bar. I cannot stress enough how ridiculously fun this campaign has been.
The player's character was a Warlock who was obsessed with cheese sticks. Why? I'm not quite sure. The Warlock in our party made friends with our Rogue through offering a cheese stick, got an important piece of information from a bandit through offering a cheese stick, and then stole cheese sticks from another character's husband. they ended the session with twelve cheese sticks. It is now a reoccurring theme.
Well, I once tried climbing up on to a different PC's shoulders to reach a trapdoor. Another one, who was a halfling or a gnome (I can't remember) tried to stabilize the one I was standing on so I got to roll advantage. Rolled terribly on both athletics rolls and ended up falling and accidentally stabbing the halfling with the shortsword I was trying to push open the trapdoor with. I was a water gensai so I tried using the shape water cantrip to help put the blood back into the halfling. Needless to say, rolling a 7 when trying to do this ends up exploding a halfling's heart via too much blood coming in at once...
Great stuff all! We were playing a homebrew campaign based in Westeros from ASOIAF/Game of Thrones. In our party are: Danwarden Westerling - The Deathknight, Mira Powdersnow - The Rogue, Gaspar Ironsmith - The Smith, Finn Codd - The Pirate, and Todd - the NPC fisherman we convinced to tag along. This leg of the quest took us to Skagos (cannibal island in the north), and we were just leaving Lord Crowl's hold when we hear charging hooves of a riderless horse behind us. We all exclaim "free horse!" before a horse with a sword on its head (not a unicorn) being controlled by a beastling starts trying to kill us. Gaspar (who was responsible for bringing NPC Todd) uses his action to step in front of Todd guardingly, but Todd uses his action afterwards to step in front of Gaspar instead, and proceeds to get SHISH KEBABBED on the horse's sword. It was a rough fight, but after much pain and Danwarden getting rammed off a cliff we have our vengeance. To heal up, the DM lets us find magical healing spiders in a cave. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth right? We continue deeper into the cave path and discover a room of cages with starving cannibals in them, we start releasing them and get attacked. We put them out of their misery. Last is a young boy, and we all feel bad so we just knock him out. As we are trying to figure out how to move on, the DM has us roll constitution. We all fail, and all become temporarily paralyzed from those damn too-good-to-be-true healing spiders. And wouldn't you know it that this is when the boy manages to wake up. So there we are lying all over the ground being hungrily looked at by a confused cannibal kid.
Gaspar:"We're just resting!" Mira:"Don't kill us!" Danwarden:"We'll kill YOU!"
And this is par for our party. Its a wonder anything gets done in Westeros.
I have two parties running through the same scenarios (it makes sense in world, honest). They come across a fountain with a giant toad in it. Both parties have been pretty knocked about in the previous encounter (one unconscious warlock) and they're pretty low level, so I don't have the toad attack. Toad intends to just lurk in the fountain, adding to the ambience.
Party no. 1 - the elf druid wild shapes into a wolf and eats the toad. Passes the con save I had him make,
Party no. 2 - the merfolk druid (we're a bit druid heavy) befriends the toad. Crits the animal handling check.
I needed my party to go into a shed off the side of the road that was actually a little outpost for the bad guys (and there was a miniboss).
However. The gunslinger had gotten a message from his god a bit before saying they shouldn't go to a specific town yet, hence why they were out in the middle of nowhere in the first place. And he (and the rest of the party) decided this warning could be extended to the shed.
I tried for a solid 10 minutes to convince them through the npc traveling with them, and even ooc. (Not like "go here, please," but like. Hinting, heavily implying.) Apparently they didn't get the hint and decided to continue on.
So I took the wheels off their cart. They all had to go outside the cart and see that the wheels, which were there last night, were now gone. And the nearest building is the shed.
So they go and find a bunch of stolen artifacts from a museum in the city god said not to go to yet, and also their wheels.
The cherry on top was that the miniboss was a white Dragonborn with blue eyes. They somehow managed to kill him in about two turns and before leaving, pantsed him.
Like two real-life months later, they had to pull over in a forest as they were being more or less chased, and go into this weird house in the woods. They couldn't hide the cart well so the npc and the artificer's construct dog stayed behind, because the gunslinger was worried they would steal the wheels again if it was left unguarded.
I read this story a while back but can't find it anywhere; please let me know where I can find it!
The story is one where a DM/GM created a spiderman themed campaign without his players knowing. He had them fight like a were-scorpion and were-rhyno, other spiderman themed villians. And they saved a guy that they called Dander-Man or Dandar-Man or some variation of that.
Please let me know if you guys know what I'm talking about and where to find that story again!
let me guess the were rhino and were scorpion names were Mac and Aleski
My group had a gnome that had the mechanical arm from Elberon and so we and he agreed that if he rolls a d100 he would cast a random spell at any level but he would take damage and he would have to repair the arm that took 2 actions so it wouldn't be op but the funny part comes in and the party is swarmed by monsters is a tight room so he uses this ability to try and end the fight early because they just finish getting attacked and gets fireball so at the time the team was all level 2 and he blew up the whole party in one action. From there the party gave him the name "loose kaboom" and we never allowed him to do it again.
I'm not a Dm, but I had something pretty funny happen.
Level one, playing LMOP, and we fought the guard wolves at the goblin cave. We put some to sleep, then put it to a vote. We decided to attack the conscious wolf, and it grappled me. So I rolled to get it off. Ended up ripping the chain out of the wall. So then, we had to kill a wolf, and the wolf promptly chewed off my arm and grappled our hafling around the head. We managed to kill it, when the other two wolves woke up. Understandably, the wolves freaked out.
So, we set the wolves on fire. I'm not even kidding.
We hit them with oil and Harold, our mage, used burning hands to set the oil alight. The wolves broke free of the chains and rushed us.
One died before it could reach us. The other got on top of Harold and attacked. Harold started making death saves. So we had to get the wolf off of him. First attempt, we couldn't get him off, and Harold failed the save. The next round, I stabilized Harold after he failed his second save with a 25 medicine check. We got the wolf off with a high strength roll...and crushed Harold's ribs. At least the DM didn't make him take damage. Then, we snuck into Klarg's room and pretty much instakilled everything with inflict wounds.
My players had just participated in a multi-session festival type adventure in a large city [I see a lot of people saying not to try these kinds of things but I think it was fun for everyone]. They are super-paranoid and believe there is a massive, evil conspiracy afoot in the kingdom [kinda true but they have little evidence and just accuse EVERYONE]. So at the opening ceremonies of this festival, to which they were invited guests, they go on a long paranoid rant in front of the assembled nobility and merchants, making a lot of baseless [but sometimes accurate] accusations about so and so and so and so being involved in an evil conspiracy and how the party will expose all of their crimes, see them hanged, etc. While in town they actually manage to expose a few traitors and are feeling pretty good.
On the way home, I decide the real conspirators need to strike back. Given how loose they were with their accusations and how close they hit to home with some of the people they claimed were up to no good (and how completely they disregarded their own safety) I thought it was necessary to hit them with at least one player kill (or at least make them work to survive). As they took a ferry barge across a huge river, 4 assassins were waiting [thanks to an ensorcelled necklace that lets the conspirators track their location]. Their orders were to target the "ringleader" of the player party and to disengage once they had sent a message by killing him.
(Player's raft approaches the dock. They have been discussing how best to commemorate their festival adventure and talk of having a portrait commissioned. They suspect nothing. Assassin 1 is on the dock, impersonating a ferryman waiting for the barge to dock. Assassin 2 is astride a horse, crossbow loaded and hidden on the other side of the horse, seemingly just a commoner waiting for the next ferry. Assassin's 3 and 4 are hidden in trees next to the dock, crossbow's ready.)
(I instruct players to roll initiative. Order is Assassin 1; Player 1; Assassin 2; Assassin 3; Assassin 4... nothing else matters)
Assassin 1 drops his gaff, draws his two poisoned daggers and leaps from the dock onto the barge. (Natural 1 on his athletics roll) He misjudges the jump, winds up doing the splits, smashed his junk on the raft and falls backwards into the water.
Player 1 targets the man on the horse (Assassin 2) who he assumes must be part of the attack. Hits him with his magic bow that allows him to attempt to paralyze a target once per day. Hits. (Assassin 2 fails his WIS save). Man on horse goes stiff as a board and falls out of his saddle. He is paralyzed for 1 minute.
Assassin 3 targets the ringleader with a poisoned crossbow bolt. (Natural 1. I can already see where this is heading. Transitioning from deadly attack to slapstick...) Characters hear a loud crack as a branch breaks and Assassin 3 tumbles from the tree. (Players note he should take fall damage. We spend some time debating how much fall damage is appropriate. Don't recall exact dice, but Assassin 3 takes max possible damage) Assassin 3 has hit the ground hard and is not moving.
Assassin 4 realizes the mission is FUBAR. He attempts to jump from his tree down onto Assassin 2's empty horse. (Assassin 4 fails his athletics roll. I then decide it should have been an acrobatics roll. Assassin 4 fails his acrobatics roll) Assassin 4 misses the horse. He only takes minimum fall damage. I decide enough is enough, Assassin 4 has more movement left, and he gets on the horse and escapes alone.
(Players clean up. Assassin 1 is picked off with arrows as he tries to swim for shore. Assassin 2 is placed in manacles before the paralysis wears off. He is interrogated and gives the party their first legit intelligence of the campaign. Assassin 3 is found to have broken his neck in the fall.)
(4 assassins - extreme overkill for this level of party and intended as a show of force/terror - do not draw blood and only 1 survives by fleeing).
(Players congratulate themselves on their awesomeness. )
PC - Ethel - Human - Lvl 4 Necromancer - Undying Dragons * Serge Marshblade - Human - Lvl 5 Eldritch Knight - Hoard of the Dragon Queen
DM -(Homebrew) Heroes of Bardstown *Red Dead Annihilation: ToA *Where the Cold Winds Blow : DoIP * Covetous, Dragonish Thoughts: HotDQ * Red Wine, Black Rose: CoS * Greyhawk: Tides of War
I decided to run the Waterdeep campaigns 1 after the other and while creating the digital characters one of the players said he wants an antimatter rifle, and because i knew he probably wouldn't play if he didn't have it, i let him. he only has 1 piece of ammo, so only 2 shots. he spent his first one fighting the intellect devourer in the Xanathar guild hideout, and killed him immediately. he goes through while conserving his last shot until we go down to the first level of undermountain, and he uses it on the person disguised as a vampire on the first level. i tell him that he wasted his shot on someone he could have punched to death and the look on his face is absolutely priceless. he was like
I read that story as well... It was about the friendly neighborhood Drieder-Man
Just running a session from a home-brew campaign. One of my players, who recently got his own set of dice and wants to use them for everything, rolls a nat 1 to stealth past some goblins during a sneak attack. Everyone stops for a minute, then another player says 'wait, you didn't use your dice' - he had used one of the table's sets. He's like, oh yeah, phew, and rolls a nat 20.
Another funny story, it was during waterdeep dragon heist, and they had just gotten the tavern with the rival. They decided to kill the rival and the barbarian went of and killed them in their sleep, or at lest, tried to kill them. he rolled low on damage. (during all this the in-house paladin was in bed, trying to forget it ever happened. anyway, the barbarian was arrested but freed because he bribed the magistrate, and they started sell each other as slaves. Me during all this.
Sorry that I don't remember where it was but I do remember it was a video with the drider man thing.
So... I was going through my first game with my friend as the DM, and another friend as a Dragonborn fighter named Unnamed. I was a Human Bard, and we were fighting a few goblins (We didn't do any of the preset campaigns, just went along with my friend's) when Unnamed took crit damage and landed on 3 Hit Points. I used one of my buff spells (forgot which one) and gave him some additional damage, and he decided to fight the last goblin by cutting off his toenail. He dealt 8 damage with a great sword and killed the goblin by cutting its overgrown nail. Perfect.
This was a long time ago (3rd Edition) and our party knew a big bad gnoll with a big sword was in his quarters. We kicked down the door and our wizard, who felt lucky after a high initiative roll decided to run in, jump on the table in front of the bad guy and use a spell. That all worked as he planned but the gnoll just took it like a champ.
On his turn, the wizard took the sword as a champ and bleeding all over the place. (he got lucky and was healed).
Our wizard learned a valuable lesson that day!
And i know, pretty basic story but when you are at the table with few friends and this shit happens, magical!
All right, here's a good one. First time DM, I'm just running a campaign with my husband for practice and fun. Original story and everything. This is a bit long, so bear with me.
He gets to a town called Devos, and he finds a little marketplace outside the inn. He's browsing the wares. Pretty basic; weapons, miscellaneous goods, and so on. As a key story element, there's a half-orc in the back selling creatures....namely, a wolf-looking thing crossed with a displaced beast. It speaks infernal, and so does Mordai, husband's tiefling. For fun, I threw another character into the marketplace; Rop. Rop sells rope. He's this weird, skinny crazy dude who literally only sells rope, and "Rop sells rope" is all he ever says. He was SUPPOSED to be minor. Just for a laugh. Nah, not in the cards.
My husband spends SO LONG trying to get this guy to say something else. He fails and Rop literally never says anything else. But he yells his tagline anytime someone says 'Rop' or 'Rope'. So that kind of turns into a joke.
And then it snowballs. Soon, this totally unimportant character is an obsession. And he gets so many more attributes....somehow, he can hear you say Rop or rope from anywhere in town, no matter how quietly you say it. He knows if you think it. And he'll shout his line in reply-- ROP SELLS ROPE! The whole town is aware of it. It's just an uncomfortable fact of life. Rop KNOWS, and that's that.
Eventually, Mordai wants to bust out this creature that speaks infernal (getting back to the main quest) and talk to it. But there are magical binds on the cage that he can't break. He just keeps trying at the binds, which aren't going anywhere, instead of trying other methods. He asks the creature for a hint; it indicates that Rop may be able to help.
Guys, my husband spent A FULL THIRTY MINUTES trying to convince this guy to help him. He also tried to physically lift him to bring him to the cage, but Rop used an unidentifiable magic to weigh himself down. Finally, Mordai bought all of Rop's rope. Instantly, the cage around the creature was gone, along with the magical barriers, and Rop has disappeared. You can hear a laughing in the sky, growing fainter until it, too, fades away.
So in summary, a totally useless character ended up being a god of mischief.
Perhaps more importantly, whenever anyone mentions rope now, my husband and I yell in unison, ROP SELLS ROPE!!!
And as a side-note, he got the half-orc out of the way to steal the creature by purchasing bowel-loosening herbs from the trader, and succeeding a persuasion check to get the tavern to cook them into some food. And then he convinced a passerby to give it to her. So while all this is happening, the half-orc is crapping herself silly just outside the bar. I cannot stress enough how ridiculously fun this campaign has been.
The player's character was a Warlock who was obsessed with cheese sticks. Why? I'm not quite sure. The Warlock in our party made friends with our Rogue through offering a cheese stick, got an important piece of information from a bandit through offering a cheese stick, and then stole cheese sticks from another character's husband. they ended the session with twelve cheese sticks. It is now a reoccurring theme.
Well, I once tried climbing up on to a different PC's shoulders to reach a trapdoor. Another one, who was a halfling or a gnome (I can't remember) tried to stabilize the one I was standing on so I got to roll advantage. Rolled terribly on both athletics rolls and ended up falling and accidentally stabbing the halfling with the shortsword I was trying to push open the trapdoor with. I was a water gensai so I tried using the shape water cantrip to help put the blood back into the halfling. Needless to say, rolling a 7 when trying to do this ends up exploding a halfling's heart via too much blood coming in at once...
I accidentally exploded a PC's heart one time...
Great stuff all! We were playing a homebrew campaign based in Westeros from ASOIAF/Game of Thrones. In our party are: Danwarden Westerling - The Deathknight, Mira Powdersnow - The Rogue, Gaspar Ironsmith - The Smith, Finn Codd - The Pirate, and Todd - the NPC fisherman we convinced to tag along. This leg of the quest took us to Skagos (cannibal island in the north), and we were just leaving Lord Crowl's hold when we hear charging hooves of a riderless horse behind us. We all exclaim "free horse!" before a horse with a sword on its head (not a unicorn) being controlled by a beastling starts trying to kill us. Gaspar (who was responsible for bringing NPC Todd) uses his action to step in front of Todd guardingly, but Todd uses his action afterwards to step in front of Gaspar instead, and proceeds to get SHISH KEBABBED on the horse's sword. It was a rough fight, but after much pain and Danwarden getting rammed off a cliff we have our vengeance. To heal up, the DM lets us find magical healing spiders in a cave. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth right? We continue deeper into the cave path and discover a room of cages with starving cannibals in them, we start releasing them and get attacked. We put them out of their misery. Last is a young boy, and we all feel bad so we just knock him out. As we are trying to figure out how to move on, the DM has us roll constitution. We all fail, and all become temporarily paralyzed from those damn too-good-to-be-true healing spiders. And wouldn't you know it that this is when the boy manages to wake up. So there we are lying all over the ground being hungrily looked at by a confused cannibal kid.
Gaspar:"We're just resting!" Mira:"Don't kill us!" Danwarden:"We'll kill YOU!"
And this is par for our party. Its a wonder anything gets done in Westeros.
I have two parties running through the same scenarios (it makes sense in world, honest). They come across a fountain with a giant toad in it. Both parties have been pretty knocked about in the previous encounter (one unconscious warlock) and they're pretty low level, so I don't have the toad attack. Toad intends to just lurk in the fountain, adding to the ambience.
Party no. 1 - the elf druid wild shapes into a wolf and eats the toad. Passes the con save I had him make,
Party no. 2 - the merfolk druid (we're a bit druid heavy) befriends the toad. Crits the animal handling check.
I've nicknamed the merfolk's new familiar Lunch.
I needed my party to go into a shed off the side of the road that was actually a little outpost for the bad guys (and there was a miniboss).
However. The gunslinger had gotten a message from his god a bit before saying they shouldn't go to a specific town yet, hence why they were out in the middle of nowhere in the first place. And he (and the rest of the party) decided this warning could be extended to the shed.
I tried for a solid 10 minutes to convince them through the npc traveling with them, and even ooc. (Not like "go here, please," but like. Hinting, heavily implying.) Apparently they didn't get the hint and decided to continue on.
So I took the wheels off their cart. They all had to go outside the cart and see that the wheels, which were there last night, were now gone. And the nearest building is the shed.
So they go and find a bunch of stolen artifacts from a museum in the city god said not to go to yet, and also their wheels.
The cherry on top was that the miniboss was a white Dragonborn with blue eyes. They somehow managed to kill him in about two turns and before leaving, pantsed him.
Like two real-life months later, they had to pull over in a forest as they were being more or less chased, and go into this weird house in the woods. They couldn't hide the cart well so the npc and the artificer's construct dog stayed behind, because the gunslinger was worried they would steal the wheels again if it was left unguarded.
The Yeehaw Master of Yeehaw Town, U.S.A.
let me guess the were rhino and were scorpion names were Mac and Aleski
My group had a gnome that had the mechanical arm from Elberon and so we and he agreed that if he rolls a d100 he would cast a random spell at any level but he would take damage and he would have to repair the arm that took 2 actions so it wouldn't be op but the funny part comes in and the party is swarmed by monsters is a tight room so he uses this ability to try and end the fight early because they just finish getting attacked and gets fireball so at the time the team was all level 2 and he blew up the whole party in one action. From there the party gave him the name "loose kaboom" and we never allowed him to do it again.
I'm not a Dm, but I had something pretty funny happen.
Level one, playing LMOP, and we fought the guard wolves at the goblin cave. We put some to sleep, then put it to a vote. We decided to attack the conscious wolf, and it grappled me. So I rolled to get it off. Ended up ripping the chain out of the wall. So then, we had to kill a wolf, and the wolf promptly chewed off my arm and grappled our hafling around the head. We managed to kill it, when the other two wolves woke up. Understandably, the wolves freaked out.
So, we set the wolves on fire. I'm not even kidding.
We hit them with oil and Harold, our mage, used burning hands to set the oil alight. The wolves broke free of the chains and rushed us.
One died before it could reach us. The other got on top of Harold and attacked. Harold started making death saves. So we had to get the wolf off of him. First attempt, we couldn't get him off, and Harold failed the save. The next round, I stabilized Harold after he failed his second save with a 25 medicine check. We got the wolf off with a high strength roll...and crushed Harold's ribs. At least the DM didn't make him take damage. Then, we snuck into Klarg's room and pretty much instakilled everything with inflict wounds.
This is why I believe that wolves manipulate RNG.
The fire giants made a gundam wheeeeee
My players had just participated in a multi-session festival type adventure in a large city [I see a lot of people saying not to try these kinds of things but I think it was fun for everyone]. They are super-paranoid and believe there is a massive, evil conspiracy afoot in the kingdom [kinda true but they have little evidence and just accuse EVERYONE]. So at the opening ceremonies of this festival, to which they were invited guests, they go on a long paranoid rant in front of the assembled nobility and merchants, making a lot of baseless [but sometimes accurate] accusations about so and so and so and so being involved in an evil conspiracy and how the party will expose all of their crimes, see them hanged, etc. While in town they actually manage to expose a few traitors and are feeling pretty good.
On the way home, I decide the real conspirators need to strike back. Given how loose they were with their accusations and how close they hit to home with some of the people they claimed were up to no good (and how completely they disregarded their own safety) I thought it was necessary to hit them with at least one player kill (or at least make them work to survive). As they took a ferry barge across a huge river, 4 assassins were waiting [thanks to an ensorcelled necklace that lets the conspirators track their location]. Their orders were to target the "ringleader" of the player party and to disengage once they had sent a message by killing him.
(Player's raft approaches the dock. They have been discussing how best to commemorate their festival adventure and talk of having a portrait commissioned. They suspect nothing. Assassin 1 is on the dock, impersonating a ferryman waiting for the barge to dock. Assassin 2 is astride a horse, crossbow loaded and hidden on the other side of the horse, seemingly just a commoner waiting for the next ferry. Assassin's 3 and 4 are hidden in trees next to the dock, crossbow's ready.)
(I instruct players to roll initiative. Order is Assassin 1; Player 1; Assassin 2; Assassin 3; Assassin 4... nothing else matters)
Assassin 1 drops his gaff, draws his two poisoned daggers and leaps from the dock onto the barge. (Natural 1 on his athletics roll) He misjudges the jump, winds up doing the splits, smashed his junk on the raft and falls backwards into the water.
Player 1 targets the man on the horse (Assassin 2) who he assumes must be part of the attack. Hits him with his magic bow that allows him to attempt to paralyze a target once per day. Hits. (Assassin 2 fails his WIS save). Man on horse goes stiff as a board and falls out of his saddle. He is paralyzed for 1 minute.
Assassin 3 targets the ringleader with a poisoned crossbow bolt. (Natural 1. I can already see where this is heading. Transitioning from deadly attack to slapstick...) Characters hear a loud crack as a branch breaks and Assassin 3 tumbles from the tree. (Players note he should take fall damage. We spend some time debating how much fall damage is appropriate. Don't recall exact dice, but Assassin 3 takes max possible damage) Assassin 3 has hit the ground hard and is not moving.
Assassin 4 realizes the mission is FUBAR. He attempts to jump from his tree down onto Assassin 2's empty horse. (Assassin 4 fails his athletics roll. I then decide it should have been an acrobatics roll. Assassin 4 fails his acrobatics roll) Assassin 4 misses the horse. He only takes minimum fall damage. I decide enough is enough, Assassin 4 has more movement left, and he gets on the horse and escapes alone.
(Players clean up. Assassin 1 is picked off with arrows as he tries to swim for shore. Assassin 2 is placed in manacles before the paralysis wears off. He is interrogated and gives the party their first legit intelligence of the campaign. Assassin 3 is found to have broken his neck in the fall.)
(4 assassins - extreme overkill for this level of party and intended as a show of force/terror - do not draw blood and only 1 survives by fleeing).
(Players congratulate themselves on their awesomeness. )
PC - Ethel - Human - Lvl 4 Necromancer - Undying Dragons * Serge Marshblade - Human - Lvl 5 Eldritch Knight - Hoard of the Dragon Queen
DM - (Homebrew) Heroes of Bardstown * Red Dead Annihilation: ToA * Where the Cold Winds Blow : DoIP * Covetous, Dragonish Thoughts: HotDQ * Red Wine, Black Rose: CoS * Greyhawk: Tides of War
I have a sneaking feeling that had any of the assasins gotten their rolls there would be a dead party member.
The fire giants made a gundam wheeeeee
this aint bad, this is good imagination.
do a rematch with the devil went back