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System: DND 5E Player Handbook

GM: So you guys are hiding in the trees, right?
Paladin (Myself): Yes.
GM: Ok, they are gonna try and find you.

A nat 20 is rolled.

GM: The commander orders his men to start cutting down the trees.

Another nat 20 is rolled.

GM: The soldier's greatsword cleaves straight through the tree's base, and it is now falling down. Paladin and Warlock, you both dont have time to jump out.
Paladin: I roll constitution to avoid damage from the impa....
Druid: Wait, you have protection style right?
Paladin: Yeah.
Druid: Then the tree has to roll disadvantage.



Many laughs were had that day. What stories do you have from the tabletop?

I guess I don't understand 5e. Why would you need a roll for guys chopping down trees? And why would soldiers, presumably ill equipped for lumberjacking, start hacking at trees instead of say immediately surrounding the potentially hostile guys they obviously spotted?

GM: The soldier's greatsword cleaves straight through the tree's base,

Wait, what? Are these tiny trees? Like 2 inch saplings? Because even an axe, a tool designed to fell trees, doesn't do this. Maybe to giant mushrooms.

I guess I just really don't get what was going on here......

Running Ravenloft.

The parties Paladin goes down in a fight with a Shambling Mound. They drag his body into in a room, with creepy artifacts, and decide that this is a good place for a short rest. Roll for random encounter, get a Ghost. GM has the spirit of Paladin rise from his body as the Ghost. The party attacks the Ghost without hesitation. After defeating the Ghost, they then drag the Paladin's body out of the dungeon.

Next session, the Paladin's player is absent, so the party leaves his corpse at a church. While travelling the roads of Ravenloft another random encounter comes up Revenant. DM uses the Paladin as the Revenant. Paladin then rolls natural 20 while stealthing up on them and pushes the parties Swashbuckler over a bridge, while saying "boo" They eventually defeat the Revenant with the help of some locals.

Following session, the Paladin arrives unharmed, walking out of the mists, with a new set of armor, and stark white hair. The Paladin has to go to great lengths to convince the party not to kill him

D&D, Eberron setting.

I've had a player strike a bargain with a necromancer: 600 corpses for a certain artifact. The kicker was that the corpses had to be delivered in a month. I was ready for the players to talk her down too a more manageable amount and/or time frame, but they just accepted it.

After some deliberation, the players decided that the best way to collect the corpses was to acquire an airship (they do exist in the setting), attach a giant scoop-grabber-thingy to the bottom, and fly around scooping up graveyards. Obviously. The party is level one at this point, but through some clever dealing, good rolls, deviousness, and outright theft they manage to rent a (cursed) airship and attach a custom-forged grabber to the bottom.

The game fell apart IRL by that point, but I wish I could've had it continue, solely for the sheer amount of player actions that would have had serious consequences later on. (Pissing off a lot of powerful people, flying around in a cursed ship, and giving a rogue Karrnathi necromancer access to a small army of corpses. That's a lot of plot that writes itself, especially in the setting.)

I have one.

DnD 5th ed.

So I was playing as a Paladin, and I had managed to get my A.C. all the way up to 20 whilst most of the party was at 14. Well, we end up getting into a fight with a rather sizable group of cultists and most of the group ends up going unconscious, except for me. My poor DM couldn't roll above a 16 to hit me for the life of him, and so he spent the better part of an hour attacking me and whiffing while I slowly chopped my way through all the cultists. I felt so bad afterwards

Pathfinder.

This story is called "why I stopped doing random loot rolls." So the party was in this underground city that had been long abandoned. They were in some mines, and the more treasure hungry ones had decided to go looking for gems. I rolled a d100 for gem finding, and rolled a 99. The two gem hunters got excited about this, and claimed, jokingly, that I should give them a sidequest with a roll that high. I laughed and said that was for rolls of 100 only.

This was my folly.

With their loot secured, they joined the rest of the party at the bay of the underground city (it had an underground river that could sail out of the cavern.) The party had been looking for some way out, and our summoner was considering using flotsam raft to get out- that is until they saw something massive lurking in the water. Our fighter decided to look among the wrecked ships and see if any could be made seaworthy.

I rolled a 100.

After the excitement died down, I informed him that he had found a ship of the line that was damaged, but definitely within the abilities of two of the party members to repair. As some went off to get supplies, the fighter, who deemed himself captain, went aboard to see what type of armaments it contained.

I rolled the second 100 right after the first. I was so shocked I literally made that dumb stuttering noise they always make in Dragonball Z.

So, as promised, I ended up giving them a sidequest which now involved their kickass ship, massive cannons, and my fighter's new desire to found a naval city. The plot got about as derailed as it could get.

I got a pair of stories from the same player in the same campaign I am in, 5e.

So about 4 or so months ago our group was trying to find an entrance to a tunnel and then happened upon a frost giant who was destroying a town. We managed to stop him after hiting him with a lightning bolt. We then asked him why he was doing this and it turns out it is because his model village was destroyed by some one in this town and he was going to wreck their town instead. Our female half elven warlock (played by a guy) then suggests that a good way to relieve stress would be to go an ( *proceeds to make jerking motion with hand*) and then rolls a nat 20 on his persuasion roll. Proceed with the entire group laughing and rolling on the ground with our faces covered in blushes . After we gained out composure the frost giant shrugged and said 'okay' leaving the party.

Skip ahead to only a few weeks ago.

This same player was in a shop and found a magical artifact, the sales man said that he had a special price, instead of it costing normally 500 GP he was willing to let it go for 499 GP 9SP and 9 CP. Our warlock spoke." Will you take 9 copper for this item?" And proceeded to roll another nat 20 and again with the entire party rolling on the floor. The DM honored the roll and we got that item for 9 copper.

 War Kitten wrote:
I have one.

DnD 5th ed.

So I was playing as a Paladin, and I had managed to get my A.C. all the way up to 20 whilst most of the party was at 14. Well, we end up getting into a fight with a rather sizable group of cultists and most of the group ends up going unconscious, except for me. My poor DM couldn't roll above a 16 to hit me for the life of him, and so he spent the better part of an hour attacking me and whiffing while I slowly chopped my way through all the cultists. I felt so bad afterwards

Not your fault- bad combat system is bad. Plus, it sounds like you saved everyone, so the DM probably should have just fudged some rolls to move things along- DM rolling dice with 1 player for an hour isn't very fun.

 jmurph wrote:
Not your fault- bad combat system is bad.

Less bad combat system is bad, and more how random dice rolls work. Streaks happen. Averages happen over time.

In my gaming group, our Paladin with AC 21, is frequently the first one who goes down in combat.

Cultists had a 20% to hit, it's easliy possible to go rounds and not roll 16+.

I'm also going to hazard a guess that the DM doesn't use the flanking rule. As a DM I would have 9 cultists attacking the Paladin, terrain permitting, all with advantage.

Of course, the DM may have just wanted to avoid Total Party Wipe.

I would offer that a system that takes so long to resolve such a small combat has some issues. But then again, I think the whole initiative/hit/roll damage to point pool model is a pretty poor one and largely popular as a holdover. But that is getting OT and more thoughts on conflict resolution are probably better suited to Game Design.

Sunday afternoon gaming at the Uni Games club. Three or four of us pushing model armies around. A group of cool kids walking by, looks in the door and titters amongst themselves when they see what we are up to. Then one girl shouts "My wizard casts Fireball!" and scampers off laughing.

The joke was on her though. We were playing Napoleon's Battles.

I was dating this girl that wanted to be at my side as often as humanly possible. She joined our weekly D&D game, and rolled up a wizard. It was obvious that D&D wasn't really her thing, but troopered on. At the point of this story, she had her wizard up to level 5, but was doing cross stich while playing D&D.

The party was travelling along a road, when a messenger bird flew overhead. One of the party, a douchey ranger, decided to be funny and shoot an arrow at the bird.
He missed, but the wizard, distracted with her cross stich assumed the party was under attack, and rolled a fist of d6's as she proclaimed " I cast lightning bolt. "
The messenger bird failed it's save and took more than 10 times the damage required to kill it. I described it like one of the old looney tunes cartoons, where a littel roasted dinner fell fromthe sky before them. The group was laughing hysterically, and she was confused about what we thought was soo funny.

Nothing that happens at the gaming table is funny as it is all serious business.

As a GM I have quite a few from my players (mostly Rogue Trader).

My players named their ship 'St.Dora the Explorer', with a Death Cult on board led by cult leader, 'Consuela'. Their Death Cult Assassins killed people by drowning them in lemon pledge or injecting vast quantities of it into their bodies.

An Artificial Intelligence that was found became an officer in the crew - Second Lieutenant Alma - and eventually became a candidate for succession after the Rogue Trader died.

The Rogue Trader got fed up of the Arch-Militant (a kroot) constantly demanding better wages and so executed him by shooting him in the face with an inferno pistol.

An Explorator was played as, 'Scruffy, the Janitor', who took Scholastic Lore: Philosophy and half the time was 'on break', when he was needed to do anything. He kept finding ways to be even lazier -- instead of walking on an away mission, he converted a Servitor into his own personal segue.

The missionary was praying on footfall when a little boy came up and said, 'My mum says the Emperor doesn't exist'. The Missionary found out this was in fact bait when he was nearly eaten by the Slaught but he survived by setting a residential district on fire. Having lost his way, he ended up in a market where some slavers tried to come for him but he incited the crowd to fight back against them, sparking a gang war. After finally making his way back to the ship, he was banned from setting foot on footfall again.

One Arch-Militant was a Space Marine fanboy and tried to put the Armsmen through a Space-Marine-Esque training regime, that killed ~4,000 of them, and called it a success because the few that survived were now tough. The Rogue Trader felt guilty after learning about it and so gave each of the survivors enough money to retire.

When asked by an Inquisitor, 'Why should you be kept alive? What use are you to me?', the Missionary (female character) responds, 'because I'm eye candy!'.

Very interesting stories so far!

I remember one D&D 3.5 campaign that took place underwater. Me and the rest of the party were underwater fighting some shark people, when our druid accidentally rolled a 1 and threw her sword. It landed next to me, but I couldn't just give it back, since the druid was so far away. Instead, I tried passing it.
Now, we had to make a roll for throwing it, and a roll for catching it. Throwing it went fine, but when the druid rolled the die to catch the sword, it came out a 1.
She spent half of the campaign with her left hand missing.

This however, could be considered karma for the druid, which leads to another earlier story. We were later attacked by some me folk, but thankfully managed to defeat them. As we looted our foes, the druid wanted to see if she could skin the merman for clothing. This lead to a 20 minute ethics debate on whether or not it was morally sound to skin and wear a merman. This debate amounted to nothing however, since the druid skinned the merman anyway. Because we were underwater however, everyone was hit with a large plume of blood coming out of the corpse. Amazingly, we didn't have to come up with an excuse as to why we were covered in blood.

Happen way way back in 90's. Early 90's

Played a Soldier. Was pirate hunting on the high seas. We charged across the deck. Took the main deck. Fought our way down into the depths of the ship. We entered room searching for more pirates and booty....

DM: "Your enter a very dark room."
Player 1: "I use my flint and steel and light the torch on me."
DM: "You notice barrels. Some of which are open with black grainy sandy dirt exposed."
Player: "I look closer into the barrel with torch and sift through it with my hand looking for whatever goods that might be stash there."
..............

D&D 3.5 Campaign, techincally evil characters, but they slayed every monster and dragon in the realm, and protected the population. I could probably right a book about the things they did, but one character, a priest, was stand out.

Early in the campaign we played a 3rd party module that was all puzzles and traps, but it ended with the character meeting an actual God of Death. They were each granted a wish for successfuly completing their trials and the Priest used his wish to convert to a follower of the god they just met.

He spent his entire down time building churches, and preaching to the masses. What proceeded was the most succesful string of miracles any Priest could ask for. His granted ability for being a Priest of Death, was a daily use of Finger of Death. He pointed at someone, and they either made their saving throw or died.

The thing was, NOTHING ever made their saving throw.

Walked into a massive Cathederal of a good diety to find the 20th level high priest on pulpit making a semon, declared him a Heretic for not following the one true god. FINGER OF DEATH, Roll of 1, Dead 20th level High Priest NPC.
Confronted by a massive Ancent Great Wyrm Red Dragon, FINGER OF DEATH. Roll of 1, and a Dead ancient Dragon.

Well. My gaming group is running a 4th edition campaign, and in said campaign my character is being hunted by a group of pro-human Knights (I'm a Tiefling Warlock). The main reason for the hunt? (Besides the fact that I'm a Tiefling) I rolled a natural 20 on an intimidation check, and with my +15 in intimidate I managed to make an entire Knight patrol crap themselves, and now they're after me because I embarrassed them (much to the amusement of our Barbarian)

I think the worst-case was when running Deathwatch.

Our Librarian (noted as possibly the least competent psychic ever) was part of a team protecting an administratum senior adept from fiendish assassins.

He interposes himself, goes to parry, and (noting the powered blade) decides to use Iron Arm - a psychic power which will boost his roll to parry, and not shatter his chainsword against the disruption field of the power sword).

He decides to push the power.

This succeeds in manifesting the power, but causes Perils Of The Warp - resulting in (due to some epic bad rolling) a brief warp vortex snapping open 2 metres behind him and slightly to the left.

Which is exactly where the protectee was standing.

The debriefing was.....interesting.



Other than that - Paranoia.
If you've never played it, I wholeheartedly recommend it. But I'll warn you - Paranoia is essentially a GM's revenge for having to spend endless weeks feeding wonderfully crafted bad guys, worlds and npcs into the jaws of murderhobo players who really couldn't care less. It is lethal beyond imagining and your main enemy is the other players.

I've had a mission cause 14 kills in a 5 (i think?) player party - the mission? Go upstairs and change a lightbulb. This is, being paranoia, nowhere near as easy as it sounds.

D&D 5E, the players know at some point during the gaming session they are going to have to fight a shambling mound, which at their current level would be a tough battle. Out of character they discuss, being veteran D&D players, that they know not to make rookie mistakes, like using lightning based attacks against it, and how it would suck for new players who did that and actually healed the thing instead of harming it.

Later that night, they find themselves trapped in a room with a large pile of rotting vegetation (Shambling mound) trying to mulch them.

The Warlock, turns invisible, and trys to get out of the room, but can not, because the Shambling Mound moved and blocked the entrance.
The Rouge, attacks a few times, got engulfed, nearly dies, and backs off, fearful of becoming fertilizer.
The Paladin, runs, leaps through the air, criticals against the Shambling mound, then the Shambling mound criticals against him, engulfs him, and actually holds onto him for the rest of the combat, slowly squeezing him to death.
The Sorcerer, who was able to get out of the room before the Shambling Mound blocked the entrance, has been standing 20 or so feet away blasting spells up a 5ft wide corrider, at a monster blocking the enire doorway, and missing, EVERY turn.

Sorcerer: Guiding Bolt ! Missed. Guiding Bolt ! Missed. Guiding Bolt ! Missed. Screw it, let me change spells. Witch Bolt ! CRITICAL !!!!
DM: Hey, what type of damage does Witch Bolt do ?
Sorcerer: Electrical
DM: Um yeah, you managed to heal the Shambling Mound back up to full health.

My last session as a player in a Rogue Trader campaign had the regular chap who acted as the captain being absent, so I as XO had to step up and take charge of some highly skilled, but utterly bored guys. To give some background, this campaign was always, despite us being Imperial Navy officers tasked with re-establishing contact with a lost sector, low on combat and high on well.. anything but that. This meant that quite a few sessions went by before we got to kill something or another. It felt more like Star Trek than 40k a lot of the time.

So with the captain absent I was in command and we decided to carry on with the plot, taking it for a more combative turn when we decided to enact a plan of sicking a fleet of orks on a forge world, which was quite willing to receive this invasion, as they wanted to prove their loyalty to the Imperium and well, otherwise the orks would invade a somewhat defenceless system of Imperial worlds.

Thing is, how does one go about getting the attention of orks?

Well.. we had a tactical officer who, using excerpts of ork transmissions to piece together a choice selection of insults and challenges, along with a good set of coordinated to send the orks to our world of choice. Only problem was getting the message across. We could send it via vox, or try it with the astropathic choir, but that left a lot to desired, we needed a good result on this one. Why do it from a distance when you can do it just as well up close eh?

We decided to slip into the ork fleet through a combination of dropping into the system at the edge, then using silent running slipping past picket lines of frigates and roks until we were within a few VU's of the enemy flagship, a former mass conveyor suitably tuned up by its new green owners. We then proceeded to hail the enemy captain, mock and taunt him with a load of insults along with the coordinates of said planet, while the expeditionary officer (Arch-militant) gave his ship a few salvos of macro fire. We then gave it full thrust and ran the gauntlet out of the ork fleet.

It should be noted, our medical frigate has a special rule that marks it out as a target of interest to the Orks, who had a go at the ship before and due to this fight left the ship with an interesting scarring across the hull. Due to these scars the orks see this vessel as something of a worthy opponent and as such, will forego all shooting in favour of trying to board her.

So as we made out escape we had to deal with an entire ork fleet trying to board us. Our tactical officer (Adept) kept overloading the engines, suitably boosting the engines that we made such a good time on our escape that we got out in no time at all. At the same time our expeditionary officer kept taking potshots at any ship coming within range, damaging a fair few frigates and other pickets on the way out.

Blocking our way at the jump point were two ork class cruisers. We decided to take them both on with the combined might of our macro cannons along with torpedoes, which I gave permission for. This may sound odd, but torpedoes are expensive and rare, but running your ship like an accountant is boring no? The captain only sanctioned the use of torpedoes under the most dire of circumstances. At this point we wanted to blow gak up good. Both were shot up two-thirds of the way as we passed them, then before we jumped into the warp we turned, gave them both a one-over and well.. One slowly came apart, the other got hit hard by our torpedoes and went down super-hard, so hard that his warp drive went into overload just as we were about to jump the system. We were sucked into the warp anomaly and got stuck in a warp storm.

gak hit the fan as just about every alarm possible went off, the geller fields were close to collapsing, the ship went in all directions all the time, warp ghosts were everywhere around the ship, our navigator couldn't get us out, we had a savage ork in the bilges that took three days to hunt down, unsecured munitions on one of the gunnery decks crushing gunnery crews, our choir went haywire, resulting in one of them receiving the Emperor's mercy and I ended up face to face with an Ebon Geist (a warp predator) that I tried shooting first with my bolt pistols, I hit it, it retaliated by charging me, slashing me, hitting me harrrrrrrrrd (12 points of damage, I only had 11 wounds, 1 fatigue point and really close to death), he restored the lost wounds and well, stood there in front of me. The expeditionary officer tried to hurt it, two armsmen charged in with boarding axes but missed and it was my turn again. I pulled my power sword and hit it with a perfect strike, righteous fury'd him and hit him hard enough that he went down hard enough and burst into flames (Energy weapon crit). I decided to pass out after that.

Just as we managed to get things under control the ship slammed back into real space, three years from our current destination, badly damaged, but still void capable somehow.



Best session ever.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

locarno24 wrote:
Other than that - Paranoia.
If you've never played it, I wholeheartedly recommend it. But I'll warn you - Paranoia is essentially a GM's revenge for having to spend endless weeks feeding wonderfully crafted bad guys, worlds and npcs into the jaws of murderhobo players who really couldn't care less. It is lethal beyond imagining and your main enemy is the other players.

I've had a mission cause 14 kills in a 5 (i think?) player party - the mission? Go upstairs and change a lightbulb. This is, being paranoia, nowhere near as easy as it sounds.

*party gets issued plasma grenades for a mutie hunt

*Party uses plasma grenades to wipe out mutie stronghold

*Party returns triumphantly, only to be killed by The Computer because.. "You were issued these grenades, but you have not received permission to use them."

Paranoia sounds awesome. The problem is multiple people in my group have refused to play it, GM or otherwise.

I don't have much else that's funny. My gaming group is now calling my Warlock John Stamos though

Our first Rogue Trader campaign ended with: a word bearer's possessed driving a battle barge into The Fortress of Hera, necron Imohtek time travel, a brief encounter with Khorne, and the Emperor resurrecting on a 4+. That system gets real out of hand real quick if you're not careful

@TheAngrySquig you say that like it's a bad thing.

Back while playing WEG's Star Wars RPG there was a smuggler who got a neruoshock hand cybernectic implant of ridiculous damage. It looked like a regular hand, but had essentially had a button concealed in the palm that would discharge an electrical shock upon impact, like some futuristic joybuzzer that would make the Joker proud. One of the Characters, a smuggler by the name of Derik Darkstar, had spent a small fortune on getting one of these illegal implants in a cybernetic hand replacement. The rules actually don't set a cap for how much damage they can do, the damage code is set at the time of implant and is determined by how much you spend on it. As the game master I capped him at 10 dice, which is what a Wookie with a Vibro Axe could inflict, and more than enough damage to kill pretty much anything. I did caution him this probably wasn't a wise idea...

The very next adventure, while walking through some busy streets some scared child comes barreling into Darkstar, while fleeing stormtroopers. Darkstar throws his hands up to catch the kid, and prevent himself from getting knock down. I tell him to roll a simple STR check, and he fails with "1" on the wild die (catastrophic failure) and accidently fries the kid with his new implant, in front of a street full of witnesses, including Storm Troopers, with is highly illegal concealed implant. He, and the rest of the party are upset with this, but quickly decide they'd be more upset with being arrested by the stormtroopers who are surrounding them, and are baffled as to what just happens.

Do they shoot their way out of it ??? Nope. First, they accuse the Storm Troopers of doing it, which goes over with the crowd, but not the Storm Troopers pointing guns at them. Then, in a stroke of brilliance, and a string of succesful bluff roles they convince the Storm Troopers that the only logical explanation is that the child spontaneously combusted.

 gnome_idea_what wrote:
@TheAngrySquig you say that like it's a bad thing.

Definitely not bad for a stories thread . Another one from the same game was when we found a necron tomb that was still sleeping. From the character's perspective we got attacked by a couple "AI" that were guarding a large pyramid. We took a solid amount of wounds from them, so we decided to play it safe with the rest. We ordered ourselves 10,000 + haywire grenades and one tomb-sized funnel

Playing games like Dead of winter, Battlestar galactica and games like secret Hitler where you don't know who the traitor or bad guy is makes for some hilarious games.
Secret Hitler is where some people are fascists and one person plays hitler, only the first time i played i was the secret hitler and won the game by feigning ignorance because it was the first time i played, although i watched a few games being played, it is funny to see people accuse each other and later find out that they were wrong.

During my first time playing D&D 5th edition I began running a campaign with a couple of friends. The asshats outright ruined my plans by going to the village's tavern, getting to play poker with a blind drunkard... and losing (we said that the hands would be determined via rolls and he had very negative modifiers). The guy got two twenties in a row.
They then decided to fight him.... only to them either roll natural 1s or the blind drunkard rolling nat 20s.

A four man party of adventurers, got punked by a blind drunkard.

Just had one in my Deathwatch Campaign I'm running -- the Kill Team were fighting a giant Xenos worm that had wrecked industrial facilities on a mining world.

This worm burrows through and consumes 3 metres of rock a second and can easily swallow a marine whole and has been trying to do so during this engagement; instead of dodging it when it tried to swallow him, one of my Marines chose to use his reaction to jump into its mouth (Captain Jack Style).

He fails the opposed strength test to resist being crushed by the Worm's muscles and has to burn fate to survive; he's found after the engagement in a Sus'an membrane Coma.
Whilst the Apothecary was able to restore him, his armour has been basically ruined by the rockgrinder he threw himself into.