New d&d dice proposal called lucked or fucked: a d20 but ten sides have 1s and ten sides have 20s, so you crit no matter what but it’s always a guessing game for which way it goes. To be used on really important, make-or-break-the-campaign rolls
Ya I know you could use a coin but listen. It’s not about the outcome, it’s about the Drama™
Shrek makes infinitely more sense if you ascribe to the theory that everyone is a PC in an RPG, and Donkey’s player managed to avoid a boss battle by rolling a nat 20 to seduce the fucking dragon
“I want to be a half-ogre.”
“What? You can’t. They’ve seen your picture, and you’re a human.”
(Context: The party is searching a fortress for a powerful enemy, trying to fight our way through two armies doing battle with each other. We come across a squad of orcs and goblins trying to break down a barricade defended by elves.)
DM: Beyond the barricade, you see–
Rogue (ooc, singing): Do you hear the people sing…?
Druid (ooc): DO NOT!
The rest of the group begins to join in.
Bard (ooc): NOW! IN THE ORIGINAL FRENCH! A LA VOLONTE DU PEUPLE, ET A LA SANTE DU PROGRES–
As an entry-level DnD player can someone explain to me in the simplest possible way how to differentiate wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers from each other?
wizards is imbued with magic, you just need to prepare mentally your spells.
sorcerer studied magic, you need to physically prepare your spells and often need materials.
warlock has magic because of demon, you have access to mainly dark magic as well as eldritch blast as a free unlimited cantrip.
to be honest, play-wise wizards & sorcerers are very similar as they tend to have a lot of shared spells. sorcerers get to specialize in a school of magic more than wizards though. and warlock its pretty much just dark magic.
this, except reverse wizards and sorcerers.
sorcerers innately have their magic (usually because someone fucked a magic being. often a dragon)
wizards studied magic and learned accordingly. they also tend to be older, but not always.
warlocks get their magic from pacts with magic beings (which i don’t think necessarily have to be demons).
Wizard: … I’m ninety, live in a tower, and read all day. where the fuck do you think? (Alternate answer: Basically radically experimental guerilla chemists)
Sorcerer/ess: Natural ability and a stupid amount of work!
Druid: The plants love me! I love the plants! Have you met my wife she is a shrub! T H E P L A N T S E M P O W E R M E
Cleric: I am a literal saint back the fuck off and do your job if you want heals.
Bard: IDK i was in a rap battle and the other guy literally caught fire so like…. yeah.
Reblogging again for the Druid, Cleric, and that bard line.
D&D players will always come up with the most bizarre, workable solutions to problems when you least expect it.
In one game I ran, the party needed to find a magical artifact and didn’t have any idea where it was at all. So they decided to use Commune to figure it out – but Commune as a spell only lets you ask yes or no questions, and get an answer out of it. So they took a map of the continent, drew a line down half of it, and asked “Is the artifact on this half of the map?”. They then continued, narrowing the artifact’s location down further and further, until they were able to pinpoint the exact building in question.
This reminds me of the last campaign I was in, when my husband played a Telepathic Psion. When we were coming up with our inventories at the beginning of the game, everyone else is putting down normal shit like horses, packs, travel provisions, money.
My husband asked for a bear trap.
The DM (who happened to be coolkidmitch) asked him what the hell he could possibly need a bear trap for, to which my husband only said, “You’ll see.” After about twenty minutes of figuring out what this bear trap would weigh, the skill my husband would have to roll in order to use it, and a bunch of other minutiae, my husband had a bear trap in his inventory.
Now, all of us kind of forgot about the bear trap while we were adventuring along on our escort quest (during which my husband’s Psion regularly tried to convince one of our employers that there was a golden acorn/tree of life/fountain of youth/whatever the fuck in the forest so she would wander off and get herself eaten by bears – she was really rude) until we run into a situation where we’ve been surprised by the locals and nobody can draw a weapon without causing a real problem.
My husband pulls the bear trap out of his saddlebag, holds it out to the nearest goon, and says the goon needs to roll a will check. When asked why the goon needs to roll a will check, my husband calmly replies, “He’s being offered the fanciest hat he’s ever seen in his life, and he really wants to put it on.”
Moment of silence around the gaming table as all of us realize that my husband is trying to end the encounter by convincing a goon to put a bear trap on his head like a hat.
The goon failed the will check.
I gotta share The Grand Show story now.
So my D&D campaign is comprised of four newbies, one guy with a lot of tabletop experience, and me, the newbie DM. The crew is trying to break into a walled manor, in part to find out if the Lord inside had anything to do with some culty plot shenanigans (P.S: he was dead the whole time, so no one would have detected them from inside the wall regardless).
I am very explicit to them about the fact that they are trying to break into the Lord’s manor, in the middle of the day, across from the main thoroughfare of the town, with no cover or disguise of any kind, and they are all level 2 – so no teleportation, invisibility, illusions – nothing. They do not heed my warnings, and our gnome paladin and halfling rogue toss a grappling hook over the wall and start to climb it. Meanwhile the other three in the party – a totally inconspicuous group consisting of a dragonborn with a cat, a tiefling in a chainmail bikini, a half-vampire warlock with a mask and a swordcane, and an NPC satyr who was along for the ride – are just hanging out below the wall watching.
After a minute I say, “behind you, you notice that a crowd of about ten or twelve peasants have gathered and are whispering in worried voices. You notice two guards approaching from down the road.”
Halfling rogue – one of the more-or-less newbies of the crew – whips around and immediately shouts “WELCOME TO THE GRAND SHOW!”, and scores an excellent deception roll. Dragonborn starts making his cat do tricks and rolls a sick animal handling check. Tiefling cleric begins pole-dancing on her spear and also rolls high. The warlock starts doing special effects with Minor Illusion and rolls ok. They nudge the satyr into playing music for them, who crits his performance check and charms half the audience as a result. The paladin, from the top of the wall, starts juggling his hammers and midway through throws one at the window of the Lord’s manor, breaking it so they can get in.
I was already going to give them that, and then nearly every last fucking NPC rolled an insight check of less than 10. So the group also made 10 gold for their “busking” and got into the manor completely unhindered. o/ goddamnit.
Roleplaying in general = epic
@listener-blue all i can think of is the damn squid babies
Running a campaign making use of the Sandstorm book for 3.5. Which is a desert environment and monster supplement book. So, the campaign is going well for an evil game. All the players are doing their shenanigans.
Most of them are following the plot but a player who regretted their CE character was given an option to reroll a new one as a cleric of storms. I figure I’ll give him a leg up and allow it. This is how the story of “Money Rain” Began.
So, rolling random treasure as they’re all level 8 or so. You can get some really silly ass results on the random treasure table. One of the enemies they killed happened to have a collection of 100,000 gold… In copper coins. All of it in copper coins. 10 million fucking pennies. So, the players, utilizing several extradimensional storage spaces have this ocean of pennies on hand to try and later convert it into a sensible currency like adamantine ingots or something.
One of the things they’ve been doing is cooperating with this cult, not so much as members but as “consultants.” Well, they were asked to help pacify this town and make it ready for the cult… Problem is they’re a group of 6 ne’er do wells versus a town of 3,500 people… That’s when the storm cleric goes, “well, I can make and generate a hurricane.” And that’s when the psion of the asks, “Can that include tornados and high speed winds?” I made the mistake of saying, “Yes.”
They then go on a twenty minute explanation and spend most of that doing various physics calculations. What is their grand plan for utilizing a force 3 hurricane in the desert? MONEY. FUCKING. RAIN. They decide to dump all 10 million copper into a pile and have tornadoes suck it up. After some quick math on the square and cubic footage of the town… They can get something like 9 coins per cubic foot of space for something like 10 rounds. And so it hailed pennies. More, and more and more. People immediately sought shelter because these things were doing almost 1 lethal point of damage from flying around at above terminal velocity. Then the weight on houses started collapsing roofs…
All told they ended up killing around 25% of the city, critical injuring another 30%, and left every single family with at least one casualty.
god damn money rain.
This post gets better everytime it crosses my dash
Dungeon Master Tip: D&D can be difficult to really get into for people who aren’t used to improv, because a lot of the time, they feel vulnerable and nervous about taking it seriously. To balance silly vibes and serious vibes and make sure your players are having fun in a way that moves the story along, stick a googly eye on your forehead. It’s a whimsical way to remind your shithead idiot friends that you’re their omnipotent god now, and that you can, and will, murder all of their characters if they keep guessing “dildo” as the answer to your puzzles, even when the puzzles aren’t text-based or even puzzles at all, like, what the fuck, guys, you just keep pausing every few turns and asking, “Is the answer dildo?” What’s up with that? Tell me how “dildo” is the answer to a boss battle. No, I’d love to know. I’m waiting. I can wait all day. I gots pajamas on under this velvet Party City cloak, I’m comfy as hell.
Dungeon Master Tip #2: Don’t post things like this on a blog that your players follow, unless you want fifteen bags of free stick-on googly eyes.