Kids these days who think that being a bard is just about swinging swords and playing lutes disgust me. Where’s the pizzazz? The showmanship? The seduction??
you ain’t a real bard until you seduce your way out of at least 19 situations that would normally end in combat
You’re not a real bard until you make your DM cry because you seduced the Big Bad that they’ve built up to for 10 sessions
Once a bard friend rolled a 1 for a seduction and ended up killing a girl and tried to hide the body. He was caught, rolled low on deception and they all thought he was fucking her corpse. He then tried seducing the guards and rolled low again so all the guards had boners while arresting him and the DM had to sideline the entire game and make up a dungeon for the rest of us to get our stupid bard out of. But we didn’t. So for like 3 nights the DM essentially ran 2 different games, one of us questing without ol’ corpsefucker and then the adventures of corpsefucker: escape from boner castle.
there’s a lot of evidence that the iliad and the odyssey were actually composed by a variety of poets through an oral tradition rather than just by one poet, so what if the homeric texts are actually just a very long game of D&D
homer, the dm: okay achilles, agamemnon has just taken away your war prize, what do you want to do achilles’ player: i roll to have a diplomatic conversation with agamemnon achilles’ player: *rolls a 1* homer: you throw the staff of speaking at agamemnon’s face and storm off to sulk with your boyfriend
Homer, the DM: Your beautiful Patroclus is dead. What do you do? Achilles’ player: I fight everyone. Homer, the DM: You can’t fight everyone. How would you even– Achilles’ player: *rolls a 20* I fight everyone. Homer, the DM: *sighs* Fine. You cut a path through the Trojan army, enemy dead strewn in your wake. Achilles’ player: How many? Homer, the DM: …lots. Enough to clog the friggin’ river with bodies. Achilles’ player: I fight the river. Homer, the DM: You. can. not. fight. the. river. Achilles’ player: *reaches for dice*
Homer, the DM: Okay guys, so the war’s over, you had a bunch of losses but you won in the end. Time to go home, let’s roll to see who gets there firs—
Odysseus’s player: I got a critical failure.
Homer: The cyclops asks you who you are. What do you do?
Odysseus’s player: I say, “Who me? I’m nobody.”
Homer: Roll for deception.
Odysseus’s player: I got a natural 20.
Homer: The cyclops now completely believes that your name is Nobody. He shouts for help from the other cyclops but they ignore him because he’s telling them that “Nobody hurt him.”
Essential components of any fantasy rolepaying group:
The player who brings exactly the same swishy elf character to every table; 50% chance of wizard, 50% chance of bard, 100% chance of banging a dragon before the campaign is done.
The player who favours dwarves because they’re uncomfortable with speaking in character and dwarves aren’t expected to have personalities.
The player who thinks they’re cleverly subverting expectations by playing their halfling as a bloodthirsty, sexually promiscuous drug fiend, unaware that – thanks to players like them – literally 80% of all halfling player characters are like that.
The player who designs their character purely for novelty value – like, this time they’re a giant telepathic praying mantis, or whatever – yet inexplicably manages to have the deepest character arc out of anyone.
The player whose character’s stats honestly don’t matter because their real contribution to the party is being the only adult in the room.
More:
The perennial orc player who you’re pretty sure is using the game as a group therapy session to work through some sort of identity issue.
The player whose rogue’s complicated backstory and sinister secret
agenda never actually end up being relevant in play because they also
kept it a secret from the GM.
The player with a penchant for Lawful Goodish warrior types who thinks they’re the adult in the room, but really they just have a talent for making irresponsibly dangerous plans sound reasonable – even to themselves.
The player who insists on taking the most complicated race/class combo
the GM will allow, then later discovers that the reason they can’t hit
for shit is because they’re been rolling their attacks on a d12 all
night.
The player who rolls druids because they are a straight up furry.
• The player that plays as a dragonborn purely because they’re a scallie
• the player that plays as a dragonborn purely because they’re a scallie
^Haiku^bot^0.4. Sometimes I do stupid things (but I have improved with syllables!). Beep-boop!
My favorite thing about Dungeons & Dragons is how fucking quickly people become ride-or-die bitches with each other
no lie i had a campaign where I tried playing a really chaotic neutral “leave me alone” rouge and ended up attached at the hip to our monk who couldn’t roll higher than a natural 10 to literally save his life bc in our first encounter he called my character “a nice lass” and that was all it took
Robes are stupid. My sorcerer dresses like Petyr Baelish.
To expand: if you are a mage, dress like a noble. Do not dress like a wizard. Pointy conical hat and sky-blue robes is medieval semaphore for “kill first and with extreme prejudice.” Tailored black silk over cloth-of-gold and studded with rubies says “Harmless, but valuable; ransom if possible or kill last.”
If you dress like a noble, they’re not going to pay attention as you take a turn or two to back away from the melee and prepare yourself. The ruse is only broken when you reveal yourself, at which point 8d6 fire damage is screaming toward them at Mach Fuck anyway, so no big.
counterpoint: if you don’t get to dress like someone ran a magical thrift shop through a rototiller and frankensteined the pieces back together what’s the god-damned point of being a wizard
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
sparksoffandommagic 