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View Full Version : [3.5] Best skin-of-the-teeth day saving moments.



mabriss lethe
2009-09-08, 12:44 AM
I'm playing in a game right now with several people who are all relatively new to D&D. We've got a pair of fighters, a ranger, a druid, and me filling in all the gaps as best I can with a fey heritage warlock/chameleon. I usually keep his aptitude fixed on divine, usually cleric, for the combination of retaining armored casting and the boost to two saves. His chameleon feat is usually locked on Fey Legacy for that extra point of DR from Fey Skin(Unless, of course, I know something else will be more useful for an encounter). Today that happy little accident saved the party.

We were getting mauled by some rather nasy hobgoblins with PC class level. Nothing went right. The druid's player refused to drop mass vigor because he thought he'd get more out of it after combat than as a roving pick-me-up in the beginning. My chameleon buff spells were stretched pretty thin(only being able to cast 2nd level spells as a 10th level character). I got in a couple of nasty shots on the enemy wizard (dropping him to negative hitpoints *twice*) using a combination of items and empower SLA to turn the warlock into a howitzer with a few good shots per day. Then I got deafened and dropped down to 6hp in the course of a round. the wizard had blur up so that meant I had to roll against two percentile chances to fire off an EB or a single chance to screw up any other invocation/spell.

Needless to say, I figured it was goodbye warlock, hello new character time. But I did what any caster would do in trouble, run for the bushes and try to avoid damage. As I fled, I remembered that lonely little Chameleon feat. Fey Legacy. Three SLAs once per day. Spell Like Abilities. Normal spell like abilities, not invocations. Things that don't require anything other than the will to use them, no somatic or material components, and more importantly no verbal ones for me to screw up. One of them is Summon Nature's Ally 5. Well, we needed the cavalry, so I called it. In the form of a friggin' Rhino! The Druid did a facepalm and decided to follow my lead, moreso that he wouldn't be outdruid-ed than any other reason, I suspect. So the Rhino Cavalry, now dubbed smoochie and moochie, comes and smears the rearguard of the hobgoblins (including that twice maimed wizard) into a thin red paste. The next round, I'm still quite deaf, so I drop another of the Fey Legacy SLAs, Confusion. It only snagged one of them, a mid-level fighter (the other two were a level appropriate cleric and a paladin of tyranny, they shrugged off the save fairly easily.) He immediately turned around and decided that those rhinos had to die. It was short and brutal and the layer of red paste on the terrain got a little thicker when it was all said and done. Not the best result, but better than I had any right to expect.

That's when the two survivors, now on the wrong end of a very unhappy group of PCs ( and a pair of rhinos) decided it was time to retreat.

The day was saved thanks to a single feat that I picked as a lark. What's your story?

Fizban
2009-09-08, 01:52 AM
Don't have any stories to add, but you seem to have forgotten that invocations only have a somatic component. Deafness won't mess you up at all. Still, it gave us rhino cavalry, so that's pretty awesome.

Fax Celestis
2009-09-08, 09:20 AM
My druid, in my bi-weekly IRL game, was among a party exploring an underground cavern network. We discovered a trap in a bottleneck in one of the passages, but we were unable to determine its effects...

...mostly because of the huecuva bugbear that came barreling down the hall and attacked us from beyond the trap. No one in our party was able to damage him meaningfully, barring one combatant who was capable of gaining enough reach for a short period of time.

When the huecuva backed off and began to regenerate, my druid decided to take matters into his own hands. He pulled out a wand, stepped through the trap and touched the huecuva. The trap discharged, rendering him permanently blind, but the wand still connected, and the cure serious wounds inside of it discharged and rendered the huecuva so much dust.

Myou
2009-09-08, 09:50 AM
permanently blind

Just until you get a Remove Blindness, yes? :smalleek:

Fax Celestis
2009-09-08, 09:57 AM
Just until you get a Remove Blindness, yes? :smalleek:

Actually, my character didn't trust those "poncy elven priestlings", so he decided to go to the dwarven, uh, "artificer" and get his eyes replaced with a graft.

Enochi
2009-09-08, 10:44 AM
Meh I guess the closest thing I have was in a recent campaign. I had a Mongrel-folk Dragonfire Adept round level 12 with a bag of tricks - tan. Also with me was a CR-14 Brown Dragon who I had bound to my service for a year and a day in exchange for freeing him from his captors. Now we had just finished protecting a nearby town and I took the dragon by myself out to the hills nearby and offered him a deal. I would release him from service in exchange for him setting up his horde nearby and protecting the town(Which I found was all most constantly under attack). He agreed to it then as soon as I release him from the oath he turns around and attacks me. We at this point I figure im screwed to hell and back as the rest of the party is a mile away in town. So trying to figure out what to do I decide to empty my full bag of tricks in hopes I can least survive. Well to make a long story short the sol Rhino I got from the bag crited on the charge and the rest of the Lions and tiger and bears(Oh my) mauled the dragon to death in 2 rounds despite the fact I had them trying to do subduel at the end. So what should have been a fight I would have easily died in I ended up fairly easily winning.

Myou
2009-09-08, 12:46 PM
Actually, my character didn't trust those "poncy elven priestlings", so he decided to go to the dwarven, uh, "artificer" and get his eyes replaced with a graft.

Ewwwwwwww. x_x

Rhiannon87
2009-09-08, 03:51 PM
So we're going up against the BBEG, my character's evil and corrupt father. We've been working towards this fight for... months, OOC and IC. We're short players that day, but damn it, we've made it to this point, we're gonna fight him! We've got a wizard, two fighters, a rogue, and me, the fighter/rogue/psion compulsive multi-classer.

We do some recon, find out that dear old Dad has a pair of ogres, a troll, and a minotaur working for him. Okay, that'll be rough, but manageable, we spend the night planning and prepare to attack the next day. Our wizard casts a magical house spell, we sleep.

We wake up at dawn when our house is dispelled. While we're all scrambling to our feet, my character's father thanks one of the fighters, a guy who joined us about a month ago in-game, for serving him so well. Yep. We've got four people, no healer, and a traitor. Let the games begin.

The minotaur challenges the rogue (an ex-gladiator invisible blade) to single combat, and they start dueling. I get some good hits in on the troll, and the ogres are neutralized via a neatly arranged wall of force. The guy who was playing the traitor switches to a new character who's appeared to help us with this fight. We get hit with a massive damage spell, I use a special, super-powerful healing item... we take out the ogre and the minotaur. Then things start getting bad.

My character's dad is a caster, and he hits me with Iron Bands. I'm immobilized, and get coup-de-graced by the troll. Who is, by the way, wielding a scythe. I go from 94 to 6 hit points in one hit. The wizard dispells the Iron Bands, I down a healing potion, and I'm about to rejoin the fight when the troll uses some kind of fear effect. I cower, new helper guy bolts away at top speed. That continues for six rounds.

So we're got the fighter, the wizard, and the rogue, duking it out with a troll, a traitor, an ogre, and a sorcerer. The rogue goes down after a critical hit with that scythe again. The traitor gets murdered by the fighter, though everyone's pretty bloodied up by this point. The ogre judges the odds and offers to turn on the troll in exchange for us not killing him; he gets one hit in on the troll before getting nuked by the sorcerer, who hits him and the troll with a fireball. Wizard gets knocked to negatives next round, thanks to a maximized magic missile, while the fighter is still battling the troll. Luckily, the fear wears off that round, and I bolt over to the wizard and pour a healing potion down her throat. (RAW, not possible, but I think either the DM forgot or just let it slide.) She starts aggressively casting at the sorcerer, the troll dies, leaving two fighter types, a rapidly returning new guy rogue, and the wizard, all glaring at the sorcerer.

Who then dimension doors away.

We have potions of fly, which we down, and chase after him. We catch him as he's riding a stolen horse through the gates of the castle of the city. The wizard hits him with a lightning bolt, killing him. He apparently had one hit point left when he fled.

It was the most insane, stressful, crazy battle ever. But we won! And now the party is semi-retired and semi-nobility. It's wonderful.

Masaioh
2009-09-08, 04:29 PM
A couple weeks ago I was DMing a game for two friends.

They were a druid and psychic (not psion, please note). I had a DMPC Dwarf Barbarian join their party through a dream sequence, don't ask. All level 4. I put them up against a minotaur zombie, and I guess it had too much health for them because the dwarf died horribly. He even used his once-per-session ability that lets him summon a random character from an internet meme, again don't ask. It was Leonidas, and the minotaur got sparta-kicked and lost a turn.

So I have an important high-level character burst into the dungeon like the kool-aid man after the party wins. The dwarf was at least dying, if not dead for good. So I have the character, a 21st level Gravity Warrior, punch a couple holes into the dungeon wall made of solid steel (30+ Str) and pour a potion of true res into the Dwarf's mouth. If such a potion didn't exist before, it does now. The GW then jumps out of the dungeon to continue his epic mid-air melee fight with the BBEG, allowing multiple more square miles of land to be obliterated by collateral damage.