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View Full Version : Gamer Tales That one perk/item/feat/skill you took as a joke that changed the campaign...



Tassyr
2014-02-14, 09:24 PM
Sometimes, you'll take that one perk, or feat, or skill, or item (depending on what you're playing) that ends up changing the very course of the story- but you took it on a whim, or as a joke, or just because it vaguely interested you.

Mine was in a 7th Sea campaign that got aborted woefully short. I made a young Castillian Rogue type. As part of Chargen, I gave Sebastian a guitar and a single point in using it. That's it, just enough to not screw up.

And it, before the campaign ended, a) gave us an alibi at least once ("No, I'm the entertainment! I play, she dances, and our big Eisen friend here provides... security.) b) gave us a way to hide from pursuit (Who's going to bother a young man serenading a lady in a carriage (we stole that) that's being watched over by a bored looking chaperon who's as big as a mountain?) and c) gave its life to save Sebastian's when he stopped an incoming thrown dagger with it, that snapped the neck.

(And yes, he mourned its loss.)

What was yours?

TheCountAlucard
2014-02-15, 09:26 AM
Not so much a joke as a whim, but for one Exalted game, I took a Charm for my tough brawler that was unrelated to brawling or being tough: "You Can Be More."

Essentially you give a person a little one-on-one inspirational talk, but imbue it with the power of one of the Chosen of the Unconquered Sun, and in doing so, you give them heroic drive and motivation.

I ended up using it on literally dozens of occasions.

D-naras
2014-02-15, 10:07 AM
Both from the same L5R campaign, and both are a set of disadvantages.

First was a Bayushi Bushi with Yogo Curse (you will betray that which you love the most), True Love (a Crane maiden which's trust he betrayed to prove his loyalty to the Scorpion clan and maybe evade the Yogo Curse) and Sworn Enemy (the maiden's brother who was his best friend prior to the events with the maiden). In short, the Bayushi spent many summers with the Crane, became true best friends with his sworn enemy, fell in love with the maiden, had a short lived affair with her and then promptly was recalled but the Scorpion lands to prove his loyalty, leaving the maiden dishonoured and ruining her chances for a good political marriage.

This added up to a really tragic character that always tried to prove that he was better than the man that broke his love's heart and disgraced her family along with his best friend. After many adventures, the time came for a duel to settle the matter of honour between the two men.

The night prior to the duel, the girl appeared to him and after the best role-playing we've ever done, stabbed him in the gut. While he survived the wound, on the next morning he lost the duel and his life but regained his honour.

This marked the turning point in our campaign, when things got real fast, as anyone could die now and even die beautifully like the Bayushi.

My follow-up character was a black sheep Phoenix, from a renowned Inquisitor family, that was fostered to the Scorpion, because they didn't want him due to his inability to speak with the Kami, his terrifying facial markings and his moon sickness. Mechanically, he had the Disadvantages Bad Fortune (Disfigurement), Lord Moon's curse and Black Sheep. I didn't have much beyond that for his backstory, so my GM improvised to great success, breathing much needed awesome to the character.

He revealed to him through a vision quest that his father was the same as my prior character's. Evidently, his father did the same to the Phoenix's mother, that the Bayushi did to his Crane maiden, with my new character as the result of that union. His mother died during childbirth, and the boy was born with a horrible facial birth-mark that was the exact same shape as a birth-mark on my prior character's chest.

Family drama done in a great and memorable way.

GPuzzle
2014-02-15, 10:05 PM
Actually I didn't take it as a joke but rather for CharOpping - the Githyanki Silver Longsword I was using in my Paladin.

It started off as a way to slap -2 to hit in anyone I hit.

It stopped a second war between the Githyanki and the Githzerai, stopped a Mindflayer invasion and saved the Rogue when he fell punching his worst enemy to death while falling over an entire kilometer.

sktarq
2014-02-15, 11:37 PM
Yep. I took secondary skill chef in DnD 2E once....because it gave me an excuse to be the scamp who was stealing the candy or cookies and eventually learned to be a thief from that and being noticed for it. . . . Well I was a fair bit more experienced than most of the other players and developed a bad habit of stealing things from the rest of the party. The Dm took me aside and told me to quit it so I needed a new hobby. I started cooking every beastie we found into dinner (the encounter directly after the talk was with giant crabs-it came very naturally)....This led to Dragon skin armour (via getting others interested in using beastie bits-plus bone weapons and the like), ways to poison a half dozen monsters with favored bait, traps that attracted only the target monsters by using similarly specific bait, fooling our way into castles, getting work in said castle so I could open a door later for the rest of the party, winning over otherwise aggressive town folk (who doesn't like a feast, a free feast?) and generally becoming about as useful as my poison or weapons. Also really skewed the value of treasure tables when with a bag of holding (in which food didn't rot as time didn't pass) I could strip down all sorts of things and collect money in the next town....I'd even cook samples so people would buy much of the meat off me.


I later built a 3.5E assassin after this guy. Not assassin PrC just an amazing craft (food) score with a bit alchemy....So much fun.

A_Man
2014-02-16, 12:10 AM
Heh heh heh, I once took an edge called "Minions" for one of my characters. This edge basically gave my character around 20 or so worthless characters who had one edge each. I took it for the fluff, mainly, since my character was supposed to have fan club and a gang, and fan club was an edge, so I made a gang.

Basically, at one point in time, we needed poisen. Low and behold, one of my minions had "Underground Ties", and we got poisen. That same minion ended up knocking out a PC, stealing all his cash, and ending up having as many edges as a starting level PC. MWHAHAHA

In another situation we Had the advantage of getting an extra minion to give us Something we didnt have. the Minion edge has a clause in it that states that certain edges give you more "minions". I forgot about this, so I never updated my minion list. Suffice to say, we needed a linguist, so I just scratched in Liguist Minion into my character sheet. :smallbiggrin: (GM approved, obviously :smallsmile:)

Telonius
2014-02-16, 03:04 AM
The Leadership feat, in an Age of Worms campaign.

I had been playing a Wildhunt Shifter Urban Ranger, Caleb "Oz" Oswald, played up as a Sam Spade film noir-ish private eye. Someone had made a (kind of off-color) comment that the Shifters who collaborated with the Silver Flame were known as "Uncle Fidos." Of course Oz blurts out with a curt, gravelly, "My uncle's name is Phido." We take the idea and run with it. Phido became a middle-aged Rogue, that one shady uncle that's always involved in some dodgy, quasi-legal scheme. I eventually took the Leadership feat to get him as a cohort. He ended up as a Rogue/Wizard/Master of Masks/Arcane Trickster. Super-high Bluff check, negatives in Sense Motive; done deliberately because he eventually started believing his own BS.

Shortly after taking the feat, there was a major shake-up in the campaign with several people dropping out of it (mostly for job reasons). Fortunately we'd just leveled up, and another experienced player had gotten a cohort as well, so we had all of the roles covered. After we switched everything around and got some new players, the DM had us drop the cohorts (because the new group would have been unwieldy). I took the opportunity to retire Oz, and play Phido as my main character. Turned out he was one of the most enjoyable characters I'd ever played, even if he was a mess mechanically.

SimonMoon6
2014-02-16, 04:25 PM
My wizard character took the Perform skill as he was planning to qualify for a prestige class that he ended up not taking.

Well, we just happened to be in a module that had some sort of magical box that could only be opened by a really high Perform roll. So, after using a bunch of spells to boost my perform skill and effectively taking 20 (the hard way-- by rolling over and over), the box opened.

And out popped a demi-lich! :smalleek::eek::smalleek:

And that was the (temporary) end of my wizard. Eventually, a new party (with the only surviving member of the old party) went after the demi lich to rescue our previous PCs. And they died. And then the third party that we built actually took down the demi lich and we got our old PCs back.

Necroticplague
2014-02-16, 05:06 PM
Once, in an exalted campaign, I took the knack Hybrid Body Rearrangement. Didn't really intend for it to be a big thing, was going to just use it to pretend to have a different Tell (the cat ears would surely distract people from the fact my voice sounds a bunch of steel sliding past each other, right?). However, realizing that it my own mote-frugalness and mote-restoring charm use meant I had plenty to spare. So it ended up being used a ton so I didn't waste absorbed motes. So during extended time away from the cities, I'd end up a good mishmash of utility traits (flight, see demons and ghosts that are dematerialized, burrow through stone, climbing, ect.).

The Glyphstone
2014-02-16, 05:32 PM
A long time ago, I was playing a character who managed to get a free template, and I settled on Shadow Creature.

From there on out, every single monster either used a one-shot item of True Seeing before fighting us or had True Seeing as an innate ability/precast spell.

Vrock_Summoner
2014-02-16, 05:58 PM
I once took extra points of Craft (Smithing) for joke purposes (we always treat Craft skills as useless NPC jobs) on my Fighter/Rogue/Blackguard character. Ended up being very useful. The BBEG was trying to fuse the family swords of the four noble houses into an ultimate weapon that would let him break the chains sealing his dark god's power, since the Shelvic prophecy foretold that whoever broke the chains would become the first Cleric and vessel of said god's power. We the players retrieved the swords before the BBEG could fuse them, and the noble houses managed to use some ancient magic thing to shatter the blades.

Cue me stealing the shards without the party's knowledge and reforging them into a single blade, and when the party went to try to perma-seal the dark gate so that even artifacts as powerful as the noble blades couldn't free the god, I whipped out my new weapon and became the avatar of evil in short order. Cue three more levels of gameplay (we had been level 17 at the time) with me as the new BBEG.

Best part?

I ended up prevailing.

veti
2014-02-16, 06:20 PM
As a joke, my DM included 'Goat Hurling' as a skill in his campaign. The fluff behind it was "an orcish sport, in which contestants take turns to throw live goats at one another until one party or the other is knocked off their rock".

This was a very messy, very - interesting skill system, in which our starting level of each skill was determined by (basically) a random % roll. We'd also borrowed from Rolemaster the custom of open-ended rolling. And so it was that my character - a ninja/illusionist - had over 300% in her goat-hurling skill slot.

As you can imagine, the skill rarely came up in-game, until...

I can't recall why we were facing Dread Mephistopheles. Given his MO, he might well have been threatening us, all we hold dear, and/or the entire universe. On the other hand, given our MO, he might also have been guilty of nothing more than "appearing in public with a gratuitously large XP tag". What I do remember, though, is that he really should have re-thought the "horns and hooves" combo before this particular encounter.

Recherché
2014-02-16, 06:36 PM
It was the very first tabletop game I ever played in was an urban fantasy based homebrew. the other four players were all attracted by the shiny shiny magic and ended up making min/maxed mages. However I tried for a mostly mundane but skilled type; I ended up making an accidental diplomancer.

Elizabeth Warren waltzed through the first two thirds of the campaign mostly by lying through her teeth and charming everyone she came into contact with. She got in precisely two fights in 6 sessions and according to the GM talked her way out of 5 planned battles. In fact he ended up seriously downgrading the BBEG's sanity because if he hadn't "You'd just have persuaded him to go away and/or use his giant golem for good."

Its not that the GM didn't expect anyone to try diplomacy, its just that he didn't expect anyone to try using persuasion on undead and faeries much less succeeding on doing so. Our overpowered mages ended up feeling kinda powerless and one of them even dropped the game because of this. Another worked very hard on gaining mind control powers.

The story didn't end up lasting too long since we were in college and the GM graduated but I learned the power of a good face from that experience and its become one of my favorite archetypes to play with.

ShadowsGrnEyes
2014-02-17, 11:11 AM
at one point there was a deck of many things. . . i drew a couple cards. i got a card whose result was (Avoid any one thing once) the game went on for like a year. . .

end of the game, the party kills the evil god with the magic dagger.
the magic dagger of which we have a perfect duplicate made by the crafting deity to fool the evil god.

the way the dagger worked it could be used to turn you into a god but if you used it you would be Corrupted by the daggers evil. . .

my character was a good Theif . . .

i swapped the daggers as a joke and used the god-soul-stealing dagger. . . dm says "okay so your evil cause the dark magic comes out of the dagger to corrupt you"

i go. "I avoid that" and remind the GM about that card i got and never used. . .

It was hillarious. i got to be a god at the end of the game.

Green Leviathan
2014-02-17, 11:31 AM
In a current game I am playing we were allowed to take flaws. As autohypnosis wasn't an allowed skill and I was playing a cleric devoted to amassing knowledge my character was allowed to memorize any book instead of gaining a feat if he took a flaw. Several months later we came across a dark book that the first page says that anyone that read any father in the book without proper training and protection it would drive them insane and probably kill them. It was also written in an ancient dead language, that with comprehend language spell could have been read. My character memorized the book without reading it and finished the quest by delivering it to its recipient and truthfully telling that he had not read the book. At a later time had his mind read by an over mind of the mind flayers and drove it insane, the full extent of which has yet to be proven. Then he pulled a visor card from a deck of many things, gained the proper knowledge to read the book and gained the plot power of basically re-shaping souls. None of this was ever intended to have been allowed in the first place.

Spore
2014-02-17, 04:34 PM
In an "The Dark Eye" oneshot, I chose to play a noble priest of some description. I wanted to play a snotty preachy prick of a person. As it played out most of the townsfolk respected my character just because of his status. Being a noble was a fairly expensive perk to take but I wanted to be the pampered son of a duke.

(I should play characters with social advantages more often.)

One Step Two
2014-02-17, 09:28 PM
Our DM had taken the World's Largest Dungeon, and decided to re-fit it into a bunch of different dungeons spread across the ancient world. Our characters were part of the Roman Empire, and we were to investigate the sudden influx of Magic and Monsters in the world. I played an Egyptian Wizard, dispatched from Alexandria as an attache to the small Roman Force to find out why our ancient spells had suddenly become more powerful. Using an Ancient Rome source book, there was a feat called Polyglot, which allowed you to learn a newly encountered language in as little as 1d4 days. I thought it was a cute idea, and I didn't want to play a totally over powered caster, so I took it for flavour

It turns out, my ability to learn and speak any language I encounter almost immediately worked to our benefit. As the Romans had no notion of what "Evil" creatures were, we were able to make bargains with things we were meant to fight, and made an Ally with a Drow Assassin who was skulking around, and gladly showed us the dungeon, negating many traps.
The game has been on Hiatus for a while, but it was an absolute blast.

HuskyBoi
2014-02-18, 02:20 AM
The wizard in my party once destroyed an immensely powerful magic item that could have been the catalyst for an world-spanning war had it fallen into the wrong hands (standard Maguffin, really :smalltongue:) with focussed Disintegrate spells, reducing it to dust.

The rogue then snorted it, on a whim.

The consequences were... spectacular.

Wraith
2014-02-18, 05:08 AM
We played Savage Worlds, using a plot that was ripped wholesale from the movie Unforgiven. The GM admitted it right away, and the Players were perfectly familiar with it, so it worked well - everyone was playing an old cowboy out for 'one last adventure', meaning we all have the "Old" trait along with a collection of things like "Short Sighted", "One Leg", "Hard Of Hearing" and so on.

My character didn't have much focus - we already had a 'sniper' with a rifle, a doctor, and a gunfighter with a pair of pistols, so I went for mid-range with a shotgun.

Long story short, the group ended up in a cave where the bad guys had holed up, but we caught them while they were out - just as we were about to leave, they turned up and chased us deep into the caves. It was a brutal war of attrition - the doctor was killed right off the bat, blundering out of the cave and straight into the arriving enemies. The sniper suffered in the dark and short, winding tunnels and went next, and I was badly wounded at the same time as the gunfighter went down, but we had whittled the Posse of killers down to the last man.... just as my shotgun ran out of ammo.

With all my old buddies dead, bleeding heavily from the ribs and with my only way out being through the last guy who had just pulled out the biggest, meanest looking knife you'd ever seen, I had only one option: take him down with my bare hands and an empty shotgun.

Back to character creation: My assortment of Flaws and other things meant that I had just enough XP left to put 1 dice into Melee Fighting. Just one, barely enough to make the roll without any penalties for being 'unskilled'.
I rolled, and crit'd with my unexpected skill - it literally would not have worked, without that 1 dice in the skill.
The damage dice rolled, and exploded.... and then exploded again.... and again!

My Old Man caved the bad guy's head in with the butt of his empty shotgun in one strike (not necessarily an easy thing to do, in the Savage Worlds ruleset), leaving him the last man standing and essentially salvaging the game from a TPK to a bitter-sweet victory as he rode off into the sunset, slumped forward in his saddle, for one last ride. :smallwink:

Socratov
2014-02-18, 06:43 AM
Well, not somethign I took per se, but a great story none the less.

So I was Dread Pirate with my own ship (not really anything short of a floating tank with ironwood etc. but a lot faster). I killed a bunch of navy ships form a navy we (the pirate island we were friends with) were at war with (which I and my friends secretly caused). We defeated 3 ships: 2 big ones, 1 small one, sadly 2 of them sank (raised it temporarily to completely loot it), the 3rd we took home (funny, our druid cast maws of chaos on it to clean it out and leave it in pristine condition). So with an extra ship I couldn't really fill wiht a crew (not enough followers recruited) I returned to the tavern (base of operations as well as favorite spot, my name was Captain Jack Sparrow after all). There we see an old sailor in need of somethign to relieve my boredom. Overnight they pimp out the ship with a 2nd mortar and a crew of all old sailors. Next day we have to fight 2 battles. They would follow me in the battles and carry out my commands. First battle 3 big ships, 5 small ones. We were my floating little tank, the big guy and another small ship. Rest of the island's fleet was at the second battle. I signal the attack and the old guys won initiative. In one turn they exploded 2 ships by critically hitting the poweder reserves of the 2 big ships, and severely damaging a small one. I and hte other ships (as well as our druids) wreck the rest in a couple of roundsafter that. Then we join the other battle instantly killing their admiral and through a signature rope swing to another boat, landing and TWF dual critting their captain on the surpise round (think slice and dice isntakill) I just had another boat with a free crew (failed my intimidate check, but the DM ruled that my action killing the captain was more then enough to **** their pants). I, through the acquisition of about a ship per day, was quickly building an armada. Sadly the campaign died out due to people not being able to show up or make time. I would have become Pirate king by the next 3 sessions If I was in any way guessing. I also elevated the status of the old guys to free of my rule to defend the island or go do awesome stuff (I've read quite enough Pratchett to know where this was headed).

Tassyr
2014-02-19, 07:51 AM
We played Savage Worlds, using a plot that was ripped wholesale from the movie Unforgiven. The GM admitted it right away, and the Players were perfectly familiar with it, so it worked well - everyone was playing an old cowboy out for 'one last adventure', meaning we all have the "Old" trait along with a collection of things like "Short Sighted", "One Leg", "Hard Of Hearing" and so on.

My character didn't have much focus - we already had a 'sniper' with a rifle, a doctor, and a gunfighter with a pair of pistols, so I went for mid-range with a shotgun.

Long story short, the group ended up in a cave where the bad guys had holed up, but we caught them while they were out - just as we were about to leave, they turned up and chased us deep into the caves. It was a brutal war of attrition - the doctor was killed right off the bat, blundering out of the cave and straight into the arriving enemies. The sniper suffered in the dark and short, winding tunnels and went next, and I was badly wounded at the same time as the gunfighter went down, but we had whittled the Posse of killers down to the last man.... just as my shotgun ran out of ammo.

With all my old buddies dead, bleeding heavily from the ribs and with my only way out being through the last guy who had just pulled out the biggest, meanest looking knife you'd ever seen, I had only one option: take him down with my bare hands and an empty shotgun.

Back to character creation: My assortment of Flaws and other things meant that I had just enough XP left to put 1 dice into Melee Fighting. Just one, barely enough to make the roll without any penalties for being 'unskilled'.
I rolled, and crit'd with my unexpected skill - it literally would not have worked, without that 1 dice in the skill.
The damage dice rolled, and exploded.... and then exploded again.... and again!

My Old Man caved the bad guy's head in with the butt of his empty shotgun in one strike (not necessarily an easy thing to do, in the Savage Worlds ruleset), leaving him the last man standing and essentially salvaging the game from a TPK to a bitter-sweet victory as he rode off into the sunset, slumped forward in his saddle, for one last ride. :smallwink:

Oh my god, that sounds epic. That's some full blown Magnificent Seven moments going on there!

oudeis
2014-02-19, 03:27 PM
The wizard in my party once destroyed an immensely powerful magic item that could have been the catalyst for an world-spanning war had it fallen into the wrong hands (standard Maguffin, really :smalltongue:) with focussed Disintegrate spells, reducing it to dust.

The rogue then snorted it, on a whim.

The consequences were... spectacular.elaborate, please.

illyahr
2014-02-19, 04:05 PM
The wizard in my party once destroyed an immensely powerful magic item that could have been the catalyst for an world-spanning war had it fallen into the wrong hands (standard Maguffin, really :smalltongue:) with focussed Disintegrate spells, reducing it to dust.

The rogue then snorted it, on a whim.

The consequences were... spectacular.

Ok, I'll bite. What happened?

Driderman
2014-02-19, 05:39 PM
In Vampire: The Masquerade, we had a drop-in-drop-out campaign/living setting type game going with around 20-30 players in it that switched in and out of sessions as they saw fit, more or less. Great fun.

Anyway, for this game I created a british Nosferatu occultist based on the concept of being an in-game powergamer. Basically, he sought temporal power through any and all manners of esoteric disciplines (and was a bit of a jerk) and had of course picked up the Necromancy discipline since that would be fitting for a guy who headed a mysterious lodge and believe in magic. I only really used it for fluff, but it turned out, the entire meta-plot of the game revolved around Wraiths, Maelstroms, Oblivion, Cappadocians, Harbingers of Skulls and magical books of ancient Necromancy.

Madfellow
2014-02-19, 05:52 PM
In a D&D 3.5 campaign a couple years ago, the party's bard decided he was going to start collecting bees. He devoted a little bit of his off-hours collecting the little bugs and putting them in jars. His idea was to use the jars like grenades, just in case we ever encountered anyone who really NEEDED to be covered in bees. We all thought he was crazy, and that our GM was crazy for allowing him to do this.

And then we encountered the Final Boss. It was a high-level Quori (Nightmare Spirit) that had the ability to split itself up into a swarm of eyeball creatures. Nobody in our party had any way of dealing with a high-level swarm monster. Nothing we tried worked! This thing was slowly whittling away our HP until...

The bard threw a jar of bees at it.

And it worked! The bees immediately started stinging all of the eyeball creatures until the Quori finally returned to its original form, which the rest of the party could then start stabbing again.

We all thought he was crazy, but that little stunt of his saved our bacon. God bless bards. :smallbiggrin:

Braininthejar2
2014-02-19, 06:30 PM
a year ago I started a Dragonlance campaign. Since the story began in one of the periods where the gods are gone, I didn't want to be left without healing, so I managed to persuade the GM to allow my wizard to take medicine as a knowledge skill, allowing him to max it out.

Then I discovered that being a 'travelling healer' opens even more doors than making booze with alchemy, gets me some easy friends and lets me get close to injured people when gathering information.

Then the gods started to return and through role-playing it turned out that my character hates the idea - he became determined to prove that humans don't need priests and started mixing his medical skills with low level transmutation and necromancy to find alternative ways to heal.

Then the game started moving towards intrigue and then politics - for his valiant efforts fighting a massive outbreak of jaundice (engineered by one of our more callous enemies) my wizard was made a count... and made a manager of the newly opened hospital in the capital city, with all the side-quest that go with it.

Half a year later, only a handful people know my character is a wizard - to most he is an eccentric count travelling the land and promoting (and often enforcing) proper medical practice as the head medic of the realm. In the meantime he builds up a spy network in the cities he goes through.

Knaight
2014-02-20, 02:15 PM
I was actually the GM here, but I was still involved. One of my players was working on a Fudge character, and had a bit of a block when it came to flaws. So I started offering examples, most of which were pretty ordinary - one of which was "can only speak in proverbs". Naturally, "can only speak in proverbs" was the flaw taken, and the character was named Silent Gecko Hunts Quietly to fit. This eventually resulted in an entire order who did this, several conversations conducted entirely in proverbs (the player and I knew eachother well enough to pull this off and actually convey information, while the rest of the group wondered what was going on), and generally a lot of fun. The character also had their highest skill as "Improvise weapon". Note that this is "Improvise" not "Improvised". There was a great deal of punching trees so that wooden weaponry would come out and fighting with it, and at one time a gate was broken down by punching it into a bunch of shruiken to throw at those who defended it so that there was more time to punch it.

It was a bit of a silly campaign, but it was glorious.

Wraith
2014-02-21, 06:43 AM
Oh my god, that sounds epic. That's some full blown Magnificent Seven moments going on there!

It was one of those games where it all just came together - the Players knew the plot and wanted to be a part of it, the setting wrote itself, and even the dice seemed to know what was up and what was expected of them.

Not too many games go so smoothly, in my experience, let alone a one-shot just to kill an evening. :smallsmile:

Erik Vale
2014-02-22, 05:55 AM
I built a wizard for Heroes, and gave him the ability to teleport small distances [among many other things].
This quickly extended to teleporting the entire party and lots of gear long distances, I became the horse the parties horses rode.
My joke power, has me teleporting around small armies, we once escaped a exploding volcano, + loot, + full dragon, + guys we brought along, soly due to me, and I even plucked a PC from mid-air using teleport so he didn't get to swim in lava.
All just because I thought it'd be cool to teleport past walls when I didn't want to blast them down, it's basically my only power no.

Doorhandle
2014-02-23, 01:05 AM
The wizard in my party once destroyed an immensely powerful magic item that could have been the catalyst for an world-spanning war had it fallen into the wrong hands (standard Maguffin, really :smalltongue:) with focussed Disintegrate spells, reducing it to dust.

The rogue then snorted it, on a whim.

The consequences were... spectacular.

I know I'd make my characters do that.

Aedilred
2014-02-24, 12:36 AM
In the last campaign I played in, we were starting at level 4/5 or so and had a reasonable amount of starting gold; enough to buy all our basic equipment and weapons but nothing magical or masterwork. We were playing with long sessions and long intervals between them, basically long weekends a few months apart, and to speed things up the DM recommended we create our characters in advance. Most of us did; one player - the one least familiar with the rules - did not.

It took literally hours for he and the DM to create his character together, during which time the rest of us got bored. After catching up socially, laughing at the Book of Erotic Fantasy, playing a card game, etc. I started flipping through the PHB equipment section and realised that I had plenty of gold left for random cheap junk that you'd never normally buy. So I got some rope, writing paper, what have you, a cart to carry all our loot, some other players chipped in for a cheap horse to pull the cart, and I made the old ten-foot-pole/ladder observation to the DM in a rather tongue-in-cheek way. He laughed and made clear that wasn't how it was going to work.

Anyway, after several drinks and a gradual depreciation in patience as the character-creation process wore on, I decided I was going to load up my cart with as many ladders as would physically fit. When I mentioned I was buying a couple the DM looked dumbfounded so I bought a load more. Eventually he set a sanity/economy limit at five, having negotiated me down from ~50.

The ladders were unbelievably useful, allowing us to circumvent all sorts of awkward situations. We could basically use them to break into anywhere including heavily-guarded compounds, and because we had five, we could all climb up simultaneously and jump over as a group rather than go over one at a time to be picked off. Eventually the DM took our cart (and the ladders) away by fiat after we'd stymied his plans one too many times; we were very sad.

The same campaign also featured a Cube of Force, which the DM gave us early as part of his novel "give the party their WBL treasure, but all in one go and in the form of an item only one player can use at a time" policy. I think he was hoping we would use it imaginatively, and was intrigued to see what we would do, but I didn't get the impression he took it all that seriously; it was just an expensive item we'd never be able to sell and we would bicker over. It went on to save us from TPKs on at least three occasions and also salvaged one of our major campaign objectives. Best item ever.