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View Full Version : Clever Players are so Much Fun!



tedthehunter
2014-06-15, 01:31 AM
Hey all! I just had a short story I wanted to share with the playground, and wanted to hear any similar stories that you might have.

Today I was DMing a D&D Next game for a group of new friends and I tell you what, I have never DMed a more clever group of PCs. The party was facing off against an enemy druid who had just wild shaped into a bear. I prepared myself for the usual tactics, positioning the bear's druid minions appropriately, when the party cleric's turn came up. Command word: Shapeshift on the bear. I have never had a PC think outside the box like that. And of course the bear failed the save and popped back into human form, at which point the party began his systematic melee beatdown.

Also earlier in the session, two dryads performed a ritual that allowed them to cast the 2nd level druid spell called Moonbeam. A ray of light streams from the moon overhead and burns one of the PCs for radiant damage, then goes moving towards the next PC in line. The PC pulls out a mirror that they had found in a previous session, and asked me if he could use it to reflect the beam of light back at the dryads. I love to reward clever/creative ideas so of course I let him make a ranged attack roll against the unsuspecting creatures. One natural 20 and one failed CON save later, there's one crispy dryad corpse and the other just ran.

The PCs creativity surprised me and made today a blast for everyone.

TLDR - Have your fellow players (including the DM) ever surprised you with an idea/character/spell combo/whatever that was so creative it just made your day? If so, what was it? If not, share your clever ideas in or out of context!

Slipperychicken
2014-06-15, 01:36 AM
Also earlier in the session, two dryads performed a ritual that allowed them to cast the 2nd level druid spell called Moonbeam. A ray of light streams from the moon overhead and burns one of the PCs for radiant damage, then goes moving towards the next PC in line. The PC pulls out a mirror that they had found in a previous session, and asked me if he could use it to reflect the beam of light back at the dryads. I love to reward clever/creative ideas so of course I let him make a ranged attack roll against the unsuspecting creatures. One natural 20 and one failed CON save later, there's one crispy dryad corpse and the other just ran.


So they had a mirror capable of reflecting a 5ft wide beam of light? And this bypassed the spell's normal area entry to extend it all the way over to the casters?

tedthehunter
2014-06-15, 02:00 AM
So they had a mirror capable of reflecting a 5ft wide beam of light? And this bypassed the spell's normal area entry to extend it all the way over to the casters?

Big mirror :smallcool: and I'm not sure what you mean by the second part, but I just ruled that seeing as it's a beam of light, it could be reflected as a laser would be, directed by the angle of the mirror. Does that answer your question?

Kid Jake
2014-06-15, 05:37 AM
In my current M&M campaign I had a villain called Baritone who's voice was among the most deadly powers manifested so far. A single word from him could literally generate enough force to strip flesh to the bone and flip cars. He'd already defeated each PC in a single shot at one point or another, so when the Hydromancer said that he was going to ambush him with a 2x4 I didn't think it was going to end well.

Spoiler: It didn't, but not for the reasons I thought.

The hydromancer snuck up and smacked the guy in the head with a piece of wood, when Baritone started to retaliate the trap was sprung and the hydromancer filled the villain's lungs with water so he couldn't draw enough breath to speak. Then things got...messy, when he decided to just beat Baritone to death with the 2x4 while he was at it.

Lost a great villain and didn't even get any cool final words.

Lakaz
2014-06-15, 05:55 AM
An enemy pyromancer, who was basically an unnamed Elite Mook of the BBEG has one of the characters cornered, and entirely separated from the group except another PC who was unconscious in a corner at the time. The PC was pinned to the wall and had a hand spare, and decided to simply shoot the mook in the gut. A successfull roll and at point-blank range the shot hit, right in the stomach. After that, the PC said "Why don't you cauterise the wound?". I was wondering why precisely the PC was giving the mook advice, but the mook decided to take it and cauterised the wound. PC then proceeded to say "Now explain to me how exactly you plan to get the bullet out. Or fix the probable rupture to your stomach, and severe internal bleeding that would've caused."

Then we have the person (A leather armor wearer) who was in a duel with a plate-wearer who was obviously the supirior fighter, and decided to ask what the floor was made of. We decided on steel, (It was the Black Citadel in GW2, in the Bane, so it was probably steel or Iron or something). The player pulled a giant magnetised rod which he had rp'ed getting about a week ago (I was present and so was the guy he was dueling, and was wondering why he'd want such a thing) and tossed it at the plate wearer's feet, sticking him to the floor and rendering him immobile while the player stood a few meters away, pulled out a pistol and opened fire.

Gamgee
2014-06-15, 06:33 AM
Conquered a planet and "won" the game of thrones in Rogue Trader. Hahaha I got called "Machiavellian". It certainly took some creative planning and improvisation to usurp the planets ruler, take the place of its chief general AND have the planet cheering me into office. I also framed them as the ones doing most of this (it was sweet gunning them down). Oh and the church entrusted me with the relic of a Saint because I would "protect" it during all the vents that were going on. For now I decided to play nice, but could have easily forged a counterfeit and took the real relic for myself. Oh and I'm a hero to the Imperium and the Imperial Navy (and two Captains in particular owe me big now). Who fully support me taking over the planet. The previous inept leadership was practically thrown out of the throne room with applause. Well what was left of them after the "attack" they launched on me and my right hand man. We survived the attack and defeated them. Their jealousy would not be getting the best of us. The Imperial Guard in the throne room even believe my story since I saved their lives from the horrible attack on the palace.

I did most of this during a massive Ork invasion of the planet and had to balance my planning and scheming with ensuring the planet survived.

Naturally there is a lot more too this with politics, planning, and a lot of assassinations. No one else needs to know that though. My poor GM had NO idea me and my friend were planning this. He always took me for a quiet or even "boring" safe player. Much cheers were had at the table because the rest of the players were going to get tons of loot from me owning a planet. He had no idea how to react for quite some time. It's still one of those most talked about events kind of things.

Edit
When the killing blow came I unloaded a bolt pistol into the governor face. Plasma Gun at the IG soldiers. My right hand man used his bolter to gun down the general. That was just the surprise round. I even got a critical hit on my attack against the governor. Then the round came and we won initiative so we gunned down the rest. Naturally wounded ourselves some to make it look less one sided.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo4cFViNLes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=821ft1hVTtw

Edit
One of my fellow players says this describes the whole event quiet well. The Rains of Castamere (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECewrAld3zw).

DM Nate
2014-06-15, 08:03 AM
(It was the Black Citadel in GW2, in the Bane, so it was probably steel or Iron or something).

Coming from a guy who only plays D&D and GW2...I SO WANT TO BE A PART OF YOUR CAMPAIGN!!!!!

JHShadon
2014-06-15, 08:12 AM
Coming from a guy who only plays D&D and GW2...I SO WANT TO BE A PART OF YOUR CAMPAIGN!!!!!

Same here, I love RPing in GW2 and a GW2 D&D game sounds awesome.

Lakaz
2014-06-15, 12:33 PM
It was in fact just some RP on GW2, rather than an actual D&D game set in the guild wars 2 universe. But a lot of events i run more or less take the D&D format with somebody DMing, so i still count the stories i accrue through that as being applicable for the "Share a story" threads here.

The Oni
2014-06-15, 02:45 PM
So. Pathfinder homebrew. We started out working for a death goddess (Pharasma), now working for a necromancer. In our last campaign, my evil Fey was put on an assassination mission (really, it wasn't a difficult mission, since the targets were now undead and likely going to be killed by an Inquisitor of Iomedae) against the party's samurai and cleric, who had gone rogue.

The samurai still owed the Fey some favors, and the way we're playing Winter Court Fey in this campaign is that settling debts properly is the basis for a stunningly convoluted honor system - and for people who can't actually die under normal circumstances, honor is literally more important than life. If the samurai dies in her current state her soul will be destroyed, and thus her debt can never be fulfilled, permanently besmirching the Fey's honor. SO, after she busts out, the Fey chases her down, then gives her the rose headband he wears. I'd cleared with the DM at character creation time that it's actually the preserved heart of a veranallia, a Level 20 plant-based azata, which he wears because it makes him ping as Good to paladintypes, but the life aura also means that an undead can wear it and have her aura of death suppressed - meaning the necromancer suddenly fails to track her, therefore assuming that she's dead. She doesn't look undead either, so we head to the slummy part of town where undine law trumps the usual city law, to plan our inevitable escape.

So, while planning our escape (and the fulfillment of favors), the samurai is poisoned by a friendly-looking undine using a charisma-based poison designed to destroy undead. SOMEHOW she makes the very last will-save required and has 1 Cha left before the Fey manages to drag her to the forest and bury her, covering over the disturbed earth with plant life, with sufficient rite and ritual that Pharasma's agents are able to pull her into the land of the dead without destroying her soul, alleviating her undeath permanently and removing all evidence of his treachery.

The Fey bluffs the necromancer successfully that the samurai disintegrated utterly after her death, presents her prison clothes as proof, ingratiates himself as a loyal servant, gets paid for an assassination mission he didn't actually complete, convinces the samurai of his good intentions while also putting her colossally in his debt AND in a position to royally **** the necromancer up when the time comes.

...And did I mention he pulled off all of this without speaking a word of untruth?

jaydubs
2014-06-15, 03:01 PM
This thread makes me feel stodgy. I get that a lot of this gets allowed because of Rule of Cool (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool). But a big part of me is just shaking my head and thinking "that's not how physics works." :smallannoyed:

Yes, I realize it's silly to worry about such things in settings with magic, vampires, faeries, aliens, and other things that stretch the imagination. But, I can't help it. :smalltongue:

Krazyguy75
2014-06-15, 05:09 PM
Let me tell you the story of Thog, the First Orc Barbarian/Logician I've met.

Let me say that Thog was so good at his arguments, that even though they make no sense, you could never find fault in his arguments.

One such time: The party entered a perfume shop, and it smelled terrible because of all the leaking and spill perfume that had been sitting there for years. Thog thus began dumping bottles of perfume on the ground, because "perfume makes things smell better". The DM, after examining this simple piece of logic, said that the odors equalled out. And thus, Thog was proved correct again.

He once broke a wall that the DM had said was protected by "Plot Protection", purely by coming up with enough ways around that the DM hadn't thought of.

He had a grudge against doors for all the actions against him, which consisted of falling on him, getting opened in his face, and almost impaling him because there was a cadaver collector on the other side. Then, being the polite Orc Barbarian he was, he decided to bury them, because they had fought well.

Gamgee
2014-06-19, 07:19 PM
Let me tell you the story of Thog, the First Orc Barbarian/Logician I've met.

Let me say that Thog was so good at his arguments, that even though they make no sense, you could never find fault in his arguments.

One such time: The party entered a perfume shop, and it smelled terrible because of all the leaking and spill perfume that had been sitting there for years. Thog thus began dumping bottles of perfume on the ground, because "perfume makes things smell better". The DM, after examining this simple piece of logic, said that the odors equalled out. And thus, Thog was proved correct again.

He once broke a wall that the DM had said was protected by "Plot Protection", purely by coming up with enough ways around that the DM hadn't thought of.

He had a grudge against doors for all the actions against him, which consisted of falling on him, getting opened in his face, and almost impaling him because there was a cadaver collector on the other side. Then, being the polite Orc Barbarian he was, he decided to bury them, because they had fought well.

:smallfrown: I know how you feel. I've got some of the smartest dumb asses in all of rpg land. I know the pain. Thankfully I'm 10 times smarter, and at least four times dumber. So I can keep them in line. Hahaha. :smallcool:

FabulousFizban
2014-06-19, 08:22 PM
In my current M&M campaign I had a villain called Baritone who's voice was among the most deadly powers manifested so far. A single word from him could literally generate enough force to strip flesh to the bone and flip cars. He'd already defeated each PC in a single shot at one point or another, so when the Hydromancer said that he was going to ambush him with a 2x4 I didn't think it was going to end well.

Spoiler: It didn't, but not for the reasons I thought.

The hydromancer snuck up and smacked the guy in the head with a piece of wood, when Baritone started to retaliate the trap was sprung and the hydromancer filled the villain's lungs with water so he couldn't draw enough breath to speak. Then things got...messy, when he decided to just beat Baritone to death with the 2x4 while he was at it.

Lost a great villain and didn't even get any cool final words.

"The MUUUUSIC MEEEEISTER!"
"Your resistance to my charm now ends, when I belt these POOOOWER CHOOOORDS!

Kid Jake
2014-06-19, 09:01 PM
"The MUUUUSIC MEEEEISTER!"
"Your resistance to my charm now ends, when I belt these POOOOWER CHOOOORDS!

Less Music Meister, more Black Bolt with a muttonstache.


Although I do now have the urge introduce a superpowered Neil Patrick Harris into my game.

Glimbur
2014-06-21, 07:23 PM
I was part of a DM team that ran a game over a year of college. They leveled each month, so they probably ended the game around level 12ish. After the first semester we split the group into two parties of six each. The two parties were, of course, Good and Evil. We kept them in different areas of the campaign world until the last climactic showdown. We gave them a week IRL to prepare, and told them that their characters could contact each other. There was going to be a big showdown between the two parties on top of a magical pyramid (spells cast up there were auto-extended). At stake was the fate of the LE city. Initiative gets rolled, most of the Evil party draws together and holds hands, and they cast Teleport.

Turns out Good had paid Evil to throw the fight.

The rest of the battle was still kind of interesting because the remaining Evil characters had minions and were decently optimized, but it was not the conclusion we expected. Good did end up winning.

DM Nate
2014-06-21, 09:42 PM
Turns out Good had paid Evil to throw the fight.

I am remarkably okay with this.

Alberic Strein
2014-06-22, 05:40 AM
I actually hate when i can't make my players play smart. They do pick up the weirdest moments to shine however.

I had my party of two meet a necromancer in MRQII. He could have looked intimidating, if his mate (who wasn't exactly human) did not have a strong jealous streak, a strong telepathic bond with him, and the tendency to dope slap him. I have never seen my (female) players shoot so many innuendos, double entendres, and fail/fail questions before. Needless to say, it ended as a pleasant evening for everyone.

A friend DM of mine once told me a story of Nephilim. A female player of his had the power 1 to create water 2 to give fevers. She tied up a guy to interrogate him and told him her power were to siphon out life force. He suddenly started to feel weak, as the water in the glass kept filling up and she went with a playful "Should I drink... Or not?". He spilled every single info he had.

I, for one, am banned from choosing mentem (mind/mental/spiritual) magic in Ars Magica. Why? Well, let's just say an enemy mage had infiltrated our base, hiding among our folk, using mind magic to ease himself into our community, and was instrumental in the planning of a particularly lethal attack. How do we weed him out? We round up every member of the community and then subtly send the message/order "sit" in a way that would make anyone with even the slightest resistance to magic automatically resist the spell. Being proficient at magic gives you resistance against that same kind of magic. So only two people remained standing. The undercover mage and my secondary character, the baddest warrior of the realm, who had just lost his newborn child in said attack. Well, the guy got beat up. Yup. Real good. But lo! One of his accomplices was one of our esteemed brother magus. So, when yet another attack was upon us, that traitorous swine had the authority to call my character out of the mentem magus' cell and right into a trap. But not before my warrior plunged his sword into the mentem magus so he would die if he was moved. They still healed him, but he was sufficiently wounded for my magus to kill him after winning initiative when he later came to ambush my magus. Revenge is sweet. Moreover since he died inside our headquarters, his soul had a rather peculiar fate...

Another reason for me being banned from choosing mentem is that our headquarters had a bit of an issue with ghosts, and clearing the damn thing of them was just too difficult and time consuming. What was way easier was drawing a circle that would draw in and effectively trap the ghosts in the cave which formerly housed the church, creating something of a hell with hundred of ghosts parked into a 5 feet wide spot (irony intended) and generating a magic source. And effectively trapping the soul of anyone dying inside our headquarters. Including those pesky hedge magi with otherwise access to immortality. Ahhh, test subjects...

Also, I once broke the trade system of a setting in a single session. I am now filthy rich.

TheCountAlucard
2014-06-22, 03:50 PM
Less Music Meister, more Black Bolt with a muttonstache.


Although I do now have the urge introduce a superpowered Neil Patrick Harris into my game.This is always a good choice.

Especially in non-super games.

The Oni
2014-06-22, 04:18 PM
The problem with the above notion is the assumption that Neil Patrick Harris doesn't come standard with superpowers

Dundee15
2014-06-24, 12:54 AM
The party's warrior was attempting to fend of a mental attack and was obviously going to lose so the party rogue, who had been blinded previously by some ash, was attempting to feel around on a statue that the party thought was causing it. Turns out the large gem wasn't the power source but the actual problem and as soon as the rogue touched it, he was taken over. Now the rogue's player couldn't communicate with the party, but could speak to his new 'master' as it were.

The 'being' happened to be a mage that somehow trapped his soul in the gem to avoid death and had come to the dungeon searching for an orb that would allow him to copy any ability that he saw. While the party was attempting to figure out if they should help or kill the mage (which would kill the rogue too) the rogue convinced him that 1. the orb would be useless in his current body as he can only copy what he sees, and 2 that the rogue could convince someone else to touch the gem to get him a new useful body. Not knowing that the blindness was only temporary or that he was speaking to a rogue (gems don't have eyes either), he agreed. The rogue then proceeded to smash the gem into pieces, killing the mage.

GreatInca
2014-06-24, 10:03 PM
The most recent time I disrupted the DM's routine was by getting lucky on the dice, first in his hands (pick 5 magic items, he sets odds based on power & whether it is the same as an item I previously lost), then in my hands (making that difficult DC 26 will save).

TeChameleon
2014-06-25, 01:40 AM
I haven't done much in the way of 'clever' that I can think of, with one notable exception...

The setting was an all-dragonborn stealth-oriented party, running a sidestory oneshot to our regular campaign. I had cobbled together an assassin with an utterly ludicrous stealth rating (well... ludicrous by my admittedly limited standards, anyhow), with the rest of the party being various flavours of rogue and bard, and maybe a ranger... memory's a bit fuzzy on that one.

Anyhow, we were semi-undercover as initially-loyal agents of a corrupt crown that we were rapidly discovering was corrupt, and didn't want to be exposed too soon as 'traitors' to our rather murder-happy emperor. So we were doing missions that we were sent on by his royal looney while (our characters) were trying to figure out what was actually going on.

By the point in time that this bit happened, our characters had discovered that the current emperor had murdered his way onto the throne, and the true heir (a character in our regular party) was on the run, but there was an artifact housed in an ancient, but still active, temple of Bahamut. This, obviously, was a bit of a problem; not only was it a good distance in the opposite direction from where we were supposed to be, but we found out about the artifact by intercepting enemy communications. So we probably weren't going to beat them there.

The distance problem was solved via a quick application of Shadow Walk (quintupled overland speed for the win!), but we found out from the kindly clerics that attended the temple that there was a rather large contingent of rough-looking fellows sent by the enemy baron we were supposedly 'serving'. Since we had arrived at night, the roughnecks weren't searching the temple, and the clerics (who must have been rather gullible, on reflection) cheerfully said that we could go right on in, since our party of state-sanctioned thieves and murderers were clearly good, devout folks (ironically, most of the party actually were reasonably pious Bahamites :smalltongue:).

Anyhow, while the rest of the party was ransacking the temple as quietly and politely as possible, my assassin wandered off pretty much on a whim. I told the DM that he was going to wander into the enemy camp and see if he could find the enemy leader. The DM pretty much just shrugged and set a series of stealth rolls, none of which I even came close to botching, considering that I'd have to roll a crit fail to be detected >.> The enemy leader was dispatched without any fuss, and my DM told me that I'd have to roll another set of stealth checks to get out.

He did a bit of a double-take when I told him that I wasn't quite ready to leave yet. I proceeded to hide the body, slam down a potion of disguise, and use a magic widget that let me make a temporary copy of any non-living thing for an hour or so. By this point, I had the attention of the entire group- the temple-searching had been played out before I got to do my solo bit.

Namely, I disguised my assassin as the enemy group's leader, and created a good facsimile of a changeling's corpse with the magic widget.

And then I proceeded to slam out of the tent, hurling the faux corpse into the dim firelight and roar "Changelings in our midst! We've been infiltrated!"

One solid bluff check later, cue the entire enemy camp flat-out imploding. What had been a potentially challenging combat encounter became a bloodbath as very nearly the entirety of the enemy group murdered one another.

I felt rather self-satisfied after that one :smallbiggrin:

Braininthejar2
2014-06-25, 02:55 AM
One of my DM's players once avoided a whole adventure by correctly deducing that the party companion NPC had been replaced by a shapeshifter spy - after hearing 5 sentences from her.

Mexikorn
2014-06-25, 04:16 AM
Thread seems interesting so far, let me add my mustard to.
Some creative things I've done so far are for example the one time when I...
(I played a elf druid btw)

... wanted to get some easy money in some town. I thought, hey where do rich people reside. So I went to a luxurious restaurant (medieval restaurants ftw) with my PC friend, sent a summoned owl into the dining room to cause chaos and trouble. Meanwhile my mate sneaked into the kitchen and mixed some poison into random food, with the intent of K.O.ing generic rich people so we could robb them later. In the end 1-2 guys died, 1 fella broke into tears and went home depressedly. So my fella followed him home, broke into his house, killed him and stole from this generic rich guy.

... had to get rid of some mafia boss residing in a spacey warehouse (one-storied). Without much planning we sniped the one guy in the ground-floor. Then our alchemist proceeded to collapse half the warhouse by destroying the pilings so half a dozen random mafia guys fell from upstairs. All the while I summoned a dire skunk and combined it's spray attack with a gust of wind to completetly piss off th enemies. In the end they suffered damage from the fall, a malus on all their rolls from the skunk smell and one guy got stunned for a round.

Segev
2014-06-25, 08:26 AM
I think my favorite devious thing I've pulled off in a game was in Iron Kingdoms. The generically-good deity of that setting is Marrow, and the generically-evil deity is Thamar, for reference.

I was playing Alan, a cleric of Thamar who the other players started dubbing "the rolodex cleric," because he'd flip out a different holy symbol depending on with whom he was dealing (a dwarf deity with dwarves, a stodgy law-oriented deity for dealing with the near-tyrannical empire, Marrow for the Good Kingdom, etc.), and claim to be a priest of the indicated god.

We were on a barge traveling down a river in the generically good kingdom, so Alan was being a priest of Marrow. He offered all sorts of counsel and advice, most of it honestly probably as good as he could give. Some genuinely moral suggestions, especially where it was clear the individual was just looking for affirmation to do what they knew they should. But he also paid attention to those who were looking for excuses and justifications, and offered - again - the right moral advice.

What's an evil priest of a corrupt goddess doing advising wavering and sin-tempted followers of the god of goodness to actually hold firm?

Well, part of what he preached to them - particularly to those who might be in need of repentance in the near future - was the concept of indulgences. Buy them as pro-active repentance for sins yet to be committed. He never quite came out and said that this made doing whatever they wanted to do that they knew was wrong into something "okay" to do, but the implication was painfully obvious to anybody looking for an excuse.

He made a fair bit of silver selling those. I never did find out just how much depravity people got up to because they thought they were pre-absolved of it, sadly.

Demidos
2014-06-25, 07:12 PM
This one's quite recent --

My DM had us up against a rather nasty Ice/Waterbending Vampire Lord (This was 12th level, for those who care. Yes. Yes, my DM is cruel). She did have one weakness -- the waterbending came from a Devil Fruit (totally not ripped off a certain popular anime), so she became paralyzed in water above her chest. Of course, she was a WATERbender, so we didnt really expect that to be of any use.

We were forced to engage her in her own terrain, an underground dimensionally locked cavern with two pools from which she could draw vast quantities of water while simultaneously harshly limiting our own movements. We'd already tried grappling her and locking her within an antimagic field, neither of which worked.

...at which point my druid said screw it and summoned whales in each of the pools. The water displaced was enough to flood the cavern, paralyzing her and allowing us to finish her off at her leisure. Which we did. We celebrated immensely.

...that is, until the 19th level homebrew vampire head general of the nation appeared. :smallmad: