Tips and Success Stories to Help You Lose (The REAL Version)

[Rakoa]

Inspired by my misled interpretation of this thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?426861-Tips-and-Success-Stories-to-Help-You-Lose), I decided to make my own based on that interpretation.

What common, seemingly good, Roleplaying tips can you think of that can somehow explode in your face, hopefully with hilarious results? Perhaps you have a personal "success story" relating to some advice that failed you, and so helped you lose. But you didn't really lose if you had fun, right? Right.

I'd start with one of my own success stories if I could think of one. I know I have them, they're just not coming to mind right now. I will post some as they return to me, or as I am reminded by those of others.

[Flame of Anor]

In the early days of my playing, I figured that a wizard should have a personal attachment to his familiar. So my wizard Lancaris had a bat familiar named Murc (referring to murcielago, Spanish for "bat"), and I always tried to roleplay a caring master.

Well, one night our party (maybe 8th-10th level or so) was camped in a tower and Murc was on watch outside. The DM said that, in the middle of the night, Lancaris felt through the empathic link that Murc was in trouble. He didn't think the party would try to do anything about it, because we would be much too late to help by the time we got up and ran out. But no, nothing would do but that Lancaris must jump out of bed, shouting to wake up the party, grab the ranger and barbarian, and dimension door in the general direction he thought Murc was. He aimed pretty well, as it turned out--well enough to land in the middle of a patrol of giants who had just finished killing Murc and were ready to kill some PCs.

So that ill-advised midnight encounter, driven by my eagerness to roleplay, led to the deaths of all three of those PCs within about three rounds. The DM had pity on us and allowed the others to recover the bodies for resurrection, but no one wanted to pay for Murc (this is a low-gold campaign). Lancaris never got another familiar; these days he has an ACF instead that gives +2 to all of his save DCs.

[GreenZ]

One time, I played a character whose core concept was "All of the items!" and was planned out to be the batman of gear. Need a bridge, got one in the bag. Boat, have one. Need to keep ghosts from going through walls, these magic nails can pin them in place. And pretty much any problem that needed to be solved I could help solve it.

At one point, far within a dungeon crawl, we were beset by swarms of mechanical bees. The party had a small handful of AOE effects left but nothing that could effectively stop the mechanical bees. I poured over my character sheet as the party ran away, chased by the swarm guards. Nothing I had left could really deal with the problem, so we would need to leave for a while and come back once better prepared. The party teleported away.

As we talk about how we could have solved that problem with resources and spells we used in prior parts of the dungeon, the fighter says to me: "And you used all of your Alchemist Bombs for today too." :smallsigh:

I had been so focused on using my items to solve the problem that I forgot I had class abilities. :smallredface: