BowStreetRunner
2015-08-12, 08:31 PM
Player One, currently grappling with an enemy leader: "I'm going to use the 'move while grappled' rule to carry my opponent over the edge of the cliff."
DM: "Do you realize that you will both plummet over 200 ft to the ground below?"
Player One: "That's why I own a Ring of Feather Falling. I can do these things."
DM: "Okay, make your roll."
Player One, succeeds. "Awesome, we go over the edge."
Player Two: "Um...I thought you loaned your Ring of Feather Falling to the rogue when he went to scout ahead."
Player One: "Oh, $#!*, you're right."
DM, rolls 20d6: "Okay, take 52 points falling damage."
Player One: "Hey, that's not so bad. I actually survived that!"
DM: "Don't forget you need to make a DC 15 Fort save for taking Massive Damage."
Player One: "Oh, that's no problem. I have a base save of 13." Rolls a 1. "$#!*."
Sagetim
2015-08-13, 02:21 AM
The New Bard who just joined the party and is new to dnd: "I'm going to drink this potion I found."
My Truenamer, didn't hear about this until after the fact, and he's the party identifier.
On exiting the caves we were in:
Silver Dragon- "Something smells gooooood, bwaaaah! Ice Breath that tasty treat!"
Bard, and only the bard- "Ahhh! Ice Damage!"
Combat starts...
My Truenamer, "You should totally not eat the bard. I'll even give you some of my dates if it will keep you from eating him."
Party Diplomancer, "You should totally not eat the Bard, it's a bad thing to do."
Party Gunslinger, "Bangbangbang,bangbangbang,bangbang,bangbang"
Party Pirate, "Bangbangabang,bangbang,bang."
Dragon, "Raaaaawrgh! Move, Grapple, Eat!"
Party Bard, "*dead*"
Party Cleric, "*sneak up* Harm!"
Silver Dragon, "*dead*"
Entire party, on looking at the dead bard, "Let's take his stuff."
-------
next session:
DM, "So, that dragon attack was kind of insane. So we're going to pretend that didn't happen. You still get the xp, and you still get the hoard, and the bard is still reincarnated into a goblin, but you didn't actually fight a dragon."
Me "Did the loot just...fall on the bard, then?"
DM, "Yes."
Crake
2015-08-13, 02:31 AM
The players were sent to prison (just in a holding cell) for snooping around where they shouldn't have been. Turns out one of the guards of the prison is one of the player's hated, long lost father. Well said player has become a demon, so decides to kidnap his father and his friends, and murder them for fun. So he goes through and kills all of his father's friends in front of him, while he's tied up and unable to do anything. His father breaks free, stabs the player, then himself, starts incanting a chant, and using the his and the player's blood summons forth the demon lord which his father was actually secretly following. Said player ****s bricks and teleports away, literally hiding in a closet with his demon wife, who is also a demon lord, and direct opposition to the one his father had just summoned. It was that moment my players learned never to take anything in my game at face value.
Oh, the demon lord clawed his way out of the player's father's chest by the way.
Sagetim
2015-08-13, 10:50 PM
Right...so, this one happened...20 minutes ago. The lead up to the situation is this:
The campaign started a number of weeks ago, and I joined in after it had been going for a while and the party was level 4 (I got to enter at level 5, because I bribed the GM a little. The party was near 5 anyway). So, apparently, before I joined the party some people had made evil characters and were fighting with the good characters. Also before I joined the game, the party had been hired and paid in advance to deal with a bandit threat. This resulted in them having items completely outside of their wealth by level.
I entered the game with two other players. One was just joining the game like me, and the other had been running an evil wizard and wanted to, you know, actually be part of the party. We were going to be 3 truenamers, until the other new guy rolled amazing stats and I talked him into playing a monk. Because really, all 17's and 18's is the best time to run a monk. He also picked up half silver dragon, and half giant. So his strength was amazing. Entering into the game, my character, his body guard ( the monk player) and the other truenamer were on their summer vacation and hitting up the market place in the main city before ranging wider to enjoy their break from classes. About two sentences into a conversation in the market place one of the evil party initiated combat by dropping three scrolls of fell animate, maximixed fireball into the market square. I called him on bull****, and after a bit of unraveling found that the evil wizard had been built using doppleganger, and certain misinterpretations of hte rules that had not been corrected lead him to think he could have prepped level 9 spells when...he couldn't. In the end, we still had one fell animate fireball go off, and it still instant killed the other truenamer and animated the marketplace with zombies of former merchants. Shenanigans ensued, with the evil sword sage assassinating a number of the players from the good party and escaping with boots of teleport or some such thing.
The next session involved us actually going after the objective that the good party had been ignoring in favor of trying to kill the evil mage. The job they had been hired to do with expensive and high end wondrous items. My truenamer had, in the meantime, been attached to the party as the representative of the mages guild, and the party leader had declared my truenamer second in command. So we got our **** together and headed out to go hunt down the leader of some bandits that had been causing problems with trade routes. We had also picked up some raptor mounts before the end of the previous session. Because that happened. And before entering the forest nearby, were waylaid by wyvern riding chaotic evil elves. The wyverns were hit die advanced to be CR 7, the Elves were level 15 each (and thus cr 15 each) and the party had rolled over to level 6 at the end of the previous session. We had a very hard fight, but eventually managed to win against the riders. Through more shenanigans, one of the wyverns was diplomancered into submission. And my truenamer used his truenaming to stabilize another one as it was dying, then further won it's loyalty by giving it an everfull feedbag and further healing.
In the next session, we were waylaid by undead. Undead at the command of the evil mage. Some of our characters nearly died. Including one that Did die due to paralysis from ghouls and being beaten to death. My truenamer managed to fix that with a scroll of breath of life, and dive bombing with his wyvern to deliver the spell, and them using a reflex save to latch onto the wyvern to get them out of danger. This is how my truenamer secured the loyalty of the drow cleric that had been running form the wyvern riders in the previous session and had joined the party for safety. This, by the way, is the third character of the evil mage's player.
In the next session, we got back to town. We stayed there for 3 days to recouperate, sell loot, get properly prepared, and so on. We were now level 9 because of those wyvern riders, and this is where the sandbox nature of the setting crossed over into what we were up to. Because a Tempest showed up in the middle of town, with templates and such on it. Eventually we managed to subdue it, mostly thanks to the bodyguard monk flying up in round one and grappling it into submission while everyone else wailed on it. I exen expended my 'oh **** device'- 16 wands of lightning bolt with a single charge keyed to one command word and strapped together. Still didn't kill it, but scared the efreeti who had been hunting the tempest. Eventually the evil mage snuck his familiar up close and did enough dex damage in one spell to incapacitate it. The Efreeti took us to the elemental plane of air to reward us, and the evil mage used a dimensional anchor to stop them from moving the tempest, then tried to teleport it away to make it a minion. That didn't work for many reasons, one of them being the weight limit of teleport. The other being the mage's own dimensional anchor. The djinni (did I say Efreeti? I meant Djinni), gave us some items as a reward and transported us back to the prime..but not back into the city. Instead they landed us in the woods near some tents. The last action of the session was the bodyguard monk completing his fall from lawful and into chaotic by setting a tent on fire just to see it burn so he could take his first level of pyrokineticist. *
In the next session, we had to fight a tribe of barbarians that I built. It was rather straight forward and it got brutal pretty fast. One character was axed so hard he had to make a save vs massive damage. He failed. The monk was laid out down to negative hp despite having the highest ac in the party by the boss of the barbarians (who entered on turn 3). There were some other shenanigans, including the party crusader/favored soul trying to dilomacy a raging barbarian out of the fight only to find that diplomacy doesn't work that way, no matter how high your check is. Eventually the fight came to a halt due to a successful intimidate, and we got some loot that the barbarians abandoned, and my truenamer fixed some of the bleeding out barbarians to make amends. We also found that the Djinni had dropped us near the bandit encampment, just not directly into it.
In the next session, we had a number of players missing. Which worked out really really well. Some new players also joined the party, including a half fey-spellscale binder. The new characters had been sent to deal with the same bandits, but had gotten lost along the way. So between the binder, an artificier with an army of rat effigies and some eternal wands of fireball, the ex-monk pyrokinteticist, and my truenamer, we made a plan of action to carpet bomb the bandit camp. Which had 1000 bandits in it. And more on the way. Included in this plan of action was a flying carpet that had my truenamer and the artificier on it, and the flying characters with elemental attacks. We also used a one time player playing a rogue to seduce a bandit away from the camp, stomp him into unconsciousness, and then turn him into a Drider using the cleric. I think the party was level 12 at this point? Anyway, the drider was used as a distraction, many fireballs were dropped on the bandit leader, and on our way out we saw that she was unaffected by them (her trolls were dead though, and hundreds of bandits died to the fires that were started by the magic carpet bombing).
In the next session a planar rift opened up as we were running from the bandits, and an arbitrary number of elder arrowhawks came spewing out of it. To escape them, we went into a nearby cave. Where we found a half fey gnome bard. On the way through the tunnel, we killed an evil presence, purified the water it was in with holy water, and my truenamer used knowledge (geography) to recognize the cave and navigate us through to the other side. The bard drank a cursed potion, etc etc. I already explained that part in a previous post in this thread.
In the next session the DM decided that a silver dragon would not have attacked the party, so we got the loot, the xp, the reincarnation on the bard, and moved on with our lives. Which meant we encountered a small town under attack on our way to the dwarven capital. Therein were undead and an entire evil party. The fight was difficult, but made more so because we saw one little girl in this town full of undead and decided we were going to save her. So the half fey-spellscale flew over to potion her with a potion of hide from undead. This worked out perfectly to keep her safe through the entire encounter. But it also left the binder in the perfect place to be blendered by the evil party's rogue. The evil party also had a blackguard, who found himself on the wrong side of a crit from the crusader/favored soul and he started running immediately (and the crusader gave chase). Because he had been reduced from full hp to about 2 or something. After a few rounds, a new crinkle came into the fight in the form of a monk running away from a number of fire giants and some other fire monsters...hellhounds maybe? I dunno, they sucked. So the evil party's wizard cast evard's black tentacles on the monk and managed to snare him with that, I had been using my carpet to fly over and evacuate the party pirate from line of sight, so she was willing to aid me in whatever shenanigans I was up to for the rest of combat. These included flying over to the monk while the evil party started fighting the fire giants and the other party members started splitting between the evil party and fire giants. My truenamer dispelled the spell on the monk with Reversed Spell Rebirth and also intimidated the evil party wizard into not doing anything against the good party by showing his mages guild representative badge of office. The combat ended shortly after my truenamer and the pirate combined our actions to move the carpet of flying super fast and my truenamer activated a cone of cold on most of the evil party and the fire giants through a staff. The fire giants tried to surrender, but were killed by the evil party, the evil party wizard gathered up with the other evil party members and they were getting ready to leave by greater teleport. My truenamer dropped the pirate off out of the combat zone and came back to ready an action and give a 'where do you think you're going' to the evil party. During the combat, the binder's body had been evacuated by the bard (who has sublime cord levels, so he teleported the body out to the nearest temple). The evil party's mage tried to use greater teleport, and my truenamer stopped him by using reversed spell rebirth to dispel the teleport as it was affecting them. This resulted in the mage using normal teleport the next round before I could ready a new action to counter him, but they had to leave the fighter's gear and everything he was carrying behind to make the weight limit. That included the evil party's 30,000 gold. The fire giants had mentioned a blacksmith as they were trying to beg for their lives, so we took a giant head with us along with the little girl and headed over to the town that the binder and bard had wound up at. In the meantime the bard had lied. He had lied really really well. He had lied so well that the mysteriously high level cleric at the temple had believed him when he said that the binder was actually an envoy of bahamut and that it should entitle him to a free true resurrrection. So when I got there with the evil party's money, and so on, I gave him 25k to reimburse him for the true rez, and told him to keep the difference for whatever he had haggled it down to. He gave 5k back to be distributed to the party to help smooth over relations with everyone else. This was important, because in his introductory session he had decided to cast dominate person on the party's gunslinger.
Anyway, with the next session, we used speak with dead to find out where the blacksmith was. Rummaging through the evil party's stuff yielded a bill of sale for the undead from the evil mage to the evil party. And we went to the blacksmith. It was more of a temple than a smithy, but the main room had an inscription that read 'choose a number' and had one of those little pick a number dispensers. My truenamer declared 'I pick one' and walked through the door while ignoring the number counter. When the drow cleric picked a number like a normal person, it transformed from 1 to 2 to reflect that one had already been chosen. The session consisted of the dm taking each of us aside and talking out what our characters did in what turned out to be a temple to Kossuth. My Truenamer managed to impress the salamander high priest he was talking with so much that he was given a branding of Kossuth's symbol on one of his hands and gained the Chosen of Kossuth template (but instead of shatter 5/day he got fireball 3/day. Mmmm, fireball). Part of that was because my truenamer was just that affable, part of it was sacraficing a still mostly charged staff of fire, and some of it was because he asked for a way to boost his ability to burn things with his spellfire instead of asking for an item. The party barbarian also wound up with that template, and other characters got some other items or things. In the end, the bard was ejected from the temple explosively, though he did get a healer's belt with 30 fire resist on it.
Oh right, before we left the small town where the binder had been rezzed my wizard requisitioned some scrolls of sending to get in contact with the mages guild. While he had been last in the main city, he had gotten his raptor awakened, and because of the dm's houseruling and the raptor's int score, he was awakened as a wizard (and had a jump start in wizard levels instead of more animal hit dice). As a mount he had also gained xp mirroring my character while he was my character's mount. So he was a level 5 wizard. So my truenamer had comissioned him to reserach a spell for awakening wyverns. That was done by the time he got in contact via sending, so he had the wyverns and some back up gear teleported over, including a new staff of fire (the one he had gotten as his badge of office was down to 31 charges already).
In the next session, we got to the dwarven capital. However, some busy bodies at the gate prevented us from entering in a timely manner, so we wound up getting stuck in a suicide bomber situation. With a lot of level 10ish rogues wearing tnt vests and using some custom poison smoke bombs. It was kind of a pain in the ass. But eventually we found out that the rogues were being controlled by slave crowns, and when the cleric used greater command, the remaining of them had the slave crown effect broken by the conflicting mind control magic. We still managed to loot two of the crowns through some alternate disabling shenanigans (Reversed Spell Rebirth to supress them for a few rounds).
*also important to note: While we were in town before the tempest attack but after the wyverns, my Truenamer had a run in with the Evil Mage at the mages guild. He recognized the mage based on an arcane marked coin that the mage used as a calling card to try and be mysterious. That backfired because my truenamer has an insane knowledge (arcana) modifier. The end result was something like 'you don't bug me, and I won't bug you'
**One Moooore thing. I forgot to mention it in the cave part, but while we were in the cavern we encountered an Earth Weird who a) hit on the spellscale and b) predicted woe upon the world due to some kind of planar convergence. This is why we weren't hunting katla back down and instead heading towards the dwarven capital (it was on the way to where the convergence was being caused). If left alone, the convergence would result in all the planes slamming together and...you know, bad **** happening.
And then there was tonight. Tonight started with the party recouperating from a viking-wedding-orgy. There was also a bit of a murder mystery, because when everyone woke up my truenamer was in a pile of women he had slept with. Including the party's barbarian and cleric. And a mysterious dead woman. So, rather than deal with that personally, my truenamer went to go get some buying stuff done and on the way back he swung by a temple and slapped a bag of money into a priest's hands to hire him to cast raise dead on the npc. In the meantime, speak with the dead revealed that the dead person had died from...overexertion...because of the party barbarian. There were no hard feelings, but raise dead solved any legal problems. There was also something about the party being scryed. The Evil Mage had been doing stuff behind the scenes, and the end result was that today we spent pretty much the entire session dealing with the fallout of that. He had modified a teratomorph and sent that after the half celestial crusader/favored soul/ruby knight vindicator as...revenge? Whatever. When we got our half celestial back, she was followed by the teratomorph shortly after. So after everyone had gotten up, but before the gunslinger and pirate could declare that the wedding celebrations were continuing for another day or not, the teratomorph plopped into town.
It was at this point that I issued orders: The (new) monk, gunslinger, and pirate, being the sneaky people and all with ranged attacks would sneak out and set up for a surprise round on this thing and we would join in combat after that. Giving the official party leader (dwarf knight)time to suit up. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of knowledge dungeoneering, so my character didn't know everything about the ooze we were about to face. We found out the hard way that it has really long range blind sight. And it already had hit it's hit dice cap. And it has all kinds of awful and annoying abilities. But one thing it did was randomly summon stuff from a chart into the battlefield. Including a dire shark (that the pirate player wanted to keep and was all 'awww, so cute :3'), a greater shadow manticor, and...Katla Dragonbane, the leader of the bandits who my character had figured out was a dragon and might have divine ranks because of the worship of various factions. But katla only showed up later. First, the barbarian died. The monk managed to get some solid hits out with his 7 attacks in round one and iajutsu draws on each attack due to the enemy being flat footed. But only 3 attacks got to actually deal damage, because chaotic miss chances that aren't subject to concealment rules. But the monk is also super short range for his ranged attacking, so he was almost the first one to die. The barbarian charged in and got some attacks out and the phase locking quality on her glaive negated it's miss chance (until it split). Then she failed her save and was eaten by it, her stuff thankfully falling in a pile on the ground. It then split because it had gained more than it's limit on hit dice, which made the fight easier, actually. 3 28 hit die teratomorphs are easier to deal with than 1 83 hit die teratomorph. My Truenamer, in these combat rounds did these things: cast disintigrate as a spell like ability from chosen template. Found out that the monster has too damn much SR for that. Dump all his stored spellfire energy levels (22 at the time) into a single attack against it dealing half raw magic and half divine damage (as a special ruling with regards to spellfire and chosen of kossuth). Round 3: regret not having a better way to deal with this. But his actual actions were saying to the monk "Don't Dodge" And dropping a firestorm to include all enemies on the field...and the monk. Because my character was aware that if the monk died to that 'being eaten' thing, we'd have no way to rez him. Because he never told us his real name. Which made sense in character. His characters response was 'thank you' to die by fire instead of teratomorph tentacle and to forego his saving throw. Also, the party got half xp for killing a cr 14 party member. It was also determined that this was still in keeping with my truenamer's neutral good alignment (especially because he intended to true rez the monk afterwards). So...in round 4 my truenamer continued his flying exit to get to the mages guild branch of the dwarven capital. He was out of combat for a few rounds, and I'm not exactly sure what happened. I do know that we determined that attacking it from the ethreal plane was a good idea. Because it had no ability to hit ethereal targets and even without ghost touch our attackers would still have the 50% hit chance due to magic weapons. As my Truenamer was abusing his authority to requisition things due to emergencies, I asked the dm if there would be a custom magic item for emergency situations on hand. The item being rather simple to make, needing only a spell that would let the book be read instantly, and every single page to be filled to the brim with explosive runes. He okayed it. So whatever else my truenamer picked up in the emergency items stash, he came back into combat and used only two of those things. Importantly, while he was gone Katla Dragonbane showed up due to the teratomorph's random creature summoning. By the time my truenamer got back, the dwarf knight had been slurped, and the teratomorphs had been killed and katla was escaping through the gates by breaking them and leaving. The evil mage, who had caused this whole problem to start, had started helping the party once my truenamer showed his badge of office and declared this an emergency. So, as katla made her exit (Katla being at least a powerful red dragoness, if not having some divine ranks) the evil mage teleported in front of her used Trap the Soul. Because he said her name, the total will save dc was 66. He succeeded. Due mostly to his deprativy and prestige class (tainted scholar). And then my Truenamer landed. He had used the Utterance Energy Negation Greater to make himself immune to sonic damage for a few rounds. He prepared an action to activate the book, then held his hand out and told the evil mage "Hand the Gem over." The Evil Mage did so with a caveat, "I will want to be reimbursed for the value of the gem." My Truenamer nodded and said, "We are done here." The Evil Mage used some cheese to teleport away as a free action, just as the gunslinger was about to start opening fire on him from the ethreal plane. My truenamer then turned to the party members on the ethreal plane, and technically to the gaping hole where the dwarven capital's gates used to be and said, "Watch this ****." with a grin. He broke the soul trap gem. This released Katla in her dragon form. He then used his standard action to activate the book. We didn't roll dice. There was an arbitrarily large number of explosive runes in that book, and it was determined that she would have failed enough saving throws to have taken enough damage to be killed instantly. There were some scales that remained of her body, which my Truenamer gathered after using Rebuild Item to get the book back. He then went around with the scroll of true resurrection that he had also emergency requisitioned and used it to raise the monk he had killed. Then he rebuilt the scroll. Then he raised the party barbarian back into her gear. Then he rebuilt the scroll. Then he raised the dwarf knight. Then he rebuilt the scroll. Then he raise and rebuilt the scroll for what few dwarves might have been caught in the crossfire during the fight. No npc deaths had been mentioned, but it's the nice thing to do. And the session ended with him returning the requisitioned gear and me mentioning to the GM "So, I'm probably going to take these scales back to the archmagess of the mages guild so we can rez Katla into the service of the mages guild." At which point the GM broke down laughing for the third time in the night.
Edit: The DM's reaction to the plan to kill katla was bemusement. The item shenanigans with truenamer prompted this rebuttal, "Well, I suppose I'll have to ramp things up next week" to which my rebuttal was ,"no no, he's returning the emergency requisition gear, after all, it was only allowed in case of emergency" And his reply was, "Oh, well, that should be okay then." And finally, when I told him what I intended to do with katla's remains, he lost all misgivings about allowing the as of yet not really statted BBEG to be killed and started laughing and having a hard time breathing.
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