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View Full Version : Gamer Humor Ever had one of THOSE players?



Varen_Tai
2018-10-11, 04:37 PM
It's been a looooong time since I've played any actual pen and paper RPGs. My stepkids have all been bugging me to put something together, so I've been doing so slowly as I have time in-between work.

I've always been the type of DM to allow a ton of latitude on character creation - I want everyone to play a character that they love, but without allowing straight up munchkinocityness (a real word I just made up).

While the campaign hasn't started yet (I'm running a homebrew system, combination of D&D and a friend's system he created a long time ago that I love because it's skill based rather than level based), my stepkids are asking me questions all the time about what I will and won't allow for character creation. It's been really fun because they've come up with some really cool and ingenious ideas that I've totally allowed (like the scythe/crossbow/spear weapon that the large Hengeyokai lizard person can wield).

However, my 17-year-old stepson has taken ingenius to another level. He is totally one that is looking to exploit (in a fun way, not in a ruin-the-game-for-everyone way) the system every way he can.

He's playing a dragonborn bard (and right after the Time of Troubles but before the Spellplague so dragonborn are super-duper rare), but wanted to know if he can have a poison bite rather than a breath weapon. I was suspicious and asked why. He wants to milk his poison out and sell it to the Thieves/Assassin's Guild in order to make money on a regular basis. I said no and he promptly asked if he could have acid breath for a similar reason. I told him that the strength of both the acid and the poison would drop dramatically after leaving his body after 10 minutes or so, but I am tempted to let it go through but make them not super valuable. If these are powerful poisons/acids, they would be worth quite a bit over time. A dragonborn who lives in the city and can create 5 flasks of acid/vials of poison every single day is going to be making bank, especially because there are no other dragonborn around.

Can I just say that I had never even THOUGHT (or heard of, for that matter) anyone utilizing a natural breath/poison ability in this way? Brilliant. And I have some GM anxiety about the kind of brilliant player in my campaign. :smallwink: I'm gonna have to be very on my toes and creative once the game starts because this kind of between-the-lines thinking makes for a memorable game and I have to allow some of these ideas through because I have no desire to squash them or keep him from doing this kind of thing.

Anyhow, anyone else have other experiences with these kind of brilliant players that have come up with plans that utterly defeated some final villain or otherwise worked the system in this kind of brilliant way?

denthor
2018-10-11, 04:52 PM
I have read two different modules with something similar.

1. Thief that tamed a snake without any one knowing. To get poison for his weapons.

2. Goblin priest who kept knowledge of how to milk snakes secret in an attempt to not have his tribe use the poison to bribe others in the town.

Man_Over_Game
2018-10-11, 05:01 PM
On the same note, Find Familiar, in 5e, lets you pick a poisonous snake. It basically does your bidding, so it's not exactly dangerous to do.

A transmutation wizard can convert raw mineral materials into wood, which will convert back after a set amount of time. Turn a silver or stone object into wood, carve it into the shapes you want, watch it revert back with expert craftsmanship.

Disguise Self + Friendship. I look like someone I don't like. I use Friendship to con people. They now hate me (the guy I don't like). I run away, removing Disguise Self. Now I repeat this until I have a mob of people to take down the guy I don't like.

TeChameleon
2018-10-11, 09:56 PM
Haven't had one, but I've played with one as a party member- we were being set up for a climactic battle with an Outsider-corrupted Ancient Gold Dragon in an area touched by the Far Planes, where reality was a bit frayed around the edges.

Cue the Swordmage popping Daern's Instant Fortress as the dragon lunged at us, ending up with the Dragon having its head stuck in one of the windows, unable to withdraw it without collapsing its own skull. So it opened its mouth wide to breathe fire at us, and the party lobbed something like 100 lbs. of fantasy plastique down its gullet, then ducked behind something solid real quick.

One impressive, if rather muffled, explosion later, and the boss fight was done with, without the party technically having made a single attack.

Oh, and for the curious, we had fantasy plastique because the DM had run an earlier plot where the party had to save a heavily mining-dependent kingdom from being blown sky-high by saboteurs filling the abandoned mine tunnels with magic plastic explosive-equivalents. I still don't know why he was surprised when the party elected to save them by stealing all the explosives for ourselves >.> (well, as much as we could figure out how to carry, anyways, then we alerted the appropriate authorities).

Varen_Tai
2018-10-11, 10:01 PM
Hahahaha, those are great! DMs should ALWAYS beware when they introduce items and weapons designed to be super powerful in a certain setting, thinking that once they are removed from that setting, they will no longer be within the player's interest.

As a side note, my stepson asked if HE could have an Instant Fortress a couple of weeks back. Me, thinking of situations like the one just mentioned, said, "Absolutely not." :smallbiggrin:

Frankly, some of these ideas (and several of my stepson's ideas) remind me of the 2500 things Mr Welch Can No Longer Do In an
RPG, found here: https://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html.

Hilarious stuff. Enjoy, if you haven't seen them before.

FathomsDeep
2018-10-13, 03:12 AM
Let's not forget the classics, Quik-E-Troll and Instant Troll Grenades. (A little slice of troll in a glassteel jar can produce an army of the beasts in short order, and if you insert a glass vial of strong healing potion into the glassteel jar as well, then you just have to pop the cork and throw...

Varen_Tai
2018-10-13, 09:14 AM
Let's not forget the classics, Quik-E-Troll and Instant Troll Grenades. (A little slice of troll in a glassteel jar can produce an army of the beasts in short order, and if you insert a glass vial of strong healing potion into the glassteel jar as well, then you just have to pop the cork and throw...

Daaaaaang, those are good ideas. Imma totally gonna use that against my players...

Kaptin Keen
2018-10-14, 07:18 AM
It's really cute that players think they can simply break the gold economy by being 'clever'. But it takes only the very slightest of cleverness for GM's to reply: You don't find anyone to buy today.

Seriously, even in a massive city, how many people out there are looking to buy poison?

Knaight
2018-10-14, 07:46 AM
It's lateral thinking, but it's not particularly impressive lateral thinking - this is the fantasy equivalent of regularly getting paid to donate blood plasma, and while the pay is probably better that also likely applies to whatever else they're doing in the campaign. Still, lateral thinking is a valuable thing in a player, and I've generally found that groups that emphasize it tend to see the more creative and impressive ideas come up at least a little.

As for whether I've ever had one of those players, yes. That's almost every player I've had, partially because I deliberately encourage that sort of approach to the game, from a mix of it tending to work in my games (at least as compared to direct options, which can be really helpful even as long shots when more direct options are sufficiently terrible), failures of these approaches tending to be more interesting, and NPCs being totally willing to use the same sort of tricks against the PCs. It's a skill that people in general can use, and once there's a demonstrated permission to bring it to a game they usually do.

Varen_Tai
2018-10-14, 05:54 PM
It's really cute that players think they can simply break the gold economy by being 'clever'. But it takes only the very slightest of cleverness for GM's to reply: You don't find anyone to buy today.

Seriously, even in a massive city, how many people out there are looking to buy poison?

Thieves Guilds and Assassins guilds would always be looking for good poisons. And with him being so unique in the campaign setting, his poison would go for a pretty penny.

Varen_Tai
2018-10-14, 06:04 PM
It's lateral thinking, but it's not particularly impressive lateral thinking - this is the fantasy equivalent of regularly getting paid to donate blood plasma, and while the pay is probably better that also likely applies to whatever else they're doing in the campaign. Still, lateral thinking is a valuable thing in a player, and I've generally found that groups that emphasize it tend to see the more creative and impressive ideas come up at least a little.

As for whether I've ever had one of those players, yes. That's almost every player I've had, partially because I deliberately encourage that sort of approach to the game, from a mix of it tending to work in my games (at least as compared to direct options, which can be really helpful even as long shots when more direct options are sufficiently terrible), failures of these approaches tending to be more interesting, and NPCs being totally willing to use the same sort of tricks against the PCs. It's a skill that people in general can use, and once there's a demonstrated permission to bring it to a game they usually do.

You are totally right, it's lateral thinking. However, I'll disagree and say it's impressive because this is a kid who's not played a lot of pen and paper RPGs, and it's unusual to find this kind of lateral thinking in new players like this. I'm totally going to encourage it, though I won't let him abuse the system. :smallwink:

Lateral thinking is way fun to have in players, and you're right in that it's way fun to use AGAINST players. Creativity for the win!

Nifft
2018-10-14, 06:49 PM
Thieves Guilds and Assassins guilds would always be looking for good poisons. And with him being so unique in the campaign setting, his poison would go for a pretty penny.

"Hey, I bought us more poison."

"Why? We have no assassination jobs this month."

"But I thought we always need more poison."

"You're fired."

-- -- --

If there really is a constant demand for poison, then you have to ask why nobody ever thought of milking a monster, or a slave of the requisite race. We certainly have used humans in whatever ways seemed profitable.

In what I'd consider a plausible world -- a world where the NPCs are presumed to be competent at their jobs -- then either milking a PC would be impractical, or it would be well-known and not that unique. (I.e. if it's profitable, he's not going to be the only person doing it. That goes for all values of "it".)

Varen_Tai
2018-10-14, 10:46 PM
"Hey, I bought us more poison."

"Why? We have no assassination jobs this month."

"But I thought we always need more poison."

"You're fired."

-- -- --

If there really is a constant demand for poison, then you have to ask why nobody ever thought of milking a monster, or a slave of the requisite race. We certainly have used humans in whatever ways seemed profitable.

In what I'd consider a plausible world -- a world where the NPCs are presumed to be competent at their jobs -- then either milking a PC would be impractical, or it would be well-known and not that unique. (I.e. if it's profitable, he's not going to be the only person doing it. That goes for all values of "it".)

Under normal circumstances, this would be true. However, the PC in question is a dragonborn in Toril BEFORE the Spellplague. Because hardly any dragonborn were around in that timeframe, that brand of poison would be impossible to get under other circumstances. He could easily charge bank and people would be jumping at the chance to get it.

Otherwise, it would be like donating plasma (as pointed out earlier) and wouldn't be worth as much.

denthor
2018-10-14, 10:53 PM
In an evil monster game. I took the party troll hunting.

Had a wagon with a reinforced iron cage. We knocked the trolls down negative. Then bound and lifted it into the cage. The others on an alter to make healing potions from the blood. Back to Blackhearts fort we went. Fed it arms legs of other trolls. Got there I had potion making but had no way to know what parts to use.

So a live troll to the local slaver. Who then parted the beast out for the magic potions wands. Until we killed about three months later. The joys of having a 15 wisdom 16 charisma and 9 intelligence

We only did it once.

Kaptin Keen
2018-10-14, 11:49 PM
Thieves Guilds and Assassins guilds would always be looking for good poisons. And with him being so unique in the campaign setting, his poison would go for a pretty penny.

Is that so? You really need to ask yourself if their consumption is in the several doses a day area. Also, whether they can pay the cost of that.

But the important part is this: If you decide the answer to both is yes - then you made it so.

Kardwill
2018-10-15, 03:21 AM
It's really cute that players think they can simply break the gold economy by being 'clever'. But it takes only the very slightest of cleverness for GM's to reply: You don't find anyone to buy today.

Seriously, even in a massive city, how many people out there are looking to buy poison?

The ratcatcher guild, but their 3cp-a-dose offer is not really going to interest most adventurers

Also, if the baron dies from a dragonborn "bite", and the PC is the only dragonborn in the country, then the authorities will want to have some very "pointed" words with him. Especially if he sells in bulk and is thus not realy discreet.

And if he goes industrial about it, how quickly does his poison glands regenerate anyway? And does it pose a danger to his long-term health?

Seriously, I could see it as a way to make a few coins, help a contact or get the upper hand from times to times (and thus a fun "quirk" for a PC), but going for big volumes (and big money) would probably be more trouble than it is worth.

MrSandman
2018-10-15, 05:55 AM
Thieves Guilds and Assassins guilds would always be looking for good poisons. And with him being so unique in the campaign setting, his poison would go for a pretty penny.

Only if it's significantly better than other poisons available and the price/quality ratio is reasonable. If there are other poisons available that can reliably do the job, there's little reason to spend extra money for something exotic.

Varen_Tai
2018-10-15, 08:33 AM
All excellent points, thank you!

He's a dragonborn bard, so he'll have a rep to consider. Selling his poison to a local Thieves or Assassins guild won't exactly stay secret for long since he stands out as he is.

SunderedWorldDM
2018-10-15, 10:32 AM
Um, I am that player. I always opt for the solution that gets the party slaughtered. Once I picked up a goblin corpse and tried to pass myself off as a goblin. Longish story short, the head fell off, and that character is now under a giant boulder.

In the Gallery of Angels (OotA), I went from statue to statue, touching each one until I went insane and couldn't participate in the rest of the gallery because I couldn't move or speak. This was my high-WIS ranger.

Heck, in a Star Trek game my party ended up using an army of surgically modified space apes to smoke out some terrorists- as opposed to going in stealthily, we just freakin' put some apes in a cage and let 'em loose in the lair, then got the Macguffin in the confusion.

And don't even get me started on when I play bards.

Man_Over_Game
2018-10-15, 10:33 AM
DnD IS a game, and a game relies on risk. If a Dragonborn wants to make more money with less risk than what other players should be able to provide, it probably shouldn't fly or do as much.

For toxins, there's venoms (goes in wounds) and poisons (goes in drinks). The Dragonborn excretes a venom, something that has to be sealed or likely doesn't work after a short time in fresh air. His bite doesn't have this issue, due to the fact that it's kept in a venom sac, and isn't exposed to air, but it's nearly impossible to use elsewhere.

To use it, someone would either need a syringe (highly unlikely) or some method to make it last. I suppose there could be some kind of oil that could improve its viscosity and its lifetime while exposed to air. Make that oil be considerably expensive, and now there's a pretty big damper on how big his profits are.

Earning easy, free money because of your race feels pretty sceevy, and probably not something your players should make a habit of doing. Or otherwise, you'll end up having to make a ton of excuses why it doesn't work in the economy, changing the world to match, causing your players to feel crappy for "picking the wrong race". Rather than dealing with all of that, just nip it in the bud, and give him just enough incentive to feel rewarded for being creative, but not big enough to make it much more than what everyone else can provide.

hotflungwok
2018-10-15, 10:49 AM
Me and a few people in the group I was in at the time did this to the GM once. Almost, anyway.

We were in Sigil, and had to go through a door (in the bathroom of a hoidy toidy Elven restaurant) to bring back a genuine, still burning, Yule Log from Valhalla. The other side of the door was guarded by a group of Norse warriors, who attacked as we came through. We killed them, made our way to the Chief's hunting lodge, and did the thing he wanted before he would give us permission to take the log. Turns out, thier logs were around 3 or 4 feet in diameter, and 10 or 15 feet long. So we tied the log to a cart, poured oil on the log to make sure it kept burning, and drove it straight through the door and out the front window of the restaurant as fast as we could. We got it to the people paying us just as the city guard were about to catch up to us.

So the DM gets up and goes to the bathroom. We start talking about the warriors we fought on the other side of the door. It's Valhalla right? These are dead warriors in their afterlife, they come back to life every day so they can keep fighting and drinking, right? So we pool our money, buy the restaurant from the now frothing angry owner of the restaurant, and turn it into an adventurer training hall. We teach low level adventurers, and when they're ready, we take them through the door to fight the vikings for experience. We can take them through once a day, over and over again. We get $paid, newbies get combat experience in a controlled situation, and also we get $paid. We were discussing how much we should charge when the DM came back. He asked us what we were talking about, so we told him the whole thing. He looked at us blankly for a second, and then said 'No, you're not exploiting Valhalla for your own personal monetary gain'.

Varen_Tai
2018-10-15, 10:23 PM
He asked us what we were talking about, so we told him the whole thing. He looked at us blankly for a second, and then said 'No, you're not exploiting Valhalla for your own personal monetary gain'.

Hahahahaha! Wow, what a brilliant idea. You know, it would have worked, at least for a little while. Until some of the Norse gods found out and did something about it. Granted, they couldn't exactly get directly involved in Sigil, but that doorway opens both ways and I imagine your training ground being flooded by a bunch of pissed off Valkyries eventually.

Still, if you could have pulled it off for a little while then sold it to someone else before jetting off with a ton of gold, leaving them to hold the accountability bag when the angry immortal girl army showed up, that would have been a great story.

Saintheart
2018-10-16, 02:54 AM
Hahahahaha! Wow, what a brilliant idea. You know, it would have worked, at least for a little while. Until some of the Norse gods found out and did something about it. Granted, they couldn't exactly get directly involved in Sigil, but that doorway opens both ways and I imagine your training ground being flooded by a bunch of pissed off Valkyries eventually.

Solution: close training centre for low-level warriors.
Re-open training centre for high or epic-level warriors mining XP. Now with added Valkyrie!

Louro
2018-10-16, 05:35 AM
Thieves Guilds and Assassins guilds would always be looking for good poisons. And with him being so unique in the campaign setting, his poison would go for a pretty penny.

- You know what would be even better?
- What?
- To get that dragonborn and enslave it. That way we could have his poison for free!
- Good idea, assign Mr. Teatime to the job.

hotflungwok
2018-10-16, 07:25 AM
Still, if you could have pulled it off for a little while then sold it to someone else before jetting off with a ton of gold, leaving them to hold the accountability bag when the angry immortal girl army showed up, that would have been a great story.
Actually, we thought of that. We were hoping to kind of make a deal with them. Not really tell them what was going on, but ask them if they wanted to fight someone new every day instead of the same old vikings all the time, and maybe get a case of something new to drink once a week. It might have worked.

Jay R
2018-10-16, 10:01 AM
Four potential responses, depending on details about the world and the culture and the current plotlines available. They include how to prevent it, how to discourage it, how to allow it once, and how to incorporate it. Pick the one that leads where you want to go.

1. Assassins don't want to be found out, given that the high-paid jobs are nobles and other people with large numbers of powerful allies who would avenge their deaths.

They have no interest in the single most traceable poison in the world, sold to them directly by somebody who has no long-term loyalty to them -- especially if he told anybody else that he was looking for them.

-----

2. I suspect that the real answer I would give a player who wanted to do this is, "Yes, you could probably find customers, slowly, over time, if you spend as much time and effort at it as all other merchants do. Certainly the rumored assassins guild, if it exists at all, does not have a publicly known base that the paladins could attack and destroy. If you take a few points in Knowledge (City Underworld) and in Profession (Merchant), you could probably eventually find them. I also recommend a few points in Appraise and Sense Motive if you don't want to lose money at it. Do you want to spend several skill points and the next three months in town quietly trying to develop a clandestine client base, or keep focusing on adventuring skills and accompany the party on its next mission?

"PC have powerful and elite abilities, which can certainly be used to build a very comfortable life as a rich merchant. But rich merchant is a full-time occupation. I promise you that you will make more money faster as an adventurer (if you survive)."

The crucial points are these:
Successful commerce requires skills, and they should pay the skill points, and
The gain should be in line with WBL. If they aren't taking risks, there should be very little profit.

-----

3. The PC makes a fairly good haul the first time, from somebody who does not say who he represents. The PC gets a good reward for a clever idea. A month later, when trying to sell it again, he's informed that the alchemists' guild bought a sample last month, and have learned to duplicate the poison. They are now selling it cheaply.

-----

4. If the PC really wants to do it, then go for it! Build a scenario about a vengeful heir of a murdered noble, or about rival assassins guilds, or merely that the poison needs to be delivered through the dangerous Blackmoor Swamp.

PCs can make money. They can invent new things to do. But correctly handled, they cannot avoid adventures.

John Campbell
2018-10-16, 02:16 PM
My reaction is basically, "Yeah, and?"

I'm not sure what your system's economy looks like — even without the custom mixer, "D&D" is actually not all that informative — so I'm going by Pathfinder rules here, because that's the book I had open anyway.

We'll start with acid, because it has industrial uses other than murder, and so has a much bigger market. In a significant city, you can probably always find someone who wants acid for etching or the like, where finding someone who wants lethal venom is trickier, and may get you involved in things that look suspiciously like adventuring. A flask of acid costs 10 gp. Doesn't matter if he's the only dragonborn around; a flask of acid costs 10 gp. Says in the price list. (Dragonborn are not the only source of acid.)

Given your assumption that the dragonborn can produce five flasks of acid a day, that's 50 gp. At sells-for-half rates, 25 gp per day working as an industrial acid supplier.

The expected treasure value from a single 1st-level encounter, per the Pathfinder Player's Guide, is 260 gp, and it goes up pretty rapidly from there. By 12th level, the treasure value from a single encounter should be about what the dragonborn could make in a year of selling his acid.

So, yeah, it's a way to make some extra money when you're in town, but it's chump change compared to what even a low-level adventurer will be raking in, and it's certainly in no way game-breaking.

Poisons are more expensive than acid, but dragonborn venom isn't going to be one of the really expensive good ones, so we're looking maybe at the 100–150 gp/dose range. Again, doesn't really matter if he's the only dragonborn around. He may be the only source of dragonborn venom, but there are other poisons, there are better poisons — from arsenic to wyvern venom. Poisons with likely comparable effects can be be made in labs, harvested from gardens, or milked from animals kept for the purpose.

375 gp/day (150*5/2) is a pretty decent pay scale for a low-level adventurer, but it still pales in comparison to what a mid-level adventurer should be making, and, in practice, it'll be a rare day when he can actually find buyers for all the venom he can theoretically produce. The market just isn't there for that quantity of venom, and the (probably shady) buyers that do exist are going to have their suppliers already and be wary of dealing with some random strange dragonborn off the street. And selling deadly venom necessarily puts you in contact with the kind of people who want to buy deadly venom, and that's a plot hook. You want your players handing you plot hooks.

Better than telling players "no" is telling them "yes, and..." and letting the consequences of that, for both good and ill, land on them.

Fable Wright
2018-10-16, 02:26 PM
The expected treasure value from a single 1st-level encounter, per the Pathfinder Player's Guide, is 260 gp, and it goes up pretty rapidly from there. By 12th level, the treasure value from a single encounter should be about what the dragonborn could make in a year of selling his acid.

Can we take a moment to appreciate the absurdly borked economics here where a a skilled peasant makes a silver a day and a guy making 375 gold a day is making adventuring chump change?

Jay R
2018-10-17, 12:55 AM
Can we take a moment to appreciate the absurdly borked economics here where a a skilled peasant makes a silver a day and a guy making 375 gold a day is making adventuring chump change?

Sure, but let's update it. A skilled peasant in a third world country makes $2 a day, or over 700 per year. Meanwhile, a guy making 3,750 time that, or roughly 3 million dollars a year, is making chump change compared to a top level athlete, actor, or (especially) CEO.

It really isn't that far out of line.

The really absurd detail is how much of the world's wealth is in tombs and ruined castles waiting to be picked up.

Knaight
2018-10-17, 01:08 AM
Sure, but let's update it. A skilled peasant in a third world country makes $2 a day, or over 700 per year. Meanwhile, a guy making 3,750 time that, or roughly 3 million dollars a year, is making chump change compared to a top level athlete, actor, or (especially) CEO.

It really isn't that far out of line.

I'm not so sure that top level CEO is necessarily a great point of comparison for some pretty low level adventurers - particularly given the loot involved. The typical level 1 encounter has 2600 days of peasant labor tied up in their equipment and pocket money. That's not as unreasonable as it sounds (for certain periods anyways), but it gets pretty scewy in a lot of situations.

That said the D&D economy being weird is hardly new information, and this slides right in with the rest of the weirdness. Plus, adventuring being especially lucrative economically is generally a good idea in a game about adventuring.