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View Full Version : Roleplaying Dramatic RP Moments



Karnack
2019-02-12, 07:15 PM
Thought I'd share perhaps one of the most fun and dramatic sessions my D&D group has had for a while.

So this story revolves the latest session in our D&D 5E campaign, where in the party dynamic changed suddenly and dramatically.

Some context: We're level 7 and in a dungeon at the bottom of the sea, death traps and puzzles galore, and due to finding a rival party of drow/pirates/generally bad people we rescued a little 8 year old girl that was taken as a slave by them. We defeat them and rescue the girl, which the paladin has taken into her care and will throw herself into anything to protect her. The other members of the party are myself (Wizard), our sorcerer (Party Leader) and our cleric.

The Story: The particular floor we are on is broken up into several rooms each behind a locked door, which due to not having a rogue we are force to batter down or force open, so very noisy. While trying to get into one room a stone golem opens the door to engage us, along with two smaller mechanical constructs. We beat a hasty retreat into the previous room and defeat the constructs that follow, though instead of following us the golem collapses the corridor blocking the way, though there is two passages to follow.

Forced to find an alternative way round, we find a riddle puzzle, that provides a line to the riddle per round in a random language and each round we don't give the correct answer we get zapped for 20 lightning damage, save for half, and the doorway locks behind us. As this isn't the first one of these we find, we leave the girl outside so she doesn't get fried.

After solving the first stage of the puzzle, which had wrecked us putting the cleric and sorcerer onto death saves, my wizard on 6 hp and the paladin on 15, we see the girl has gone missing. Following the trail and with our cleric using some magic, we find that the girl is still alive has been taken into the room with the golem.

Thus the argument started, in character. The paladin, sorcerer and cleric want to go rushing into there to try and save her, I argue this is a bad idea as we can't get in there without making alot of noise and between us we have 23 HP, we need to rest or we will get ourselves killed. The sorcerer says he could use polymorph to change themselves into a spider, try and sneak in and then use Thunderstep to teleport out, I again say this is a bad idea as he has 1 HP right now and even if he gets inside the room and sneaks past the golem and who knows what else is in there, he needs to see where he is teleporting for Thunderstep to work and will be stuck in there. My wizard tries to get them to use caution and rest and heal as to act now in our current state we are going to get ourselves, and the girl, killed.

The plea falls on deaf ears and the sorcerer turns himself into a spider and they all move to head off. So my wizard makes an extremely hard choice and does the only thing he can think of to stop them marching to there deaths, and casts magic missile at 6th level (Wand of missiles) and knocks the party out. The party then wakes up a few hours later and feel utterly betrayed, with the paladin swearing a blood oath to never protect me again and I am no longer her friend. We ended the session there with us taking a short rest, with us taking on the task of either saving the girl next session, or avenging her.

Feel free to comment, critique and share your own dramatic moments in games. Just wanted to share what my group felt was an awesome story. Have a good day all :smallsmile:

Schismatic
2019-02-14, 10:11 AM
There are weird moments of partial fourth wall breaking that happened with one GM.

He noticed on two of our character sheets we came from roughly the same place. roughly the same age (5 years off), and both our characters had (in part or whole) human relations. We didn't write much about our background, but my character (half-nymph human bard/arcane duelist/sublime chord build, AC tank gish build) and hers (human warblade White Raven, Diamond Mind & Ironheart heavy build) and sort of similar backstories...

My character wrote about how her father effectively disppeared from her life, while with her character she wrote little about her family bckground beyond basically 'her dad was a known adventurer' ...

So this mid-campaign mini-big bad we all assumed had a special feybane sword did ridiculous damage to me before fleeing a scene. At the next run in he smashed her PC with it and it had the same effect... but when striking our CN cleric it did not.

We spent a whole arc of the campaign assuming it was actually a special weapon that did bonus damage vs. Good PCs ... makes sense right?

Nope... turns out the evil lich necromancer had multiple run ins with our mutual father, hated him so much that he custom built a weapon to target him and anyoe related to him, and he kept targetting our party more and more and involved himself in the realbig bad's machinations not because he got anything out of it but purely for revenge.

Effectively when we destroyed his phylactery, we did so solely because he decided to attack our party purely on the basis of hatred of our RP father's lineage. Basically being his own worst enemy and ultimately avenging our dead father in the process despite ever realizing our familial connection until not long before then.

It kind of made things a bit awkward and came out of seemingly nowhere.

To be fair, in hindsight our GM was dropping a lot of hints. If we picked up on them we would be like; "So, let's check out your (our) father's mansion then? See if your (our) dad has any intelligence on this guy or weapons useful for taking out undead..."

So he was working around our dense-ness... but who legitimately would pick up on a puzzle like that?

Elvensilver
2019-02-21, 03:56 PM
I had a dramatic RP moment, too. A while ago, I DMed for my siblings and cousins. (Pathfinder, they were fourth level, a dwarfen underage Paladin, an elven Cleric, a halfelfen Wizard and a human Druid, all good aligned).
They had overpowered a band of robbers with minimal casualities in their hide-out in the woods and freed their captives- around 20 elves of all ages that were abducted from their home village. So they took the robbers prisoner, tended to the weakened ex-prisoners and arranged transport back into civilisation, where the robbers should be brought to justice at a proper criminal court at the charges of robbery, arson, abduction, animal-cruelity, murder, mind-affecting-spells and probably rape.
So, to spice things up, I had some of the elves murder their ex-captors in the dead of night. I hoped that my sister, who played the Paladin, could nicely paladin away with this situation. After all, playing a paladin is all about such calls. I expected the rest of the group to be either indifferent or to jump at this murder-mystery. I was sorely mistaken.
The Cleric was furious about the murder. Ending lives didn't set well with him at all. He saw them as worse than the robbers. The Wizard wanted the elves punished now, mainly because she didn't feel that the party freeing them had earned enough thanks and they didn't want thr party to have all their previously stolen stuff as loot. The Druid was, indeed, indifferent. The Paladin, lastly, was devasted. Why didn't they trust in the judical system? They were good! She planned to also bring the culprits before a criminal court. Seeing their relatives killed, then being abducted and imprisoned for a month, some of them raped would count as mitigating circumstances, but justice had to be done.
The Cleric and Paladin agreed to find the culprits, because treating every adult elf as a culprit and thus as a prisoner was infeasible and unjust. So they locked everyone, even the sick and venerable, into one small prison cell, and asked the kids to look after the elvish baby.
>_<
The next day, the Cleric prepared Zone of Truth, and he and the Paladin entered the cell to begin the interrogation. The Cleric casted it and I had to roll twenty-odd saving-throws (and a few spellcraft checks, for good measure). The elves were smart, quite a few knew how the spell worked and thus to protect the culprits, they tried to buy time with their answers, or technically tell the truth, while hiding their true involvment. The Cleric was angry, there were a lot of uncomfortable questions, (death-)threats in the end, after some particulary stubborn elves he threatened to release the evil robbers if they wouldn't hurry up. The way this interrogation went from that point on was very close to psychical torture, and the Paladin was mortified. She pleaded the Cleric to stop and the prisoners to answer quick and truthfully, but she didn't intervene directly, lest to destroy the image of a group that was working together, and because ultimately, she couldn't fathom that he made good of his thread. The Wizard almost began to cry and began planning an eventual assault on the Cleric. That was some pretty nice roleplaying in this tight situation. Even though it was extremly uncomfortable for everyone.
After they were finished, they released everybody that was proven innocent/ made the saving throw (or was to ill to answer). While the Paladin went to tend to the sick, the Cleric made good on his thread and freed two of the robbers, one of which was evil-aligned. The Paladin and the Wizard caugth up to him. Then, the evil robber took the neutral robber hostage, while the Cleric summoned a crocodile to fight for his cause of letting robbers go...
We stopped at this point, where the party stood apart from each other, swords unsheathed and spells readied to fight to the death.
Well, I imagine next session will be pretty tense roleplaying-wise, too...


tl,dr: The inexperienced party was faced with a moral conundrum (former captives murder their former captors) and started to turn upon each other, after an intense interrogation scene.

edit: added a tl,dr.