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Skeletonpatch

Share your Dungeons & Dragons anecdotes! (Other tabletop RPGs are available)

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I want people to share any awesome/interesting Tabletop RPG stories they have been a part of over the years. These can range from epic adventures, embarrassing deaths or anything else you feel like sharing, either as a player or as a GM (Game Master). All tabletop systems are valid (i.e. Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, etc.).

 

Allow me to share the D&D story that inspired this thread, and played out literally two hours ago (I will assume that you are familiar with D&D's rules already, so this might not make sense if you aren't familiar with the game).

 

WALL. OF. TEXT. INCOMING:

Spoiler

Our party of six adventurers were exploring a cave suspected of containing Elementals so that we could test a set of experimental Banish Elemental scrolls developed by a sage at the local university of magic. The cave was reported to hold dimensional tears that open into realms of pure elemental power, the perfect place to go searching for test subjects for our nifty new scrolls.

 

In a room close to the entrance of the cave was a tear that opened up into a realm of fire, and anyone who tried to cross the room needed to spend as little time in that room as possible or risk bursting into flames. Four members of our party managed to cross the room, while me and one other party member waited at the entrance, not wanting to risk injuring ourselves. As the four of them were searching the rest of the cave, the person next to me (who herself was a Warlock) tried to see if she could coax an Elemental into passing through the tear so that she could test a scroll on it. The Dungeon Master rolled a percentile to see what kind of creature would be attracted by the Warlock, and shuddered. He rolled the percentile again and we were greeted by the telepathic voice of something that definitely wasn't an elemental...

 

At this point the rest of the party had gathered at the opposite end of the fire room while the unknown entity asked us who we were and why mere mortals were calling for attention through a dimensional tear. The Warlock attempted to read the entity's mind to find out what it was. The Dungeon Master informed us that he had rolled 00-0 (a percentile is rolled using two ten-sided dice, 00-0 equates to 100%) twice in a row, meaning that we had just encountered a fucking Demon Lord. Only the Warlock knew this in-game, to everyone else this was merely a terrifying evil presence. Another member of our party, who is a Monk with a low intelligence score, decided to throw, yes, throw, an arrow he found on the floor of the cave into the dimensional tear to see if it would damage the Demon Lord. Multiple people tried to stop him before he could do it, but they failed and he successfully threw the arrow into the tear. The Demon Lord just laughed and eviscerated the arrow as it passed through the portal.

 

It asked the Monk for his name, which the Monk provided like a moron, and reached through the ceiling surrounding the tear, crushing it and sealing the rift between dimensions. We promptly abandoned our mission to test the scrolls and left the cave, heading back for the university. Everyone, especially the Warlock, was traumatized by what had just happened. That night all of us received extremely similar dreams in which a pair of glowing orange eyes peered at us from total darkness. Whatever was looking at us wasn't just part of the dream, it was something that is aware of our existence and enjoys this knowledge. The Monk got a different dream, and the DM made everyone else leave the room while he described it to him.

 

This is where the session ended, and our party has basically been catapulted into the deep end of character development thanks to an encounter that our DM wasn't even planning for. Seriously, that encounter was determined entirely by dice rolls.

 

According to the DM, if the Demon Lord had decided to expand the portal so that it would be large enough to fit through, ONE QUARTER OF THE CONTINENT WOULD HAVE BEEN KILLED. This would have caused a war between demons and celestials, though, which is why the Demon Lord chose not to enter our world and kill us. Level Twenty characters, who the DM says can pretty much flip the bird to gods without consequence, would have a hard time defeating this Demon Lord...

 

Oh, and all of our characters are Level Four, by the way...

 

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>4th Edition

>combat starts

>takes 2 hours between 5 people to kill several enemies 

>almost every ability just pushes/pulls enemies and deals almost no damage 

>get bored halfway through and dick around on my cellphone except when it's my turn

>repeat next week 

 

Jesus H Christ fuck D&D. I'm going back to Mutants and Masterminds. 

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>2nd Edition

>Group of adventurers raiding a mages tower.

>Stupid thief decides to burn some scrolls in a library of magical tomes even after being told not to burn shit in there.

>Explosion kills the party and tower ends up mostly destroyed.

>End of campaign.

>Next adventure same guy playing a thief.

>Thief being an ass with loot and not sharing some of the stuff other players could make better use of.

>Party climbs another tower, telling the thief guy to bring up the rear.

>Party on the balcony 200ft or so up and thief almost to the top.

>Rope gets cut and thief guy dies on a pile of rocks.

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I used to play those 4th edition board games such as Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon at a local hobby store. They were really good for casual fans of D&D, such as myself. I usually played with Beezo, Scooter and Mike Long (not to be confused with the famous Magic: The Gathering professional of the same name). Mike Long was Scooter's boss who ran a shady air conditioning company called Dr. Comfort Heating & Cooling.

 

Mike Long once tried to convince Scooter to see a movie in a theatre at the same time as himself, pretend not to know each other, and have Scooter fall down the stairs at the end of the movie, whilst attempting to legitimately injure himself. Mike Long would be a witness to the cinema's dangerous conditions. Scooter would then sue the cinema, and Mike Long would keep (I think something like) 80% of the profits. Scooter resigned from Dr. Comfort after his boss wouldn't stop pressing him to participate in this get rich quick scheme. 

Edited by Ajora

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7 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

>takes 2 hours between 5 people to kill several enemies

 

I played Tomb of Horrors recently, and it legit took our party of four TWO HOURS to search a single room with no combat whatsoever. This happened multiple times. There were several traps that would have been instant death for our entire party if it weren't for some random abilities that our Paladin happened to have chosen before we started the dungeon.

 

I've been playing 5E, by the way.

 

My rating of Tomb of Horrors is:

GarryGygaxIsAnAssholeAndIWouldn'tHaveItAnyOtherWay/10

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I recently killed two harpies using a Sleep spell.  They plummeted to their deaths...the table was dumbfounded then broke out laughing.

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Our next session is tomorrow, I'm looking forward to seeing what the aftermath of our Demon Lord encounter is.

 

Our DM is also going to start trying to incorporate individual story arcs for everyone's characters. I sent him a stupidly long (twelve pages long) word document containing all the details I had already thought of for my character's backstory.

 

I'm also writing a diary from the perspective of my character. You could say that I'm a little invested in the game...

 

[Tangential thought that just occurred to me:]

Spoiler

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm pretty sure that one of the main influences behind demons being the main enemies in Doom actually was Dungeons & Dragons. And you know what, I think the guys at id Software probably had a Demon Lord encounter in a similar vein to the one our group had (as in, I think they somehow did something to gain the attention of an extra-dimensional being and it just so happened to be a Demon Lord); the only differences being that it happened at the end of a long campaign and resulted in their entire world being overrun with demons, whist our encounter just happened pretty close to the beginning (two weeks maximum have passed in-game) and the Demon Lord is more interested in toying with our low-level characters than flat-out annihilating the world at this point.

 

(Of course, I could be and probably am wrong. If anyone knows more about the actual story I'd like to hear about it.)

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Never played D&D in my life due to lack of interest but I once recall watching a group of friends back in high school getting their entire party demolish by a giant tree.

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My roommate ran a high-level one-shot recently that ended with our whole party of druids wrecking the shit out of a dragon that happened to also be a forest that spanned the entire world. As it spat us out of its mouth while bleeding out of every tree in its forest, our spore druid kept chanting "SLIMY DOOM! SLIMY DOOM!" over and over, as that spell combined with dazzling/stunning moves turned out to be astonishingly deadly. Things ended in a good way, but now we love to chant "SLIMY DOOM! SLIMY DOOM" at each other once in a while for no reason.

 

Before that, I played a half-orc monk in a Pathfinder game and rolled a Nat1 when trying to attack a boss mob, which ended up with me winding myself on a table. So our spellcaster created an illusion of me being threatening and intimidating... while still being winded by a table. It was just embarrassing and hilarious.

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@OP Have you read Masters of Doom?

 

your story reminds me a little of my adventures in Angband; I remember my early days of that game encountering waaay out of depth monsters early on. I once encountered a Dracolisk on dungeon level 13 (out of 100 dungeon levels). He wasn’t really interested in toying with me, though.  Needless to say that marked the end of my adventure.

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Ars Magica has this system of exploding die where if you roll a 1 (on a d10) then you reroll and you double the result. If you reroll a 1, then you do the same again, for as many time as you get a 1. Getting some ludicrous result like 1-1-1-10 gives you 80, for example. Statistically, you're bound to get a few unlikely outcomes throughout a campaign just as a result of the sheer number of die rolls you do (and I did personally get a 80 once), but there's no greater disappointment that rolling a very exciting 1-1 and then getting something low like 2 or 3. Sure, 1-1-2 gives 8 and 1-1-3 gives 12, which are good results, but when you could have gotten a result above 30 it's disappointing.

 

And in this way, I once had the pleasure of rolling three 1-1-2 series in a single session.

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I think I broke 5th edition.  My character bought a 'Robe of Useful Items' and the combined value of the useful items magically contained within it far exceeded the cost of buying it.

 

It's like buying a 'Bag of Holding' and finding out someone left a load of treasure in it.  

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10 hours ago, Hellbent said:

@OP Have you read Masters of Doom?

 

I haven't, but I would really like to at some point. I plan on seeking out a physical copy at some point in the future.

 

Back on topic with this, our monk has been branded by the Demon Lord, but he doesn't know where the brand came from and now our party is searching an ancient city that sank in the desert millennia ago in hopes of finding information on the brand. The guy who plays as the monk wasn't present at the last session, so we literally stuffed him into a bag of holding to justify his absence and sudden appearance next session. We need to make sure he gets let out before being in there for eight hours, I doubt the guy that plays him would like it very much if at the next session the DM went, "Oh, yeah... You suffocated in a bag of holding..."

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Good old D&D. My favorite edition is 4th, due to the customization that could go into classes (choosing abilities and so forth).

 

Before that, there was our 3.5 campaign, and it was...strange. One of my characters was an anthropomorphic snowman named Dr. McCosto, an elf who had been transformed into a snowman by an evil wizard. He was a quack rogue with a sharp tongue, who often landed the party in trouble from the things he said. My other character was a cat named Nine Lives who used a cat-o-nine-tails as a weapon. I do miss the days of playing D&D.

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