D&D Stories

[Tanavast_the_lesser]

5 minutes ago, Ookla the Uscritic said:

oh, I nearly forgot the time that she launched the party and a friendly NPC into a dangerous demiplane because she couldn't wait for a long rest. That was interesting.

Do go on, I'm intrigued about what a long rest has to do with changing planes of reality.

[Rushu42]

Just now, Tanavast_the_lesser said:

Do go on, I'm intrigued about what a long rest has to do with changing planes of reality.

Well, the story goes like this: The party had found a mysterious key fairly early on, but none of them had Identify, so they had never bothered to find out what it did. I dropped a few reminders about it, eventually, and they ended up asking their NPC wizard friend to cast Identify for them, after several months in-world and nearly a year out of world. She informed them that it could transport them into an infamous, dangerous demiplane. This was at the end of a day of adventuring, which had included a battle and a dungeon, so they were half-spent. Upon hearing this, the rogue went, "cool", and activated the key right there. So all of them, including the wizard NPC, were launched into the demiplane without a long rest. I ended up being merciful and giving them a rest anyway, but she still got some flak from the rest of the group for that one.

[danex]

Don’t let this thread die! I don’t have people to play DND with and this is the next best thing.  

Edited January 6, 2021 by Dannex
Edit: well that’s not entirely true, I guess the next best thing is just other types of RP, but this is the second best thing!

[Condensation]

Dannex, you could always join D&D With Null.

[Rushu42]

3 minutes ago, Condensation said:

Dannex, you could always join D&D With Null.

It doesn't work super well on the forums, unfortunately, but we're trying!

[Condensation]

3 minutes ago, Rushu42 said:

It doesn't work super well on the forums, unfortunately, but we're trying!

Yeah? Well, it looks pretty cool.

[Tanavast_the_lesser]

On 1/5/2021 at 8:19 PM, Rushu42 said:

It doesn't work super well on the forums, unfortunately, but we're trying!

D&D on the forums, you say? How would I join this thing?

[Rushu42]

1 minute ago, Tanavast_the_lesser said:

D&D on the forums, you say? How would I join this thing?

I'm not sure if it's still open for new people to join, since we've already got a big party, but here's the link:

 

[+JesterLavorre]

Okay, so I was playing in a Christmas one-shot last year where we (the characters) were all Santa’s elves who were going after the Grinch and his dog Max, who were a troll and barghest respectively. We had four characters in the party, about level 5, I think. A sorcerer, a fighter, a bard, and me, a rogue/fighter assassin multiclass. My character’s thing was that he had mask of the wild from his wood elf race, which allowed him to hide when he was only lightly obscured. I flavored this so that he had a pine tree costume. So, whenever he needed to hide, he would just stand really still and pretend to be a tree.

Eventually, when our characters made it to the boss battle with Max and the Grinch, we tunneled into his cave through the ice using fire spells, then my character snuck in behind him and hid in the corner with a 20+ stealth check (we tunneled through the roof, if I remember correctly, so the baddies didn’t see us).

So there we are, with our team positioned and ready to go. The Grinch starts to wonder where this Christmas tree in the corner came from, and walks over. So, I sneak attack him for 80-ish damage and start a surprise round. Then, in one round, our sorcerer absolutely nukes the poor troll with three fireballs using sorcery points using a combination of twinned spells and quickened spells, dealing 150-250 damage (I don’t remember exactly).

The two enemies die in the first non-surprise round of combat without even getting a turn to act.

Later, if I remember correctly, our GM even said he had buffed up the enemies and was worried they were going to be too powerful for us.

We’re doing another (late) Christmas one-shot this year, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

[Shard of Reading]

On 1/7/2021 at 6:19 PM, JesterLavorre said:

So there we are, with our team positioned and ready to go. The Grinch starts to wonder where this Christmas tree in the corner came from, and walks over. So, I sneak attack him for 80-ish damage and start a surprise round. Then, in one round, our sorcerer absolutely nukes the poor troll with three fireballs using sorcery points using a combination of twinned spells and quickened spells, dealing 150-250 damage (I don’t remember exactly).

That's a lot for level 5 characters.

[+JesterLavorre]

7 hours ago, Shard of Reading said:

That's a lot for level 5 characters.

Well, if I calculate it out, I think I may have overestimated, but now I’m curious to see by how much . Also, worth mentioning that recently our group has implemented a policy of every character getting a free feat at level 1. I don’t remember if that was in this game, but just to keep in mind.

For just a base fireball, you have 8d6 fire damage. The sorcerer also had the Elemental Adept feat that allowed him to count 1 on fire damage dice as 2. Twinned spell, after looking it up, doesn’t work with fireball. That means that the sorcerer either misused twinned spell or used Empowered Spell instead. I’ll go with the second. Meaning the sorcerer had two empowered fireballs. The average roll of a d6 is 3.5, which I’m going to round to 4 because of the Elemental Adept feat. That leaves us with 32 damage per fireball, for 64 total. So, with empowered spell and some good luck, I could definitely see that getting up to 100 or so. Not 150, though. 
As for me, the rogue. I had assassinate, which gave me advantage (and thus, sneak attack) and an autocrit on the troll. I also had the sharpshooter feat, giving me a +10 to damage. A light crossbow deals 1d8 damage, plus 3d6 sneak attack dice. All that, plus the times two on the dice from a crit, plus my desk bonus, which I think was 4, gets us to 44. Half of what I thought.

So, actual likely damage: 44 from the sneak attack, 70-100 to each of two different targets from the fireballs (so, actually close to 200 total).

So, yeah. That was a wildly incorrect estimate on my part. Thanks for catching that.

Edited January 13, 2021 by JesterLavorre

[Ghanderflaffle]

I would really like to try D&D at some point, but I’ve never had the opportunity. And I certainly don’t have the time right now. I do listen to the Just Roll With It podcast and they do some great things.

[BreezeCauthon]

8 minutes ago, Ghanderflaffle said:

I would really like to try D&D at some point, but I’ve never had the opportunity. And I certainly don’t have the time right now. I do listen to the Just Roll With It podcast and they do some great things.

Kinda where I'm at too. I did start a roleplay with my siblings set in my own fantasy world using the Cogent RP system. It's not D&D, but there are some good stories, so here goes:

So, I had us all meet up in some random town. My sister (a kleptomaniac elf with a particular craving for buttons) is stalking my brother trying to get a golden button on a bag he carries around. They both go to an inn. A merchant offers my brother a spot as a guard on a caravan headed to a desert country in the far south. (My own character is also a guard on this caravan, so this was my plan to get us to all meet up). My brother, being the strange man he is, declines the offer (despite the fact that he too is headed to this country) and instead tries to buy the caravan. He tells the merchant to name his price (20,000 gold coins is the merchant's opportunistic reply), and then decides not to buy the caravan after all.

Eventually, my brother heads out to the northern marshes after learning that Orcs don't live in the southern deserts. (He's hunting Orcs). My sister is in tow, still trying to figure out the best way to get the button (she's already been caught trying once). After my brother one-phases a trio of bandits (with no help from my sister, who misses her knife throw), they wander for a while and my brother gets struck by lightning (at this point, I determine that this is a good game). They stop at a farm, and stay in the barn for a while. After they set off again, they return to the barn to try to sell a stoat skin to the farmer's wife, and somehow end up paying her to take it. 

They both blame each other for this, and set back off. They come across a river. Rather than try to look for a bridge, one decides to jump over (fails, gets swept someway downstream, and finally crosses), and the other stupidly decides to dig under. He's pretty set on this, so I have a boat pass by on the river. My brother gets the memo, but instead of hailing the boat, tries to hurl himself onto it. He is a very short character with a low athletics score, so fails, and then almost drowns (he's not good at swimming either). The sailors save him and drop him on the other side.

That's where we've left off. Right now they're trying to figure out how to retrieve his halberd from the river. Meanwhile I'm many miles away, on my way to the desert, unlikely to ever make contact with the party.

[Quivil]

Are GURPS stories allowed here?

[Rushu42]

23 hours ago, Tani said:

Are GURPS stories allowed here?

Yeah, sure! I admit I don't know what GURPS is, but if you've got a cool story I'm down to hear it.

Here's a story just from today:

My little brothers wanted to get into D&D, so I agreed to run a dungeon for them. (They're 12 and 8). I had to throw it together pretty quickly, but I was actually proud of the way it turned out, and was excited to play. Well, I had them each make 5th level characters, and we ended up with a cleric and a paladin. So far, so good. They had some bad luck at the beginning, failing some checks and landing in a pit trap, but they got out and kept going. The first fight was against 4 Animated Armor. They're each CR 1, so I thought it would be interesting but not challenging enough to pose a serious threat. Boy was I wrong. The armor rolled well and scored a bunch of hits, and the cleric was quickly low health. And then it came out that he hadn't prepared any healing spells. Then the paladin went down. Then the cleric, instead of running over and using spare the dying, kept trying to attack. And died. I think we all learned something from this.

TL;DR: I TPKed my little brothers in their first fight.

[+JesterLavorre]

30 minutes ago, Rushu42 said:

Yeah, sure! I admit I don't know what GURPS is, but if you've got a cool story I'm down to hear it.

Here's a story just from today:

My little brothers wanted to get into D&D, so I agreed to run a dungeon for them. (They're 12 and 8). I had to throw it together pretty quickly, but I was actually proud of the way it turned out, and was excited to play. Well, I had them each make 5th level characters, and we ended up with a cleric and a paladin. So far, so good. They had some bad luck at the beginning, failing some checks and landing in a pit trap, but they got out and kept going. The first fight was against 4 Animated Armor. They're each CR 1, so I thought it would be interesting but not challenging enough to pose a serious threat. Boy was I wrong. The armor rolled well and scored a bunch of hits, and the cleric was quickly low health. And then it came out that he hadn't prepared any healing spells. Then the paladin went down. Then the cleric, instead of running over and using spare the dying, kept trying to attack. And died. I think we all learned something from this.

TL;DR: I TPKed my little brothers in their first fight.

Oof

I assume this wasn’t first level, but I always have problems designing encounters for first level characters. They’re just so squishy. I’ve nearly TPK’d so many first level parties...

[Frustration]

32 minutes ago, Rushu42 said:

My little brothers wanted to get into D&D, so I agreed to run a dungeon for them. (They're 12 and 8). I had to throw it together pretty quickly, but I was actually proud of the way it turned out, and was excited to play. Well, I had them each make 5th level characters, and we ended up with a cleric and a paladin. So far, so good. They had some bad luck at the beginning, failing some checks and landing in a pit trap, but they got out and kept going. The first fight was against 4 Animated Armor. They're each CR 1, so I thought it would be interesting but not challenging enough to pose a serious threat. Boy was I wrong. The armor rolled well and scored a bunch of hits, and the cleric was quickly low health. And then it came out that he hadn't prepared any healing spells. Then the paladin went down. Then the cleric, instead of running over and using spare the dying, kept trying to attack. And died. I think we all learned something from this.

TL;DR: I TPKed my little brothers in their first fight.

Ah, the... fun of balancing an encounter.

That hurt to say.

[Rushu42]

1 hour ago, JesterLavorre said:

Oof

I assume this wasn’t first level, but I always have problems designing encounters for first level characters. They’re just so squishy. I’ve nearly TPK’d so many first level parties...

Yeah, this was 5th. 1st level is rarely fun. It's good if you want to introduce new players to the game or if you want to say that you ran a character from 1 to 20, but not much else. I never do a one shot at level 1.

[Quivil]

TPK?

[Rushu42]

2 hours ago, Tani said:

TPK?

Total Party Kill.

[Quivil]

Ouch.

I wasn't around for this story, but it's (more than) a bit famous in my family.

Once we were playing GURPS and Sister 3 (my third oldest sister) was about six maybe? and the GM asked for marching order and Sister 3 said "Uh-oh! Monsters coming!"

Here's another that I was around for. It's pretty recent. At this point I'm playing a person who can shapeshift into a leopard.

We were fighting some zombies and one of them started screaming, we think because it recognized (my 5th brother's) Brother 5's character? and all the other zombies started paying more attention to it and I was pretty sure it was a bad thing, that scream. I'm in my leopard form and am in a place where I can get to the zombie quickly, so I run over to it and basically bite it's head off.

The scream stops with a choking noise.

The zombie tastes nasty and my mouth is now in pain. I shift human and back, rub at my mouth, then start running back towards the half of the party that's closest, which is where I came from and where both (I think) of our healers are. My 4th sister gets my 3rd brother to help and he stops the fungus from going any farther, but can't heal it because we don't know what it is. He asks where it's from and we don't tell him. (He's necrophobic (the character, not the person)). My 2nd sister (playing an octopus who wants to be a necromancer) squished her face to get a better look at it and said it was a fungus that was growing into my face. We discussed non-magic ways to starve it of oxygen and get rid of it, then decide none of those are viable because it's got tendrils inside my face, and can probably access any oxygen in my blood, so for it to die I have to die. Eventually my 3rd brother uses wild talent to get a spell that gets rid of the fungus.

(In GURPS the number of spells you can have is not set and wild talent lets you get skills/spells that you didn't start with and possibly keep them, depending on the modifiers.)

Edited January 19, 2022 by Tani

[Frustration]

Well I had an intresting one this weekend.

I have come to the conclusion that D&D players are just the worst, no matter what you do they will find the perfect way to ruin it.

I have set up this amazing sandbox world with dozens of different plothooks for them to explore, and what do they want to do?

Build a ranch.

I wish I was joking.

[Rushu42]

On 6/2/2021 at 10:11 AM, Frustration said:

Well I had an intresting one this weekend.

I have come to the conclusion that D&D players are just the worst, no matter what you do they will find the perfect way to ruin it.

I have set up this amazing sandbox world with dozens of different plothooks for them to explore, and what do they want to do?

Build a ranch.

I wish I was joking.

Just send the plot hook to the ranch. Lots of fantasy books start with the protagonist's family farm being burned down to spur them into adventure, right?

[Frustration]

4 hours ago, Rushu42 said:

Just send the plot hook to the ranch. Lots of fantasy books start with the protagonist's family farm being burned down to spur them into adventure, right?

One of the other players got mad at them I think we're good.