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Episode 35 - Dungeons and Dragons

edited January 2006 in Role Playing Games
Everyone tell your favorite D+D related experience ever. This is bound to create some interesting talks.

Comments

  • Thanks for this episode, my gf was asking me about D&D all day on saturday so I might just get her to listen to this. I've never actually played as when I joined the club at my school it was going out of fashion and Magic cards were coming in. I did sit in on a few sessions though, it blew my 12-year-old mind, and a year or two later I started a game of the Diablo II D&D which lasted quite a while (funnily, there were loads of the really "cool" kids playing, seriously into it) .
  • Never roll random treasure when it's 3 AM and you've been up for 36 hours, because it generates such wonderful conversations as this:

    (I'm the DM in this case, and it was AD&D 2nd Edition.

    I miss THAC0.)

    ME: "OK, so I'm dead tired. Someone else keep track of the treasure categories that I'm about to roll."

    FRIEND: "OK, will do. Go ahead."

    ME: "OK, the first one...Potions and Oils. Next, Potions and Oils. OK, annnd...Potions and Oils! Potions and Oils! Potions AND Oils!"

    At that point, I realized I had been rolling a d20 for random treasure, which was supposed to be rolled on a d100. The "Potions & Oils" category occupied 1 - 20 or so on the table. :p

    That spawned one of my greatest lines ever: "Oh, I guess you really can't get above a 20 on a d20, now can you?"

    There was also the time that a hurricane came rather far north and went inland in the Adirondacks, up Lake Champlain in New York. Knocked out power to my home town for several days, so my friends and I decided to go play D&D in my grandparent's cabin, with no heat or power, by the light of a Coleman lantern, for 13 straight hours.

    We were hardcore about this shit.
  • D&D, the memories are many. I was sitting at my computer nodding to myself with just about everything you guys said. Good bit!
  • My least favorite experience with D&D is when someone at anime club decided to tell me the story of his character named Thag.... Ugh.
  • OMG I remember that, lol!
  • was it really that boring?
  • As they said, listening to someone describe their D&D character is the second least interesting thing in the world.
  • It's not only boring, it's often scary and painful to listen to.
  • My friends down here in CT tell me about their games that I wasn't part of and their stories are actually hilarious. Though I'm guessing that Thog guy was only telling you about what his character is about.
  • The trick is to tell the story like a story. No one cares about how many levels in Archmage your grand Red Wizard had. They might care slightly more that he once accidentally killed his entire party with an ill-aimed lightning bolt. ;^)
  • But...but...my 15th level paladin had a holy avenger and adamantine full plate and a gold dragon mount and....

    Yeah. Don't be a fanboy like that. Relaying a story can be interesting; telling someone that your rogue had 13 ranks in Hide and Move Silently is bullshit.
  • ::continues to nod in agreement::
  • One of my favorite moments was the converse of the "stupid but lucky" archetype, times when you do something intelligent, but so far off course that it turns out to have been incredibly stupid.

    From a campaign that fizzled due to low attendance:

    My name's Rudiger, I'm one of the normal-sized folk. (you humans are all freakishly huge.) Along with my friend and ally (mostly, he doesn't always approve of my sneaky nature, seeing as he's one of those honorable holy knightly people... but at least he's normal-sized) Bunco, I'm part of a mercenary company, and we've been hired to check out this old keep on the borderlands (no, not *that* Keep) for viability as an outpost in what seems to be an upcoming war against the Gnollish hordes. (Apparently Yeenoghu's cart got cut off or something.)
    Anyway, we get there, and it's this big round tower, big square double doors, looking all keepish. We open it up, and it's like 15 feet of hallway, and 5 feet of floor. Past that, there's this deep pool of orange liquid... so, I pull out my trusty bottle of air (had it ever since I got stuffed into a sack with it by some gnoll with grass on his back.) and dive in (after I test for corrosivity. I'm kind of a science and magic geek, along with the thieving.) To my surprise... it's a maze. I swim around in it a while, with that maze-pathing technique (lefthand on a wall, you know), find some dead orcs... and then I start seeing ghost dogs. well... I'm not sticking around to mess with them, so I swim back to the entrance, and pull Bunco in (he can turn undead things, which hasn't really come in handy till now.) We wander around a bit, passing the airbottle back and forth, and he smacks down a couple of the dogs... meanwhile, I've been thinking about the liquid, trying to figure out what it is, so it's back to the entrance, pulling Bunco out, one piece of armor at a time. I pull out a boot, scoop some up, and set it on fire. The way it burns, I figure it's some kind of oil, so I decide... Torch it. That stuff burns like nothing.
    At this point we hear an inhalfling scream, and this ghost comes through the outer wall of the tower yelling, "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? THERE'S OXYGEN IN THE LCL! YOU COULD HAVE BREATHED IN IT!"

    While annoying humans is funny, annoying a ghost is horribly funny.
    I kinda felt sorry for the guy while going up the tower, though (after the smoke cleared a bit)... he had all these great psychological barrier puzzles set up, designed to turn you back through your own fear... and I go and set the first one on fire. Sort of a sad commentary on the world, I guess. Didn't stop me from needling him all the way up to the top, though.

    I'll have to remember that place for when I turn into a trickster-lich.
    --

    It was a good, well fleshed out campaign, but the DM had a lot of trouble drumming up interest. (poor guy, needs to build up his self-esteem, talk to some new people.)

    There's a few other great moments I remember... like cracking open Vecna's Vault (picked the lock from outside fireball blast radius), Alex's Nightmare Beast scene (Scott the thri-kreen was the key player that day, I've got to admit.) and later in the same campaign, lemure swarms and great cleave make for a fighter in (figurative) heaven. (but, those last two are more of combat stories, every warrior's got a hundred of those. I like more the stories of great ingenuity, cunning... more Batman than Superman. (or sometimes Plastic Man.))
  • Frank?

    Wow. Long time no see.
  • Frank, is that you? Damn, I thought you'd disappeared through an interdimensional rift and ended up in a parallel universe or something. Either that, or gone to Iowa.
  • Indiana, actually, which is almost as dimensionally rifty as Iowa. (it's also statistically flatter than Kansas.)
  • Now I know; and knowing is half the battle.
  • Goddamn you Katsu, get out of my head.

    Of course, I know I've tried to make GI Joe characters fit into D&D before; I'm sure everyone has at some point. Any success stories in trying to fit a fictional character into the D&D rules?
  • Thundercats fit into D+D quite nicely. They are surprisingly low level. But watch out for those ancient spirits of evil.
  • I can't say it's my favorite, but its my most memorable gaming moment.

    I was a merc working as a bodyguard for a poncy elf mage, and we were in some misbegotten elf city in the Realms, hunting for some stupid elven Mcguffin or something, and we run across a dragon. All I knew about dragons was that they were as smart as men, and ten times as arrogant, so I walk towards the dragon, bow and begin to try and stike some deal, looking to buy our way out of this fight. What I had forgotten was that elves were equally arrogant. While I'm out there bargaining with this Dragon, offering bribes and other sundries to get us out of this fight, the stupid elven ponce hits the dragon with a missile spell. And then I die, because the dragon gets to vent its rage on me alone, like a cat with a poorly-made toy.

    And they wonder why I agreed to betray them?
  • A personal favorite of mine is when the party used the Artifact/Plot-Device to turn an entire dungeon into our personal conveyance (Alex's Ferath game and the battleship).
    Not only did we harness the Plot-Device, teams of gnomish engineers, and a powerful NPC that we were secretly plotting to stab in the back, to super-charge a Repair spell to fix and power a rusted out husk of a battleship, but we botched the Final Boss Fight by not following the boss monster through the interdimensional rift for a climactic final battle in its pocket dimension, but instead giving it a full salvo from the battleship's main gun battery.

    "Maniacs! You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!"
  • Yeah, that was amazing! I think it was my idea too. He opened and went through a portal that stayed open. Of course we were cautious about going in. Only complete idiots just jump into all sorts of portals willy nilly.

    We were on a battleship. We had giant deck guns. We hadn't yet really used them significantly. So we put the end of the barrel in the portal and let loose. Truly epic.
  • I was DMing for a group with a bunch of newbie players.

    They were in a large abandoned castle, and just defeated a load of rats.

    One of my players (player A) was searching the room, and the others (group B) were moving on to the next room. One of the guys in group B was getting annoyed at player A for staying behind, so he ran over to player A, grabbed him, and threw him down the hall on the others!

    2 people from group B and player A all lost a significant amount of non-lethal damage, and almost got knocked out!

    Of course, they all got killed in the next room by a spider the size of a small kitten.

    It's not easy DMing for these fools (they all die twice in every session)!
  • I once played a game with 4 friends, where we decided to a campaign as orcs. We had the house to ourselves for the weekend, so when we started playing that night, things went downhill quick. We were all grunting and screaming like orcs (FOR THE HOOORDE!).

    I remember at one point we ran into rival orc territory, and they had humans working a mine. We took some prisoner, and one of the guy's decided to bash their teeth in and take them to use as reagents for spells and potions.

    Later that night, we return to the mine, where people were on the verge of starvation. Our DM was awesome, and caught that without teeth, they couldnt eat what the orcs gave them for food. We laughed our asses off, I think I killed one and turned his skin and bones into some sort of clothing.

    I also remember killing a very large ogre at one point, and then turning his skull into a helmet. It worked out quite well actually.

    We got so damned carried away, the next day we could barely talk because of all the orc sounds we had been making. Still remains my 2nd favorite D&D campaign. My favorite is an epic tale that took about half a year of playing, that covered everything from crime syndicates, fighting/becoming pirates, raising armies of the undead, and participating in a world war between catholic, the english, and the norse. We affectionately refer to it as Lumen's, the name of the fictional town we had started in.
  • I just started playing DnD really for the first time this summer. We are playing this variation called Iron Heroes which is pretty cool so far.

    So one quest we found this green dragon skull that was poisoning this river. So after we pull it out of the water this guy appears on a cliff above us saying its his, and he wants us to give it to him. Firstly his name is Gawayne (Gah-wayne) the Boneharvester, which led to Gawayne's World jokes, and then of course one of our players was having trouble with his name and just ended up calling him Kyle the Boneharvester.

    So we basically tell Kyle no, and shoots at us with a bow or something. Everyone but the archer runs to the cliff to try and climb it, except the archer who can actually hit him. Since there is a boulder next to Kyle that he's using as cover, then DM is supposed to have him do a strength check to push it over the cliff and cause a landslide, but our DM roll a 1. I then pointed out that since he critical failed, it means the boulder should have rolled back onto his foot, pinning his foot under this boulder. Which also happens to make him flat footed.

    No one manages to reach him by the time he manages to get it off his foot, but our archer did a lot of damage, so Kyle ran off into the woods and dissappeared.

    That was one of the few times I've seen our DM roll a 1, and it was hilarious.
  • edited October 2008
    Best- I was DMing a campaign where there was a magnetic ceiling operated by a large lever in an adjacent room. A skeleton was ordered to "keep the switch in the on position and do nothing else". As the fighter dressed in pure metal armor walked in, he was sucked to the ceiling taking a bit of damage. Thinking it was a monster the mages stayed back while the ranger wielding a spear ran in hoping to see what was going on. He stayed on the ground because of his leather armor, but the spear impaled the fighter still on the ceiling.

    As they were trying to figure out what to do, another character who got separated from the group ran into said lever. He was a character who was curious by nature. He killed the skeleton, but wanted to find out what the switch did. He flipped it ALOT. The fighter was slammed into the ground and brought back to the ceiling 3 times before the gnome gave up and left the switch alone. I have never had my players laugh so hard as they were getting killed.

    Worst- A kid I met in college told me about his level 30 character who has killed gods, and he finished by seriously saying how I was not even close to being as cool as his character was. I felt so bad for him I couldn't even make fun of what he said to me.
    Post edited by Mosquitoboy on
  • edited October 2008
    A kid I met in college told me about his level 30 character who has killed gods, and he finished by seriously saying howI was not even close to being as cool as his character was. I felt so bad for him I couldn't even make fun of what he said to me.
    I think we've all met that guy, at some point or another.
    Post edited by J.Sharp on
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