Category: Uncategorized

Many years ago (back when we all were still playing D&D), I ran a game where I pitted two groups against each other. Several members of Group One came up with the idea of luring Group Two into a trap. You remember the Hand of Vecna and the Eye of Vecna that were artifacts in the old D&D world where if you cut off your hand (or your eye) and replaced it with the Hand of Vecna (or the Eye) you’d get new awesome powers? Well, Group One thought up The Head of Vecna.

Group One spread rumors all over the countryside (even paying Bards to spread the word about this artifact rumored to exist nearby). They even went so far as to get a real head and place it under some weak traps to help with the illusion. Unfortunately, they forgot to let ALL the members of their group in on the secret plan (I suspect it was because they didn’t want the Druid to get caught and tell the enemy about this trap of theirs, or maybe because they didn’t want him messing with things).

The Druid in group One heard about this new artifact and went off in search of it himself (I believe to help prove himself to the party members…) Well, after much trial and tribulation, he found it; deactivated (or set off) all the traps; and took his “prize” off into the woods for examination. He discovered that it did not radiate magic (a well-known trait of artifacts) and smiled gleefully.

I wasn’t really worried since he was alone and I knew that there was no way he could CUT HIS OWN HEAD OFF. Alas I was mistaken as the Druid promptly summoned some carnivorous apes and instructed them to use his own scimitar and cut his head off (and of course quickly replacing it with the Head of Vecna…)

Some time later, Group one decided to find the Druid and to check on the trap. They found the headless body (and the two heads) and realized that they had erred in their plan (besides laughing at the character who had played the Druid)…The Head of Vecna still had BOTH eyes! They corrected this mistake and reset their traps and the Head for its real intended victims…

Group Two, by this time, had heard of the powerful artifact and decided that it bore investigating since, if true, they could use it to destroy Group One. After much trial and tribulation, they found the resting place of The Head of Vecna! The were particularly impressed with the cunning traps surrounding the site (one almost missed his save against the weakest poison known to man). They recovered the Head and made off to a safe area.

Group Two actually CAME TO BLOWS (several rounds of fighting) against each other arguing over WHO WOULD GET THEIR HEAD CUT OFF! Several greedy players had to be hurt and restrained before it was decided who would be the recipient of the great powers bestowed by the Head… The magician was selected and one of them promptly cut his head off. As the player was lifting The Head of Vecna to emplace it on its new body, another argument broke out and they spent several minutes shouting and yelling. Then, finally, they put the Head onto the character.

Well, of course, the Head simply fell off the lifeless body. All members of Group Two began yelling and screaming at each other (and at me) and then, on their own, decided that they had let too much time pass between cutting off the head of a hopeful recipient and put the Head of Vecna onto the body.

SO THEY DID IT AGAIN!… [killing another PC]

In closing, it should be said that I never even cracked a smile as all this was going on. After the second PC was slaughtered, I had to give in (my side was hurting)…

And Group Two blamed ME [Mark] for all of that…

 

By: DnDAdventure

I did some major DM’ing over Christmas break, both to get my girlfriend accustomed to the game and then playing with my regular group (girlfriend now included).

Okay, first off, gf makes an elf ranger, looking for her father who was a legendary hero. To help her a little, I DM a dwarf companion (who knew her father) and a human bandit whom she spared and roll a nat 20 diplomacy check with.

So, they’re in her first ‘dungeon’, very basic and only containing a few rooms each floor. There’s occasional undead, which sucks because I keep botching the rolls to see if the dwarf and human are frightened. They chatter along after the PC, afraid enough to stay back a ways but brave enough to follow. However, at the end two ghosts appear (not combative) and for giggles I roll the two NPC’s reactions. Two nat 1’s.

They piss themselves and scream like girls.

The second funny story happened in the middle of the first ‘group adventure.’ They party is my gf, a Heygoneko (or whatever it’s called) Samurai, a dwarf fighter (actual PC, not the dwarf from before), and a halfling rogue. They’re in a dungeon fighting four bonedrinkers (nasty things….and awesome). The dwarf gets hit and grappled, and fails his check to throw it off. Several rounds in a row….

It brings him down from 17 Con to 4 before the others realize, “Shoot, we gotta save him!” Luckily they did, and the dwarf hid in the corner for the rest of the battle. They find a Blink Ring, which the Samurai takes.

Finally, at the end of said dungeon. I have a Drow Hexblade/11 in the wings, he’s the BBEG of the session. I planned for him to be a reoccurring villain, and even though he had 49 HP I didn’t think he’d die….his character had amazing armor and some nice spells. After giving his speech of why he’d been raising dead, the battle begins. I wanted the drow to take, maybe half damage….and run.

First round, the Samurai goes first. He immediately blinks behind the drow, and Iaijutsu’s him. Rolls a nat 20, so he succeeds….and a nat 20 to crit. Somehow, someway, he rolled exactly 50 damage….killing my BBEG in one blow.

The table erupted in applause and laughter, and of course, my swearing.

 

By: Talon Sky

Just this past weekend we had a stick hit a dragon for 36HP.

Let me say that again, we had a stick hit a dragon for 36HP.

For the long explanation, the stick was created by Master Tovin. An old mage who specializes in making things become sticks when they’re not on the ground. We were in a small town having the local mage look over our stuff we he complains about some weird mage who passed through and sold him a bunch of magic sticks. The immediate outcry from one of our members was “TOVIN!!!”. However, knowing Tovin he also bought a stick.

Of the two he had to choose between, one of them was a potion (old joke involving Tovin), and the other just happened to be an explosion with 20 ft radius and dealt 8d6 damage. Our DM seriously thought that he would toss in down in town or something, just to see what it does. Instead, he saved it. We opened up some doors in the dungeon and we see a dragon (mind you, we’re level 4 at the time). What’s his first action? “I run in and throw down the stick in front of the dragon.” The look on our DM’s face at the moment was just complete disbelief. He gathered up 8d6, and rolled them. He told the player to make a reflex save. He passed the save, so the dragon took 36 damage, and he only took 18.

 

By: pieaholicx

In a campaign (that was lovingly titled “The Frelled Up Campaign”, because it was in no way, shape or form, serious.. it was in this campaign that our DM realized the foolishness of DMPC’S…), I played a wizard. An 80-year-old wizard. I bargained with the DM to buy down my wisdom so that I would have an int of 20 at the start. (We were all.. fairly new). My wisdom was… six. I argued that he was going senile, but highly intelligent nonetheless.

After traveling with the party for a while, one of the characters turned to me and asked “So, where did you come from, anyways?”, hoping to learn of my back story. Without missing a beat, I started: “Well, you see boy, when a man loves a woman very, very much…”

We had to stop play for about five minutes or so. I felt quite proud of myself.

 

By: Felgraf

I ran a one night goofball D&D campaign with a few friends that was mostly cheesy jokes and fighting pirates. We laughed a lot, even if the campaign wasn’t very good – I tried to give the illusion of depth, but it was pretty closely welded to the rails.

It started in a tavern – I make a point of all of my non-serious campaigns off with starting in a tavern – and the players were supposed to talk to the pirate captain, weeping into his mug of rum alone at a table in the corner.

But the players wanted to know if there was anyone ELSE in the tavern to talk to. So I improvised a little bit, and told them there was also a table of six hooded figures, off at a table in a shadowy corner, their faces hidden by their crimson robes. One of the characters insists on talking to them before they have a chat with the pirate captain, so he pulls up a chair, plunks down on it, and tries to start up a conversation.

“Hey, uh, dudes. What’re you up to tonight?” (We’re not big on role-playing on screw-off nights.)

“We were just talking about our problems finding a band of adventurers to solve our little… problems.”

“What’s the mission? Who are you guys?”

At this point, the speaker from the group pulls the hood down, revealing a slender face with long, pointed ears and sky blue eyes. He looks directly at the player character and says, with a hush:

“We’re representatives of the North Everonian Elf-Boy Love Association.”

“…”

“N.E.E.M.B.L.A.”

The player character stood up, walked over to the pirate, and started right onto the rails.

That was the last time they let me DM an off-night game.

 

By: Mecks

I am the DM of my group, and sometimes I really hate the players. They like to make it hard for me to run a serious game for them, because they’ll do things like pull down their pants or start crashing through the windows of people’s houses. I think next time they do something like this I’m going to have the town guard gang up on ’em and beat ’em.

Anyway… One day they were supposed to go looking for information in a town to figure out where this one man was, but they weren’t just going to go house to house asking questions. No, they had to try to be inventive and creepy. The rogue tried to do some tricks in front of this kid, and ended up falling flat on his face because of a weak roll, then he started to intimidate the kid because he was mad, and made her run into her house. He started banging on the door and screaming at the kid “I’m going to kill you!”, until eventually I said the villagers were starting to stare at him.

The time before that they were going to go check out a bank to save some of their gold in there, but instead of just waiting in line they cut in front of a dwarf and pulled down their pants. Right when I was going to say what the dwarf was going to do, I hear the Ranger say “Hey, I want to pull down the dwarf’s pants”.

I was just like “…Really..?”

 

By: supreme_slayer

My Paladin was sitting alone in the tavern while the party was doing some disreputable thing they didn’t want me knowing about, when a peasant came in to warn everyone to hide. Scouts saw the orc army that had been alluded to during the campaign was just a few hours march. The rest of the party had no idea and were away (and were actually getting killed by being stupid and being led into an obvious trap.) My Paladin character, who has been laughed at his entire life for one thing or another, stepped up with an air of determination that would have made the most epic veteran of many wars quiver. He told the guards how to set up the defenses as he rode off to prevent this town from being destroyed in any means he could.

This orc army had been devastating the lands. Since the beginning of the campaign we have heard about their Epic level Half fiend orc Fighter specced cleric of Orc God leading the campaign on his invulnerable Vampire Fang Dragon. His army of ten thousand marched to the town to claim it for their God.

And my level seven paladin rode off to stop their reign of fear and destruction here.

I met an orc scouting party and told them to go tell their boss to surrender. Otherwise this will be the last day he sees on this Earth. They laughed, so I fought and broke their squad and won the fight against the ten of them by being smart and getting lucky.

In the meantime, the rest of the party had whipped by falling in the most obvious of traps and getting backstabbed. I so wanted to scream at them for being so stupid and warn them, but I wasn’t about to meta game.

So the DM concluded that the campaign was over. But I told him I wanted to continue, and if I died, I died, I would at least see the rest of the story be told damn it.

So there I was, at the edge of this forest, watching the orc army move past me.

I took out my bow, and fired a shot into the mass, killing something.

Then again.

And again.

Until they realized someone was killing them from the forest.

They sent in a group to find who it was. I hid from all of them, and killed anyone who found me. I continued shooting into the mass, and they sent more into the forest.

I continued this for a few more minutes, until finally I saw the vampire fang dragon in the sky flying towards the forest. He used some sort of fire breath attack for some reason and started burning down the forest.

I took pot shots at the dragon until I pissed it off something fierce.

I ran through the cover of the forest, and searched for a fallen sturdy log, and a high Y-shaped tree bearing. I lifted the log using all of my strength to drag it onto the tree bearing. I fired flame arrows into the air to show the dragon where I was.

I mounted up as I saw it approach, and when it was close enough, I did something stupid. Compared to everything else, it really was.

I rode my warhorse up the log and jumped into the air as high as it could go and then jumped off, passing the necessary rolls to do so, and jumped on top of the dragon, grabbed the evil orc cleric’s boot, and made him fall. In the meantime, the dragon bit me, doing a lot of damage and two negative levels. My horse died from its fall. I rolled to hit, and luckily, did max damage on my called shot to its wing, tearing it out. It plummeted to the forest below, staking itself into the trees.

In its death throes it breathed an everlasting curse against me and screamed to its master to avenge it, breathing fire everywhere.

And now in the clearing, I grogged in pain and attempted to heal myself while standing and watching through hazed eyes as the Half-fiend orc approached me, giant bone tower shield and great war axe in hand. I saw orc warriors circling the area.

The Orc warlord said something in orcish and the warriors stopped, circling us.

“I hope your ancestors grieve at the knowledge of the stupidity they have sired. You will die this day, and not even in death will you escape the fate that you will face. An eternity of pain beyond your comprehension awaits you. Your soul will be forever engulfed in suffering, knowing no release.” as he heals himself and buffs himself up. “All you will find this day is death, and forever on…. only pain.”

Initiative.

I win.

But I miss. So I draw back.

Move and attack, one attack hits, and brings me down to 15%.

I slam against a tree and am brought down to 4 hit points. I pass my fort save versus massive damage.

New round, I hold off my turn until he is close enough to attack, as he comes near.

“Feel accomplished, Paladin; you made this day memorable — for myself at least. And I will make sure that there will be no one left to remember you, your name, or what you did here. That village will burn, and all within it will die. You are nothing but a stain on my blade. Nothing.”

I knew it, this was it, there was no way I was going to live through this. Not even with a crit. I was going to die. But dammit, I was going down swinging.

So he spoke my Epitaph to my own thoughts and memories, detailing everything he knew, and why he had become a paladin, and even though everyone had laughed at him, and ridiculed him, that he would save them, even if they never cared, even if no one cared, or would ever care.

He walked up to deliver the final blow. And I screamed out loud and swung…

All hope resided on this die, I wanted some memorable scar to leave him with. Up to this point, this die I had used always failed me when it mattered the most. But I kept using it for the day that for all it’s bad luck, hoping it would one day churn out unbelievable luck and count at the right time.

So I rolled to make it spin, making it last forever. and it finally came out.. . . . … …..

…….

It had rolled a 1.

I groaned and the DM laughed at me.

He told me to roll again to see how bad I fail.

I rolled again.

Another 1.

I groaned again. The DM laughed again, and told me to roll again. If I got another 1, I was dead.

I rolled and thought about how embarrassing it was going to be to die by my own hand.

… 1.

I sat there in complete pissiness and threw my die in the fucking trash as the DM laughed and consulted his book of critical failures.

He rolled his dice, referenced the book and froze.

“What, I decapitated myself didn’t I?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Well, what is it?”

He just looked up at me in a look of befuddlement and spoke words that I will never, ever, ever, ever forget.

“Player and adjacent target die.”

 

By: 1d4chan

“CHAAAAAAARGE!”

“I charge.”

“I charge after him.”

“Rage then charge.”

“Charge.”

“Please note that, even though I raised my sword and yelled “charge”, I’m not actually going to move a step. I’m staying where I’m at and watch them fight it out.”

“Okay, everybody charges towards the opposing forces except the dude who who yelled charge. Your enemies heard you and are preparing for your attack. Roll initiative.”

“It’s fun being Chaotic Neutral.”

 

By: Hate_Prime

Our party is merrily marching along the woods on our way to ransack the gnoll caves where we slaughtered the inhabitants the day before.

Me: Okay, snack run. Play my character while I’m gone, ‘kay?

Player: ‘Kay.

It would take me 15-20 minutes for the round-trip to the store. I figure my character was pretty much okay in their hands for a while. We already killed most of the f*cking gnolls in the area. Any survivors from yesterday would have run off already.

I return with food.

Me: Alright, what’s going on?

DM: *Laughs*

Player: A tiger has [your character]’s neck in its mouth and you’re pinned to the ground.

Me: What the F*CK did you do?!

Player2: It came out of nowhere. The ranger is trying to talk to the tiger and negotiate for your life right now.

Player: It would have eaten our horses. Luckily, [your character] volunteered to be bait. It was very heroic.

Me: You guys better be just f*cking with me right now.

 

By: Hate_Prime

Now, before I begin, I have to explain that these things happened to very, VERY new DnD players, and are a result of lack of experience, not from stupidity. Well, not ONLY from stupidity.

Also, all of these stories are from 3ed/3.5.

– A party, containing a new player playing a Paladin, are trying to get into a castle in a foreign city. The Paladin was recently told of what the code of conduct is, and is still trying to work out how to run a paladin without ruining the campaign. Well, didn’t work out so well. A guard asks the paladin what his business is, and he promptly answers: “I’m here to murder the queen.”

– A party is trying to get through a locked gate, but there are no rogues, so lock-picking is out of the question. There is one player in the party who everyone loves to pick on, and DnD is the best place to do it. The party gang up on, hold him down and tie him up. Then, they proceed to use his head as a battering ram. Well, at least they got the gate open…

– A party of all new players is on their first mission (DM is relatively new as well). The mission is to explore an uncharted area of a map and find a rainbow-colored mountain, kill a bunch of gnolls doing rituals there, and bring back proof that the mountain exists. The Wizard doesn’t quite grasp the idea of evidence, so he says he wants to draw a picture of the mountain to use as proof. He doesn’t have paint, a canvas, or even enough parchment to draw on. Still, he doesn’t hesitate, and takes off his rope in order to draw on it. He realizes that he has no paint, so he decides to stab himself with a dagger and use his blood as paint. He also decides that his robes are not a proper canvas, so he uses a triangle-shaped rock. As the rest of the party tries to explain that you can’t draw a rainbow-colored mountain with blood, but our attention is taken away by the monk, who takes this opportunity to steal the wizards robe and throw it off the edge of the mountain. At this point, we are left with a robe-less wizard with a red-painted rock in his hand, and a DM who will have nightmares for years to come.

 

By: cleric_of_BANJO