Casting on Autopilot
You guys would not believe the stink eye Laurel gave me when I turned in this script. That’s because she and Necromancer share more than a gothy fashion sense. They also have a mutual and rather unfortunate history with negative energy. Lemme explain.
So no shit there we were down in the dungeon. It was early days in Dragon’s Delve, and the party was only sitting on 3 HD worth of hit points. So naturally, when they ran into their first truly frightening incorporeal opponent, shit got real in a hurry.
“Did you say ‘drain?’ Are you sure you don’t mean ‘ability damage?'”
“What do you mean it takes a five foot step into the floor? This is bullshit!”
“How many more magic arrows do we have left?”
That last question was especially relevant. As every good Pathfinder knows, incorporeal critters are immune to nonmagical weapons. And when you’re only level 3, you’re lucky if you’ve got a glowing butter knife.
Happily, this was a well-prepared party. The bladebound magus and his sentient scimitar were chipping away. The alchemist’s bombs were getting in there too. The bard had a handful of +1 arrows, and between some lucky shots and the standard inspire courage, she was doing work. Constitution scores were getting dangerously low however, and Mr. Wraith was just one lucky roll from delivering the campaign’s first permadeath.
“Relax,” says Laurel. “I’ve got this.”
They were three or four rounds into the fight, so the wraith was also near death. And when you’re a dark tapestry oracle specialized in delivering bad touches, nearly-dead opponents are your bread and butter.
“Inflict light wounds!” she shouts. “That’s a 19 to hit! Come on big money… Max damage!”
The rest of the party looks on in horror. Yours truly sits behind the GM screen, head in hands. And if you’re not familiar with the inflict light wounds spell, then suffice it to say that the only important line for this little anecdote is the last one: “Since undead are powered by negative energy, this spell cures such a creature… rather than harming it.”
When realization finally set in, it was hard to know whether the anguished cries of, “I’m sorry!” came from Laurel or her oracle. In the cold recesses of my evil GM heart, I like to think it was a little bit of both.
Have any of you guys made a similar mistake? I’m not just talking about negative/positive energy shenanigans, but casting confusions in general. Perhaps you’ve plunked down a wind walk at an inopportune time. Maybe you’ve miscalculated your AoE and trapped your buddies in black tentacles. We’ve all been there, and if you’re lucky (like my group) you managed to limp away from the encounter with your lives. So let’s hear it, guys! Tell us all about your favorite magical blunders down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
I’ve seen similar mistakes before, though I have to say I’m glad that they got rid of that rule in 5e. The whole negative/positive energy thing is significantly less interesting or sensible to me than magically healing damage versus the inevitable entropic decay of the universe.
Negative energy by any other name…
https://www.dnd-spells.com/spell/negative-energy-flood
😛
The ranger/druid did not want to go into a room full of spiders, and did not want the spiders to come to him. From the 5-foot corridor, he put an area of wind pushing into the room. It pushed the spiders to the far side of the room, along with the 3 party members who were standing in front of the druid at the time.
I love this, can picture it cinematically, and cannot shake the sounds of Kate Capshaw’s shrieking out of my head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQXqhk-8h7o
Rogue: “Cast the fireball, I have evasion and a Reflex of +14, I can’t fail this.”
Wizard: “You sure? The only one I have is Maximized…”
Rogue: “I’ll be fine.”
Wizard: “Okay. I cast Maximized Fireball centered here, it gets all the rats and the rogue. It does 60 fire damage.”
Rogue: Tosses dice “Uh…Nat 1. That’s a 15?”
Wizard shakes his head, indicating failed save.
Me (GM): “Well, funny you should do that. Remember how I mentioned these rats were red with glowing green eyes? I was not being thematic. These rats, known as the Rylkith, are immune to fire.”
But my favorite friendly fire incident does not actually involve magic. It was Anima, and my thief was watching from a safe distance as the beefy warrior and the agile duelist were facing off against some cultists. The duelist and I had beef, but the Warrior had asked me to come because his order wanted to recruit me. So I came with him on the ship only after making him promise that no harm would come to me. I was actually just watching to see if they needed my help, but it was good cause as a thief, I was not as combat focused as the other two. Having picked up a table to parry the crossbow bolts of several cultists last round, the warrior still has it in his hands.
Warrior: “can I use this Table to make an Area Attack?”
GM: “Sure, that’s awesome. But…you may hit duelist.”
Duelist: “I’m imbalanced toward dodge. it’ll be better than the three attacks these guys get, go.”
Warrior: “Okay. Open roll! So uh…280.”
Duelist: “Fumble…I declare…a 15.”
GM: “Oh….crap. You take 80 damage, make a critical resist.”
Thief (me): Dies laughing
Dice hit the table. Tables are consulted.
GM: “Your left arm is severely bruised, you…can’t dual wield until the injury heals. How many Life points do you have left?”
Duelist: “Four.”
Thief: laughs harder. produces dagger. Eyes Duelist. GM’s eyes widen.
Tables make natural AoE attacks. So do doors. And benches. And most of the contents of Home Depot. Just add barbarian!
First game I ran featured a fight, 2 PCs and an NPC vs some manner of villain, mostly because i barely had a clue as to what i was doing. Anywho, come the first PCs turn, and they cast Obscuring Mist. Only the NPCs were melee fighters, both PCs were ranged magic users.
What followed was a few rounds of our dear heroes shooting the breeze outside the mist as their buddy and the baddie whailed on each other inside. Clearly this wasn’t a serious game by any metric, but thats the first combat i ever ran.
There is no better metaphor for the hard life of an NPC than a big, pointless brawl cloud…
https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/sarge_and_beetle_6625.jpg
…as background for PC dialogue.
My DM’s most shameful moment was in a 2e game, where a single spell spelled (heh) doom for his party all because he forgot how big the room was.
He cast a fireball to kill a whole room’s worth of enemies… Unfortunately, the room was inside of a ship, with a low ceiling. Thus, the AOE included not only the enemies, but himself and all of his allies. He survived. The rest of his party… Not so much.
From the Pirate Code of Captain John Phillips, captain of the Revenge, circa 1724:
Fireball aboard a ship indeed. Harrumph!
Or in the words of Captain Dan:
On the off chance anyone else is inclined to go on a Google quest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFnYMwIOjhU
It looks like I’m far from alone in terms of casting AOE damage on allies who refuse to get out of the way. In my story, though, the tank got mad at me after I said I was going to blast a cone-shaped area three times and she didn’t move. That’s how the cookies crumble, I guess.
You are indeed in good company: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/artillery
Stinky Cloud…
my favorite use for Shadow Conjuration 🙂
only 1/5 chance to hit my allies as they know it’s fake.
Oh boy… Ball of wax right there. The bizarre leeway between “a character faced with proof that an illusion isn’t real” and “if any viewer successfully disbelieves an illusion and communicates this fact to others” has always left me scratching my head in terms of interpretation.
We generally just use a plus 2 bonus for the will save when an illusion gets announced by a PC, like the Aid Another action.
With my stuff…
The team knows I can’t do any real big spells, so when I announce the „Stinky Cloud“ they know its a fake.
When I hit a crowd of opponents, they all get to save at the same time, and for those entering later it’s hard to believe it’s not real when more than half of those stuck in the cloud are busy throwing up.
Next level gives me Shadow Evocation, looking forward to throwing Fake Fire Ball.
Laurel is talking about going shadow dancer for our next AP, so this is suddenly relevant, lol.
I can post my built here if you’re interested.
I may have told this story before on here, but I’m not sure. Anyway, it was a good one.
The key PCs were a Gethlain Witch and a Hobgoblin Kinesticist. Witch is high-INT, lowish-WIS, very bookish and loves birds, she’s also our healer via healing hexes and cure spells. Kinesticist is primarily a pyromaniac, but also has negative energy as an element allowing him to reanimate dead, he also can’t read because everyone knows that reading steals your soul.
So we were in this building, and we had found a couple of texts written in cyphers. The GM handed us actual cyphered texts to see if we could figure them out for ourselves without making rolls.
So our witch’s player is trying to figure out these cyphers (and the witch is doing it in character too) and the kineticist gets bored. He sees a locked door and decides to blow it up. He does, spectacularly, and discovers that this was an aviary in which he has now killed dozens of birds. He knows that witch loves birds and doesn’t want her to be angry, so he decides to reanimate one of them and bring it over to her.
So out of character the witch’s player was busy working on the cypher and missed the whole exchange. In character our oblivious witch had missed all of the action for the same reason.
GM: “You see kineticist walking up to you carrying a bird, which looks badly burned. There is a big whole where the door was behind him, and dead birds all across the floor.”
Witch player: “Oh no, what have you done? I cast healing hex on the bird.”
GM: “Ok, you do that, and the bird just [b]explodes[/b].”
And that was the day that our witch’s player was as oblivious as her character, and we learned that you should not try to heal bird zombies with 1 hit point.
Oh shit dude. I have no laughed that hard at a story in a hot minute. And now the rest of the coffee shop is looking at me weird. So thanks for that.
In the Hackmaster campaign I was playing in, our characters had reached sufficient level that we had aquired proteges (lower level characters that you can bring along for a share of xp, or siphon a portion off your main character, to provide you with a back-up in case the worst happens). My Wizards protege was his apprentice – a Wild Mage.
Wild Magic is bizarre enough in most games, but Hackmaster goes for broke (one entry in the list is “teleport intacampaignar” which literally suggests you introduce the character in some other campaign, preferably a different game system). My Wild Mages go-to spell in bad situations was Reckless Dweomer, which allowed you to cast it as any spell in your Spell book, but with an automatic Wild Surge (so it almost never actually cast the desired spell).
We were deep in a dungeon, battered and low on spells, when the party Fighter entered a room and was jumped by a large pack of ghouls. The first attack paralysed him, leaving him facing several helpless turns surrounded. I checked with the player whether he would be fine with a little friendly-fire to clear the danger off him, and he was, so, with my main char out of aoe’s, my protege used Reckless Dweomer to cast a low level Fireball (Hackmaster has multiple Fireballs). And he was successful, the Fireball went off… but the Wild Surge effect was that the spell would persist for d10 rounds, and I rolled a 10.
In Hackmaster, armour has hit points. Whenever you do damage, the first point of damage off each dice damages your armour instead of the character (and in the case of plate, the first 2 points of damage). And my friend Fighter had a tasty suit of Magic Plate Armour. Magic Armour soaks that hp damage, but only suffers damage itself if the attack is magic… like a Fireball.
I mention I cast a lower-level Fireball – this one did D4’s for damage, and I had picked it deliberately as I knew his armour would soak up most of the damage, with only a few points getting through to him. But I hadn’t counted on the fact he would be sat in this Fireball for almost its full duration (I believe he was paralysed for 8 rounds). By even the most conservative maths his armour was doomed to be reduced to ash, and likely his character with it. In the end, we waited till the Ghouls had themselves been vapourised (the few that got out being mopped up by the other characters) before my Wild Mage, as penance, ran into the Fireball himself to drag the Fighter out. Both characters survived, but the Fighters armour lost a permanent point of its Magical Bonus due to the amount of damage it accrued in the time.
Hey, the Fighter survived the encounter. That’s a win in my book.
All of these stories about poorly placed AoEs are bringing back a lot of memories (haven’t we all set a ship or three on fire, though?) But here’s something a little different, not a spell but very much in the same spirit. Also, I love this story, mostly because it didn’t happen to me.
It was the first session of our new campaign. One player had rolled up a monk, and had persuaded the DM to let him get away with a dubious bit of min-maxing: He would be starting the campaign with an adamantine quarterstaff, and no other belongings whatsoever. His entire character was built around making use of this weapon.
So, perhaps taking a bit of inspiration from this, the DM sent us into a lava cave for our first dungeon crawl. After all, anyone with a metal weapon should take pause at fighting elementals, right?
Unfortunately, the monk was chomping at the bit to use his shiny metal quarterstaff, and swung it at the nearest magmin. For those who don’t know, whenever you attack a magmin with a metal weapon — ANY type of metal weapon — it has a small chance to melt into slag. And for all the player’s protests, he couldn’t find anything that suggested adamantine should be immune to this effect.
He lost the quarterstaff and went through the rest of the dungeon unarmed.
There’s something delightfully zen about the story, isn’t there? That’s what I thought, at least — the monk’s player didn’t agree.
Sounds like a good time to take a vow of poverty.
I’ve not done it myself, but several times I’ve had players cast spells that require Fort saves on Undead. In Pathfinder, unless the spell specifically states it affects undead, it works on objects or is harmless, undead have this little trait: Immunity to any effect that requires a Fortitude save.
I always give them a knowledge check before they commit, but they never succeed.
Good on ya for the reflexive knowledge check. Creature types provide a lot of depth, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the majority of players don’t have them memorized.
DM: there are creatures moving in the house in front of you.
Round 1…
Sorcerer: I ready a fire ball
Rogue/Cleric (me): I go closer to investigate
Ninja: I turn invisible
Round 2…
Sorcerer: ready whenever
me: [peeking through window] bunch of monsters
Ninja: [goes in through door]
Round 3…
me: [ducks]
Sorcerer: fire ball through the window!
Ninja: [fails reflex save] well thanks for that! [sulks rest of the evening]
The thing about evasion is that, even though it’s a calculated risk, it’s still a risk.
I think he was mainly counting on Sorcerer using his player knowledge [Ninja turned invisible and goes in] to hold back the Fire Ball.
The thing about invisibility is that it makes you invisible.
I hadn’t noticed :-p
But it didn’t help his mood that we pointed this out afterwards.
„shoulda said something, our characters didn’t know you could do that“
„grumblegrumble“
Once playing as a Wizard, party still all 1lvl pcs, we were ambushed by a small party of wolves. I without thinking much cast Prismatic Spray, only to later discover that my party were positioned in a way that everyone, wolves included, where hit by the spell.
The only ones to resist it were the cleric and rogue. The rest of the party weren’t very happy.
Cue the argument: “Wolves aren’t smart enough to coup de grace!”
So we were a party of new but mid level DnD players tasked with going into a dungeon on another plane to retrieve a relic. We head to the dungeon and see two iron statues flanking it. Now we may have been new to DnD, but we still knew that if you see statues they will animate and attack you. So we decided to get the drop on them, everyone readying actions and then attacking the golems. The golems charge, but my wizard puts a dome of force around one so we only have to deal with one golem. Our druid sees an opportunity and decided to melt the iron golem we were fighting with Heat Metal. So for the next several rounds our druid was healing the golem that was smacking us around and we had no idea until a good knowledge check followed by a frantic “Stop!” By this time the other iron golem had the bright idea to use his sword as a shovel and try to dig out of his little prison, putting it back to two golems. My wizard decides to switch to damage to finish one off and uses his best damage spell: animate objects on 10 daggers. None of them were magical. I knew iron golems were likely resistant to nonmagical damage, but was hoping to at least scratch them. Instead I wasted my last 5th level to hear the daggers chiming off of the iron golem.
The moral of this story: memorize your momster manual for the resistances and Immunities of all the momsters.
https://youtu.be/tOUksDJCijw?t=47m27s
I was pleased with my Wizard when he figured out that “create pit” is a solid answer for golems. He was not pleased with me when he next golem had rocket thrusters.
“I am iron man,” baby!
You know before i star playing Pen and Paper tabletop rpg i used to, and still do, play pc tabletop rpg games. Funny thing, in a computer sometime the rules are streamlined so AoE is no a concern. In a PaP rpg is a big concern, bigger in the finger of my trigger-happy wizards. So many times the rest of the party have got angry to me for forgetting that part of the rules. When the party is in the middle of a grand melee with a group of orc maximized fireball is not the spell you want to cast. Friendly fire have got a new and flaming meaning due to that 🙁
Just remember: monsters are best served well done. PCs are best when raw.
the feat Selective Spell is your friend here, unless your DM is a stinker like me and doesn’t allow it.
What about a Paladin’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti 😉
Phthththth.
Unfortunately I don’t have many stories of getting spells wrong, but the above comic does remind me of a point I’ve been sitting on; Cure Wounds is a garbage spell in 5E.
At the cost of a spell slot, as an action you can heal Xd8+Mod where X is the spell’s level. Attacking with a Warhammer deals 1d8+mod, has no cost, and by level 5 you can do it twice a turn. A better use of your slot would be to prevent the damage entirely with things like *Bless, Shield of Faith, Protection from Evil and Good, and Sanctuary**
The same problem applies to Healing Word, but it has uses around Yo-yo healing. Yo-yo healing is one of my biggest grievances with 5E though. In short; any healing you receive while downed instantly brings you back up because negative HP doesn’t really exist, and damage while downed is just a death save unless the damage is equal to your maximum HP. As such because the numbers on healing are so bad a more effective use of healing spells is to wait for your buddy to get downed, then use your bonus action to bring them back up.
Outside of combat you have hit dice making low-end healing even more worthless. TL;DR: Don’t play a healbot, healers aren’t even necessary in 5E anymore. MMO “Firehose healing” is beneath your dignity.
4E had a pretty elegant solution to managing healing; healing surges. Being healed took from a reserve of stamina. This was represented by healing surges. You had a finite number of surges. Your surge value was 1/4 your max HP by default, but could be improved in ways that I cannot recall. Most healing consumed a surge. Cure Wounds for example would heal 1d8+mod+surge value, and consume a surge. This made all healing more effective, but also more finite. /rant
Yeah… yo-yo healing seems like a feature rather than a bug. You get that sense of “things are serious” but lose (most) of the threat of permadeath. Unfortunately, the trade off is real, and the healing numbers just don’t add up.
Healing in combat is definitely suboptimal, which I thing was an intentional design feature to prevent combats from dragging out. Keeps fights short and brutal. It’s why the only healing worth while uses coveted high level slots (Heal restores almost as much hp as an average disintegrate, and disintegrate isn’t even guaranteed damage).
Regarding yo-yo healing, one solution I have seen to keep it more gritty is to have recovering from 0 hp confer a point of exhaustion. You can still get healed up and the threat of permadeath is not as big, but the near death is harrowing and you won’t be at peak fighting capacity. Do it too much and there is no coming back; you’re dead now.
That’s an interesting solution, gives a bit more weight to dropping unconscious. The only problem I could see with it is if you are fighting an opponent that confers levels of exhaustion anyway, it could make them considerably more dangerous. That’s just a balancing issue for the DM though.
The other good option I’ve seen (which is the way it’s being played on High Rollers, a Twitch D&D stream, currently) is to have injury tables. Every time you drop to 0HP you make a DC10 constitution saving throw, and on a failed save you have to roll on an injury table which has a range of problems from “cuts and bruises” to “lost limb”. Most of the time the PCs will pass, particularly at higher levels, but it makes them good and afraid of dropping to 0. It also applies to named NPCs, which can be fun.
Of course, any change you make will change the balance of the game. I wouldn’t want to play a grave domain cleric in either of those scenarios, because their whole schtick is yo-yo healing. Path of the Berserker Barbarian wouldn’t be great with the first either, given the exhaustion caused by going in to a frenzy stacking and given the high chance of a front liner dropping to 0HP at lower levels.
Grooarr is my favorite. So cute. So… drippy.
Also, hmm. Now I kind of want to play a necromancer whose goal is to get a skeleton or zombie of every creature. Sadly that’s not even remotely a possible thing you could do in 5e.
Also….
Gotta Raise ‘Em All!
My favorite is Divan:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unnaturally-comfortable
I remember in the early days of my Kingmaker game something similar happened.
The party has just killed the Stag Lord and was about to start their kingdom, but still had a few days to explore and fight some things.
They came across a shambling mound, and they really weren’t prepared for his grappling. So the Half-Orc figther gets grappled by the Mound and gets squeezed down to 1 or 2 hitpoints.
Then the Skald, who just didn’t realize the fighter was close to death, has the brilliant idea of casting Sonic Scream (I think) and in the process kills the Shambling Mound and the Fighter.
Since they player wanted change up characters anyway it wasn’t that big of a deal out of game, but in game the chars mourned their beloved half-orc, named the capital of their new Kingdom after him, built a giant statue in his honor in the capital.
I read “shambling mound” and expected electricity-based shenanigans. What a twist!
Out of curiosity, what was the name of the capital?
The proud city and kingdom of Lashante.
It’s not quite “was” yet, we just started Book 6 and decided that all our campaigns from here on universe. So as soon as the next AP with that group starts the Kingdom of Lashante will be still there 🙂
As the proud owner of Carl, the spiked-armor-and-katana-wielding pottery-hating edgelord GMPC Anti-Oradin of Rovagug party healer/tank with negative energy affinity, this comic amuses me.
All dhampirs all the time!
He’s a tiefling, actually, but he has the Vampire Curse from his Oracle level. His Oracle mystery is life, though, which makes things a bit weird. But then again, he’s nothing if not a weird guy, so I guess it works.
Well… I can’t say that I’ve made a mistake as grandeurs as that before… but there have been a few times that I forget about damage reduction or immunities on creatures or brutes. There is a reason that every – single – character I have made has MINIMUM 10 Acids/Alchemist Fires at any given time… First character death (not in my current PFS group) was due to swarms: “I hit it with my sword!” “Your attacks are ineffective and do nothing to deal damage to the swarm. Its turn, moves into your square and you begin taking automatic damage.”
Swarm bane clasp, yo! That’s where it’s at!
You reminded me of my buddy who caught a face full of pyrohydra though. Ten simultaneous breath weapons should have killed him. Then I reminded him he was wearing fire-resistant armor. That mess is occasionally important.
I recently had a Barbarian partymate who ended a fight by passing out when he de-raged (was in negatives, but not close to death). Then he remembered that he had DR 1/-, we did a quick guestimation, concluded he’d taken at least 6 hits during the fight and he magically went from -5 HP to 1. Which is really funny to imagine in my head.
Reminds me of Little John drowning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxdfwbicNk
I can just picture the GM making Robin’s WTF face.
Imagine the setting. It’s 887M41 and we’re into the elite levels of Ascension in my Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader crossover game. The party consists of a Killmarine, a Crusader, a Heirophant, an Explorator Magos, and their valiant Arch-Judgeteer Captain. They were escorting a bunch of nobility who’d been about to be sacrificed for profane purposes. They’d lost their Psyker to a horrible case of Chaos Space Marine Sorceror, but were now primed to escape this lair of Chaos after the Judge somehow managed to kill the bugger with a prison shank (literally 6 Righteous Fury rolls in succession, which caused Sorcy boi to lose his remaining three wounds). All they had to do was defeat the band of crappy cultists in their path and they would escape the vehicle bay and be home free to report this den of iniquity to the Inquisition.
The Crusader, who had ritually burned his own arm off to wield the mighty weapons of the Grey Knights, went first and stepped out of the APC to deal with the filthy scum. The Magos burned (not spent, BURNED) a Fate Point to go NOW NOW NOW. plugged into the controls and floored it, mechanically bellowing for everyone to grab onto something. Everyone wondered why they were leaving the Crusader behind until the entire building went up like a nuke. Apparently, promethium lines for vehicle maintenance aren’t compatible with flamethrowers with high penetration. The casualty (except the Crusader natch) was the sniper rifle the bugger had “borrowed” off the captain that our lovely Arch Judgeteer had literally had since level 1 which to this day has the highest damage total from a single bullet in any of my 40K games (75).
That may be a blunder on the flame-throwing crusader’s part, but what a way to go out!
One of the classic stories in my group of friends is from the earlier days of us playing D&D 3e. The party was delving in a sewer when we were set upon by a pack of small creatures. When the arcane caster’s turn rolls around, the DM says, “There has never been a better time for Burning Hands.”
The player sees nothing wrong with taking this advice and goes for it. The DM then announces that the flames light the methane gas in the sewer and catches everyone in an explosion.
On the flipside, there was the time I was GM’ing my online group through the Pathfinder module Hollow’s Last Hope. They reach a large tree where a tatzlwyrm is hiding. The druid who goes to investigate doesn’t beat its Stealth check and gets pounced into dying status. The bard then casts Sleep to try to knock the wyrm out.
The wyrm is immune to sleep. However, I had not memorized that fact and allowed the spell to work, only discovering my error while the melee guys crit the wyrm into submission. I held my tongue and let it go, at least in part out of guilt for the druid having a bad time.
ಠ_ಠ