Chokepoint
If you happen to have a friendly zombie in the party, then foreboding portals and trapdoors into darkness are no problem. The disposable minion goes first, draws out the inevitable enemy fire, and the PCs pile in after. If you happen to share Necromancer’s protective instincts, however, then you’re in for some serious marching order arguments.
Way back when my gang of neophyte delvers were first dipping their toes into the local megadungeon, they came face-to-face with just such a conundrum. They’d learned to listen at doors before barging through, so they knew there were horrible fluttering things on the far side of the secret passage. Unfortunately, those things also knew that the PCs were preparing to burst through the door. Here’s what I was facing on my side of the GM screen:
Tactics: If the PCs come from area 25, the time it takes to open the door alerts the darklings and allows them to crowd around the door (including above it) to strike at anyone coming through.
What resulted was a bizarre dungeoneering Mexican standoff. As new Pathfinder players, we had to figure out the differences between surprise rounds and readied actions, the precise nature of opportunity attacks, and what exactly this total defense business meant. Rules lookups and learning curves dispatched, all that remained was for someone to dive through the door. The darklings must have been confused by the sounds that came echoing out of the passage.
Rock–paper–scissors-shoot! Rock–paper–scissors-shoot!
“I hate you guys,” said the luckless paladin. I still don’t understand how he survived that first level.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever found yourselves faced with an ominous portal, knowing that an ambush lay on the other side? How did you handle it? Did you push the dude with the highest AC through and hope for the best? Let’s hear all about your best breach and entry tactics down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
This is a prime example of why the spell “Mount” doubles as “Trap Detector”.
Mount? Don’t you mean ‘Wall of horse’? Because that’s how that spell (and its upgraded version) tends to be used. Yay for large-sized, expendable obstacles to block a charge or provide cover.
I prefer “celestial dolphin” myself: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/evil-summons
As you know, we play Pathfinder. Our best Breach and Entry strategy to date is the Summoner, who has multiple GM infuriating options. The first of which should be Earth Elementals. They are low on the summon list and get Earthglide, which allows them to flow through everything stone and dirt related. They can pop their heads up, make a Perception check, then report back to the Summoner easily. Next on the list are Giant Spiders, who have Tremorsense. While not as effective at a distance as Earth Elementals and less beefy when the blows start flying, they are very good at determining if someone lurks behind the door.
Coming in second and my personal experience, is Shadowdancer. Between Shadow Familiar and Hide in Plain Sight, its really easy to just not be where the enemy expects or use an incorporeal familiar to scout. Arcane Trickster will probably be third.
The Earth Elementals are the ones that seem to drive GMs the most insane though. One of our dungeons “had rebar in all the walls” so that there was metal and they couldn’t Earthglide through. That’s when the Spiders came out, and the Summoner got a book thrown at him.
For me, the question isn’t so much about scouting as getting through the chokepoint. You know the enemy is there. They know you’re there. You’ve got to make like the Persian army and get through all those Spartans blocking the way. What do?
Shadow Dancer throws a Stinking Cloud with Schadow Conjuration and lets the Shadow companion go to work in the conceilment. That’ll distract them enough to pass the bottle neck of the door.
That’s what invisible wizards with Fireball prepared are for. Or Shadowdancers with a Wand of Fireball. If you can convince the GM to let you use the rules for sniping, you play a Tiefling and get that one racial trait that lowers the penalty to your hide check after sniping. Or you sneak past them and gank their spellcaster. When everyone is distracted, the fighter rushes into the middle of them, death.
If you aren’t a Shadowdancer, anything that provides concealment (except darkness, because everything with Darkvision can see through it. Don’t even bother unless you have Deeper Darkness or are obviously facing things without Darkvision.) can cover your entrance. Alternately, using the Summer Example earlier, the Earth Elementals hit them in the back, you hit them in the front. Pincer attack them and cackle madly as your GM panics.
Are those elves, drow, or some other pointy-eared bow-shooters that the evil team is fighting? Also, nice to see that the evil team values APs puppy/hellhound-in-training over AP.
I believe those are the archers from Samurai Jack:
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/038b5a_e3c128ad6fda4f4981e6db81f895cf05~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_630,h_354,al_c,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/038b5a_e3c128ad6fda4f4981e6db81f895cf05~mv2.png
You can tell by the pointy ears. 😛
I once played in a Spacemaster campaign (Sc-fi Rolemaster) and decided to play as a demolitions expert. I don’t know whether it was my fault for not asking, or the DM’s for not telling me (or perhaps never checking the rules before we put them to use), but I never clarified the effectiveness of the various explosive devices listed in the equipment lists. Grenades ran from Lv1-Lv5 (in stun, fragmentation, plasma, etc flavours) and “charges” ran from Lv6-Lv10. So I tooled up my explosive expert with a few lv3 frag grenades, a lv5 plasma for big problems, and a couple of lv7 charges, and thought I was good.
We were set a mission to investigate a military post that had gone silent. We rolled up in our APC (another PC was a tank driver), found no-one answering the door bell, and our passcards not functioning, so I thought “time to shine!”. The rest of the party (the tank driver and the party medic) waited in the armoured vehicle 20-30m from the main entrance gate, while I slunk up with my blasting charge, strapped it to the door, and ran off to the side to hide in a hedge to press the trigger.
Well, seems the lv7 was a teeny bit of a bigger bang than anyone had been expecting. I certainly opened the gate. But in the process shredded a good 10m of wall away to either side, vapourised the group of insurgent guards lurking on the other side, blew myself and what remained of my hedge several dozen meters, tore the tracks off our APC, and filled the inside with flying shrapnel that crit our tank driver (which would have caused him to bleed out had the medic not been wearing power armour, so was unaffected by the shrapnel, and able to stabilize him).
Gods damned moranth munitions….
https://malazan.fandom.com/wiki/Moranth_munitions
This is the reason why sappers aren’t invited to parties!
Back in one of the living world campaigns I was in that allowed custom races, I had done a little bit of an experiment to see how high I could get a custom race’s AC, and then build one of them as a tank. My AC at 6th level (the starting level of the part of the campaign I was in) ended up being something silly like 32 (Touch 20, FF 22), and I had a pretty good pool of hit points as well. The character was also mostly selfless, but with a bit of a gloryhound streak. I went through a LOT of doors first with that character. Also took a lot of traps to the face, as we lacked a proper rogue, but we did have a very effective cleric, so it all worked out.
Like we talked about way back in “Barbarian vs. Thief”…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/barbarian-vs-thief
…Face-tanking traps is the traditional occupation of big dudes when they aren’t busy cracking heads. Way to contribute!
This is why I love playing god wizards; situations like this offer such opportunities that don’t necessarily involve just sending in the guy with the higest AC. Some of my favorites:
1) Cast an illusion and let it soak the attacks and spring the ambush.
2) Open the door from a safe distance with mage hand, then lead the charge with fireball. Put a grease or black tentacles in front of the door to make it hard for them to just charge out.
I one game I played as synthesist summoner, we were trying to get out of a tunnel compmex and the front entrance was guarded by a giant praying mantis. The mouser rogue went out first and managed to roll perception and stealth high enough to avoid its notice, but none of the rest of us could squeeeze through the small hole to the outside without being noticed. So my summoner summoned a fiendish eagle right next to the mantis, then readied his action to summon another as soon as the first popped. The eagle ate the surprse round, which let the rogue then engage more safely as our sorcerer on the inside started flinging magic missiles and I summoned more eagles. The mantiss kept going after the screeching summons which just kept coming, until after the 4th one the mantis gave up and fled.
Love that illusion play. Such a good use for the spell. It’s just a bummer that you’ve got to rely on reasonable GM calls to let the spell do its thing.
Always been a fan of circumventing doors and turning the surprise around on the lurkers behind the doorway, whether it be with an undead bulette burrowing around from beneath, a full moon lunar in warform Koolaid-Maning through a wall, or rolling a magic jar under the gap of the door while the rest of the party hears the baddies all turning on each other in confusion and terror. Not that you always get to do those things, but it’s always satisfying when you can pull it off.
Magic jar might be the ideal solution to this situation. Such evil. Much effective. Wow.
In one of their worst tactical blunders, the party came across two doors, both likely presenting ambushes, and decided that the best course of action would be to open both at once.
Dunno what they were thinking with that. Nobody died, but three of the five of them did go down in the ensuing super-battle.
“No one would be stupid enough to walk into this trap.”
“No one but us.”
“They’ll never expect it!”
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4x0MbVYVE2A/hqdefault.jpg
Opening both doors could work: open both doors simultaneously, run away, and hope that both sets of ambushers pile out and “ambush” each other?
In this cases a necromancer goes handy. By this kind of situation is that i recommend to enslave a halfling village, you send them through the door, either is safe or you revive them for a second use. By doing this you also give their miserable life some meaning, also as technically they are dying to save someone life they are going straight to heaven, so you also give them a free pass metaphysical pass to a better afterlife as reward. And you Colin, where thinking bad of me for suggesting this 🙁
🙁 indeed.
Tell me three bad things about halfing slavery. You would’n because it’s great, and good for the economy #MakeGolarionGreatAgain 🙂
increases sinspawn population
destabilizing effect on empire due to adventuring liberators
hampers innovation in agricultural techniques
Not a single good one.
On other things, i wanted to ask you something. If you were to organize a game based on The Handbook of Heroes, which character would you play?
In GURPS Dungeon Fantasy you have the standard two methods of door opening: Ye Olde Fashioned “Kick In The Door” and the more subtle “Pick The Lock” (as befits all dungeon adventure games).
However… in DF Thieves are, well, let’s just say “underwhelming” and leave it be eh? So you tend to get the beefy fighter types who can’t be arsed to wait around for the noodly armed types to try their meager skills at door openry and just kick everything down. Doors. Chest lids. Gates. Manacles on prisoners. Traps. Enemies. Walls…
Of my four current GURPS DF characters, two are door kickers and two are door pickers.
Jednesa the Ogress Barbarian has to actually be restrained (usually by politely asking as no one is capable of holding her back physically) from just strolling up to open doors and ripping them off their hinges. Usually by accident. The one door she’s had to kick was torn from its hinges and sailed ten feet into the room, laying out half the enemies that were waiting for us to bust in.
The other characters have yet to have a memorable door incident.
You’re the reason we can’t have adamantine doors. That shit just becomes loot.
Not if the stuff bolting it to the wall is adamantine. Good luck busting it down then.
I’m not sure of the lore accuracy, but I remember hearing that Adamantine was an alloy, and the moment it set and alloyed since it was nigh unbreakable it wasn’t going to be used for anything else. Unless someone wanted adamantine doors of the exact size and shape provided, you couldn’t resell them. Once alloyed it couldn’t be melted back into usable parts anyways.
Metalurgy is the traditional counter to door thieves.
I had a GM make that terrible mistake in a Pathfinder homebrew campaign. He put a pair of pure mithral doors in the BBEG’s lair. Naturally instead of seeking out the two part key as he planned, my sorcerer disintegrated the wall next to the door. We later came back and looted the doors in a portable hole. Credit to the GM, he calculated out the doors weight and we got the full price for them. 50k~ gp. Not a bad haul. To be fair we were 12-13th level, so split 4 ways it wasn’t that unreasonable.
Monte Cook put “blue steel” doors into the dungeon I’m running. Same indestructible idea content gating, less worry for runaway profits. (The shtick is that you’ve got to find the password or find another route.)
I seem to recall this being an issue with a tournament module in the far past. The solution in later renditions was the have them merely magicked to look and act like it until removed, becoming a less valuable mundane material afterwords. That of course will inevitably annoy the heck out of your players though.
Heh. Fool’s mithral.
I love chokepoints. They make it so attacks only go for the hard target. If the enemy is going to attack someone they might as well waste their efforts on the hard target. MMO tanking isn’t a thing. Standing in the doorway is one of the easiest forms of functional tanking to pull off.
The funny thing aboot AC is that increasing it while it’s already high dramatically improves its’ math.
Let’s look at a Hill Giant vs. a Paladin with plate, a shield, and the defense fighting style for 21 AC.
The hillbilly has +8 to hit and does 3d8+5 damage for an average of 18.5 per hit, and 32 on a crit. But not every attack hits.
Against AC 21 they hit on a 13. Averaging hits and misses that’s 7.4 expected damage per attack before factoring critical hits, and 8.075 per attack after factoring in crits.
Now if our Paladin ups his AC by 2 to 23 using a Shield of Faith spell the giant hits on a d20 roll of 15 the giant does an expected 5.55 before crits, and 6.225 after crits. That took off almost a third of the expected damage.
Now lets say our Paladin loves offense so they use a 2-hander instead and use all their slots for smites. Their AC sits pretty at 19. That means Hilga the hill giant hits on an 11. A 50% chance. 9.25 before crits, and a 9.925 after calculating crits. That’s almost a quarter more than if the Paladin had used a shield, and almost one and a half times if the Paladin had used a metal and a faith shield.
I’ve found that in a way, tanking does exist in the most unlikely place in 5e: the barbarian. Not high AC mind you- that’s actually counter productive because it incentivizes the enemy to target another character they can hit. No, a barbarian actually draws fire with reckless attack. And with their damage resistance (especially if like in my party, they go bear totem) they basically double the effectiveness of healing. Plus having a huge hp pool to buffer means the baddies can wack away all day and never knock down a raging barbarian (well, at least as long as rage lasts).
To be honest, the 5e interpretation of barbarian isn’t my favorite but it serendipitously fits my player’s halfling barbarian tank concept. Obviously you can build a barb with some customization but I’m used to barbarians being melee damage powerhouses that they’re just not in 5e.
Choke points are great when you’re the one taking advantage of ’em. When you’ve got to fight your way through the portcullis in X rounds to keep your favorite NPC from getting sacrificed, the calculus changes in a hurry. I prefer defending the walls too. It’s much less fun when circumstance forces you to climb over ’em.
Shifting gears for a second, can you help me understand the math here? If I’m reading you right, the numbers are as follows:
19:11:9.25
21:13:7.4
23:15:5.55
I’m not sure I understand why AC is better for high-AC builds. I mean, the difference in average damage per attack is 1.85 between 19 and 21 AC. The difference in average damage between 21 and 23 AC is also 1.85. The percentage thing seems less relevant than the fact every +2 to AC means +1.85 damage per attack.
I suppose that the dramatic percentage shift represents the fact that you’re more effective at being “the guy that gets hit” in party role terms…?
So the funny thing aboot the dynamics there. Adventuring parties rarely go beyond 8 combatants when including NPC allies. Enemy hordes can be massive. Therefore AoE tends to be more effective against monsters than PCs. If your enemy blockades you, blow em’ up.
First you calculate the average damage from a hit. Then you calculate the extra damage from a crit. Divide the extra from a crit by 20 since it only comes up 1/20th of the time.
Once you have the average hit, (Every die’s average result is half it’s max +0.5. A d8 is 4.5 for example.) and 1/20th of the crit’s bonus you factor in AC. Every side of the d20 it hits on is an extra 5% to hit. Hitting on a 16 for example is 25% because it hits on 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20.
Take your average hit and divide it by your to hit percentage. Then add 1/20th of the extra from a crit.
Percentages are what matters here. If you had a 20% chance to hit, (Hits on a 17+) and I increase my AC by 2 then you’ve only got a 10% chance to hit. I have effectively halved your damage output. Crits just make the math a little wonky.
If you had a 75% chance to hit my Wizard (Hits on a 6+ on the d20) and I give him a Shield of Faith then you now have a 65% chance to hit them. The average damage has not notably shifted.
To long didn’t math: Give that Ring of Protection to your heavy.
I’ve encountered a few of these kinds of scenarios myself. It tends to result in everyone but the door opener having a readied action to attack the first thing they see and the person opening the door doing it from an angle that should be difficult to see.
So it winds up more or less working the same as a standard round of initiative.
Though there have certainly been variations on the plan depending on the circumstances and resources available.
Initiative shenanigans? Let’s do this!
Since I already wrote it up in a reddit comment, here’s the explanation of how I handled the interaction in today’s comic. Keep in mind that this was a Pathfinder game. Ahem:
There’s no surprise round because no one was surprised. All combatants were aware of one another.
You can’t take readied actions outside of initiative, since the consequences of readied actions cause you to shift in the initiative order. (A “readied action” outside of initiative is called “a surprise round.”)
With that logic in place, the critical decision was when to roll initiative. Rather than rolling during the Mexican standoff and letting everyone involved set up their own specific readied action (which is a bit silly), I decided to roll initiative during the inciting moment of the combat: When my paladin player said, “Screw all you guys. I dive through the door.” That statement is tantamount to saying, “I’m deciding to start this combat.”
Look at it this way: Initiative is the thing that determines the order of combat, right? I therefore decided to let the basic mechanic do its job despite the weird situation.
As it played out, the big question was whether the paladin won initiative or the darklings did. As it happened, the darklings won the roll. They got to ready attacks as their standard actions and also make attacks of opportunity when the paladin passed through. I know it seems counterintuitive, but in my mind it represents the darklings being that little bit quicker on the draw, reacting to the paladin’s advance rather than being caught flat-footed by it. That’s what their higher initiative roll represented.
The paladin took a bunch of attacks and shrugged off 2/3 of them due to good AC. From there combat proceeded normally.
Hmmm. In my circumstances it seemed to make sense to everyone that you could “ready” actions outside of initiative since…. well what really stops you?
So how it tends to work out for me is both sides have readied actions. Then the door opener opens the door. Then initiative is rolled since everyone on both sides aside from the door opener is prepared to fire at the first thing they see. Then those attacks are resolved in initiative order. Then once all of those finish, door opener gets to do the rest of their turn which is automatically at the top of the initiative order since nothing else would really make sense. Then initiative carries out as normal.
To my way of thinking, “ready actions outside of initiative” is the definition of a surprise round. You’re basically getting two surprise rounds if you ready outside of initiative.
shrug To me you can’t have a “surprise round” if nobody is the least bit surprised.
You misunderstand. I agree that you can’t have a surprise round in this scenario.
I just happen to think that, if you find yourself in a situation where everyone has a readied action, that situation is better represented by simply rolling initiative to decide who goes first. Turn sequence is what initiative is for after all.
Your HP is a resource, just like Spell Slots or Ki points, that some characters have more of and some have less. But if it’s not ever being depleted, then you’re wasting it since it’s sitting there doing nothing.
Yes I do play a lot of characters whose main strategy is “apply face to enemy”; why do you ask?
Suicide black, baby! https://img.scryfall.com/cards/large/en/ice/154.jpg?1517813031
In my group it’s usually the ‘beefiest’ person going through doors, usually by way of a well-placed kick. And that can be beefiest by way of most HP, best AC, best Init in case things go downhill, best defensive spells… just whatever adds up to this person most likely to survive whatever’s on the other side of the door. Heck, sometimes it’s the person who just hits the hardest so they can just start clearing the way.
I’ve found an image of this brave soul: https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/glass_cannon_by_swarleyswazenoskie-d604r4t_6338.png
This is what hand grenades are for. Get ’em, Alchemist!
I remember a Reddit challenge to make a SWAT Team party, and most respondents focused on this issue. The most common combo was a Barbarian with Stunning Irruption ( https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/stunning-irruption-combat/ ), some way to cast Obscuring Mist/Fog Cloud (or an Alchemist with Smoke Bomb) and either 1-level dips in Waves Oracle or 8,000 gp Fogcutting Lenses/Goz Masks. Smoke ’em out, take ’em down.
Recently, my players heard words coming from down the hall in an enemy base. The Druid used Summon Nature’s Ally and sent a squad of Compsonathus to check it out. One immediately hit a Blackstar Bomb mine and another one got one-shotted by a max damage roll of one of the archers in the room. The survivor achieved that difficult feat of rolling a 20 to confirm a nat 20 crit, which, because it does 1d4-1 damage, did 5 damage to a DR 5 enemy. So yeah, they were cannon fodder without a doubt. (I ruled that 1 point of damage got through on the crit in acknowledgement of, well, it being a crit.)
Forever ago in my Runelords campaign, we were raiding a barn full of ogrekin. Monk punches the barred door open, only to find two rows of ogrekin in elevated positions, armed with crossbows. The party scatters and takes cover outside, but rather than moving forward to engage us, the enemy is content to hold their ground with readied actions. After a round or two of arguing, I activate my Magus’s immunity to conventional weaponry (Snake Style + Mirror Image + high HP) and dash across the doorway, drawing fire so that the Sorcerer could leave cover to get line of sight and toss one set of enemies into a Created Pit. Magic defenses like Mirror Image and Displacement are probably perfect for the kind of alerted door breach scenario you described. Especially since it avoids one of the key issues of D&D tanking, in that the enemy can’t just ignore the high-AC target and go after other enemies (as happened once when a boss put all of her attacks into the PC beside my Magus, which killed him).
After reading this comic, I broke out my two greatest tanks out of my character sheet box – Edam the ultimate swordsman (Crane Style Daring Champion Cavalier) and Dethbladé Soulstyyl (real name Carl) the unkillable edgelord Anti-Oradin – and had them duel it out for the title of ultimate tank. It took 15 rounds, but Edam proved triumphant after inflicting a mere 338 points of damage on Carl. I think either of them would do fine here.
This tactic is so damn good. I think the only reason we don’t see every party adopt it is the sheer obnoxiousness of rolling % dice. My players have actually begun to groan and facepalm whenever the mirror images or the fog clouds come out, no matter which side is using them. Yakety Sax for days as everyone swings and misses.
My players are about 10 in-game seconds away from meeting a boss built around that.
I’m actually thinking of scaling her back a level or two. 7d6+7 damage save-or-be-Slowed Fireball might be a little much if they can barely hit her as it is.
If it’s a sometimes food, you’re golden. My guys were averting heir eyes from a level’s with of Medusa cultists, and 50% miss chance in every fight makes grown fighters cry.
My kick-in-the-door playstyle is very suited to this kind of scenario. When you know or highly suspect that the person behind the door is intelligent enough to put forth a strategy to counter you, the last thing they’ll expect is someone jumping the gun and interrupting their planning phase.
Announce your presence, eat all the damage you need to, then rush in and kill someone. The lack of available actions (due to readied actions) means the rest of the team has time to get in to the room, observe the situation, and adjust on the fly.
On a meta level, I find that the players are better at this than the DM, since the players have more than one brain to strategize. The DM is limited in numbers, which means they will make mistakes sooner than players. And if the damage-sponge has survived the first round of readied actions and attacks of opportunity, then they get to contribute as well.
And if it means any difference, I prefer hp-tanks to AC-tanks. On top of having bigger numbers, it means you get effected by more things, which I tend to think is more badass for a character. The Boromirs of the world that take many arrows to fall are more easily remembered than the Frodos that tank hits due to high AC.
It has also been argued that high-HP tanks aggro enemies easier, because the enemies still feel like they are making progress and have a chance to take down the target, whereas a high-AC tank makes it pretty clear pretty fast that they aren’t scratching her. The key to tanking is be able to take many hits and also be able to convince the enemy that issuing those hits is in their interest.
HP tanks also get cooler funerals:
https://www.wordonfire.org/wp-content/media/brboromirlastrites.jpg
Though I remain irritated to this day that the weapons of the Uruk-hai Boromir defeated weren’t put in the boat with him. It’s an easy detail right there in the book. How hard is it to shove a bit of cutlery into that canoe? Grumble bargle!
My group never has this problem… we’ve got that guy who’s always going to to be the first into trouble.
The use of the phrase “that guy” is cause for concern:
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/That_guy
I surmise that this player brings their own problems.
I’ve developed a tendency to make characters that become the point guy. In my 5e campaigns, I’ve made a couple of barbarians who have high AC and very high physical stats as well as the requisite shitload of HP, making them ideal for kicking in the door. I also started out Curse of the Crimson Throne with a Warpriest whose AC was basically untouchable to most enemies outside of crit threat range once we got past the first couple levels and he could get decent armor. Unfortunately I couldn’t (and still can’t) roll worth a damn so while they couldn’t hit me, I also struggled to hit them.
The curse of the armored personnel carrier. Your character is safe, but the offense is lacking. That mess tends to course-correct once your bonuses come online at higher level. And since I’m a year late replying…
How’s the character doing?
I love every character, but Witch is my favourite, snort.
I promised that I’ve got sillier comments, too, so – I actually LOVE being that moron when I’m playing instead of hosting. Running into a room yelling ‘YAHOO, I GOT THIS!’ (in-character, of course) is the best. Being gibbed by a very obvious trap the thief may or may not have noticed is hilarious – and when you DO successfully tank the eldritch portal of myriad squamous mandibles, it’s a moment to remember.
Nothing comes to mind that’s quite so ‘only-in-tabletop-gaming’ as your example, but! One of my favourites was when our party turned a heavily reinforced BBEG-iron-door into a mobile tower shield? Me and the barbarian were using it to deflect arrows and physical attacks, while the sorcerer was using a homebrew staff to surround it in a SR bubble that might as well have been antimagic. We were very slowly crossing a giant, decrepit stone bridge, but the idea of turning what’d been intended to be a scary chokepoint into a battering ram was so cool the DM allowed it.
Uh, one last thing for my technically illiterate self. Is it possible to login to gravatar/wp instead of typing my info in all the time? Bahaha!
Dunno. I’ve never used commenting on WP from the user side. What exactly are you having to do?
Pulled that trick once to foil a glyph trap. Just hold the door over your head like an umbrella. No one has to look at the scary writing!