Confessional
Poor Cleric. The burden of being the group’s “rules guy” is a heavy one. It happens to be a feeling I know all too well. Scouring FAQs and errata for correct rulings is often a thankless task. And worse, when those lesser mortals gathered around the table manage to catch you in a bad ruling, you may be disbarred from practicing rules law entirely.
Today’s story comes courtesy of a peculiar draconic chamber. The party was questing for 12 sigils of power, and they knew that the latest one lay shrouded behind a runic circle. All they had to do was break the plane of the circle, sketch the suddenly-extant sigil, and be on their merry way. Unfortunately, four huge dragon statues were arranged about the perimeter of the room. It didn’t take my players long to guess what might happen when they disturbed the circle. It emanated conjuration magic after all. And for those of you keeping score at home, that’s exactly the sort of magic that might 1) summon a sigil into being, or 2) replace dragon statues with actual dragons.
Being high-level adventurers, the party did the intelligent thing. They prepped for the fight. This mostly involved the wizard getting a good night’s sleep and memorizing four wall of force spells. The party’s intent was to wall off the dragon statues before triggering the summons. It was honestly a good idea. The only problem was the dragons themselves. These were powerful beasts, long-lived and redolent with magic. In other words, two of the four had access to dimension door, meaning they could bypass the force walls with ease.
Suddenly, it was go time. The wizard cast his spells. The party crossed the circle’s boundary, causing both the sigil and the dragons to spring into being. The designated scrivener started scrivening. While the sigil was being copied over to parchment, everyone else had great fun taunting the dragons through their transparent barriers. There were many moonings; several birds were flipped; I couldn’t wait to wipe the smirks from their faces.
“Two of the dragons begin casting,” I said. “Laying claws upon their companions, they prepare to dimension door into your improvised force cage. That will end the casters’ turns of course, but the other two dragons—”
“OBJECTION!”
It was the party wizard. He’d made good progress copying the sigil, and was just one round away from completing the job. “What age category are these alleged dragons?”
I flipped through my notes. “I suppose I can divulge that information. They’re in the Old category.”
“And what caster level is an Old dragon?”
I furrowed my GM-ly brow. “They’re 9th,” I said.
“Aha! Then would you be so kind as to explain to the court how a 9th level caster is able to dimension door a huge creature?”
I looked at my stat blocks. I looked at the battlefield. He was right! In Pathfinder 1e, you’ve got to hit Caster Level 12 before you can begin teleporting the big boys.
As I said, there were many moonings. Several birds were flipped. My players finished copying the sigil, ignored the dragons that were suddenly in their midst, and simply teleported out of harm’s way on the following initiative pass. Both my dragons and I were left to rage impotently. I doubt I’ll live that one down any time soon.
So in the spirit of today’s comic, it’s confession time! When have you YOU biffed a rules call? Did you manage to catch it mid-session, or was it only something you realized after the fact? Help Cleric (and me!) to feel a little better by sharing your most grievous rules-sins 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.
First off, your wizard doesn’t get off scott free either, as the dragons could still dimension door themselves, even if they couldn’t bring their allies, as the hug creature part only applies to guys they bring with them. I would say my most memorable rule mistake was with dimension door as well, though in 5th edition. We were in the middle of fighting a blue dragon when it decide to flee into the surrounding sand after being brought to near death, though not before purposely setting his lair to disintegrate around us in a couple rounds, dropping a few thousand tons of sand onto our head since we were around 300ft underground. While our barbarian decided to stay stuck to the dragon with the sword he stuck into it and punch it to death while being ripped apart by the sand it was swimming through, everyone else thought they were rather screwed since it would be almost impossible to get out in time. Luckily though, I knew dimension door, and simply teleported out myself and the other 3 party members, rescuing us. The problem however, is that in 5e, you A. can only bring one willing creature with you, and B. said creature has to be your size or smaller, and as I got reincarnated into a halfling, which meant that the only person I should have been able to rescue was myself, which I realized at the end of that session. In the end, we decided that my guy managed to just overcharge the spell in desperation, but as someone who was a big rules guy, there was a good amount of egg on my face with that. I forget how the DM actually intended us to get out for that one. Regardless, I was at least happy that everyone got out alive, as we managed to save the barbarian too after he finished punching the dragon too death by me transforming into a dire mole with polymorph and dragging him out of the sand, with him nearly punching me too death as well in the process since he didn’t know who I was.
Also confusing, didn’t the description say they were putting force walls round each of the dragons anyway? They prepared four of them, for four statues. So they wouldn’t be able to touch the other dragons anyway.. but yeah, as you say, the two with dimension door coulda just got out
There was topography involved. Two of the walls sealed off long, narrow strips of the chamber (each strip containing a pair of dragons) while the other two walls closed off the ends of this box. There weren’t enough 10′ sections of wall to seal off each dragon completely.
They did. The dragons’ turn ended, the party’s scrivener finished scrivening, and then the good guys teleported out before the dragons could act again.
Ah oops, misread that:).
Could the dragons teleport slightly above the scrivener? Falling down doesn’t need an action last I checked.
Heh. The old free action crush maneuver. It’s a cool idea, but that’s also a mechanical can of worms.
Of course, like all weird technical rules, invoking this clause in the context of teleportation (as opposed to summon / calling spells) is also up for debate: https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2n5uq?Can-you-Teleport-MidAir#1
One argument in favor would be that dragons can fly and one could thus argue that “the open air” is a surface capable of supporting them (at least assuming they are flapping their wings, or gliding or something), then after appearing the dragon could choose to fall as a free action by no longer doing that.
Of-course on the other hand there is the meta element that the reason for that rule is to prevent the summoning of big creatures above foes from being an effective attack spell.
On the third hand (apparently we are an alchemist) with how relatively wimpy the falling object rules are in pathfinder perhaps that’s not really necessary as a consideration. (a huge dragon might do as little as 3d6 damage with a reflex save DC 15 for half, assuming that being made of meat they are closer in density to being made of wood than to being made of stone).
This consideration would be strenghtened when teleporting instead of summoning since that means the caster will likely take the damage from falling themselves instead of getting to pawn it off on an expendable summoned minion.
Yeah… We can get into semantic squabbles about what the word “surface” means. I’m acutally inclined to allow casters to teleport mid-air. How else is that flying barbarian supposed to cut off a fleeing dragon’s retreat, after all?
The real problem is that, if we don’t apply the clause I mentioned to teleportation, there’s nothing to prevent you from teleporting inside of another creature. The RAI clearly wants to avoid that scenario.
In my own games, I plan to enforce this mess selectively. If the barbarian wants to get teleported above that fleeing dragon and try to grab on? Roll for it. If someone tries to teleport inside the dragon’s windpipe? We’re gonna have words.
Any dang way, I’ve thought about this encounter a bit more since I wrote the post. In retrospect, the dragons actually should have disrupted the scrivening thanks to the attack of opportunity rules: “Use skill that takes 1 round –> Usually [provokes].” Still, I’m happy with the way it played out. The player felt like a genius for invoking rules knowledge to salvage a tough situation. That works for me.
Let’s see, rules biffs!
I didn’t realize that using a pearl of power took an entire action to perform on its own, and that you couldn’t cast the spell you’d prepare out of it in the same action. I and every other party I played with (over five years of weekly games) assumed that you could just expend the pearl and cast the spell simultaneously.
I didn’t know that all the restoration spells have a 3-rounds cast time until half a year ago. Another case of ‘stuff nobody noticed until it was pointed out’. A similar thing happened with the Enlarge Person and Summon Monster spells, but those I learned fairly early, only after a year of playing.
Our Oracle spent the majority of a fight blinded by a Shining Child. It was only after the fight was over that we realized that the Heal spell, which they regularly used at this point, removes blindness as well.
I assumed that the ‘Beyond Morality’ Wizard discovery effectively made you count as the best/chosen alignment for all purposes, including feats and such. What it actually did was immunize you to a very narrow field of alignment spells or detection abilities. I luckily didn’t grab the discovery before I realized this.
I spent a long time trying to work out how to make a Warpriest functional by gaining a sacred weapon for a weapon that wasn’t associated with their Deity. And then after reading thr class features, I realized that they apply that to anything that they have Weapon Focus in (which they also get as a class feature).
I spent my last round of shopping in Starfinder by binging out and spending wildly, working on the assumption that we entered the endgame of the Dawn of Flame AP, that there would be no shopping beyond this point, and that we’d finish the adventure. And then I realized that we were on the penultimate book, rather than the finale.
Nobody in our group could figure out how the protection from alignment spells worked against the mental control effects – whether they offered complete immunity, an extra/bonus save, or how they worked if cast on someone who was already controlled.
We had the rather unfortunate realization after a party member got hit by Dominate Person, that it had a duration in days, and that its effect did NOT cease after killing the controller, with the victim forced to enact the last command it was given for the entire duration. Meaning anyone dominated would HAVE to be dispelled or knocked out/restrained to prevent them murdering our party members (or a specific PC that they were ordered to kill). This nearly got me killed on two occasions. Luckily, we had options to dispel it.
Heh. Would you look at that? Neat!
I really need to read ahead in Dead Suns and find out of Book 6 has a shopping opportunity. I can’t imagine how it will narratively, but you never know….
Narratively, you don’t need to actually ‘shop’ in Starfinder, as there’s an alternative – making your own stuff out of UPBs.
The crafting rules, and the way UPBs work (which are equivalent in value to credits, and are used as fuel/materials for the setting’s equivalent of 3D printers) let you craft virtually any item, assuming you have people with the appropriate skills (mysticism for magic, engineering for tech stuff, either for hybrid items, medicine for drugs, etc…) and have a ship with an appropriate workspace or laboratory. Beyond that you’re only limited by time required to craft a given item and the amount UPBs you have.
The intent of this system is that you can play scenarios where the PCs have crashed their ship on a planet and need to repair it, are stranded in space, or are otherwise unable to return to a place to shop for supplies at. UPBs serve as a handwave option so PCs don’t have to scavenge for high-tech ship parts on a planet of dinosaurs and cavemen or such.
I’ve always been confused by the UPB economy– why are credits even necessary when you can just fabricate whatever you need from the base components? This is exactly what Eclipse Phase addresses would be different about the game world. How exactly are UPBs made anyways?
Credits are virtual/digital currency, so they’re always more convenient to use than UPBs, which are physical rice-sized objects that need storing or transport. Kind of like the difference between coins and paper money.
You can, for example, transfer 100,000 credits to someone on the other side of a planet with the push of a button, but transporting 100,000 UPBs is a major logistical task that you need to hire a ship crew for.
So credits are useful for everyday business or transactions, whilst UPBs are essential for spacefaring, colonization and manufacturing and are useful enough to be equal in value as credits as far as trading goes.
As for how UPBs are made, there’s several recycling-style machines that generate UPBs out of tech, organic products, corpses, or similar. You can ‘sell’ a gun by tossing it into a recycling machine where you get 10% of its value back as UPBs. There’s also likely factories that create UPBs en masse out of mining or organic products that are convenient for a given planet.
Wait, shortswords are piercing in 5e AND Pathfinder, like a dagger? I thought they were a slashing weapon, or both slashing and piercing. Today I learned, I guess.
Wait a minute, Goldie isn’t even a Shortsword, she’s a longsword (or similar non-rapier, slashing-capable sword with a long blade, given she’s as long as Mr. Stabby, who is described in the cast page as a Bastard Sword). This would make the Slasher feat functional after all!
Does Thief never actually use Goldie / Goldie never lets her unsheathe her in any combat, or is she making a longsword + shortsword TWF build?
Goldie is a shortsword. Why else would Thief be the one using her? Finesse weapons, bro!
There are plenty of other finesse weapons, including a few swords (rapiers being the most prominent by far).
Pffft. Like someone with Thief’s pirate background…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/diva
…would ever use a unthematic weapon like a rapier. Ha!
What about a Sun Blade? It’s a unique magic weapon, but it’s the size of a bastard sword while being wielded like a shortsword. Probably still does slashing damage though since it hits as a bastard sword, so maybe Cleric should have been more specific.
Yeah that’s a plausible situation – there’s quite a few items that are the appearance of one type of item but mechanically function as another. Mithral Shirt, Wizard’s Mail, Celestial Armor, Djezet Skin, Cayden’s Fighting Tankard, and such.
In this Case, Goldie might be a longsword in appearance (or is a shortsword, but it’s hard to compare scales in the comic), but mechanically functions as a shortsword.
Huh, makes me wonder why the The Anti-Party even wanted Goldie to begin with then. Barbarian has little use from light weapons, Paladin likewise is better off with a Holy Avenger rather than a sword that encourages greed, and both Oracle and Sorcerer are non-martials.
A Roman gladius short sword is definitely a piercing weapon. In general, I think the idea of a short sword is that it is meant for situations when you don’t have space to swing your whole arm around (like enclosed spaces or when you’re a part of a shield formation), so thrusting is the more powerful attack option.
Pathfinder 1e at least has the machete, which is essentially a short sword but slashing. Plus, it’s funny! (I maaaaaaaaaaay have a machete-wielding unkillable swordsman build.)
huh, I thought that longswords and shortswords where slashing or piercing your choice when attacking (depending on whether you stapped or cut with them).
Turns out that was an old houserule that I was unaware was a houserule.
To the confessional with you!
What’s the artwork on that book Priest is holding? A witch being burned/boiled in a cauldron? A wizard(ette) who managed to ignite a cauldron and their spellbook on fire simultaneously?
A female wizard… with a cauldron… Of everything you mentioned, I think those are the most important details.
laughs in the heresy of letting people do slashing or piercing with swords
heh. heresy. I still sometimes wonder what the comic would have been like if people voted for Space Marine instead of Street Samurai.
Don’t know, but there would be more pauldrons.
I wonder if Mando would get on alright with Space Marine?
“The Sigil’s ritual magic allows the dragon’s to cast as 12th level casters”.
Well sure. But at that point I might as well declare that the dragons use the magical rainbow farts to propel them through the force walls.
A move best prefaced with:
“Hey, guys, remember the discussion about predictable rules making combat just a question of preparing the perfect plan in advance?”
Point well taken.
I did once have a baby T-rex run up its mama’s back in order to grab a flying sorcerer out of the air. I feel like that’s in the realm of narrative possibility though… More a creative (if silly) use of what’s already there than the sudden addition of new rules.
Wait, isn’t this comic itself a rules biff? Shortswords have versatile S, so Thief should have no problem making use of that feat.
I’m looking at the 5e SRD:
Shortsword 10 gp 1d6 piercing — 2 lb. finesse, light
Looks like a system difference, and one just has to realize that Slasher is a 5e feat in Tasha’s, and/or that it’s Tasha’s that Priest is consulting
Or that the alt text definitely refers to 5e things.
What? I’ve never seen the cover to Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything in my life! Hearsay! Slander! Inadmissible!
You mean we haven’t been talking about the film genre this whole time?
What tripped me up on that is that I have the variant cover version of Tasha’s Cauldron…
Huh. I haven’t played much 5E. I didn’t realize that shortswords don’t have versatile S in that version. It seems strange.
I struggled with which “rules oopsie” Cleric should make. Failing to find one that cut across all D&D editions, I picked one from the current edition.
Out of curiosity, what edition are you thinking of?
Versatile S is a weapon trait in Pathfinder 2e, not sure about 1e or Starfinder.
3.5 and both Pathfinders have multiple damage types for weapons (although the Versatile trait is apparently just a Pathfinder 2e thing, while Versatile in D&D indicates weapons that can be wielded in one or two hands.) They apparently got of weapon damage types entirely in 4E. I’m surprised they locked weapons to a single damage type in 5E. That seems unnecessarily restrictive.
Seeking Guidance? It’s on page 248 of the PHB.
If I were to redesign the weapons table swords would do less damage than comparable weapons, but they could do piercing or slashing damage.
That might make rapiers a little more exciting anyway.
Speaking as someone who hasn’t gotten around to playing Ace Attorney, but who is nevertheless a fan of their pose design and animation and whatnot, I wonder what a bunch of Ace Attorney lawyers playing D&D together would be like. I imagine the judge would be the DM, which would add an extra layer of confusion…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/community-support
I have consulted with a group of Ace Attorney nerds, and they propose the following:
The Judge is, indeed the DM. He is committed to his craft, but also often pushed around or manipulated, and he is terrible at remembering even things that he made up.
Miles Edgeworth is a rules lawyer, regardless of who the rules benefit at the moment, and hates metagaming. He’s the guy who knows all the rules (better than the DM), all the lore (WAY better than the DM), spends his spare time painting miniatures and who always shows up to the game half an hour early.
Franziska von Karma also knows all the rules, but she’s a min-maxing power gamer who always interprets the rules however would benefit her in the moment, and then bullies the DM into agreeing with her. Her “it’s optimal” attitude also causes friction in the party and occasionally PvP.
Simon Blackquill always plays an edgy, lone wolf sort, usually wielding a katana.
Athena Cykes is super into roleplaying and creates elaborate backstories for her characters before going around and asking about every single NPCs’ inner lives. She remembers the details the DM makes up on the fly in response WAY better than he does.
Maya Fey is also big into roleplaying and tends to get caught up in the moment, but isn’t very good about keeping track of the overall plot and context. She always rolls poorly due to her terrible luck.
Phoenix Wright just wants everyone to have a good time. He usually plays the standard-issue version of whatever class he’s playing and makes up his backstory as he goes along, but he’s always Neutral Good and wants the party to do heroic things because it’s right, not for loot or other reasons. He also has the greatest die rolling on the planet – there is no desperate saving throw he cannot pass, and no boss he cannot crit.
Manfred von Karma is only a DM, never a player. Every single game he has ever run has ended in a total party kill.
wait, but shortswords do typically deal slashing damage, don’t they? I know mine does for the one character of mine that uses a shortsword
Depends on what game you’re talking about. This is a 5e gag.
I was in fact talking about 5e
Ah. Well then. Into the confessional booth with you.
I believe I have previously mentioned when I discovered that the Antipaladin’s Touch of Corruption is not QUITE an equal-but-opposite of the Paladin’s Lay on Hands ability, as it does not provide the ability to negative energy yourself as a swift action. This robbed my heals-from-negative Evil Oradin of one of his major advantages. Then I remembered that I was the GM and this was a GMPC, so I just house-ruled it. God powers are very helpful in these situations.
Forgive me Cleric, for I have sinned! When two of my players’ PCs were swallowed whole for the first time and the Slashing Grace bastard sword character tried to cut her way out of the stomach, I knew that she couldn’t use her sword because it was functioning as a one-handed weapon (instead of a light weapon), but the party was about to kill the thing and I thought it would be cool if the PC sliced it open before it died rather than after and she did and it was and I’m not sorry but am asking for forgiveness anyways.
Speaking of which, I only recently realized that Slashing Grace weapons are still slashing damage (having previously assumed they became piercing weapons). Which makes more sense, I guess (“HOW ARE YOU STABBING SOMEONE WITH THAT AXE!?”), but I’m not changing my mental image of Edam the Invincible Swordsman who can add triple his level to damage just running up to mooks, putting his sword through their chest, ripping it out and moving on.
As for Colin’s story… my mentor DM once ran an Iron Gods campaign, and apparently near the end the party boxed in a big robot enemy with Walls of Force… without remembering that lasers go through Wall of Force like regular light does. (Fun fact: Invisibility makes you immune to Pathfinder/Starfinder lasers.) So they’d made it impossible for THEMSELVES to attack the foe.
What I’m saying is that Colin should have used Laser Dragons. Frankly, everyone should use Laser Dragons.
That’ll be 10 posts to the Paizo forums and 20 hail reddits.
I shall adopt this new wisdom. My thanks.
Colin, if you are the DM you can’t biff rules call. If you say something and the rules say otherwise you are right. A DM is a powerful being, you can go to macdonals order a soup, and no matter what the rules say, they serve it to you. Embrace the power, become the rules and your journey to the dark side of the rules will be complete. Remember the rules are more of a guide 😛
That is strictly true. However, you do risk undercutting your authority when the players know that you’re changing stat blocks on the fly.
Leave no witness ALIVE!!! 😛
Make that their best game ever for it will be the last 😀
Colin Stricklin, the demon DM of Fleet street 😛
Just by curiosity, how is Laurel cooking? Hope she makes a good meat pie 😛
There should be a comic where a vengeful GM gruesomely kills a series of “That Guys.”
Glad to be a font of ideas XD
Also, I’m sure that following the rules gave a much better result.
I’ll bet that Colins players had a much better experience with and much better memories of “that time we totally got one over those dragons with Wall of Force and got off scot-free with taunting them”, than they would have had with “that time those dragons arbitrarily ignored our clever preparation by fiat”.
I’d based “combat scrivening” on the lock picking rules as well, meaning that the players had to roll 1d4 to see how many rounds the sketch would take them. I figured that lucky roll on their part made for a good luck element. shrug
Meanwhile in our table: “Let the anarchy reign supreme” 😛
5th edition. One time, my players were fighting in a fire giant forge. They were on an elevated platform above the foundry, fighting ogres on the platform while two giants were lobbing globs of molten steel at them from ground level below.
Two of the PCs decided to jump down to fight the giants, because they didn’t really have any ranged option. So they jump down and hit a few times, all good. Then comes the giants’ turn. I look at the PCs. I look at the giant’s high athletic score. I look at his two attacks. I look at the literal pool of molten steel that explicitely acted like lava that the PCs jumped right next to.
Welp.
Two failed athletics checks later, the two PCs were helpless to stop the (fire immune) fire giant from jumping into the pool with them, and thus learned the hard way that “being submerged into lava” dealt 18D10 fire damage.
They actually survived (they were OP), but that made them panic and forced them to flee. The kicker though?
In 5th edition, you can replace an attack with a grapple, but there is a difference between having several attacks (like the martial classes get) and having a multiattack (like creatures get). Long story short, a creature can’t actually grapple several time in a round, no matter how many attacks it has in its multiattack. So I actually could have given the lava bath only to a single PC. Which wouldn’t have turned the tides so hard as to force them to flee. Oops. Lesson learned, I guess. At least the players didn’t give me a hard time about it.
Good one! I could see myself making that mistake as well.
When did you catch the error? Was it a realized-the-next-day sort of thing?
Yes, exactly. I had a “wait, that was cool, but does it actually work that way?” moment some time the next day, checked online, and found out I was wrong. Though in my defense it’s an easy mistake to make.
My attitude is always, “If the PCs are still alive, it’s probably OK.” I bet they had fun anyway. 🙂
Oh yeah, there were no hard feelings, and we all had a laugh about it. It ended up creating an interesting situation anyway.
Up to you, but this is definitely a time I would ignore the silliness of a rule. Fire giants have multi attack only because the monster designers wanted to keep things simpler by having them follow monster rules. However, it’s not like they have two arms that end in greatswords – they just get an extra attack with it like any martial character would. Ergo, perfectly valid to use two grapples.
Early days in my GMing career. I rolled a crit with an Alchemist’s bombs, I doubled all the damage rather than the initial d6 and melted the face off of our poor magical boy vigilante.
Oh man… That would definitely do it. To be fair though, it can be awfully tough as a new player to wrap your brain around, “I double the damage, right?”
“Exactly! Just not that damage.”
“What? Why not?”
“So sayeth the rules!”
I had assassins hired for a non-lethal mission use sleep gas, bludgeoning weapons designed to deal subdual damage, and an archer with a stone-firing crossbow equipped with either fuzzy animal-pellets from a bag of tricks or, to slow pursuit, dust of dryness beads. In my haste to cobble the stats together, I overestimated the volume of water absorbed by the dust.
When the PCs began to do too well, the archer fired a bead and flooded the room to waist deep, scrambling the confused melee below and sweeping a few smaller combatants toward the door.
When we took a beer/pizza break immediately after the big combat, prior to resuming the whodunnit plot of the session, one of the gamers (an engineer) coughed politely and pulled me aside, showed me the text of dust of dryness where it said “100 gallons” and patiently (and out of earshot of the rest of the group) explained the difference between 13.37 cubic feet and a 13.37-foot cube.
Then he asked, with the grin of a Christmas morning, “Do the rest of the beads in his pouch do the same thing? Or do they just make a beachball-sized splash?”
When we resumed, I pointed out that, indeed, these were special beads of water of unknown origin that function just like the regular kind, except for the unnatural volume of water produced. If the party were to buy or make some, the new beads would be of the normal, boring variety. I explained that the PCs could keep the remaining beads for their own use, or sell them to wizards to maybe try to reverse engineer them someday–
The players got the hint and kept them all for another day.
Ah. The old Professor Chaos flooding the world mistake.
https://y.yarn.co/365cdf75-acb0-44b3-b18f-94869a9f40e7_screenshot.jpg
I think we’ve all been there with a decanter of endless water.
See, the smart caster would have created a wall of force acting as a ceiling 5ft off the ground. Sure, the dragons might be able to teleport to the other side of the wall of force, but how do they expect to squeeze a huge/colossal creature into a medium size space? They can impotently rage ABOVE the party while the party crouches down a little and works unmolested.
then again, this obviously isn’t 5e rules, so maybe Dragons have more options for moving in spaces that are too small for them.
I think this is why forcecage was first invented. Some poor wizard got sick and tired of casting six walls of force.
Exalted 2nd, I let the players grapple and thus catch a fleeing NPC – completely forgetting I had given them a Freedom Stone, thus making them immune to grapples… it was quite annoying, to say the least.
But not much to do about after the fact.
Scroll of Retcon. It’s an artifact as well as a magic item!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/second-chances
Shortswords and daggers have blades as well as points. Longswords have points as well as blades. Morningstars are certainly spiked, but have a big ball of iron bludgeoning right behind them. Many polearms and other large weaponry had blades on the back or spears on the point, providing alternative damage. As a GM, if a player wants to do a reasonable weapon type of damage with a weapon, I have no issue with it, and if they want to reskin a weapon, no worries there either.
As for the dragons d-dooring, I generally modify spells for races that are not medium-sized humanoids to apply correctly to them. Yes, the dragons know a racial variant that would work in this case. In a similar manner, there’s a charm [type], a hold [type], and similar spells. The collections of spells in the various PHBs and other rule books are sadly written from the perspective of the “medium-sized humanoid” master race.
As for rules biffs, I’m sure I’ve made plenty in my gaming career, but none spring to mind. I do remember a particular player in Living Greyhawk who’s nickname was “You read it wrong” for this reason, however ; )
I dunno… I can’t picture too many dragons being social enough to want to bring their buddies along. Awfully independent those lizards….
I had one 3rd edition D&D game where the DM flubbed the rules a bit. We’d gotten into a fight with an assassin and had managed to knock him out and capture him alive. We took him to a safe location and tied him to a chair. But when we went to question him the DM declared he’d taken poison and was now dead.
To be fair, we hadn’t specifically said that we’d search him in order to find the poison. But something occurred to me and I asked “When exactly did he regain consciousness?”. I’d been thinking that we’d surely have noticed when he came around. Another player though, pointed out that it normally takes at least an hour before they might recover and that much time hadn’t elapsed.