Dirty Deeds
Have any of you guys ever come close to losing a character? Or even better, have you ever come close to a TPK? If so, then you understand the strange kind of time dilation that comes along with these situations. Moments before you were skipping merrily about the initiative tracker, briskly passing turns and allowing the Rule of Cool to sort the details. But now there’s death on the line, and that jerk behind the GM screen can just wait a friggin’ minute while you look over the fine print on your character sheet. There must be something on there to save you. Some rule. Some forgotten magic item. Look hard enough and surely (surely!) you will find that all-important +1 bonus.
It’s moments like these when I’m reminded how many rules there are in gaming. I like to think I’m pretty good at keeping them all in my brain, but it is truly, staggeringly easy overlook some seemingly minor detail. Trying to use the cover of darkness to sneak around a dwarf is a perfect example. Same deal with creature subtypes in Pathfinder. (If you’ve ever tried to cast “enlarge person” on a tiefling, you know what I’m talking about). Same deal with the grappling rules in any system ever.
This all leads of course to the question of the day: Have you ever forgotten some rule or ability that, in retrospect, could have saved your bacon? What was it?
EARN BONUS LOOT! Check out the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. We’ve got a sketch feed full of Laurel’s original concept art. We’ve got early access to comics. There’s physical schwag, personalized art, and a monthly vote to see which class gets featured in the comic next. And perhaps my personal favorite, we’ve been hard at work bringing a bimonthly NSFW Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic to the world! So come one come all. Hurry while supplies of hot elf chicks lasts!
Does it count as forgetting powers if I just took so long to choose them that I was effectively 3 levels behind the rest of the party?
Poor Laurel got spoiled by automated character sheet software (Hero Lab). When I ran my dragoneers game, she found that In the Company of Dragons wasn’t supported. In consequence, when we made the 5-level jump between the first campaign arc and the second, she spent a good three or four sessions as a 5th level dragon in a 10th level party. Her saves were…not good.
5e is great for getting rid of 95% of the flat modifiers, but I always forget to add the +1d4 bonus on attacks and saves from Bless. Great spell, *IF* you remember to use it.
Having sex away from your party is a great way to get jumped without your armor on. Let ’em watch, I say.
For 5e, I only seem to remember my buffs when it comes time for the concentration check. Bleh.
Also, I think you’ve invented a new kind of armor enchant.
“Armor of Conveniently Placed Flaps” ?
All new meaning to the phrase, “Oiling up my chainmail.”
I’m not going to ‘tell’ you that there’s probably something in the Book of Erotic Fantasy for that, but…
The Book of Erotic Fantasy has been mentioned in this discussion and I would just like to point everyone to the Guide to Carnal Knowledge instead, which is better written than the Book of Erotic Fantasy and also free
http://carnal.orfinlir.de/
lol. For a minute there I was getting all offended that you were dissing our NSFW “Handbook of Erotic Fantasy” comics and linking to another kinky D&D webcomic.
“The nerve!” thought I. “And right in our own comments section no less! Why i oughta…”
Then I actually clicked the link. I am a derp. 😛
Wait, you have an NSFW comic? Where? I only saw the link to the webcomic about Exalted.
Nevermind, I see it now.
Is that title seriously not a spoof of the Book of Erotic Fantasy (https://www.amazon.com/Book-Erotic-Fantasy-Gwendolyn-Kestrel/dp/1588463990)
It totally is. But the title is so close that, in my initial reading of your comment, I confused myself. Hence my self-imposed derpitude. 🙂
There was that one time I forgot to tell the DM that rays are subject to the -4 penalty when firing into melee. Well, more like he forgot and I just didn’t tell him because I didn’t like that rule in general. I mean, if a wizard can’t zap the bandits that the fighter is keeping busy, then what is that heap of violence and chainmail even good for?! If that’s the case, wizards should just go into melee themselves.
…Like the wizard in the comic. He was clearly just demonstrating grappling maneuvers to the rogue. Nothing lewd to see here…
I once won this epic scenario in Mordheim (a favorite minis game of mine) by having the orc shaman I was running teleport a few inches towards the scenario objective: this big-ass Empire canon. The whole idea was to have a living mini stand next to the canon for one round, which counted as “spiking” the canon and destroying it.
The guy running the scenario was surprised by sudden orc teleportation magic getting my dude into his backfield. He was so surprised in fact that he forgot a very important detail: the canon itself is a mini, and could have filled my orc’s face full of grapeshot. He conceded the game on the next round, and I felt like a tactical genius.
So yeah, I know the joys of pulling one over on an opponent. However, I will point out that there’s a difference between not reminding an opponent of one of his own options and neglecting to apply your modifiers. It comes dangerously close to Cheatyface. Nobody wants to be Cheatyface. Thus do I confer upon you a stern finger-wag. 😛
I’m perfectly fine with enemy spellcasters doing the same, though. I just don’t like the rule that forces you to take 2 feats just to be moderately useful in combat… not about to fall to the depravity of being “That Guy”. Been on the receiving end of it too, having to hit full AC on my warlock’s Eldritch Blast instead of touch AC, and was ok with it.
Good on you, Sir. May the awful specter of That Guy never again cast his shadow upon the good name of Doge.
You just brought back memories of my very, -very- first roleplaying session in my life. Me and my older cousins and their friends were playing GURPS and I was an elven wizard. One of my quirks was ‘tells stupid science jokes’ and my cousin couldn’t contain his laughter when I got to ‘Do molecular biologists wear designer genes?’ One of his friends couldn’t contain his axes…I switched quicks shortly after my not-too-serious death and revival.
And then we were in a clearing, and we heard rumbling. There was a tree! We all climbed up to see if we could see what was coming. Turns out, it wasn’t hard…giants on the way. I think most or all of us died…it was a fun session though.
And then a few days later, I remembered that I’d had Air Walk as a spell on my list. I could have just taken a stroll into the middle of the atmosphere and magic missiled them forever, instead of letting them knock us out of the tree and stomping us into pancakes.
Unrelated, the next time I played a pure caster was years and years later when I was properly seasoned. It’s harder to forget your lists as a martial character.
I think that there should be an incorporeal creature called l’Esprit d’Escalier. It can force you to pick another action after you’ve already declared your action.
“Why didn’t you just attack it!?”
“It honestly didn’t occur to me!”
Well, it’s not an ability exactly… but we were given a badge as a sign of our aiding the nobles to recover stolen property… so naturally when some guards appeared and accused us of burning the fair down and killing everyone, we fled… until some more guards appeared and we killed them all, it was only after we killed them that we remembered we had the badge…
Hey, that’s one’s on the nobles. Like you’d deputize some “professional adventurer” you met in a bar to go and get your stuff back.
So there I was, Kitsune Rogue, scouting mission gone bad, stuck surrounded by enemies. I could, very easily really, have just Acrobatics’d my way through them and made it back to the party no problem, but I completely forgot about that. Instead, I tried to use my other great Skill, Climb, and with the lousy climb rules got my butt handed to me. Fortunately the GM let an ally’s animal companion hear things and they showed up quickly afterwards.
“OK. Ummm… Have Squiggles make a Perception check. 9? Yeah, that’s good enough. The marmot’s ears turn in the direction of the awful scream of a hapless Shinigami02 being swatted off the ceiling like a raccoon. You think something may have gone wrong with the Kitsune’s mission.”
I don’t know how many times I forget about Point Blank Shot…
Remembering several turns later, does not help you get that hit…
Remembering immediately after your GM writes down the damage, however, is a sure-fire way to learn exotic new swear words.
On the other side of this: the FM from the homebrew I mentioned in an earlier comment, wanted us to be attacked by a group of phase spiders. The idea was we’d be paralyzed by the spiders, some vampires would kidnap us, & we’d have to be rescued by a group of Rogues. Pretty railroady of the guy, but I was too new at the time to know that term.
Well, he forgot that my Ranger had the Alert feat (for those of you unfamiliar, it means I can’t be surprised by enemies as long as I’m awake). The look on his face when his railroading plan was thrown out the window…I still cherish it to this day.
You reminded me of the time when I was that DM. It was an Exalted campaign, and the whole schtick was that the PCs had to venture down to Malfeas (read: Hell) to retrieve a kidnapped Lunar elder. This Lunar was extremely powerful, able to transform into a literal kaiju, but had been infected by some horrible disease. I’d set up for the “kill me” scene from Aliens, but when they finally found this ailing Lunar elder one of my players casually announces that she has magical healing.
“It says I can cure anything up to and including the Great Plague.”
Understand, the PC in question was a combat monster. She was this demon-blooded badass warrior. She had never used or even mentioned this power before.
“Well it hasn’t come up until now,” she said.
And thus my players rode a skyscraper sized mandrill out of Hell.
I’ve pulled a tpk back from the great beyond once. It was a3.5 game and I was a sorc/MotAO (oh the hoops I had to jump through to pull that off!). We had planned to enter a den of vampiers to sort them out (evil game and They where supposed to be working for US). I went in with daylight up, and for shits and giggles I’d heighten it (I wasnt sure if spells from the pool needed metamagic and that was the smallest addition I had at the time). The BBE vamp gave his speach and then dropped a darkness based spell. We quickly got wrecked. It wasn’t untill everyone was getting ready to reroll (and quite bummed. Even the dm was sad to see the evil game end) that I remembered that MY spell was heightened! We reset to the end of the speach! This time, when the darkness was used it did nothing, and we stomped the main vamp so hard that the rest surrendered, giving us back our minions.
That is one epic retcon. I can just imagine you leaping over the DM screen with an outstretched rulebook like you were scoring a zero-seconds-on-the-clock touchdown.
Happened recently when our party Ranger got killed by a Redcap with a scythe crit. He took it pretty well, and even had a backup character ready, and he handed me the Ranger’s character sheet to divvy up his gear to the surviving party members. I’m looking over his inventory when I look up at him and say, “What’s this Aegis of Recovery thing I see here?” with a smirk on my face. (Magic item that heals you 2d8+3 if you go below zero HP) Happy ending to that particular story.
More often it’s me forgetting that the monster is immune to this or that that the party has been curb-stomping it with.
You’d think Wizard would cast Invisibility or something. Or use Rope Trick/Tiny Hut/Magnificent Mansion as a love shack.
In the immortal words of The Gamers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSynJyq2RRo&t=34m21s
Spells don’t help when you aren’t expecting an encounter. 😛
One PFS session, I was playing a 1rst-level Wizard. In two fights on two separate days, I cast my one prepared Magic Missile, and then had to fall back on my cantrips. Worse, the second fight was against a giant skeleton, and it had enough electrical resistance that Electric Arc (the only offensive cantrip I had prepped), was useless. It wasn’t until after the session that I remembered I had the Arcane Bond feature, which would have given me another use of Magic Missile in each fight.
Wizard turns girl, or Wizard always wears a bra.