Divine Intervention 4: D’aww(n)
Ye gods they’re a good looking couple!
Look at the wind in their hair!
The raw sex in those expressions!
Also I like the lighting.
I’m just so gosh darn proud ’em! They’ve changed so much! Both Paladin and Necromancer have become a little more open-minded, and little less set in their ways, and a lot more Neutral. It only took 5 years, 8 months and 13 days to figure their shit out.
I mean, just think about all they have to forgive one another. She ruined his theater experience and also raised his mom from the dead. He threatened to destroy her character concept and also her self esteem. They’ve been so obviously in love for so long, but Palromancer just couldn’t get out of their own way.
But now look at ’em! They’re out here fixin’ to fade to black, and it’s about damn time! Do you have any idea how many dream sequences and alternate reality cheats I had to come up with to make a Paladin/Necromancer ship work? Lots, that’s how many! Several in fact! And now they get to do sloppy makeouts properly. Maybe I should give them a honeymoon arc or something?
Anyway, as you can tell from my general air of ebullience, I am having a grand time staring at this image in satisfaction. And lest I break my arm from patting myself on the back, let me arrive at my point.
This hobby has a reputation for producing “geek outs.” We’re talking dudes going on at length. We’re talking hperfixation on esoteric shit that was SO COOL except that YOU HAD TO BE THERE. You weren’t there? Too bad, because I’ma KEEP ON TALKING ABOUT IT ANYWAY. Yes, this sort of behavior can be a bit cringe. But the way I see it, celebrating the thing that gives you joy is a net positive. I’ll take gamer passion over a milquetoast dice-chucking any day of the week.
So in appreciation for today’s long-overdue pairing, why don’t you share your own geek-out moments? What do you tend to get excited for in your own games? What is that one, special, SO FREAKING COOL thing that you tell all your friends about? And because we’re all friends here in Handbook-World, tell us all about it down in the comments. Now go forth and geek the heck out!
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In my last D&D campaign, one of the players – a redemption Paladin struggling with his past life as a brutal warlord – kept trying to make the characters around him better people, kept trying to save his foes, and due to various Circumstances kept failing. He even had a magic item which could make an enemy confront their own worst misdeeds of the past, and people *kept passing saves.* One of the party members became a villain, another – his closest friend – left forever, forced to flee from a theoretically-good enemy the Paladin couldn’t convince they weren’t a threat.
And then, at the conclusion of the story, the Paladin used his item to enter the mind of the giant tormented Elder being.the villains were trying to summon. This thing was originally a very powerful human, and he reached that part of its mind, convincing it that no matter how far it had fallen it could still be saved. Helping it control its pain, he guided it to teleport itself, with his mind still inside, into the ocean, where it died and he guided its soul up to his gods, then reunited with the spirit of his dead friend (and later most of the rest of the party, who died in the epilogue.)
I am in a glass cage of emotions with this one. Super cute!
Point of (Lawful Evil) Order!
Technically he’s not a Paladin anymore, so the Paladin/Necromancer ship didn’t work out
Hairymancer?
He will always be Paladin tho, so if in only name… 😉
Point of (Lawful Neutral) Order!
Technically, Casually Challenged is completely correct, which is the absolute best kind of correct
I concede the point, the Paladin/Necromancer ship did work out! ( O_o )
I mean, if he WASNT Paladin then there would be a huge gap in the setting that would need to be filled….
This is lovely. 🙂
YOU’RE LOVELY!
NO BOTH OF YOU!!!
I thank you both. <3
I guess my geek out moment was hitting lvl20 as a Wizard in the climax of a AP.
As well as seeing a friend hit a nat20 crit with ‘harm’ against the BBEG of that same AP as the killing blow.
I bet the table was shrieking like chimps.
Latest tale: in a current samurai-themed campaign constructed mostly as a fix-up anthology of 3.5 updates to old Dungeon Magazine adventures from 1986-1991, the party leader, a level 15 samurai/iaijutsu master found himself (party in tow) tricked into accepting an invitation from a river dragon. The invitation itself was part of an existing adventure, but I rewrote the ending to allow the dragon to have volunteered to be the one to issue a summons to the court of the Celestial Emperor. The samurai was on trial!
The party had helped so many wayward ghosts in the course of their campaign that the samurai stood now stood accused of impersonating a psychopomp. The Monkey King himself volunteered to read the list of charges, which included an unexpected diatribe of the character’s alleged sins compiled from all of his previous adventures, though deliberately misconstrued to cast every good deed in the worst possible light.
This character assassination permitted the subsequent admission of rebuttal witnesses to the aforementioned events (all part of the Monkey King’s plan to help the PC), a This-is-Your-Life parade of party members, nature spirits, and lesser deities who testified to the many good things the PC and his party had accomplished.
The campaign is nearing endgame-content stage, so blindsiding the players with a The Road So Far moment had the desired effect– complete surprise with a hint of sniffle.
(In case you’re wondering, ACQUITTED ON ALL CHARGES. “Who filed this nuisance grievance, anyway?” (shrugs from the court officials, confused shuffling of papers))
Hey, that’s how we resolved the death of our paladin!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/phoenix-downs
The rez spells didn’t work because his soul was on trial. Same deal with the guy who constructed the tomb that killed him as a hostile witness, while all his companions who’d died talked about his virtues. It was good times.
Say, what did that prophecy say two months ago? https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/cassandra-mode-activate
“And this will herald a great Ending”?
…
Why do the gods of prophecy also have to be the gods of puns?
Holy shit. I don’t believe someone picked up on that.
My classic geek moment in the realms of RP has been and probably will always be the “Way too early Vorpal sword get”. I have literally told that story multiple times in my life and also literally right here in this comments section of this wonderful little comic, so I won’t bore you all with the entire tale, but the TL;DR of it is that at level 2 or 3 I was given a random loot table (probably rolled wrong by a young DM) Vorpal Sword and subsequently used it to lop the head off of the secret vampire mayor/head of the evil cult/secret long term recurring big bad of an entire campaign, and because of the “youth” of the DM, that was the end of the entire game (another DM might have done any number of things to keep the game and story going without taking away from my “cool” moment, but weirdly, it made my moment “cooler” to me, because I killed a whole campaign! I was also “young”).
But more recently, I think my favorite moment is not a single game moment, but very very much in line with Paladin and Necromancers full journey, my previous character’s long form journey in both the story told in the game as well as the concept that came to pass.
I also won’t go into vast detail here about it, but the simple is that I wanted to play a “pacifist monk-tank” and had a loose idea in my head of how that might go. I started playing the character and realized quite early that being either a tank or a pacifist as a monk was going to be nearly impossible, so I began sort of pivoting my idea to fit something else instead, despite not knowing what else I might do with the character.
A hundred-ish sessions later, and a number of level ups, and my original character concept was coming into the light without my having tried to force it (and in fact actively not thinking about the original idea because I thought it wouldn’t work anymore), and much like a monk on some kind of zen journey of their own, the path laid before me was longer than I expected and took more turns to get there, but then suddenly, there I was, the actual mechanically speaking tank of the party, center stage in every battle, and not throwing a single punch… because if I attack, my tank-ness actually gets worse (Open Palm monk gains Sanctuary as an effect that only stays around if they don’t attack that day).
Sometimes it is the journey as they say, and this character’s journey is one that like my “best boy moment” of my gaming youth, I don’t think I will ever forget the overall feeling of “having been there” for the moment when I realized I had done the thing I set out to do… and I almost didn’t notice it had been done.
I love this game.
Way to stay the course and finally get there. Character sounds like a blast to play. 🙂
How did you ‘draw aggro’ though? Did you just RP insulting the monsters and getting in their faces?
with 180 feet of move, I would just get within range, and then yeah, basically, just tell them they can’t hit me… and realistically, they couldn’t. Wisdom save to try, and if they tried to move, I had sentinel feat (which would drop my Sanctuary, but then I also had 26 AC, so good luck hitting me even then XD )
my main weakness was crowds and AoE attacks, can’t “block” those!
Right, so, before last October, this probably would have been the tale of that time I ditched my party, or maybe the tale of Viridian’s cats. Now? Now is the story of The Writing on the Wall.
First up, a bit of context: the game this story comes from is based off the Mega Man Battle Network series, which was one of those stories that imagined the Internet as a digital alternate universe, populated with figures called Navis. The important part here is that the series’s basic premise is that it’s an alternate universe of the classic Mega Man games, with internet instead of robots. This will be important later.
So, I tell my players “hey, I want to run a special bit for Halloween”. I had a plan on the backburner, but I put it off because I had a player I didn’t know well enough to drop the big surprise on quite yet. (They’d actually drop out of my game, but I hadn’t had that confirmed at this point.) This story was the one I did instead.
My players are sent to a strange structure because the reporter was deemed expendable enough to waste on this story and the others were useful backup. There’s some odd spikes outside and a keypad with symbols they don’t recognize. Thankfully the password is comically easy to break.
The party is lead through a strange storage site that collects parts. Humanoid looking parts. There’s a message near the top, but the players don’t find the exact translation until the very bottom.
Now, if you’re familiar with MLP fic, you might get the feeling that this seems FAMILIAR. Indeed, this is inspired by “The Writing on the Wall” the fic. Except where that fic had deadly radiation, my game had THE FLAMES OF JUSTICE! (As in the Robot Masters made by Dr. Wily!)
I like to sum up this story as “the time I sent deadly robots after player characters that don’t even have an HP mechanic”, because per Pokémon logic, the humans aren’t supposed to do the fighting; that’s what the Navis are for. So these squishy humans are desperately trying to escape what could very well have killed them if I were a nastier GM.
And to top it all off, I imply when they get their ride away from the storage site of doom that they’re not the first people to go there and that somebody has unearthed its secrets sometime before. (Their cab driver was meant to be descended from Quick Man, the worst Robot Master out there.)
It’s probably my favorite experience as a GM. Seeing one of your players in full “oh @#$%” mode is an experience one should treasure. (I still remember the one player sending five “NO”s at the end of session.)
I don’t know the fic. Are you saying this was a Chernobyl dungeon?
Not quite, think the “This is not a place of honor” set of warnings.
Granted, in this case, the threat was more alive than just radiation, buuuuuuut…
Nope, stop it, no geek outs here!
After the second time I had some fellow nerd follow me around the FLGS telling everything about their favorite PC and their PC’s drow girlfriend, I vowed upon all that is holy (my Crown Royal Dice Bag) that I would never “geek out” over anything. I do sometimes casually mention things I enjoy, but I have a strict time limit of 30 seconds to a minute to talk about it before letting it drop if the other person is not asking fellow-up questions.
His name wasn’t John, but that’s what I’ll call him here…
The only time I’ve enjoyed, not just tolerated, but enjoyed a “geek out” sesh, was a few weeks after a group member died. We’d had the “In Memory Of” game, which didn’t go so well, but the GM was trying to force what happened a few weeks later. So we were still out of sorts having lost a long time member and the session just wasn’t starting, it kept faltering. A few people were straggling in late… I had even been late as John had previously been my ride and I wasn’t used to taking that bus yet (wasn’t used to it’s vagaries) and the GM was a bit of an acerbic twit, so he said “You know what I miss? I miss John and [evileeyore] always showing up 30 minutes before game start, we could atleast get some hands of Magic in while waiting for everyone else to show up an hour late!”
I responded, “You know why we were always half an hour early, cause John would show up at my house two hours early and after an hour of playing chess, I’d insist we leave to ‘avoid traffic’ (which was non-existant) just so I’d have another person to chat with…”
The Gm looked thoughtful, “I never knew that, I thought it was John forcing you guys to be early and interrupt my quiet prep time… you know he was the local 13th Grandmaster..”
“… of chess. Yeah. He said he liked playing me because I knew enough of the game itself to be challenging and play weird, playing other chessmaster was boring as they’d all just play the classics…”
And then everyone started in with their Favorite John Moments, and what teh GM had tried to force a few weeks prior (just to “get it out of the way’) happened. We got past our sorrow, and the game, eventually, started flowing again.
Looking back on it, autism and aspergers weren’t commonly well known about back then (early 90s), but that group had several spectrum kids on it, and two that eventually revealed as being trans (one FtM and myself, a transhumanist). Gaming kept us all sane and gave us something to look forward to each week.
I really need to start collecting these identity formation stories. I have an interest in COVID transitions and their intersection with gaming. It just seems natural that a game that plays with identity would attract that kind of crowd.
The party is led through an odd storage facility that accumulates pieces. Parts that appear to be humanoid. There is a note near the top, however the precise translation is not found until the very bottom.