Save vs. Beer
Anyone can fail a save. A barbarian might have one too many, and a 27 lb kobold can drink the whole of the King’s Arms under the table. It’s all down to hot dice and weird luck. I mean sure, a fat save modifier or special resistance can help, but at the end of the day ±40% isn’t a sure thing. That’s why I love “everybody make a save” situations. You never know what shenanigans will shake out when one (and only one!) lucky PC manages to pass. Is it story time? You bet your ass it’s story time.
So no shit there they were, deep in the depths of the Stone Sisterhood’s domain. This medusa cult had given the party a rough go of it, and more than one adventurer had become statuary in recent sessions. Our heroes had finally tracked down the scaly ladies’ base though, and they were itching to take the fight to the baddies. Did they make any special preparations? No, not really. Were they understaffed that night? It was a party of three due to scheduling conflicts. Did they let that stop ’em? Hell no! My PCs were looking to scrap, and they weren’t going to let a little thing like caution slow them down.
Let me be fair to my guys though: When you get to high enough level, the standard medusa gaze attack is pretty much an auto-pass. An unlucky 1 can always ruin your night in Pathfinder, but risk is something you live with when you’re a professional thing-killer. Besides, they had their trusty teleporting magic carpet. If things got harry they could always bamf out of there.
Trouble is, they didn’t meet medusae. Once they kicked down the door and stormed the first chamber, they came face to face with one of these bad boys. This thing was size huge. It’s advanced templates had advanced templates. It was some kind souped-up super-gorgon guard dog, and its petrifying breath DC was a full 10 points higher than the standard version. You can guess what happened next.
The cleric failed. The cavalier failed. The cavalier’s mount failed. Every-freakin’-body was rocks. After the dice settled and the dust cleared, there was only a very scared, suddenly alone, and (luckily) invisible gnomish alchemist left to clean up the mess. It was touch and go for a few rounds, but some clever bull fighting and judicious use of a blade barrier made hamburger out of the gorgon. Unfortunately, that still left a Str 8 gnome to drag a cleric, a knight, and a riding gecko onto the party’s magic carpet contingency plan.
You know that chunky dude from Jedi that cries when the rancor dies? That was pretty much going on in the background as the distraught medusa cultists showed up to investigate the commotion. Magical beast parts were everywhere, and the medusae were slipping in entrails and wailing in horror. Meanwhile this poor alchemist is still invisible, but he’s sweating his ass off, trying to rock his petrified buddies across the gore-strewn chamber like a skinny dude solo-moving a fridge. Suffice it to say that he was not built for Strength checks.
“What was that?” said a medusa.
“What was what?” said another.
“That ugly human statue… Was it always standing on that carpet?”
“Look, that gecko moved!”
“Someone is still here!” they hissed.
My poor alchemist buddy was suddenly up against a ticking TPK clock, and he was sweating bullets trying to save the day. Dude greased the floor. He made creative use of impact foam. He put his back into it, made a series of last-minute heroic shoves, shut his eyes when the medusae got close… but time was up. Two of the gecko’s four feet were on the carpet, and that would have to be good enough. The Stone Sisterhood cultists were nearly upon him, arms outstretched and hands grasping.
“Go carpet go!”cried the gnome. The carpet went….
The table collectively leaned forward. No one spoke. No one breathed. Was everyone present and accounted for?
The remains of the party popped back into existence at the dungeon entrance, but all was not well. Those failed Strength checks had taken their toll, and CONSEQUENCES had arrived. The gecko and the cleric came through just fine, but I ruled that having your mount shoved partway onto a teleport pad didn’t do the trick for the rider. The luckless cavalier had been left behind, plucked from his faithful beast’s back by the teleportation! After my players roundly cursed my name, they set about making plans. Saving their petrified pal was suddenly on the agenda, and yet another daring escape was in the history books.
So yes, my session went a little sideways, but it also produced some truly memorable antics. That’s what I mean about loving group saves. None of us sat down that night thinking a game of invisible-gnome-statue-Battleship was likely to happen, but shenanigans are always afoot when you let the dice take charge.
That of course leads us to our question of the day. Have you ever seen a group-save situation where an unlikely hero emerged? Confusion always seems to cause this mess, but any kind of AOE mind-affecting silliness can make it happen. So how about it? Have you ever been the last one left in a dire situation? Tell us your tale of suddenly-solo encounters down in the comments!
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Sort of, but in my instance, it was not a save. I was a Tiefling Rogue. Going into this, you have to know that my backstory involving having escaped a cult of my ancestor who had raised me to plant knives at the bottom of stairwells for people to fall on. One of the tools i used for this most often was the combination of Alter Self and Disguise Self, because no one expects a Tiefling in disguise. I had also made rolls in town recently and discovered a bounty on the Wizard’s head for something involving his own backstory.
We had been exploring an old castle and the floor had fallen out from under us, dumping the party into a series of old caves. We had been separated from each other for a moment, which was the set-up for this particular threat. The GM leads everyone singly into the kitchen for short one aparts before we finally all meet up. We go through a few encounters. All seemed good until the fighter volunteered for first watch. We had a strict policy of the Wizard taking first watch to allow for proper spell recovery. The check that saved the day was the Sense Motive to catch the imposter who had waylayed our poor fighter and stole his gear. So I reply that there are probably things with tentacles for faces down here, and fighter should switch to his silver sword. A Bluff vs a Sense Motive later, the fighter nods, declares that a good idea, then pulls the silver sword. Black energy arcs up his hand, as the short sword was Shapeshifter bane instead of Aberration bane (we’d been dealing with Werewolves. Lots of Werewolves.).
So, everyone realizes the fighter isn’t the fighter at all, and the GM declares that I get a surprise round, since I was obviously in the know. It was fun. We later found an annoyed, stripped, tied up fighter in one of the caves.
Love me some doppelgangers:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-10
They generate shenanigans just by existing.
Indeed. Also had fun in a certain Eberron adventure module when a vampire showed up and was chasing our party, who was in a wagon, on a horse. My character, being a changeling (effectively Doppelganger lite in this world), was on the lookout for others of her kin. So when she hit the vampire with holy water and got no reaction, she simply nodded and told the Party Cleric he was doing a terrible job.
Then I continued that character’s tradition of telling the Ranger to shoot the horse.
Pre 3E Save grow at the same rate as THAC0.
In pathfinder, I had a history of failing almost every will save i had to make, even with characters built with strong will saves. Knowing that we were about to play a dark suns game with a lot of psionic, I decided to make a character with the specific purpose of making will saves in mind. As such, I ended top with my half elf druid with a +12 or 13 to will at level 3, and while i still failed around 50% of my saves due to bad rolls, it definitely did also come in a lot of use when the rest of the party was mind controlled since the next highest save was the wizards +3. One of the main times it was useful, was when we faced these guys who could mind control us with their music, luckily it only worked on sentient creatures, so my primary strategy, summoning big cats till things die, plus some poor attack rolls from my allies against me managed to save the day. On the reverse side of things was Elliot the unlucky, who not only failed almost every save and ability check with consistent 1s and 2s, making him the unluckiest guy any of us had seen at the table, but no enemy every failed the saves from his spells either. It became a running joke among us, since we always knew what the result would be ahead of time. we faced a lot of low will enemies too, and they still consistently succeeded despite having only a 10-15% chance, with often straight successes even when something like hypnotic pattern was casted on 5-6 of them. We knew the dm wasn’t faking it too, since he didn’t have a dm board back then and rolled with the same dice he used for everything else right in front of us. It was insane.
I want to know what horrible misdeeds you committed in your last life to warrant that kind of karma.
I would say its more likely karma from this life for my fairly munchkinny characters.
In which case, praise be to Tyr’s justice!
Over a decade ago, I played in a rather silly infinite dungeon bash game in D&D 3.5E, where we levelled up like crazy and fought the most ridiculous monsters in the books. At one point, we found ourselves in a classical sand-floored arena fighting, uh, Orcus. I was the only one who saved against his fear aura.
Now, for context, I was playing a halfling fighter who specialized in throwing rocks at people. We were about level 25 at this point, and I had five levels of the Master Thrower prestige class and everything else in fighter. So there I was, a halfling with a handful of rocks, facing down Orcus.
Did I kill him? No, but it took him about eight rounds to kill me. Highlights of the fight included knocking him off his feet multiple times with my Trip Shot attack, emerging unscathed from the Meteor Swarm effect of his rod by using Infinite Deflection and Exceptional Deflection to bat all four meteors aside and Evasion to avoid all damage from them, and getting caught in his grapple only to escape with my Cape of the Mountebank.
Eventually he managed to grab me, hold me down and fire another meteor swarm into my face, which finished me off. But I’d bought the party enough time for the ranger to shake off the fear, Hide in Plain Sight against the sand of the arena, sneak up on Orcus and pummel him to death with his fists which counted as demon slaying weapons. It was a very memorable fight.
When you’re high enough level, you can count on a rez anyway. That counts as a win in my book. 😀
Oh Magus… Never change.
Fun fact: you can re-use/recycle this strip for the Handbook of E.F. by just flipping the view to the outside of the tavern.
Heh. We’re doing monthly pinups now, so you never know. It’s still a new genre for us!
Considering half the people in the above comic are monks, by level 10 they’ll be immune to poison and therefore immune to alcohol, which is kind of awkward for Way of the Drunken Master Monks.
The situation in the comic is why I made a rule for substance abuse to make it a little less swingy.
Your tolerance is your Con score. (Score, not mod) Double it if you have resistance to poison damage.
Every drink has a point value. (Deli wine: 1. Beer: 2. Actual wine: 3. Hard alcohol: 4. Dwarven baby-formula: 5. Dwarven hard alcohol: 8.)
You can drink up to your tolerance without making saves. When you drink while at your tolerance, every drink calls for a Constituion save. The DC starts at 10, and increases by the value of every drink you have. When you fail you pass out.
When you’re at 1/4 your tolerance you’re tipsy. Half you’re drunk. Making saves you’re hammered.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/bsazk6/alcohol_is_a_poison_dont_get_in_a_drinking/
Many will judge you if you give a Dwarven infant Dwarven baby-formula, as it doesn’t have as much of the alcohol that a developing Dwarf needs as the real thing.
thanks, added to my house rule list with the following alteration:
When you fail by 4 or less you throw up.
When you fail by 5 or more you pass out.
Nice addition, I approve.
Of course, most of the older boys, and some of the girls, of Downtime Town are going to have dreams about Magus for a while…
And none of them will be able to forget the pineapple + jojo trick without a modify memory spell.
The what now?
Tis’ something bipedal cats might do when drunk. And a Prequel reference.
https://www.prequeladventure.com/quill-weave-take-control-of-the-situation/
Funny how these coincidences turn out, ain’t it?
Huh. Maybe I should get around to naming the town one day. Eventually. If I remember.
I’ve been wanting to stat up a town name Paladin Falls for a while now.
The mayor/burgomistress of that town might have a (hyphenated) last name of Stearne-Tolkinthu.
=D
I suspect you of anagrammary, but your references are a little Oinkbane for me.
Edit: Just got it. Goddammit.
I’m also wondering if, after out-drinking the regulars, Pugilist went on to party with this guy;
https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74260
Look man, this is a TRPG comic, and there’s no way that the characters from Handbook-World and M:tG would be together in the same…
https://mtg.gamepedia.com/D%26D_Guildmasters%27_Guide_to_Ravnica
…Ah. Well then. Yes she did.
The best failed save story I have experienced was when my group was playing Wrath of the Righteous.
We had tracked this demonically tainted dragon to it’s lair and were ready to do battle with it.
It got the drop on us and managed to confuse half of the party with it’s funky breath (including the charging paladin and his mount), which I then magicked away, however before I could cure the damage dealers in our party the dragon turned me (and incidentally the stone to flesh salve I was carrying) into stone (after an unlucky 1 on my part).
This left our tank, who proceeded to have an epic fight with the beast the highlight of which was when the dragon ate him and he proceeded to do so much damage to it’s interior with his claws that the dragon had to drag him out of there itself with it’s own claws so that it would have a chance to fight back instead of attacking the helpless flailing confused people like it had intended.
You see? Confusion rocks socks! I always appreciated that it let the affected PC continue to participate in combat rather than fearing them or paralyzing them or whatever. Games are more fun when you can do stuff, you know?
You’ve got my sympathy on the whole “stone to flesh turned to stone” thing. Remember that cleric in my story? Yeah. He was the condition removal guy.
Whose legs are those behind Kineticist?
The legs are associated with the lavender hand.
Ah, hadn’t seen that.
This is a fun one, since I’ve had a couple of times now where I’ve looked at it again and caught a new detail. Props to Laurel’s artwork.
I’ve said it before, but Laurel’s wit makes the Handbook immeasurably better. My script called for “other heroes passed out in the bar.” She invented Ladies Night and all the sight gags. Girl brings A LOT to these comics.
Let me just say that that smug grin on Pug’s face (muzzle?) is just adorable.
Also, Magus’ kitty fangs being visible in the window is both adorable and a nice touch of detail.
Unfortunately, I think I sympathize with Barbarian most here. I’m notoriously dice cursed.
So you remember that campaign I was talking about with the two paladins? Well, we actually lost the final battle because of bad saves. See, there was a will save to enter the final bossroom, and the three who failed were the two paladins… and a devil that one player called in a favor from, just for extra muscle.
Kind of a weird choice, right? The player thought camaraderie was overrated, and it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission from the party’s lawful good majority. So paladin protests be damned (literally), a devil would be fighting on our side.
But thanks to those bad saves, we ended up with two paladins and a devil essentially locked in a room together. And while that make a great pitch for a sitcom, when you have more pressing matters? It’s a little hard to make them wrap things up and attempt to rejoin the main battle.
So wait… Did the paladins fight the devil instead of trying to go for the BBEG? Because that’s a “pick your battles” type of situation right there!
Other way around: the devil decided this was a good excuse to take some time and fight the paladins that were glaring it down. It didn’t have the same sense of urgency about saving the world, and the wording of the favor was more than loose enough to allow killing a few party members before stopping the BBEG.
But it’s funny you bring it up, since that “you should pick your battles” reasoning was really why he called in the favor, OOCly. He was a noted problem player who had recently talked the DM into letting him return to the table, and during the final dungeon crawl, he was using the circumstances as a way to twist our arms into forfeiting any IC response to his actions. Earlier in that final session, he also used a Wish on instant lichdom, which I was already overlooking with the most paper-thin of justifications.
Ah. Well then. I hope the paladins activated smite player after the game.
Gotta love creative use of impact foam. I’ve only managed it once, but it saved the butts of an entire adventurers’ guild’s low-level members, who we were saving from the evil constabulary.
As for group saves: I recall a funny Pathfinder session that still makes my players cringe at the memory. The party was mid-level and up against the final enemy of the dungeon, a ghost bard. They did some decent damage to him, had him on the ropes, and then they all failed their saves against a Confusion spell. All… except the party’s lone ranger cohort.
You’re probably familiar with confusion, but for those who aren’t, let’s just say that the party erupted into a riot of PvP action. The lucky cleric rolled “act normally” on their first round of confusion, but didn’t actually have anything prepared that could remove the condition, and instead elected to finish off the ghost bard.
Said bard was level 10, and confusion has a duration of round per level, so what followed was ten rounds of the poor ranger cohort–the one sane hero left among them–dashing around the edges of the room, throwing rocks at her allies to get them to stop killing each other and focus on her. The fighter had her unconscious by the end of the tenth round (fortunately the confusion wore off just in time, as he was raising his axe for the killing blow), the wizard had been clawed into a pulp by her own quasit familiar (who had also made his save vs. confusion, come to think of it, but a quasit’s not going to say no to an opportunity to claw apart his wizard), and the rogue had spent a solid minute babbling nonsense in tengu.
They actually came closer to killing themselves than any other enemy in that dungeon had come to defeating them.
That’s a good NPC right there. Reminds me of the necrophidius fight in Crimson Throne:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/constructs/necrophidius/lesser-necrophidius/
It’s a noted player-killer encounter on the Paizo boards, and here I was with only two players and their awakened poodle bard in a gestalt game. Sure enough, both the players failed, and it was down to Good Dog to save the day. My players were both in love with their characters, and would have absolutely murdered me if that TPK had gone through.
Moral of the story? It’s good to bring a clever NPC along. That mess saves campaigns!
Once we were waiting for the only one left ogf the group to appear, he send us a message:
hyg:)
imlatte:(
*playa:)
m_rWIlltonightshowletterleater:)
Which we translated into:
Hy, guys 🙂
I am late 🙁
Start playing 🙂
My ranger will show up later 🙂
We were already late for his absence and since deciphering his message toke us 45 minutes we decided to follow what we think it was his advice. After a while he show ups and ask us:
Hy, what i miss?
The total party kill, we respond to him.
The punishment then fr his lateness was to save us from a pack of seagulls. He was lucky enough to do it, otherwise there could be problems and “accidents” 🙂
Pack of seagulls you say? I gather your ranger pal took Favored Enemy: 80s band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpfWORQWhU
A pack of seagulls? o_o
Sorry i mean a pact of sea-ghouls. My keyboard sometimes works in a funny way 🙂
And no, the ranger didn’t have Favored Enemy: 80’s bands, our DM wouldn’t allow it.
I realized something, if it’s ladies night, why isn’t Wizard drinking? Isn’t s/he a lady? Don’t invite them the other ladies or, since inquisitor also isn’t there, does that mean the ladies have problems with elves?
I imagine her lying under the table out of sight. That Elf CON penalty and bad Wizard Fortitude save having teamed up on her.
She was a lightweight when she was 30 lbs. heavier:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/cultural-exchange
I therefore endorse this interpretation.
So that is the fate of Wizard and Inquisitor. Punny elves 🙂
Huh. Never thought of them occupying the same scene at the same time. Wait a minute though… Aren’t Team Bounty Hunter still tracking down the Heroes thanks to that evil twins mixup?
I don’t know, if you don’t know how i will know that what you don’t know if don’t know if don’t know? You know 😉
In any case Magus is just there so with a very hard remember mark skill check, and putting his shirt again, she can tell Inquisitor. Surely Ranger wasn’t allowed in the tavern 🙁
We had a ad&d 2.5 game. I was playing a dwarf cleric. The others 2 had a human barbarian, and a elf wizard. As I was sailing our ship pass an island we see a naked dyuid taking a bath under a waterfall. Save vs blind. I pass and everyone else fail including the npc crew. As we were only coasting along I just watch the show and leave everyone yelling “I can’t see” spent the next 3 days cureing blindness.
Anytime the barbarian drank by himself he was fine. But whenever we had a contest he would always lose. I had like a 14 con to his 18. He would roll all 2-3 and I would get 17-18
This one was an adventure in typos for me. I sat there staring at the word “dyuid,” trying to guess what kind of story it would be. Was it a druid? Was it a dryad? “Naiad” right? What a twist!
While not technically me against the world, I had a similar moment back playing 3.0 in an epic level focused campaign. We were fighting a large group of vampires and the like, which caused our sorcerer to have the genius idea to cast Sunburst.
Proceed to our entire party failing the saving throw and becoming blinded…
Luckily for us, my fighter had 120′ blindsense, and proceeded to fight the enemies while the rest of the party blindly stumbled around helplessly.
I think I’ve seen that fight: https://media1.tenor.com/images/48e5abc21b318871a005ac0de96d65de/tenor.gif?itemid=8019791
I’ve had several tank type characters fail the first inebriation save >.>
When you take more inebriation saves you fail more inebriation saves. That’s “big dumb guy” math right there!
guess I’ll have to dig this up whenever I get to use my freshly aquired Sippery Mind with Shadow Dancer.
That one time all except the Paladin got Hold Person-ed doesn’t count, as we discovered later the spell allowed a save -every- round… and the encounter got 1984ed: „you won this encounter, you have always won this encounter, any other information is outdated, false and/or enemy propaganda“
“Sippery” Mind? Is that a sipping jacket equipment trick?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/h-l/jacket-sipping/
Do you pour it into your ear? 😛
How did the actual Hold Person fight go? I mean, was it a TPK before the retcon?
Drinking problem?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=firBlh0OeT4
only when he can’t refill his pocket flask
sippery mind is alcohol induced Slippery Mind, to tipsy for the spell to take proper hold. Thats why Shadow Dancer carries a pocket flask with rum 😉
The actual fight was:
Shadow Dancer: I sneaketh with a take 10 for stealth = 37 into what turned out to be the throne room of Hook Mountain in Rise of the Rune Lords.
Stone Giant Sorcerer on the throne be like: Perception with take 10 = 38…
„HOW DARE YOU!“ – ‚Hold Person‘
Me: roll 1, um… Eternal Hope! – re-roll – … to fail again.
Rest of party —> charges in.
Me: Shadow Jump toward party and supports them with rays of frost (minor magic rogue talent) not much damage, but everything counts and enough to make myself a target.
after that one by one the party fails the saving throws and gets squashed as easy targets.
When the last one gets chopped down the Pala runs off (no one left to save, time to go)
It did take over 12 rounds altogether to work down everyones HP, so the DM guestimated 6 rounds to make the save and ruled a win with everyone drained of spells, HP and healing(channels/lay on hands)
Ha! Mokmurian, right? We fought a mythic version of that dude, and he seems to attract questionable rules calls. Mokmurian was scary AF, but that was mostly because he got vomit twin:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/v/vomit-twin/
Only it wasn’t really vomit twin. The duplicate got a full suite of Mokmurian’s mythic spell casting actions, so we basically had to fight two of him. My GM certainly put together a challenging fight, but once I identified the spell I was sitting there like, “That’s not… How could it possibly… The stone giant’s got hax!”
it was Barl Breakbones at Hook Mountain, Mokmurian comes up next at Jorgen Fist. No spoilers please, I just know because I volunteered to pre-draw the gigantic 10ft per square maps on flip chart and the library has his/her name on it. Next session is in a month, by then the maps will have leaked from memory.
No worries. Pretty sure the standard version doesn’t have vomit twin. That’s a goblins-only spell anyway.
checking Barls spell list I just remembered that I got hit with a Blindness spell first and Hold Person later. Thats why I didn’t bail out myself.
I have never been in this situation, but I have long wanted to play a PF Monk of the Healing Hand in a 1-20 campaign specifically for such an occasion. I feel like the MotHH’s capstone is basically designed around the possibility that the monk will be the last one standing, but I’m not sure the class is necessarily designed in that way.
In another encounter, I saw someone save the party in a 3.5 game due to his bizarre Daze condition-immunity. We were fighting three Balors on the Abyss (because we had previously defeated a single Balor), and two of them were committed to Daze-locking us with the second taking cheap shots on us. The third Balor was engaged in a battle in the sky with the Daze-immune hero.
He killed the Balor he was fighting and caused the Death Throes ability to trigger. The other two Balors saw that fight turn sour and tried to run, but one of them was held in place. As we became un-dazed, we killed the imprisoned Balor, letting one get away. After that encounters on the Abyss became mostly trivial, but they were also just distractions from the plot, so…
At some point, rerolling at lower level sounds easier, lol.
What gives you daze-immunity by the way? That’s a fairly rare one if I recall correctly.
Does failing inebriation on purpose count? That’s how I played a drunken master monk (the one I mentioned before, Shinku Kyo) who got combat benefits from getting tipsy.
https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1718128
As for being the only person present who could save the day, I had two situations. One was when my wizard was the only individual who could perform a magical trial (match symbols with spells of appropriate school) because he was the only class with enough arcane spells to do this.
The other, and much more RP worthy, was when he was the only one who followed our Kitsune into a perilous situation – we suspected an NPC was trying to steal an evil artifact from us (we had to get it secured from baddie cult), and they asked for a private conversation with the Kitsune who had it – the rest of the party was busy with helping around with ship duties, leaving my ratfolk wiz to invisibly follow. They entered a room and tried to charm her, but she made the save, so they went with plan B – rogue sneak attacks! Being a witch and flanked and surprised, she was badly hurt to start off and one round from being shanked to the floor. She had to run and get to her party. Unfortunately, she was locked in the room, whilst my wizard was outside.
So naturally, he opted for appropriate and wizardly response. The Kitsune needed an exit and the enemies needed to be fought. He did both by blasting a lighting bolt through the walls of the ship and into one of the baddies, giving our witch an exit, nearly disabling an enemy, as well as alerting everyone within a mile radius that something was amiss. And shrieking like a madrat as a ratfolk might be expected to. Kitsune used the hole to escape, our artifact remained unstolen, and one of the baddies was captured ( the one zapped managed to port out).
TLDR, wizard needed to solo rescue a teammate from rogues in a locked room. He did it by blasting a hole in a ship with lightning.
GOOD RESPONSE: Well that’s freakin’ awesome. Goddamn I love a well-applied blast spell!
DICKBAG RESPONSE: Well technically, energy damage should only deal half damage to the ship. You divide the damage by 2 before applying the object’s hardness. In the case of a typical galley, that’s hardness 5. So your lightning bolt deals half damage minus 5. That same galley has 1,560 hp, and doesn’t gain the broken condition until it’s down to 779 hp. Of course, that’s broken for the ship as a whole. A localized breakage is more reasonable, and a “strong wooden door” seems like an OK analogue for a ship’s hull. That’s 20 hp.
So I hope that your lightning bolt rolled exceptionally well on its damage dice. You need to hit at least 50 (50/2 – 5 = 20) points of damage to blast through that hull, otherwise your story is invalid and your fun doesn’t count. 😛
COUNTER-ARGUMENT RESPONSE:
The lightning bolt was shot not through a sturdy door, but a simple wooden wall next to it, belonging to a cabin room. The walls of cabins likely aren’t as thick as typical house walls or the ship’s exterior (which needs to be sturdy), and are better suited as light (reducing weight of the vehicle as a whole) and flexible for wood warping – simple planks might suffice, since the cabin walls are unlikely to be smashed through compared to a door.
All the damage is concentrated on a single point of the wood to punch a hole through – thus it’s not the same as trying to break a door off its hinges. In engineering, a laser, which acts similarly (instantaneous ray of light/energy) is capable of cutting through industrial steel, so a wooden wall would be trivial to punch a hole into. Since the spell specifically states it can ignite/damage flammable objects, it can be ruled that it might do full damage to the wood, burn-cutting through the hardness like a cutting laser.
Finally, from the ‘rule of cool’ standpoint, the lightning bolt can be equated to enabling the ‘Torso with a View’ trope, as it’s similar to a laser, light-saber, or plasma bolt.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TorsoWithAView
OK. I will reinstate your fun. It still only does half damage though.
Not quite like the other stories, but in one adventure, our party of four entered the vault/crypt of an ancient wizard, who made a bid at enslaving a god once.
As far as the other PCs knew, Rogue guy was a very distant relative of the guy, and since ‘blood calls to blood’, it would be totally safe to breach the vault and claim all the loot, right?
So yeah, they party enters the inner sanctum, it’s Will saves for everyone and Rogue guy passes on a lucky roll. So while he goes ahead and can’t quite decide which chest to loot first, he suddenly gets distracted by his companions shouting out and starting to fight something.
Basically it was a sort of ghost/psychic remnant of that wizard, but it could only affect people if they managed to perceive it. Which Rogue guy had somehow managed to avoid. But as far as he was concerned, it was just the vault trying to chase off intruders while readily admitting him, as the rightful heir.
So the battle went on and the Rogue tried to convince his fellow tomb-evacuators that they were merely fighting an illusion and that it was ‘all in their heads’ (trying to get re-rolls on their will saves basically).
When that only resulted in one other guy making their save, but still being attacked, Rogue guy tries to parlay with the ghost/entity. Something along the lines of “Uncle Rho? Could you please not hurt my minions?”
It’s a bit more complicated then that, but between Rogue distracting the ghost (which actually ended up hurting it) and the rest of the party managing to fight back, the ghost eventually gets defeated.
Too bad that the demise of the guardian also triggered the vault’s self-destruct mechanism…
Hell yeah! I like that story a lot better than, “There was a ghost and then we killed it.”
This sort of thing is also why I love pairing traps with combats so much. They always seem to make each other more interesting.
If magus not keeping shirts on is in the HoEF, I may have to officially subscribe to it. Jist sayin. #favoriteCharacter
She won the pinup poll this month. Jist sayin.
Pinup poll? Now I HAVE to check this out…
We were getting tired of the monthly wallpaper, so we changed up the rewards a bit. As it turns out, people prefer bikinis.
I think I’ve probably told this story before, but there was one boss fight that went like 17 rounds because there was a big part in the middle where just about everyone on both sides was disabled by some status effect or another, and pretty much just had to lie down and wait for the spell effects to wear off. There was nausea from Stinking Cloud, confusion from two different castings of, well, Confusion, and like 5 pits of varying levels of spikyness dividing the battlefield and blocking off whole doorways.
In terms of good saves, though, there was a point where the party Sorcerer (who had been lent to me as her player could not be there) had to run into the Stinking Cloud and end her turn next to a pit in order to line up a spell that was key to victory. I got the rest of the players present to sign a metaphorical affidavit that this was, in fact, our best and only option (in case this got her killed), then did it and rolled very high on both the FORT and REF saves. In general, that Sorcerer rolled really well on saves whenever I was playing her, which I guess was the Dice Gods’ reluctance to kill a PC while their player was not present.
Not exactly a “unexpected character makes the save” moment, but pretty close: During that fight, both the Barbarian and my Magus were confused. The Barbarian ran into an empty room so he wouldn’t hurt a partymate, only to constantly roll “you act normally” on his percentage dice and just stand there doing nothing. My Magus, on the other hand, kept rolling “do 1d8+STR damage to yourself” and slamming her head into the stone floor. She did like 36 damage to herself that battle, which was, incidentally, the ONLY damage she took.
As a fun note, the final part of that battle involved the last boss stuck in a pit. He had enough movement to climb out, but not to move away from the pit, so each round he would climb out, take one swing at someone, then fail the Reflex save from ending his turn next to a pit spell and fall back in. Eventually, we readied actions and shot him a whole bunch of times when he climbed out.
I have a feeling that the other bosses in the BBEG bar shake their heads and stare into their drinks, knowing it could be them in the pit one day.