Smashing Success
That ominous orb has me pondering an ominous question: Is anything truly indestructible?
I mean sure, you can invent some super-metal or imbue your MacGuffin with plot armor (along with cruelty, malice, etc.). But that’s just the trick that power level pulls in Dragon Ball Z. These things only exist so that we can go “holy crap!” when the impossible happens. The shield breaks. The ring melts. Vegeta crushes his scouter in disgust.
I think there’s a reason that these things happen. When it comes to narrative, change is more useful than stasis. Invincible and invulnerable means that the story is over. “We’re stuck like this forever” is tantamount to “then end.” So in that sense, I would like to propose The Gordian Trope. This trope states that, for any narrative state, it is possible to change that state. In other words, when it comes to storytelling, unstoppable force really is more powerful than immovable object.
Think of the Kobayashi Maru. Think of Plus Ultra. Think of any impossible jam that your protagonist of choice has gotten themselves into. And remember that they found a way out. It’s the same reason that Morpheus wins his duel against Choronzon. You never run out of hope.
I think that’s why (as today’s hover text reminds us) there’s always a way to destroy those pesky indestructible artifacts. Here are a few chosen at random to illustrate the principle.
- A warding box can be destroyed by placing a portable hole inside it, closing the lid, and then placing the box inside a second portable hole. This second portable hole must be closed, and then a wish must be used to switch the two portable holes. Doing so destroys both portable holes and the warding box along with them.
- Melting a torc of the heavens in a cauldron filled with the boiling blood of an ancient red dragon destroys it.
- If a talisman of ultimate evil is given to the newborn child of a redeemed villain, it instantly crumbles to dust.
These things are not easy to do. They are in fact obnoxiously hard to do. They require convoluted thinking, specific situations, and enough heroics to make the impossible feel earned.
So here’s my question for today’s discussion! What “impossible task” did you manage to achieve in a game? Was it the destruction of an artifact? The dissolution of an undying evil? Perhaps you managed to punch a hole in reality? Or conversely, is The Gordian Trope a steaming pile of BS on account of [reasons]? Whatever your take, tell us all about your favorite unbreakable objects, and how you managed to smash them to smithereens!
ARE YOU A ROLL20 ADDICT? Are you tired of googling endlessly for the perfect tokens? Then have we got a Patreon tier for you! As a card-carrying Familiar, you’ll receive a weekly downloadable Roll20 Token to use in your own online games, as well as access to all of our previously posted Tokens. It’s like your own personal NPC codex!
Does destroying your DM’s faith in humanity with your actions count?
Did you use fire? That mess tends to regenerate.
You want Dracula World? This is how you get Dracula World!
Wait is that a thing?
*Googles*
Still unsure if that’s a thing. :/
There’s this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/AnnoDracula
Well hot damn! That seems a boatload more interesting than True Blood.
… No comment. :p
Anyway, I’ve read neither, so I can’t really comment.
It’s absolutely awesome. Some of my fav novel I think 😀
I have a few item ideas for artifacts for a 5e-turned-PF2e campaign, and one item in my notes (the Cheatstone) had a somewhat convoluted destruction entry. It might end up belonging to the BBEG, it might not—the idea of someone sufficiently clever getting their hands on it seems like it might cause narrative issues, and it might be a bit overkill for what said character needs.
The Cheatstone is an artifact that lets the user “lie to the universe”—by making a Legendary Deception check, they can dramatically reduce the risks of using powerful magic, such as that needed to raise a clone, and perhaps enables that magic further. (Basically: a rogue-themed plot device to allow resurrective immortality and other such bullshit, likely with SOME big guidelines/drawbacks to make it not an instant win button for a sufficiently clever BBEG who owns it.)
Destruction: Within a 10th-level Zone of Truth, a holder must succeed the Deception check to activate the Cheatstone three consecutive times, telling the universe that the Cheatstone does not exist in each. When that is done, the Cheatstone will attempt to bargain with the holder, allowing them to undo one lie the stone has told the universe, of the holder’s choice, for each critical success rolled. The Cheatstone will cooperate in attempts to figure out what lies it has told that the party does not know of. If the bargain is accepted, the Cheatstone remains intact and cannot be destroyed or bargained with in this way for a week. The DC of checks made by the same person to destroy or bargain with it again is increased by 2, cumulative for each bargain made with that person.
If the bargain is rejected, the holder must roll a Will save, with a +2 cumulative circumstance bonus for each critical success on the Deception check—on a success, the holder crushes the Cheatstone into paradoxical dust, and on a critical success, they may also undo lies as though they had accepted the bargain.
I appreciate that the cheatstone tries to weasel its way out of the deal. Very flavorful.
One of my players once did the impossible. She saved another character’s life.
In this world, it is known that anyone with hag blood in them invariably turns into a brutish, evil hag by the age of 30. Enter our paladin, a 29-year-old half-hag changeling, who is determined to do as much good in her life as possible before she turns. The player who made her fully intended her to be a tragic figure, knowing that she was doomed and expecting nothing to be done about it.
The other figure in this story is the party ninja. Shortly after they met, the ninja was cursed by a wizard to have an irrational fear of the paladin, having nightmares about her every night and feeling dread at her presence or her touch. On a side mission to cure herself of this curse, the ninja winds up ensnared by a BBEG, who plans to drain her not only of the curse but of all her memories. Imagine my surprise when, instead of bargaining for her life, she offers to submit to him if he gives her a way to save the paladin from her fate.
By coincidence, she asked this of exactly the right person. The BBEG directed her to a castle on the coast, where she discovered a book in a dead language on the nature of the hag. Then it took another journey up and down nearly the length of the continent to find a doctor who was able to decipher the book and perform the surgery that saved the paladin from her transformation – just in the nick of time.
The paladin went on to marry the party wizard, and the ninja now lives with the BBEG inside her head. Sometimes they plot crimes together. I suppose the moral of the story is that if something seems written in stone, find someone suitably powerful and ask them about it. Sometimes, you may be asking a question that even the GM hasn’t thought of, and their answer might just surprise you.
I thought you were going to tell us that you hired vampire to get rid of all that inconvenient hag blood.
Nah, it just turned out she needed an appendectomy, which hadn’t been invented yet.
Nice! The appendix is the hag of the organs after all. Everybody knows that.
Lesser known is spleen’s role as the gelatinous cube of the organs.
Not sn artifact, but Jasper Stone is a villain in Deadlands, who exists solely to vibe-check players who get powerful enough to threaten the metaplot (basically the worst kind of lazily-written plot device). Has maxed out all stats and skills, as well as every combat edge and Harrowed power available, and then a bunch of unique, game-breaking bullshit on top of all that. Crucially, he can only be killed in 2 very specific ways: either using the exact bullets which killed him the first time (still lodged in his back btw), or with a bullet fired from a gun by his own hand (and whichever method you use has to be a headshot, because screw you). So, barring time travel (the actual, canon method of killing him), wrestling him to force his gun to his own head, or “Commander Shepard”ing his ass into suicide, your options aren’t great.
How fuckin’ ever, the Enlightened (basically a Monk) version of the Deflection power allows you to catch and return projectiles (it’s all in the reflexes). So, if you were to bait him into shooting you, and got unspeakably lucky, you could *technically* satisfy the conditions for the second method of killing him. And then the GM beats your metagaming ass with the rulebook. #worthit
>So, if you were to bait him into shooting you, and got unspeakably lucky…
Has this actually happened? Please tell me this actually happened.
Sadly no. None of my mates have ever run a Deadlands game and I wouldn’t include Stone in any game that I run (because he’s a shit character)
This reminds me of that 1d4chan story when that guy destroyed his GMs plot not once but multiple times.
TBH, according to story GM deserved it.
Henderson or That guy destroys psionics?
It’s probably not ‘The Ballad Of Edgardo’, but that’s another story worth mentioning.
I love the illustrations on that one. This one in particular…
https://i.imgur.com/4PHakP5.png
…Might have stuck in my memory:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/brooding
Psionics one
The culmination of our 4e game was permanently getting rid of a Shard of the Abyss. Our options were letting a demon absorb it and get annihilated from the energies, destroying it (which we were told would be extremely bad), or yeeting it where it came from, into the Abyss. We chose the last option, flying on a Astral Skiff to the Abyss’s hole and chucking it in. Didn’t prevent us from fighting the Herald of some evil deity afterwards tho.
I think I just found the best use for that joke item that lets you change a letter in a spell. Harald of an evil deity is just an accountant.
to which frame of reference is the „Immovable Object“ immovable to anyways?
and since the object is already moving (around the earth’s center, around the sun, around the center of the galaxy, etc) an Unstoppable Force should have no problem nudging it a bit of the current trajectory.
In your face philosophers! (who can’t distinguish shit from manure).
my first campaign had uns stumble across an indestructible McGuffin (indestructible for single digit LvL adventures anyways. Destructible for higher level easily, but who wants to be the target of the wrath of a goblin god?)
So the plan was to wrap it up in lead, encase it in stone, dump it in the ocean and thereby move the problem 10.000+ years into the future.
The campaign fizzled out due to short attention span of the DM.
As with Kars, moving the problem sufficiently far away counts as a W.
https://media.tenor.com/KyrkglRjubIAAAAC/kars-jojo.gif
I should add that „short attention span“ of the DM was like „2 sessions later“ and totally unrelated to my estimate of how long the artifact would be at the bottom of the ocean.
Everyone is always sooo determined to destroy the evil artifact. Nobody ever thinks to just seal it in an adamantine box warded against divination and dump it at the bottom of the holy water sea surrounding Mt. Celestia so nobody can get to it. Either way it’s out of the picture.
lol. See Homeslice directly above your comment. XD
I destroyed someone’s character sheet by making them spittake from a joke my character told. Not sure if that counts as an artifact.
I’ma need to hear that joke. Just one sec while a take a nice big sip of coffee.
“Oh the orb is unbreakable? This would make a super awesome mace!”
And oldie but a goodie:
https://i0.wp.com/shaneplays.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/39a074ec4840396b6dcf8650acca711e-400×320.jpg?resize=600%2C479
The whole “trying to make everything indestructible” reminds me of that story I read about a DM who was tired of his group always bypassing stuff, so he had one dungeon closed with a set of double adamantine doors. The IDEA was that the group would need to locate and acquire the key so they could enter the dungeon and plunder it.
Instead, the group broke the walls, and plundered the doors themselves – since, because of their size, they represented a huge amount of adamantine, and thus a LOT of money. Oops.
Point is (aside from, you know, funny group shenanigans) that trying to make everything indestructible might actually backfire in the end.
On the topic – I didn’t do it, my players did it in the campaign they GM’ed. They encountered a demilich. A demilich that, the module mentions, cannot speak. They killed its retinue, and when they realized it was trashing them, thought about escaping… But instead they ended up shoving it into an abandoned house with no chimney and closing the door. No hands to open the door, no servants to do it for it, no voice to call for more. It never got out.
some big monsters where especially designed for players who just smash away noisily at the walls in dungeons.
Couldn’t the demilich bash its way out eventually?
Demiliches are generally pretty physically weak with no inherent natural weaponry (presumably they might have the generic unarmed attack to represent biting or headbutting something).
1d3-5 is not going to get trough the 5 hardness wooden door anytime soon.
Presumably there might be something using “wear and tear” rather than attack rules, but I’m honestly not certain that’d be faster than just natural wear and tear and decay over time.
I could see it being a matter of mostly coincidence (or knowledge:engineering) whether the bashing actually speed things up, depending on whether it picked one of the places that’s naturally decay first or one of the spots that’d take longer.
Maybe tangentially related, but in a 3.5 game the party was climbing a tower that was supposed to represent the different planes of existence. While in “hell” we got into a fight with a horn devil and were unable to overcome its regeneration, good aligned AND silver weapons. Not wanting to leave such a powerful foe behind us, we dragged its body down several flights of stairs and tossed it into the “gears of Mechanus”. While we couldn’t kill it, we made sure that the gears kept it so far into non-lethal damage that it wasn’t going to bother us anytime soon. 🙂
So you the sent the devil to its own special Hell. Neat.
Personally I think the gordian trope is a bit too extremist.
I think it really comes down to whether it’s more interesting if something can be destroyed or if it can’t. Somethings are more interesting as changeable and some things are more interesting if they have to be lived with.
For instance I agree with the design decision in Exalted to make Exaltations indestructible and irrevocable.
It’s just more interesting when that particular cat is permanently out of the bag for people to make their own choices with and about. Instead of something that can be taken back.
Similarly various to-this-story-unimportant background details/large objects can be better served as indestructible. For instance most grounded (or even grounded-ish) stories and low-powered games wouldn’t really be well served by being set in a setting where blowing up the Sun was a real possibility.
Now I do agree that most things, particularly most things available for the players to interact with, are more interesting as breakable/accomplishable.
Through I don’t really have a good story of doing the so-called “impossible”, I haven’t really played a lot of games in that space of pretending things are impossible – through I guess I have destroyed plenty of ancient evils in my time
Are you suggesting that Exalts (of all fictional beings!) are incapable of doing the impossible?
I don’t disagree with your assessment on that example. Working within the rules often makes for a better story. But if my Heroic Motivation was to rid myself of my exalted essence, I bet that could be made into a story.
Exalts do have a strong mode running in that space where people start singing “Row Row, Fight the Power”, but I think that’s what makes them such a good counterexample.
Because even for them, they have a few “no-takesbacks” rules they have (no destorying exaltations, no true resurrections, no time travel that can change the past) which are better and more interesting as “actually impossible”-impossible than as “C3PO babbles about astroid fields so you seem cooler when you do it anyways”-impossible.
In this case it’s because the game is largely about having power and what you choose to do with it, which is much more interesting when you then have to live with those choices (even if living with it involves trying to change the future to counter the choices, you can’t literally undo them).
Now see, I think we aren’t disproving The Gordian Trope here. I think we’re doing something better: exploring its limitations.
If you’ve ever read a comic where yet-another-resurrection brings back a fallen character, or rolled your eyes at bad self-insert fan fic involving wormholes sucking the author into the fiction, you know that the aesthetic of “anything is possible” feels lame when it’s handled poorly. It feels unearned.
In other words, you literally can do anything in fiction. You can decide, like so many of us back in high school, that rolling a natural 20 means your level 1 barbarian leaps to the moon. But the aesthetics of the situation is badly off. I suspect that there’s more to dig into here, but I would want to do some actual digging on Google Scholar before venturing a theory.
I feel like what you are saying here is kind of the other side of a two-edged sword from the Gordian Trope. The Gordian Trope postulates that any narrative state can be changed, while what you’re talking about is rules stating that certain narrative changes cannot be “un-changed”, so to speak. Which is really the same basic idea as the Gordian Trope, since there is little meaningful difference between “You cannot kill GMPC X” and “If you kill GMPC X he can be brought back to life and nothing changes”.
Really, any wizard capable of organising enough electrons to create their own lightning bolt on demand should also be able to turn any given object into an equivalent mass of neutronium and neutrinos. No one ever thinks to ward against p + e- => n + νe.
Might see if the other Forever-DM would accept a Weakomancer whose one spell is ‘Induce β Decay’.
This is why I don’t game with engineers. Fuckers are dangerous!
In a sky fantasy setting, we once hijacked a pirate airship that the GM originally didn’t intend us to even catch up to, then modified it to go at hypersonic speeds by manipulating the air density around it while driving it with not one, not two, but THREE engines in tandem. Fairies were also involved.
This makes me unreasonably happy. I just imagine you guys hurtling through space doing the tandem yell like the climax of every Voltron episode:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/bba97c1882ddd00c800d0db95f95393d/tumblr_p1y8ptCgdT1va3eivo4_r1_1280.jpg
Several of the items in ‘Tasha’s cauldron of everything’ have rather unreasonable requirement to destroy them, including getting the cooperation of several lords of hell, making an emotionless god cry and crush it under a very specific dancing hut.
Those are pretty silly, but I don’t know that they’re “unreasonable.” I read that mess more as “build a campaign around this.” If you’re trying to destroy one of those, it’s AT LEAST a full arc of a campaign.