Subbing In
We’ve seen Thief deal with a no-show. We’ve seen Fighter being a no-show. Now it’s Wizard’s turn. Her usual adventuring companions are MIA for the day’s adventure, but our heroic mage does not miss sessions. Pity poor Commoner and his nine hit points.
Sending your under-leveled henchmen to the front lines might not be an optimal strategy, but sometimes it’s the only option. When you’re facing down a deep dark cave shorthanded, you make do with what you’ve got. I can sympathize with that impulse.
Allow me to take you back to the days of yore. Way back to my mythic wizarding days, when one particular session saw the party of five down to a party of three. It was me, the paladin, and emo cleric. We were mighty indeed, what with our mythic tiers and our phat lootz. Our GM had prepped mythic content designed to challenge five players though, and we were understandably nervous about adventuring with a skeleton crew. As such, we decided to bring along my temperamental behir cohort as our fourth. It would be tough going, but doable so long as we were cautious. It also led to one of my fondest gaming memories.
So no shit there we were, faced with a horrible mythic hag and a moral quandary. It was one of those Jeepers Creepers torture chambers (NSFW), complete with flayed bodies strung up all around the room. Typical day on the job for big damn heroes, right? Only problem was that one of those bodies—the elf we’d been sent to save—was still horribly alive despite her current skinlessness. No points for guessing who was wearing said skin.
“She can still be saved,” said the hag from within her Edgar Suit. “Surrender your weapons to me, and I shall restore your companion.”
If it was any other party we might have cut our losses and stabbed away. I was rolling with team holy-bro though, so the hag’s innocent-threatening ultimatum left us well and truly boned.
“Damn,” I said. “This would be a perfect time to cast regenerate.”
“Um,” said emo cleric.
“But who actually prepares regenerate? Obviously it’s great as a scroll, but it’s so niche that I couldn’t see anyone actually having it prepped and ready.”
“Ummm,” said emo cleric, a little louder this time.
“I mean, if we had access to regenerate right now, we could just cast it on our elf pal, regrow her skin, and then dogpile this horrible hag no questions asked.”
“UM-HMM!” said emo cleric through his shit-eating grin.
Yeah he had it. And it worked out even better than you might expect.
“Get her!” shouts the paladin. And oh boy did we. First my behir cohort grabs the hag. Then the paladin activates aura of justice, giving all of his allies (behir included) smite. My well-prepared cleric companion begins wailing away with his mace. The hag tries to cast dimension door to escape, but I’m on the spot with a readied dispel magic for the counterspell.
“Curse you!” shrieks the hag.
“Jog on!” says I.
The next round was the good bit. My behir begins to swallow-whole. The holy bros begin jabbing their weapons down behir-bro’s gaping gorge, smacking the hag about the face and head. Ax, mace, and behir throat are all glowing with celestial radiance and doing smite evil damage. It was like watching the world’s holiest plumbers trying to exorcise a demon clog, and the onomatopoeia was magnificent. There was much giggling at the table, and none of it would have been possible without the last-minute substitute.
So if you ever find yourself shorthanded, I say to look at it like this. Your allies and minions and cohorts might not be as powerful as the regular party. But when you change things up and roll with an unusual party composition, you’re more likely to get unconventional tactics. If that means Commoner gets to go Flynn Rider with his mithral frying pan, or Warrior gets to test out his weird intimidate skills, or Wizard gets to roll the dice and mage-tank with mirror image, then for my money that’s an interesting change of pace. At the very least it means that game night isn’t cancelled.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever brought your hangers-on into battle with you? Did they go down like under-leveled chumps, or did they manage to surprise you with their resourcefulness? Tell us your tales of substitute adventurers down in the comments!
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A bit confused on what you mean through that opening desc.
Each of the stuff is the chars facing an objective and fighter is well watching TV in the comic that you linked my guess nobody just showed up that session?
Also the general desc is weird, do you mean the players never not show up?
Because in one of the comics wizard is not there ‘w’)/
its really weird famalam on what you meant or said in the desc.
https://i.imgur.com/U7Ghu2s.mp4
This comic is about Wizard being the only one to show up to the adventure that day. She’s been forced to go adventuring with NPC hangers-on Warrior and Commoner in place of Fighter, Cleric, and Thief.
You’ve obviously never read the ‘Life of the Party’ webcomic, have you? Looking like a fluffy bunny is how they get you! https://www.deviantart.com/travisjhanson/art/Epic-Battles-728507690 and https://www.deviantart.com/travisjhanson/art/Killer-Bunny-RPG-Comic-675667506
Also, in my first game, Gunslinger hired a squire. Squire would load guns and pass them to Gunslinger. Occasionally he would fire them himself if needed. He got paid in some silver and experience. Sadly, the game was cancelled and we never found out how much Squire could grow.
I’ve seen one or two of those pages, but never knew what it was called. Cheers for the links!
Good thing hired squire died along with the rest of the campaign. Otherwise I suspect he would have died with fireball. Minions don’t do so good with splash damage, especially when it’s their job to work with gunpowder!
You’re welcome. He makes one almost every day.
Probably. Though it would have been fun to watch. It would have also been fun to see if Barbarian ever found out that Gunslinger was an android. He had a hatred for robots.
I suspect that the silhouetted creature goes “Pika pika!”, which bodes ill for the (surrogate) party members wielding metal weapons….
I’m of the opinion that only Fighter wields a truly “metal” weapon in this comic:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-03
\m/(>.<)\m/
Appropriate comic to the question for me. My story this time actually involves a campaign where I was playing a female elven wizard.
So: We were a party of wizard, witch, fighter, and, oracle. On this day, however, our fighter was absent. The GM decided to compensate by having the NPC ranger we’d hired as a guide sub in as our front line.
We rolled a random encounter with an angry tiger. It opened the fight by pouncing upon our ranger ally, rolling a truly obscene number of critical hits, and killing him on the spot. From there we had a very hard fight on our hands, but it shall forever be known in that group as they day the wizard ended an encounter by punching a tiger in the face.
Pouncing cats are no joke. My buddy the gnome bard wound up getting reincarnated as a halfling bard after she got jumped by a cave lion. And let me tell ya, between having to dye her hair back to pink and doubling her daily food budget, that wound up being a major bump in overhead!
I wonder what the nutritional value of a hag might be for a Behir-sized anatomy. Poor thing probably didn’t enjoy the taste of her – regardless of what kind of hag it was.
Hmm, that’s a ‘fun’ fact: If the Behir ate the hag whilst she was still wearing her elven skin-suit, your Behir technically got to taste and eat your elf rescuee via skin-suit proxy. In other words, it now knows the taste of elf.
No elves in the party, thank Erastil. Let’s hope he never gets a hankering for manflesh.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/004/476/MF.jpg
Silly Colin, what do you think its diet was before you ‘adopted’ him from that meanie cult?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6S5ZuXhNbL4
I don’t have nothing to say regarding the current topic at hand 😉
Once a beautiful lady ask me
Where is the queen that was never born?
What may be lost? was my answer.
That was my answer and always is.
To find a treasure one must walk its path
To find a path one must walk its road
To find a road one must walk its route
To find a route one must walk to it
My name is the one i choose
not the one there was give to me
therefore i am the one i am
The oracle sees the future
The king build it
The man live it
You get what i mean 😉
No idea, mate. I never played Cultist Simulator.
Ah! But you know what Cultist Simulator is! points finger accusingly at you
Seriously though, go play it. Go mad. Eat your friends. Mourn the Sun. Fear the Worms.
Eat the dead and become the Door 😉
While Cultist Simulator is a really good game and i enjoy playing it, that isn’t what i was talking about.
Still if you want to believe that, good for you i suppose 🙂
That’s exactly what a cultist would say.
You are paranoid, good idea, that will help you with the hunters of the Suppression bureau 🙂
fine, he has a sidekick class.
https://media.wizards.com/2018/dnd/downloads/UA_Sidekicks.pdf
I seem to only attract NPC tagalongs when I’m playing good people who value the lives of their comrades.
I was a heroic party-leader Paladin in Tomb of Annihilation. When they died it was therefore a failure of my Paladin’s leadership. Every time one of them charged in against my advice and got bisected by a zombie t-rex, or got dropped off a 500 foot cliff by Gargoyles, or followed into a danger and got caught in a Fireball from a Death Slaad, or didn’t take a short rest and as such was at reduced HP when we fought a grueling gauntlet of Devils that got them killed, it was clearly my fault because I led them into that situation.
Lawful Good egomania is stressful.
*Warrior will be fine.
I posted and the site ate it, so my pasted backup didn’t have the first three words. Damn lack of an edit button.
You may recall our recent discussion of “knives”:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/sidekick
Yes, but those had nothing to do with my backstory, those knives organically forged themselves.
A whole 9hp? Commoner must be at least 3rd by now, then.
Cook enough flapjacks and you’re bound to complete a few cooking-based encounters eventually.
Well aside from the Leadership granted half-celestial spider eater I just used as a mount there’s only one other game I can recall I had cohorts in.
That was a short lived Blades in the Dark game where I had a cohort of cultists that were also badass warrior women (the crew was an entirely female war/blood cult). In one of only two battles of the game, they (all two of them) successfully worked with the PCs to cut/shoot down a bunch higher tier gang members.
It was a pretty cool fight. We were at another gang’s HQ to negotiate a deal when a third gang that was at war with them attacked. We wound up with this multi-level and indoor/outdoor fight. Iirc the cohort wound up making their big contribution while fighting down a stairway.
Is this a “Hodor” situation?
I can’t say for 100% since I didn’t watch GoT that far, but probably not.
Being a tier 0 crew our “gang” cohort was “1-2 people”. In this case two. One used a claymore (the sword, not the explosive), the other a harpoon gun.
I was asking “did the dude sacrifice himself for the party?”
(Perhaps I should eschew the memes sometimes and talk like a normal human.)
Oh ok. No, not at all. Their swift and brutal murder of their targets was part of what caused the enemy gang to flee for their lives.
So basically the exact opposite.
Competent hirelings that do what you pay them for? Do they have a phone number or a PO box or something?
I mean, technically we didn’t pay them. They were just the first members in the cult we were running. So I’m pretty sure you don’t want to contact them. =P
But yeah, they somehow managed to roll a 6 on 2d6 drop highest.
Though mechanically this means they’re actually (supposed to be on average) incompetent and just happen to be lucky.
It’s funny how weird decisions and fickle dice-luck can turn ‘this is a TERRIBLE idea’ into ‘That was AMAZING!’
My wife’s favorite tabletop story is from when she played Vampire: The Masquerade back in high school. For anyone not familiar, the vampire clans in that game all have different shticks, and the most infamous one was Malkavian. Malk’s are all literally crazy. They take one psychosis or mental illness at character creation, and are mostly built around it. In theory, this could lead to a lot of variety and drama and tragedy. In practice, it’s Clan Chaotic Neutral.
So her little group ended up forced into a fight with an even number of Werewolves, and in that setting Werewolves are MONSTERS. So it was going to be a brutal fight, and everyone was going to have to give it their all.
…So of course the Malkavian pulled out the stray kitten he’d ghoul’d a couple sessions back and sent it out to 1v1 the 8 foot tall murder machine like it was a gorram pokemon.
…The kitten won. It wasn’t even CLOSE. The DM could not roll a successful hit against the damned thing to save his life, and the kitten got crits in a system with exploding dice damage three out of four rolls. All the while his player sat back laughing his ass off with the smuggest shit-eating grin you can imagine.
It was a Bone Gnawer, wasn’t it? Probably a ragabash too. And malnourished.
Try your tricks against a proud son of Fenris, leech!
😛
Dunno, I hear tell that there ARE no wolves on Fenris…
Also, just told her I shared this story and she laughed. Said they were Glass Walkers, apparently! Doesn’t mean much to me, but…
lol. She beat up a computer nerd.
Oh jeez oh jeez.
Oh jeez.
I’m in a PF game right now, the one with Seer Kakapo, the faerie-tormented Tengu Oracle. Before this oracle was Malachi the Evil Wizard, but he was lawful, so working with the party isn’t a problem.
The Vespergaunt that the party met, on the other hand, was. We weren’t hunting -it- down when we met it, it was just visiting the dungeon we were raiding. It promised us a Wish spell, for no reason at all, but the majority of the party was definitely forewarned of Greeks bearing gifts, so it was refused. Malachi, on the other hand, said ‘Give me a bit to think about it.’
As it turned out, even so much as thinking it over (after the vespergaunt teleported, as it was accidentally given a round to itself while Malachi deliberated) invited its corruption and Mal found himself making will saves for no reason every so often. Eventually, he failed, and took a step down to Neutral Evil and got half a Deep One template. A little later, he failed again, and got the full template and another step to CE. He did bring up the imminent transformation after the first failed save, though, so it was a side quest to find the vespergaunt in question and kill it to reverse the curse, and they didn’t just suddenly kill him for it.
That happened later. The sailors we had hired on our vessel we went around on were not keen on their employer’s gross looking evolutionary path, even if they were part of Malachi’s and the tiefling crossbowman’s backstory. A few days after the template was complete, sailor Bari got a little too uppity and Malachi killed him in the bunks while a fight was going on upstairs. He then surrendered to the party when they demanded to know what was going on. He pretended to have been possessed by some external force-oh no, it’s happening again!…and killed another sailor, Bah-ree. That got him thrown in the brig without his spell book, component pouch, or any hit points not covered in subdual damage.
Then one of the Sea Dogs (the expensive mercenary marines) named Beiri, sat around and waited for the paladin to leave. As the PCs went upstairs to the main deck, he and Barry opened up the brig and accidentally turned all that subdual into actual. With knives.
Fortunately, they came across a shipwreck a day or two later, and a marooned Tengu surviving on Dream Feast.
For real, though, those Sea Dogs were awesome in a fight. The Dogs stuck around for the duration of their contract, the 2 surviving regular sailors ducked first port, Barry and Baurei. I think Beiri, Berry, and Kevin had some fighter and rogue levels. Good men. Sorry to have killed some of them.
I should give an honorable mention to the sailor that sacrificed so much to get us through one of the earlier dungeons. He died bravely. Little Barry, you’ll be missed.
lol. I was halfway through your story of evil transformation and mythos shenanigans before I realized we were still talking about hired NPCs.
What were the terms of the Sea Dogs contract, btw? You don’t usually hear about PCs hiring the brute squad. I mean, usually the are the brute squad!
Pay in the order of ten times that of a standard sailor, if I recall correctly. Contract stipulated they were on duty until the conclusion of the listed objective (restarting the Throne of Neptune) or the destruction of the vessel.
The vessel did get destroyed from underneath us, but we found another one (a magical one, next to the above Throne), so we re-signed the Dogs for the return trip too. All but two of them wound up surviving.
I like to imagine that the Throne of Neptune is a literal chair with an outboard motor.
Commoner, Warrior, and Aristocrat should team up; one of my fondest games was spent playing the much-maligned ‘Expert’ class. I had a pretty fun one with the weak divine spell casting option available, too, though I’m having trouble recalling if it was called Shaman or whatnot. Then again, I like playing characters whose strengths are in creatively using their skills or abilities (or words, or background).
Basically, I root for the z-team, because I like being the z-team. Somebody has to clean up the Greater Diamond Basilisk muck, after all, might as well be me!
That’s going straight on my “script ideas” page. It would be nice to get that band back together. And pitting Aristocrat against the tag-along of Drow Priestess could be fun to watch….