The Nuke
When you decide to unload the big guns, it better be for a good reason. That’s because collateral damage and excessive force can both ruin the moment. This is one that I learned the hard way. What follows is the tale of “Dammit Dangus.” I’ve yet to live it down.
So no shit there we were, a bunch of deposed kings of the universe fighting an evil robot uprising down in Autochthon. It was the final fight of the campaign, and we found ourselves inside a bizarre Lavos-looking chamber facing off against our BBEG.
My characters was… not well built. Dude was an archer named Dangus Wildspeaker (because I am a paragon of originality). More importantly, his puny arrows had zero chance of punching through the BBEG’s indestructible soulsteel plating. The best I could do was “ping damage,” chipping away for one measly health level at a time. I’d built the guy to take on swarms rather than single targets, and that’s not where you want to be when you’re fighting the 40-foot tall avatar of a living city.
So anyway, as I’m watching my buddies swinging away for actual damage with their grand goremauls or whatever, I’m left paging furiously through my character sheet wondering how I can be effective. I’m reading and rereading Essence Arrow Attack and Phantom Arrow Technique and Inexhaustible Bolts of Solar Fire, but it’s completely hopeless! I had more chance of damaging the building than the boss monster. I was doomed to go down in campaign history as “the useless one.”
But wait. Damage the building….
“Hey ST! You said this fight is happening inside a dome, right?”
“Yeah. There’s a big cupola on top and everything.”
“Perfect! I shoot that.”
“You what? Why?”
“Rain of Feathered Death!” I shout triumphantly. “See, you can create duplicate attacks with that one. Ima do one of those shoot-a-hole-in-the-floor things and bring the building down on this bastard’s head!”
I was supremely happy with my daring ploy. I was also somewhat perplexed by the blank expressions around the table.
“Are you sure?”
And to my lasting shame, I did not heed the age-old wisdom. I’d found my biggest, baddest attack, and I was gonna use it Sol-dammit! So I begin chucking my bucket of d10s. Everything comes up success. Numbers are crunched. Calculations are made.
“You’re aware that your opponent only had two health levels left, right?”
“Yeah, of course I’m… Wait, what?”
Apparently, while I was feverishly hunting through my charms list, somebody had magic’d up a status report on the end boss. Dude was nearly dead. I could have had the killing blow.
“Heh. Oops. Seventeen successes though! That’s pretty good, right?”
That’s when my ST uttered the words that will haunt me for the rest of my days. “Everyone? Roll Dex + Dodge please.”
As it turns out, bringing a building down while you’re inside of it is not the smartest move. The collateral damage was considerable, and some of the party’s allied NPCs were already on their last legs. I’m pretty sure my group would have disowned me if our adorable otter mascot had actually snuffed it. As it is, I’m still routinely treated to a chorus of “Dammit Dangus! He only has two health levels left!” whenever I plan out a fancy attack.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever accidentally done more harm than good with an attack? What happened? What were you hoping to happen? Sound off with your own ill-advised nuke deployments down in the comments!
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Somewhere in the background, a Halfling is happily readying to update the number on the ‘It’s been 99 days since the last astral rift’ tally.
I can’t imagine that number ever gets out of the single digits.
I can’t tell how much of Sorcerer’s behavior is his own fixation with explosions/pyromania, and how much of it is due to influence from his bloodline matron’s world-destruction-yearning affinity/upbringing. She’d probably be proud of him, though.
Demon Queen is waiting on the other side of that astral rift, eager to be showered in free extradimensional handbags.
Back to back augmented force damage fireballs were great for clearing the enemy encampment in surprise round+going first in initiative. Unfortunately they were also great for wrecking all the evidence and loot in the tents at the same time.
Ah, the old “fireball fireball fireball” tactical formation. Gets ’em every time.
One of the parties I DM for has an Alchemist, so this happens a lot with his bombs. Recently, he dropped an enemy patrol by grenading them twice with the surprise round/high initiative combo. Good technique, though it did kind of alert every single patrol in the house. But what are you going to do? NOT blow people up?
There was that time the entire docks, part of the city, and half the boats in the harbor were on fire and it totally was my fault…
The game was GURPS and I’m playing a ‘genius’ apprentice elemental wizard… the party was fighting a loosing a battle on some docks, we were pinned in, outnumbered, and our heavy melee dwarf was starting to falter. So I shouted to the other mage (my characters Mentor) “Put resist fire on all of us!” and started casting a whalloping big “Create Fire” spell (like Harry Dresden, I didn’t do subtle, or intricate, or surgical, but I could do big in a very big way…). A few rounds later I’d magicked up the biggest fire spell my young wizard had ever dreamed up, I was spending everything I had, all my mana, my artifact’s mana, and a chunk of HP, but boy howdy was I was gonna catch all of the baddies, and their ship, and their favorite tavern in that fire spell…
What I hadn’t figured on was rolling a critical success. See normally that just means “spell costs nothing”. But I’d spent Hit Points, and because our GM deemed “It affected the roll so you don’t get those back”. Our GM had his own “spell critical effect chart” for these moments, he pulled it out, rolled, and then just put his head in his hands stasting, “Congrats, the whole docks and half the bay is now on fire…”
Which was fine. I didn’t like that town anyway.
I’ve had my little tirade about “unlucky crits.”
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unlucky-crit
I do think they can be appropriate sometimes though. You’ve got to respect the one in a million chance when it actually happens!
Any crit you can walk away from is a good crit.
And anytime you can you make the GM sigh and toss half his campaign notes into the dustbin is one for the books… (okay he didn’t actually throw them away, but he did have a pained look when the group decided to cross that town/city “off the map”. Like they’d ever welcome us back!)
Which of course reminds me of the time I nuked an entire treasure hoard and the secondary adventure that was supposed to arise from it…
D&D 3.5, 6th lvl Wizard (Elven Generalist). I’d literally just gotten fireball, so like every Wizard I dedicated all (3) of my fifth level spell slots to it. So there we are, out for a leisurely stroll through gentle rolling hills, waaaaaaaaaay out in the boonies between cities, traveling to someplace to find a way to get to Sigil.
GM says in the distance you see a dragon flying toward you.
“How far away is it?”
“Probably a mile or so, you’ve got time to hide or prepare to fight it.”
“I wait till it gets to 600 ft and Fireball it.”
“You.. wait… okay… roll damage…”
Average damage was rolled, save was failed.
“Dragon roars at you, and seems to put on speed, it’s 450 feet away no-”
“Fireball.” It’s saved is failed and damage is again about average…
“It screeches with fear and turns to hightail it awa-”
“Fireball”
“Hold on. You’re only 6th level, where’s the third… oh dammit. Elven Generalist? And you memorized all three spells as Fireball?”
“Yup.”
“Why? Aren’t their other useful spells like-”
“Nope. Just Fireball. But this is my last one…”
“sigh* Roll damage…”
Nigh on max damage. Again it fails it’s save.
“It crashes to the ground around 400 feet away.”
There is a pause… my Wizard who until this point has been barely holding up his end of the damage output has just smashed a dragon to the ground without even using up his entire 15 minute workday.
“So, were good to just keep going right? I mean, it’s not going to have loot, I’m not in the mood to get gory digging for bones or the few undamaged scales, we should really get to the next tavern by nightfall…”
GM sighs and dumps the pamphlet adventure into the dustbin… all because he miscalculated how many Fireballs the wimpy (till then) Wizard had.
(The ‘nuked’ treasure hoard is because the adventure called for us to //wound// the dragon and for it to fly away, us to follow, and then fight it in it’s lair… since we had no idea where the lair was, nuking the Dragon nuked our chance to get the hoard. And the map to another adventure we were supposed find in it’s hoard.)
Yeah, looking back on it I do have a disturbing tendency to nuke adventures right in the bud with Fire Wizards…
“I don’t always play Wizards, but when I do, FIREBALL”.
That’s one situation where I might bit have minded a little GM “cheating.” Sure it robs you of the dragon kill if a GM tacks on a few extra hp behind the scenes, but to me it’s worth it if I get to play the adventure.
Agreed*. In fact we had that discussion afterwards when he commented on how the adventures (both) were derailed and he’d have to figure out how to fit the second one in somewhere else.
He was just one of those GMs who wasn’t very good at “seat of the pants” GMing.
Indeed, I’d have been fine with him saying, “Hey, can you hold off on the last fireball and let it escape so we can have the adventure?” But I’m a flexible Player and ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants’ GM, so improvising, bumping up, nudging down, and letting things go is all in my nature.
Had this happen with my ysoki (Ratfolk) mechanic a few times.
I went with this nickname, because I thought it funny a long time ago, but its been proven true. the rodents nickname is Scorch.
Scorch is creative, dangerously so. He’s done the macerena to irk deific avatars. Punched another to keep an adopted daughter safe. Kidnapped and walk down the side of a building with a hostage to find where a dragon was shipping an earthquake generator. Got someone to trick geases and reveal base locations by teaching them a language.
Scorch lives on the godzilla principle you listed above. That you approach something with the firepower that you yourself are caught in the blast. and there is often at the table a lot of the “Dammit Scorch!” but folks keep agreeing to let him do this, because they work. Clean out a red dragons lair by posing as janitors, check.
Because that level of crazy and methodical. (He is even a lawyer too.) He makes folks, beasts, and others actually step back in fear from the 2’4″ rodent. It often can backfire and does in some fashion, the hostage thing went spectacularly south. But he warned others doing that mission with the party soldier would. But for all the setbacks, the benefits have been that he just has garnered some recruitment offers from a few bbeg’s, and even personal attempts at stopping him and his family.
I think perhaps there is a more appropriate comic for Scorch:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/artillery
😛
Wont disagree there, no in the slightest!
A quick recap of last session:
The party (consisting entirely of very visibly nonhumans) was trying to sneak into a very human-centric city through the sewers. Pretty much the first thing the wizard asks is “can i summon an earth elemental from the ceiling?” I, being the DM, just sort of give him a blank stare for a second, and ask “are you sure? The entire city is sitting on that ceiling.” This time, he listens, and avoids the most literal encounter of “rocks fall, everyone dies” i would ever have seen or heard of.
An hour or two of playing later, they manage to reach their destination, by sneaking in through the treasure vault. As one might expect, it is trapped to the nine hells and back, so they dont touch anything right now, going on to find their real objective. After dealing with that however, they decide “hey, lets go back and see what happens if we move something with an Unseen Servant. Maybe the caster of the glyphs of warding forgot to prep for that!” I once again ask “are you sure?” but this time theyre set on it. They move one of the trapped coins… and the entire thing goes off, because seriously, what did they expect. Between the firestorms and the disintegrate spells, the entire room collapses, and they lose 2.5 million gold pieces of coinage… on top of cutting off their escape route out of the city. The area has been warded against teleportation, because im tired of them not walking anywhere, so they flee the main building only to discover the reason the guards hadnt accosted them was because the city was being attacked by an ancient black dragon.
We all agreed it was the best session in this campaign so far.
How were they supposed to get the treasure?
Well, they could have made a token attempt at disarming the traps instead of, you know, deliberately blowing the room to hell and back. They did grab a couple of magic items (really good ones too) this way before remembering they had a real quest, then swung around for a second pass on the way out. At least one of the players told me later that he didnt say anything because, and i quote “i wanted to see the room blow up.”
I think you’ve found the Sorcerer of your group.
That was last campaign :p now he’s a bard.
So I just now am learning about Chekhov’s gun, and there’s a little blurb about Hemingway on the wikipedia entry:
“Hemingway valued inconsequential details, but conceded that readers will inevitably seek symbolism and significance in these inconsequential details.”
God I feel so vindicated for calling bullshit on the symbolism my literature teachers claimed were in stupid minor details.
Good essay on the topic: http://www.labyrinthrat.com/journal/2011/on-symbolism-and-author-intent/
The author’s intent isn’t the end of the conversation. “Readers seeking symbolism” is quite literally half the point of reception theory:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/reader-response-theory
I’m a simpleton so I’ll accept that greater minds than mine have gone a much better job thinking on the subject. But, it still FEELS like bullshit to me, subjectively. Perhaps it’s just how my brain works (or doesnt depending on your take). I like the information I recieve to be bare bones, with little embellishment. I finally decided to get out of my decade long reading hiatus by listening to “The Last Human” by Zack Jordan and I noticed myself getting frustrated at some of the world building sections for being too unnecessary. By all means, he created a fascinating world and he clearly thought out many details in it, but I personally found some of it superfluous. So for me I guess maybe my brain refuses to accept meaning in something that it has already filed under ‘useless’.
Laurel was just telling me about a concept she encountered that differentiates “hard world building” from “soft world building.” The former is Tolkien: there is a definite lore reason for everything you encounter. The latter is Miyazaki: the Spirited Away bathhouse is surrounded by ocean because it’s aesthetically pleasing. It’s still evocative as hell though, so you get to wonder and imagine on your own lore, but you don’t have to explain it to death, or even really have an explanation.
The endgame of my lvl20 wizard Ratfolk was a few ‘nukes’ as problem solving methods.
Spoilers for Return of the Runelords AP below!
We entered the BBEG’s final dungeon, and found ourselves facing a bunch of large baddies, as well as a large construction – a tower topped with a magic device that was designed to shoot hellfire rays at intruders! Fortunately, our level final level caused my DCs to skyrocket with a +8 int capstone, and I had won initiative. A single cast of Clashing Rocks allowed me to shatter the break DC of the tower’s foundations, causing it and the baddies to be sandwiched between a wall or rock, demolishing the entire tower before it had a chance to shoot and burying the baddies for good measure.
Faced with a dangerously accurate gunslinger with a magical musket, I figured that making his gun wet would negate his main gimmick. So I cast tsunami on him, causing his gun and black powder to be unusable.
Rock to Mud buried a pair of fossil golems during a dicey encounter by making the ceiling collapse on them.
Clearly, clashing rocks lacks the safety phrasing found on move earth:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/move-earth/#:~:text=Move%20earth%20moves%20dirt%20(clay,)%2C%20casting%20takes%2010%20minutes.
Time to start putting ‘warning: load-bearing!’ signs on things that aren’t.
Also, I have to figure out a pun that combines OSHA and fisher-king to make it really work.
Fissure king?
Oof, yeah. Good one.
“No-Guard-Rail-Around-the-Fissure King”
If he has to ask that, then he didn’t bring enough explosions.
Bad adventurer!
It’s not for lack of trying!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/explosives
Ah, this reminds me of our one stealth plan that actually worked. We’d infiltrated the ogre-controlled fortress via secret passage, but knew we were heavily outnumbered. Knowing out ability to clear the fortress quietly was pretty limited (the musket guy was really bad for this sort of situation), we settled on a new plan – set off a big distraction, retreat back into the secret passage and use it to get deeper into the fortress and take out the leadership while the grunts were busy responding to the distraction.
We approached a shed full of sleeping ogres and arranged to simultaneously put them all down with coup de graces and a Fireball (since we didn’t have enough people to drop them all at once). We execute perfectly… and then the Fireball does enough damage to the walls of the shed that the entire thing just collapses. Which DID finish off all but one of the Fireball’d ogres, and didn’t especially damage us, but it meant that we had to extract ourselves from the rubble while also dropping the surviving ogre AND flee before too many reinforcements arrived. But hey, the plan WAS to make a lot of noise, and it did that marvelously!
(…In retrospect, we probably could have silently coup de grace’d all those ogres and moved further in before raising the alarm. I believe our theory was that setting off the alarm far away from the passage would remove our ability to immediately retreat into it to flank the enemy.)
It occurs to me that a gun could have made a nice distraction. 😛
Allow me to present an as-yet unused (by which I mean that one independent PC in the factional politics of the setting has it, but does not wish to use it unless necessary for reasons doubtless soon to become apparent) magic item from my homebrew setting:
“NOVA STONE
Wondrous Item, Legendary, requires attunement by an arcane spellcaster (not a bard)
Held in the treasury of the Demon Lord Abraxas the Unfathomable prior to his defeat and usurpation by the elven arch-necromancer Jevalon, the Nova Stone was a weapon crafted by an unknown group of demihumans to defeat their divine foes in [setting-specific war]. It allows the user to break every suspended thread of reality held in their mind at once.
When the attuned creature activates the Nova Stone, they must immediately expend every remaining spell slot. If possible, each slot must be expended on a different spell; if not, as few as possible must be duplicated. These spells are cast instantly, even if they would normally take longer, without verbal or somatic components except for the activation word. Spells with material components that have a value in gold pieces lose those components for the purpose of this spell. At will spells or x/rest spells are cast once each.
Once all spells have been cast, the DM should take a moment to grin evilly.
The caster, as well as all creatures and objects (a 5-ft. cube of material, including earth, is considered an individual object) within 1000 ft. of him suffer force damage equal to the combined level of all spell slots expended x2. Packed earth in a 5 ft cube is assumed to have 45 hp, whilst stone has 225. For the next 500 ft., all creatures suffer damage equal to the combined levels of the spell slots. For the 250 ft. after that, the damage is 1/2 the total spell slot level and so on in ever-smaller increments until either the damage is less than 1 or the area is less than 10 ft. Any creature within half its Movement of a lower-damage area may make a saving throw versus the caster’s spell save DC to run to that area, taking the lesser damage, but no other saving throw is allowed.
Any creature reduced to 0 hp by the Nova Stone’s backlash without some form of protection (a contingency to teleport them away, or a Death Ward) is disintegrated a millisecond later.
The Nova Stone then loses all power for 1d100 years.”
I eagerly await the day when the (very cautious) player in question feels the need to bring it out.
That’s a really complicated way to write, “Destroy all creatures. They can’t be regenerated.”
https://img.scryfall.com/cards/large/front/2/d/2d9b12cc-f616-4b52-91eb-a430e70f9251.jpg?1580013874
Well, yes, but given that the campaign in question includes 22 active characters in a level range of 12 to 22 plus divine ranks, plus an entire folder of NPCs including some of immense power, there’s a reasonable chance that any battle large enough for it to be used will have at least a moderate chance of some (probably not the ones targeted by the user, nor the user themself, but still) surviving.
Does ti still count if the ridiculous amount of collateral damage was planned for? Or at least not something our characters particularly cared about?
This was in a shadowrun campaign, and it was the last session of the campaign. Things had happened, and my character was really, really pissed at this dragon, and had decided it was going to go down. I’d somehow convinced my compatriots that it was an actually good idea, so if we where trying to figure out a way to kill a dragon, while getting paid for it.
getting paid for it once wasn’t too difficult. Aztechnology had a standing bounty on dragon corpses after all, but their bounty wasn’t enough, and we also didn’t have a dragon-killing plan yet. So we managed to track down a famous director that was trying to film the most lifelike giant-mecha-vs-monster movie ever. He had the giant mecha, but the program for breeding the giant monster had failed. So we offered to get him his movie, all we needed was that mecha, and some sort of reward. He ended up offering us retirement to a luxury resort on the moon, which we decided was good enough.
So off we went to fight the giant dragon with our giant mecha in the middle of the big city (fairly certain it was Hong Kong) while a swarm of cameradrones made certain to record it all. Everything went pretty fine with a minimum of collateral damage, until the dragons summoned a giant spirit shaped literally like godzilla, so at that point we had to break out all the special effects. I think the fight involved smashing the dragon and spirit with a train, toppling half a dozen large skyscrapers and detonating what was, for all intents and purposes, a small nuke.
We won that fight, and got paid and retired. And we where very happy that the moon resort didn’t have any sort of extradition treaty with the place we’d just smashed up because we left an unholy mess in our wake.
Honestly, if we don’t do things that would make Mr. Walsh proud once and again, are we really bringing our best game?
Who is Mr. Walsh?
I believe he means Mr. Welch, a guy whose antics has resulted in the implementation of various rules at different tables, which he has compiled into an ever growing list of “Things that Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to do.” Currently up to 2525, in fact: https://theglen.livejournal.com/16735.html
Unless you were making a joke about the misspelling, in which case sorry for the joke going over my head.
Don’t you mean Welch? o_O
Yes, I do. Walsh, Welch, they’re names further in the alphabet than mine, and I’m usually asleep by the time I get called. ;p
Don’t worry, internet can have that effect on people 😛
Do you mean like the time i set ablaze a tavern to kill a cockroach with a fireball? Sometimes i can be a little too trigger happy with my spells/powers/abilities. Like the time i cast a never ending winter on a city to chill my pc tea. Or that other time i use a bunch of rocket-nuns to defeat an evil cybernetic Alfred Nobel but in the process i torn down an orphanage. Or that time i teleported the Big Ben outside the solar system and throw it at relativistic speed to use it as a weapon against Mahatma Gandhi 🙂
But Colin, there is no kill like overkill. Don’t be ashamed, the enemy was still up and you bring him down, single-handedly by the way. Sometimes you need to se all your power and then a lot more to make the more epic attack you can and defeat the BBEG with an overly complicated and completely unnecessary attack. Like my example above of a Big Ben full of British power used as a relativistic weapon 😀
Well I mean… He didn’t get to two health levels by himself. 😛
But who took out his two remaining health levels? While the rest of the group was struggling and about of be defeated, when suddenly your arrows cross the battlefield, the BBEG dodging them with a smirk. Only to see Dangus smiling for he have give on te bullseye destroying the dome and collapsing it over him. Don’t let anyone steal the glory out of you… specially when there wasn’t any casualty… of importance at least 😛
All I’m going to say is that I have asked the question “Can I still cast Burning Hands if an ally is in the AoE?” in a Pathfinder Society game… more than once.
Why couldn’t you? Is that violating the “no PVP” rule or something?
Yeah, Pathfinder Society has a rule that you can’t intentionally attack/damage other players. However, I do remember that AoR spells are somewhat of an exception as long as the other player consents to being caught in the blast. I was never in a situation where it was desperate enough to be necessary (and probably never would be, Society scenarios aren’t particularly threatening,) but I’m sure at least one group has taken advantage of that rule.
Oh! Just a few days ago, my Merfolk Bard and her party were up against the goblin boss, two of his minions, and his pet rats, who he was busy feeding civilians to.
Rather than attempt to negotiate, I decided confusion was our ally.
So I shouted “We’re here to save you!” to the goblin boss, and shot at one of his rats.
Nat 1. The DM asked me if I wanted to roll on the fumble tables, to which I was like “Heck yeah!”
The recoil of the shot propelled me backwards out of the room and onto my back. I succeeded only in nicking a stalactite and starting the combat.
Well I’m certainly confused. So… Mission accomplished I guess?
I was playing a wizened old gray elf druid (“Venerable” age benefits/penalties–more on that some other time). Going to fight pirates on an older/less well taken care of ship.
ME – “So there’s like seaweed or other things growing on the ship? Moss between the decks and whatnot?”
DM – “Yeah, I guess, sure.”
Me – “Awesome…I cast entangle, it’s a 40ft radius, minutes per level, DC 17 Reflex Save to avoid getting entangled each round, DC 20 strength check to break.”
Everyone gets stuck. The super-badass face splatter of doom fighter looks in horror as he can’t go anywhere…the entire pirate crew is stuck. And the combat devolves into the archer plinking away pirates, and me merrily burning them to death with flaming sphere being moved around.
It did lead to the party/group rule of “Always bring a back-up ranged weapon. Even if you are bad at it…it is still better than just standing there doing nothing.”
Hey, if all else fails: https://secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/b/d/7/b/highres_436068507.jpeg
We require and/or demand art or context of the ‘adorable otter mascot’.
I believe the only art Laurel ever did of Small Claw was the crowd shot here:
https://www.deviantart.com/fishcapades/art/Northern-Circle-Commission-251844734
He may look like a standard issue fantasy adventurer, but trust me: the war form was adorable.
So our Lizardfolk Ranger was unconscious with 4 mephits standing over them in a position I couldn’t get to them.
My Paladin: Mentally considers whether 4 attacks would result in 2 hits, or even just one hit and a failed death save on the next turn, since each melee hit while at 0 HP is two failed death saves “[Wizard]! Air-burst a Fireball over [Ranger] to take out those mephits before they kill him!”
Wizard’s player out of game: A Fireball will hurt [Ranger] though…
Me: “It’s one failed death save. Each of those mephits is going to hit him for 2.”
Wizard: “I air-burst Fireball over [Ranger] to kill the mephits!”
DM: “As the four Mephits die, they each explode, for a failed death save each. [Ranger] you’re dead.”
I later learned that those mephits only explode into a blinding cloud of dust, but the Ranger’s player wanted to tag-out their character for a while, but my captain Kirk-esque determination to save my party from certain doom kept keeping him alive. If he had just told me that he wanted to tag out his character I would probably not have wasted my one use of Greater Restoration saving him when he got petrified.
Five explosions, five deaths. The math adds up!
I haven’t gotten to USE this collateral damage machine yet, mind, but oh boy is it going to be fun when I get to.
I’m playing a Technician in a Spheres of Power/Might game (based on pf1e, but with a rework of magic and a huge expansion on martials)
My technician has a robot. This robot’s arms are mounted with giant drills. When the drills are activated (which consumes a resource) they start spinning, dealing increased damage and giving my robot a new power:
Whenever a creature wielding an active drill charges, they can charge through solid objects. To do so, they must make an attack against the object, reducing the object’s hardness by (my skill ranks in craft: mechanical).
The drill counts as a lance, giving it a wild bonus to damage on charges, and my robot is dual wielding them. There was errata that says I can only apply the lance bonus to the FIRST hit of my charge, but being able to just plow my way through any and all obstacles is worth the lack of synergy between dual wielding and lances. Tested it out on the average hp of say, a stone wall, and cleared it easily.
Unfortunately, unless the situation is really dire, we’re looking to avoid collateral damage as much as possible… but when I get the all clear to bring in the one man demolition squad, hoo boy.
I believe I’ve seen an anime about your robot:
http://www.quickmeme.com/img/d6/d61aba2f338f4f3f34bcaf932304beb0ccc5a131f42dae74c1300431cdf57b5a.jpg
The talent to get that drill is actually called Diga Drill. I’m like 999% sure it ‘s a direct reference.
Oh boy… in my Crimson Throne group, my first character was a bit impulsive and a teensy bit of a pyromaniac. During a particularly tricky situation in the second book, my character set the structure we were in on fire because we suspected that there was a monster in a sealed room and we’d already had a really rough time with fighting the enemies in the rest of it. We were right and the fire did kill the monster… but it also burned down a small section of the city and nearly killed us too.
Later on we ran into a vampire and my character hit it with a wand of cure moderate wounds, breaking the wand over its head. My GM has a house rule that breaking a wand releases all of the spells remaining in it at once. Unfortunately, it wasn’t QUITE enough to kill the vampire, especially since it made its Will save against it, but it did make the vampire run away.
It’s sad times whenever I’m reminded of Crimson Throne… That game is very on hold for me right now since we’re in Book 2. And Book 2 is not where you want to be for fun fantasy escapism in the midst of a pandemic. 🙁
Sorry man 🙁
When we first got started into book 2 and the pandemic hit, we thought it eerily appropriate, if just a teensy bit too close to home with everything.
Gonna say that story is your ST’s / fellow players fault as much as yours. The ST should have said “if you do that, it may hit you too” rather than assume you understand. Your fellow players should have said, “hey before you do that, this is what just happened”. Should you have paid attention during their turns? Yeah, ideally. But there is always the issue of if you pay attention to their turns, you won’t have a plan for your turn so it will take longer.
WebDM has a great story about a player jumping into a furnace and burning alive. The GM admits that he should have described it better, the player did not realize the furnace was active. Perhaps the ST in your case could have said, “how much damage are you looking to do? The more you deal, the more ceiling you’ll need to bring down, and the greater chance of damage to you and your team”.
Just my opinion maybe, but I think we too often forget to reel in players. Nothing wrong with saying, “stop rolling” as a GM, DM, ST, etc.. Ive done it a few times when someone got overzealous and I had to say “I did not ask for a roll. Tell me again, ignoring those rolls, what EXACTLY you wanna do?”
It got me the “Dammit, Dangus!” catchphrase. I’m cool with it.