Unexpected Improvisation
Over the course of Handbook history, we’ve explored a number of variations on this theme. With a little help from Monk we learned about improvised weapons. Thanks to Fighter, we’ve experience the magic of beating a motherfucker with another motherfucker. And today, we come full circle as Barbarian bludgeons poor Jeremy the dracolich with his own femur. I can only assume that our dearly departed dragon deserves it for reasons.
These kinds of maneuvers—hurling the goblin at its buddies; clubbing an ankylosaurus with its own tail—are important for two reasons. Firstly, they’re hilarious when they work, and even more so when they fail. But second (and likely more important) is the chemistry that happens when character engages environment. When you prop open the monster’s mouth with a bone or hurl your adoptive brother at the baddies, you’re interacting with the world beyond your character sheet. Because let’s face it: when you have a complex suite of abilities laser-printed in ink, it can be awfully difficult to remember that you’ve got options outside your base mechanics. Those moments might be hard to adjudicate, but I think that they’re worth encouraging.
Case in point, my Crimson Throne players recently took a little rowboat ride. It was a subterranean lake, and they were desperately trying to make it to shore before being swept over a waterfall. To make matters worse, there was a nearby islet in the lake with “a single glass statue of a beautiful woman standing atop a platform, one leg poised before the other as if she were preparing a running leap into the water.” When the inevitable happened, the party quickly discovered that they were at a severe disadvantage fighting a water walking glass golem from a tippy little rowboat. In consequence, the group’s caster hit our barbarian with enlarge person.
“Can you touch bottom now?” shouted the caster. “Great! Now drag the boat to shore.”
It was a solid plan. However, it came with one glaring weakness.
“Seeing the caster spider-climbing on the nearby wall, the golem ignores the figures struggling in the boat to go mage hunting.”
It was a suitably dramatic “oh shit” moment for the exposed cabalist, who thought he was well away from danger.
“Quick!” he says, “You’ve got an opportunity attack. Drop her before she gets to me!”
“Bruh,” says the barbarian. “What am I supposed to attack her with? In case you forgot, my hands are kind of full of boat.”
Sometimes, GMs get handed a straight line. And when your enlarged barbarian complains that the he can’t hit the monster because he’s busy carrying a boat, it is incumbent on you to remind your players of all their options.
The ensuing boat-based critical hit didn’t fell the creature, but it was instrumental in avoiding the TPK in a very tough encounter. Plus I got to ask the boat’s passengers to make low(ish) Reflex saves to maintain their footing, which was pure implausible fun.
All I’m really saying here is to pay attention to the world around you. Dropping chandeliers, triggering mechanical devices, and even something as simple as bracing the crushing trap with random garbage can all be useful actions. Much like staring at a dracolich’s femur and seeing a great club, it just takes a little imagination.
Question of the day then! When have you used a bit of dungeon dressing to your advantage? Was it a triggered landslide? Jury-rigged cover in a gun fight? Or did you simply beat your enemy with its own damn self? Tell us all about your most unconventional environmental maneuvers down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
One time the Ravenloft party had to cross a room that served as a rookery for a vampire’s colony of bats. We could have tried the stealth route, we could have just assumed the bats were harmless.
Somebody said: “Hey, guys? Bat guano burns, and the floor is covered in it.”
We threw in a lit torch, slammed the door shut and waited for the noise to die down.
There’s a reason fireball has those material components. 😀
That’s where I got the idea. ^_^
In a recent dungeon for the cult of norborger in agents of edge watch, there is a battle where you fight a powerful silenced assassin in a hall of darts which are triggered by any sound. I ended up doing a sorta mage version of what you described by casting ventriloquism on myself and then constantly talking at her location to get them to hit her, though since I wasn’t actually wielding the darts it wasn’t exactly the same.
That sounds to me kind of like fighting an enemy who is constantly shooting laser-guided missiles at you with a laser pointer, and I approve.
Ima need to know what you had the ventriloquism voice say.
“Hit me!” 😀
As a cleric of shelyn, goddess of love, beauty, and the arts, to a cleric/assassin of norborger, it was an improvised song about why she’s better than norborger.
Casting aspersions on the good name of the ‘Reaper of Reputation?’ Consequences and repercussions!
Some lyrics come to mind:
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they’re like, it’s better than yours
Damn right, it’s better than yours
I can teach you, but I have to charge
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
…
I love making full use of the environment and improvised weapons, as both a DM and a player. Doing stuff like knocking over tables for cover or tossing bags of flour to blind an enemy. These are things that GREAT, especially when you’re a martial lay inclined character who’s base abilities ordinarily wouldn’t allow you to do exotic things like blind foes or cause any meaningful debilitations beyond grapple/shoving/burying an axe into their shoulder.
Hit or miss of course. Even decent DM’s may not have throughly thought out what a particular battle scene looks like beyond maybe general details. It’s boring to fight on a final destination no times fox only map where the only distinctive detail is the distance between you and the enemy. At the same time, BECAUSE using the environment and improvised weapons isn’t exactly covered in the book, some DM’s make a spot decision that makes the whole attempt far too complex or lack potency compared to just hitting it with your given weapon.
As with all things, it depends on your DM. If nothing else though, I find Alchemist Fires far more useful when you smash em over someone’s head than risk losing it if you miss.
There’s a reason that I said “these moments are worth encouraging.” They make the game more varied and more interesting. In my example, I could have ground the game to a halt to figure out whether the enlarged barbarian could actually lift a passenger-filled rowboat without trigger encumbrance rules. In practice, “It’s an improvised great club! Smack that vitreous bitch!” was much more fun.
I once DM´ed a game where my players fought their enemies on moving platforms above a giant vat of acid. The platforms would move into the wall in one side of the room, and come out of the other, conveyerbelt style, meaning that everyone would have to jump to a new platform every now and then. The groups ranger, however, kept on fighting one of the duegar enemies on her platform as it edged closer and closer to the wall. Just before it went under, she cast ropetrick and climbed up the rope, while the duegar was pushed to his doom.
In another game, my players manged to herd the horde of explosive bats that a beholder had prepared as a trap, straight into it s iron golems, greatly weakening it.
In a recent game they were involved in a high speed car chase with a dragon, when they discovered a herd of centaurs running on the road in front of them, at the exact moment they unknowingly activated the nitro button. Thinking quickly, the sorcerer shot a fire hydrant and used shape water to make an ice ramp that the car could use to jump over the herd.
As for me personally, it has mostly taken the shape of breaking chairs for stake wood against vampires, pulling the carpet away under someone, swinging from chandeliers, or spending every turn, for at least five turns readying my action to push down an especially unfortunate knight down the stairs, whenever he got up again.
That rope trick maneuver is exactly what I hope for when I see goofy conveyor belt setups. Brava to the ranger!
I still haven’t forgiven my Rise of the Runelords party for negotiating a surrender at the local lumber mill. I was playing a barbarian who specialized in bull rushing. It was an industrial accidents wonderland full of buzz saws and log sluices, and we skipped it for diplomacy checks. #disgruntle
I have never been prouder of a player before.
I had a moment akin to that in the same session as the car chase. The players were supposed to fight a bunch of harpies on the outside of a large airplane. The idea was that the harpies would attack the motors, and the party had to deal with them before they destroyed too many of them.
Turns out most of the party had taken the sleep spell. The harpies had like 8 HP (The party was just first level). So they cast sleep and the harpies all pummeled to their doom within the first two rounds. As a player it was an incredibly smart and amazing move, as a DM I can´t help but sigh as I see my set piece battle disappear into the void.
At least they managed to get the Shatner quote in before it was over, right?
https://imgur.com/gallery/Rw2AAIL
Environmental hazards are fun. In one of the Freeport adventures, there’s a rock crusher… big grinding gears, the perfect place stage a fight.
Well, if you’re a swashbuckler type with a teleport up your sleeve, at least. I seem to recall the paladin was less positive about the affair…
The power to alter the environment is important. So is the freedom to explore it. 😀
I suppose this doesn’t fully count as environmental, but at the end of my group’s last D&D session a few weeks back, Orcs started pouring out of smugglers’ tunnels en masse to attack the city our party is in, while my character was playing lookout on the tallest tower on the ruling noble’s castle; when I was struggling to figure out how to get down quickly enough, the DM kindly reminded me that my (Magic and Summoner domain) Cleric can call forth celestial giant eagles and the like. I’d shout something about Yor’s World while paragliding down to street level at the start of next session, but there’s no way any of the other players’d get it.
To be fair, i wouldn’t have got it either. Might need to fix that:
https://www.rifftrax.com/yor-the-hunter-from-the-future
As with everything fun in D&D, my most recent case of this happened by accident.
We were fighting a cloaker in a clock tower, and it had just grabbed our wizard and dragged him into the giant bell in the middle of an otherwise suspiciously empty room. So, being the enterprising bard that i am, i decide to cast Heat Metal on the bell, because nothing says “stop that” like spontaneous combustion.
Well, it worked. The cloaker decided it didnt want to be in there with or without our wizard. But what i failed to account for was that the bell was now hot enough for the rope suspending it to catch fire. With the cloaker and wizard still underneath it. On the third floor of a building. The wizard was, fortunately, ejected out from underneath the drop zone. Two floors down, a pair of guards who were meddling in our affairs were not so fortunate, and the bell crashes down directly on top of them.
It gets better. Somehow, they both manage to live, but the cloaker gets annoyed and just starts destroying the building while we’re still on the third floor. A couple party members are fast enough they can run out of the building before it collapses, but being a dwarf bard, i instead decide to style my way out by grabbing the party rogue, hurling us both out of the tower, and casting feather fall to keep us alive. Miraculously, the two guards inside the giant bell ALSO survive specifically because of that darn bell protecting them from debris. So naturally, that was my intent the whole time. /nod
I love that this is almost entirely the GM extrapolating from a player’s actions. But notably, the player still gets to feel like “I did that.” I’m beginning to think that what players want more than anything is to topple dominos.
Absolutely. Those situations where things just cascade into chaos… that’s what we live for.
Can confirm. The best moments in the game have always been when the players get to zoom out their mental camera to the whole system and see the ripples go out.
giant stone slabs, expected to trap us, or something else, avoided easily, because they were not triggered by a preasure plate or anything magical, but actually required a switch to use.
Later, MUCH later (days in game, a couple weeks in sessions) we get attacked by a dragon and “decide” we are outmatched and need to FLEE! (run away! run away!)
but with nowhere to hide exactly, a couple of our group remembered the big stone slabs and went to set them down very carefully (drop them like their hot!)
of course it was not that easy, because the levers that worked them were frozen and they were also sized for giants, but a few spells and a couple big strong folk (myself included!) dropped the slabs down, blocking the entrance and hitting the dragon on the noggin in the process!
oh sure, it didn’t kill her, but hey, we lived to fight another day!
(and if the scenario sounds familiar, it probably is, because we ran through that published adventure)
There’s a reason that this nugget gets included in the Disable Device rules over in PF1e:
It’s the game trying desperately to tell you (in its dry way) how to make the awesome happen.
I once DMed myself into a corner: the plot hook for one session was that my big cleric had been sidelined from the previous adventure by being lost overboard in the surprise round and was now without his holy symbol, trapped in the belly of a giant beast and playing cards with undead. No holy symbol, no turning or casting. It occurred to me that if the PCs decided not to look for him or simply failed their mission, I hadn’t created a way to ever get my character back. –Then I remembered that the cave ceiling is filled with piercers, and if you can withstand a hit from the creature and pull it out, “Hit a MF with another MF” rules mean that every piercer is a potential bone club, and if you’re a cleric of Heracles, every club is not just your weapon, it’s also a symbol of your god. Problem solved.
My favorite example of today’s question, though, was my “MacGuyver at Helm’s Deep” adventure. The PCs are chased by a superior force of gnolls and running toward where their map says there is a Dwarven fort. The monsters are X hours behind them. At two or three spots along the trail, the PCs are told that a ranger or rogue could construct X trap to kill, injure, or slow their pursuers, but it will take X minutes. When the party reaches the fort, it is in ruins, abandoned for decades. A signal horn is atop the fort: blowing it has no immediate effect, but it alerts the whole valley that someone is there–the gnolls will move faster (and are less cautious) and a small squad of Dwarven berserkers is dispatched from the nearby mountain to investigate. (They’ll arrive in X hours: either before, during, or after the fight.) The fort is full of trash and debris, the PCs have X time remaining to shore up their defenses before the fight… Dunh, Dunh, Du-uu-unhh!
In actual practice, the PCs won, the dwarves arrived late, and grease and trip were determined MVP of underrated spells.
I was quite proud of my module writing on this one:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/323290/5E-MiniDungeon-147-Feud-at-the-Falls
You’ve got a room of junk on one side of the waterfall, the dwarf version of Olive Oyl trapped in a tower on the other side, and a roaring river between. Solve for X. 😀
What kinds of traps and fortifications did your guys wind up building at the fort?
It’s been awhile. Lessee… I remember that they constructed a deadfall and a small avalanche to slow the pursuers, and thus gained more time than they lost in constructing the traps. They dug pits and lined them with spikes, then covered them with wet blankets that would freeze and hold a thin dusting of snow; these funneled one flank of the attackers through an arch and straight to the tank who held the breach as long as his AC and hit points permitted. The rogue used a crossbow and provided support for the fighter from behind a makeshift redoubt made from broken bunks and rusted shields. They used the shape of the building to prevent the gnolls from using their archers to full advantage. The first gnoll to enter the breach caught an ACME dwarf anvil to the noggin. The bard, mage, and fighter/cleric sheltered in the one intact room on the second floor and provided cover fire and spells from the windows, but eventually were reduced to tossing hot coals and debris down on their attackers when they ran out of arrows and offensive spells. The only path to the healer and 2 glass cannons was a single stair and a 5′ wide parapet. The cleric cast trip on the parapet, which prevented most of the gnolls from reaching them. https://dungeonsdragons.fandom.com/wiki/Trip
Those that fell off the parapet took falling damage and landed with the greatsword fighter below; the few that made it across met the fighter/cleric at the door and were introduced to her longsword.
Love this Seven Samurai type gameplay. Nothing better than feeling like you used your wits and resources to overcome the odds.
My players pulled an AMAZING case of ‘using the set up to their advantage’ last night, actually! I wanted to introduce a mostly new table to monsters with Legendary Actions for the first time in a reasonably safe setting, so their caravan stopped in a town holding the 50 year anniversary of their Contest of Champions, where they let budding new (re: Level 3) adventurers face off against dastardly villains who had plagued the town since it’s founding.
I was rather proud of the setup as a massive coalition between the fighters guild providing stunt actors to play the bad guys, the Magic Academy offering up special effects (lots of prestidigitation fireworks and minor-illusion after images), the local church providing several low level clerics for standby, and the Bardic College doing announcements and narrating the event. It all capped off with a fight against a Hobgoblin with the Legendary Commander template from Grim Hollow on him, and weakened versions of the two legendary fights from earlier in the night backing him up, with half their HP pool an none of their own legendary actions.
Part way through the fight and several devastating hits from the support enemies, one of my players gets an idea: Playing up the theatrical announcer narrating the events of the mock battle, he used Minor Illusion to immitate the announcer’s voice and declare that “The Monk gathered his energies and performed a DARK RITUAL to take hold of the Displacer Beast’s mind, turning it on it’s OWN ALLIES!”
The guy playing the ‘displacer beast’ looked to the dugout, shrugged, and turned to whip the last dozen hitpoints off of his companion, and the whole table absolutely loved it! Even better when the commander rolled a crit next turn and, “Fired an arrow crackling with his own dark energies to fell the monk in a single blow!” All while one of the mages used Message to tell him, “We can do that too, y’know!”
The monk found this hilarious, and even though he had a few HP left, he dramatically fell to the ground, ‘defeated’. I was so proud of my players~
Tell your players the Handbook of Heroes guy said they done good.
Just a reminder that Athletics is the best skill.
So my Descent into Avernus Commander Warlord developed a theme of slapstick happening. In the first encounter an angry mob was charging up a staircase. I shoved the leader and it caused all of them on the stairs to fall in a 3 Stooges-pile. It was funnier the second time in the same encounter. Later in the campaign we found a backdoor escape-tunnel in a stable. There was an anvil in said stable, and the trap-door swung outward, so I thought it would be funny to block the enemy’s escape route with the anvil. In the actual dungeon one of the baddies tried escaping up the hatch; just as planned. Not as planned was when they broke open the hatch, only to have an anvil slam them down a 20′ ladder. Later later I tossed Devils off a floating-island leaving some Wily Coyote dents. I also regularly threw people in front of the Infernal War Machines (Mad Max vehicles) they were driving. “Florida man runs self over”.
It was a good time.
There really should be more anvil-falls-on-baddies in D&D. Also safes. Also grand pianos.
It was funny for a moment, then we thought aboot it, and then it was really gross.
It was a 5e game with a little homebrew so, first my character was a warforged who the DM and I agreed it would be amusing if he couldn’t swim due to his density making him sink like a rock, later he got a ring of water walking that if put on under water would result in him falling up through the water as if falling down through air.
We got into a fight with a sea monster and my guy took few critical hits early in the fight and was knocked down to single digit HP and decided to sink for a bit to get away from the conflict. The fight started to go south so he put the ring on and used his own body as a projectile reverse falling over 200 ft right into the beast’s belly like a cannonball. It didn’t end the fight but it did turn it around, and was quite fun.
In my mind, Cavalier the oread is in a similar situation with the sinking in water. I like to believe that she tethers herself to Brick the giant snapping turtle when she has to do free diving missions.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-fog
I’m not sure if water walking causes you to reverse fall at terminal velocity, but damned if I’d bring that up in your GM’s place. Like I said, these maneuvers ought to be encouraged. Mostly because they’re awesome.
Hell’s Rebels book 1- we encounter an enemy the party can’t beat, because she has Regeneration 1/Good, and the party has no way to deal Good damage. For those who don’t play pathfinder, creatures that have Regeneration are completely immune to dying via hp damage as long as they have Regeneration.
Except, the boss fought us in a room with a pool. I’m playing what is, in effect, a summoner, with a big eidolon that fights for me while I sit in the back and take potshots with a gun. Seeing that we didn’t have an option to kill her with hp damage, my summon runs in, tackles her to the floor, then picks her up, walking over to the pool and jumping in with her still grappled.
My summon could stay underwater indefinitely, since it didn’t need to breathe. She couldn’t. Drowning doesn’t deal hp damage, it just kills you.
Similar biz over in Starfinder once upon a time. It was a vampire in an acid pit. I ruled that it worked.
First Cavalier, now Barbarian.
Jeremy just does not have any luck with the warrior women of Handbookworld!
…
Oh, no. He hasn’t been listening to Summoner’s class on talking to girls, has he? >_<
You’d think that he would learn after the first time. Lying on your back in exactly the same position is not a winning maneuver.
It would be funny if we used the same position one more time with Kineticist or Street Samurai or somebody, and then cut to Jeremy complaining to Summoner that “your advice didn’t work.”
Summoner: “But when an animal shows his soft underbelly to another beast, it’s supposed to signal surrender and make them leave it alone! That’s just scientific fact!”
Well, he is Fighter’s brother, after all…
Intelligence is probably his dump stat. :-/
I’ve always wanted to do a comic explaining how Fighter was adopted by dragons after he murdered his parents…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-13
That seems like more backstory than Fighter deserves though.
Maybe he wasn’t so much adopted as the equivalent of a scruffy animal you take pity on and feed, only for it to assume it’s now part of the family?
Or maybe they thought of him as just a really ugly and vicious guard-dog.
In stars Without Numbers my psychic once said: “Even if their commander may resist my mental assault, on my expertise, even advanced technology has proven faulty at resolving the ancient vulnerabilities of combatants to telekinetic trowed debris boulders” 😀
Telekinesis allows to throw things. When everything around you is munition you start looking more to the environment and thinking creatively 🙂
From the Darth Vader school of combat….
Part of the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy 😛
Not quite improv, but my wizard and a sorcerer PC effectively got a ‘free kill’ on a ghostly enemy that threatened to pull some possession shenanigans. My wizard cast Mage Sword and set it after the ghost, whilst the Sorcerer surrounded the ghost with a force wall.
The result was the ghost was stuck and unable to escape or harm us… Whilst the force sword, which it couldn’t damage, repeatedly kept attacking it.
We pretty much waited for the sword the kill it off from that point.
Another improv trick was to defeat a pair of giant worm enemies that were dormant in a pit of tar by converting all the tar into solid steel via Polymorph Any Object.
Saw a thread recently about using mage armor as improvised gauntlets to punch a ghost. Pretty clever IMHO.
My Street Sammy, on his very first mission (IC and OOC), managed to get his team out of a bad situation by having a real beef hamburger in his inventory.
He dropped it on the floor as a bunch of guards with a bio-augmented guard dog were closing in on our robbery of a warehouse, and the burger was a good enough distraction from our scent that we got away scot free.
MythBusters is pretty much a tutorial for Shadow Run:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntY7vf5X87k
I haven’t used any random items around me as weapons, but I have one character that can do so no problem. Her name is Kotri and she’s a Dwarf Forgepriest. It’s an archetype that gives crafting bonuses and item creation feats. I thought it would be fun to have her be able to use improvised weapons, in this case her crafting tools. I even got a chance to use them when we fought some plant monsters. Away went the warhammer, out came the fabric scissors snipping away. It was fun.
Bringing out those scissors like the chainsaw in that Spider-Man-2 scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx3Xo2K910Q&t=94s
Kotri owns a weapons shop now. I have decided that her entire inventory will be odd and unusual weapons. I’ve already made one sale – a Traveling Kettle. Just gotta get to work crafting other weapons.
I even found a way to make some weapons that are usually wood out of metal instead. Though they have to be polearms or staffs.
A trick that may prove useful if you ever encounter lycanthropes, or any other creatures that require silver weaponry and you didn’t come prepared: load your sling with silver coins, or use telekinesis-like abilities to fling the coins.
With an allowing DM, filling a sock with silver coins would work as an improvised sap as well.
Nothing like using a roll of quarters for werewolf monk punching.
Good news regarding Body Bludgeon: it’s been improved/optimized!
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathfindermemes/comments/m072q0/new_improvised_weapon_meta/
Turns out, Fighter was an innovator.
He always knew he was awesome.
Scene: Vaguely Greco-Roman ruins. The walls have long since collapsed, and the freestanding pillars-
Rogue: How wide are the pillars?
Uh, like, this? [Holds hands up]
Rogue: Do they look like they’re attached at the base?
Um, no, but they’re like a thousand pounds. Your character knows he’s not strong enough to-
Rogue: I climb to the top of one, slip the opening of my bag of holding around the top, and slide it all the way down until I reach the ground.
….. Uh. Okay…..
[Later] The dragon is several hundred feet below you, at the bottom of the canyon. It hasn’t noticed you yet, distracted by-
Rogue: I hold the bag of holding upside down and pull the pillar out. I have proficiency with Improvised Weapons, so I don’t take penalties on the attack roll, and per the homebrewed rule from eight months ago, downward distance doesn’t count for range penalties. What’s the falling damage for dropping a twenty foot marble pillar on someone?
………
lol.
In what edition does a 20 foot pillar fit in a bag of holding?
Who cares? Still funny.
Was there any dialogue in the comics original script? I imagine Jeremy would object to his situation. Or terribly humerus puns would be involved.
No dialogue. Just rage.
Also possibly the hover text.
Purring kitten + megaphone + enhanced amplify-gadget magic = one impromptu earthquake to drop on their heads, the building that our enemies (and only our enemies) are taking cover in.
Including an excuse for one player to go into cute detail about exactly how she’s making the kitten purr loudly in the first place.
That’s some dangerous (and adorable) precedent.
This is the serious problem that accompanies these moments. Does the party now have unlimited access to casting “earthquake?” Is it just the gentleman’s agreement of “I’ll let it work, but only once?”
In a campaign a couple years back we encountered a purple wurm as the second -to-last fight before the fight with the ancient white dragon that was the boss of that dungeon. The wurm tabbed my paladin and I ended up taking a hefty amount of poison damage, but that’s just part of the job description of being the party tank.
Once the fight was over and we had a short rest before going into the dragon’s lair, I made a point of cutting off the purple wurm’s stinger to use as a weapon against the dragon. After a bit of head-scratching the DM ruled it as an improvised lance that’d have the purple wurm’s poison as a damage rider on the first attack that hits.
Well, it took a bit of buff-stacking and using daily resources to make sure I landed that hit I had a hell of an opener to that fight.
I am ashamed to say that, in my early days of GMing, I would not allow the party alchemist to milk a slain wyvern’s venom.
“That’s not in the rules! You don’t have the necessary equipment! You’re only supposed to have X amount of treasure at this level.”
Wanna go back and slap myself sometimes.
Is anyone else here just waiting for Jeremy and friends to get ultra leveled because Mom is at the table and sees them getting abused by GM and friends?
What? We would never repeat a joke we’d already used!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/family-ties
Never ever! >_>
I mean I just finished a session where my double arty pulled some absolutely lethal pit maneuvers (literal instakill void plus knockback mechanics via thunderwave and force ballista and some clever movement shenanigans equals never having to worry about if the damage is enough for the killshot). Made it through three combats without spending any non-first-level spell slots, and one of those slots was to remake my cannon after using it as a grenade
I’ll never forgive my Rise of the Runelords partymates for deciding to diplomancy past the lumber mill encounter. Sawblades and falling objects and industrial hazards for days. I was playing a barbarian specced for bull rush. >:(
So, this one’s a bit of an odd note. Starting with a preface that the monster in question was, I believe, layered in templates that I would assume where homebrew due to an epic level sentient magic item that we probably shouldn’t have had kill things so much. The result was a variant undead empowered by twisted positive energy, while still holding negative energy aspects. It also had regeneration, and guess how many players in the party had Negative or Fire damage as options on that day?
I did, however, have Telekinesis prepared. And thanks to a generous DM, I was able to discuss an option that was used to finish it off. So after we downed it for a third time, I ripped out some of its own teeth (crystalized negative energy) and continued to stab it with them until we were certain it wasn’t going to get back up again. The party gave me some “looks” at that, though that might have been because I had my character shouting about “staying dead this time” and “stop getting back up after we kill you”.