White-Haired Witch
For those of you that aren’t familiar with the archetype, you can check out the White-Haired Witch in all its glory on the PFSRD. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the trope, you can read up on the Japanese hair monsters who inspired it. And if you’ve ever found your super-cool character concept being mocked mercilessly by the rest of your party, you might sympathize with Witch in today’s comic. You might also sympathize with the following story.
So no shit there we were, doing righteous battle against something called a *squints through glasses* lifespark elite flesh golem. Silly names aside, the thing was big and mean and dressed up like a nightmare scarecrow. More worrying however was its +1 scythe. A size large two-handed weapon is bad enough in Pathfinder, but when you tack on that x4 crit, you’re looking down the barrel of a real PC killer. Even without the benefits of power attack, the thing crit for 8d6 + 44 points of roll-up-a-new-guy damage. In other words, it was destined to be a black day in Magnimar.
We’d walked into this creepy clocktower dungeon expecting trouble, but figured the serious fight would come at the top of the structure. Ya know. Where a boss chamber ought to be. We were off our guard when the golem made its entrance. My barbarian meat-tank was on the other side of the room when this gruesome thing charged Laurel’s elven rogue. And let me tell ya: 6th level Dex rogues in leather armor aren’t so great against scythe crits. It cut her in friggin’ half.
We managed to fell the the thing a round or two later, but there’s no coming back from that. Our elf was dead, and we still had a most-of-a-dungeon to go.
“Wait,” says our druid. “We’re in a big city, right? We should be able to find a scroll of reincarnate no problem. We’ve got the gold, and I shouldn’t have too much trouble activating it.” We immediately set about this plan, bundling up the body of our fallen comrade and hurrying away into Magnimar’s mercantile quarter.
All this while, poor Laurel has been quiet. She grew up playing with with My Little Pony beneath her dad’s gaming table. Her first campaign was at 11 years old. The girl had a lifetime of gaming under her belt, but in all that time she’d been extremely lucky. This was her first ever character death. Her beloved elven rogue was stone dead, and it was a MAJOR LIFE EVENT for the player.
We managed to track down that scroll without much trouble. We threw our cash at the magic merchant, grabbed 1,000 gp of rare oils for good measure (reincarnate is expensive!) and set about performing the ritual. It was a heart-touching scene as our druid made contact with the departed elf’s spirit, pleading with her to come back. The rest of us watched with baited breath.
“Go ahead and roll it,” said our GM.
The d100 tumbled. The chart was consulted.
“Dwarf,” declared our GM. “You come back as a dwarf.”
We immediately lost our shit. You see, Laurel’s elf was a vain fashionista. She’d played her as a snob from day one. More importantly, the party druid was this elf’s adopted brother, and he also happened to be a dwarf. The pair had major sibling rivalry, and the traditional elf/dwarf tension had been a theme throughout the campaign. So for the rest of us, it was pure poetry when our supermodel, fashion-conscious rogue with a faux-Parisian accent came back with mutton chops and a plus size figure.
“Maybe you can sew some of your old clothes together.”
“Do you have Scottish accent now?”
“I bet your palette changed. No more wine for you! Only beer!”
Mostly we were just relieved to have our rogue back. The tension had broken, a mood of hilarity prevailed, and we all thought we were just taking the piss. Imagine our collective surprise when we noticed Laurel trying desperately not to cry.
You see, when you have a a strong vision of your character, it’s tough to watch your partymates undermine it. But more importantly, when you happen upon a critical moment in your narrative arc—meeting your deity; delivering an impassioned speech; experiencing your first PC death—it can be a tough pill to swallow when your friends turn that moment into a joke.
Never fear though! The group sorted itself out between sessions. Laurel got a re-roll on the reincarnate table, and the adventure continued with a halfling rogue. But for me the lesson remains clear. Friendly banter is a good thing. Jokes are fine. But don’t trample on other players’ special moments. They’re hard enough to come by.
Question of the day then! Have you ever had to deal with your fellow PCs mocking your character? Was it all in good fun, or were there some genuinely hurt feelings? Conversely, how important is it to learn to laugh at yourself and roll with the punches? Tell us all about the cracks in your character’s self-serious self-image down in the comments!
GEEKY GREETING CARDS For the holidays this year, Laurel just threw some brand-spanking new limited edition D&D X-mas cards onto her Etsy store. We’re also rocking our ever-popular d20 Class prints. We’re only missing “Monk” and “Warlock” at the moment, and I have it on good authority that Laurel will be working tirelessly to knock ’em out before New Year’s. So come one come all! Get your shopping done early and make a geek in your life happy.
GET YOUR SCHWAG ON! Want a piece of Handbook-World to hang on you wall? Then you’ll want to check out the “Hero” reward tier on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Each monthly treasure haul will bring you prints, decals, buttons, bookmarks and more! There’s even talk of a few Handbook-themed mini-dungeons on the horizon. So hit the link, open up that treasure chest, and see what loot awaits!
I’m having trouble seeing what WHW is actually despairing about. Is she trying to hide her white-hair-ness (which is odd given her tips are white-ish) or the fact she’s not actually white-haired naturally? Conscious about her age / witchy appearance?
Poor Antipaladin though. Can’t be fun having to sport the Bald of Evil whenever you want to take a shower.
Since Witch acquired her powers, she developed (un)natural white hair. She’s had to dye it back to blonde again ever since. While she appreciates a nice Doc Oc power-up, no woman wants to go prematurely gray.
Ah, reincarnate. You’re the spell that everyone would like if you weren’t so disruptive to RPs and/or builds – Druid’s unique, surprisingly cheap rez that nobody wants to be rezzed by, preferring to stay dead permanently or grabbing 8k more gold for a ‘proper’ raise dead.
And unfortunately, by the time you can get cyclic reincarnation, it’s non-random version with youth benefits, you end up having raise dead by then.
My experience with the spell was mostly fellow PCs blatantly and adamantly refusing to be raised by it, or it being handwaved into a desired race for early deaths.
I’ve only encountered it once, but the GM rolled “100 Other” on the table, and decided to get creative… my cleric wound up as a were-bear. Which actually fitted the story, but it took us a while to figure out what that meant mechanically… ended up using the 3.5e Savage Species rules to put together a sort of multiclass setup.
I, for one, like it because it can disrupt stuff. Death is supposed to do that, and being stuck in a new kind of body is a pretty modest disruption all things considered. (Kinda yikes in the editions when it messes with your mental ability scores, but still.)
One of my PCs in a game I ran intentionally committed suicide in order to reincarnate on the full moon in hopes of getting benefits out of it. He went from Human to Dwarf and got a dope boost to HP and saves against magic. Lucky man.
An extra couple of centuries worth of lifespan isn’t a bad deal either.
In 5e at least, +1 or +2 to the wrong stat, or the loss of a racial ability can completely cripple a character build.
The ONLY reason to accept reincarnation is if your character dies of old age. It’s not a poor man’s raise dead, it’s a poor man’s after-the-fact clone spell.
My Changeling Witch recently got reincarnated into a Gnome Witch. The party thought it was hilarious. My Witch has actually grown more serious with the change…
What I’d really like to know is what the Evil Party was doing on a ship, and why it sank. SUCCUBUS. Did you snack on the crew?
And… where is Necromancer? 0_0 Is she alright?
Necromancer is probably fishing out her zombies (and their parts) out of the sea. That, or her swim check is abysmal enough that she has to walk her way back (presumably using undead anatomy to not need to breathe).
That, or she’s busy having an, ahem, ‘epic duel’ with Paladin.
Yeah, that’s a hazard with ships. Years ago, my cleric had to meet the rest of the party on the beach after he got tipped over the side while wearing plate. No problem, he’d naturally prepared water-breathing that day and they were only a few miles offshore, but the whole thing was very inconvenient.
My guess is finding some shark skeletons to put together for undead leviathan-style transport.
Necromancer is behind Anti-Paladin! She’s just passed out, I promise, but her dress/hair are blending in with his fur collar and dark armor a bit too much, sorry!
Ahh, there she is! I completely overlooked her! So sorry.
Thanks for pointing her out for me. ^_^
(Antipaladin and Necromancer are my favourite characters on the Evil Party.)
My guess is they hired Swash and Buckle for passage when Cavalier got in the way
Experiences of mocking, lets see:
Played with this expectation of being mocked with a blatantly crazy Ratfolk Wizard (who collected and ate eyeballs) and a Kobold Gunslinger (massive ego and overconfidence). One of them turned into a PC with more INT than most elder gods / had a wizard duel (opposing spellcraft rolls) with a mythic superwizard and won, the other is a very deadly and accurate shooter and competent (if daft) party leader. Both have been called ‘greedrat’ and ‘greedbold’ for being mindful of looting and equipment and have had their alignment assumed to be CN instead of what it actually was.
The Kobold was also forced into a maid outfit (he was male) by a female crystal dragon, on the egging of another maid-outfit obsessed PC.
Our other players regularly play fluffy things (Kitsune, Catfolk, or other animal-ears-anime characters). Said players are constantly the targets of petting, fluffing and general invasions of personal space by other PCs. This also applies to friendly NPCs.
One of our players is infamous for blasting and almost-TPKing a different party with a fireball (cast it in a room, not realizing the room is smaller than the fireball range). He gets reminded of it regularly.
One player, who plays a literal maid-bot in Starfinder, recently got the reputation of being the prime target for any lewd creatures or spells due to several instances of being grappled or engulfed by slimes or things with tentacles.
In Starfinder, any usage of mind thrust is immediately associated with ahegao faces. This is one that I’m a pretty much annoyed with as that’s my Shirren Mystic’s primary spell and it’s been tacked on by another player – negating and ruining my image of the character’s spellcasting/theme in general.
I had a character like that once. As long as I didn’t cause any other characters’ deaths and remembered to yell “Duck!”, the players were fine with it.
(Some of the characters wanted to kill him, though. And after an incident involving gibbering-mouther-induced blindness, non-fireball-induced party deaths, and bad timing, my character came to the conclusion that some party members were killing and looting others and promptly fled into the dungeon.)
This from the fella that argued we now owned the collar of a slave we recently acquired (as a replacement PC for someone who got tired of playing their old one) to scrape up a few more gold. THAT reputation was earned. :p
It felt perfectly fitting for the cheeky little bastard that he was! He didn’t go into tomb-pillaging-with-legal-permit for moral or historical reasons, after all.
And the collar felt practical, given it’s made of adamantine. Whether to bash someone (or something) with it, smelt it into a different tool, capture a monster with it, or sell it.
There’s a joke about kobolds and traps somewhere in there.
Ah, I know exactly what encounter you’ve had. Tough tower, that part is – and infamous for TPKs and general difficulty. How long ago was this encounter? Is Laurel by now a veteran of PC deaths?
Was this character death one that happened before, or after, the time you’ve had demons kill the party’s beloved mascot(s), described in a previous comic?
I think the deaths of the party mascots were actually my fault, since I was DMing that particular campaign. I still maintain that it is absolutely fair that when you leave defenseless unintelligent animals alone around evil, malicious creatures, you shouldn’t be all that surprised when you come back and they’ve been eaten.
So, the Elf got cut in half, and as a result of this, became a Dwarf? I do hope you made at least one ‘cut down in size’ or ‘half the Elf she used to be’ reference when you could.
…and once she became a halfling, those jokes could continue unabated.
Like Wizard once said, think of it as character development. No? Yeah, I’d have trouble with that too. When you have a clear idea of what your character should or shouldn’t be, it must sting like hell to have that idea torn to shreds in front of you.
Gotta feel bad for Witch, though. She kept that dye job up as a child https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/origin-stories-witch and a mermaid https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/zero-prep only for some potentially Cavalier-related shipwreck to catch her unawares. Also, Antipaladin is bald.
He’s not bald! He just has a quenched hair day.
Most mockery at my tables is over characters’ intended flaws, so the players in question tend to laugh along with it; after all, if people are joking about your reckless sorcerer’s tendency to hit himself with fireballs or your grumpy fighter’s poor social skills, that just means you’re playing your character well. We sometimes make fun of ridiculously bad luck with dice (for instance, one of my fighters botched so many Listen checks that she was declared officially hearing-impaired), but it’s generally in low-stakes situations where the players are happy to roll with it, and we balance it out by joking about absurdly good luck as well (one time a clumsy paladin somehow succeeded at several Dexterity saves in a row, so we made cracks about how he just stood there while the attacks dodged him).
One group I’m in has six players. At one point, two of them got into a pretty thorough bashing of the rest of the party, most notably how “These useless [rude word]s” are going to ruin the party more than help.
Two of the three of us who’d been pointed to had just spent their roleplay time nearly setting the tavern on fire, and had barely participated in the campaign’s first fight due to being mired in ooze.
But why the heck were they counting me and my good-boy of a cleric? He’d gone to bed early after a bath, and not participated in the near-arson. He was so useful that he’d personally killed literally all the enemies in the campaign’s first fight.
I never really got a satisfactory answer.
I had a very shy/anxious character once who stumbled upon another PC while they were singing alone in the forest. My character loved music but was too awkward to walk up to people and talk to them, so he stayed quiet and left without them noticing him.
i was planning to make this a little character arc where he learns to play the song they were singing and eventually takes the big step to approach them, but instead he was forever branded as a stalker by the players and i couldn’t say one thing in character without it being (jokingly, I assume) twisted into some kind of stalking behavior
the players didn’t mean it badly, but any plans of character progression or showcasing my character’s actual personality were forever ruined. Unfortunately it’s happened a couple of times with the same group and different characters of mine, but it’s more of a having-fun-differently situation and I happen to be in the minority that likes to roleplay seriously from time to time
I feel that. Not necessarily from roleplay, but I’ve definitely had the experience of trying to do something I seriously enjoy with friends and having them make a big joke out of it.
There’s entire fairytales that revolve around this kind of thing happening!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XotvfdpRMOQ
The thought of tiny Laurel playing with MLP under the table while her dad and his friends are dungeon-crawling made me smile.
I run a very mockery-prone table. It doesn’t help that some of the players’ reach exceeds their grasp when it comes to actual roleplaying. Sometimes it’s going for a gruff, grizzled, brooding veteran… when we’re all level 0. (If you’re wondering how, that’s a LANCER session.) Sometimes it’s just a matter of diving headfirst into the RP equivalent of a group of disgruntled ogres. In our latest session, one guy ended up digging himself so deep that the party diplomancer pulled the NPC aside and apologized in a language the first fellow didn’t speak.
(And fair’s fair, I get my share of the drubbings. What? No, this shopkeeper NPC isn’t based on Tom Nook at all. Don’t be ridiculous. Just give him all your money and don’t ask any questions about what he’s doing with it.)
I try to make sure everyone’s having fun. That same Pathfinder session ended with an overview of how the first guy could’ve handled the situation better, and reassurance that his speech later in the session would’ve worked fantastically if he hadn’t literally been ordering goblins to practice fire safety. I admit, we do sometimes go too far, but we make sure to celebrate the incredible moments when they happen.
Not mocking my character, per se, but I remember one time in a pirate campaign when we were sacking a sahuagin lair/village and I was the only one who had a problem with murdering noncombatants (or eating sahuagin eggs, but I think they were just joking about that). Not helping matters was that this was literally my first session with a new character, who I was trying to get a feel for, so I was criticized for not being able to put my discomfort into in-character terms.
They argued that this was a pirate campaign, so I should expect the characters to be pieces of shit. I counterargued that this was a game about fantasy pirates, who didn’t need to be any nastier than Will Turner, Guybrush Threepwood, or Luffy. (I don’t remember which exact example(s) I used, but the point stands.) But everyone else was either enjoying or tolerating it, so I got to have my day ruined.
I don’t know why this question reminded me of that, by the way. Maybe it was the beach in the comic?
The only time I’ve had to deal with anyone getting poked fun at a table for their character in recent memory was when a player who, at the end of the last session, declared that they were going to play a healer for the next campaign showed up with a draconic sorcerer. We mostly relegated it to bugging him for healing, because I took a few minutes to reconfigure my character to at least have some healing available.
I actually once insisted in-character that the druid not use reincarnate on me; blatantly borrowing Howel’s “life’s not worth living if I can’t be beautiful” line.
That character was also the only one I recall particularly being teased; she was a runaway from a noble family, who was used to using her looks to get what she wanted. The rest of the party interpreted her constant flirting as being boy crazy, and jovially dubbed her the party thot. Initially I was a little stung; there was a lot more to this character than chasing romance! But ultimately I leaned into it; whatever her reasons, they were pretty on the money about the way she acted. It just let me subvert expectations now and then.
In terms of major character changes foisted upon characters, by the end of Tomb of Annihilation my Paladin had gained 100 pounds of muscle, had his Intelligence go from 14 to 18, gained a manic impulsiveness, and was very distracted making out with a clone of himself.
The player who had to dip out for most of the tomb but rejoined for the finale was very much the Community gif where Troy comes back with pizza.
I remember that lifespark elite flesh golem! Our party’s Monk had a rough time of it too, as commemorated in this expertly-drawn comic: https://i.imgur.com/NJSxJEs.png
I believe he was crit and downed from full health, but got healed back into the fight. Even blinding that thing barely seemed to matter. The most fun part of that dungeon was, though, when the dwarven Cleric decided that she was never going to make all the checks to get up the broken and unstable staircases, so she just stayed at the bottom while everyone else climbed up and then lowered a knotted rope. Except we got attacked at the top. But, via math, we determined that the top was just in range of her Spiritual Weapon spell, so she got to contribute after all!
My favorite part of that dungeon was that we actually used scouting on the boss fight.
“OK. There’s something in there, and we’ve got a pretty good idea what it is. Ima use disguise self and slip this bag over its head. Then you guys rush in and beat nine hells out of it.”
The crazy bit from the rooftop fight for us was that the Sorcerer got mind-jacked, but hadn’t done anything against us yet. The Cleric, not knowing what else to do, threw down Circle of Protection from Evil, which gave him another save, which he passed. A debate about whether this metagaming was a step too far was thwarted when the Cleric’s player expressed surprise that Protection from Evil did that – she legitimately didn’t realize that was a thing.
Or the moment when the boss was almost down, and my beat-up Magus/Bloodrager decided she could tank one more hit, double-handed her weapon, bloodraged and activated a charge – only for the inevitable AOO to be a trip attempt that knocked her on her face before the 7-HP boss flipped us off and jumped off the roof. (Which then led to a debate about if we could use Summon Mount and push the mount off the tower to try and hit her as she Feather Fell.)
Did nobody have a ranged weapon, or did they just want to take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to squash a major villain under a horse?
You know the real answer, but we also shot a crossbow at her (it missed). I think the Sorcerer was out of higher-level spell slots he could use for a decent ranged attack. Also, his player loved trying to find ways to use spells for things they are not supposed to be used for.
After one round the villain went invisible anyways. It was a shame. If I hadn’t used my once-a-day Feather Fall spell-like ability earlier (to save the Sorcerer when he got elbowed off a balcony), I absolutely would have jumped after her, which would have been an EPIC way to finish the fight.
Out of curiosity, was the Evil Party traveling on Swash/Buckle’s ship when Cavalier sunk it? A shipwreck comic followed by a castaway comic is mighty suggestive…
How dare you imply that this comic has continuity! Never mind the parenthetical notes in the script!
Killer monster in a bell tower in Magnimar, Ehhhh. I actually know that specific encounter. It was the first time my party actually started to desperately hope my Alchemist would come up with some of her trademark big damage instead of being bummed about how she was had been splitting enemies like cord wood to that point.
I suppose my issue has been a little bit different here, though. My experience has been players so afraid of having their idea messed with at all that what should be a defining, interesting character moments becomes off limits to most people, even if the rest of the party isn’t making fun.
I’m not so sure it’s different. I thought the elf –> dwarf thing was just such a moment. I’d have been thrilled to take on that story beat (though annoyed at losing my Dex bonus). For Laurel, it killed all of her enjoyment of a well-defined character concept. Different strokes and all that.
Give me an example though. When have you seen a gamer reject that kind of defining moment out of hand?
I am playing a very japanese inspired sumo wrestler monk. He’s a big lad and has a long Japanese name though he gets called Yama for short for the most part.
Many have joked that he clearly hails from the east which isn’t true. He plainly insists he’s from the north.
I don’t get it. Do historical sumo originate from Hokkaido or something?
Almost the opposite, actually…
My first PC, after years as Forever DM, was Orestes Tintasquel Agellion Xilanthi-Escabaro, a gothy alf-elvish romantic poet, entitled noble scion and coincidental grave poet. I based him off Lord Byron, with all of the snobbery, brooding, womanizing (I decided not to copy over Byron’s bisexuality,) drugs and alcohol that you’d expect, but with the poetic sensibilities of Poe. For all that, he was a very skilful poet, the sale of whose work was the main source of funding for the party throughout the game.
I, meanwhile, am middle-class, left-wing, bi, have a fashion sense that, whilst definitely eccentric, is a very long way from being “gothy,” break out in cold sweats at the thought of drugs and cannot (despite being a fair hand at prose writing and recitals) write poetry to save my life, yet from the very first session it was universally decided that Orestes was a shameless self-insert. The only real argument seemed to be that we shared an unusually long name. The mockery was relentless and utterly immune to reason, but thankfully I have a reasonably thick skin and managed to wait it out.
It ended about one year after the campaign did…
That said, though, it was never, for me, beyond the bounds of good taste from my friends.
At my usual table, we would tend to make characters who ranged from off-kilter to worryingly odd to batshit crazy, so it wold be hard to mock the PCs in a way that carried much sting. But we all seem to seriously bond with NPCs; you are NOT advised to threaten or insult the assorted friends, rivals, loved ones, only-vaguely-liked-ones, mentors, probably-ex-bandits, research students, excitable kobolds, still-mostly-sapient zombies, or ex-bandit research zombies who populate the campaigns.
If you ask the players for their greatest badass memories of those campaigns, at least half will not be something a PC did at all. It’ll be the time the kobolds, on their own initiative, undermined the elf ambassador’s podium in the middle of his speech. The time Professor Irons crashed a tense faculty meeting by splintering the oak door with her ancestral axe, to cast the deciding vote with seconds to spare. The time an entire halloween session turned out to be a story our alchemist’s father was telling her back when she was nine. The time we finally rigged a way to communicate with the Mad Doktor’s brain-in-a-jar wife after a decade of alchemical stasis, and her first words after he explained where she was and why were not “Ludwig, you fiend, you’ve turned me into a MONSTER,” but “Flame and Ash, it WORKED!?!”
I remember once when I was DMing the group and had to deal with a new player who was covertly throwing allied NPCs under the bus, and seemed to expect that when the shit inevitably hit the fan, the other players would side with him because the real game is players-against-DM, with NPCs by definition on the DM’s side.
It was hard to convince him that no, I am not taking you aside to warn you because I am over-protective of my NPCs. It’s because, in-character and out, your fellow players like the guy you’re about to frame for murder way more than they like you.
Good for you. I suspect I would have defaulted to “Don’t say I didn’t warn you” pretty quickly.
We usually start mocking each other characters when we want to change from PVE to PVP 🙂
But Colin, i am disappointed of you, making her suffer that way 🙁
Let other people have their moment. Just look at how pure Laurel is:
https://www.deviantart.com/fishcapades/art/He-s-not-a-Pet-He-s-an-Animal-Companion-273296468
She even took her time to “find” those poor “orphan” critters in need of a family 😀
I was pretty sad about my first pc death. I fought so hard to escape the wyvern’s grasp. My eberron changeling artificer fired bolt after from her enchanted hand crossbows into its chest as it carried me away into the air. At the end of the third round with no escape in sight, I perished and fell to the ground in a mishappen heap. My homunculi, that represented a little under half my total wealth crumbled to ash. My comrades killed all but one Wyvern before it fled. They collected my body and set about finding a reincarnation scroll, much like your story. I rolled my d100 and came up. . . kobold. Thats when my dm reminded me of our campaign specific ability to add 1d4 to any roll twice a day. He allowed me to use it, and I gloriously came back as a changeling! My character stopped goofing off and drinking all the time, and became deathly afraid of wyverns. It was a formative moment for both me and my character.
One of my fraternity brothers made an elf paladin champion from Kyonin for our short-lived Pathfinder 2E game and played him with the most fucking godawful Australian accent I’ve ever heard and I refuse to let him live it down to this day.
Not quite on the topic, but I recently had a campaign where every time I had a good character moment set up someone would completely ruin the moment. Either it was the GM deciding their assassins in the middle of the night scene had to happen at the exact same moment as my harmless slugs in the bed prank on another PC (which of course given focusing on slugs or PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO MURDER ME IN MY SLEEP! meant my prank go no attention at all) or stuff like a warlock having his imp familiar not once, but twice (the second time after warning them to stop on threat of horrible retribution), decided to imply my character was evil and pro-slavery because the GM decided at the last minute to flavor my rogue getting a familiar after we spent about 1/4th of the game building up to being able to do that (everyone else had a magic pet of some kind, my character felt left out) as binding the elemental against their will instead of inviting it and having a happy fun pet like I’d made it clear I wanted.
My first Shadowrun character, a huge Troll physical adept, with a (to me) cool handle: Orca (like in killerwhale). But the group only heard “Orc-A” as in orc-a, orc-b, orc-c etc.
Needless to say, I was stuck with that name, and they kept asking when the rest of the guys (the b, c, d etc.) would show up…
You should sell t-shirts that say “so no shot, there we were…”
I know the exact adventure you are talking about. That Scarecrow Golem was no joke, but I got a little smug grin out of the fight when I played. My character had recently purchased an Amulet of Vermin Call(or something like that) that let him summon a Huge Scorpion. Another player said there would never be room to use it and I’d wasted my gold.
Que Scarecrow Golem Fight. A perfect stop for it to be summoned is behind the golem. The only reason we even won that fight was the scorpion managing a few lucky grapples. 🙂
Ah, the scythe crit. The be-all, end-all, ‘here’s a new character sheet’ on par with guns. Paizo is particularly evil with them, putting them in the hands of some NASTY npcs.
One AP I ran recently, a scythe boss showed up around level 10. Here’s his combat routine.
Start of combat: activate his SLA Quickened Invisibility, then dimension door to another location.
Next round: Walk up to a pc, swing with his conductive scythe. On hit, apply any of the effects of Inflict Curse. (As-written, he goes for the -con, because the damage isn’t high enough already, apparently. I went with the chance to miss turns instead.) Then, immediately cast quickened invisibility again.
Important note; if this dude crits, he is doing an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM of 124 damage. A barbarian who is particularly con-heavy might not die instantly. (By my calculation, with 20 con, you’d be left with 2 hp. Before the -6 con from inflict curse wipes the last of your health.)
Rounds thereafter: Repeat until party, or npc, is dead. He has 4 inflict curses to dispense, and an unlimited supply of quickened invisibilities.
I’ve never had the misfortune of having a character die when I wasn’t ready for it, mostly because I tend to make them have the same durability of a slab of adamantine or other fun “Get out of jail” abilities. The closest thing I’ve had happen to this situation is getting hit with a Rod of Wonder and having my tiefling magus turn blue, which was more annoying than actual trouble for my character.
I was under the impression that all tieflings were blue. I think WotC made it mandatory sometime around January of 2018.
When my GM rolled to see the effect of the Rod of Wonder and came up with my tiefling turning blue, I face-palmed quite hard. Fortunately, only the GM in my small group listens to Critical Role, so the other two weren’t quite aware of why I was so annoyed and weren’t able to come up with Jester-related jokes.
Awww, cheers, Witch. It’s striking!
I love this panel so much, I think it’s Antipaladin. No, not the obvious. It’s his expression.
“This is my life,” he thinks to himself, as he lies on an uncomfortable spot of sand? Except, it’s rocky. A rocky, uncomfortable beach.
A crab is poking Necromancer. Should he do something? He should. Probly.
Succubus is taking the opposite, ‘done with this’ approach.
It’s just all good. Just brilliant, I love it.
I’ve had a couple of folks do “the archive binge” over the years. It’s always fun for me to go back and do a bit of a re-read with ’em. And in that sense, one of my favorite things about Handbook’s run is watching Laurel get better and better. She’s come a long way, and even our con merch has improved noticeably. 🙂
My Sanguine Angel Char in Rise of the Runelords is getting mocked by the party all the time. Imagine, a “no-nonsense” full plate wielding former Hellknight in Training being tricked into giving a vow to protect a Party of: A Chaotic Good Halfling Bard, A Chaotic Neutral GNOME Druid and a Neutral Good Kitsune Sorcerer. The char is constantly thinking of ways to get rid of the others without breaking her word… maybe when she turns into a full fledged devil on lvl 15 *maniacal laugh*. Of course they don´t know that their lifes depend on a soon to be evil being keeping her word… or finding someone to cast “Imprisonment” on them.
Being mobbed by a party of casters is bad news for someone who can only hit things with a sharp stick. Even worse if she is not allowed to let her bullys come to serious harm.
All you need is an item that casts antimagic field and a grapple score. 😀
Spending 118.000 Gold for this is not an option, sadly ^^
But, she can use Command Person once per day as a SLA – the DC is crap but, as fighter pointed out, unconscious (aka sleeping) targets count as willing 😉
660 gp to hire a wizard to cast it for you.
Of course, the hazard pay for staying within 10′ of the combat might jack it up a bit.