Searching Your Inventory: Finding that Silver Bullet

There is nothing I love more than facing an impossible situation, frantically searching through my character's half-forgotten inventory, and pulling a "silver bullet" item or ability out of my bag of tricks. Has this ever happened to you? What was the situation and what was the item?

Comic for illustrative purposes.

I recall an adventure where the GM was trying to tease us by granting our heroes a view into a treasure chamber containing the objective of our quest through a tiny barred window. As it happened I had found a potion of gaseous form in our previous adventure, allowing us to grab the mcguffin right away and skip almost the entire dungeon. Fun times!

The single best 'silver bullet' moment in the history of my gaming occurred in a campaign I was in in college.

One of the main plot threads of the story had coalesced around this civil revolt against an evil queen and her ruthless minions, eventually culminating in a siege of her fortress like capital city by an alliance of rebel forces lead by the party's Ranger - many of which were forest dwellers. The allies had attacked the fortresses strong point, owing to the fact that it offered the speediest access to the Queen's palace, hoping to finish the battle quickly. Unfortunately, the Queen had anticipated this and had arranged for the strong point to seem much more lightly defended than it actually was, baiting the allies into this very action as a trap. She had arranged all her most elite forces hidden in the approaches to this strong point, including her loyal wizards. For the allies, the key to the battle lay in their Treant units, which could batter through the fortresses walls. The treants breached the outer wall, and the rebel army began to pour through the breach. At that moment, the queen sprung her trap. The rebels found themselves trapped between the outer and inner walls, and surrounded on all sides by the queen's most elite units. Worse, the queen's wizard allies had conjured fire elementals which now bore down on the Treant units, threatening to do serious harm to the most important unit in the rebel army. The PC's were momentarily frozen with indecision and worry, and the battle seemed hung in the balance.

Several of the players were actually playing some of their higher level henchmen for this battle, with their main PC's elsewhere. One of the players scanned the relatively unfamiliar character sheet, looking for a solution. And at that moment, he realized that the entire campaign had turned on a seemingly unimportant decision he had made months earlier.

It was usual when distributing treasure to give your henchmen magic items which had little utility to your main PC. By the rules, this bolstered your henchmen's loyalty scores regardless of the quality or utility of the treasure. Months earlier we had found a particularly worthless seeming magic item, and since no one wanted it, it was duly assigned almost at random to one of the henchmen that could use it - in this case a Halfling thief that was high enough level to utilize wands.

That Halfling thief now stood in the middle of the main boulevard, with the elite forces of the Queen bearing down in all directions, flights of arrows cutting down the lead units of the rebel army, fireballs bursting round about, and a unit of fire elementals threatening to turn the tide of the battle. The player controlling the Halfling thief announced, "I pull from my pack my Wand of Fire Extinguishing, and target the nearest fire elemental."

I too love that feeling.

Though as they say, sometime you have to make you own luck. Back when (AD&D 2nd) I had a long running character with the largest size bag of holding. I outfitted it over many levels with unwanted items, misc treasure, and with plenty of mundane but odd items. I had a full sheet (from my dot matrix printer, old school) of the things in it. And they came up at the strangest times.

The character was known as a clothes-horse, so having lots of outfits was no surprise. That he also had fancy clothes for everyone else in the party "so you don't make me look bad if we meet royalty" was a happy surprise at one point. We needed to bribe people and I'd always come up with not just value, but particular value for the whomever we were bribing. Rare elven wine for X, a matched set of emerald-encrusted goblets for Y - all leftover treasure we never got around to selling.

But I had things like grappling hooks, a small anchor, ridiculous amounts of rope, tack and bridle, whatever. Dried aged wood for a fire. It became a running ... well, not gag, but DGatham's bag of holding had it's own stories told about it.

Until all was lost in a bag-of-holding + extradimensional space (portable hole?) incident. It used to be that when you combined the two they would go 'xplody and rip a hole to the astral. I ended up later using a wish to reconnect a new bag to the particular extra-dimensional space I used to have so I could recover everything.

There are (at least) two aspects to this: the structure of gameplay; and the fiction.

From the structural point of view, an "inventory" is a suite of player-side resources that is accrued over time, with a significant amount of GM influence over what's in it. This gives it a different sort of play dynamic from other sorts of player-side resources. Discovering that you've chosen the right spell, or seeing a new potent combo of (say) a feat and a class feature, is enjoying your own cleverness in building. Finding a useful item in an equipment list, or finding a use for something unexpected, has a more adversarial and puzzle-solving dimension to it, as it's making something useful out of stuff that you didn't get to choose.

The fiction aspect probably has two sub-aspects: playing the fiction cleverly; and creating memorable fiction thereby. The last time I remember this sort of thing happening is a while ago now: mid-Heroic PCs in a 4e game were in a flooding room with the only exit about to close, and one of them pulled out a random magic mace that had been found and stored away for a rainy day and used it to wedge the door open. (The same mace was later lost in a river crossing accident.)

The one I remember the best is from nearly 30 years ago: in a Rolemaster game a PC had had his arm severed and was bleeding to death. The players (and their PCs) knew where a healer could be found who could treat the injury, but he was some distance away. The injured PC was a two-handed sword wielder, and the players were joking that he'd have to change to longsword. "Don't I have a spare magic longsword somewhere, from that fight with so-and-so?" one of them said, and looked down his sheet. "Oh yeah, there is it - you'll be able to use that," "What's its bonus?" "Well, let's see - it's a +5 sword [RM is a percentile system] and it's got a Teleport rune on it."

At which point a more immediate solution to the situation presented itself!

It’s happened to all of us, I suspect.

No one springs to mind- though the 2Ed dual-classed Ftr/cleric of Tyr always seemed to have the right weapon for the job...and she only had 2 weapons. (Granted, they were a vorpal longsword and a mace of disruption.)

But my favorite exemplar was kind of the negative version of this. I was in a small group- 3 regular players plus one who would join us on occasion- who all DMed in rotation in a high-level campaign. Format typically had each of the players running 2-3 PCs (with no DMPCs), so keeping track of things was part of the challenge.

Once, we were in a particularly puzzling magically trapped passageway, and the other player and I tried everything we could think of. Finally, after more than an hour, we decided to have the party retreat & regroup, and called it a night.

As we sat around the dinner table, the DM asked why we hadn’t tried a particular spell. We two players looked at each other, considered the spell and our PC resources and then turned to face the DM...”Dude, the only PC in the group with that spell is your top-level wizard.”*

So much for THAT adventure.




* not only was that spell 9th level, he routinely- to this very day- refuses to share spells from spellbooks.

Here’s my story from the DM side of the table.

During the prior adventure the cleric had cast Heroes feast and the extra hit points literally made the difference between life and death for two of the characters.

Fast forward one session: before engaging in a pitched battle against the forces of Tiamat the cleric again casts heroes feast. Ok. What the heroes don’t know is that they are walking into a bit of a trap(based entirely on their decisions). An ancient Green Dragon that nearly killed them before is lurking in the forest.
Battle begins:
Initiative is rolled. Battle joined. The Green emerges from the forest swoops down upon the heroes and unleashes its breath! Saves are failed! The damage roll is positively ruthless! The lamentations of the PCs is sweet sweet music to my ears! Then...
Cleric: hey... I think heroes feast gives us advantage on saves or something.
Me: ok... let’s check because like... two of you are down now and I want to make sure we’re right.
‘Pages turning’
Cleric: aw...darn. Just advantage on wisdom saves and immunity to poison.

‘Immunity to poison... to poison... poison...’

Me: so you guys take the full... poison... damage...
Oh man.... no damage... at all from the dragon breath... that had two of you down... and...

Well the battle turned quickly there. The Green wound up fleeing and the heroes stood victorious on the field of battle.

I still wonder if I handled that wrong. Doesn’t really matter, it was awesome.

My groups just had one in our last Starfinder session. Facing an undead solarian who is building up energy and preparing to unleash a supernova AoE attack.

"Hey guys... I've still got this fire extinguisher in my pack!"

It was pretty funny watching somebody spritz down Goku and foil his attack. The rest of the group wailed on the solarian while the fire extenguisher guy suppressed his energy. Not exactly rules-as-written, but it was pretty amusing in practice.