Greenfield
Adventurer
In our game the DM has just attached an NPC to the party. We don't want her, we don't need her, and by the end of the session we didn't trust her.
I'm running a Half Satyr Bard who is known to be a girl chaser. Our adventure started at a play, and it was a given that the Bard had a date with him.
Incredibly inept bad guys tried to kill us using name-targeted magic. However, because the play was about some of our own adventures, the spells somehow split and took out the actors first, then tickled us a bit.
Yeah, yeah, I know, the very few spells that take advantage of "true name" stuff won't work like that: The actors were just pretending to be us, and none actually had our "true names". It was a plot device needed to get things rolling and we all pretended it was okay.
Now we're off on the road to someplace of uncertain location (the directions keep changing every time the DM brings them up) to find a house whose link to what's going on is tenuous at best, to solve a problem that really isn't ours.
After our first day of travel, who comes riding up but the girl from the theater. She had minimal traveling gear, is armed only with a dagger, and though she has some jewelry, she has no magical gear at all.
We're 12th/13th/14th level, and we figure that she'll die the first time something looks at her funny, but she refuses to leave.
She's half-elven, and after we learn her family name we divert to the nearby Elven village, where we know she has family. Since she's a child by most standards (16 years, for a Half Elf, is all but infancy). Note that this was all news to me/my character, who has his standards and certainly isn't a child molester.
We get ambushed on the road and my character has to go off to her rescue when she rides out of one fairly obvious trap and into another.
She proves to be good at hiding, which keeps her from getting killed.
We get to the Elven village to discover it's under attack. Orcs. We enter the scene and proceed to kick butt.
Her family isn't there at the moment, but in any case she isn't welcome there. Turns out she's an Assassin, and was banished. (Note that this is my character's home village, and he's been asked not to return either.)
So they thank us for our help, and then politely ask that we leave as soon as possible.
To make a long story short, we're stuck with her. Any attempt we make to lose her will result in her catching up, somehow, smiling, and pretending nothing happened.
I've seen this ploy before, from more than a few DMs, and the symptoms are clear and unmistakeable. She has an Amulet of Proof Against Detection and Location, which is why no magic was detected. And she'll turn out to have whatever skills or feats she needs to be able to stick with us, no matter what we do.
Do your DMs ever pull this subtle-as-a-sledgehammer stunt?
I'm running a Half Satyr Bard who is known to be a girl chaser. Our adventure started at a play, and it was a given that the Bard had a date with him.
Incredibly inept bad guys tried to kill us using name-targeted magic. However, because the play was about some of our own adventures, the spells somehow split and took out the actors first, then tickled us a bit.
Yeah, yeah, I know, the very few spells that take advantage of "true name" stuff won't work like that: The actors were just pretending to be us, and none actually had our "true names". It was a plot device needed to get things rolling and we all pretended it was okay.
Now we're off on the road to someplace of uncertain location (the directions keep changing every time the DM brings them up) to find a house whose link to what's going on is tenuous at best, to solve a problem that really isn't ours.
After our first day of travel, who comes riding up but the girl from the theater. She had minimal traveling gear, is armed only with a dagger, and though she has some jewelry, she has no magical gear at all.
We're 12th/13th/14th level, and we figure that she'll die the first time something looks at her funny, but she refuses to leave.
She's half-elven, and after we learn her family name we divert to the nearby Elven village, where we know she has family. Since she's a child by most standards (16 years, for a Half Elf, is all but infancy). Note that this was all news to me/my character, who has his standards and certainly isn't a child molester.
We get ambushed on the road and my character has to go off to her rescue when she rides out of one fairly obvious trap and into another.
She proves to be good at hiding, which keeps her from getting killed.
We get to the Elven village to discover it's under attack. Orcs. We enter the scene and proceed to kick butt.
Her family isn't there at the moment, but in any case she isn't welcome there. Turns out she's an Assassin, and was banished. (Note that this is my character's home village, and he's been asked not to return either.)
So they thank us for our help, and then politely ask that we leave as soon as possible.
To make a long story short, we're stuck with her. Any attempt we make to lose her will result in her catching up, somehow, smiling, and pretending nothing happened.
I've seen this ploy before, from more than a few DMs, and the symptoms are clear and unmistakeable. She has an Amulet of Proof Against Detection and Location, which is why no magic was detected. And she'll turn out to have whatever skills or feats she needs to be able to stick with us, no matter what we do.
Do your DMs ever pull this subtle-as-a-sledgehammer stunt?
