Irresponsible use of magic and other WMDs

[TheYeti1775]

Tactics. It took many a group time to learn positioning tactics to allow the mages to be the most effective in their spells..

I played a mage one time whose first words of casting were "DUCK".
But then there was the case of the fighter who prepped for it and asked for the fireballs to be centered on him. Well at least until that Rod of Maximize came about.

We did have a thief one time in 2E set fire to the docks because he was bored and started playing pyro game (near some lamp oil drums).

 

[SnowleopardVK]

In my first group our sorcerer tended to cast spells/throw alchemical splash weapons regardless of whether his teammates were present or not. In fact in some cases he seemed to be deliberately aiming for us:

"You know if you target your fireball here, you'll catch the zombies at the edge of it, and miss us"

"No, I want them to be right at the centre of the explosion! I cast fireball at [spot in the middle of the crowd of zombies, and right beside his teammates]."

We were all rather happy when his character died. We forced him to make his next one a bit more caring about the well-being of his allies.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

I have been the player of that irresponsible explosives user (was in a Star Wars game). A very common thing for me to say regarding my character's actions for the round was, "tick tick, BOOM!"

The character was a starship engineer who had been fired for integrating concealed weapons into ostensibly civilian grade starships. As compensation, he stole the prototype and made off into the outer rim to start himself a mercenary/shipping company.

In one instance, I got the suspicion that a cloaked opponent was in the room, preparing to attack, so I tossed two thermal detonators into opposite corners of the room (the room which we were in, and which was not large enough to contain the blasts of two thermal detonators). On the bright side, I was correct, we were about to be ambushed by a trio of cloaked aggressors. On the other hand, I did blow us all up quite badly. Oops.

In another, we needed, for some reason that I don't recall, for local security forces not to know who was involved in our (criminal) operation. So, I hijacked a Medium Transport filled with pigs, and set it to crash into the security office. Molten bacon and starship parts were scattered for dozens of miles around the impact zone. And lots and lots of people were probably murdered. oops.

The final such instance was very amusing. My character was grappled by someone who had just taken down another of the characters. Right after I had set up my emergency suitcase explosive, but before I had been able to move to a safe (ish) distance. I detonated the thing anyway (since I had no hope of escaping the much more physically powerful opponent). It killed my character, the downed character, the grappling bad-guy (along with the remaining bad guys) and collapsed a good portion of the underground base that we were infiltrating at the time. Unfortunately, the rest of the party was stuck with the collapse in between them and the known route to safety. Oops.

 

[Evilhalfling]

1.The elven druid builds a tree house (2400 sq ft) then awakens 6 trees and teaches them to march while carrying it.
2. created so many Quaal's feather tree tokens that they are renamed after her. She then uses them to build a "Tree Stridable" highway, across a difficult border.

- Once out of player control the character went rapidly insane. The world still has stories about he adventurers that had to stop her tree house from destroying villages.

The wizard made a 30' tall permanent image of himself. He only did one, but it would have been funnier if he left them scattered around the world.

The wizard also teleported/flew above the "Island of the gods" which was surrounded by an eternal maelstorm, and invited them all to his wedding (to elvish druidess). They didn't come, some sent representatives: 2 rampaging dragons, a boat full of viking ratmen, the high priest of the god of hatred and assassins, an Evil Lord from a nearby country, and a rain of frogs.
ticking off multiple gods is pretty irresponsible use of fly & teleport.

- the Thief (multiclass) used disguise self, misdirection and invisibility to make the Ner'do'well brother of the local duke, the front man for his large thieves guild/spy ring. The noble was killed by a rival gang, but the thief continued to impersonate him.

We had a lot of fun in that campaign.

 

[malcolypse]

I remember playing in a game where a character took out a dragon with a bag of holding and a portable hole.

He has been banned from the tactic ever since.

In another game, I was playing a spell caster who had the idea of casting explosive runes every day and sticking the resulting piece of paper in a backpack. Then whenever something needed to go away, he planned on pulling out the backpack and throwing at the target. Upon impact he would have cast an area effect dispel magic on the bag, intentionally failing the required roll since the two ways you can set off explosive runes are to read them or to fail to dispel them.

6D6 damage multiplied by however many pieces of paper he could fit into a backpack plus telling the DM about it ahead of time equaled being told that if I ever tried it my character was a dead man.

 

[Hand of Evil]

His actions should have results within the game. Maybe the guild calls him up, maybe the law puts a bounty on him, maybe the other players kill the character.

you also need to sidebar him and let him know.

 

[S'mon]

the fighter, more so than anyone else, botches all of his saves, his equipment's saves and ends up barely alive, with a slagged sword, taking continuing burning damage from the slagged armor (plus a few other minor magic items and practically all of his mundane gear) that is now baking him for an additional 3 rounds.

You do that to NPCs too, right?

 

[steeldragons]

You do that to NPCs too, right?

I use d4 rounds of d6 additional damage...in that case it was 3 rounds.

But to answer your query, yes! Of course!

However that was many moons ago and the way I work gaining spells now is a bit more...I'll risk using the term, "traditional." IOW, you have to find/seek out the spells you add to your spell book. So not every 5th+ level mage is automatically running around with fireballs in the campaign world...anymore Not every mage guild tower has any/every spell in their cache of research materials...at least, not necessarily available for any/every member use.

--SD

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

In a home-brew ruleset game I played in for a few months, one PC was very short and would fly into a rage about that. (The character; the player was of average height.)

In my first session, said character stole a mecha. She had most of the skills for it, but not weapons. The mecha had guns (hard to use) and plasma flamethrowers (easy to use). She nonetheless intended to use the guns on enemies near our army. Eventually we convinced her to use the plasma. However, by that point, the enemy had been defeated, and fled into a building where our sniper was hiding out. He came within inches of being roasted to death, and probably would have been very upset about that if he hadn't lost the use of three body parts due to the counter-ambush/very messed up damage system.

One time said character jumped on a table and started dancing, but a fellow PC made a comment about her height (not even a very bad one), and she skewered that PC in the "upper leg". My character was a doctor and many bad jokes were made about the "stiffness" of the affected area.

Finally, the day I left the campaign. Our side had collected allies and we were going to attack the enemy. We had discovered a tactical AI which, while not taking sides, was giving us a "minimap" for both our troops and the enemy troops. The crazy PC took her mecha to a "parliamentary" meeting and left it outside. Someone inside insulted her for her height, and she stormed off toward that door. Fortunately, one of the NPCs wasn't entirely stupid, and picked her up and dropped her off at another door. Alas, that only delayed the inevitable. After the meeting, most of the allied representatives and soldiers they had brought went to the bar. My character was watching the AI's screen when all of a sudden our troops numbers fell drastically. The crazy PC had used her mecha's flamethrower on the bar, which was of course filled with kegs of alcohol. We lost our numerical superiority, our allies (who were justifiably enraged), our plan... that was my last session.
But that didn't come near how nuts she was

 

[S'mon]

I use d4 rounds of d6 additional damage...in that case it was 3 rounds.

But to answer your query, yes! Of course!

However that was many moons ago and the way I work gaining spells now is a bit more...I'll risk using the term, "traditional." IOW, you have to find/seek out the spells you add to your spell book. So not every 5th+ level mage is automatically running around with fireballs in the campaign world...anymore Not every mage guild tower has any/every spell in their cache of research materials...at least, not necessarily available for any/every member use.

--SD

Good stuff - I've been taking the traditional approach in my 1e AD&D campaign, the only time an M-U player gets a free choice spell is one common spell, on level up, while in an arcane research facility, IF they make their chance to know % and IF they haven't already maxed out their 'known spells' limit.

Edit: Also I'm keeping the massive destructive magics rare, most NPCs will have more or less random spells in their books.