Amusing player anecdotes

[Eccles]

My players last night spent a lot of time and effort capturing two slaver/thieves from a dwarfhold they had just recently liberated.

Bringing these captives to the upper layers of the dwarfhold, they were confronted by a large number of vengeful, spear wielding dwarves who wanted to torture and kill at least one of the two captives.

(One was an alchemist, one was the guy who cooked for the thieves).

After some considerable discussion and roleplay, they decided to save the chef, as he was probably the more innocent of the two, and they made the decision (all credit to them) to forego the additional knowledge that questioning the alchemist could have given them.

They decided to rest, and question the chef in the morning, and so the mage says "I've got just the thing that'll hold him".

He threw their captive into a room, cast Evard's Black Tentacles, and closed the door.

5 seconds of screaming and tearing, and he opened the door again onto the charnel house he'd just created.

"Errr... Oops!"

 

[Tyris Harmon]

ROFLMAO!! That's just too funny.

 

[Morpheus]

The PCs are walking down the streets of Five Fingers (in actuality, Freeport), when a monkey steals the spyglass from the bard. Now, to set it up properly, you have to understand that the PCs were poor and didn't have much. The spyglass was about the most valuable thing they had.

The PCs gave chase across the rooftops where the fighter fell a couple times and got back up. They finally caught up to the monkeys after their two-headed dog (an Argus) ate one of the monkeys. It seems that a street performer named Mungo had trained his monkeys to steal from others and he would act the innocent saying that they were "Wonderful lil' beasts with a mind of their own".

After some serious roleplaying where the player of the bard was seriously getting ticked, he finally said," We're going to the docks to buy a bunch of monkeys and feed them to Fido (the dog). We're going to teach him to eat monkeys on sight."

All this, after the player said he had never gotten emotional over in-game events before...

 

[R.T.]

Last night, we were asked by local villagers to get rod of a bunch of orcs who had taken over a warehouse. Some of the orcs were on the roof, wielding bows, and some were inside (we had no idea how many and how strong).

Since our DM could play for only a few hours, we were trying to get things moving as fast as possible. One of our team members, a no-nonsense fighter/thief from Luskan got tired of planning our assault on the warehouse, so he just charged the nearest window, crashed through it, and impaled the orc behind it... only to find about 10 more inside, one of which was a barbarian. An orc barbarian killed our toughest fighter with one lucky crit only a few sessions ago, and Lemmy (the Luskanian) didn't feel like a repeat.

So the next round, he dashed back out the window, where our fighter/druid was waiting. Then the orcs ran outside and surrounded both, so now the druid dashed inside, again through that window, leaving Lemmy to face the orcs once more. Then, he cast entangle, after which he dove back through the window to help against the now immovable orcs.

All the while, we were standing on the roof after disposing of the archers, watching both characters dive in and out of the building non-stop.

[EDIT: bad spelling ]

 

[Halivar]

This sucked...

Two nights ago, my Ftr9/PlCh3 was wrapping up a campaign subplot where we tried to defeat a powerful Caliph who was using 2 captured Efreet and a Djinn to control a great city. As a diversion to our dungeon crawl, the good priests of Pelor launched a revolution from their temple. The revolution is, of course, doomed to fail without us freeing the Djinn and Efreet powering the Caliph's near omnipotence.

Now, we're getting ready to free the Djinn, who will give us a wish (the other two were used up, sez DM). We have one partial action to wish to stop the Efreet from destroying the temple.

I smash the Djinn's container, the Efreet are freed and run off to destroy the temple. The DM starts shaking the table violently and yells, "WHAT IS YOUR WISH?!?!?!"

In a panic, I exclaim, "PROTECT THE PALACE!" The palace. Where the Caliph lives. As in, NOT the temple.

We were teleported outside the city so we could see, in vivid detail (the DM was relishing this, and you could tell), the destruction of the temple of Pelor, and the subsequent crushing of the revolt. The Caliph's palace is now, thanks to me, impregnable.

To add insult to injury, the DM didn't penalize my XP rewards. (sigh)

 

[isoChron]

Uh, that "Dive through a window" thing is something I tried twice and failed twice...

First situation: Ranger and Halfling thief are surrounded in a small room with Suzail's City Guards. One window... Ranger grabs halfling and tries to throw him out of the window. Attack role ... 1 !
Halfling is being hurled at the wall beneath the window and slowly sinks down to the floor. (The Ranger escaped ... ).

Second Situation: Invisible female Bard is trapped in a tavern full of suspiciously Outlaws. They knew there was a invisble creature sneaking around ... Bard ducks behind the bar: "I try to charm the barkeeper" Poooof ! Visible ... oups ! Ok, door is blocked, try the window. 3 tumble checks later (20; 20; 20 !) The bard reached the window in a very glorious and professional way and tried to jump through it ... check ... rolled a 1 and hit the wall.

I never try to jump through a window ever again, no matter what character !

BYE

 

[Eccles]

The scene: The party is in a dungeon crawl. 5 people. A large crowd of baddies can be heard charging around the corner to attack them.

Front rank: Dwarven Barbarian, Fighter/Thief
Second Rank: Fire obsessed sorceror, Cleric
Third Rank: Wizard.

Wizard wins initiative.

Casts lightning bolt.

Kills most of party. Ignites Greek Fire the sorceror was carrying.

Kills rest of party.

Wizard flees.

 

[RangerWickett]

My home game is somewhat like Dragon Ball Z. The PCs injected themselves with magical serum that lets them fly at will, and most of them are strong fighters with some magical powers.

In one session, the PCs end up hiding out on a ship owned by the bad guys, waiting to see where the bad guys are going. They get there before midnight, and the ship leaves a little after midnight.

One of the players realizes that they're still low on spells and hp from the last day of fighting, but hey, it's a new day, so they should be getting all their spells back right now, right? This leads into a 5 minute discussion where the other players start referring to themselves as 'powering up' at the stroke of midnight. The conversation ends when three players at once start clenching their fists and shouting "AAAAAAARRGH!", like whenever one of the fighters charges up on Dragon Ball Z. So now we've decided that PCs regain their abilities exactly at midnight, in a brilliant yellow glow of energy.

That same adventure included the PC bard hurling a kusari gama, enhanced with a druidic Entangle spell, to entangle an entire field with chains. As he threw the kusari gama, the bard shouted, "Quake With Fear!" Only people who've seen Ronin Warriors will get that one.

 

[Byrons_Ghost]

About a year ago I ran an adaptation of an old 1st ed module, "Against the Cult of the Reptile God". Since the party was 10th-level (and mostly wizards), things had been bumped up substantially. All the snake/reptile references they'd found in the town housing the cult had led them to believe that the yuan-ti were involved (they weren't, and in fact didn't even exist in this setting- beware metagaming, kids!)

Anyway, they manage to track the cult's HQ to a certain Inn and go beneath it into the secret tunnels to see what's what. They find the temple to the "reptile god", with the usual altars, braziers, etc. The main room is also contains several snakes, because the cultists are into that sort of thing.

Assuming that these were the dreaded yuan-ti, the party immediately buffs themselves out and then peppers the room with offensive spells as their surprise action. The result was that they spent half their day's worth of spells doing nearly 100 points of damage to a few normal snakes, which promptly vaporized under all the multiple fireballs...

 

[Zappo]

I have made a thread with a similar theme and a different focus here.

You can find my player anecdote there.

DM's view anecdote? Well, recently the generally-evil PCs in one of my campaigns had been captured by an advance party of a large army. The army includes several Good-aligned dragons, a couple of which are with the soldiers, so getting away is going to be extremely dangerous.

Since I didn't want them to be caught yet, I had an ancient white dragon show up. There was a reason for it being there, but right then the only thing that mattered was that it was attacking the golds and throwing the soldiers into a panic. The PCs were thus given their chance for an easy escape as the military dealed with the wyrm.

They friggin' stayed there and attacked the white instead! Stuck in the "chromatic dragon == ph4t l00t" I guess. A remnant from previous editions, I'm afraid. Since 3E, it's mostly been "chromatic dragon == quick death" in reality.