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Message: <blockquote data-quote="werk" data-source="post: 2553488" data-attributes="member: 29663">I remembered this one because the fantasy weapons thread's discussion of mercury.  I was DM...this was a LONG time ago, so don't criticize the mechanics.I had some friends and we used to have a fairly large, good group of gaming friends, but they moved away to farmland BFE.  Several months after they moved, I packed up a couple friends from the group and went to visit them/play all night.  Once we got there we met a lot of younger people that they had met, since moving, who wanted to play too.  I said sure, no problem.So one newbie player says, with all conviction, that he wants to kill stuff.  I told him that would be fine, he can play a barbarian or fighter or something.  He rolls up a barbarian and we commence with the dungeon crawling.  The whole time he's reckless (like a good barbarian, but he wasn't roleplaying much IMO) and was always trying to grab the loot and force the party into disadvantagous postions.They make it to the end, beat the BBEG (i forget the details), and find four large chests made of different materials, each in a corner of a large square drawn on the floor of a small circular treasure room.SO the rogue went up to the first chest, made of gold (of course), and looked for traps/tried to open the chest.  He failed miserably and got flamed by the trap which melted the chest and golden contents...shiny puddle.  It was designed to do that.The rogue was then so low on HP that he was super skittish.  He checked for traps and attempted to open the second chest, made of dark wood.  He failed both and was pricked by a needle trap and passed out.  The party leader stepped up and bashed the chest, yielding a nice cache of druid items.  WOo hoO!The barbarian at this point is freakin' out.  He hasn't smashed anything in a while, the girly paladin just smashed something, and HE WANTS LOOT BAD!  He took out his great axe, went over to the chest made of stone, and bashed it.  He rolled exploding crits and reported that he did some ridiculous amount of damage to the chest.  I told him that that wasn't very good (smile=>frown), so roll a d100 to see how bad it is.  00.SO I explained that the stone chest was full of mercury.  He utterly destroyed the chest splashing mercury all over himself (and made the rest of the party roll saves).  Had the barbar roll a poison save, 1. He started to rant, that's not fair, you're out to get me, the other chests have treasure, blah blah blah.  I leaned over to the party leader and showed him my notes.Chest #2 - Stone - Full of mercury, designed so bashing will result in contact and possible poisoning/death.  Nothing else of value.  Anyone breathing near the chest must save vs poison.  Poison causes madness and if largely exposed (from doing more than 10HP damage to the chest) death.We all had a good laugh except the barbarian player who left.  That wasn't very cool, but we found it very funny.</blockquote>

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