Cursed Daggers

Elf Witch

First Post
I was just like a an opinion on something that happned in our game.

In our first session which was months ago we killed an assassin and I picked up his daggers. I first put them in my backpack. Several times I took them out and showed them to people to see if we could get them identified. We couldn't. I then moved them onto my bandolier of daggers. Later we were attacked by another assassin using the same style of daggers. I took these and put them in sheaths in my boots.

Months go by in game and we end up in a huge city and the rogue of the party offers to take them to a contact he has that knows a lot about assassin guilds so I take the ones out of my bandolier and hand them to the rogue who goes off and finds out about them.

When he comes back he says the daggers are cursed and that handling them is dangerous he then shows us his bare palm which now has blood coming from it he says the daggers stuck him.

Now our rogue does not wear gloves and I always do. So I take one of the daggers off my boot to look at it. The DM asks me of I am handling it by the hilt or the blade and I say the hilt. He says that all of a sudden I get stabbed by something that comes out of the hilt.

When I asked why it had never happened before he says that I never handled the daggers by the hilt. That he was waiting for me to do so. :confused:

Now this is what confuses me, I own knives and daggers in real life and I usually always handle them by the hilt. The only time I handle one by the blade is when I am handing one to another person. I can't figure how my character put one in the bandolier much less a boot sheath without handling the hilt.

Anyway I end up cursed. The rest of the party almost dies because of it and some of them are pissy over it.

They want to know why I choose to handle it even after the rogue said it was dangerous. I tried to explain that I thought my gloves were the reason I was protected because I assumed I had handled the hilt many times. I thought the gloves would protect me and if the daggers were cursed I wanted them off my body anyway. And the only way I knew of to get them off was to pull them out of the boot sheaths by their hilt.

But according to the DM and some of the players it was a stupid thing to do and it endangered the party and also according the DM since I had never said I was handling them by the hilt he assumed I was handling them by the blade.

I am a little bit ticked over this, for one reason I feel as if the dM was making a bad call personally I don't think he had planned the curse when we first found the daggers and just added it later, months later because he thought it was cool. And secondly I don't really think it was stupid to asume that leather gloves were a good way to get them off my body. We don't have a mage to mage hand them off. How else was I supposed to get them off?

Am I just not seeing their point of view and I am looking at it the wrong way? What would you have done differently to get the dagggers off or would you have assumed like me that leather gloves would have protected you?
 

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Here is how I would lay it out to the DM. Next session bring a dagger and a sheath to the game. Ask him to put the dagger into the sheath without touching the hilt. Then fasten the sheath to him and ask him to remove the dagger without touching the hilt. When he cannot do this, explain to him that you had put the daggers into and removed them from sheaths prior to this in game and that you had to handle them by the hilt to make that happen. He should overturn the curse at that point.
 

Elf Witch said:
But according to the DM and some of the players it was a stupid thing to do and it endangered the party and also according the DM since I had never said I was handling them by the hilt he assumed I was handling them by the blade.

I am a little bit ticked over this, for one reason I feel as if the dM was making a bad call personally I don't think he had planned the curse when we first found the daggers and just added it later, months later because he thought it was cool. And secondly I don't really think it was stupid to asume that leather gloves were a good way to get them off my body. We don't have a mage to mage hand them off. How else was I supposed to get them off?

Am I just not seeing their point of view and I am looking at it the wrong way?

No, you're seeing their POV. It just happens to be wrong and dumb. The default assumption for people handling daggers is that they handle it by the hilt, which can also be called ... well, the handle.

However, since calling them morons is probably not going to improve the situation, I second Drawmack's suggestion. I'm definitely not assuming it's going to make him change his rulings, since anyone capable of that ruling is capable of a lot of other dumb ones, but at least it should make it a lot more difficult for him to argue that his assumption is a clearly justifiable one.

What would you have done differently to get the dagggers off or would you have assumed like me that leather gloves would have protected you?

Probably not made the assumption about the gloves, but (as mentioned above) since I would figure handling the daggers via the hilt is the natural way to do so, I would have pointed that out and illustrated that.

As for getting them off me, I would go looking for a spellcaster as soon as I could, rather than trying to manually do so.
 

Drawmack said:
Here is how I would lay it out to the DM. Next session bring a dagger and a sheath to the game. Ask him to put the dagger into the sheath without touching the hilt. Then fasten the sheath to him and ask him to remove the dagger without touching the hilt. When he cannot do this, explain to him that you had put the daggers into and removed them from sheaths prior to this in game and that you had to handle them by the hilt to make that happen. He should overturn the curse at that point.


I think I will do this. even though the curse has been umdone. I spent close to two sessions out of it and tied up and missed an encounter that gave some nice XP. :(
 

IMHO, you were in the right.
This isn't the first time this DM has pulled funky stuff out of his ... er ... hat, is it?

Cheers, -- N
 

Wow, I hope that was a one-time brain blip by the DM.
Of course you handled it by the hilt before.
I second (third?) the call to show the DM with a real life demonstration.
 

Next session bring a dagger and a sheath to the game. Ask him to put the dagger into the sheath without touching the hilt. Then fasten the sheath to him and ask him to remove the dagger without touching the hilt.
This is gonna be fun...
 

I'm going to suggest that trying to prove who is right and wrong here may not be that constructive. If this is the biggest continuity problem you have to worry about, your DM is managing pretty well, and there is not much to be gained from hammering it home.
 

Umbran said:
I'm going to suggest that trying to prove who is right and wrong here may not be that constructive.

Umbran beat me to it here. I think you'll just cause an unpleasant confrontation unless you're very careful about this. If anything, show him when you guys aren't gaming and make your point gently, but explain that you do not expect any do-overs. (Do-overs are perhaps the biggest sin in rpgs, imho.)
 


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