D&D Urban Legends: I new this guy who...

[Torm]

Torm: Are you serious about the decapitated house pets thing? Because that's crazy, I would seriously harm someone who harmed one of my animals.

Yep. He was a scary guy. To tell the truth, other than the fact that he was the son of one of my dad's friends, I'm not sure now exactly how I got involved in that group. You may not believe me, but one of the guys in the group went kinda haywire for a couple of weeks and behaved as though he were his character everywhere - fortunately, I guess, he was a LG Ranger. He always acted a bit odd afterwards, too - less like he had stopped doing it, and more like he had learned to pretend to be who he really was.

I've gotten pretty good at it, too.

 

[kilamanjaro]

Whoops! First double post.

 

[kilamanjaro]

I once attended a seminar about the evils of pop culture and it included a brief segment about gaming. To my surprise the demons and devils in D&D didn't bother this group at all. The only two things that bothered them was the depiction of pagan gods as if they were real, and the fact that the thief was a chararcter class (because stealing is wrong).

 

[Cassander]

Could someone explain the Gazebo and Head of Vecna stories? I've never heard from them.

Head of Vecna:
http://www.hut.fi/~vesanto/link.fun/stupid.pcs.html

Gazebo:
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/Jul/gazebo.html

 

[Krieg]

.../snip/... and had to spend some time in one of those places where they send kids who shoot up the schools,.../snip/...

Umm...Prison?

 

[Saeviomagy]

I shouldn't talk however. I'm a pretty "rational" person but I'll "fire" a particular d20 after a lengthy run of bad luck and set it aside in favor of another die that I haven't been using.

Well, statistically speaking if a dice keeps coming up with a certain number it's either
a) Statistical clumping - this becomes less likely the more the dice does it
b) Your own memory - you remember those remarkable runs of bad rolls and forget the other numbers
c) The dice is actually weighted.

So you've probably got a slim chance that you do increase your odds, and an almost zero chance that you worsen them. So you're better off overall...

 

[shadow]

"Fatal Magic: the Gathering"
Source: Word of Mouth
Premise: I heard this one back in the day when M:tG was relatively new. It seemed that some people started linking M:tG to the occult. Anyway, the story went that some group of Magic players were really into the occult and used the game as some sort of bizarre ritual death match. Whenever a player was killed in the game he would be killed for real. One night, according to the story, ten players started playing the game and only two ended up alive before they were discovered. One player was killed by a fireball card, so the other players doused him with gasoline and burned him alive. (They were supposedly killed in a similar manner that they died in game.) This story was "proof" that Magic: the Gathering was evil. Without doubt this was the weirdest gaming urban legend that I ever heard.
Validity:Undetermined (Although I can't imagine this possibly being true!)

 

[DaveStebbins]

One of my old DM's took the 20-sider from his dice set (this is back in the days of the "low impact plastic" dice in the basic set) and rounded all the corners except those opposite the "20". He thought it would make the 20 come up more often. The joke was on him. He never rolled a 20 on that die again.

True story (because I did it).

It was the early '80s (maybe 1983 or 1984 I think), and I decided to try an experiment. This was back when a d20 just had the numbers 0 to 9 twice and you had to ink or crayon them to tell which ones were 1-10 and which were 11-20.

The fad at the time was to ink one entire side high and the other low, instead of mixing the numbers up. This could be done because each side had a set of 0-9, centered on the zero.

So I took one of my d20s and filed down the edges on the high numbers side. My hypothesis was that it would tend to roll past those edges and stick or end on the 'hard' normal edges, placing the low numbers down and the high numbers up.

Well, I confided what I had done to one of my friends, but not the DM. We played that evening and my friend and I were amazed at how excellently I rolled. Instead of rolling a single digit half the time, I was above ten at least three quarters of the night. All rolls were made in the open and everyone noticed how great I was rolling. I had effectively loaded the die and it worked great. No one except the one other guy who knew ever noticed anything funny about the die except how high it was rolling.

After the game was over, my buddy and I were convinced that I had made a cheating die. I 'fessed up to the DM and the other players and showed them what I had done. I then took an Xacto knife to the die and drilled a hole through it, so no one (me especially) would be tempted to use that die again.

As exciting as it was to spend the entire evening rolling great, I was never tempted to modify any of my other dice. The excitment was in the rolling and the 'nobody else knows' exclusive knowledge, but it made the game itself less fun.

-Dave
Dang, I had almost forgotten that story. I still have the die, though, in my dice bag.

 

[s/LaSH]

And brainiac scientists reckon light can exert force - which means it must have mass - which means it can't travel at the speed of light - which means... hang it, just roll the friggin' d20 will you?

Cheers, Al'Kelhar

Allow me to clarify.

Yes, everything at speed c has its mass infinitely increased. But photons are only encountered at the speed of light, because it's their own speed - they just don't exist at any slower speed. Why is this? Well, my reference tells me they have zero rest mass. But is there a difference between zero and infinitesimal? Technically, yes there is. It's weird and I don't really know what I'm talking about.

Basically, I (with my imperfect knowledge) reckon a photon has infinitesimal rest mass, so when it's multiplied by infinity, you get a finite number.

No, I have no legends to share. I just thought I'd enrich your minds with tainted knowledge.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Allow me to clarify.

Yes, everything at speed c has its mass infinitely increased. But photons are only encountered at the speed of light, because it's their own speed - they just don't exist at any slower speed. Why is this? Well, my reference tells me they have zero rest mass. But is there a difference between zero and infinitesimal? Technically, yes there is. It's weird and I don't really know what I'm talking about.

Basically, I (with my imperfect knowledge) reckon a photon has infinitesimal rest mass, so when it's multiplied by infinity, you get a finite number.

No, I have no legends to share. I just thought I'd enrich your minds with tainted knowledge.

Unfortunately for you, lightspeed is not infinity.

Actually I think that light has mass because it has energy, but I'm not entirely sure on the specifics of that.