D&D 5E "I Forgot I Had It"

[iserith]

In tonight's session, the party pushed through the remaining distance in their boat to some submerged ruins about 18 hours from town, desperate to recover a magic item said to be there before a dangerous cult gets their hands on it. At the upper level of the ruins, they did battle with some sporpses, waterlogged human bodies taken over by a rot flower's spores.

The druid killed the first of the sporpses in their midst and it exploded into a cloud of spores that covered the druid, the ranger, and the rune knight. The ranger failed the save and, as a result, he was badly diseased with only 18 hours to live (1d12 + Con score, rolled a 6). Nobody in the party had prepared lesser restoration. Long resting takes 24 hours in this game. This was bad, and they had recently lost the party's barbarian to a similar situation involving a vargouille's curse. (Ultimately, he chose to take his own life by chaining himself to a crate of sex toys and jumping into a lake, rather than succumb to the curse and endanger his friends.)

Now the players really had to think about what to do here, as the stakes were very high for the campaign. Does the ranger accept his fate and delve the submerged ruins to secure the magic item knowing this means his certain death? Or does the party turn around and go back to town, and hope they don't get killed along the way due to monsters and exhaustion, to get their friend cured by an ally at the church... only to potentially lose the magic item to the cult? They went back and forth on this for a while because we're near the end of the campaign, they have very limited time, and it would mean the player of the ranger would have a much lower level character with no time to train them up.

In the end, they came up with a plan: The wizard has a broom of flying, so he took the ranger with him and beelined it to town at the risk of exhaustion. Now the party was split up and, round trip, the wizard and ranger would not rejoin them for another 32 hours. And so began the random encounter checks. Wave after wave of swamp denizens came at the four party members on the boat while the wizard and ranger soared over any potential threats. They barely survived the onslaught, nearly losing their ship and their lives in the process. This entire situation took up the whole 4 hours of the session.

The wizard and the ranger flew back to join them. It was at that point the rune knight remembered something in his pocket: The heartstone of the Hag of Woe which they had captured in the same battle that led to the death of their barbarian friend.

The heartstone can cure all diseases. "I forgot I had it," the rune knight's player remarked. What an epic night with a perfect ending!

Have you ever forgotten you had something in your inventory that would have been clutch had you just remembered to use it?

 

[Maxperson]

The druid killed the first of the sporpses in their midst and it exploded into a cloud of spores that covered the druid, the ranger, and the rune knight. The ranger failed the save and, as a result, he was badly diseased with only 18 hours to live (1d12 + Con score, rolled a 6). Nobody in the party had prepared lesser restoration. Long resting takes 24 hours in this game. This was bad, and they had recently lost the party's barbarian to a similar situation involving a vargouille's curse. (Ultimately, he chose to take his own life by chaining himself to a crate of sex toys and jumping into a lake, rather than succumb to the curse and endanger his friends.)

You've said things about your game that have made me worry about if I would be good enough, but now I'm more scared of your game than I have ever been before.

The heartstone can cure all diseases. "I forgot I had it," the rune knight's player remarked. What an epic night with a perfect ending!

Have you ever forgotten you had something in your inventory that would have been clutch had you just remembered to use it?

While I can't remember specifically what, yes that has happened to me multiple times over the decades. A few times remembered after my PC died.

 

[Charlaquin]

Forgetting you had the perfect tool to get you out of a tough spot until after you’ve gone to great lengths dealing with the problem in other ways is a time-honored D&D tradition. Right up there with getting it in your head that some random pointless thing the DM mentioned must be important and wasting an hour or more trying to solve this nonexistent enigma.

 

[Citizen Mane]

(Ultimately, he chose to take his own life by chaining himself to a crate of sex toys and jumping into a lake, rather than succumb to the curse and endanger his friends.)

This is all well and good until the party needs that crate of sex toys later. Doomed to repeat the same mistakes, over and over.

 

[Seramus]

Right up there with getting it in your head that some random pointless thing the DM mentioned must be important and wasting an hour or more trying to solve this nonexistent enigma.

A painful lesson I've failed to learn over and over again. It cracked me up when I learned PF2 has a feat you can take that let's the DM just tell you when you're chasing a total red herring.

 

[delericho]

We use the "drinking a potion is a bonus action" house rule. We had a player realise his character had a potion of acid resistance immediately after an encounter with a black dragon - an encounter during which he basically had no bonus actions to take.

And there was then no other time in the remainder of the campaign in which it would have been particularly useful.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Scroll of Stone to Flesh... The damn wizard had been carrying it for about four character levels, and we'd left the petrified barbarian sitting in a dungeon two levels ago - the wizard's player was reading off his list of stuff to try to find something useful for our current situation, and the rest of us simultaneously went, "Wait... what???"

In another game, the DM rolled a Stone to Flesh scroll as part of our treasure for the fight where the stray lightning bolt that KFC'd the cockatrice also turned the thief-statue into a large pile of small gravel.

 

[Bitbrain]

My players forget their class features all the time, but NEVER forget what their magic items can do.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

The body of their fellow PC, killed by a bodak and stuffed in a bag of holding until they could get to someplace for a raise ... and forgotten for over 48 hours.

 

[toucanbuzz]

PC killed by a massive critical hit. Next session after a new character is introduced into the party, another player takes a deep breath and confesses.

He'd forgotten he had a Guardian Emblem (3/day use your reaction to turn crit into normal hit, Tasha's). If he'd used it, PC would've survived.

 

[nevin]

A painful lesson I've failed to learn over and over again. It cracked me up when I learned PF2 has a feat you can take that let's the DM just tell you when you're chasing a total red herring.

wow why not just let the DM play for them....LOL

 

[DND_Reborn]

Forgetting inventory items have never been an issue that I can recall, however forgetting class features or spells has happened.

 

[Charlaquin]

My players forget their class features all the time, but NEVER forget what their magic items can do.

Forgetting inventory items have never been an issue that I can recall, however forgetting class features or spells has happened.

Seems like your players could learn something from each other

 

[DND_Reborn]

Seems like your players could learn something from each other

IMO it is just 5E has PCs with too much "going on", especially when a player has a spellcaster.

It's gotten to the point where index cards and sticky notes have become essential role-playing tools for some of them.

 

[Umbran]

Heh.

Going into the original Ravenloft, I forgot I had a scroll of Wish until 5 party members were down...

 

[Burnside]

I once had an entire 4-member party forget that one of them was a werewolf, including the player who was the werewolf. And I did a bunch of stuff to try to remind them. They had several in-game days to deal with it, and a cleric who could have prepared Remove Curse during multiple long rests but just didn't. The full moon finally arrived and the player turned when they were all resting inside Leomund's Tiny Hut and she started eating them in their sleep.

 

[iserith]

I once had an entire 4-member party forget that one of them was a werewolf, including the player who was the werewolf. And I did a bunch of stuff to try to remind them. They had several in-game days to deal with it, and a cleric who could have prepared Remove Curse during multiple long rests but just didn't. The full moon finally arrived and the player turned when they were all resting inside Leomund's Tiny Hut and she started eating them in their sleep.

Maybe they were quietly hoping to gain all the benefits of being a lycanthrope without that one inconvenient downside of eating your friends.

 

[J.Quondam]

Maybe they were quietly hoping to gain all the benefits of being a lycanthrope without that one inconvenient downside of eating your friends.

As they say in the Old Country: "Never use sriracha-flavored healing ointment bought from a cackling night hag."

 

[Lanefan]

Once, the player of a captured PC in my game remembered she had a Dimension Door device just after the party had gone to great lengths to rescue her from her prison cell....

 

[James Gasik]

This happens to my groups all the time. I tend to plan encounters a few sessions in advance, and if I know they're going to want fire resistance, I make sure to drop a few potions or scrolls in their way long before said encounter.

My group, however, tends to do one of two things: sell it if you can, or forget it to even write it down in the first place.

And no matter how many times this happens, they still can't quite grasp what I'm doing (even when I explain it after the fact). Well except for my roommate, Matt, who deserves a thread of his own about times the DM forgets a player has something, lol....