Tell me about your best Monty Hall moment!

[Gomez]

With several threads about D&D nostalgia. It reminded me about a not often used description of a type of play. Monty Hall! For you whipper snappers who don't know what that means. Monty Hall was the host of a game show called Let's Make a Deal in the late 60's and 70's. The host, Monty Hall, would stroll through the audience asking for all sorts of crazy items. “I’ll pay $200 for a rubber band,” he might say. A rubber band-waving audience member would leap to his feet and Hall would quickly pay out the cash, with the entire audience counting out the bills in unison.

Then came decision time. “Would you like to keep that $200,” he would ask the rubber band trader, “or swap it for what’s behind the curtain?” Sometimes there was a car behind the curtain and other times a bucket of sand or something like that.

Now in the world of D&D at that time, if you ran a "Monty Hall" game it was all about treasure and power. I knew a player who ran his favorite character through a dungeon that was nothing but one room after another with a Red Dragon in each room. He would killed the dragon and rolled up it's treasure. He then repeated this over and over. Greed was king.

I remember having my mom drop me off at a local gaming store on a Saturday afternoon so I could play D&D. The game I got into was run by this kid who was the king of Monty Hall DM's. First off the main kingdom of the land was run by one of his own characters. His police force for the kingdom were Storm Giants. You catch my drift. I remember having my 3rd level fighter being giving an Arrow of Slaying by a NPC and after a bitter fight with some orcs we saw a giant headed our way. Well, I was thinking OMG we are toast. That giant will cream us. So I used the Arrow of Slaying and killed the Giant. Well it turned out the giant was a "Police Man" coming to save our bacon! LOL!

I would like to hear your brushes with Mr. Monty Hall!

 

[Crothian]

Second edition. I'm playing a Bard and we are in the underdark. The DM put in this room filled with treasure, like 20,000 star diamonds knowing we could not carry it all out. He was trying to see what the characters would drop to try to carry out treasure.

I had a ring of wishes he forgot about and wished the gems and myself back home. And he allowed it. I then argued that all the XP for finding the gold should go to me since I got it out (Love the XP for gold rules of the previous edition) and he couldn't think of a way not to say yes. So, lots of money, lots of level, and not a really good DM.

 

[DethStryke]

A friend of mine was the recipient of that treatment. He had a character by the end of it that was based off of Gambit (from X-Men of course), with special magical cards that were so powerful and wonky that with one attack he could kill any god from the Dieties & Demigods handbook (1st/2nd Edition). He ended up killing random gods in a plane to plane romp and took over multiple planes as his "domain". This was so long ago much of the specific detail is lost to my mind now though.

 

[Wombat]

OD&D (c. 1976)

Actually having the set of Let's Make A Deal in the dungeon. And the players were the "wacky, dressed up" contestants...

If they did well in the contest, they got to go to the next level of the dungeon; if not, they got one of the dummy prizes. One barbarian was grabbed by invisible arms, had all his posessions stripped away, and was re-dressed in the classic diapers-and-baby-bonnet. Although, to be fair, I did give him a +2 binky...

Ah, Faiyne's Dungeon... Will there ever be another like it?

 

[Voadam]

Paladium RPG.

There is an absurd chart of things you can sell at a magic shop, things like wizard's tongues, dragon's claws, etc. The absurdity is shown at sea serpent flesh which is something like 100 gp per pound.

We slew one on a sea voyage and sold the multi-ton corpse to a magic shop then bought almost artefact level weapons and armor for the whole party with every optional feature we could find that appealed to us.

We were something like fourth level. Our swords cast better fireballs than our fire elementalist did.

 

[Voadam]

Second edition. I'm playing a Bard and we are in the underdark. The DM put in this room filled with treasure, like 20,000 star diamonds knowing we could not carry it all out. He was trying to see what the characters would drop to try to carry out treasure.

I had a ring of wishes he forgot about and wished the gems and myself back home. And he allowed it. I then argued that all the XP for finding the gold should go to me since I got it out (Love the XP for gold rules of the previous edition) and he couldn't think of a way not to say yes. So, lots of money, lots of level, and not a really good DM.

There was a rule that you couldn't go up more than one level though at a time so extra xp would be lost.

 

[Piratecat]

2e. A 1st lvl magicuser drinks two potions at once, invisibility and heroism. The DM rolls on the miscibility chart: one potion becomes permanent. He rolls again: heroism. He ruled that the magic-user gains something like 4 levels all at once, permanently.

The rest of us were pissed.

 

[Ambrus]

In my second D&D game our hapless party was exploring a dungeon when we came upon a room with a large pool of water out of which sprung a vampiric ixitchatil (like I could spell that correctly). None of us, including the DM knew what an ixitchatil was and the adventure didn't include any descriptive info so we assumed it was pretty much like a regular vampire. I emptied a vial of holy water into the pool and then convinced my DM that the holy water would dilute into the larger pool and that all the water would then become holy water. In short order the vampire had melted away to nothing. Then the DM started randomly rolling on the DMG treasure tables but what he rolled at first was pretty lame, so with a little proding I managed to convince him that a Staff of the Magi was an appropriate bit of treasure for a vampiric ixitchatil. Did I mention this DM didn't have a backbone? And that's how my 4th level human wizard gained his Staff of the Magi.

Another time, with another DM, our party killed a great wyrn red dragon but our DM wasn't feeling well so he left us to random roll the monster's treasure by ourselves. After a few test rolls we decided that the dragon had been too cool to have any lowly magic items like potions or scrolls or +1 items so whenever we rolled any such item we'd simply reroll. My paladin ended up with an intelligent Holy Avenger +5, while my buddy got himself a Helm of Brilliance.

Another time, we fought and killed an evil god and Odin was so grateful that he gave me his spear 'Gungnir'. At the time I was quite upset because Gungnir was pretty lame and the other PCs got much cooler stuff. :\

I don't play in those kinds of Monty Hall games anymore, though remembering them still brings a smile to my face.

 

[AuraSeer]

Nitpick: The gametype you're talking about is usually called "Monty Haul"-- note the spelling. It's a pun, because you have so much treasure to haul away, get it?

My worst Monty Haul campaign was the one I was in at the beginning of 2e, and it almost defies description. We earned levels about every other session. By the time we passed level 3 each of us was carrying at least one artifact, and we just kept finding more. Our paladin had a Holy Avenger, plus both Vecna pieces. One guy wound up with the full set of Orbs of Dragonkind, so he rode around on the back of a great gold wyrm, with the Rod of Seven Parts as his jousting lance.

Like most games of its ilk, it quickly became boring because there was no challenge in it. We moved on to other systems and other DMs, without even bothering to save the character sheets.

 

[Mark Hope]

Back in 1e I ran a game where the PCs found the Throne of the Gods artifact (from the 1e DMG). They all took it in turns to use it, each sitting down and invoking ever more ridiculous wishes (because, of course, it could grant wishes). However, each use also came with a curse so as they wished and wished, they were also ageing by decades, turning into green slime, becoming evil demonspawn, losing ability points in the droves. In the end, one of the PCs wished that they had never found the damn thing and they left in something of a hurry. I was so, so grateful.