Tell me about your character's shenanigans.

[Shades of Eternity]

I need motivation so let's do something fun.

Tell me about a time when your character got into silly hijinks.

If you are a G.M., tell me when your players got into silly hijinks.

 

[James Gasik]

So many years ago, we had to figure out a way into a noble's mansion. We believed he was hosting a cult, and they were going to sacrifice a kidnapped child.

The security was pretty hefty, and if we started a fight, the cultists might flee or kill the child sooner.

So my Bard was like "we need a distraction." I turned to our Goliath Barbarian, and told him to strip naked and run past the guards saying "you can't catch me!".

The Barbarian player immediately says, "Yes, I'll do that!"

The DM looked at us in abject horror. "You...you aren't serious?!"

He didn't even make us roll dice, he just let us into the mansion unopposed.

 

[payn]

My players were navigating their way to the top of the castle tower of an eccentric noble who needed their help. The two towers of the castle were built into a mountain and separated by a raging river. A few rope bridges connected them. After crossing one said rope bridge the PCs encountered a store room. It had many old relics including a sarcophagus. So, of course they opened it.

At their level a mummy was certainly an extreme challenge. The players immediately regretted their decision to not let sleeping mummies lie. The bard was a dirge sub-class so he told everyone to back off and he would charm the mummy. The mummy ended up failing its will save (a very lucky roll for the players). So, the mummy was like, "Sup? How do I get back to my hometown?" The PCs pointed across the rope bridge. As the mummy got half way across they frantically began hacking at the ropes on their side. Thus, dropping the mummy into the raging river below. This left the mummy pissed off, of course, and would play a part later in the campaign...

Same castle climbing the PCs found a guards rest house and decided to sleep for the night. One of the hammocks ended up being a mimic that got loose from the noble's laboratory. The elf sorc developed PTSD after that exciting episode. Whenever the party came across a hammock the rest of the campaign, they drew daggers and slashed it to ribbons lol.

 

[R_J_K75]

Me and two friends of mine decided to play a 2E AD&D Planescape pick-up game. Person DMing said roll up whatever you want just dont tell each other. I rolled up a CE wizard, other player rolled up a LG Paladin. Game starts and immediately we're in a two-person boat going down the River Styx, with 2 paddles, slowly drifting towards whirlpool/vortex. We two players start roleplaying/bickering back and forth on what to do. As we approached closer to doom I threw the two oars into the water. We died by planar whirlpool/vortex after 15 minutes of playing. we all laughed at how things roleplayed out as it was all pretty random. I really wish I could remember more of the particulars of us roleplaying, but it was a long time ago.

 

[John Dallman]

We were in the Plane of Earth, where it is always night, in the DM's rather individual set of D&D planes, which may well have predated the first article on the subject in Dragon (edit: No, they didn't). We encountered the Lord of Fear, who maintains his domain by terrifying anyone who comes into it. He asked us what we were doing, and then did his terrifying laugh.

In a fine display of dice rolling, everyone saved, except for one person near the back, who was instantly tackled and de-feared. One party member took off his hat, revealing a propeller-beanie, which spun up and he took off (an odd item of Flying, but perfectly effective). Someone else changed sex, I have no idea why. A few other weird things were done in response to the laugh.

The Lord of Fear was severely taken aback, in fact boggled. He suggested he'd tell us the way to the place we needed to go if we'd just run away from him. Please?

 

[Fenris-77]

So, you have to ask yourself Are my shenanigans cheeky and fun? Or are my shenanigans cruel and tragic? Might they be EVIL shenanigans?

I'll show myself out.

 

[Richards]

In my previous 3.5 campaign, my son ran a gnome fighter named Binkadink Dundernoggin who had an ongoing prank he played on the other PCs/NPCs in our group. He'd use his innate prestidigitation spell-like ability to turn a random companion's hair some oddball color for an hour, and occasionally coupled that with his innate ghost sound spell-like ability to create the sound of fairy laughter. I, as the DM, was the only one who knew ahead of time what he was doing; he had the other players convinced for literally months they were being stalked by a group of invisible pixies.

Johnathan

 

[Richards]

In my son's previous 3.5 campaign, I ran a human fighter named Jace Syngaard who was wickedly racist against halflings. In the same campaign, my friend Vicki ran a halfling rogue named Orion Nightsky. After months of my PC constantly cutting down her PC with all kinds of snide remarks about halflings, Orion decided to (literally) cut me down to size by pickpocketing a potion of cure light wounds from my belt and secretly replacing it with a potion of reduce person. This was something Vicki had worked out with the DM, and he rolled to see if she could do it without my knowledge - and rolled high enough to succeed. (They did this when I wasn't present, so I had no clue there was anything going on.) And then they waited until Syngaard drank down one of his healing potions...and waited, and waited, because it was months in real time (in a weekly game) before the situation came up that Syngaard needed healing in mid-combat and was across the battlefield from the party healer. So I said I was drinking down a potion of cure light wounds and the DM asked me to roll percentile dice. (Syngaard had two such potions to start with and the DM randomly determined which one I grabbed from my belt.) Sure enough, it was the doctored one, so in the midst of a battle with a band of demon cultists, my son tells me, "Suddenly the world around you starts growing to twice its original size" and the entire table bursts out laughing - it turns out everyone had been in on the gag except me, who was just now learning my PC had been shrunken down to halfling size.

That particular shenanigan only made my PC hate Vicki's PC that much more - but out of game I congratulated Vicki for a revenge plan well thought out and expertly administered.

Johnathan

 

[Longspeak]

So, you have to ask yourself Are my shenanigans cheeky and fun? Or are my shenanigans cruel and tragic? Might they be EVIL shenanigans?

I'll show myself out.

And if the answer is YES, but you're the GM, then that's fine.

 

[Richards]

Years ago, my son ran a modified D&D 3.5 campaign patterned after the Skylanders console games for my nephew Harry as an introduction to RPGs. Harry ran a humanoid sheep named Baabby the Baabarian and I ran his sidekick, Sam Crow (a humanoid crow, naturally). Sam performed a number of shenanigans against the campaign enemy, an imprisoned Elder God called the "Devourer of Nightmares." The first thing I did was to shorten his title to only refer to him by his initials, DoN (which became "Don," "Donnie," or "Donnie-Boy" depending on my mood). Don was built rather like Cthulhu and had eyeballs on the ends of his tentacular fingertips and would occasionally extrude a finger-tentacle through a tiny portal to observe what we were doing; Sam had a tendency to "drop trou" and poop all over Don's eyeball tentacle whenever the opportunity arose.

Sam also had an irritating habit of claiming ancestry to a number of different birds, all on his mother's side. If he was chided for fleeing from battle, he'd claim, "It's not my fault - I'm half chicken on my mother's side." If anyone complained about him telling the same story over and over, he'd claim, "It's not my fault - I'm half-parrot on my mother's side." If he was outside in the winter without any winter gear he'd explain, "No problem - I'm half penguin on my mother's side." (His most ridiculous was when he claimed to be "half-roast-turkey-and-gravy" on his mother's side.) But in the final battle against Don, after Baabby cut him down with the Elemental Sword (the MacGuffin we'd spent all campaign powering up), as Don lay dying Sam carved out the Elder God's eye with his own short sword and started eating it like an apple in front of him, stating, "But I'm all crow on my father's side!"

Sam also picked up an animal companion in the form of a snail (named "Shelldon," naturally) that pretty much just sat immobile on Sam's left shoulder. Nonetheless, Sam insisted that Sheldon was fully trained, having mastered the commands to "stay," "play dead," and - most impressive of all - perform mathematical computations where the answer was always zero (wherein Shelldon communicated the answer by not answering at all).

Johnathan