Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8772062" data-attributes="member: 6779196"><p>I’m not sure if this is what the OP meant, but what it makes me think of is the finale to the Wonderland arc of The Adventure Zone: Balance. At the end of a long and pretty downer adventure, one of the two villains of the arc manages to steal one of the PCs’ bodies, and the PC’s soul is shunted to the ethereal plane. There, he sees a super ominous portal thing full of evil black goo, and one of the party’s NPC allies being swallowed up by it. It’s very clear that some serious poo is going down, and the DM later confirmed in a postmortem of the campaign that he’d had this epic setpiece encounter planned where the party is split and fighting two different bosses on two different planes at once. But, as mentioned, it’s been a long and pretty downer adventure, and having one of the party’s body stolen must have been one unfortunate turn too many for the players and they were not having any of it. One of the other PCs casts magic jar so he can send his own soul to the ethereal plane and drag his friend back, which… isn’t really how magic jar works, but the TAZ cast had always been pretty fast and lose with the rules, and it was very, very narratively appropriate. The DM gives one final telegraph to the players that something big is going down in the ethereal plane, but it’s clear that the direction the players want to steer the story in is way more important than his plans, so he allows the spell to work (even though, again, it doesn’t actually work that way) and the body-snatched PC’s soul animates a mannequin (the room they were in was full of mannequins for reasons that make sense in context) and they fight the one boss as a full group to take back control of the PC’s body. It’s one of the most tense and exciting moments in the whole campaign, and everyone is left wondering what was going on in the ethereal that they turned away from. And that decision did have repercussions later in the campaign, but in the moment it was this very powerful thing where the players made a huge decision that changed the story in a way that I think could reasonably be described as “overturning the DM.”</p></blockquote><p></p>

Verification