Inventive ways to screw with your friends in D&D

[Guerrilla James]

https://www.facebook.com/maxplaylive/videos/576534102502607/

As a community based around a board game, I'm sure many of you play Dungeons and Dragons. What are some of the fun ways you've messed with your friends either as a DM or Player Character? Extra points if you can make me cringe.

[DoomYoshi]

Can you give an example that isn't a video? Or paraphrase the iconic moment in the video?

[Guerrilla James]

I'll tell of a different scenario. I was DMing for a game in which the party was in a necromancer's manner where he experimented behind an enchanted door that could only be opened by destroying three homunculus(-es? homunculusi?). The homunculus looks like a hairless bat which one of the PCs thought was cute. Now this same PC would always threaten and try to make intimidation checks on every NPC and quest giver he came across. So when I realized he liked the first homunculus, I played along. I described it with big eyes, ears that would fold back when he was shy, and how he'd occasionally harmlessly nibble on the PC's ear. They were fast friends and PC quickly became closer to his new pet than any of his other party members. Toward the end of the module they learned that glyphs were disappearing along with a homunculus dying. It became apparent that the only way forward was to kill his pet which the PC refused to do. He said he'd sooner die than surrender it to his team. Luckily it didn't come to that because the warlock had his imp turn invisible and assassinate the homunculus before a PvP fight broke out. The door opened and they had a boss to fight.

[macbone]

Well, I am of course always a perfect gentleman when I play or GM, but this is one thing our GM did to us once.

We were playing Alternity, a d20 sci-fi game from TSR. We had a crew of three, and we were exploring a crashed ship on a planet. We came up on the crash site and started searching the wreckage for survivors, or better still, loot, when suddenly someone started shooting at us. Our merc died almost instantly. I looked at my buddies and said, "We run!" Combat lasted maybe one more round, with both of our remaining characters dying almost instantly.

Our GM wanted to switch to an AD&D 2nd edition game, and decided to kill us with a cloaked Predator. We never saw it coming.

[KoolBak]

Pull one of these perhaps.

[tkr4lf]

Well, I am of course always a perfect gentleman when I play or GM, but this is one thing our GM did to us once.

We were playing Alternity, a d20 sci-fi game from TSR. We had a crew of three, and we were exploring a crashed ship on a planet. We came up on the crash site and started searching the wreckage for survivors, or better still, loot, when suddenly someone started shooting at us. Our merc died almost instantly. I looked at my buddies and said, "We run!" Combat lasted maybe one more round, with both of our remaining characters dying almost instantly.

Our GM wanted to switch to an AD&D 2nd edition game, and decided to kill us with a cloaked Predator. We never saw it coming.

Dude, I love your sig. That is so awesome.

Seems like maybe Thompson should have been the High Elf though.

[AndyDufresne]

You should all watch Critical Role live on Twitch on Thursdays or on replay a few days later on Geek and Sundry's website, if you don't already. Primer for story the happened before the first episode.

Also the Adventure Zone podcast is a nice silly D&D podcast, from some of the people who write for Polygon and their family.


--Andy

[IcePack]

Do you read KODT? It's a fun comic w lot of antics re gaming groups, the "nerds" and the like. Pretty funny if you like that sort of thing or played in the past

[Symmetry]

The one and only game of tabletop D&D I played, the DM brought a friend who was starting a new character (as I was), turned out he was a ported character from another RPG called Aberrant.

It was confusing, but basically it's a superhero game, and the character had broken reality. I've stuck with D&D on my computer since.

[tzor]

I first started playing D&D back in 1980. I soon became a DM. Those were fun times, in college, gaming with ROTC students. I really wasn't into screwing with the players; the game did enough of that to make everything interesting. We had a very flexible environment and allowed characters from other DM's to mix freely among the campaigns. We were also working on our own rule set, which never really got published. One of the interesting things from one of the other campaigns was a magic item that consisted of a number of combined magic items that made it look like a small X wing fighter (known as a Rune Broom). There was a monk from that campaign that wanted to get into my campaign. He had all of his teeth replaced with teeth of spell storing and had an M16 of "Sharpness." (On a natural roll of 20 one random limb would be disabled.) He eventually went on to become an Ice Devil. (Poor player never realized that Ice Demons have no teeth, so he lost all his teeth of spell storing.)

I then returned to playing in the 90's. The DM was using 2nd edition at the time and was doing a next generation on his previous campaigns (so that all the powerful NPC characters were former player characters). He was still using the old 1st edition method of random things that screwed you. My 8 intelligence dwarf once drank from a magic pool. A number of dice rolls later, including one that had a 50/50 chance for plus minus, he wound up with a 16 intelligence (if that roll had been minus, he would have been made permanently brain dead). By the way, ever since a drow wizard dropped a delayed blast fireball into a crowd of huddled human children, he has completely hated Drow (except for a half drow paladin who was his friend, but that is another story). (Seriously, he would have jumped on the delayed blast fireball if only his dwarven legs could get him there on time.)

By the way, when the rules state that dwarves have a certain percentage chance of not having magic items work for them, you don't jump into the portable hole and tell the dwarf to look after it. Fortunately they didn't die of suffocation before the elf cleric managed to get the non functioning portable hole working again.

Happiness is having armor of total invulnerability. Annoyance is realizing that you don't have the helmet to the suit.

[Symmetry]

For some reason, I suspect that a DM who has read a lot of Terry Pratchett might figure out how to undermine D&D tropes.