D&D chatter

Let's talk D&D! War stories, settings, characters, DIY D&D, whatever.

I've played a bit of 4e and I'm currently in a 3.5 game, but I've probably been more influenced overall by the probably-unhealthy amount of OSR blogs I consume (if anyone wants in-depth reviews/recommendations of various D&D blogs, just ask. i have a lot.)

I'm sloooowly putting together a SBURB D&D hack-thign. Might recruit some players here when I'm done. (also, if anyone wants to help me bounce around ideas, I would be so up for that)

Also, @jacktrash, what was that psionic rogue thing I think you mentioned Cavino having some stuff in? Because my current D&D party is looking at a potential TPK situation and if this campaign goes down the tubes on account of our horrible, horrible deaths I'm thinking of rolling up a Cavino-esque rogue.

Lastly, if anyone here is interested/has friends interested in D&D but doesn't want to blow a fuckload of money and time on rulebooks, may I point you in the direction of this lovely simple-D&D pictorial rulebook?
nb. I have not actually run this, so I can't directly vouch for it, but it looks pretty useable.

 

My D&D group are having our first meeting next weekend. Apart from the DM we're all complete newbies, and I don't know everyone, so I'm nervous, but it'll probably be fun

 

hahahahaha HELLO SPECIAL INTEREST

I mean, I'm presently playing in 2 campaigns (one 5e, one Pathfinder) and DMing another 3.5 game which has gone on for... approaching 3 years now. I've been looking into other systems because Gods know D&D has a load of problems both mechanical and stylistic... but something about four to six True Companions in a heroic-fantasy mash-up setting, solving problems with creatively applied violence and skill, keeps me coming back for more.

War stories maybe when I'm more awake...

 

Today, my 5e D&D group met for the first time in at least a month, and my character got killed.

He wasn't an honorable or heroic man, just an ex-bandit cook whose chief pleasures were drink, food, sex, and sleep. He should have run away after the assassin who stabbed him shrugged off the first few blows of his magic sword. But he was poisoned -- he could feel it eating away his insides -- and if the rest of his party died while he fled, no one could save him when he succumbed. Besides, the closest thing he had to a friend, partner in battle and in debauchery alike, was bleeding out on the cobblestones ten yards away.

He fell trying to reach her, the druid who'd saved his life twice but still wouldn't taste his cooking. The warlock arrived in time to hold the druid back from the brink of death and shred the assassin with a cloud of mystic daggers at point-blank range, but with their only healer unconscious, they couldn't save the cook from his many grievous wounds. I failed my third death save on the round the fight was won.

My character's last words, approximately, were "aaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMOTHERFUCKER!!"

They stuffed his body into a bag of holding for transport. He left behind a handful of expensive spices, a respectable amount of gold, an unreasonable number of edged weapons, a compact set of cook's utensils, a chunk of blue stone that could purify a small amount of water, an unidentifiable receipt of deposit, an illustrated book of tiefling smut called Daemonic Dalliances, and the enchanted greatsword with which he slew a wraith.

Not the worst death, nor the worst legacy, for such a man.

 

Oohhh, there's a D&D thread here, how did I miss it so far... I started when I was like 13 (got there through LARPing) and started immediately wreaking havoc. My first group played 3.5/Pathfinder only and I tell you, it gives so glorious OP opportunities. (Also one time I got a dinosaur.) Current group plays 2e usually. Have also tried 4e and Shadowrun.

My current group is atm having three campaigns: two 2e ones (second one happened only because first one is on a break) and my Pathfinder. 2e, as I have discovered, is glorious, because everybody dies all the time. Somebody else said that the whole point of 2e is to do cool stuff before you die. Which I agree. Threat is serious. One of my 2e characters, a dwarf fighter, recently narrowly avoided being killed but lost a hand. What do you do with a fighter with one less hand? They get drunk and try to kill a specific NPC (not one responsible for hand loss). Every session. And the Pathfinder I run... let's just say we have a talking squirrel. With most improbable DEX, which can currently fail only when he rolls a natural fail. It's a ninja and steals everything it comes across, including dead bodies, because I made the mistake of allowing him to buy a bag of holding. We also have a kitsune and a drow (who has a wendigo-ish eidolon) ... and a mute dwarf wearing a gnoll mask, who is not the sanest person in the company. "Why am I the zookeeper?" the dwarf wrote once exasperatedly. "You're not the zookeeper, you're a zoo exhibit," somebody else answered. (There was also a tengu at one point. Zoo indeed.)
In my defence, I thought it would be a one-time game, but squirrel's player got far too excited about his character and the rest of us just went with it.

Ain't nothing gonna beat the punch elemental, tho. My first ever party encountered a water elemental in a village. After some combat, the strike that took it down was a flurry of punches from my combobreaker ninja (ninja class didn't exist back then, so I multiclassed into Monk Rogue Assassin).
Summoner: "Oy, next time you wanna punch, just throw berries at it until it dies."
Druid: "... I think we killed their water supply :("

Or maybe that time I acquired an egg from giant dodos we encountered, and then carried that egg to a rebel camp intending to make a GIANT OMELETTE. I got drunk on rum and fell asleep next to the campfire. Woke up in a bed. Naked. Next to the summoner. My first words? "Where's my goddamn egg?"

(Then, some sessions later, they got tired of me mucking around and stealing their money, and sold me to slavery. Ah, good times. D&D truly is amazing.)

 

Unfortunately now that I've graduated high school I am left without a D&D group, as all of us bar two (me and one other) are going to different colleges - save for our DM, who is still in high school. Our group's modus operandi was to first attempt to solve a problem via seduction, and if that failed, murder. We also started up a cult to try and raise enough followers for our druid's albino bear to become a god. Can't wait to find a new D&D group in college.

 

Let me tell you about Steve the Drider.

So it's our third Pathfinder session or so with a new GM who is far too No Guys This Is How The Story Is Going To Go for our group of scatterbrained scoundrels (but that's another story) and we have to rescue the Cleric from the local Assassin's Guild.

My husband's Gunslinger, Ameanas, has already managed to thoroughly tick off the head of the Guild before we even knew they had the Cleric, so when we arrive, he's made to wait in the antechamber, which is naturally Impenetrably Dark because of course the Guild is headed by Drow. So while my Witch, the completely incompetent Paladin (yet another story), the Druid and both Rogues head deeper into the tunnels, he's left twiddling his thumbs in the dark.

Eventually, there's skittering, clicking footsteps above him, and a large glob of acidic slime splatters onto his shoulder. A perception roll reveals that, oh fuck, it's a Drider. (Cue my gleefully horrifying description of Driders, how they're made, what they look like, etc. because the GM left it at "Think 'spider centaur'" I mean really they have such gruesome lore come on, man.).

Ameanas, unsurprisingly, decides to brass-ball his way through this and rolls stupidly high for Bluff. "Sup. How's your night going?"

(GM begins frantically rolling various dice. More high rolls, all around.) "Quite well, thank you."

Turns out, that the Drider was blown away by the fact that this guy isn't afraid of him, was wildly more intelligent than the average Drider and they strike up a casual conversation. What's more:

GM: "Okay, evens he's pretty, odds he's fugly"
Nat20
Rogue1:"What's his Charisma?!"
Another 20
GM: "This is the Fabio of Driders."
Me: "Apparently the Priestesses creating him either really fucked up or did something really right."
​

By the end of the session, Steve will have fallen into desperate, creepy spider-love with Ameanas, and sacrificed himself to kill a Forest Giant that the GM summoned on the group because he was pissy about us fucking off to do side quests instead of following the story.

 

D&D YES! Definitely a special interest (or at least the custom setting my moirail and I have been building for 3+ years, name Vanovasi)

Right now I'm in 5 games in varying states of activity/hiatus:

Spoiler: probably excessively detailed list of games

1. one 3.5e printed module my sister is running just for the lulz (party nicknamed "Wacky Midget Brigade," contains a gnome whose favorite method of shopping is five-finger discount, a kender who's straight-up delusional, a halfling who is a devoted cleric of (essentially) Pippin Took, and a 5'even human who's damn proud she's the tallest)
2. one 3.5e epic Vanovasi game that's slowly limping its way towards a conclusion as the DM finds spoons to do the number crunching required for prepping a 26th-level combat
3. one 5e Vanovasi game I'm running that's meant to be me feeling out how 5e works with less handwaving than my moirail prefers to do
4. one 5e Vanovasi game my moirail is running that is fairly epic scope but slow burn
5. and one game in an entirely different setting run with a completely different friend group - Interface Zero, a cyberpunk setting in the Savage Worlds ruleset. We've graduated from taking the bus to do crime to being big damn terrorists to, within the same session, a) possibly uncovering a mistake in the first human genetic engineering experiments and b) convincing one of the party members from Doubting Thomas [psionics aren't real, Sev is just making shit up or pulling grenades out of somewhere or really touched in the head] to Delusional [SEV CAN DO LITERALLY ANYTHING]

During the session of tonight's game (my moirail's 5e Vanovasi game), we also demonstrated the power of falling in love with random NPCs. Partway through combat, the DM jokes that "Millitiaman #3 has hit a target every round - he's on his way to deserving a name." 2 rounds later, we're naming him Wes and promoting him to commander of the squad. A few rounds later, Millitiaman #4 who has almost as high of a hit count becomes Wes' younger brother Tobias. As combat progresses, and my paladin is whaling away at the final boss, with super-helpful ranged support from the cleric and the ranger, Wes and Tobias run out of mooks to keep mopping up and decide to charge the boss. Boss gets an attack of opportunity, drops Tobias in one hit, and Wes takes that moment to be inspired to his calling to paladinhood and smites the boss for almost max damage, finishing him. Our cleric rescues Tobias before he fails too many saves, and we all head back into town with my paladin convincing the party sage that it's better that she gently talk Wes through his new experience as an Adventurer than get lots of nosy research questions from a sage. ;-)

 

D&D thread o.o awesome. I have been a part of a lot of not very long lasting campaigns(due to schedule conflicts and such) I mostly play Pathfinder(I guess its the equivalent of D&D 3.5?) But, Here I shall talk about my favorite characters that I have run. In one campaign I was a chaotic-neutral witch who was at odds with a Paladin that was in our party. To be fair I was pretty snarky and sarcastic but he deserved it. So we were running through a mission and all of us were pretty hurt at this point so he uses his channel heal and uses it on everyone...except me. I did call him a massive cunt though lol. My character was painfully unaware of his uhhh forwardness.

Another fun character I had was a guitar wielding bard with a fancy for pop songs. And due to his very high charisma was very convincing with dashingly good looks that the ladies and gentlemen just couldnt stay away from.
he was a minor celebrity. Fortunately the concerts he had brought in a lot of money, unfortunately he was hit with misfortune often. The singing of the milkshakes did in fact bring the boys to the yard however. and his acoustic cover of let the bodies hit the floor gave the troops the moral boost they needed. Sadly the bard was a victim of an enemy insta-kill and was no more. Damn nat 20's. He'd been drinking. He'd been drinking...

And then there was the halfing rogue with a ridiculous amount of intimidation skills. The only orc in the group picked on him and he fought back with an intimidate roll. The nat 20 was strong with him and the orc backed down in fear of the ferociousness of the small creature. (Funny thing is I had to think in a totally different set of dimensions since I am 6ft tall and he was 2.5 feet tall. So making a few short jokes was key. The DM/GM used every opportunity to pick on my height and everyone thought I was a child until they had a knife in the leg. However after the fight with the orc the two became best friends.

And lets not forget m very first character, a half-elf with a knack for disguises. So on the very first campaign I ever played everyone including the GM were new to the game. So things got pretty ridiculous story-wise. It all started on a farm in the middle of God knows where. Two brothers, both half elves living with their father. one day a stranger came to their house and partook in their hospitality. But then told them of a mine where they could find wonderous treasures. So they were interested and followed him to said mine. However once they got to the deeper parts of the mine a t-rex appears and chases them back out and into combat. So I daze the monster with a spell and we are figuring out how to defeat the menace. It wasnt looking too good for us so I decided "Hey let me try something new." I rolled a disguise check and got a nat 20. I told the DM "I put a mask on my face made of leaves and put my arms up near my chest to emulate a trex. The DM rolls a save against it and apparently gets a nat 1. Not that I would have known. So , the disguise works however the trex thinks I am a lady trex and is attempting to try and court me. I swing at the monster and hit him in his lower regions. The GM grins and says "You hit him in his private parts, however it does very little damage and he is actually now aroused." SO here I am, a lady dinosaur being chased around by a huge dino who thinks I am pretty while the guy who was my brother and the mysterious wanderer laugh themselves silly. Eventually we killed the dinosaur but that...We never spoke of that particular campaign ever again xD

 

So last night our warlock got his lungs disappeared.

He tapped an item called "the Fork of Failure" against a silver orb that we have very little clue about in character, but the DM has dropped hints about being a hugely plot-relevant MacGuffin.

The good news is that he doesn't seem to need lungs anymore (my theory is that his blood is constantly being oxygenated by a miniature portal to the Elemental Plane of Air in his chest) so he can go underwater, at high altitudes, or in a Bag of Holding indefinitely. The bad news is that all his spells have verbal components. He's now a shitty archer with a couple of tiefling racial abilities until we can figure out how to break the curse.

My new character is VERY skeptical about the sanity of his new adventuring party -- but they have a relatively large number of magic items, they're clearly powerful, and they accepted his ridiculous operating expenses for the position of Wilderness Guide without blinking, which means they have more money than God would if all the gods weren't dead.

 

BDSM SKELETON
and that is all.

 

D&D... My love. Having just left college, my last campaign is probably on infinite hiatus, which breaks my heart because it was so much fun. We were playing 3.5, though I was borrowing a little from later editions with my Warlock build.

My character was Duna du Mork (or Duna Fayholden), who gave her name to a powerful Winter Fae in exchange for the power to escape from slavers. Ever since, her Faerie Godmother has used circumstance and Duna's own ambition to exchange bits of her humanity for various boons. Duna wants to reclaim her name from the faeries, but she's patient, and is not going to rush anything or show her hand.

The campaign itself is set in a world created by our DM, the long and short of it is that the King of the country we're in now has been assassinated, and his eldest children are fighting a civil war for the throne. However, our party is a part of the Peacekeepers, basically the guard, and we were there during the assassination. We rescued the King's bastard daughter, who was in possession of Northung, an executioner's mace that the rightful ruler of the kingdom wields. So we ran away with her and we are trying to figure out what to do when it turns out that Northung is sentient and talks, though thus far he's been painfully unhelpful.

My favorite thing about our game though is the character interactions. We've got four PCs, Duna the Warlock, Briga the druid and her Dire Weasel named Bitey, Justin who has both cleric and wizard levels and is our token lawful good character, and Sam Starkhaven our bard who plays a mean fiddle. Starkhaven and Duna have the best interactions. Mostly it started when Starkhaven failed utterly to disable a magical device with Duna, causing a massive explosion and the loss of an artifact, and has since evolved into belligerent sexual tension after Starkhaven came in as backup and saved Duna from a "stealing things date" when her date ended up trying to kill her.

 

Oooh DnD! I am currently in an online group with 3.5, with a few RP friends. The DM has a homebrewed world that he put a lot of thought into and it's great! I have a Neutral Good human cleric, Iska Tjarnet. She is the team mom and also hits things with a morningstar. The DM stopped me from taking a couple feats and stuff to break the game though. No Divine Metamagic + Persistent Spell + Divine Power for me :c. Although I did get the Divine Might feat.

It's a lot of fun, especially with four PCs constantly arguing and snarking and bickering at each other all the time! I want to make another character but alas I don't know of any other games.

 

WithAnH posting about the All Guardsmen Party in genchat reminded me of my other favorite campaign journals. http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?116836-The-SilverClawShift-Campaign-Archives

Two and a half (the third sadly unfinished) 3.5 games with dedicated, clever roleplayers and a dungeon master who might be the physical incarnation of Tzeentch. SilverClawShift has an unconventional storytelling style -- half immersive, half metagame -- that puts you on the edge of your seat about what's going to happen to the character while simultaneously making you chuckle at the chutzpah of the player or the cleverness of the DM. Great stories, memorable characters (PCs and NPCs both, thanks to excellent roleplaying), and real urgency and atmosphere that the average dungeon crawl just can't live up to. This is the kind of game I aspire to run.

 

The All Guardsmen Party is just the best. :D

 

Turns out my brother-in-law does some tabletop gaming! So while we're visiting family this weekend, I'm running a one-shot D&D 5e game today *muffled happy shouting in distance*

I have too much fun making last second props and maps :D

 

SO: ... So my Panda(ran) Anti-Paladin--who henceforth shall be known as "Rolly Polly--"
A: Eh, Rolly Polly doesn't really do it for me. I was fond of Punchy McBreaksface (his monk) Rolly Polly doesn't have the same ring. I'm picturing him in say, red enameled samurai armor, but like, have his huge snaggletooth fangs instead of the tusked demon mask. Helmet overshadowing creepy glowy eyes and shit.

SO: And then he CHOOSES to be Rolly Polly. Because it's unsettling.

And that's how my husband's joke Antipaladin became Roland pol Irumpus, Scion to the God of Blood and Clockwork

 

One of my friends named his cleric Eric, not thinking about the implications. We're 3 years into the game and one of the central protagonists of the world-shaking drama is Eric the Cleric.
(I also, briefly, played a druid called Davarfi MacBadhaz. That's the closest I've come to the glory of Roland pol Irumpus.)

 

One of my first times playing Pathfinder, I made a human STR-based barbarian to practice my optimizing skills. She was level 1 in a group of level 3s and 4s. The wizard used Enlarge Person on her. She did the most damage to the main enemy of the party. Got a nice crit and nearly one-shotted the big monster of the encounter. I was excited. I hadn't named her, though. The wizard's player had an idea, and I have a stupid sense of humor, so I gleefully embraced it.

She became Anne. Anne the barbarianne.