honestly i love creative solutions! as someone whose favorite party role is face, my instinct is always to try and talk to people before a fight breaks out. saves spell slots and you get to talk to some cool NPCs/force the GM to do voices for a bunch of weird monsters, which is always a good time. in the same game as the hallway trap, there was a classic "i'll help you if you do something for me" scenario, when a cyclops who was renting a temple from some nagas wanted us to kill the nagas for going back on their contract. instead we just... talked to both groups and facilitated a meeting between the cyclops and the head naga. instead of doing the fight, we mediated a landlord-tenant dispute.
our party last night avoided fighting a house sized spider by 1)our sorcerer cast Banishment on the bigass spider so we only gotta deal with the medium ones 2) due to Omen's sorc origin, they can build what's been dubbed the probability fortress. Basically you only have a 25% chance of hitting omen *before* you even roll the d20 so holding onto Banishment for the entire duration of the fight worked fine 3) after killing the smol spiders and making off the big spider returned and tried to pursue us, Omen cast Impossible Angles, basically turning the ground the spider was on into an escher landscape 4) after we got some space between us and spider we reached a sheer cliff that we had to go down so Omen cast Animate Object on a bunch of spider webs because animate objects has a hover/flight speed basically giving us the worlds grossest magic carpet we did not fight that giant spider at all. We'll prolly have to on the way back, and there's likely an aboleth waiting for us too but NOT TODAY SPIDER SATAN
Bc it came up in the game my gf is dming: the dragon kink table I came up with a while ago, for when you players really wanna seduce their way put of every encounter. Sure, go ahead, if you're prepared for the consequences. Nsfw obv
Spoiler: Grousing about player problem I am 99% sure I saw someone in my d&d game cheat at a roll and I am extremely conflicted. On the one hand - pretty inconsequential roll, they things were going we would have succeeded one way or another, and it's not like anyone aside from said player was affected. On the other hand.... cheating bad? And it makes me think that this isn't the first time. Plus they're a friend out of game, and so I get to hear them keep talking about their great roll and how with expertise their total was over 30, and adding reactions that are almost but not actually what happened. They're only playing a few more games, so I've settled on not saying anything and keeping my discomfort to myself. I guess, at the end of the day, there's a reason that I tend to tell up Lawful characters. (This tracks with my consistently Chaotic Good-playing partner's reaction of "Eh, if they have more fun that way")
In a more amusing light, two excerpts from last game: After a party member dies from her max HP dropping to zero Cleric: I cast animate dead DM: You're a cleric of life! Why would you -- That's a no-no spell! Cleric: He panicked! He panicked and animate dead comes before revivify in his holy book's index. --- Everyone's character is now piloting a different, level 20 body DM: So tell us what [your dragonborn paladin] experiences as she comes to in this new body. Me: Well first she thinks "Ooh, golden armour, nice." Then she thinks "Wait, I have skin?" at which point she realizes she's wearing studded leather. "Oh no I'm flimsyyyyyy."
A completely different group of people whom we know nothing about, in media res. The bodies are for characters we designed, though, so it's not like anyone is unhappy with their new specs.
Our DM managed to exasperate the party by making combat too easy, and by too easy I mean such examples as the cleric rolling a 2 to attack, and his target tripped and died by falling on a rock. In character we finally communed with whatever power did this and demanded that it be "more fun." Now a zombie t-rex is charging the campsite. Also, cleric no longer has any magic because his god is still mad at him, so we have one (1) holy caster. My paladin is attempting to remedy this by poaching him for her god, who doesn't object to a bit of necromancy. (My sister's art makes me so happy.)
I run a West marches style campaign for some people from work and a couple other friends, meaning I just kind of present the world to them, throw in some options and let them decide what we're doing this week. Nobody wanted to pick something a couple weeks ago so I went with a suggestion I'm pretty sure was a joke from one of the players; putting on a benefits concert for the goblin village the party accidentally sent a rhino rampaging through a couple sessions ago. It was very different from the kinds of games I usually run but oh it was so much fun to see what they came up with, and they only burned down the stage and not the whole town so I consider that a success!
Tuesday's DnD session resulted in the party having to fight a troll. And the DM was making it roll an Int check, to see if it was smart enough to know that it absolutely should not pick up the Flaming Sphere my necromancer summoned to help fight it. Readers, the troll fucking ate the Flaming Sphere. Only for about a round, and then it puked it right back out (onto a party member). But it rolled a 0 on that Int check, and it ate the giant orb of fire. A couple rounds later, it failed its save again and tried to pick up the sphere and use it to bludgeon the party member who got puked on. It was unsuccessful only because the party member dodged. My necromancer was absolutely speechless and indignant, and ended up dealing the killing blow. (And then briefly raising a skeleton, as part of checking whether or not the troll was really dead.)
A question: this character grew up in the mob and became an explosives expert at a young age. Should she be a rogue or a wizard?
Is that possible at level 1? (I have participated in a bare handful of campaigns and am still pretty inexperienced.
What edition? 'Explosives' aren't really a thing you can focus on in 5e as far as I know. There may be an explosives class in 3.5, I can't think of any, but there definitely is in Pathfinder. There's alchemist's fire and some similar things, but they're very weak. Possibly something in Unearthed Arcana? Generally, I'd say you'd probably want to go Rogue, look for feats to enhance splash weapons, and Wizard is... not that. Maybe go Arcane Trickster and the unconventional route of taking only spells that could credibly be explosives?
Alchemist for pathfinder definitely works, esp if you've got a dm willing to homebrew up a wider variety of splodey flasks
For 5e, if you have the Eberron book, you could try either the alchemist or artillerist archetype from the artificer class.
