This was with the AD&D rule books in the mid-80s, so rules were simpler and it was more off-the-cuff.
I had a dwarf fighter in the party, and we were in a dungeon at the end of a corridor in front of a door. I explained to the DM I wanted to run at and jump into the door, bashing it open, do a roll, and land on my feet with my axes in my hands. He told me I’d be successful with a natural 18 on a D20, and I rolled a 20. He described it really well, embellishing with how the door splintered and all; it was fantastic.
The room, however, was completely empty, which turned it into an epic tale we’d refer to the rest of the time we gamed together.
Playing a high level (19th) home brewed adventure. I’m playing a Dragonborn Twilight Domain Cleric, my wife is playing a Sea Elf Paladin Oath of Vengence. There are two other players in the party a Tortle Warlock/Bard and Triton Ranger.
The party runs across a large chamber absolutely filled with various monstrous insects and other nasties, with the latest BBEG at the other end of the chamber. In between are chasms, and other obstacles. Basically, the entire room was designed to wear us down before we get to the BBEG.
My wife’s Paladin has Gauntlets of Storm Giant Strength, so her strength is 29 AND she’s hasted. So my nearly 300 pound armored Dragonborn Cleric climbs onto her back and casts Spirit Guardians… at 9th level.
Then my wife runs as fast as she can. Her movement was 120 and she was able to leap over all the chasms in the way. I rolled for Spirit Guardians and damn near maxed out the damage and the DC was 22… There were THREE monsters left, besides the BBEG, and they were severely bloodied and easily dispatched by the other two characters, at range obviously. Also, the BBEG had to use one of its Legendary Resistances to save against Spirit Guardians, and with smart work from the Warlock/Bard and Ranger its next two LR’s got used up and we killed it in 3 turns.
Our DM was too impressed to be pissed.
Spirit Guardians has long been one of those spells that can be absolutely brutal in the hands of the right character. It’s gotten a bit more recognition since 5.5e turned it into an outright broken lawnmower, but it’s always been up there as a better spell.
Oooh I’ve done something similar with Ashardalon’s Stride. It’s incredibly satisfying.
A dragon has been attacking trains going into and out of a mining city. The party has been hired to deal with it. They planned on taking an empty train out of the city, hoping to lure the dragon into a fight. I was thinking it would be cool, an epic dragon fight on a train. “Hey, this is a mining town. They have explosives right? Can we borrow some?” Roll for persuasion. DC20 persuasion check, passed.
I don’t have the math on me anymore, but I spent a couple minutes working out how much damage the dragon would take based on how much blasting powder they had, and how close the dragon was before it ignited it, and it was just enough damage to bring the dragon down to like 20 HP
I realized later on that I forgot to convert pounds to kilograms, so it should have still had closer to half its health, but whatever. The idea of a dragon basically killing itself by accidentally blowing up a train car full of blasting powder is sick as hell
The question is, how did the mining town feel about the party cratering their lifeline in and out?
It’s a lot easier to fix a railroad than it is to remove a dragon.
Besides, the town provided the explosives after a charisma check, they had to know what they were going toward.
Gnome barbarian tied himself to the mast of an airship and jumped off to fight a blue dragon.
He was outdone by the cleric jumping on it’s snout and necrotic touch hugging its health down.
Capped by the rogue who saved themself from falling with an immovable rod and made a one handed shot with an enchanted blunderbuss for the kill shot as it was fleeing.
I think the most epic was when I was DMing my party at 5th level. They were trying to free some Yuan-Ti slaves from a large complex with a pyramid in the middle. After selling two of their party into slavery to get someone on the inside they rallies the Vanara (monkey folk) to help with their prison break by defeating a Yuan-Ti patrol to prove their worth. So they had some scouts (CR 1/2) backups along sides some commoners in the complex. So they had a tough fight. There was a deadly fight at the main entrance, a hard guarding the slaves and another hard inside with a full dungeon worth of reinforcements inside the temple. So doable if they could be to kept apart.
Before they started their prison break they wanted a big entrance. So they stole a triceratops egg to get them as their distraction. So the barbarian is rushing towards the entrance with these beasts while the wizard and artificer teleported in the gate to give the hard and ranger (inside as slaves armed with daggers) their main weapons. They got inside to arm the party and few of their slaves. The dinosaur and barbarian in front of them hit the front gate causing chaos. At the same time the slaves with the rest of the party turned on the hard encounter of Yuan-Ti guarding them. During this time the bard cast major image of a dragon to draw some fire, while the blade singer and the artificer are killing the melee crew around the fleeing ex-slaves.
The barbarian is taking hits while running towards the party. The dinosaur made some good distractions if the front guards but the reinforcements were coming around to attack the party and the temple alarm was being raised. I figured they would turn tail and run because it was looking bad.
But then the spell that turned the tide was cast. The bard cast Plant Growth. The entire massive battlefield became 4x movement to get through. The reinforcements which were 1 turn away now became 4 turns away if they dashed every round. The bard made a path for the barbarian to catch up to the party while everyone enemy was either dashing to get nowhere fast or barely taking pot shots with their weak ranged. The tide flipped and the Yuan-Ti tried unsuccessfully to retreat back inside before the ranged attacks rained now.
The entire battle took like 20 rounds over 3 play sessions. It was an epic fight all around
During Lost Mines of Phandalver we’ve entered an orc cave and seen an ogre among them. Since we knew ogres aren’t that intelligent and we all had some form of telepathy (no darkvision though), we’ve decided to convince him that he’s a champion of Kelemvor (my paladin’s god).
Our sorcerer cast prestidigitation to get their attention, and our fighter used her telepathy to tell the ogre “listen to the short guy in heavy armor that will come here in a minute”,roll deception… Nat 20.
A fight with orcs later, I’ve explained the basics of my religion to the ogre and renamed him Shrek. Now he’s running a church in Conyberry.
I was running Curse of Strahd, and my players managed to kill the Roc of Mt. Ghakis without even directly interacting with it.
This was actually on the heels of a major boss encounter where I ran a certain coven of hags as a (https://www.reddit.com/r/monsteraday/comments/90jss4/day_365_hag_covenbiest/)[covenbiest] out for revenge. When the party defeated them before, they decided they wanted to eat part of the hags as revenge, so they cut off some fingers, and each had one. I rolled some force damage (3d8) and on my (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7WbOcl0Q_ZvR21BcUZFMXlMSWc/view?usp=drivesdk&resourcekey=0-pCVKv7KV3DIEnS6sozkX1w)[d10,000 wild magic table] to determine what happened. Some laughes were had but nothing major. Cut to my party of 3 + an NPC half dead on the slopes of Mt. Ghakis, desperately trying to Tiny Hunt through a long rest in the blistering whiteout conditions of Mt. Ghakis with the covenbiest laying just outside, their and the party’s blood everywhere. Happened to roll the Roc on the random encounter table and figured it’d be very interested in the scent of possible fresh carrion near its nest.
It landed. Immediately, I thought, “Well, its not stupid, it won’t eat the vile-smelling unholy boss monster laying here” and said so. Party wanted to roll for it. I probably said something like “Ugh, fine,” and that it probably wasn’t hungry because there’s only a 10% chance it had an unsuccessful hunt. We roll the d100, fuckin’ 98. Fuck.
So I guesstimate how many d8s of damage to roll and the party run out and bum-rush the thing to make sure it’s dead. Obviously the bird did not survive.
DM here. Had a classic dungeon crawl going and the party came against some Kuo-Toa. The Kuo-Toa rolled really poorly against the bards major illusion, so now the party are the mouthpieces of the Kuo-Toa god Blibdoolpoolp.
I once played a warlock with a kraken for a patron.
My character had been a sailor, shipwrecked in a storm, saved by the kraken in exchange for my service.
I washed up on an island full of kuo toa. Started up a little cargo cult to direct their worship towards the kraken, so that he could ascend to full godhood with the help of the psychic energy bullshit.
Of course things went a bit sideways, the kuo toa kind of fixated on me a little bit since I was the one sitting on a throne in front of them and not the kraken itself.
I also kind of figured that whatever the kraken wanted with godhood was probably bad for the world in general.
So I ran the fuck away from that island before the start of the campaign.
And so I constantly had a bunch of koa toa trying to track me down to drag me back to the island, or maybe to eat me, kind of hard to say. The kraken felt he had invested too much time and energy with me to just let me go so he kept pointing the little fish monsters in my direction to try to get me back on track with his plans.
Sometimes when they showed up I could leverage my position as the object of their worship to bend them to my will. Other times not so much.
I guess I can start.
We double crossed an incredibly powerful wizard in Out of the Abyss. DM did not expect it at all.
Full Spoilers for Out of the Abyss, which was by and large a not super great adventure, just because the whole first half of the plot was a survival sandbox and then the second half was really interesting but didn’t feel super fun to do a bunch of fetch quests.
Tap for spoiler
Essentially there is a drow wizard who hates others of his kind.
He wants the players to use his plot warping ritual spell, which you collect the missing components for, to summon the Abyssal Demon Princes all to Menzobarrazen. The plan was to let them rampage and destroy themselves while we then went and fought them after the killed each other.
From what I recall there is a magical mcguffin that we had to stash at the top of a tower. The archmage could track the location of this and knew if we did or did not leave it in this location.
About 5 out of game months prior to this, my Sorcadin had picked up Ritual Caster Wizard in an effort to transcribe a BUNCH of spells from like 3 spell books we’ve picked up over the course of the campaign. This was to get stuff like Leomund’s Tiny Hut, Find Familiar, Phantom Steed, and pretty much every ritual wizard spell that existed back in 2015.
One of these spells included Drawminji’s Instant Summons.
So we left the item in the tower, I cast Drawminji’s instant summons and set it as the target (because I also spent downtime finding the expensive 259g Sapphire needed as the component for the spell), and we faffed off to an abandoned myconoid grove to complete the ritual and before completed, summon the ritual item there.
We saved countless drow lives and they will literally never know.
why limit to dNd?
For a few reasons I determined. But feel free to ask it for other TTRPGs.
I’m currently playing in a DnD 5e campaign and wanted to hear and get inspired by others’ wit, charm, and shenanigans.
I honestly can’t remember any specifically because been playing ones for years but remember joking around and singing kumbaya at one because the rolls went our way.
Feel free to X-post on [email protected]
