Misadventures in Roleplay: Crazy Ideas

[Chaser617]

Was just thinking, since it seemed a fair amount of us have played DnD before, was wanting to start a thread to see what some of the crazier ideas a party has come up with.

This one tops my list, a the party "invents" the first known guided seige weapon, by adding a jump seet and controls to the tail fins of a Balista, and using our Goblin Theif as its "Guidence Package."

[Capnregex]

One of my favorite characters in a campain, was the crazy dwarven chef.
His weapons of choice was a cleaver and a frypan.
We eventually had to have a mithril frypan made for him, since he'd break them so often over the heads of our opponents.

[Shyal_malkes]

my brother (or a friend of his I forget which) had a mage that had these egg thingies that orbited the head and increased one's abilities and stats (again, I forget which) the problem is that these things break easily so they aren't really combat worthy. so the character's owner had it so the character had a helmet that rested 'above' the head with the eggs attatched with slots for the eggs to rest in and protect them, the eggs held the helmet up and the helmet protected the eggs.

it'd be pretty odd to see some guy walking around with a floating metal halo and have him tell you that it gave him super buko destructive powers from the underworld or something... yeah that seemed funnier when I thought about it the first time.

[Selden]

I doubt any of it counts as crazy, but I have managed some creative solutions when my characters wound up soloing...

A rogue of mine was wandering through Market Square at night, trying to find a merchant a Find Information check had said would know something. As I approached the stall I'd been told the merchant spent most of his time in, an orc with a bloody battleaxe left it... and got a natural 20 on a check to spot me. I was dead meat if I fought and didn't want to try to run, since for all I knew the orc was a barbarian and could overtake me. So instead I bluffed along about how I was more of a burglar type, but any enemy of the town was a friend of mine and... hey, how about if I help you get out of town? That corpse'll probably be found fairly quickly, and a lone orc would be too suspicious to just go through the gate. Here's the deal; you act like you've drunk too much and I'm helping you stagger on home. That's a familiar enough sight that the guards won't think anything of it, so we can go right past that temple to the main road and you'll be out of here in no time.

Naturally, the temple guards got suspicious and (after a little miming from me) clouted the staggering oaf over the head. The merchant turned out to be beyond the local cleric's Resurrection capabilities, but at least his killer was in jail. He almost lived long enough to be questioned before one of his 'buddies' managed to kill him, too.

My cleric didn't have anywhere near as much skill, but he had been loaned a cloak that could cast Alter Self twice a day. The mission: to sneak into the manor of the Captain of the Guard in a town where my group had been framed for murdering the mayor, and to find proof that he was (among other things) the real murderer. We'd managed to get into the house by having the elf rogue pick the lock on a basement door and had found all sorts of evidence... including several members of the town council and the mayor. Getting back out without alerting anybody was going to be even more difficult, so I used the cloak to make myself look like some random member of the guard and opened the only outside door we could reach (stupid internal patrols) to see if we could sneak out that way. There was a guard stationed there who wanted to know why I was opening that locked door, so I told him it had been unlocked and asked if he or any of the exterior guards had seen anything. When he was off asking them, everybody else ran for it-but since I was supposed to be waiting for the report, I couldn't leave without it being suspicious enough for them to search the house.

What I did, after the all clear report, was wait near the house's main corridor and grab the lone guard on that patrol as he passed the door. A couple of headbutts put him out like a light, and he was left on a pile of dirty laundry to sleep it off while I used the cloak to make myself resemble him-with a nasty looking bruise on my forehead that looked like I'd rammed into a hard object with it. I walked right out the front door, pleading dizziness after I'd tripped and hit my head against the wall. I really should've hit that guard a couple more times to make sure he stayed out, though... he's probably the reason the captain of the guard had already fled when we tried to arrest him.

Also crazy, but considerably less effective, was the elf rogue's decision to find a back door to an evil temple and sneak in so he could attack everybody who tried to flee through it. His AC was pitiful, he only had 5 hp because he'd managed to miss every significant fight so far and the first man to use the tunnel was (naturally) the head honcho. Level 3 cleric vs. level 1 rogue with poor constitution... not hard to figure out the result, right?

[MikeVanPelt]

Was just thinking, since it seemed a fair amount of us have played DnD before, was wanting to start a thread to see what some of the crazier ideas a party has come up with.

I haven't done much (one partial Dragon Quest campaign ages ago) but I've had interesting conversations with friends who've done quite a bit.

One of the more entertaining panels at an SF convention was Larry Niven talking about the D&D campaign he was in where he had some kind of magic user with an "expand/shrink" spell of some kind. So he asks the DM "What is conserved when I use this spell?" He had creative abuses of the rules for any possible DM answer to turn a simple archer into a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

My absolute favorite was one some friends of mine did -- Party comes to a big room, with this transparent wall separating them from where they want to go. Detect magic ... nope, no magic, it's just easily breakable glass. Detect poison... nope, no poison gas on the other side of the wall. No mechanisms, no traps, nothing. There's nothing on the other side of the wall at all.

Nothing.

As in hard, hard vacuum.

Another neat one I read somewhere was the Palladin Trap. You take a 16 ton slab of granite, and magically stick it to the ceiling. Annoying palladin comes crusading through, waving his Holy Avenging Sword with its Anti-Magic Field ... SPLAT!!

[RHJunior]

My favorite has always been the Giant Iron Door.
The players check the thing for magic, for traps, for poison, for magic traps, for magic poison--- everything they can think of. Nothing.
The Rogue goes up and picks the lock.
DM: okay, roll reflex to dodge the falling door.....

[Celidah the Bardess]

Recipe for a so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea:

1 chaotic evil, demonic, abbysal dragon (daughter of the evil dragon god)
1 Mirror of Opposite Alignment triggered by speaking the dragon's name
6 wacky adventurers
1 dragon disciple bard with high diplomacy and bluffing skills
1 halfling bard with Invisibility Sphere spell
1 tube of universal dissolvent

Stupidly trigger the mirror with your strongest people in front of it and almost get the party killed. Next, use the universal dissolvent to take the mirror off the wall. Carry mirror all the way to evil dragon's lair. Once in front of dragon's lair, use the Invisibility Sphere spell to hide the mirror and the people carrying it. Send dragon disciple bard into lair with the now-invisible mirror being carried directly behind him. Place dragon disciple bard directly in front of evil dragon, and have him bluff dragon into saying her own name. When Lawful Good version of dragon pops out of mirror and makes for the evil dragon, get the ever-lovin' daylights out of there.

Sit back and enjoy ensuing battle.

It would have worked splendidly if the guy who came up with the plan didn't blurt it out in front of the DM! Needless to say, we ended up dealing with a blind dragon who sensed presences instead.

Grr.

[Chaser617]

Imagine this group:

Paladin of the Holy Light who's hand&half sword is a great sword and armor could only be worn by and wielded by him because he was afreeking 7 foot tall mass of muscle that had the smarts and charisma to back up the muscles. (my character)

Goblin Theif/Tinkerer who had so little hit points that if the Paladin stepped on him, he would be close to dying, and the Paladin DID step on him several times because he had a penchant for running *BETWEEN* the Paladin's legs to get to the battle.

Half-Elf White Sourceress with a bit of a temper towards some people in the group, and a rather nasty scourching ray attack...(My wife's character).

A Kitsune Ranger who thought the Paladin was 'quite the pretty boy' and on several occasions made said paladin squirm.

Half-Elf Mage Fighter who had more ego than commen sense and thought he was Yeshu's gift to women.

Chaotic Neutral High Elf Wizard who had a bad drinking habit, and the bad habit of casting spells when he was drunk.

A Holy CLeric of the Light who was the Wizard's drinking buddy and most the time partner in crime.

The result?
Most days the Paladin's lay hands ability was used up by healing the GOblin after he was stepped on accidently by running under his legs.

The Kitsune hiting on everything with an /x/ chromosone and a pulse, save the fightermage and the goblin.

The white sourceress's blood pressure rising from the Kitsune's advances on her husband and the fightermage's advances on HER.

Three Bar Burned Down Minimum for the High Elf....

[Gabriel Mobius]

Okay, this should probably be left for RH to tell, but I can't help it.

Our party was running a rescue mission to a zoo for someone, I can't remember exactly who. Our party consisted of Honest, RH's character and the resident Rogue; June, our resident druid; Aramil, our pyromaniac Elven Hexblade; Rurik, the pirate dwarf, my character; and Caleb, a member of the Thug's Guild (more or less an NPC). While wandering around the zoo, we stumbled onto a mirror that, upon someone looking into it, would release a hostile doppelganger from it. This should be noted. As should the fact that Honest was shrinking cage doors the whole time with a Gauntlet of Shrinking.

We were attacked by the zookeeper, and sent on a trip to dreamland via some form of hallucination drug. When we woke up, Honest was in a cage, and the Zookeeper took off running. Honest, being the lovable raccoon that he is, started scheming. First, he went back to the cage with the mirror, slipped his hand under the sheet, and used his ring of prestidigitation to make the surface too dirty to look into. My character then grabbed the mirror and started walking with it.

June, meanwhile, was conversing with some bears, and offering them freedom if they helped her with the Zookeeper. Honest let them go, taking the shrunken cage doors with him. Now comes the fun bit.

We found the Zookeeper in his hut, packing to leave (for fear of us). My character set the mirror down a little bit aways from the door, so as to not get it knocked over, and Honest cleaned it. We then ducked around the building, and Honest set to work re-expanding the cage doors over the windows and exits to the hut, save the back window...

The execution was beautiful. The bears went in the back window, on June's prompting. Honest then expanded the last cage door over the window. A scuffle ensued inside, and the Zookeeper ran for the door. As he flung it open, his doppelganger leaped from the mirror and knocked him back into the hut, slamming the door behind him. We waited for a bit, then smashed the mirror and had June call the bears off. Honest walks in, stands on his legs, tells him to keep his rubby mitts to himself, and then leaves.

However, we weren't done. Rurik then knocked the zookeeper out and dragged him to an undead pirate captain that he knew, and shanghaied the zookeeper; also leaving behind a gift if the zookeeper gets too rowdy: a redneck tree kit.

Needless to say, he's still in service, and we haven't seen or heard of him since.

[Selden]

Once there was a Forgotten Realms character who had rolled a 17, two 16s, a 13, an 11 and a 9. He decided to put them in strength, constitution and dexterity, wisdom, intelligence and charisma, respectively, to make a finesse fighter. But he wanted to make something a little more interesting than the usual 'me bash things' fighter, so he burned a feat on Improved Unarmed Strike so he could take Improved Grapple and used his racial bonus feat to take Knifefighter, a regional feat that lets you attack with light weapons as normal in a grapple. His bonus feat at 2nd level was Two-Weapon Fighting, letting him use a pair of shortswords. His skill points were all put into Jump, Climb and Ride. In most fights he either fought like a basic ranger or tried to pin the greatest threat so he could more easily stick knives in the guy's chest, but when there was an enemy larger than medium size (or sometimes even Medium non-humanoids) it was time to really get into action. He'd usually try to get around behind the enemy, take a running jump to get as high on it as possible and use climb/grapple checks as appropriate to get himself into a comfortable position. Once there, he'd hang on for dear life while plunging his shortswords in, using ride checks whenever the opponent tried to throw him instead of using grapple checks to get him off. He once panicked a dragon enough that it accidently rammed its head into the cave wall trying to shake him off, but his finest moment was when he managed to lock his legs around an ogre's neck so he could stab it right in the top of the head with both blades.

This guy is actually made up, but you've got to admit it fits the theme.