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Some fights and scenarios are SO bad or SO brilliant we will likely remember them for the rest of our lives. What are some of your experiences?
My CE pyrokineticist was recently killed after rampaging across the countryside for several weeks, burning and pillaging as he went. The people had finally had it, and decided to do something about it--one wizard in particular--a wizard whose daughter had allegedly been blinded by one of my character's wildfires.
So what did he do? He lured my pyro into a dark cave. Determined to punish his attacker, my character pursued him down into the dark depths with murderous intent. Only too late did my character see the stone golem emerge from the wall behind, to collapse the shaft, cutting off all hope of his escape. The wizard laughed, welcomed my character to his tomb, before setting his stone soldier to new orders and teleporting away.
My character's fire burns hot enough that he could conceivably melt through solid stone walls, allowing an escape, given enough time. Time the golem was not interested in giving him, sadly. Instructed to keep my pyro from escaping and little else, my character simply ignored the would-be jailer and cast light so he could get to work on finding a way out.
The cave turned out to be an abandoned coal mine, long retired due to the dangerously flammable vapors within.
The moment the spell was cast, the resulting explosion burned away my character's skin, caused several more collapses, and burnt away all of the oxygen in the tomb, depriving my pyro of a fuel source for his fire.
It was a slow, agonizing demise I'm not like to forget.
I'm told the golem later delivered my character's body to his master for proof of death, then on to the people, where it was further mutilated by those that my character had terrorized.
What stories do you have to share?
That was awe-inspiringly cruel.
*Makes notes in Book of Cool Ideas and chuckles*
We were traveling down a straight sloped corridor and noticed a pit on the side. Then, a giant bolder rolls towards us. We dive into the pit. Turns out the bolder was an illusion and the kobolds were right behind it. If I hadn't botched my reflex save to dive into the pit, then I wouldn't have been able to stall for the rounds needed for everyone else to climb out. Screwing up my saving throw actually helped the party. Shocking isn't it?
We went to sleep in a field. The ninja kept watch. The same ninja who bought a nodachi and spent hours telling us how awesome it was and how big it was. Anyway, he's keeping watch and fails to pay any attention. So goblins sneak up on us. They initiate grapples with everyone on the ground sleeping including me. So the ninja says "Hold still. I got this" and attacks the goblin thats sitting on me with his nodachi.
I'll always remember the time that the GM got annoyed that we felt more inclined to hang out at the bar for days instead of questing that he started a bar fight with enemies that should have murdered us completely. I began the fight by one shooting one and the rangers critted the others.
As a GM, many years and edition ago, my PCs faced down the Lich they had been struggling with for months, in a large cave. He enrolled help, in the form of a well-known many-eyed sphere that is the IP of another company. Anyways, it was a complete clown show. When the Lich himself wasn't in the anti-magic eye (being useless), the PCs were taking shelter there from both enemies and raining arrows on the monsters.
Ravingdork, I am not sure it is ever a good idea to take a pyro into a cave or mine.
One of the interesting ideas I keep encountering was the bit of fridge logic that fire magic would be terrible in an enclosed space (such as a cave, mine, or labyrnth system) with poor ventillation. Because fire burns through oxygen.
I am not going to trust medieval miners to make proper air shafts at recommended intervals. Since I am fairly sure most nations use criminals for that sort of work, and that means there is even less guilt than a 19th century industrialist that thinks 'kids are best at repairing the machines with their tiny hands- no don't stop the machine, that would waste money'.
A creature used blink on itself, then proceeded to miss because of it on every attack except one. None of the party missed him. He dealt a grand total of 6 damage to the level 5 party.
And he was the final boss of the dungeon.
I made a character that had double the attack bonuses the rest of the party had, and minimum double everyone else average damage. And then I failed to roll anything above a 3 for 5 whole sessions.
In d20 Modern, we were told to deactivate a bomb by cutting the red wire first, then the blue wire. We were kind of distracted, so we tried cutting the blue wire first, rolled a Natural 1 on the untrained Demolitions check, so we accidentally cut the red wire!
In 2nd Edition, the ranger got a bunch of followers at level 9. One was Skraan, an axe & dagger dual wielder. After about 3 levels, there was finally a fight with followers, Skraan charged into battle, rolled TWO Natural 1s, and immediately fell on his face, had his axe cut off his beard, and his dagger hit him in the butt.
And hilarity, it ensued.
I once ran the PCs against a camp of goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, worgs, and a barghest boss. The PCs were so effective (even though they totally ignored the plan they spent 2 hours plotting--ugh!) that it ended with the barghest levitating into the sky and throwing thunderstones at the PCs.
Once upon a time, when my friends and I were just getting into tabletop RPG's, we were playing a 3.5 session, where our group needed to sneak into a town housing a blacksmith. This blacksmith was the maker of weapons and armor for a rival of ours, and we were set on killing him to demoralize said rival. The problem was - we weren't exactly welcome in this town, so we decided one of us should don a disguise, sneak into town, and lure him out of town into our ambush.
Charlie Brown, the Cleric entered the smith's shop and asked if he could get his helmet repaired. The smith said "Sure. Where is it...? The Cleric replied "Uh, outside town." The smith scratched his head and said "...why?" and the Cleric boldly stated "It was too heavy to carry."
We never let that player off on his own ever again.
Some great stories, but please add a few more "setups" and a few less "this happened to us" stories.
What memorable encounters and/or scenarios have your GM put you through (or you put your players through as GM) that turned out wonderfully or disastrously as a direct result of the setup?
Recently had one enemy absolutely destroyed by the party's Level 18 Arcanist, who used Time Stop to do the following:
1: Cast two Maximized Delayed Blast Fireballs and two regular Delayed Blast Fireballs all set to go off once the Time Stop wore off.
2: Cast Wall of Suppression, boosted to CL 22 with Potent Magic and a lucky roll on his wayfinder-slotted Orange Prism ioun stone, directly between the fireballs and the enemy.
3: Cast Crushing Hand.
4: Readies an action to counterspell and orders the hand to Bull Rush the enemy through the wall.
As Time Stop ends, the enemy realizes what's happening and attempts to activate their contingency, but the arcanist dispels it. The hand pushes them through the wall, and thanks to the boosted CL it's enough to dispel everything they had. The player finally turns around because cool guys don't look at explosions.
In another world this act likely caused him to ascend, becoming the God of Disrespect.
Cast two Maximized Delayed Blast Fireballs and two regular Delayed Blast Fireballs all set to go off once the Time Stop wore off.
How did he know when time stop was going to end? Did he just get a lucky guess?
In our campaign, advanced firearms have just been invented and only a few people know how to build them. They were invented by the mother of my dwarven alchemist. She's in hiding because lots of people want to kidnap her to learn her secrets.
The rogue wants to get her revolver enchanted and doesn't want to wait because our party enchanter has lots of jobs ahead of her. So she goes out and hears rumors of a smith that enchants guns. She actually heard the rumor from multiple sources. (all of them paid to steer business to this person)
The smith agrees to enchant the gun. When it's done, she returns to us. We examine the gun and find residue that it was used to scry on my mother. We also figure that the smith was now familiar with the gun from enchanting it and could scry on us.
We check with a member of the guard to find that the smith is an upstanding citizen who follows the laws to the letter. He's also known as "the devil's smith" because he's an Asmodean.
At this point, we've told somebody in the guard and thus can't simply break in and kill the smith. So with reluctance we smash the revolver and go on.
Hahaha! You guys gave secret weapons technology to an Asmodean? Ooh, that's not going to end well for the world.
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I mostly play Pathfinder Society, with the Paizo's published adventures. I like them in general, and there are a few true gems.
One of my favorite "go to" adventures to run if I'm GMing last minute is "Assault on the Kingdom of the Impossible". I don't consider this a spoiler, since it's in the opening mission briefing, but I'll put it in spoiler tags anyway, just in case someone doesn't want to read that.
Basically, bandits have ambushing caravans, but nobody knows where to find their base and their leader. So the PCs are given a magical tracking device and told to let the bandits steal it from them, then use it to track them back to their hideout. The hard part is that the bandits are so weak that any group pretending to fight them off has to be really careful not to actually kill them all before they can get away with the homing device.
I've run that adventure five times, and that first fight has been really amusing every single time.
A first level game, but one where the PCs were very well optimized for their roles. No one took long range though; they were focused on ranged touch, slings, and TONS of melee. Also so highly focused on combat that they didn't really think about their skills; no one took Swim despite being told there would be lots of wilderness exploration.
So:
PCs arrive at the edge of a 20' wide stream. Using excellent Perception, Survival and Knowledge skills they ID some Shriekers and take the fungus out from short distance. Now they are stymied... by running water.
The current mission is to cross the stream, venture into a ruin on an islet, and take out a bunch of kobolds. They can clearly see a "hunter's blind" made from loose boulders placed around a cave opening; they KNOW where the kobolds are hiding and guarding from but they don't see any other obvious approach.
After some fruitless long-range arrow fire by the party which resulted in them taking return fire from kobold shortbows which did some minor damage to them they decide to just throw caution to the wind and force their way through the stream.
What followed was a near TPK trying to swim 20'
I knew the kobolds would be hard because of their vantage point. I knew the water would add a wrinkle. I didn't realize until that moment that no one could hit the broad side of a barn from 60' or that Swim checks were going to be the near end of my new campaign.
For RD, here's the setup:
- An islet is surrounded by a 10' deep, 20' wide stream
- The stream is partially fed by a shallow falls that descends into the streambed as well as through other brooks emptying into it from other areas.
- The blind is a Small sized cave, 6' tall, 10' wide, and 3' deep blocked by small boulders forming a line in front of the opening. This provides the kobolds inside with Cover; because of the overhang not much light gets in making it Dim Light conditions inside as well
- Tactics: The kobolds were using a feat to help them Snipe at -10 instead of -20. Thanks to their Stealth skill of +9 and the 60 distance and finally just ruling a take 10 on each Stealth check as a time saver for me, each kobold would fire then hide with a DC 15 Perception check needed to spot them; otherwise they'd pop up the next round and fire on your Flat Footed.
PCs have to
- Cross the 20' stream
- To short range attack after the stream, take cover just on the beach
- To melee after the stream cross another 30' of beach
Their foes are:
- x2 kobold warrior 1
- 1 Kobold adept 3 who buffs/supports his archers or sends out his swooping lizard familiar to deliver Touch of Fatigue spells
We were playing the short module, The Warren of the Death Spider, by Rogue Genius Games as a side quest at 6th level. We created an advantageous setup for the final confrontation by accident, turned victory into disaster through overreaching, and turned disaster into a pyrrhic victory through heroic sacrifice.
That skylight hole was a wondrous stroke of luck. The giant mystic spider that occupied the temple lost most of its magical powers in sunlight. The rest of the party--elf rogue, half-elf wizard, gnome ranger, and gnome ranger/monk--came in the front door and attacked. It had DR 10 but we were armed with fire. We scared it enough that it climbed up to the ceiling for safety. But even there, the cleric, wearing the druid's handy haversack, hung from the skylight rope and threw flasks of alchemist's fire at it.
It risked direct sunlight to bite through the rope from which the cleric hung. The druid tried to trap it there by using a feather token to instantly grow a tree below the hole. The ceiling was 60 feet up and the tree was 60 feet tall, so the giant spider had no trouble pushing through the topmost twigs of the tree to another part of the ceiling. And the foliage blocked off the sunlight. The spider had its full powers back and turned invisible.
The cleric decided to burn down the tree. He knew that he would need several flasks of alchemist's fire, so he upturned the handy haversack to empty it in a single turn. Out fell 42 flasks of oil and alchemist's fire. The GM said that four cracked open and coated the pile in liquid fire.
We ran. The rogue, druid, and cleric escaped through the front door. The two gnomes were too far in and instead ran deeper into the temple to hide behind a statue. The spider invisibly moved into ambush position before the wizard could escape. Its attack of opporunity on the fleeing wizard would have killed him, but the player spent two hero points so that some of the damage knocked him out the door instead. The fighter decided to fight the spider.
The fuel-air bomb exploded in 42d6 damage! The spider was badly damaged, the fighter was barely on her feet, and the fighter's remaining oil flasks had ignited. The GM offered her a chance to drop the flasks for her last remaining hero point. Instead, the fighter spent that point to grab the spider and hang on as the oil burst into flame. Crystalline the dwarven fighter gave her life to destroy the avatar of the Death Spider God.
The gnomes ran to escape and took damage from wooden shrapnel as the overheated tree exploded. They escaped before the temple became an oven as the wood fragments burned. All treasure was incinerated. Later, the grateful nearby village buried Crystalline's melted armor, for her body had blown away as ash.
Afterwards, the druid tried to declare himself the new party leader to replace the fallen fighter. Instead, we kicked the druid and cleric out of our party and their players out of our group, the fighter's player switched to a druid, and we recruited an oracle and sorcerer.
Some great stories, but please add a few more "setups" and a few less "this happened to us" stories.
This would be a "this happened to us" story, except that we created both the good and the bad setups ourselves. It was hubris.
Cast two Maximized Delayed Blast Fireballs and two regular Delayed Blast Fireballs all set to go off once the Time Stop wore off.How did he know when time stop was going to end? Did he just get a lucky guess?
** spoiler omitted **
Greater Rod of Maximize.
Due to the very loose wording of Telepathy, one of my players managed to trick a Serpentfolk that he was one of them. Or, more specifically, that one of the other players was.
The group was stuck in a town, where a few Dragons who hated Serpentfolk figured out that some were hiding among the villagers, and weren't letting anyone leave until they rotted them out. The PCs decided to help, and once they had a pretty good idea who it was, one of the PCs (a Ratfolk) told another (a Human) to take out his backpack. The Ratfolk had a custom, minor magic item, which was a pipe. You needed to draw from it, and on the exhale, you could disguise your voice (via Vocal Alteration). Without explaining his plan to anyone (including the unwitting PC), the Ratfolk took his mutagen of Reduce Person, hopped into the Human's backpack, and told him to start talking to the supposed Serpentfolk. "I'll take care of the rest".
The PC went over to the supposed Serpentfolk and started chatting. Inside his backpack, the Ratfolk lit up his pipe, disguised his voice's pitch and dialect as a Serpentfolk's, and shouted "DANGER, RUN!". I had him roll Bluff, because I couldn't think of anything else, and he got mid-twenties on the check, so it was decided that this Serpentfolk was pretty sure that he was talking to a fellow Serpentfolk, who just urged him to run. And that's exactly what he did.
I just ran a total disaster in a PbP game. I wanted the first combat to be something different, so I decided on a variably long-ranged combat. The basic idea being that about 20 bandits, mostly warrior 1, a few fighter 2, and 2 4th level bosses were robbing the town grain stores for supplies to get them through the winter.
There are 3 major parallel streets in town. The robbery occurring on the central, main street. Action begins when a sergeant in the local guard stumbles into the robbery and makes a fighting retreat into the street where he sounds the alarm and is subsequently cut down.
The party, 8 2nd level PCs, is wandering into town, so they aren't together in one place to coordinate their actions at the beginning. The PCs started in random places from 500 to 1000 feet from the stores.
The bandits major goal is to get away with some food, but they have to finish loading while some of them arm themselves with bows and spears to cover the others.
The PC's were free to try what they would.
Other mistakes: A 40' x 1000' foot map was too much for me to do on line. So I had rules for randomly generated cover, climbing access, cross street location, rooftop movement. Position was only marked by which street you were on and your linear position along it. This made the opening of the combat rather vague.
Some things worked. The archer, monk and barbarian started pretty close. After a couple rounds, the archer had climbed to a nice rooftop position and did what archers do. The monk and barbarian were closing under more or less light arrow fire. Most of the others who started far away hopped into a horse-cart and drove up a side street so they didn't face ranged attacks.
But the 5 who started farther away took forever to reach any sort of combat range. 7 or 8 rounds. I think this was the biggest mistake. There was too much 'downtime' for them as they moved toward the fight.
The entire fight took about 12 rounds and the bandits were well-shredded at the end.
I'll try a long range fight again, but I won't separate the party by so much distance next time. I'll use large and small scale maps to track movement and give the players a better sense of environment.
Owner - Game Knight
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Oh man, I ran an entire campaign focused on cinematic and memorable moments.
My wife and I were discussing one of the encounters, happened years ago but still gets brought up from time to time.
The party had recently been stuck in a neighboring country to recruit mercenary forces to protect their homeland after a brutal civil war (that campaign had catapulted directly into this one, so we're talking 17th level characters). There was to be a sacred ceremony in the city they had taken residence in following uncovering a Yakuza plot, a vampiric cult, and repeated harassment by a Doppelganger they had come to know as 'faces', including framing, misdirection and all that good stuff. This was the opening of a new market square, the unveiling of a statue of the merchant prince celebrating an alliance with the surrounding orc tribes, and a general celebration for all--during an eclipse.
As the ceremony got underway there was some great exposition, a few speeches and a nice monologue from an unseen villain over it all. The ground shook and all Hell unleashed (literally) and I threw The Legion Devil encounter at them, backed up by an ranger optimized for sniping. The 8 Legion devils (dubbed Hell's 9) I believe were: 1 Ruby Knight Vindicator, 1 War Weaver, 1 Crusader, 1 Lion Totem Barbarian, 1 Lockdown Knight, 1 Chain Tripper (3.5), a debuff wizard and a Disciple of Dispater crit devil, all optimized for max synergy. Evil DM me chuckled inwardly "how will they get out of this pickle!" All-in-all the devils were a distraction for the real show, artifact robbery. A later mid-boss (Epic Redspawn Arcanist) for the campaign was watching the show from several hundred feet away, having cast a spell to make the eclipse more permanent, and was waiting to unleash his pet Half-Iron Golem Abyssal Drakes (the party had previously slain them, but left the bodies) should the PCs take to the skies. The party had anticipated something like this and had bribed a nearby Copper Wyrm to come to their aid on this day, so he did battle with the Abyssal Drakes overhead while the party prepared themselves.
Mobs of Vampire Spawn flooded forth from the city sewers as the sun was fully eclipsed. A reasonable low-damage swarm with a level drain thrown on.
The party wizard opened up with a banishment. Poof, half the encounter gone. The PC cleric threw up a defensive wall to keep the vamp mobs at bay for a moment. The remainder of the Legion Devils were mopped up by the party's own Barbarian and Shadow Sun Ninja. At this time the paladin of Bahamut decided to engage the Redspawn. He was immediately Detonated, after managing a lucky crit at range, which angered the entire party. With the Legion devils mostly beat and their allies taking care of the Spawn Mobs directed by one of the PCs (the nature cleric), the remainder of the party took to the sky for the Midboss, intercepted by a Vampire Blackguard mounted atop a Vampiric Dragon--his sword forged of soul-stealing metal. Concerned more with the Redspawn for the time being, the party Ninja hit him with a force-chain dimensional anchoring crossbow bolt and let the Barbarian winch it taught while he ran up the line to engage the flyer in melee. Unable to escape via teleportation or other means, he engaged the party to the best of his ability while the Wizard and her cohort combated the vampiric threat, throwing him against a called forth Elemental Monolith and enough positive energy to heal an army. With his ally nearly beaten, but the heist known to be a success, the Vampire Knight struck a final blow, slaying the wizard's cohort and absorbing her soul into his sword.
The campaign left off a little after that, with the party being summoned to the realm of the death god to learn what their foes had planned while simultaneously being offered and exchange of the cohorts soul for the body and gear of the Redspawn. But I have so many great stories of encounters that came before, I'd be happy to share when I have time again!
This doubles as a stupid player story. Back in 3.0 when you could polymorph stuff into anything, we had a GM who for various reasons would occasionally put in something way too tough for our low mid-level party. We were OOC aware of this but sometimes we tried to fight anyhow...
We wound up teleported into a cavern with a titan who started attacking us. There were several exits, and my Sorc won initiative (and had Fly up) so I cast a hail mary polymorph at it, shouted "Run" and took off down a passage.
So it rolls a 1 and polymorphs into a hand-sized slug (my default "baleful" at the time).
The next guy up uses his turn to walk up to it and *step on it*. GM ruled that this killed it. There were groans from the other players (ie, we could have tried to sell it, plant it on enemies and Dispel, etc, etc...)
Next words out of the GMs mouth: "Oh, and I'm not giving you full experience for that..."