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Sooo...
I'm in a game.
It's a Primitives Game.
We're cave-people.
the GM's best friend played for a few sessions and got the brilliant idea to kill a gargantuan tortise.
We're level 3.
It was CR Fracking 9.
With Bleed and grease and acid splash... we offed the big-old slow thing (mainly because the GM ruled that it's a big DUMB (int 1) creature that when threatened retreats into its shell) and has a touch AC of 4...
Anyway, with someone who has all the knowledge skills and a bunch of the craft skills (my gnome summoner) we now have a giant tortise shell-tank that's powered by three giant geckos. (no they don say "eh... it's a living." though it would be funny).
anyway, that's how we jumped the shark.
Have any of your games jumped the shark, and if so. How?
(of course, our game is now no less awesome. Though we did "beat" HALf the encounters in last game by throwing food at them)
No games come to mind, but we did have a GM that jumped the shark. Yes, you read that right.
It was the "height" of 3.0, just months before 3.5, and the GM decided everyone gets +4 to every stat in his new campaign. We thought, "Cool. So we're super elite or something?" Nope. Every creature in the world had +4 to every stat. Why? Because he felt he needed to correct a perceived error in the system. But if everything had a +4, why give a bonus at all? We'd never know. This guy used to run amazingly detailed stories, but suddenly from then on every session he ran was walk a bit, have a fight in a featureless field, rest, repeat. No real story, no actual point. He moved away shortly thereafter. Over a decade later he came back and it was the same thing: walk a bit, have a fight in a featureless field, rest, repeat.
He hasn't had contact with us in years. I assume he's sitting at home running imaginary players through the same walk, fight, rest cycle over and over.
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Lets see, It was the 4 of us vs. an army of mooks and the big boss. My character the magic hating barbarian charges into the middle of the enemies whilst his companions d-doored away and proceeded to crack the staff of the magi.
Yes he survived..barely and was promptly dropped in the next round after losing initiative to the 1 survivor.
When I was a teenager playing 2nd ed., we played The Keep On The Borderlands several times. The last few times we skipped the caves altogether and successfully assaulted the keep itself, taking it over or destroying it each time. I'll spare you the over the top stories (such as knocking over a tower by catapulting a peasant at it), but I will say is that it was a very different time. The RP always present, but was fast and loose to accommodate our newly found rampage-mode.
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First campaign I ran with my veteran players after 3.0 came out. I tried an "anything goes" approach to classes and races with a multidimensional threat from Nazis using a super science/magic mix of technology.
Things just got out of hand. Badly.
First campaign I ran with my veteran players after 3.0 came out. I tried an "anything goes" approach to classes and races with a multidimensional threat from Nazis using a super science/magic mix of technology.
Things just got out of hand. Badly.
This sounds like the game I've been waiting for my entire life.
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Back in our early days of PFS, we played a scenario:
and got to the point where we have to assist in making a cure. We didn't really understand how the mechanics of this encounter worked, and we got incredibly stuck after a few attempts to assist.
Eventually our GM had to tell us verbatim what the book said about trying to proceed through this encounter with creative solutions because we were getting exasperated to pieces, we were out of ideas and getting rolls that weren't high enough even when we did come up with ideas.
Even though she was trying to come up with a potion, looking for plants and looking up books were expending our skill checks so much that we started coming up with the most ridiculous ideas.
For example - and this was my personal favourite - hiring a bard, bringing them back to do a perform check to play some music for her while she worked to help her think!
The other day while playing Skulls and Shackles, my druid's shark animal companion jumped 5 feet straight up, grappled a giant wasp, and dragged it down into the water while our party's rogue "rode" it down.
A bit of a literal take on the topic :)
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Uh... a game many years ago, the very first session I used enlarge person on the dwarf fighter and declared, "Make my dwarf grow!" and threw my staff down.
Flash forward further instances of this and it became a running gag. When he'd grow large we'd play the power rangers theme (we played background music as it was already), and then when we got to the dwarven lands we found an "ancient dwarven artifact" -- a belt that could be activated as per the power rangers transformation sequence to gain enlarge person and a bunch of other buffs and gain the Blue Ranger suit (the player's favorite ranger...mine, too) and officially become a "Mighty Dwarven Power Ranger." DM was considering giving all of us belts so we could be an entire sentai team, but we decided it'd be better if it was unique to the one player, and that way our characters could still think of it as just some sort of "weird dwarf thing."
Later still after that, we acquired a construct Triceratops that the player named Yost.
What initially was just a one-off joke on my part became a campaign-long, and in some ways, multiple campaign-long gimmick. Not that any of us were complaining, it was awesome.
i converted return to castle ravenloft to pathfinder poorly I might add and after a few months the group got bore or did the story plot wrong any way i realized they would clearly destroy strahd. so i had a giant battle in the main square where sthrad was soundly defeated but came back in his robo golem (see where he slept was inside a golem so he came back and was utterly destroyed by the pc's. nex time i will not give them a 35 point buy and have more system mastery.
in my defense i had never run pathfinder before and only played a few times before
I low level (2 or 3) party tracking some orcs and what looked like one ogre to a cave type lair. One main chamber with a tunnel to more chambers.
We pushed in and killed the two orc guards to see 6 Ogres charging out of the tunnel.
We only survived because of a fortunate obscuring mist and the GM's insistence that the Ogres would continue to use their reach advantage and suffer the 50% miss chances. Those miss chances spared the lives of every character in that party, who adopted the phrase "How many Ogres?!?!" as a battle cry.
My druid who was Johnny on the spot with the Obscuring mist went on to an ignoble death vs a Critical hitting hill giant... the Druid has been forever known since as "Stuff on a club"
This sounds like the game I've been waiting for my entire life.First campaign I ran with my veteran players after 3.0 came out. I tried an "anything goes" approach to classes and races with a multidimensional threat from Nazis using a super science/magic mix of technology.
Things just got out of hand. Badly.
LOL Thanks! The concept was solid, I think. But I'd been away from my group for a year and when we got back together with 3.0 we weren't familiar with the rules and the optimizers in my game got hold of Savage Species and it went to hell in a bucket for me (the DM). Now that we have a few years of experience with the 3.x rules and Pathfinder, I've been considering running it again; this time with my hands on the reins and a better grasp of what I'm doing.
We have a cameo that appears in most of our campaigns in the form of a Lincoln Mark III billowing colored smoke from the windows. An angry bunny sits where the hood ornament should be. It is driverless but idly rolls across the plains of every campaign i've ran in the last 20 years except maybe 3.
We had a character who new he was going to spend a huge portion of the campaign in a specific foreign country and he chose not to learn the language... So everyone he ever talked to answered every question or attempt to communicate with 'yeeeessss!'
He was taken to his room where he flipped on the television to wind down and a commercial came on.... Yesfully clean... Yesfullly clean! You're not fully clean unless you're yeeeesssss! fully clean.
You guessed it... It was an add for YES soap.
Sometimes gaming past 2am is not the best idea.. But it often produces the best ideas.
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Sometime in the 2rd edition we played a campaign where the DM just *loved* dragons. Any NPC got a weird eye or hair color? Polymorphed dragon. A Silver ran the local magic shop (remember those?).
Anyway, we headed out one afternoon and discovered that there was an Old Red in a cave and it had done... something... IDR, to attract our attention. So we busted into it's lair after a gauntlet of traps and minions. We quickly realized that we'd hit the point where monsters get Spell Resistance, and the dragon's was a whopping 75%!
So, the paladin stood in front of the Old Red and taunted it with some special power (the DM gave out odd, random abilities like candy). Everyone else just stood out of range, waiting to be tapped. I stood behind a rock with a Wand of Magic Missile after my damage spells fizzled harmlessly. Now, in this edition, the wand of magic missile spit out one missile every 3 segments in the initiative pass. Since we could barely affect the dragon, but it couldn't leave (one spell was to collapse the other exit), I ended up laying on this large rock I'd initially taken cover behind rolling a d4 every 3 segments and if I got a 4, rolling for damage. In the end, I'd burned the wand of 100 charges down to something like 17 charges and did the most damage from any one given person. My reward? The Silver introduced my to his friend the Gold that was so impressed that my character was given an amulet that allowed me to turn into a Gold/Shadow dragon hybrid once a week. As if being a Priest/Wizard of Isis (remember that Legends & Lore hybrid class?) wasn't enough...
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In one of my past games the DM was hellbent on killing us. Needless to say he failed horribly every time. It was getting to the point where we were needing to find some closure to the campaign, so he unleashed Hell's forces on us, throwing a Hydra at us. We dominated it through superior tactics. Then he's like screw it and made us fight a Pit Fiend.
My character passed out from fear, all of the others except two ran away. Our Level 4 Lawful Stupid Ranger decided to step up and fight it with our Half-Orc Fighter backing him up. The Pit Fiend reared back and made his attack, and subsequently critically fumbled. The Pit Fiend then lost its footing and fell over. The DM declared him helpless and the Fighter Coup De Grace'd it.
He was dumbfounded.
In one of my past games the DM was hellbent on killing us. Needless to say he failed horribly every time. It was getting to the point where we were needing to find some closure to the campaign, so he unleashed Hell's forces on us, throwing a Hydra at us. We dominated it through superior tactics. Then he's like screw it and made us fight a Pit Fiend.
My character passed out from fear, all of the others except two ran away. Our Level 4 Lawful Stupid Ranger decided to step up and fight it with our Half-Orc Fighter backing him up. The Pit Fiend reared back and made his attack, and subsequently critically fumbled. The Pit Fiend then lost its footing and fell over. The DM declared him helpless and the Fighter Coup De Grace'd it.
He was dumbfounded.
God does indeed play dice.
My character passed out from fear, all of the others except two ran away. Our Level 4 Lawful Stupid Ranger decided to step up and fight it with our Half-Orc Fighter backing him up. The Pit Fiend reared back and made his attack, and subsequently critically fumbled. The Pit Fiend then lost its footing and fell over. The DM declared him helpless and the Fighter Coup De Grace'd it.
He was dumbfounded.
I'm dumbfounded by how incredibly horrible those crit fumble rules are. On the other hand, if your DM thinks falling over makes you helpless, that'd be a great game to make a tripper (or Toppling Spell caster) in. In any case, I find it funny that he had instituted a rule that every time you attack you have a 5% (or slightly lower % if he had some sort of "confirm" or "save" roll) chance of automatically losing... and then was dumbfounded when an unlucky roll proceeded to auto-kill his big, bad monster. Like, that's basically the poster child for WHY CRITICAL FUMBLE RULES SUCK. On the other hand, DM's that actually realize the repercussions of fumble rules don't tend to be the ones to use them.
I'm dumbfounded by how incredibly horrible those crit fumble rules are. On the other hand, if your DM thinks falling over makes you helpless, that'd be a great game to make a tripper (or Toppling Spell caster) in. In any case, I find it funny that he had instituted a rule that every time you attack you have a 5% (or slightly lower % if he had some sort of "confirm" or "save" roll) chance of automatically losing... and then was dumbfounded when an unlucky roll proceeded to auto-kill his big, bad monster. Like, that's basically the poster child for WHY CRITICAL FUMBLE RULES SUCK. On the other hand, DM's that actually realize the repercussions of fumble rules don't tend to be the ones to use them.
Yeah, I don't understand why he considered it helpless.
I used critical fumbles for one session then I realized how dumb they actually were.
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Dumb rules are dumb. Those critical fumble rules are dumb, but that doesn't mean that all CF rules are dumb. It would be like saying that "The wizard IMC can cast all his spells in one round so all wizards are broken".
Back in the day, running a 3x Forgotten Realms game, the PCs (APL 5) get teleported to the former lair of an ancient white dragon. The dragon was put into a powerful magical torpor and now a hundred years later the giant stronghold above has collapsed into ruin and been re-discovered by beholders and their kin.
A few giants, now savage barbarians w/no kingdom left to speak of, venerate the ruin as a holy place. The PCs are teleported by a minor artifact meant to give them power enough for one day of survival and battle. The intent of the item is that the victims teleported would free Icwylaud, allowing the giants to re-claim their ancient homeland.
Fast-forward to the end of the adventure: the PCs have achieved the goal of re-awakening the dragon. It's gift to them is to free them from the glacial dungeon they're in and not eat them. They break the surface and make for the giant-sized ruin, murdering a frost giant by getting the jump on him. Now they're alone, as night is falling on the tundra, surrounded by wasteland and glacial ice.
I figured we're pretty much done so I asked flippantly how they were going to get home. My players pooled EVERY resource they had at their disposal, including skills so rarely used I'd forgotten they had them. They used some utility spells, re-copied onto scrolls and then rationed them out over the next several days. During that time, they scoured every inch of the place.
They cobbled together a sled using a pair of old warped giant-sized polearms from a ruined coat of arms, a trio of giant-sized shields and every square inch of fabric they could tear from the place. The cleric of the group had access to animal spells and the group had on the way here spied caribou amid the wastes. Summoning up some monstrous creatures to hitch their sled to and gathering every possible thing that would burn they sledded for several rounds as fast as the dire wolves would carry them, until the creatures winked out. They then used that as a base camp, scouted up the caribou and charmed a couple.
These things were then hitched up and used to carry them from the top of the freaking world south, through to Neverwinter. They were originally from Cormyr. In all it took them 3 months of game time to return home. They had pulled together no loot, so once in Neverwinter they hocked the sled and dead caribou hide/antlers (the beasts had given out on them in the hinterlands of the city) and managed enough cash to get some basic gear. They then set out on the High Road south on foot. They had many epic adventures, the wizard of the party had their Con permanently weakened by GM fiat due to exposure but at the end of it all they went up a couple levels and the players had a blast.