idk about "outside the rules" but my rogue 2\mutan fighter 1 wayang character was outisde in the desert with his party when some creaper burst out of the ground with a big mouth and tanticals and tried to eat them.
it got one party member grappeld and was trying each turn to ge it into it's mouth (it kept loosing that graple check, but still delt a lot of damage to the grappeled character). and we didn't really had anything that could hurt it that much. i had my small wayang move out of reach and was just pulling my mutigen to try and go into battle, when i reread it's ability in the alchemist page and found out that if some1 who is not an alchemist drinks it . it makes a save or gets nausiated for hours (can only take move action). so i chucked it into the gappping mouth. (got a very high roll there) and the gm made us the fevor and rolled a 5 on the thing's save so it didn't save the dc 11 fort...next thing we know it lets go of it's grappled chew-toy and borrowed deep into the ground (gm didn't let us follow though..)
There was a T-Rex chewing a PC. And IIRC, the PC was already below 0. Another PC threw a healing potion inside the mouth, and of course, it healied the T-Rex. But a single drop went to the PC and stabilised him. Later he burst out of the T-Rex.
Back in Homlet™, I recall two incidents.
1) Facing an oncoming horde of enemy troops, that came at us in a 4X4 formation. I cast Hold Person on the first rank, and all failed. They stopped, as expected. hat happened next was not expected. Rank 2 failed to stop, so their spears all killed rank 1. While dealing with that, rank 3 ran into rank 2 and rank 4 into rank 3, the earlier ranks dying. It ended with one Hold Person spell effectively killing 12 of 16 enemy.
2) Next to the moat house, we are accosted by a fire breathing beast. [Dragon of some type?] Being next to water, the wizard casts summon monster and summons an octopus that appears on its face. Just as it is about to breath on us, the octopus grapples its mouth shut. The backfire explodes the beast.
/cevah
In 3.5, I ran a pirate campaign, and people swinging on ropes would add their Use Rope skill check to their Jump checks or Acrobatics checks to determine how far they could travel.
In PF, I ran an "Aztec" ball game where they could use an immediate action to catch a thrown ball, or make a DC 5 or 10 Reflex save to do the same.
The party ninja shelled out the money for fireworks during RotRL. He proceeded to tie one to a rope, light it, hold on to the rope and we decided the firework would spin around in a circle, making trip attacks on everyone in the room. It was super hard to pull off and mechanically probably more trouble than it was worth, but fun as hell.
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In a 3.0 game I DM'd the party monk lassoed a manticore as it made a flying pass over the party and yanked it to the ground where the barbarian raged like a raging thing all over it.
In 2nd edition, we were being attacked by winged dog-faced creatures that held their bows in their feet and used both hands to shoot spear-sized arrows at us.
My tabaxi (jaguar-folk) monk/kensai polevaulted up to kick them down!
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I played a game where a group of soldiers were coming at us across a rope bridge and I threw my Greatsword at them. I rolled a natural 20 to hit, so the GM decided to just assume I'd killed the guy.
I pulled out a hand-axe and cut the ropes to the bridge and rode it down with them.
Because I was a Paladin I was able to heal up when I hit the ground and finish off the enemies (and get my sword back).
There were a lot of moments like that in that game, because besides myself and the GM, nobody at the table had ever played before. We wanted to showcase why table-top gaming is better than computer-games.
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My games typically have lots of rule of cool, largely because of a houserule I implemented. In short, the PCs get a series of tokens, in the vein of hero points, called Badass Tokens. These can only be gained through good roleplay, since I like to encourage that in my players, and essentially allow them to temporarily suspend the rules and make their characters look awesome. Now, I get veto power on any actions (I don't let them one-shot beings much more powerful than them, or take out bosses) but I do allow a lot of minion killing. Some examples:
1) A half-orc fighter used his sword to slash through the hinges in a large door, then followed this up by kicking it down, smashing it onto the head of the boss and doing some decent damage.
2) A rogue, frustrated at fighting some very robotic golems (half-magic, half-machinery) and his inability to do sneak attack damage, used his to jump down from a rooftop and puncture one of the machine's fuel lines, doing serious damage to it and gaining the ability to make sneak attacks on this variety of robo-golem, albeit at a higher AC, and only 1/2 as effective as normal.
3) Another rogue in another campaign was caught in a trap, along with one of his allies, a warlock. He made the check to avoid it, but the warlock was going to get hit, and he was rather squishy. So the rogue spent a badass token and used his whip to pull the warlock out of danger.
Not D&D based, but from a current World of Darkness game I'm playing in that features a game within a game (we're playing mortal characters who get together on Friday nights to play RPGs). The current game within a game is Hunter, and we're taking on a certain religion well known for lots of celebrity members and a pay your way to the top methodology, because we've discovered that they're basically a cult of Mages. So we've been leading assaults on them through the collective unconsciousness... (note, this is less a moment of Rule of Cool and more of the GM just rolling with however the hell we decide to deal with our situations. He's running the same game for another group on the off weeks that we aren't playing, and they've taken some very different, slightly less crazy courses of action)
My character is a psychiatrist who got really bored and started experimenting with drugs, eventually finding ones that gave her enhanced perception and a sense for when conspiracies are afoot. Over the game I've built up her arsenal of mind altering substances more and more, and eventually when I realised we were coming up to the big final showdown in the collective unconsciousness, I slipped the GM a note asking for a very specific form of drug, one that as far as I'm aware doesn't exist in the game itself. Basically I wanted something that would turn me into a walking source of Paradox, causing any magic used near it to have a major chance of causing it (for those of you who aren't familiar with Mage: The Awakening, Paradox = Very, Very Bad, it's basically a magical backfire)
So we plan our assault. The GM completely rolls with what we're doing, which is basically inciting a riot in the real world directly outside the main compound of the organisation, as well as using plants in their guard uniforms armed with real weapons to make it look like they're firing live ammo at civilians, while we lead a strike force of hunters from various agencies and compacts into the collective unconciousness, armed with a bunch of supernatural weapons designed to really cause havoc in there.
They all split off and start blowing up the mental representation of this religion, while the core party wills itself to the top of the compound... where we encounter one of the mages, a celebrity by the name of Dom Ruse (actual in game name, which amused me as we're not renaming the church itself, but hey, whatever). He summons up a bunch of minions, and battle is joined... however, when he takes a massive hit in the form of one of our party members bear hugging him and setting off a grenade held between them (yes, we brought high explosives into the collective unconsciousness), leading to her falling off the building to her death... he used a spell to try and turn back his personal timeline to recover, not realising that I'd just popped the "psych-bomb" as I was calling it. Paradox goes off. GM rolls a few dice, looks at potential backfires, shrugs and rolls with what seems coolest... Our friend who sacrificed herself reappears standing just behind Dom, this time with him already wounded. She takes a look at him, with no idea what's happened (her memory of the explosion is gone, she just knows she was about to do that and suddenly he looks injured for some reason), so she shrugs, puts the grenade away, and double taps him in the head with a hand cannon.
Head back to the real world and the church is in tatters, because everyone who followed it has suddenly decided that it's a total crock at the same time, except for the leaders (the mages). Plus they're in a whole world of legal trouble because hey, there was a bunch of cases of highly illegal assault weapons with the church's logo all over them found near the riots where a bunch of people dressed as church security were using them on an initially peaceful protest that flared into a full blown riot.
So yeah, less a moment of Rule of Cool, more a non-stop rollercoaster of it.
Homebrew campaign I'm running, I gave all the players unique weapon attachments (that way, if by some miracle they decided to use a different weapon, they wouldn't lose the fancy stuff). They gave the players various unique powers, because why not? The Ranger in the group had joked that he wanted his hammer to be Thor's hammer...so I gave it a souped up form of returning and a limited lightning ability.
The party was fighting in a 2v2 arena, against a pair of lightning based Kitsune Vanguards (more for flavor than build strength.) The ranger had already used his usages of the lightning attack for the day. At the end of one turn, he decided to point the hammer right at one of the kitsune in a "you're going down" sort of motion. The kitsune, on its turn, decided to hurl a Lightningbolt straight at him. Rule of cool dictated that the hammer acted like a lightning rod and, while still hurting him, recharged a single use of his lightning attack. Next turn, he ran up, used it, and KO'd her. His ego was through the roof that night.
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In a 3.5 game where I played a Soulknife, the GM told us the BBEG was holding the distressed damsel over an open pit by one leg. I told the GM what I wanted to do, and my character ran full tilt toward them, leaped over the pit, and used his momentum to knock the girl out of his grasp and into my arms before landing on the other side.
This is a place to post a moment when you as GM through the rules out of the window or as player your GM let you do something totally outside the rules.
P.
Great thread idea and great post!
Not D&D based, but from a current World of Darkness game I'm playing in that features a game within a game (we're playing mortal characters who get together on Friday nights to play RPGs).
Love it!
Not D&D based, but from a current World of Darkness game I'm playing in that features a game within a game (we're playing mortal characters who get together on Friday nights to play RPGs).Love it!
Heh, yeah it's an awesome game. Haven't played for a while since the GM has been working shifts, but he's off that now so we're picking it up again Friday after next. Can't wait to see where it goes next, we're done with the Hunter part of the storyline for now (though we'll come back to them later), so I think the next session is meant to be mostly advancing our characters day to day life stories and maybe foreshadowing some of the supernatural stuff that'll happen later on, before we dive into the next game within a game. Which I believe is Changeling, so all I can say to that is bring it on.
In a game where the players had been tasked to guard a gem being displayed by a local noble, the Bard was chasing the villain up a flight of stairs when he turned and shot a bolt from a hand crossbow at the hero. The player said he was going to try and dive out of the way (which worked anyway because the roll missed. It just sounded and looked good). While twisting away from the attack he cast Sleep on the villain. I ruled that a concentration check wasn't necessary simply for the fact that stopping the action to make a dice roll would've killed the mood at the moment. The crossbow bolt missed and the bad guy dozed off.
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Today's OotS reminded me of a session in which my Witch (with the Princess trait) and her fox familiar intimidated (rolled well, maybe a 20, and had a great bonus) the pack leader of 6-8 velociraptors into running off.
Then she became queen of the velociraptors.
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Very recently I played in a campaign where I challenged myself to never do any direct HP damage. I was a caster who specialized in enchantment and control - after a few sessions it became a running gag that I ALWAYS cast "Grease" - especially once we hit about Level 5 and our other caster was using stuff like Fireball to clear gaggles of minions. Despite this proving very useful (especially in some out of combat situations), I game with people who measure success by how much direct damage you're doing so there were always silly arguments about whether Grease was stupid or, as I insisted, the most useful spell in the game.
Fast forward two years. Our characters are all Level 16 and fighting a Balor with Fighter class levels for control of the World Ending macguffin - something he and a friend developed for this campaign that appeared as a normal Crystal Ball but actually containing the energy of sorta mini-universe. I've burned all of my higher level spells on keeping him and his minions away from this thing, but after the rest of us are unconscious and dying and he's managed to grab the orb I get desperate and do the only thing that comes naturally - I Grease the orb.
Amazingly, our DM Nat 1'd the save and the crystal falls from the BBEG's hands and smashes on the ground. Our DM rolls on a table for random effects and a planar gate opens --- deposting everybody in a 300ft radius onto the plane of Elysium.
Grease. We ended a 2-year campaign against a Balor with grease. Most useful spell in the game.
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So what do you consider 'good roleplay'?
Well, roleplaying. Development of characters, not thinking in a purely strategical sense 100% of the time. You have to keep in mind with this that I GM almost exclusively for very inexperienced players, and this is my way to encourage roleplaying.
I think one good point to make comes from the FATE system, which uses fate points in a manner similar to hero points in D&D and Pathfinder. One of the ways you can get these is if, due to a pre-established character trait, your character does something that could get them in trouble down the line, or makes it so they have to do something the hard way.
The idea is to encourage the players to roleplay further. The system isn't perfect, and is probably unnecessary for players who already create and play interesting characters, but I find it's pretty fun, and honestly that's the reason we all play.