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Closest I've ever seen to something like soloing dungeon based on only a few roles was when the DM okayed our characters but apparently didn't pay attention to all the details when doing so. Or maybe he forgot? Either way; our group was hired to clear out some evil cultists, worshippers of Tharizdun. We get there, two of us walk right up to the front door of the hide out, knock, and wait. When a guard came to the door we showed him our own symbols of Tharizdun and told him we came to warm them. We informed the cult that local authorities were onto them and that they should probably relocate. We were thanked and promised future favors. After the cult left we went back and got our reward for riding the place of the cultists.
I am currently running my very first campaign and since the very beginning the law of unintended consequences has been my guide to a story that I never planned and I love it. I learned that despite being a first time DM and relatively new player to D&D, I now have confidence in my ability to improvise.
@@theDMLair Wow I never expected I'd get a reply. Thank you so much. Your videos are many of which that has brought me entertainment, insight, and inspiration to DM for my friends.
Legit D&D story! My (1st ever) game group is level 4, so hearing about waves of frost giants, two of them riding remorrhaz, and killing a white dragon in its lair, is so crazy to me!
You'll be level 15 sooner or later and then that sort of thing is pretty much normal. At least it's normal if the game is to be challenging at all. LOL
There was one time while playing Starfinder, actually my groups most recent session, where my DM didn't pay attention to the languages my character knew. Side note: he, as well as my other 2 friends who introduced me to the game, told me they weren't going to be important and were only there for character flare. So, we were helping a tribe on another planet to appease their "God" (a dragon they worshiped, but hadn't been seen or heard from in millennia.) who they believed was on a rampage. I made a check to see if I knew what they were talking about and was vaguely aware it could have been a dragon they were talking about, but didn't think it was as they aren't common. So, anyway, we were fighting some goons and they called for "the beast" for aid. As a xenoseeker my character was naturally curious what they meant. Then she sees a small red dragon, and recognizing from my studies they were the originators of Draconic (which I picked because it sounded cool) I started talking to the dragon. I asked my DM if I could roll to see if my character could make the connection between the legends of the flying beast and this baby and succeeded the roll. So I told the baby dragon that I knew the area his mother was likely to be and if he help me and my friends get out of the situation we would help reunite him with his mother. Now we have 2 dragons as science officers on our ship.
Yes my players go off the rails a lot. I have to wing whole sessions before. My players loved it and didn’t even know I was off the cuff with the session.
So, he came up with the idea to bluff an entire giant clan into clearing out their own dungeon, but was unoriginal enough to name his wizard "Raistlin?" I think its possible he may have had some help with that strategy! BTW: "Jarl" is pronounced, *_yärl._* Play some Skyrim, or watch Vikings. =P
Played a kitsune trickster in a pathfinder game a while back, only went for a few sessions but I died laughing plenty a time during it. My favorite section was a few rooms filled with cultists, some more dangerous than others, all with really low wisdom. I'm sure most of you see how this is going. The first cultist I tricked into thinking the dolls he was talking to were talking back, eventually convincing him to off himself as "the god's will". The next room I snuck up on had three cultists tossing a library, so I did the first thing that came to mind: I kicked open the door (he made me roll strength just to try and hurt my case but I lucked out with a minus in my strength score) and yelled "I am your God!" Ding ding, that's a nat 20, for a total of I think it was a 32, suffice to say they were on their knees XD In the end, I had them fight to the death and coup de graced the last of them. After all of that, I got crit by the boss trying basically the same thing. Which sucked for me, but the rest of our party was at max strength so we rolled the rest of the way through. From that day on I was no longer allowed to play that archetype. XD Worth it.
In my very first game of DnD, I was a ranger in a quest that involved marching through a small cave. I don't remember what the boss monster of the dungeon was, but I remember that even though I had disadvantage I landed the first arrow I shot and rolled the max damage and killed the thing. The DM (also brand-new, it was the VERY first session for all of us) just looked so crestfallen that this neat idea she had fell apart so quickly. That group still meets, and her challenges have gotten much harder since.
This reminds me of the time our group realized we only had so many supplies and couldn't smash our way through a ritual, then through a labyrinth like crypt etc to acquire something plot oriented and then use a transport item to join a final battle in PF1E. So the party shrunk themselves and handed me their extra dimensional space items after getting in. Strapped each caster in a bag to my rear shoulder pauldron location and the non casters to my lower back with a climbing harness and some use rope. Between consumable fly magic/skill, invisibility/non detection, high stealth/dampen presence and the sift spell to dramatically speed up my ability to search for traps along my route of movement. Oh and keep watch so I didn't need to sleep for the three days I was in the dungeon (one session though) the only major snag along the way was when I got noticed by a group of ghosts or spirits of some kind with life sense. However thanks to having undeath ward available I was able to keep them at bay long enough for our group to dispatch them via range volley (wands and crossbows from bags). Every other encounter I managed to sneak past for the most part. Upon getting through all the floors and to the objective I let everyone out in preperation since we would have to join a big battle after this and I took a breather and let them handle the rest from there.
Closest thing we got to this is when me and my party entered a dungeon, blew open a locked door and making a load of noise. Attracting EVERY enemy in the dungeon in one room. Then killing all of them with a Thunderstep, Fireball, and tidal wave. Glorious moment.
Mask of Many Faces + the Actor feat + the Friends Cantrip + the Suggestion spell + proficiency with Deception, Persuasion, and maybe even Performance = Master Infiltrator! 😊👍🏻
Sorry I will not give out any XP award for an action like that. Walking into a Drow city and doing the movie theme of "A Fist Full Of Dollars" and "The Last Man Standing" I will give XP for. I will give player characters XP just for going into a Drow city, not killing anyone, talking a good trade deal to not get attack as they leave the city with trade goods. How did you get out of the Drow city alive ? !
Natural 20 persuasion/deception does not mean you get what you want. It means you get the best result possible for the situation. When dealing with some creatures your best result is: "I'll eat you last."
F Huber this is how it works but it is more fun if you get a cool outcome for nat 20. It doesn’t have to be exactly what you want. But at least it somewhat working is nice or else it feels unrewarding when the player rolls a 20 and still can’t do anything. You feel powerless no matter how well you roll and that can discourage people.
@@realrelapse2476 There are no critical rolls defined in the D&D rules for anything but the attack roll. Other rolls don't automatically succeed or fail on a natural 20 or 1 (respectively). Or at least, so I've been told, and although I'm fairly new to the game, I _have_ read the Player's Handbook and that interpretation of the rules seems to be correct. Some things just shouldn't be possible no matter how high the player rolls and no matter what bonus items the player uses (unless the game is running on Rule Of Funny) :)
👍 pretty much any monster or cannible with an evil disposition... There's perfectly good meat right there that said character would be more inclined to eat rather than befriend
this reminds me of the time i turned an entire warcamp on itself as my bard. Me and a rogue arcane trickster friend snuck into a warcamp where hillgiants + duergar were amassing preparing to attack a nearby city. (both me and the rogue are dwarves). We used disguise kits to make ourselves look like duergar, then went around town attacking random giants and getting them riled up, making them turn on the deurgar. After like 30 minutes of doing that the rogue snuck out and i blatantly just walked out of the front gate, not in stealth, and removed my disguise. Strolled from the front gate back to where our party was waiting while the warcamp just tore itself apart behind us. It was glorious. lol
For dungeons like this with lots of enemies I suggest changing up the different enemies whilst keeping the same monsters So give some giants some spells, bows and other variations on the same monster type to break up the slog and give combat some variety
I just HAVE to tell you that this video is so incredibly well-paced and the story incredibly enthralling. I can only assume it would be so amazing to have you as a DM and I might learn a thing or two about my own storytelling! Well, just gonna subscribe and binge all your videos now, dont mind me!
I had a similar thing happen in one of my games, except this was in LMoP and the rouge charmed the Green dragon "Venomfang" into leaving his lair to ransack an entire village. It had little repercussions, in fact only one. They lost the entire town of Neverwinter, where Venomfang now has made base and has his follower's fortifying and perfecting the lair for him. BTW, it was with one role this all happened.
So. It seems like most of my stories start with this particular player’s characters. This is from a player’s perspective in a home brew campaign. So we had a rather interesting party composition. It was well rounded, but the standout was our Mogogol Rogue who literally stole a flying abandoned sentient kingdom (and by stole I mean, he put the crown on and the castle said ok). We were trying to recover powerful artifacts left over literally from when AO established the current order and had just landed right outside of a massive anti magic field caused by a shard of the Void we were after to keep it away from our BBEG. Our wizard wanted it for herself to boost her power, and my Fae Warlock was laser focused because it was a clue as to what happened to their hermetic clan and family when they tried to invoke multiple Patrons at once and essentially blinked out of existence. The only clue left was that the dead Prince of Frost and lost Queen of Summer Tatiana were able to help, and this is the first thing in ages that gave him new information. A noteworthy aside is that we had the High King over all Dwarvenkind with us because besides stealing the castle, our Mogogol King Fizzy Pop had established trade, travel, and agricultural routes with multiple gates and increased both of our economies, so High King Battlebeard was armed to the teeth and ready to go in as a heavy with pretty much every melee legendary artifact that wasn’t home brewed equipped. We were pretty confident as we went down, with our wizard and myself doing what we could to support difficult terrain travel and damage from the cold. Finally, we make it to the edge of a giant crater where snow won’t fall and the ground is bare, but it’s cold as death. The shard is there in the shape of a perfectly round purple crystal. Out of mutual agreement, Battlebeard is the first to try to take the shard, thinking that if anything, the Axe of the Dwarven Lords that he won as a true hero would keep him safe. He gets blasted back about a good mile and is unconscious. Our wizard and I are broken with a couple of Ion Stones (she’s over 20 because she has the book of vile darkness and has an intelligence boosting stone to start and I altered my spell absorption stone to take around 50 or so 9th level spells through a lot of lucky rolls) so we go next. The Mogogol does too, because his character is recklessly impulsive, even though he doesn’t have a hint of magic (yet, but different story). As soon as we touch it, wisdom saving throw. All of us failed hideously. And we were sucked into the fragment of the void. The DM had planned this encounter for a decent amount of time. Essentially we arrived in a flat endless spatial plane with a dark sky, and right in front of us an immensely tall pale blue fae Noble is throwing as many defensive spells as he can against six elder liches hurtling spell after spell after them, and behind him was a fae noblewoman with hair like fire passed out on the ground. Since my character already knows who they are and doesn’t question it since he had been pulled into multiple party mishaps and feels they owe him a favor, I dimensional door both of them over and start supplementing defense while the wizard (who apparently is terrified of any higher power) is pissing herself and the Mogogol doesn’t care (in character) and just starts dialogue with the Prince of Frost. Very quickly, the question of, “why don’t you just leave with how strong you are,” came up and the Prince said he’d been trying to figure out for centuries and failed. So what does Fizz do? He asks an elder Archfey holding their own for centuries if they’ve tried to hit the floor. This elicits a very skeptical and dismissive look and (thankfully) starts slinging spells again so I wasn’t the only one on defense and only on because I was so close to thenArchfey and plot armor so I wasn’t low on spells. Well. What does our froggy king do? He pulls out his sun dagger, rolls a confirmed hit against the floor, and then the DM goes off of the chart for percentiles and rolls. The frog is gone from the empty plane and pops up in front of the rest of the party and the still groggy Battlebeard, and the entire group goes silent for a second. A few of us wanted to confirm what happened: he landed a 98 on percentiles to land in then 4% chance our DM gave him. At that point I think the DM and I were twitching in unison, but all PC’s made it out ok. An entire critical arc for my pc was ruined and it underpowered me through the rest of the campaign, buuuuut I learned how to survive better because of it. Needless to say we book it, including the prince, who’s only comment was, “hundreds of years in here and I never once tried to hit the damn floor.” The lichs were still stuck, when originally we were supposed to kill all of them off with the Prince and also open up a new chapter to the story. All of us were fine, and we had a shard of the void with unknown properties. But a full chapter of the campaign was ruined I swear.
Something I wish to mention, Fire Giants are actually above the frost giants in the ordaining. However the adventure ahinst the giants establishes that the ordaining has been disrupted, and all giants are free to try and reestablish themselves as the are capable of doing so.
I had a very close one - basically the players were discussing to collaps the roof of an underwater dungeon to drown the monsters inside. I managed to avoid catastrophy by having the player who got the idea roll an intelligence check - and after he rolled well enough to give him that hint telling them that they COULD do that, BUT then the entire temple would be under water. They then decided that killing all the monsters wouldn't be worth it, when it also means killing themselves in the process (as none of them had water breathing at that point) and continued to do the dungeon the "legit" way.
I was running the lost mine of phandelver with a bunch of completely new players. One of them, the halfling rogue, wanted to disguise himself as a goblin. My games are usually very goofy, all the goblins had sunglasses and leather jackets, so I let him roll a deception check. He got a 24. He was able to go in and just get Sildar Hallwinter out.
I was playing AL Curse of Strahd, as a Fey Warlock who I described to as the DM as “a roleplayer” basic character concept is that a Fey liked one of her performances and gave her the ability to “become any character she wanted to play.” So, we entered into the Amber Temple and I with my Devil’s Sight, Mask of Many Faces, and I high stealth role. Saw the humanoid guardian of the temple and assumed his form. I became him and I immediately ran into the Flame Skulls that guarded the temple. “Brethren, there is an intruder in our esteemed temple, and he’s right over there. [Pointing to the area where the guardian had been.] I rolled for Deception, a Nat 20 a total of 25. The DM rolled a seven. Convinced, the Flame Skulls assisted the party in clearing out the Temple. Everything that wasn’t the party was dead, except the Lich but that is a story for another day.
This happened in my last session, right now my DM has my character going through a training montage and he decided my trainer would teleport me into the middle of nowhere, fight until I got knocked out or 2 weeks passed, and then teleport me back. Well, the random location was only about 40 miles from my character's home town, so he just decided to buy a horse, rid the town of some local bandits, and ride there, thus bypassing the entire training.
Funnily enough, it was the sunless citadel adventure within TFtYP. Our party had a lizardfolk shaman (me),a white dragonborn ranger, and a halfling warlock with the mask of many faces invocation. When we got to the area where the goblins and kobolds are fighting, the warlock presented himself as a kobold with a white-tinged coloration, and with the help of the ranger and I convinced the kobolds that we were sent by the dragon powers above to aid them in their rescue of the white dragon wyrmling. After we got the kobolds to do most of the killing for us, at great loss to their numbers, we managed to be alone with the wyrmling. The warlock then convinced him that the kobolds clearly were unworthy slaves for letting him be captured by the goblins, and got him to aid us in wiping out the kobolds. Again letting the monster do the majority of the hard work for us (after prodding him into a bit of a rage that the kobolds were so inept of servants, and should be punished), we were then finally able to bring down the wyrmling with most of our abilities and health in place, since the monsters did the hard work for us. Easiest dungeon clearing I've ever had the fun to witness, and all because that warlock had spent so much effort on deception.
Whoa. Deceiving enemy monsters, into joining your army?.... I DMed for the first time, with the lost mines of phindelver, and that's EXACTLY what my middle brother had done throughout most of the campaign. He currently has two bugbears, two goblins as his loyal soldiers, and two hobgoblin slaves.
"Storm giants are the highest in the ordning, followed by cloud giants, fire giants, frost giants, stone giants, hill giants, and finally giant kin such as fomorians, ettins, and ogres. Regardless of a giant's rank among its own race, the chief of a hill giant tribe is inferior to the most common of stone giants. The lowest ranked giant of any type is superior to the highest ranked giant o fan inferior type. It isn't considered evil to dis respect or even betray a giant of another type, merely rude." a quote from monster manual so it would be the frost giants acting out of the ordning.
I have a solo quest coming up this week for our rogue who decided he wanted to go back into Silverymoon alone (where the party escaped from a wizards hold prison) in search of the bards prized possession, the Doss Lute. It's so sad cause he doesn't know the lute isn't in the prison anymore, and it's being held up in a wizards tower under a ton of security. So we shall see where this leads...
It was 3.5 and I was playing a rogue that specialized in infiltration. He wasn't overly sneaky and instead was the friendliest person you'll ever meet. He was level 18 going on 20 and ready for that level up and so the gm had him face down an assassins guild. Getting past the guards would have been easy, Lusaran is a certified badass when it comes to damage output, but fighting people outright is no fun. I stead he approaches the guards and tells them that their leader asked for him. That he was way early so they probably weren't expecting him yet, but he was here. Pass the deception roll and they take him right to the leader who Lusaran attacks. A couple rounds later this rogue has killed the boss, his closest guard, the two that brought him there and is now traveling room to room playing clean up on all of the assassins. Lusaran came out of this at level 21 and some pretty sweet gear.
@@theDMLair Oh he was a blast to play. I played him like a prankster so he was also using his slide of hand to sneak random items into people's pockets. One time he was being especially disruptive so the GM had his god character shoot him with this rare metal bullet. So Lusaran dug it out and took it to the blacksmith to be recast and then took this bullet to the god's temple and gave it to them as a gift. To this day they continue to worship Lusaran's ass bullet.
That letter challenging the players reminds me of this one time in my campaign where I made an antagonist do the same. The bard asked what is written on the letter. Since it doesn't really state who is the recipient, the bard had an idea of giving the letter to another villain that they previously spied on, a bandit leader. Their disguises worked before and they were not discovered, so it worked again. The challenger happen to be a bounty hunter, so it would make sense that he would challenge wanted people like the bandit leader. players said that it would look bad for his gang if he wouldn't deal with the challenger, A few good checks, the bandit leader went and fought with the bounty hunter the following day. while the bandit boss is absent, the players reveals themselves in the bandits' lair and killed all the other bandits, took of with the loot. They removed the big boss out of the picture, and launched a surprise attack from the inside. All it took was one letter.
Little do the adventurers know that the bandit leader and bounty hunter talked things out mid-scuffle, resulting in the duo teaming up to take revenge upon the adventurers later on. Especially since the bandit leader would have a grudge to settle for his gang being wiped out and the bounty hunter would be in it for 1.the promises of a share in the loot and 2.the satisfaction of taking down his marked targets instead of letting his prey continue to escape.
That reminded me of the session two weeks ago, where our wizard won basicly a major battle and let us skip an entire dungeon with one spell. We were level 6 and we found out the lair of a evil Wizard, which we had multiple reasons to go after. The situation was way more complex then that but in the end, when it came to the first hard fight in this dungeon, were we should have fought the spirit of the evil wizard possessing another body (which we didn't knew at the time) our wizard brought out suggestion, and told the wizard to go with us. The wizard rolled a Nat 1. And of course, the suggestion forced the wizard to go immidietly to town, and we could just not leave her alone, so we had to leave the dungeon at the very entrance of it, to deal with the wizard. After fighting an epic boss battle in town, because the wizard wanted to get in there anyways, and we just accelerate that process, next day we returned fully rested to a completly emptied and evacuated dungeon. That is how a single spell let us skip the dungeon and with every enemy, and trap and any loot in it planned by the Dm, just because our wizard casted suggestion
I keep seeing the Drizzt Do'urden box in the back it is nice to know others who have read the books or at least know of him and I think you would need a much bigger set of snipers for giants. Also have you tried running or played The Storm kings thunder it is very fun to play.
I was really looking forward to hearing about some epic scene where the armies of frost and fire giants just collide on the battlefield. that would have awesome. though what actually happened was still very cool. I could be wrong as its been awhile since I learned about it but I'm pretty sure fire giants are above frost giants and stone giants are below frost giants. I could be wrong and I'm a little less certain that stone is below frost but I still think that's how it works. forgive me if I'm wrong on that one. also I won't complain about the mispronuciantion of jarl since someone else beat me to it in the comments lol. also Lord paxton, what a whimp. he only has a white Dragon under his control? pfffft I'd only be afraid of a man with a red Dragon, or at the very least a blue Dragon... lol watch him end up getting a red Dragon now. good video man very much enjoyed the story of what happened and have a good day all who read this. :)
the DM Lair if his power is infinite why'd he go for a white Dragon instead of a red dragon? I bet a group of adventurers will take him down eventually. lol
@@DragonGunzDorian White dragons-also called ice dragons or snow dragons-have a reputation as dull, stupid creatures. Although white dragons are remarkably bestial, they are as intelligent as other chromatic dragons. They care little for intricate schemes or political power, preferring to live their lives as hunters and collectors of treasure. Rarely, if ever, can a community negotiate peaceful coexistence with a white dragon whose territory borders it. Members of a community might have a slim chance of convincing a dragon to leave their livestock alone, at least for a while, if they display a significant show of force or give a truly magnificent bribe. All dragons are predators, but reds are the most voracious, consuming far more than they require. All dragons are greedy, but reds are avaricious beyond any point of reason, for they fully believe that all wealth belongs to those strong enough to take it (and no amount of wealth is ever enough). All dragons are prideful, but reds are arrogant in the extreme. They see themselves as the pinnacle of draconic perfection. Red dragons never forgive even the smallest slights. They kill over territorial intrusion, over the tiniest theft from their hoard, over an insult, or because they want to. These great beasts take satisfaction wherever and however they can get it. A red dragon unable to slay a person who offends it will go on a rampage, wreaking havoc and destruction upon any nearby communities. Only enormous monetary tributes can sate the legendary rage of a red dragon; only blood can cool and drown that rage. Comparing the two of them side-by-side with these facts established across mainstream D&D lore, it is easy to figure out why Jarl Paxton has a white dragon at his command instead of a red dragon.
uhdictiveSUGAH I already know all of this, I was mainly just making a joke. because like a red Dragon is unreasonably greedy, I have unreasonable standards. if lord Paxton has anything under a blue then he's not intimidating. even a blue is barely acceptable. also not trying to be nitpicky but I think you misheard something in the video as the jarl and paxton are two different people. paxton isn't the jarl.
Kinda unrelatd, but it's very weird how after some sessions we dms think to ourselves: man, this session kinda sucked. Then you ask the players, and it's like it was the most fun they have had in their lives
So, This is in my Werewolf campaign (and if some of you have read other comments involving this werewolf campaign, you'll know it's the one where the players decided they were the bad guys 75% of the way through, and also they broke my 'you can always run you know' encounter) and the party was sent to deal with a cave system full of kobolds. I'm not sure why they were, thinking back, but it was important to the plot. The plan was for them to go through the cave system, get maybe halfway through the second room, waist-deep in gnoll blood at this point (these were furred kobolds and had gnolls as cannon-fodder because they were nearly infinite, don't worry about it), and notice that the rival party that was supposed to be hunting them had found their location, and was closing in, having just reached the entrance. Give them a fight on two fronts y'know? That decidedly did not happen. One of my characters had a backstory where he had been a kobold war wolf originally, only being turned into a Wer after he proved great ferocity once he had been lost and ended up in a forest. He spoke kobold. The mage did too but that's a different problem. So our archer instead decides to speak with the gnoll guards, in kobold, and command them to allow them past to speak with the kobold in charge. Success, he goes in, has a chat with them while the party is waiting outside. I figure 'screw it, the timeline is happening' and have the rival party attack and be caught off-guard by the fact that the players haven't killed a bunch of the gnolls yet. What was originally going to be an absurdly large fight turned into the party escaping down the secret exit and eventually collapsing the entire hillside on their rival party (don't worry they lived, the players had agreed to give the rivals plot armour long before this). There's also that time when the shaman got such a high-rolling critical (exploding damage dice) that he severely wounded a demigod in a duel to first blood to convince him to ally with them. Good times.
I as a dm still need more practice in writing dungeons and I have more experienced dm friends helping me with that. But as far as soloing, I have a favorite story. A tiefling named Malarai was a warlock with Asmodeus himself as his patron. The world was called Itruve (just a word scramble for virtue that kinda sounds latin cuz everything else is latin because of a church theme). He finds weapons based on the seven deadly sins and oh boy do I still need to fix their balancing to make them more than magic items that can poke you. So Malarai finds all seven weapons which turn out to be keys to find an entire city that had been locked away for a century or so. The main villain, the lead priest for the country, follows him as Malarai has been unravelling his plan to have a perfect world that literally doesn't know sin (which ultimately harms everyone). I underestimated a homebrew rule and overestimated my villain's build. Malarai casts mirror clone on himself. I have a house rule that says if you do damage under this spell, its multiplied. He casts wall of fire. Which is now 4 walls of fire. And he's a warlock so these are upcast walls of fire. The priest had brought his underlings with him. Only two made it past the wall of fire. The priest did not. The two immediately surrendered. They just wanted to go home.
If you looking for help learning how to make dungeons you should check out my live streams. Most of the time we are creating adventures together. So I think it would probably help you at least see how the process works and all that good stuff.
Had expertise with deception, rolled two 1s triggering combat, then a 1, 2, 2, 3 and, long story short, the bard is dead in a chasm, my monk died in prison, the paladin remains jailed, and the fighter and warlock plan a rescue. Never before have things gone south so fast at our table. Upside, new characters are fun
Yes it was about 30 minutes in game where everyone else watched. Every so often that's okay but if it becomes a pattern thats a problem IMO. The other players were actyally enjoying the drama and hoping the wizard got killed. Lol
Once, right at the beginning of the lost mines of phandelver, I managed to convince all of the goblins at the cave to run away. My DM allowed me to play a changeling, and using the shapeshifting, i became. A goblin and lied to them all about a group of mercenaries coming to clear them all out. After that, they all ran away, basically leaving just the boss there. After that, that DM didn’t let me play a changeling again
We had an adventure where we were expected to stealth our way into a stone giant lair, kill the leader and possibly recruit one of the other stone giant elders to our side and then make our way out unscathed. Only problem was that we had one character who A)Had an intense hatred of all giants. B)Was very stupid. Think Lenny from Of Mice and Men, as that's who the player based him on. So my craft specialist wizard built helicopters(not actual helicopters), machine guns(actual machine guns) and enough mustard gas to kill...well, a mountain full of giants. We then recruited a team of mercenaries and went full Apocalypse Now on them. Not sure why I'm sharing this, but the setup where everyone was talking made me think of it.
my group infiltrated a fort clamming that they are the health inspectors then proceed to get a tour or the place. What do you call a necromancer, a pyromancer , and a fighter covered in weapons of all types?: The Health Inspectors.
Hey dm lair just found your channel and loving it so far... quick question have you done a video on custom races? And if not could you give some tips on introducing them? I've been introducing my semi aquatic race above the waves and in just curious if I've been doing it wrong the whole time.
I just realized that if that wizard told the Jaaral in private that Sebastian Venetia was really a double-crossing liar who sought Paxton's mantle and would go as far to say he was the "true advisor" of Lord Paxton before the frost giants left for war against the fire giants, that would have been a superior checkmate on your part as DM.
i had a creative paladin, they had a waterweird infested pool in front of them, the only way across is to swim, paladin cast create destroy war on the pool destroying it, but now they had a trench to cross, and no rope
There was the time we entered a dungeon with a major encounter being a T-Rex skeleton. The crazy rogue decided to re-enact Night at the Museum, and the DM rolled to see if that worked. It did, so now the party has a T-Rex skeleton as a pet. Also we were all drow and the boss of the dungeon attempted to Charm Person (AD&D 2e, elves are immune to charm spells) And Darkness, to which drow can always say "You merely use the darkness. I was born in it, molded by it."
At the start of the vid I though the sign said "Death to ghosts!" And I was like "did the barbarian write that? Rewatched vid and noticed I got it wrong. So... go me?
Quick story My first group ever, running through the level 1 part of Mines of Phandelver My brother had rolled a very charismatic Half-Elf bard, who decided to transform himself into a goblin and bluff his way through the compound He rescued the knight, got his gear and walked out like a boss, essentially skipping the whole thing in a few deception checks
So this happened to me recently, didn't solo a whole dungeon through bluffs, but I DID bypass a very hard encounter and get to do that same encounter later under much more favorable conditions. My group is playing the descent into Avalon or whatever its called. And very early on there's a group of pirates you need to save your informant from. She's on the 2nd floor and they haven't found her yet, but will soon. So I hide her in a corner with a minor illusion to make it seem like a plain old wall. None of the pirates think to examine the wall on the 2nd floor for a secret door or anything, so they don't find her. I then befriend their leader over a consolation drink and tip him off that I saw her leave. Deception rolls abound as I convince him that she's going to be impossible to find in this hellhole of a city. The pirates leave empty-handed. Of course, our informant wants them dead as payment for the info. So we do end up fighting them later, but ever the strategist I had also done some bluffing and gotten a warrant for their arrest put out, which gave us the info we needed in the short term, though not all of it since the party wasn't on board with hunting them down personally. We later find the remainder of the pirate crew unwinding at the bathhouse we needed to investigate, there are 5 fewer pirates than before, and they are unarmed and unarmored. The party still didn't want to pick a fight, so I continued bluffing our way through things until we found the secret entrance we were looking for. At this point the pirates, sensing possible treasures abound, insist on us leaving the discovery to them. FINALLY we fight them over this, but thanks to my series of bluffs and deceptions the pirates are STILL unarmored and unarmed. the two minion pirates go down before even reaching their weapons, and the leader only had his blade, no armor. AND we had a surprise round in which I Hexed him so I do more damage with each attack. The fight was an utterly one-sided slaughter of a boss enemy that was meant to drop at least a few of us (the encounter as written is HORRIBLY unbalanced for 1st level characters, like wtf Wizards of the Coast?). And that is my most recent tale of just royally mucking up the campaign through clever lies and good rolls
I did a very similar thing when my group started Avernus. We encountered the pirates and they attacked our NPC. I am playing a Changeling Phoenix Sorcerer who has high deception skills at this time. I shout out that this isn't the person they are looking for, but she's my friend, Ellen Cleghorne; the person they are looking for went to the north district a short time ago after cheating us at dice. I roll a 23 with disadvantage. He falls for it and swears to kill me if I am lying. I leave the room and transform from an elf into a dwarf. We leave the tavern and see his men across the street. Since I no longer look the same, they ignore us. We get to the bathhouse and find the secret entrance. We run into some cultists in the second room. They detect us and ask who is there. I shout out, "It's the plumber; I've come to fix the sink." *Rolls a 24 on Deception* Unfortunately, one of the cultists rolled a 26 (the DM mentioned the number since we were shocked that he passed). We didn't avoid that fight but it came close. I have never really tried playing a character like this before. I really am enjoying it now that I am trying it though.
Okay, so. This is technically a duo, but still a great story. Once in a dungeon, there was a large restaurant wrapped around an even bigger arena. In this arena, there was a legendary monster, but my party didn't know. Upon finding this out, my character (Barbarian named Aloysious, but we'll call him Al.) And my friend's character (Sorcerer named Sherllotte, but we'll call him S) told the others to find a way out of the arena. S decided to be mostly support sorcerer, and had healing and battlefield control spells. He cast spiderclimb on Al, who used that to run up the wall. In the 3 turns that Al ran up the wall, S was keeping the monster distracted with some fairly weak spells, but they kept the monster off of the other players. On Al's 4th turn of going up the wall, he didn't use the dash action, and instead decided to jump off the wall to land on the monster. Being 120 feet up, and having to leap about 50 feet over, this was bound to hurt if it didn't kill him. Al passed his athletics check, and then came the attack roll. He had decided that instead of just landing on it, he was going to land with his axe first. He was raging, at a reasonably high level, and we allowed him to add the falling damage to the attack because he hit the monster. Al rolled a natural 20 to hit, and rolled max damage on his axe. I don't remember correctly, but he did about 138 damage in one hit, then used his second attack to kill the beast. Doing in one turn 202 damage, and killing a legendary monster with a great plan, and even better execution. Al survived the encounter with only 4 hp left, and quite frankly, the party deserved a long rest after that. (We later lost Al to an ancient gold dragon after it picked him up, dropped him, landed on him, and used it's breath weapon directly on him. He did still solo the dragon by using his wand that S had given him to blast apart the ceiling, and crush the both of them.)
Not quite a solo, but my party find a wizards tower in a neat circle of sand in the middle of a grassy field. However, we can't find the entrance, so my friend and I use a grappling hook to climb the outside, and enter through the wizards harem and bed chamber on the top floors. We run into him in his lab the next level down, and we're all surprised. Luckily, I go first, crit, and silence the wizard with a stab to the throat. The other PC disarms the wand that our opponent withdrew, and then we proceeded to beat on this poor wizard that could only use potions or scrolls, that my buddy kept disarming. After that we start looting the body, and as his amulet is taken off the entire tower starts sinking into the sands. We then hurry back up, help free the girls he had taken, and watch the tower disappear, along with all the loot. It was great.
Jax' was a mischievous (damn nearly diabolical) half-grougach of the swamps. He'd grown up learning the ways of pit-fighters from a befriended (?) mul named Krin... AND in the early adventures, despite the ubiquitous discord between elves and dwarves, he'd earned a few "favors" from the Iron Mountain clans, including a genuine tolerance for Krin. Half-dwarves are often considered a bane to both human clans and dwarves. {for those who don't know... the "mul" is practically always a child of rape, constituted from wars between desert clans of dwarves and humans. They're a mark of disgrace, since the husband wasn't available or strong enough to defend his wife, and the wife wasn't good enough to die before such an abomination... even if it meant suicide after the act... They're almost always raised as "another useless mouth to feed" until they can be thrown into pits to fight dogs over meat... a rather common if mundane betting game, especially among the traveling caravans. Bottom line? A mul doesn't know how to retreat. The pit has no where to go, so surprise, anger, or scare a mul, and you end up dead. They only know to go straight through what they fear... They're often considered too crude and reckless to be civilized... even by those who do not dwell in the deserts.} _just to give an idea of the general attitudes, so even that any "half-blood" could win favor in a court was a feat of its own, getting a mul accepted openly in dwarven society was beyond_ Now, this isn't a clever fast talking method of "soloing" a dungeon, but rather a nuance about "flanking" the thing... When Jax's (more or less) adopted sister Kara was kidnapped and held in a stronghold somewhere in the Dark Elven (not Drow... since this was around the time Drow were factioning away from Dark Elves) Country to the North, Jax' called in a couple of those favors, and convinced the dwarves a tunneling "spur" from nearby caverns was the perfect ruse to undermine the ENTIRE Dark Elven castle... Then he simply made his way to the Court... Upon Jax's entry, the King scoffed at him, "A fine brother, taking near a month to show. Do you even care about this sister of yours?" Jax' shrugged. "Do you care a damn about your men, your women, your court, and your palace?" "What's that supposed to mean?" Demanded the Crowned Ruler. "You have two hours, and Kara best be returned unharmed." Jax' responded. "One minute late, or even such as a hair out of place, and I'll drop your palace to a shambles in a deep smoldering pit." "You are in no position to command me!" The King retorted. "I do not take orders in my own Palace and Home, half-bred swamp whelp!" "Two hours," Jax' repeated, and turning, he proceeded to cut down the two guards who'd quietly been posted near the double doors. "You've been warned." AND in a blink, he was gone. Obviously, this was setting up the king for the fall. It was supposed to be the "bluff" getting called. Everyone at the table knew there was no possibility a King would take such an order from an outsider in his own court... BUT that was the point. Two hours and five minutes later, Jaxon was casting "Stone to Mud" for the critical support under the Palace, over-loading the surrounding crust and stone according to his dwarven engineers (who know stone like no other)... AND in a collossal crashing rumbling collapse, the palace and all the royal family of the North Clans of Dark Elves was no more... The Duke of Vinterlandt, where Kara was being held, heard of the catastrophe around a day later, and riders were dispatched in short order, with Kara and an emissary, to negotiate Jax's approval of the Duke taking the Crown left vacant, unless of course, there was to be no such accord... Along with Kara, a Coach fit for royalty, and four fine horses were granted, including a knowledgeable driver in case Jax' preferred some instruction or the added hand in travels. Rather than simply take and leave, however, Jax and Kara dubiously decided to return to the Duke's Keep in Vinterlandt, seeking audience, and being quite polite about it. They discussed with the Duke exactly what the social and political ramifications were, surrounding this coronation, and everyone decided that it was wiser for the Duke to take leadership of the North Clans (well... what was left of them) rather than the unseemly appearance of a half-blood and his mul doing so... Jax didn't care for courtly matters anyway... only preferring to measure the Duke up as a leader before deciding on whether or not to pursue war... or assassination if needs be. In the end, between the Duke and Jax', cooler heads prevailed and the Dark Elves that had remained "topside" were to continue a relatively peaceable dynasty. After that little stunt, since Nobles of all kinds pay attention to word of a house falling without regard to race or geo-political affiliations, word got around of Jax's remarkable response to his sister being kidnapped... Two things happened after that. 1. Nobody bothered threatening or taking prisoner anyone who kept Jax's company regularly. 2. When Jax' went to seek audience, nobles pretty much allowed him any damn where he wanted. Guards wouldn't have stopped him if they'd been ordered more than half the time... AND who could blame them? He was the guy who threatened to obliterate a Palace, and promptly followed through on such a delivery! When flanking isn't exactly in the cards, "undermine". ;o)
So if I was a rogue I would have tailed the wizard either using an invisibility spell or by keep a far distance, and then go back to the party to inform them on what happened so we could act as a group or if I was the wizard I would have summoned a familiar to inform the party
My party did this with goblins, but the goblins thought they wanted to join the goblin's group. The party ended up raiding the town they are attempting to protect. Oh well, it was still fun.
Fun story from me, very short , very simple It was a mess. A catastrophe, the party split. The dm let it happen, the part formed two factions. I managed to use .. a lot of leverage against the cult of pyromaniac mages.. that I.. also a pyromaniac mage, but not a member of their cult, was there, to warn them of the crazed wizard, and barbarian.. who happened to be rending through their entire fortress alone- just the barbarian that is. Anyway. Turns out the barbarian had a quirk the dm gave the char to be really strong sort of, for dealing with magic users, but would be essentially berserk, uncontrolled. While the dungeon was solo'd, in the sense I got the entire place to turn on the other party, the barbarian sliced down everyone and the evil wizard managed to get out, and burn everyone inside alive, the irony that is. Also the higher level mages just dimension'd door their asses right out of there once they realized they couldn't do anything. This really all started because we had a Lawful Good char in the party and a Lawful Evil character in the party. Both in-game and out of character they wouldn't stop fucking with each other. The lawful evil mage, was actually bound and forced to reside within in inanimate object. The bard, who remained neutral, and also extremely wealthy behind our wildest dreams, had more money, more influence, more power, simply because he knew what to do in his downtime. He managed to pay an obscence price, bluff, bribe, and convince an npc to unseal the much hiugher level character, the dm allowed to exist in the party. The dm himself did not expect it to succeed, infact, the person playing the character did not want his character let out of the prison, But in-character the Bard was to fascinated and interested in unleashing a bit of chaos in the world. Always looking for a way to spice things up. The short version is, some metagaming made this mess h appen, and while I pulled some fine natural 20 rolls to convince the cultists to do something, and leverage my knowledge on the planes of fire (Which I actually had a relevent chunk of points shoved into [3.5]) It was wild. Sadly, despite the recovery, the dm was like "Well they don't know you and shit really has hit the fan, so the remaining members of the cult, just dimension door themselves out, leaving you to burn alive." Which, as you imagine kind of sucks. Gotta say tho. It was really fun.
The ordning is Hill Stone Fire Frost Cloud Storm So I can totally see frost giants bullying some stone giants into working for them but fire and frost are technically even in the ordning so that one seems a stretch to me, but then again a lot of the team ups that WOTC uses in their modules and stuff doesn't really make much sense to me
Deception/Intimidation/Persuasion checks can be OP, and should only be allowed sparingly. It just makes it way to easy for the party's "face" to get way with absurd stuff. Further it can get boring for the players who would like to fight stuff, and can result in certain players getting more than their fair share of "spotlight" time. Also, anyone can attempt those checks, since it's not class restricted. Generally, I only allow two players to make an attempt per situation. Also, you should explain to your younger viewers who the original Raistlin was.
Yes I totally agree. This isn't the sort of thing that would be happening a lot in my games. Because you're totally right it takes the fun away from the rest of the group who doesn't really get to do anything as one person take the Limelight.
Can we get a session on 1 on 1 adventures? I’m doing one now where I’m attempting to capture and persuade enough hirelings that mini combat should work like a war game once or twice a session. I’ve also had hours long 1 on 1 sessions with so much story building and world exposure that there’s almost no dice rolls Others focus on a single character, their personality and cunning, and an environmental survival session.
Note: You have a split party and let the 2 groups know what is going on, even though the PCs shouldn't know. I run such splits by writing notes and not allowing the players to talk about what is in the notes. There are dice rattling which may or may not mean combat. "Roll a D20 and then 2D8, write the numbers down, say nothing. These rolls are meaningless. Pass the note back."
In a Star Wars D6 campaign taking place in the Mandalorian Wars... we had this human join up with us at one point (a friend joined the campaign). He was a gambler and a smooth talker with very good social skills in the system. We try to maneuver an illegal drug cartel because we’re supposed to murder the leader. This guy convinced them that their leader hired us and got us through level after level of the dungeon until we were face to face with the guy himself XD. So we just ya know... took care of that guy and immediately took over the cartel. It was great.
i had this one character in a "mash-up" campaign talk a white dragon into killing itself (i rolled decent for a 5th lvl, DM rolled a 1) after being the only member of the party left alive after getting through the dungeon, so the DM mashed a bunch of different universes in to this world (D&D, Bleach, Dragon Ball, Star Wars) and the party was supposed to confront the dragon and pay a tithe from the locals, however the dragons underlings had decided to attack us, by the time my PC made it to the dragon the others were dead he was out of spells (3.5 Sor) and blood thirsty for vengeance (one of the PCs was his close Sister another his best friend), after some dialog i drew my weapon and the dragon asked "whats that" i said this is a wish scope (bluff like 23, his sense motive nat 1) "oh hows it work?" "well you look into the dark hole and hit the button on the side and it shows you what you truly desire and how to get it easily" "give me that and you can leave here alive" "....ok, if thats the only way", dragon activates a lightsaber to the eye, that was the last time the DM mixed universes
I’ve never seen this happen because when one player goes off the others always get impatient and do something that messes things up. It’s a game for all the players not just one, so they feel like they have to do something. Even the characters work against this because few players create patient or cautious characters.
In Curse of Strahd the adventure has really interesting random encounters but some of them seem kinda dangerous for a low lvl party. Should I scale them down or leave it be to make it seem more like a real dangerous world?
Curse of Strahd is supposed to be a high-risk high-reward campaign setting. Setting that tidbit aside, just use your own discretion. Scale it down to where you think the players would still have a challenging yet survivable experience and bump it up to adjust accordingly.
So, story from my first Dungeons and dragons campaign. My players accidentally break through the wall of an area they weren’t supposed to reach yet. So they found a cave full of lava, and an ancient red dragon. Now, you would think that that would be the end of my level 6 party, right? But no, instead they manage to activate a massive teleportation circle that was meant to take them to safety at the end of the dungeon and away from the dragon, instead the wizard cast fireball to burn down the wooden ceiling supports, trapped the dragon in the circle, and teleported it to a nearby gathering of about a hundred other adventurers where the party was currently camped, who promptly decimated it.
Sorry, I'm not trying to criticize, since mispronouncing a word means you encountered it via reading (which is a good thing) but Jarl is a Scandinavian word with a liquid "J", so "Yah rl" is technically correct. But hey, Jarl and Chiefchin go well together ;)
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Could you make a video to how to let absent plsyers PCs leave and rejoin the party
Jarl is pronounced as yarl. Like fjord and mjolnir
Cheers
Closest I've ever seen to something like soloing dungeon based on only a few roles was when the DM okayed our characters but apparently didn't pay attention to all the details when doing so. Or maybe he forgot? Either way; our group was hired to clear out some evil cultists, worshippers of Tharizdun. We get there, two of us walk right up to the front door of the hide out, knock, and wait. When a guard came to the door we showed him our own symbols of Tharizdun and told him we came to warm them. We informed the cult that local authorities were onto them and that they should probably relocate. We were thanked and promised future favors. After the cult left we went back and got our reward for riding the place of the cultists.
Lmao that's a great story
well you did technically rid that place of the cultists lol
I like how you accomplished all of this without lying and being helpful to all parties involved.
Always read the backstories! 😆
Way not to be murderhobos
@@anthonynorman7545 or at least read the Deity slot on the character sheet before approving
I am currently running my very first campaign and since the very beginning the law of unintended consequences has been my guide to a story that I never planned and I love it. I learned that despite being a first time DM and relatively new player to D&D, I now have confidence in my ability to improvise.
That's awesome. Improv is huge in D&D I've found. 😁
@@theDMLair Wow I never expected I'd get a reply. Thank you so much. Your videos are many of which that has brought me entertainment, insight, and inspiration to DM for my friends.
Legit D&D story! My (1st ever) game group is level 4, so hearing about waves of frost giants, two of them riding remorrhaz, and killing a white dragon in its lair, is so crazy to me!
You'll be level 15 sooner or later and then that sort of thing is pretty much normal. At least it's normal if the game is to be challenging at all. LOL
There was one time while playing Starfinder, actually my groups most recent session, where my DM didn't pay attention to the languages my character knew. Side note: he, as well as my other 2 friends who introduced me to the game, told me they weren't going to be important and were only there for character flare. So, we were helping a tribe on another planet to appease their "God" (a dragon they worshiped, but hadn't been seen or heard from in millennia.) who they believed was on a rampage. I made a check to see if I knew what they were talking about and was vaguely aware it could have been a dragon they were talking about, but didn't think it was as they aren't common. So, anyway, we were fighting some goons and they called for "the beast" for aid. As a xenoseeker my character was naturally curious what they meant. Then she sees a small red dragon, and recognizing from my studies they were the originators of Draconic (which I picked because it sounded cool) I started talking to the dragon. I asked my DM if I could roll to see if my character could make the connection between the legends of the flying beast and this baby and succeeded the roll. So I told the baby dragon that I knew the area his mother was likely to be and if he help me and my friends get out of the situation we would help reunite him with his mother. Now we have 2 dragons as science officers on our ship.
Yes my players go off the rails a lot. I have to wing whole sessions before. My players loved it and didn’t even know I was off the cuff with the session.
Yes that's the best when your players don't even realize that you were winging everything. :-)
So, he came up with the idea to bluff an entire giant clan into clearing out their own dungeon, but was unoriginal enough to name his wizard "Raistlin?" I think its possible he may have had some help with that strategy!
BTW: "Jarl" is pronounced, *_yärl._* Play some Skyrim, or watch Vikings. =P
I'm pretty sure I have impeccable pronunciation skills... 😶
@@theDMLair As well as perfect time keeping.
What's wrong with Raistlin?
@thunderdrae niigga, it's fresh and original like a new stripper in town
kapitan19969838 That new stripper in town is 40 years old and been around the block more than a few times. Just maybe not in *your* town.
Played a kitsune trickster in a pathfinder game a while back, only went for a few sessions but I died laughing plenty a time during it.
My favorite section was a few rooms filled with cultists, some more dangerous than others, all with really low wisdom. I'm sure most of you see how this is going.
The first cultist I tricked into thinking the dolls he was talking to were talking back, eventually convincing him to off himself as "the god's will". The next room I snuck up on had three cultists tossing a library, so I did the first thing that came to mind: I kicked open the door (he made me roll strength just to try and hurt my case but I lucked out with a minus in my strength score) and yelled "I am your God!"
Ding ding, that's a nat 20, for a total of I think it was a 32, suffice to say they were on their knees XD
In the end, I had them fight to the death and coup de graced the last of them.
After all of that, I got crit by the boss trying basically the same thing. Which sucked for me, but the rest of our party was at max strength so we rolled the rest of the way through.
From that day on I was no longer allowed to play that archetype. XD Worth it.
In my very first game of DnD, I was a ranger in a quest that involved marching through a small cave. I don't remember what the boss monster of the dungeon was, but I remember that even though I had disadvantage I landed the first arrow I shot and rolled the max damage and killed the thing. The DM (also brand-new, it was the VERY first session for all of us) just looked so crestfallen that this neat idea she had fell apart so quickly. That group still meets, and her challenges have gotten much harder since.
This reminds me of the time our group realized we only had so many supplies and couldn't smash our way through a ritual, then through a labyrinth like crypt etc to acquire something plot oriented and then use a transport item to join a final battle in PF1E.
So the party shrunk themselves and handed me their extra dimensional space items after getting in. Strapped each caster in a bag to my rear shoulder pauldron location and the non casters to my lower back with a climbing harness and some use rope.
Between consumable fly magic/skill, invisibility/non detection, high stealth/dampen presence and the sift spell to dramatically speed up my ability to search for traps along my route of movement. Oh and keep watch so I didn't need to sleep for the three days I was in the dungeon (one session though) the only major snag along the way was when I got noticed by a group of ghosts or spirits of some kind with life sense. However thanks to having undeath ward available I was able to keep them at bay long enough for our group to dispatch them via range volley (wands and crossbows from bags).
Every other encounter I managed to sneak past for the most part.
Upon getting through all the floors and to the objective I let everyone out in preperation since we would have to join a big battle after this and I took a breather and let them handle the rest from there.
"If you don't tell your DM, I won't tell your DM"
Stahp, you're so cute!
Closest thing we got to this is when me and my party entered a dungeon, blew open a locked door and making a load of noise. Attracting EVERY enemy in the dungeon in one room. Then killing all of them with a Thunderstep, Fireball, and tidal wave. Glorious moment.
Mask of Many Faces + the Actor feat + the Friends Cantrip + the Suggestion spell + proficiency with Deception, Persuasion, and maybe even Performance = Master Infiltrator! 😊👍🏻
I once had a character take out a city full of drow (but also destroyed the loot) by using stoneshape to open up a lava flow. That was a fun time.
Sorry I will not give out any XP award for an action like that.
Walking into a Drow city and doing the movie theme of
"A Fist Full Of Dollars" and "The Last Man Standing"
I will give XP for.
I will give player characters XP just for going into a Drow city, not killing anyone, talking a good trade deal to not get attack as they leave the city with trade goods.
How did you get out of the Drow city alive ? !
Good “yes but”
It's a story telling device for writers who fly by the seed of their pants. It's really good for improve
Natural 20 persuasion/deception does not mean you get what you want. It means you get the best result possible for the situation.
When dealing with some creatures your best result is: "I'll eat you last."
F Huber this is how it works but it is more fun if you get a cool outcome for nat 20. It doesn’t have to be exactly what you want. But at least it somewhat working is nice or else it feels unrewarding when the player rolls a 20 and still can’t do anything. You feel powerless no matter how well you roll and that can discourage people.
Weird i always thought the result was whatever the DM says :)
@@realrelapse2476 There are no critical rolls defined in the D&D rules for anything but the attack roll. Other rolls don't automatically succeed or fail on a natural 20 or 1 (respectively). Or at least, so I've been told, and although I'm fairly new to the game, I _have_ read the Player's Handbook and that interpretation of the rules seems to be correct.
Some things just shouldn't be possible no matter how high the player rolls and no matter what bonus items the player uses (unless the game is running on Rule Of Funny) :)
👍 pretty much any monster or cannible with an evil disposition... There's perfectly good meat right there that said character would be more inclined to eat rather than befriend
this reminds me of the time i turned an entire warcamp on itself as my bard. Me and a rogue arcane trickster friend snuck into a warcamp where hillgiants + duergar were amassing preparing to attack a nearby city. (both me and the rogue are dwarves). We used disguise kits to make ourselves look like duergar, then went around town attacking random giants and getting them riled up, making them turn on the deurgar. After like 30 minutes of doing that the rogue snuck out and i blatantly just walked out of the front gate, not in stealth, and removed my disguise. Strolled from the front gate back to where our party was waiting while the warcamp just tore itself apart behind us. It was glorious. lol
Sweet. Were you both dwarves, thus allowing yourselves to resemble duergar?
@@theDMLair yep we were both dwarves, it was alot of fun. the rest of the party was very surprised we didnt get ourselves killed lol.
Last Second winging it..... I am at my best in this area. On the spot BSing is truly a lost art. lol
That figures. Lol 😁
#1 skill all dms need to master
For dungeons like this with lots of enemies I suggest changing up the different enemies whilst keeping the same monsters
So give some giants some spells, bows and other variations on the same monster type to break up the slog and give combat some variety
I like variety in encounters, but personally I'm not a fan of monster variants. kolbold fighter, kobold shaman (cleric), kobold wizard, etc. etc.
2:38 Reminds me of that Always Sunny episode with the song "I've Got A Troll In My Hole".
Great stuff! I love to see such good verisimilitude! Actions have consequences. AKA 'ripple effects'. Fun story thanks for sharing!
Goddamamazin... is that a word?
HelYeah. It ain’t ridin if you ain’t off the rails!
I just HAVE to tell you that this video is so incredibly well-paced and the story incredibly enthralling. I can only assume it would be so amazing to have you as a DM and I might learn a thing or two about my own storytelling!
Well, just gonna subscribe and binge all your videos now, dont mind me!
This is awesome! Good ideas like that should be rewarded. These are the stories that are remembered
I had a similar thing happen in one of my games, except this was in LMoP and the rouge charmed the Green dragon "Venomfang" into leaving his lair to ransack an entire village. It had little repercussions, in fact only one. They lost the entire town of Neverwinter, where Venomfang now has made base and has his follower's fortifying and perfecting the lair for him.
BTW, it was with one role this all happened.
Lesson for DM's: A diverted problem doesn't stop being a problem. It becomes someone elses' problem, and usually not for someone who can deal with it.
So. It seems like most of my stories start with this particular player’s characters. This is from a player’s perspective in a home brew campaign.
So we had a rather interesting party composition. It was well rounded, but the standout was our Mogogol Rogue who literally stole a flying abandoned sentient kingdom (and by stole I mean, he put the crown on and the castle said ok). We were trying to recover powerful artifacts left over literally from when AO established the current order and had just landed right outside of a massive anti magic field caused by a shard of the Void we were after to keep it away from our BBEG. Our wizard wanted it for herself to boost her power, and my Fae Warlock was laser focused because it was a clue as to what happened to their hermetic clan and family when they tried to invoke multiple Patrons at once and essentially blinked out of existence. The only clue left was that the dead Prince of Frost and lost Queen of Summer Tatiana were able to help, and this is the first thing in ages that gave him new information.
A noteworthy aside is that we had the High King over all Dwarvenkind with us because besides stealing the castle, our Mogogol King Fizzy Pop had established trade, travel, and agricultural routes with multiple gates and increased both of our economies, so High King Battlebeard was armed to the teeth and ready to go in as a heavy with pretty much every melee legendary artifact that wasn’t home brewed equipped.
We were pretty confident as we went down, with our wizard and myself doing what we could to support difficult terrain travel and damage from the cold. Finally, we make it to the edge of a giant crater where snow won’t fall and the ground is bare, but it’s cold as death. The shard is there in the shape of a perfectly round purple crystal. Out of mutual agreement, Battlebeard is the first to try to take the shard, thinking that if anything, the Axe of the Dwarven Lords that he won as a true hero would keep him safe. He gets blasted back about a good mile and is unconscious. Our wizard and I are broken with a couple of Ion Stones (she’s over 20 because she has the book of vile darkness and has an intelligence boosting stone to start and I altered my spell absorption stone to take around 50 or so 9th level spells through a lot of lucky rolls) so we go next. The Mogogol does too, because his character is recklessly impulsive, even though he doesn’t have a hint of magic (yet, but different story). As soon as we touch it, wisdom saving throw. All of us failed hideously. And we were sucked into the fragment of the void.
The DM had planned this encounter for a decent amount of time. Essentially we arrived in a flat endless spatial plane with a dark sky, and right in front of us an immensely tall pale blue fae Noble is throwing as many defensive spells as he can against six elder liches hurtling spell after spell after them, and behind him was a fae noblewoman with hair like fire passed out on the ground. Since my character already knows who they are and doesn’t question it since he had been pulled into multiple party mishaps and feels they owe him a favor, I dimensional door both of them over and start supplementing defense while the wizard (who apparently is terrified of any higher power) is pissing herself and the Mogogol doesn’t care (in character) and just starts dialogue with the Prince of Frost. Very quickly, the question of, “why don’t you just leave with how strong you are,” came up and the Prince said he’d been trying to figure out for centuries and failed. So what does Fizz do? He asks an elder Archfey holding their own for centuries if they’ve tried to hit the floor. This elicits a very skeptical and dismissive look and (thankfully) starts slinging spells again so I wasn’t the only one on defense and only on because I was so close to thenArchfey and plot armor so I wasn’t low on spells.
Well. What does our froggy king do?
He pulls out his sun dagger, rolls a confirmed hit against the floor, and then the DM goes off of the chart for percentiles and rolls. The frog is gone from the empty plane and pops up in front of the rest of the party and the still groggy Battlebeard, and the entire group goes silent for a second. A few of us wanted to confirm what happened: he landed a 98 on percentiles to land in then 4% chance our DM gave him. At that point I think the DM and I were twitching in unison, but all PC’s made it out ok. An entire critical arc for my pc was ruined and it underpowered me through the rest of the campaign, buuuuut I learned how to survive better because of it.
Needless to say we book it, including the prince, who’s only comment was, “hundreds of years in here and I never once tried to hit the damn floor.” The lichs were still stuck, when originally we were supposed to kill all of them off with the Prince and also open up a new chapter to the story. All of us were fine, and we had a shard of the void with unknown properties. But a full chapter of the campaign was ruined I swear.
Something I wish to mention, Fire Giants are actually above the frost giants in the ordaining. However the adventure ahinst the giants establishes that the ordaining has been disrupted, and all giants are free to try and reestablish themselves as the are capable of doing so.
I had a very close one - basically the players were discussing to collaps the roof of an underwater dungeon to drown the monsters inside. I managed to avoid catastrophy by having the player who got the idea roll an intelligence check - and after he rolled well enough to give him that hint telling them that they COULD do that, BUT then the entire temple would be under water. They then decided that killing all the monsters wouldn't be worth it, when it also means killing themselves in the process (as none of them had water breathing at that point) and continued to do the dungeon the "legit" way.
I was running the lost mine of phandelver with a bunch of completely new players. One of them, the halfling rogue, wanted to disguise himself as a goblin. My games are usually very goofy, all the goblins had sunglasses and leather jackets, so I let him roll a deception check. He got a 24. He was able to go in and just get Sildar Hallwinter out.
I was playing AL Curse of Strahd, as a Fey Warlock who I described to as the DM as “a roleplayer” basic character concept is that a Fey liked one of her performances and gave her the ability to “become any character she wanted to play.” So, we entered into the Amber Temple and I with my Devil’s Sight, Mask of Many Faces, and I high stealth role. Saw the humanoid guardian of the temple and assumed his form. I became him and I immediately ran into the Flame Skulls that guarded the temple. “Brethren, there is an intruder in our esteemed temple, and he’s right over there. [Pointing to the area where the guardian had been.] I rolled for Deception, a Nat 20 a total of 25. The DM rolled a seven. Convinced, the Flame Skulls assisted the party in clearing out the Temple. Everything that wasn’t the party was dead, except the Lich but that is a story for another day.
In my last session, my players managed to form a peace treaty with a pack of wolves. Food for safe passage, as negotiated by the druid
This happened in my last session, right now my DM has my character going through a training montage and he decided my trainer would teleport me into the middle of nowhere, fight until I got knocked out or 2 weeks passed, and then teleport me back. Well, the random location was only about 40 miles from my character's home town, so he just decided to buy a horse, rid the town of some local bandits, and ride there, thus bypassing the entire training.
Funnily enough, it was the sunless citadel adventure within TFtYP.
Our party had a lizardfolk shaman (me),a white dragonborn ranger, and a halfling warlock with the mask of many faces invocation. When we got to the area where the goblins and kobolds are fighting, the warlock presented himself as a kobold with a white-tinged coloration, and with the help of the ranger and I convinced the kobolds that we were sent by the dragon powers above to aid them in their rescue of the white dragon wyrmling.
After we got the kobolds to do most of the killing for us, at great loss to their numbers, we managed to be alone with the wyrmling. The warlock then convinced him that the kobolds clearly were unworthy slaves for letting him be captured by the goblins, and got him to aid us in wiping out the kobolds.
Again letting the monster do the majority of the hard work for us (after prodding him into a bit of a rage that the kobolds were so inept of servants, and should be punished), we were then finally able to bring down the wyrmling with most of our abilities and health in place, since the monsters did the hard work for us.
Easiest dungeon clearing I've ever had the fun to witness, and all because that warlock had spent so much effort on deception.
Damn! 'Bout to use this at my friends sometime later, nice! ❤️
Steal away. 😁
Whoa. Deceiving enemy monsters, into joining your army?.... I DMed for the first time, with the lost mines of phindelver, and that's EXACTLY what my middle brother had done throughout most of the campaign. He currently has two bugbears, two goblins as his loyal soldiers, and two hobgoblin slaves.
"Storm giants
are the highest in the ordning, followed by cloud giants, fire giants, frost giants, stone giants, hill giants, and finally giant kin such as fomorians, ettins, and ogres. Regardless of a giant's rank among its own race, the chief of a hill giant tribe is inferior to the most common of stone giants. The lowest ranked giant of any type is superior to the highest ranked giant o fan inferior type. It isn't considered evil to dis respect or even betray a giant of another type, merely rude." a quote from monster manual so it would be the frost giants acting out of the ordning.
Eh I heard of the yawning portal modual although I only heard of one where the pcs have to swim in beer
As the great captain cold once said "make the plan, execute the plan, except the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan"
I have a solo quest coming up this week for our rogue who decided he wanted to go back into Silverymoon alone (where the party escaped from a wizards hold prison) in search of the bards prized possession, the Doss Lute. It's so sad cause he doesn't know the lute isn't in the prison anymore, and it's being held up in a wizards tower under a ton of security. So we shall see where this leads...
It was 3.5 and I was playing a rogue that specialized in infiltration. He wasn't overly sneaky and instead was the friendliest person you'll ever meet. He was level 18 going on 20 and ready for that level up and so the gm had him face down an assassins guild. Getting past the guards would have been easy, Lusaran is a certified badass when it comes to damage output, but fighting people outright is no fun. I stead he approaches the guards and tells them that their leader asked for him. That he was way early so they probably weren't expecting him yet, but he was here. Pass the deception roll and they take him right to the leader who Lusaran attacks. A couple rounds later this rogue has killed the boss, his closest guard, the two that brought him there and is now traveling room to room playing clean up on all of the assassins. Lusaran came out of this at level 21 and some pretty sweet gear.
Sounds like the rogue had some fun!
@@theDMLair Oh he was a blast to play. I played him like a prankster so he was also using his slide of hand to sneak random items into people's pockets. One time he was being especially disruptive so the GM had his god character shoot him with this rare metal bullet. So Lusaran dug it out and took it to the blacksmith to be recast and then took this bullet to the god's temple and gave it to them as a gift. To this day they continue to worship Lusaran's ass bullet.
Ah yes, winging it. Good job chessex mats and erasable markers exist.
That letter challenging the players reminds me of this one time in my campaign where I made an antagonist do the same. The bard asked what is written on the letter. Since it doesn't really state who is the recipient, the bard had an idea of giving the letter to another villain that they previously spied on, a bandit leader. Their disguises worked before and they were not discovered, so it worked again. The challenger happen to be a bounty hunter, so it would make sense that he would challenge wanted people like the bandit leader.
players said that it would look bad for his gang if he wouldn't deal with the challenger, A few good checks, the bandit leader went and fought with the bounty hunter the following day. while the bandit boss is absent, the players reveals themselves in the bandits' lair and killed all the other bandits, took of with the loot.
They removed the big boss out of the picture, and launched a surprise attack from the inside. All it took was one letter.
Little do the adventurers know that the bandit leader and bounty hunter talked things out mid-scuffle, resulting in the duo teaming up to take revenge upon the adventurers later on. Especially since the bandit leader would have a grudge to settle for his gang being wiped out and the bounty hunter would be in it for 1.the promises of a share in the loot and 2.the satisfaction of taking down his marked targets instead of letting his prey continue to escape.
That reminded me of the session two weeks ago, where our wizard won basicly a major battle and let us skip an entire dungeon with one spell.
We were level 6 and we found out the lair of a evil Wizard, which we had multiple reasons to go after. The situation was way more complex then that but in the end, when it came to the first hard fight in this dungeon, were we should have fought the spirit of the evil wizard possessing another body (which we didn't knew at the time) our wizard brought out suggestion, and told the wizard to go with us. The wizard rolled a Nat 1. And of course, the suggestion forced the wizard to go immidietly to town, and we could just not leave her alone, so we had to leave the dungeon at the very entrance of it, to deal with the wizard. After fighting an epic boss battle in town, because the wizard wanted to get in there anyways, and we just accelerate that process, next day we returned fully rested to a completly emptied and evacuated dungeon. That is how a single spell let us skip the dungeon and with every enemy, and trap and any loot in it planned by the Dm, just because our wizard casted suggestion
Powerful reason that bosses should almost always have legendary resistance. :-)
I keep seeing the Drizzt Do'urden box in the back it is nice to know others who have read the books or at least know of him and I think you would need a much bigger set of snipers for giants. Also have you tried running or played The Storm kings thunder it is very fun to play.
Sounds like the DM in the intro. bit needed a "you head back to town" .
I was really looking forward to hearing about some epic scene where the armies of frost and fire giants just collide on the battlefield. that would have awesome. though what actually happened was still very cool. I could be wrong as its been awhile since I learned about it but I'm pretty sure fire giants are above frost giants and stone giants are below frost giants. I could be wrong and I'm a little less certain that stone is below frost but I still think that's how it works. forgive me if I'm wrong on that one. also I won't complain about the mispronuciantion of jarl since someone else beat me to it in the comments lol.
also Lord paxton, what a whimp. he only has a white Dragon under his control? pfffft I'd only be afraid of a man with a red Dragon, or at the very least a blue Dragon... lol watch him end up getting a red Dragon now. good video man very much enjoyed the story of what happened and have a good day all who read this. :)
Did you just speak ill of Lord Paxton?
...
His spies are everywhere...
His power infinite...
His wraith sublime...
😁
the DM Lair if his power is infinite why'd he go for a white Dragon instead of a red dragon? I bet a group of adventurers will take him down eventually. lol
@@DragonGunzDorian White dragons-also called ice dragons or snow dragons-have a reputation as dull, stupid creatures. Although white dragons are remarkably bestial, they are as intelligent as other chromatic dragons. They care little for intricate schemes or political power, preferring to live their lives as hunters and collectors of treasure. Rarely, if ever, can a community negotiate peaceful coexistence with a white dragon whose territory borders it. Members of a community might have a slim chance of convincing a dragon to leave their livestock alone, at least for a while, if they display a significant show of force or give a truly magnificent bribe.
All dragons are predators, but reds are the most voracious, consuming far more than they require. All dragons are greedy, but reds are avaricious beyond any point of reason, for they fully believe that all wealth belongs to those strong enough to take it (and no amount of wealth is ever enough). All dragons are prideful, but reds are arrogant in the extreme. They see themselves as the pinnacle of draconic perfection. Red dragons never forgive even the smallest slights. They kill over territorial intrusion, over the tiniest theft from their hoard, over an insult, or because they want to. These great beasts take satisfaction wherever and however they can get it. A red dragon unable to slay a person who offends it will go on a rampage, wreaking havoc and destruction upon any nearby communities. Only enormous monetary tributes can sate the legendary rage of a red dragon; only blood can cool and drown that rage.
Comparing the two of them side-by-side with these facts established across mainstream D&D lore, it is easy to figure out why Jarl Paxton has a white dragon at his command instead of a red dragon.
uhdictiveSUGAH I already know all of this, I was mainly just making a joke. because like a red Dragon is unreasonably greedy, I have unreasonable standards. if lord Paxton has anything under a blue then he's not intimidating. even a blue is barely acceptable.
also not trying to be nitpicky but I think you misheard something in the video as the jarl and paxton are two different people. paxton isn't the jarl.
Back in 1st Edition when we went through the frost giant part, a remorhaz tpk'd my party.
Kinda unrelatd, but it's very weird how after some sessions we dms think to ourselves: man, this session kinda sucked. Then you ask the players, and it's like it was the most fun they have had in their lives
Yep, that's certainly true sometimes. 😁
So, This is in my Werewolf campaign (and if some of you have read other comments involving this werewolf campaign, you'll know it's the one where the players decided they were the bad guys 75% of the way through, and also they broke my 'you can always run you know' encounter) and the party was sent to deal with a cave system full of kobolds. I'm not sure why they were, thinking back, but it was important to the plot. The plan was for them to go through the cave system, get maybe halfway through the second room, waist-deep in gnoll blood at this point (these were furred kobolds and had gnolls as cannon-fodder because they were nearly infinite, don't worry about it), and notice that the rival party that was supposed to be hunting them had found their location, and was closing in, having just reached the entrance. Give them a fight on two fronts y'know?
That decidedly did not happen. One of my characters had a backstory where he had been a kobold war wolf originally, only being turned into a Wer after he proved great ferocity once he had been lost and ended up in a forest. He spoke kobold. The mage did too but that's a different problem. So our archer instead decides to speak with the gnoll guards, in kobold, and command them to allow them past to speak with the kobold in charge. Success, he goes in, has a chat with them while the party is waiting outside. I figure 'screw it, the timeline is happening' and have the rival party attack and be caught off-guard by the fact that the players haven't killed a bunch of the gnolls yet.
What was originally going to be an absurdly large fight turned into the party escaping down the secret exit and eventually collapsing the entire hillside on their rival party (don't worry they lived, the players had agreed to give the rivals plot armour long before this).
There's also that time when the shaman got such a high-rolling critical (exploding damage dice) that he severely wounded a demigod in a duel to first blood to convince him to ally with them. Good times.
I as a dm still need more practice in writing dungeons and I have more experienced dm friends helping me with that.
But as far as soloing, I have a favorite story.
A tiefling named Malarai was a warlock with Asmodeus himself as his patron. The world was called Itruve (just a word scramble for virtue that kinda sounds latin cuz everything else is latin because of a church theme).
He finds weapons based on the seven deadly sins and oh boy do I still need to fix their balancing to make them more than magic items that can poke you.
So Malarai finds all seven weapons which turn out to be keys to find an entire city that had been locked away for a century or so.
The main villain, the lead priest for the country, follows him as Malarai has been unravelling his plan to have a perfect world that literally doesn't know sin (which ultimately harms everyone).
I underestimated a homebrew rule and overestimated my villain's build.
Malarai casts mirror clone on himself.
I have a house rule that says if you do damage under this spell, its multiplied.
He casts wall of fire. Which is now 4 walls of fire. And he's a warlock so these are upcast walls of fire.
The priest had brought his underlings with him.
Only two made it past the wall of fire. The priest did not. The two immediately surrendered. They just wanted to go home.
If you looking for help learning how to make dungeons you should check out my live streams. Most of the time we are creating adventures together. So I think it would probably help you at least see how the process works and all that good stuff.
Had expertise with deception, rolled two 1s triggering combat, then a 1, 2, 2, 3 and, long story short, the bard is dead in a chasm, my monk died in prison, the paladin remains jailed, and the fighter and warlock plan a rescue. Never before have things gone south so fast at our table.
Upside, new characters are fun
Thats a deep philosophical question my fiend.
I think you handled that well. I do feel a little sorry for the other players who were left behind, while the wizard was soloing it though.
Yes it was about 30 minutes in game where everyone else watched. Every so often that's okay but if it becomes a pattern thats a problem IMO. The other players were actyally enjoying the drama and hoping the wizard got killed. Lol
Once, right at the beginning of the lost mines of phandelver, I managed to convince all of the goblins at the cave to run away.
My DM allowed me to play a changeling, and using the shapeshifting, i became. A goblin and lied to them all about a group of mercenaries coming to clear them all out. After that, they all ran away, basically leaving just the boss there. After that, that DM didn’t let me play a changeling again
We had an adventure where we were expected to stealth our way into a stone giant lair, kill the leader and possibly recruit one of the other stone giant elders to our side and then make our way out unscathed. Only problem was that we had one character who A)Had an intense hatred of all giants. B)Was very stupid. Think Lenny from Of Mice and Men, as that's who the player based him on.
So my craft specialist wizard built helicopters(not actual helicopters), machine guns(actual machine guns) and enough mustard gas to kill...well, a mountain full of giants. We then recruited a team of mercenaries and went full Apocalypse Now on them.
Not sure why I'm sharing this, but the setup where everyone was talking made me think of it.
my group infiltrated a fort clamming that they are the health inspectors then proceed to get a tour or the place. What do you call a necromancer, a pyromancer , and a fighter covered in weapons of all types?: The Health Inspectors.
Dang. Such a good story. I love it.
Hey dm lair just found your channel and loving it so far... quick question have you done a video on custom races? And if not could you give some tips on introducing them? I've been introducing my semi aquatic race above the waves and in just curious if I've been doing it wrong the whole time.
I just realized that if that wizard told the Jaaral in private that Sebastian Venetia was really a double-crossing liar who sought Paxton's mantle and would go as far to say he was the "true advisor" of Lord Paxton before the frost giants left for war against the fire giants, that would have been a superior checkmate on your part as DM.
i had a creative paladin, they had a waterweird infested pool in front of them, the only way across is to swim, paladin cast create destroy war on the pool destroying it, but now they had a trench to cross, and no rope
There was the time we entered a dungeon with a major encounter being a T-Rex skeleton. The crazy rogue decided to re-enact Night at the Museum, and the DM rolled to see if that worked. It did, so now the party has a T-Rex skeleton as a pet. Also we were all drow and the boss of the dungeon attempted to Charm Person (AD&D 2e, elves are immune to charm spells)
And Darkness, to which drow can always say "You merely use the darkness. I was born in it, molded by it."
At the start of the vid I though the sign said "Death to ghosts!" And I was like "did the barbarian write that? Rewatched vid and noticed I got it wrong. So... go me?
Great stuff friend 👏 👍
Quick story
My first group ever, running through the level 1 part of Mines of Phandelver
My brother had rolled a very charismatic Half-Elf bard, who decided to transform himself into a goblin and bluff his way through the compound
He rescued the knight, got his gear and walked out like a boss, essentially skipping the whole thing in a few deception checks
I remember this one time our party accidentally did the dungeon backwards which made puzzles fun
How any playing days did all of that take?? Just to know if my games are too slow... Thanks for your videos, they have amazing content!
AAAHHHH Luke, you're a man of the culture. DMing like a god and eating pizza (which kind?)
So this happened to me recently, didn't solo a whole dungeon through bluffs, but I DID bypass a very hard encounter and get to do that same encounter later under much more favorable conditions.
My group is playing the descent into Avalon or whatever its called. And very early on there's a group of pirates you need to save your informant from. She's on the 2nd floor and they haven't found her yet, but will soon. So I hide her in a corner with a minor illusion to make it seem like a plain old wall. None of the pirates think to examine the wall on the 2nd floor for a secret door or anything, so they don't find her. I then befriend their leader over a consolation drink and tip him off that I saw her leave. Deception rolls abound as I convince him that she's going to be impossible to find in this hellhole of a city. The pirates leave empty-handed.
Of course, our informant wants them dead as payment for the info. So we do end up fighting them later, but ever the strategist I had also done some bluffing and gotten a warrant for their arrest put out, which gave us the info we needed in the short term, though not all of it since the party wasn't on board with hunting them down personally.
We later find the remainder of the pirate crew unwinding at the bathhouse we needed to investigate, there are 5 fewer pirates than before, and they are unarmed and unarmored. The party still didn't want to pick a fight, so I continued bluffing our way through things until we found the secret entrance we were looking for. At this point the pirates, sensing possible treasures abound, insist on us leaving the discovery to them.
FINALLY we fight them over this, but thanks to my series of bluffs and deceptions the pirates are STILL unarmored and unarmed. the two minion pirates go down before even reaching their weapons, and the leader only had his blade, no armor. AND we had a surprise round in which I Hexed him so I do more damage with each attack. The fight was an utterly one-sided slaughter of a boss enemy that was meant to drop at least a few of us (the encounter as written is HORRIBLY unbalanced for 1st level characters, like wtf Wizards of the Coast?).
And that is my most recent tale of just royally mucking up the campaign through clever lies and good rolls
I did a very similar thing when my group started Avernus. We encountered the pirates and they attacked our NPC. I am playing a Changeling Phoenix Sorcerer who has high deception skills at this time. I shout out that this isn't the person they are looking for, but she's my friend, Ellen Cleghorne; the person they are looking for went to the north district a short time ago after cheating us at dice. I roll a 23 with disadvantage. He falls for it and swears to kill me if I am lying. I leave the room and transform from an elf into a dwarf.
We leave the tavern and see his men across the street. Since I no longer look the same, they ignore us. We get to the bathhouse and find the secret entrance. We run into some cultists in the second room. They detect us and ask who is there. I shout out, "It's the plumber; I've come to fix the sink." *Rolls a 24 on Deception*
Unfortunately, one of the cultists rolled a 26 (the DM mentioned the number since we were shocked that he passed). We didn't avoid that fight but it came close. I have never really tried playing a character like this before. I really am enjoying it now that I am trying it though.
A dungeon master without backup plans? I guess you never learned that, was a different time back then.
Okay, so. This is technically a duo, but still a great story. Once in a dungeon, there was a large restaurant wrapped around an even bigger arena. In this arena, there was a legendary monster, but my party didn't know. Upon finding this out, my character (Barbarian named Aloysious, but we'll call him Al.) And my friend's character (Sorcerer named Sherllotte, but we'll call him S) told the others to find a way out of the arena. S decided to be mostly support sorcerer, and had healing and battlefield control spells. He cast spiderclimb on Al, who used that to run up the wall. In the 3 turns that Al ran up the wall, S was keeping the monster distracted with some fairly weak spells, but they kept the monster off of the other players. On Al's 4th turn of going up the wall, he didn't use the dash action, and instead decided to jump off the wall to land on the monster. Being 120 feet up, and having to leap about 50 feet over, this was bound to hurt if it didn't kill him. Al passed his athletics check, and then came the attack roll. He had decided that instead of just landing on it, he was going to land with his axe first. He was raging, at a reasonably high level, and we allowed him to add the falling damage to the attack because he hit the monster. Al rolled a natural 20 to hit, and rolled max damage on his axe. I don't remember correctly, but he did about 138 damage in one hit, then used his second attack to kill the beast. Doing in one turn 202 damage, and killing a legendary monster with a great plan, and even better execution. Al survived the encounter with only 4 hp left, and quite frankly, the party deserved a long rest after that. (We later lost Al to an ancient gold dragon after it picked him up, dropped him, landed on him, and used it's breath weapon directly on him. He did still solo the dragon by using his wand that S had given him to blast apart the ceiling, and crush the both of them.)
3:25 The Ordening is FR lore, Against the Giants is a Greyhawk adventure.
Nice story.
Not quite a solo, but my party find a wizards tower in a neat circle of sand in the middle of a grassy field. However, we can't find the entrance, so my friend and I use a grappling hook to climb the outside, and enter through the wizards harem and bed chamber on the top floors. We run into him in his lab the next level down, and we're all surprised. Luckily, I go first, crit, and silence the wizard with a stab to the throat. The other PC disarms the wand that our opponent withdrew, and then we proceeded to beat on this poor wizard that could only use potions or scrolls, that my buddy kept disarming. After that we start looting the body, and as his amulet is taken off the entire tower starts sinking into the sands. We then hurry back up, help free the girls he had taken, and watch the tower disappear, along with all the loot. It was great.
Good topic today
I can't be the only person that noticed that Raistlin is the wizard from Dragonlance
Jax' was a mischievous (damn nearly diabolical) half-grougach of the swamps. He'd grown up learning the ways of pit-fighters from a befriended (?) mul named Krin... AND in the early adventures, despite the ubiquitous discord between elves and dwarves, he'd earned a few "favors" from the Iron Mountain clans, including a genuine tolerance for Krin. Half-dwarves are often considered a bane to both human clans and dwarves.
{for those who don't know... the "mul" is practically always a child of rape, constituted from wars between desert clans of dwarves and humans. They're a mark of disgrace, since the husband wasn't available or strong enough to defend his wife, and the wife wasn't good enough to die before such an abomination... even if it meant suicide after the act... They're almost always raised as "another useless mouth to feed" until they can be thrown into pits to fight dogs over meat... a rather common if mundane betting game, especially among the traveling caravans. Bottom line? A mul doesn't know how to retreat. The pit has no where to go, so surprise, anger, or scare a mul, and you end up dead. They only know to go straight through what they fear... They're often considered too crude and reckless to be civilized... even by those who do not dwell in the deserts.}
_just to give an idea of the general attitudes, so even that any "half-blood" could win favor in a court was a feat of its own, getting a mul accepted openly in dwarven society was beyond_
Now, this isn't a clever fast talking method of "soloing" a dungeon, but rather a nuance about "flanking" the thing... When Jax's (more or less) adopted sister Kara was kidnapped and held in a stronghold somewhere in the Dark Elven (not Drow... since this was around the time Drow were factioning away from Dark Elves) Country to the North, Jax' called in a couple of those favors, and convinced the dwarves a tunneling "spur" from nearby caverns was the perfect ruse to undermine the ENTIRE Dark Elven castle... Then he simply made his way to the Court...
Upon Jax's entry, the King scoffed at him, "A fine brother, taking near a month to show. Do you even care about this sister of yours?"
Jax' shrugged. "Do you care a damn about your men, your women, your court, and your palace?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Demanded the Crowned Ruler.
"You have two hours, and Kara best be returned unharmed." Jax' responded. "One minute late, or even such as a hair out of place, and I'll drop your palace to a shambles in a deep smoldering pit."
"You are in no position to command me!" The King retorted. "I do not take orders in my own Palace and Home, half-bred swamp whelp!"
"Two hours," Jax' repeated, and turning, he proceeded to cut down the two guards who'd quietly been posted near the double doors. "You've been warned." AND in a blink, he was gone.
Obviously, this was setting up the king for the fall. It was supposed to be the "bluff" getting called. Everyone at the table knew there was no possibility a King would take such an order from an outsider in his own court... BUT that was the point. Two hours and five minutes later, Jaxon was casting "Stone to Mud" for the critical support under the Palace, over-loading the surrounding crust and stone according to his dwarven engineers (who know stone like no other)... AND in a collossal crashing rumbling collapse, the palace and all the royal family of the North Clans of Dark Elves was no more...
The Duke of Vinterlandt, where Kara was being held, heard of the catastrophe around a day later, and riders were dispatched in short order, with Kara and an emissary, to negotiate Jax's approval of the Duke taking the Crown left vacant, unless of course, there was to be no such accord... Along with Kara, a Coach fit for royalty, and four fine horses were granted, including a knowledgeable driver in case Jax' preferred some instruction or the added hand in travels.
Rather than simply take and leave, however, Jax and Kara dubiously decided to return to the Duke's Keep in Vinterlandt, seeking audience, and being quite polite about it. They discussed with the Duke exactly what the social and political ramifications were, surrounding this coronation, and everyone decided that it was wiser for the Duke to take leadership of the North Clans (well... what was left of them) rather than the unseemly appearance of a half-blood and his mul doing so... Jax didn't care for courtly matters anyway... only preferring to measure the Duke up as a leader before deciding on whether or not to pursue war... or assassination if needs be.
In the end, between the Duke and Jax', cooler heads prevailed and the Dark Elves that had remained "topside" were to continue a relatively peaceable dynasty. After that little stunt, since Nobles of all kinds pay attention to word of a house falling without regard to race or geo-political affiliations, word got around of Jax's remarkable response to his sister being kidnapped... Two things happened after that.
1. Nobody bothered threatening or taking prisoner anyone who kept Jax's company regularly.
2. When Jax' went to seek audience, nobles pretty much allowed him any damn where he wanted. Guards wouldn't have stopped him if they'd been ordered more than half the time...
AND who could blame them? He was the guy who threatened to obliterate a Palace, and promptly followed through on such a delivery!
When flanking isn't exactly in the cards, "undermine". ;o)
So if I was a rogue I would have tailed the wizard either using an invisibility spell or by keep a far distance, and then go back to the party to inform them on what happened so we could act as a group or if I was the wizard I would have summoned a familiar to inform the party
Yay for Raistlin!
My party did this with goblins, but the goblins thought they wanted to join the goblin's group. The party ended up raiding the town they are attempting to protect. Oh well, it was still fun.
didn't waterdeep have protection from dragons? or am i just imagining that lore part...
I really want to know! Please, if somebody knows, answer me. ☺️
Yes, it does. The dragon-staff of Ahghairon. The open lord can make exceptions though.
@@goldenurg1578 thanks
Fun story from me, very short , very simple It was a mess. A catastrophe, the party split. The dm let it happen, the part formed two factions. I managed to use .. a lot of leverage against the cult of pyromaniac mages.. that I.. also a pyromaniac mage, but not a member of their cult, was there, to warn them of the crazed wizard, and barbarian.. who happened to be rending through their entire fortress alone- just the barbarian that is. Anyway. Turns out the barbarian had a quirk the dm gave the char to be really strong sort of, for dealing with magic users, but would be essentially berserk, uncontrolled.
While the dungeon was solo'd, in the sense I got the entire place to turn on the other party, the barbarian sliced down everyone and the evil wizard managed to get out, and burn everyone inside alive, the irony that is. Also the higher level mages just dimension'd door their asses right out of there once they realized they couldn't do anything. This really all started because we had a Lawful Good char in the party and a Lawful Evil character in the party. Both in-game and out of character they wouldn't stop fucking with each other. The lawful evil mage, was actually bound and forced to reside within in inanimate object.
The bard, who remained neutral, and also extremely wealthy behind our wildest dreams, had more money, more influence, more power, simply because he knew what to do in his downtime. He managed to pay an obscence price, bluff, bribe, and convince an npc to unseal the much hiugher level character, the dm allowed to exist in the party. The dm himself did not expect it to succeed, infact, the person playing the character did not want his character let out of the prison, But in-character the Bard was to fascinated and interested in unleashing a bit of chaos in the world. Always looking for a way to spice things up.
The short version is, some metagaming made this mess h appen, and while I pulled some fine natural 20 rolls to convince the cultists to do something, and leverage my knowledge on the planes of fire (Which I actually had a relevent chunk of points shoved into [3.5]) It was wild. Sadly, despite the recovery, the dm was like "Well they don't know you and shit really has hit the fan, so the remaining members of the cult, just dimension door themselves out, leaving you to burn alive." Which, as you imagine kind of sucks. Gotta say tho. It was really fun.
The ordning is
Hill
Stone
Fire
Frost
Cloud
Storm
So I can totally see frost giants bullying some stone giants into working for them but fire and frost are technically even in the ordning so that one seems a stretch to me, but then again a lot of the team ups that WOTC uses in their modules and stuff doesn't really make much sense to me
So I typically prepare more than I should for a campaign just in case something like this happens
What's the image you've used in the thumbnail?
Deception/Intimidation/Persuasion checks can be OP, and should only be allowed sparingly. It just makes it way to easy for the party's "face" to get way with absurd stuff. Further it can get boring for the players who would like to fight stuff, and can result in certain players getting more than their fair share of "spotlight" time. Also, anyone can attempt those checks, since it's not class restricted. Generally, I only allow two players to make an attempt per situation. Also, you should explain to your younger viewers who the original Raistlin was.
Yes I totally agree. This isn't the sort of thing that would be happening a lot in my games. Because you're totally right it takes the fun away from the rest of the group who doesn't really get to do anything as one person take the Limelight.
majority of the time i am improvising when i dm. but i do plan out certain things
Can we get a session on 1 on 1 adventures?
I’m doing one now where I’m attempting to capture and persuade enough hirelings that mini combat should work like a war game once or twice a session.
I’ve also had hours long 1 on 1 sessions with so much story building and world exposure that there’s almost no dice rolls
Others focus on a single character, their personality and cunning, and an environmental survival session.
this was inspiring; thx
Note:
You have a split party and let the 2 groups know what is going on, even though the PCs shouldn't know.
I run such splits by writing notes and not allowing the players to talk about what is in the notes.
There are dice rattling which may or may not mean combat.
"Roll a D20 and then 2D8, write the numbers down, say nothing. These rolls are meaningless. Pass the note back."
In a Star Wars D6 campaign taking place in the Mandalorian Wars... we had this human join up with us at one point (a friend joined the campaign). He was a gambler and a smooth talker with very good social skills in the system. We try to maneuver an illegal drug cartel because we’re supposed to murder the leader. This guy convinced them that their leader hired us and got us through level after level of the dungeon until we were face to face with the guy himself XD. So we just ya know... took care of that guy and immediately took over the cartel. It was great.
How did you convince the cartel to follow you? Weren't there layers and layers of heirachy and underlings ready to jump in and vie for power too?
the DM Lair well when you see a bunch of Mandalorians devastate your membership the fear is substantial for loyalty building XD
I should mention it was a party of six and we had better gear even though they had the numbers advantage.
i had this one character in a "mash-up" campaign talk a white dragon into killing itself (i rolled decent for a 5th lvl, DM rolled a 1) after being the only member of the party left alive after getting through the dungeon, so the DM mashed a bunch of different universes in to this world (D&D, Bleach, Dragon Ball, Star Wars) and the party was supposed to confront the dragon and pay a tithe from the locals, however the dragons underlings had decided to attack us, by the time my PC made it to the dragon the others were dead he was out of spells (3.5 Sor) and blood thirsty for vengeance (one of the PCs was his close Sister another his best friend), after some dialog i drew my weapon and the dragon asked "whats that" i said this is a wish scope (bluff like 23, his sense motive nat 1) "oh hows it work?" "well you look into the dark hole and hit the button on the side and it shows you what you truly desire and how to get it easily" "give me that and you can leave here alive" "....ok, if thats the only way", dragon activates a lightsaber to the eye, that was the last time the DM mixed universes
Okay that is just awesome
@@ienglishwell3374 thanks, ive been known to have my moments
This is about as true to Raistlin’s character from the books as could be 😶
I’ve never seen this happen because when one player goes off the others always get impatient and do something that messes things up. It’s a game for all the players not just one, so they feel like they have to do something. Even the characters work against this because few players create patient or cautious characters.
That's hilarious, and a good DMing tip. How did you handle the XP rewards for these shenanigans?
I use milestone. One milestone was ending the frost giant threat. They achieved it when they actually ended the threat.
In Curse of Strahd the adventure has really interesting random encounters but some of them seem kinda dangerous for a low lvl party. Should I scale them down or leave it be to make it seem more like a real dangerous world?
Curse of Strahd is supposed to be a high-risk high-reward campaign setting. Setting that tidbit aside, just use your own discretion. Scale it down to where you think the players would still have a challenging yet survivable experience and bump it up to adjust accordingly.
12:58 Oooooh yoooou. lol
So, story from my first Dungeons and dragons campaign. My players accidentally break through the wall of an area they weren’t supposed to reach yet. So they found a cave full of lava, and an ancient red dragon. Now, you would think that that would be the end of my level 6 party, right? But no, instead they manage to activate a massive teleportation circle that was meant to take them to safety at the end of the dungeon and away from the dragon, instead the wizard cast fireball to burn down the wooden ceiling supports, trapped the dragon in the circle, and teleported it to a nearby gathering of about a hundred other adventurers where the party was currently camped, who promptly decimated it.
Sorry, I'm not trying to criticize, since mispronouncing a word means you encountered it via reading (which is a good thing) but Jarl is a Scandinavian word with a liquid "J", so "Yah rl" is technically correct. But hey, Jarl and Chiefchin go well together ;)
Yes Jarl and Chiefchin are perfect allies! 😂
There are rails? It's been so long since my party has seen them I forgot.