Dungeons and Dragons Story - Failure Is Always An Option

So yes, even at 50 I enjoy playing Dungeons and Dragons with my wife, son and a good group of friends. We meet up about once a week and game. We've run many campaigns with different characters and different DMs.

Our latest adventure has us playing some low level (4th) characters. We thought it would be fun as we'd just got done doing a campaign with some epic level 30 characters. Nothing like suddenly having a character that if it sneezes wrong will die.

Beginning of this week, we sat down and we thought the night would be pretty normal.

Wrong....we were horribly wrong.

First, a little background:

When we play, we use a fumble chart, with a roll on the d20 of 1 being a fumble. There is no "official" fumble charts with D&D 3.5 which is what we play. Instead, we have the fumble as a house rule and a homebrewed fumble chart. Makes the game more interesting, instead of just saying you missed if you roll that 1.

Well, we shall forever call the other night "Night Of The Fumbles", as it seemed lady luck had abandoned us, and the fumbles came out of the wood work.

We ended up running into a Corrupter of Fate.......never fought one of them....and I never want to fight one again.

I'll let my dwarven fighter Blaleck tell you about it......





As the evening deepens a pair of tired travelers walk into a crowded inn. After getting a couple of mugs of ale, they look for a place to sit, seeing only a spot at a table where a rather grumpy looking dwarf is. Wanting to get off their feet, the travelers shrug and sit down at the table. The dwarf grunts a greeting, then begins talking to them:



"What's this now? Couple of travelers? Didja come from the north or south? South isn't? Headed North? Ah ye don' want to be headed that way, most of the towns along the way have been burnt to the ground. Hellfire Wyrm is on the loose up there. I was part of a group sent to deal with the beastie.....

"What's that? No....no I'm afraid we didn't take the beast out. In fact, we never got close to the beast. We met something worse along the way.

"Oh I see your eyes and the disbelief in them, but it's true. Something much worse. I'll tell the tale to ye both. Mordiran knows if you'd ever come across this other beast. Ye need to be warned. If you see it: run! Run as fast as you can away from it. It be cursed I tell you. Cursed!

"Our group held a young paladin, a eleven bard, a half-orc barbarian, an eleven ranger, some shifty looking human, and two dwarfs, me and another fellow fighter.

"We'd finally figured out where the lair of the damn Wyrm was, down in some cave. We came upon a door that we needed to go through, and that's when our troubles started, when that damn whelp of a paladin decided to kick in the door. It was trapped! Some blue looking gas came out. We all backed out of the way, but that idiot paladin got a lungful and fell to the ground not moving. Some damn paralyzing gas."



"We trussed him up on our pack mule at the end of our line and pressed on down the hallway that was beyond the door. We came upon a room that held this new beastie from hell. A Corrupter of Fate is what some scholar here in town told me it was."



"Big damn ugly beast. He surprised us and snuck a blow in on Grogg our half-orc, stunning him. I swung at it, but somehow my blow missed. Our bard, Bretera started to sing her magic and I could feel the melody fill my veins of my blood with the urge to fight."



"Our ranger pulled back on his bow and let loose an arrow......

"It missed the beastie and hit me instead. Damn elf shot me in the ass! I'm still having a hard time sitting because of that! What? Wipe those smirks off your faces before I wipe them off for you!....that's better.....where was I? Oh yes.....

"We all started trying to fight this thing, but nothing worked! We kept missing! Worse, the damn shady fellow that was with us, he tried to pull some damn fancy move.

"Not only did he miss, he cut poor Grogg's head off! Poor Grogg...we'd traveled together a lot...

"Now his head was rolling around on the floor! As if that was not bad enough, the human fighter we had took a swing and missed too

.......he missed and cut my fellow dwarf Glant's arm completely off!

"Poor Glant.....he won't be holding his axe proper any time soon.

"Well next that damn ass shooting elf ranger was able to land some arrows in this beastie. That really ticked it off. It swung out and hit the human fighter, breaking his back. He went to the floor like a sack of potatoes. The human fighter tried to fight back, but somehow his sword slipped and cut his own nose off!

"Quit that snickering. Poor lad will be making babies and ladies scream if they look at him. Where was I? Oh yes, the beast had turned to finish off that poor human, showing his back to me. I was able to sink my axe into his back and he dropped to the floor dead.

"Needless to say, there was not any way we could continue our quest at that point. Time to make a hasty retreat. That's also when I decided to part company with that lot. Just felt like they was cursed.

"I see you two still smirking. Smirk all you want, but remember this:

"Failure is ALWAYS an option!"

Damn elf shot me in the ass! I'm still having a hard time sitting because of that!

Oh, yes sir. Bit me right in the buttocks. They said it was a million dollar wound, but the army must keep that money 'cause I still haven't seen a nickel of that million dollars.

-- Forrest Gump

I think we've all had nights like that at the table. Nights when we want to throw the dice as far as we can. I think I've had characters so unlucky, I've actually built them so it wouldn't matter if they consistently rolled below 5 on a d20 ... their luck was that bad.

a reply to: ketsuko

This critter was bad. He's got this special ability called "Unluck"

It makes you have to roll twice to hit, and you have to use the lower number. Then, if you do hit, you have to roll damage twice and again, use the lower number.

The problem we had was: we kept rolling 1's the 2nd time around trying to hit it.

Shawn, our DM was laughing. I told him that we were suppose to be fighting easy stuff. He said he was drunk when he made this campaign up....and that apparently he's a mean drunk, hehehe.

a reply to: eriktheawful

S and F and applause if I could!!!

Thank you for taking me on that journey with you!
That must of been one hell of a great session! I think it's awesome you play with your son as well.

It's kinda crazy the way the game was vilified in the early 80s.. a cooperative game that involves imagination and problem solving..You would think it would have been encouraged.

Anyway thanks for sharing and bringing back fond memories .

Respectfully,
~meathead

Good story. Play long enough and one's bound to pick up a few. Here's one of my own.

We were playing Ravenloft back in 2nd edition times. One regular player with us always made the wrong decisions, consistently, to the point it just became expected. The party had been invited for a "dinner" at Strahd's castle. The characters had just been sucked into Ravenloft and didn't think this was unusual. Skipping the unnecessary parts, Failureboy failed some rolls and ended up falling down a hole and dying. Sucks but it happens. So instead of just leaving he pulled out another character he already had rolled up and asked the DM if he could just shove him in the dungeon somewhere.

We finally found a place for him... a room full of giant spiders. The DM figured he could be wrapped up in webbing affixed to the ceiling (and thus out of combat) and we could discover him after the fight.

Somehow we all managed to forget we were traveling with a pyromaniac mage... We were winning the fight and down to the last spider, wounded it retreated upwards to the web covered ceiling. Pyromaniac mage lets loose a fireball to the ceiling to burn the webs hoping the spider will fall and maybe take some burning damage. It worked. The spider burned up and died.

But the webbing holding up Failureboy also burned causing him to fall to the ground. Between the fire damage and falling damage, he would have died again. DM offered a dex check to maybe roll and cut some of the damage down, crit fumble... True death again.

Enraged the player threw his d20 at the ground, it split in two and both halves went flying. We kept them in the communal dice stockpile for years as a reminder... poor guy. He once went through an entire family in one session. Mother, father and two sons.

So it goes.

I've got a few good stories of this guy if you're interested.

mistake

Thanks for the memories of countless weekend nights. From the original Swords and Spells , Chainmail , and Eldritch Wizardry through AD&D 3.5

Thank you for sticking to 3.5.

Love d&d although dont get much time to play like i used to.

a reply to: Somethingsamiss

We tried playing using 5.0 a while ago, was not that happy with it.

Most of us in our group were used to 3.5, and a few of us are old enough to remember getting our first Basic Box Set back in the early 1980s and play 1.0 - aka "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons"

3.5 are the only rules for me. That being said, I am a hardcore DDO player. I think They did a great job translating PnP into an online platform.
I can tell who plays PnP and who walked in thinking they were just playing a video game in less than a minute.... its all about the numbers.

If you havent tried it.... you should roll up a toon and if you can look past the graphics and see the dice rolling underneath .... you just might have some fun.
Zimnydran, Human, 2 Rogue/18monk
Clumsyoof, human, 2 monk/18 cleric
Orion Server, Member of Legends of Orion

I think the best/worst one we had was the epic compilation of a long-running campaign. My husband had put together a nice series of adventures for myself and two of our friends in college.

We were playing Legends of the Five Rings, a pseudo-Samurai type adventure game. The three of us had run the same trio of characters up to fairly high level, and the game was culminating in the incorporation of seige-style published module that incorporated waves of mass battle with lots of corrupted Shadowlands denizens, undead, and oni. Teikiatsu had tuned the mod to focus on our characters so it wasn't run straight up. I think two of us had "Great Destiny" advantages, and the other had some other heroic background on board.

And this was supposed to be it.

Two of us had had our own shining moments in the sun leading charges like heroes, facing down giant oni in single combat ...

Now it was "Little Buddy's" turn (our friend had made the only character who wasn't "large" so he was normal size with two overly tall characters; hence, the nickname). He was something of a duelist and called out a general of the other side before the gates to give everyone time to organize a defense to keep the gates from getting crashed.

Now, L5R works on a dice pool system, so you're operating on a bell curve, not a straight die roll. It gives you the advantage of having a better idea of what you can and can't get away with and what your odds might be. He *should* have been able to do it even on a straight roll with a reasonable chance. But the player was taking NO chances. It was do or die!

He loaded every advantage he could to get dice and keep dice ...

And ...

He rolled. And the room was silent ... until the cussing began.

Never seen so many 1s in a die pool roll in my life. He'd lost. Soundly.

Now, Teikiatsu can be a brutal GM, but he sort of needed that to come out a bit differently. So he gave a re-roll. The next roll was worse! We worked hard to salvage that scenario and our "little buddy." I forget how we managed it, but it happened although 'little buddy" came out with a permanent wound and some other scarring from that. I'm not sure the player ever recovered.

The recent campaign that we'd done with the epic level 30 characters was interesting, I'd never played anything that high before.

Our DM had pre-rolled the characters he wanted us to play (takes quite a LONG time to roll up a 30th level character, heh).

I was given a 30th level Rogue halfling to play. In a previous campaign, I'd been playing a Kender, pretty much cracking everyone up with my antics. Kender are not in 3.5, but we found a conversion online and the DM allowed it.

Only problem was: we didn't really do any dungeon crawling, and there was not a whole lot for my 30th level Rogue to do.

My wife was given a spell caster, it was multi class, level 15 wizard / level 15 druid, and of course she was handed a book for it's spells.
Thing was: my wife doesn't like playing spell casters. She likes to play Rangers using bows.

My son was given a Arcane Archer to play. One of his abilities was to put 10 arrows on 10 different targets at once....nifty ability there. But then the DM said he couldn't put all 10 arrows on the same target......which when you think about it makes no sense at all. If you can put 10 arrows on 10 different targets and once, then you certainly should be able to put all 10 arrows on a single target.

One of our other players was given a barbarian to play. Problem is: he didn't know how to play it. He thought barbarians were stupid....but that's not true, they're not really stupid, they are just not socially refined, use a fork to eat, or dabble in poetry.
Needless to say, we kept getting into trouble because he kept playing his character like a moron.

I will say it was entertaining though.

a reply to: eriktheawful

We had another friend try an all kinder campaign ... lasted about two sessions.

Took the party about five minutes to come up with the "kinder game." The party would role into a town, the townsfolk would react to 6 kinder predictably, and the kinder would also react! We'd throw up our hands, shout "Ah! Kinder!" and run into the nearest houses. It was the best fun ... not very conducive the getting the campaign to move along though.

Then there was our healer who had no real idea how his skills worked. He did know that one time he shoved grass in someone's mouth and they got better, so that's how he healed folk from then on.

I don't think that's how kinder were necessarily supposed to work, but that's how the GM decided they would go.

a reply to: ketsuko

What was cool for me playing my Kender was the fact that Kender were not really known in the world we were playing with our DM....they just assumed I was a regular halfling.

After a trip to a city's local magic shop, where I'd walked out with about 20 different items that weren't paid for, I was headed to a temple, where the DM had some epic items.

He actually made a gigantic gelatinous cube appear inside the temp so I couldn't get in! The temple ended up destroyed in the end, all because he didn't want my Kender to get his hands on some of the stuff in there!

Our party leader would make me empty out my bags at the end of each day.....normally filled with various items belonging to all the other party members. Too much fun!

a reply to: eriktheawful
Damn that was funny. The fumble chart sounds interesting.

a reply to: eriktheawful
Playing a Kender where nobody knows about them would be a blast. I don't have any good Kender stories. Just once we were playing Planescape with a Kender and Githyanki on the team and the Kender stole his silver sword. That was one of the funnies in-game arguments I've ever heard. Shame I don't remember it.

On you guys talking rulesets, anybody ever play 2nd edition Player's Option? It broke every ability stat down into two sub-stats. It was a little clunky but really let you dig into customizing your character a bit more. That was probably my favorite system until 3.5.

originally posted by: Mike Stivic
a reply to: eriktheawful

S and F and applause if I could!!!

Thank you for taking me on that journey with you!
That must of been one hell of a great session! I think it's awesome you play with your son as well.

It's kinda crazy the way the game was vilified in the early 80s.. a cooperative game that involves imagination and problem solving..You would think it would have been encouraged.

Anyway thanks for sharing and bringing back fond memories .

Respectfully,
~meathead

Great story. Brought back lots of memories.

It was unfortunate about the 1980's . The Christian Fundamentalists were against it because it encouraged a belief in "Magic". The crime fiction writers jumped on the opportunity to write stories about suicides of players who had lost their best characters.

Used to play "nethack", the UNIX game. Getting close to finishing the early version which finished at level 26), I'd gone to the supermarket stocked up with crisps and soft drinks in anticipation of spend the evening finishing off the last three levels. Went home, got the PC fired up, drinks and crisps set out. Started exploring level 23, and being fully kitted out, fell down a trap door and all the way down to the unlit level 26. Various of my belongings fell down behind me. Then still dazed and confused, my charactet got up, stumbled around, walked into the Balrog, and killed it instantly. Some of the other items had fallen on top of it and taken nearly all of its HP. The game finished in less than 10 minutes, leaving me with a whole evening of work.

a reply to: stormcell

I was living in Naples, Italy from 1981 until 1985....I heard about the whole: "Don't play that game it's evil" thing, but never actually encountered it.

From 1985 on I was in the US Navy myself, and can tell you now we spent a LOT of time gaming while floating around on the oceans when off duty with not much else to do, heh.

a reply to: stormcell

That was Teikiatsu's parents. That's why when I met him, he was playing things like Rifts.

He and his friends would meet and play Rifts and TMNT and other Palldium games and then they could truthfully tell their parents they weren't playing D&D even though they were still gaming.

I've played a lot of different systems, and I honestly do prefer them to the D&D rules.

Got such a smile and a laugh from this post, great stories. I haven't played pnp for a year or so and must have a game, now I am itching too. We play AD&D 2 and D&D, and have a home made fumbles chart with results rolled on percentile dice. It has had some detrimental effects over the years, one time a certain uber magic weapon I had just obtained sliped into a pool of larva grr.

Kicking in doors never ends up well for my parties. Paladins, don't get me started ran one in a party a long time ago and he turned in the rest of the party to the town guards, for breaking into houses on recon to gather information. Ended that adventure. I have a love of playing crazy little dwarfs, gnomes and halflings they do not meld well with law abiding human Paladins.

Have only played 3.5 on D&D online I used to play on Thelanis server in a guild it was a lot of fun but nothing like pnp.