Friendship is Dragons
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Page 188 - High Roller
Author Notes:
For the guest author's note, I was given a very long, strange, self-deprecating rant that I'm not going to include in its entirety, but it did contain this very unique bit...
Guest Author's Note:
"Here's a song. I need the practice, as I've taken up the role of a bard in one of my d&d campaigns. The tune should be familiar to you all. I apologize in advance either way. Ahem.
"Friendship is Dra~gons.
Friendship is Dra~gons.
Aaa~h.
Friendship is Dragons,
I wished that I could play some D&D (Friendship is Dragons)
Then you showed the player's handbook to me.
Big Adventures,
Tons of loot.
A beautiful larp,
faithful and wrong.
Sharing buffs now
is a single feat.
And magic makes it all complete,
because Friendship is Dragons.
Did you know you are my very fi~rst group?
"Now get out of here. Oh, wait. This isn't my home. OK, loiter here as long as you want. Don't expect free food. Chances are, I ate it."
On the way back to town he figured he cut me a break so we stumbled upon a tree with +1 swords growing out of it, all we needed was to do a athletic check.
Fail.
"save vs bleeding"
Success!
"Your now at half health, but avoided the shock."
I swear d20s all can make that peace sign AJ's die does.
Man, it's no fun when your dice get cursed. The group I play with are so superstitious of it that we refuse to even let the GM's dice come into contact with ours, lest the doom aura his evil, evil, EVIL dice exude contaminate them. Heck, his wife even salts his dice on a regular basis.
My wife autopsied the die and found a huge airpocket near the lower-end numbers. Suddenly we had context.
(Easy to build, hard to get licensed for home use. X-ray tubes are not toys.)
Not that X-rays aren't cool, but as you said, they're not toys.
EDIT: D'oh, I'm an idiot. I thought this was the comment thread about the cooked dice. Disregard my previous statement.
The water glass test, where you take a tall glass of water and release the die just below the surface. Do this a few times with the die starting in different orientations and you will quickly see if there is a heavy/light spot.
Bad joke I know.
p.s. I've been here senice comic 50.
You can guess what happened. Soaring Song constantly and unendingly rolls high, and tends to be 24/7 epic.
The dice love to troll players.
I try to encourage my dice to have a sense of humour. Ill-timed failure is fine if it's accompanied by unlikely success, as long as neither happens too consistently. It's also why I roll in the open.
Warning: The event I am about to describe happened. Liberties have been taken with dialogue as I no longer recall exactly what I said."
One night, I had a player outnumbered 2 to 1 by enemies. The first one attacked, rolled a 20, and the player winced.
"Don't worry," I assured him, "That was a minion," which meant that it didn't cause more damage on a critical hit.
Then I rolled an attack for the second creature, and it was a 20 again.
"No, it's okay," I assured the player again. "This attack just pulls you toward the monster. It does no damage. It's a minor action though, so it gets to follow up by attempting to spear you."
Another 20.
"...This just wasn't your round."
Just grey.
We have a general rule of thumb in my Tatters game. Well I do. Derp Eyes McSpellcaster is not allowed to roll sense motive on plot important NPCs, and KN:Arcana, even if it is his cutie mark, is not allowed on plot relevant artifacts that might activate on a nat 1.
Dang, that's impressive.
I once dueled my DM: My d100 versus his d20. He won best out of five.
There are times, "Does not play well with others," is a measure of bad luck rather than personality.
Not even joking, he turned to me at least two rounds later and said "trust me" when I was almost dead.
Gave me an imaginary friend who looked like a skeleton and constantly berated me for everything I did.
He was evil, but really bad at it. He kept insisting that he was the ultimate force of darkness and would doom the world, and then engage in semi-polite conversation for a bit.
His name was Murry.
The problem is their well-earned name: The Cursed Dice.
(Guess who forgets his own set more than anyone else >.<)
Finally my spell is maxed out at 9d6 dice of damage and I fire it off into the group of mooks! I roll for damage and...
10 Fire.
Me: "Alright, I'll have Alcazar start reading. *roll* 14."
DM: "After a few chapters, you come across a description of the place you are looking for!"
Me: "Great! I'll keep reading then. *roll* Whoops, a nat 1."
Group: "Uh oh..."
DM: "In your excitement at finding some information, you accidentally tear out the relevant pages."
Me: "Crud. Ok then, I guess I'll try to put the pages back before I try reading them again. *roll* ... what."
DM: "Ooh, and that's another nat 1. As you reach for the pages, a gust of wind blows past you, sending the pages into a nearby torch."
Group: "Alcazar..."
And now not only is Alcazar banned from any plot-devices, we have a saying in the group: "Every two nat 1's a plot point dies."
Alc gets 11. Mares beat him up.
...
yeah, Alc wins worst rolls.
Also, 11 is still higher than 1, 2, or 3. Alcazar may have dealt with the consequences, but Scrapper still got the lower roll.
Not that I've actually tried that yet. >_>
But then when I get to roll for myself using my dice, I can't help but feel like everyone's going to think I'm cheating every time I roll higher than 12- which is a lot more frequently.
edit: Ninja'd by Bronymous. Curses!
As for personal experience: Pony Team Bravo failed pathetically at trying to get a carriage in Appleoosa, as we were unable to convince them we needed it. The events right after that further cemented the deal, but luckily didn't actually affect us, as prepared for it.
Context: We need to get to a changeling hive to steal/retrieve an artifact from them. The closest town to the hive was Appleoosa. We decide to rent a carriage for the desert trip.
We attempt to haggle the rent price down, as well as conceal the fact that they'll probably never see the carriage again after we visit Changelingland.
First, Green Horn attempts to spin a tale about how we're looking for rare plants in the desert. Cue Natural 1. We try to salvage the situation, saying we're geologists looking for oil. We roll again, they aren't buying it. We finally give up and just tell them that we're on an important mission. Natural 1 again. Skill challenge ends with two nat1's and a failure.
What happens after that is the best/worst thing anypony could do in a campaign.
Our resident nutter, "Unknown Answer", decided to use his "Element of Laughter" ability, coupled with "The Fun Has Been Doubled", causing two d100 events to happen in succession. DM asks him to point at something/somepony, he points at Mouse, our klepto/psycho pony.
Results:
- Mouse is set on fire, but the fire isn't harming her. Essentially, she looks like Twilight after she blew her fuse and lit herself on fire.
- Mouse gets a feeling of dread as something omnious is summoned to her location, at DM's choice.
The thing that gets summoned? "Kitten". A Sugarcube Corner-sized, eldritch abomination, that Mouse befriended/pacified/mentally bonded with/puppy-dog eyed into submission two sessions prior using "The Stare".
"Kitten" fall right on top of Mouse, almost knocking her out. This extinguishes her flames, but causes them to burn "Kitten" in the process.
As a result, "Kitten" is hurt by the fire and starts rampaging, destroying Appleoosa and causing havoc.
We realize we need to fix it. We all decide to enact an insane plan: Transform Kitten with magic into a pony to save the town. We used a pearl artifact to augment the spell, amplifying it (we learned of this property during a train ride, where a faint "echo" spell was amplified, breaking all the windows on the train and nearly deafening us). The one doing the roll could critically fail on a 1, 2, or 3 roll, we staked a lot of things on this.
Our roll? A natural 1.
LUCKILY, we used a "failsafe" spell right before, which lets us reroll a natural 1. Whew! After that, we rolled rather high, allowing us to transform "Kitten" into a pony foal.
Our troubles were not over, however. We then had to run from a pitchfork-style mob, as "Kitten" practically erased Appleoosa from existance. We roll to run away. Two of us stumble and are about to be caught, one of them being Mouse, who was carrying "Kitten" with her.
In desperation, we throw a stick of dynamite to delay the mob.
We realize that our two friends would be caught in the blast. One of them is teleported away, while Mouse and Kitten are quickly rescued from the explosion, Matrix style.
Our DM later said that if we had kept the natural 1 of that roll, and he rolled high enough, we'd pretty much doom the world right there.
Also, I still think it's funny that Green Horn couldn't even convince the guy of his actual job.
With the Green Ranger incident, you rolled a nat20. I could have had you fight your later teammate but the complaints I would get about ignoring a nat20 wouldn't be worth it :)
The Giant Enemy Crab fight was poorly thought out but yes, consistently rolling low with d10 and d12 is frustrating.
Apparently botching eating a sandwich results in you accidentally sticking it in your own eye.
Having had RL sandwich-fumbles, I can believe it.
Most memorable wierd dice ju-ju (not a fumble): The Realms campaign half a lifetime ago.
A recurring NPC was an entity called the Riddling Reaver (yes, that one). He didn't want to kill us per se; he just wanted to make things more _interesting_ (he's been described as "the original wild mage", and is pretty much a demigod of chaos). To that end, he'd often show up and offer us a gamble of some form or other (when he wasn't just teleporting my character into another dimension for the fun of it).
On this particular occasion, he offered us draws from a Deck of Many Things.
Good things happened to us if we drew good cards.
If we drew bad cards, bad things happened to our *friends* (the other PCs).
One character drew "powerful extraplanar enemy". This was our party's wild mage (who thought the Reaver was loads of fun). He successfully made the case that his NPC friend, Doug, should count as a candidate.
The DM rolled the die in front of us to pick the target. It came up as Doug.
A few days later, during a parade, a portal opened, a huge demon reached out, grabbed Doug, bit his head off, smiled, and closed the portal.
Thus died our third Doug (he was our campaign's Kenny, mostly through sheer bad luck).