-10 HP.

[gridlore]

Gary Gygax has failed his last saving throw.

For those of us of a certain age, D&D was, if not the first, one of our early gaming experiences. Yes, the man could be an opinionated bastard, but he was a creative, generous, opinionated bastard. And that makes the difference.

So, as we gather at the tavern to wait for the inevitable adventure hook to walk through the door, relate you favorite D&D tale. In character, table talk, odd events with dice.. whatever.

You enter a 10x10 room, an orc is guarding a chest...

Comments

+5 Frying Pan of Bard Slaying

[dalen-talas.livejournal.com]

I was running a game based on Russian fairy tales. One of the characters was a lecherous catwere Thief / Mage (he was supposed to be a bard, but my D&D manual was a hand-rewrite from a copy of a printout and was missing the bards' level progression). I gave him a Lute of Charming as a starting magical thingy.

So, there's that guy, wandering around a village, trying to pick up chicks. He spends some time on that, and finally notices a pretty girl in the window of one of the houses. He strikes a rock star pose, and just as he's about to pull the strings, an old woman's hand drags the girl away from the window.

The guy walks over to the window and sticks his head inside. I tell the player, "Okay, you're being hit on the head with a frying pan."

"Huh? All right, can I have an attack roll for that?" - probably hoping that his 18+ Dex, insane AC, and the old granny's THAC0 of 22 would get him out of that predicament.

"Allright," I say and roll the D20.

As you probably expected, it lands with a 20 on top.

10 minutes later, when everyone is finally done cracking up, I check the Vicious Critical Hit Table for Bludgeoning Weapons(tm). The results were as follows: "Broken spine: save vs. polymorph at -10 or remain permanently paralyzed."

Well, being a nice enough DM, I let the guy get away with a concussion and a viciously bit tongue. But that's how the +5 Frying Pan of Bard Slaying became a legendary artifact in my setting.

No shit, there I was...

[isomeme.livejournal.com]

This scene was actually run in one or another version of our insane C&S/D&D/RavingLunacy homebrew systems, but it's a D&D story whatever the rules system might have been at the time.

My fast-talking magician Franz Aritt was on a particularly ambitious dungeon raid with his usual comrades. A combination of poor strategy, bad luck, and pure DM evil led to the party being scattered, lost in ones and twos in various relatively nearby parts of the dungeon -- though of course none of us knew how near we were to each other at the time.

Franz ended up alone. He was, to put it delicately, no Gandalf; he could throw a magic missile without injuring himself or a friend about three times out of four. He had all kinds of sometimes impressive yet ultimately pathetic tricks he could do with water. And that was about it for his magic skills. At the moment in question, he was exhausted, had virtually no magical energy left, and was armed with a rusty kitchen knife nicknamed "Hamsbane".

He barely had time to collect his thoughts before a bugbear came trundling down the corridor, roaring with pleasure at the prospect of a nice magic-using afternoon snack. Franz looked around quickly; he was cornered. There were seconds to act, too few to get off a spell, not that he had one that would do much good. So he pulled Hamsbane from his belt, took a defensive stance, and when the creature got close enough, stabbed wildly, expecting to die in the next split second.

[Cut to the players and DM at the table looking stunned, as I toss off a series of perfect to-hits and maxed-out critical damage rolls, each less believable than the last...]

The bugbear howled, staggered forward, and died, blood gushing from its punctured heart. Franz was thrown to the ground by its collapsing weight. And just then his barbarian companion Gorp came racing down the corridor, saw the huge form falling on Franz, and with a shriek of battle lust jumped onto the dead bugbear's back and stabbed it straight through the chest with his sword.

Neither Gorp nor anyone else in the party would ever believe Franz's wild story that he had killed the damn thing himself. Franz sulked about this for the remainder of the campaign.

[mikkop.livejournal.com]

AD&D, Spelljammer, somewhere in a dungeon in the Rock of Bral, this time located in Realmspace.

We got stuck in a dead-end corridor with some skeletons chasing us. My Chaotic Neutral Wild Mage, whose name escapes me at the moment, decided to let loose with a few magic missiles. He casts the spell, there's no effect, and the GM asks for any comments.

"Perkele." Which means literally "Devil" in Finnish, so a portal appears, a couple of devilish winged guys step out of it and ask my character what did he summon them for? All of the other PCs make themselves very scarce, but my lunatic mage just points at the skeletons and the devils nod, say that it's the usual price, destroy the skeletons and portal out.

All the other characters come back and ask what happened. My mage doesn't tell, but just points at the skeletons. The others become more vary, but after this the mage saves the group from certain death a couple of times by striking a seemingly good deal with extra-planar entities.

The party did have its suspicions about the help, but the campaign ended before the deal with the devils was completed. The wild mage was left in space galloping towards the closest planet: a wild surge transformed him into a nightmare on some small asteroid, and being a demon horse he didn't need to breath and could fly, so he started flying towards the nearest planet.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

There was the time my character helped lay a ghost to rest, the time my character actually got "Good Ending" by finding a door that led to his heart's desire and going through, and of course the time when I managed to roll 00 on cue...

But my favorite D&D memory, especially in this context, would probably be one of my very first. It was 1980 or so, I'd just started playing "blue book Basic" with the other kids at school, and the module was good ol' B1, "In Search of the Unknown." My character was one of the pregens from the back, Trebbelos the Boy Magician. The party I'd joined had already made a couple of forays into Quasqueton, and they took me to the big chunk of mica down in the caverns that gives you a random magical effect if you chip off a flake and put it in your mouth. IC and OOC (not that I was really clear on the difference at the time), I wondered if it was some kind of weird hazing stunt for the new guy.

[grimmwire.livejournal.com]

My favorite tale would take at least half an hour to recount face-to-face. Remind me about it when you're in town for Worldcon. It's a full-on epic complete with prophesies fulfilled (purely by chance), disastrously failed quests, a Dark Lord, and some major unexpected twists...

Instead I'll just mention the time in 1982 or so, when I was reffing a popular AD&D campaign at the Forest City Gamers club in London, Ontario. A halfling thief attempts to climb down a well -- the well being a completely unnecessary bit of dungeon scenery leading nowhere interesting except a large tidal cave partly full of lake-water. But the players don't know that, so the thief is sent down the well just to have a look-see. (They also have yet to find the nearby stairs.)

The thief -- a veteran of countless infamous heists whose calling-card (a simple silver ring) is known and hated by embarrassed crowned heads all across the known world -- suddenly and badly flubs a roll.

He falls two hundred feet into ten feet of water. I roll twenty D6 damage. The halfling actually survives the impacts (first hitting the water, then the ground under the water) -- but now he's unconscious and rapidly drowning. Kinda sad, because this character's been around since the start of the campaign, years and years, and he's a near-mythic Robin Hood type.

I check his character sheet to see what he's carrying. He's got two Potions of Healing in his backpack. Doubtless they broke on impact. I let the player roll to see whether, in the process of drowning, he happens to ingest some of the Potions. He does, and survives. In a world of pain, but alive.

I was always such a softie.

[omimouse.livejournal.com]

Juneaux, my CG human cleric who worshipped the sun, moon and stars as true representations of light and good. She started life with a wooden holy symbol she'd carved herself: sun on one side, moon and stars on the other.

After several really *bad* turning attempts on a pack of skeletons, she got seriously fed up. It didn't help that the mage kept 'helpfully' pointing out that I must've had the wrong side facing the skeletons. I got one of my leather thing/stone dish necklaces to demonstrate to the GM exactly what she was doing for the next turning attempt.

Which was twist the cord (and the wooden symbol) a lot, and then make her next turning attempt immediately after letting go, right when the disk started spinning.

I rolled a natural 20. One room mostly full of skeletons became one room full of bone dust.

From that moment on, she *always* spun her holy symbol on turning attempts. Even when a party member carved her one that had sun, moon, and stars on *both* sides.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

*PAF*
"...!" ^_^

[jilesa.livejournal.com]

My (current) favorite D&D tale is ongoing (http://lindisty.livejournal.com/). This is because I'm fickle. My favorite campaign is almost always the one I'm engaged in at the moment.

My two best OOC gaming stories come out of a BattleTech campaign, though, not D&D.