Your Funniest Tabletop Story

I think you mean "compounded" instead of "compacted". But otherwise

Played Munchkin last night. We played with a bunch of expansions including the dungeons. We got the dungeon of genderbending where everyone switches genders, comes up with a new name and whenever you call someone by their real name you go down a level and every time you switch genders you gain a level. I got the freudian slippers that lets you change your gender whenever you want. Combine all of these factors and you end up with me constantly being at level 9, except during the charity phase .

edited 18th May '16 1:01:53 PM by Braincogs

The best part is that it happened during a game of Munchkin. In any other game someone would have gone, "no way I'm letting you game the system like that". But in Munchkin, this is explicitly the way it's meant to be played!

Less funny, more tragic but still a wonderful story.

My usual DM decided he wanted to try something new and do a quick one-shot since it seemed like some of the players of our group wouldn't make the session. Eventually, all of us showed up anyways but it was worth it. We were playing through the Mines of Madness.

First thing that happened is that my dragonborn bard (Ryvel Thrum) checked out the 'KEEP OUT' outhouse. In the ensuing disaster, one of the party members was immediately killed but the DM pointed out how amazing it was that the group was also good friends and travelling compatriots with her identical twin sister. Great start.

When we happened upon and rescued Hug Hug the Goblin, my dragonborn bard quickly took a shine to him and did what she could to keep him safe. As we progressed deeper and deeper into the mine, the two's friendship also deepened, to the point that Hug Hug appointed her as his 'momma' and she accepted the title with pride. However, she still felt guilt over the death of her party member.

Eventually, the party arrived at a sacrificial altar, blocked off from progress by an obisidian wall, which called for a sacrifice. After trying more than a few alternate possibilities, Ryvel pointed out that there didn't seem to be a clever answer to this and immediately named herself as the sacrifice. Hug Hug did not agree, nor did the rest of the party and after a short scuffle, Ryvel is knocked out. Unable to come up with an alternative, despite Hug Hug's emphatic demands that he be sacrificed so that his saviors could continue on their quest, the party rested until Ryvel stirred and the argument over who would be sacrificed began anew.

After numerous magical and skill checks, the other bard, Liam, convinced the majority of the party that he would be the sacrifice. To try and keep the hands of her friends clean, and after one last musical send-off, Ryvel is the one to use the ceremonial dagger to end her best friend's life.

After a short bit of travel through the mine, the party arrives at the throne of the holder of the Forever Stone. After declining the material wealth offered, the undead ruler of the mine demands one final sacrifice. Seeking a chance to finally repent for directly and indirectly taking the lives of two of her friends, Ryvel marches forward before any of the party can stop her. In a flash of bright green light, she is "disintegrated".

What actually happens is she is transferred to a secret room next to the throne room, which contains a single stone goblet, overflowing with blood that drips down from the ceiling. Unbeknownst to Ryvel, her remaining friends were locked in battle with both the skeletal mage and his pet dragon. Hoping that washing herself with Liam's blood would bring some sort of clarity or cleansing of her soul, her hands make contact with something solid in the goblet. Removing it, she finds the Forever Stone, an artifact that would grant its holder eternal life (from aging) along with powerful magics provided they fight against evil during that time.

As the stone is removed from the goblet, the door to the throne room opens and, in a moment of euphoric joy after such crushing defeat, Ryvel turns to show her friends the item they had lost two of their own to acquire. As she did, she witnessed the dragon cleave Hug Hug in two with a single swipe of its claws.

Fueled by rage, the remnants of the party eviscerated the undead creature, which caused the dragon to vanish. Ryvel had acquired an item that would grant her eternal life, but only after witnessing her companions have theirs snuffed out.

Hug Hug dying was the most disgustingly ironic, as the dragon's turn was immediately before Ryvel's, meaning the actions did happen in almost immediate succession. The adventure ended then, with the surviving trio bringing their dead and their rewards to the surface.

What started as a goofy light-hearted one-shot ended with one of the most surprisingly well-timed crit gut punches I've had happen in a tabletop campaign.

Thats sounds like a good run. when i ran it, i had the players use the pregens from the main site. One of them got turned into coins so they decided to try sacrificng the coin pile and i decided to let that work, since the coins could have turned back to normal.

I'm part of a game where all the P Cs are Commoners. My character is a Goat herder with a pet goat as a not-animal companion. It's basically a dog with the physical abilities shifted around, a Slam attack instead of Bite, more goat-like skills like Jump and Climb, and Iron Will and Toughness as feats instead of whatever a dog gets.

Point is, this goat is the MVP of the game so far. Not only did she one-shot an enemy that was giving our Not!Barbarian trouble, but she consistently makes the best spot and Listen checks in the game, despite having a Wisdom penalty.

So I was playing my green / red Eldrazi deck yesterday and I was getting my ass kicked pretty hard, but had Descendant's Path and Emrakul's Hatcher out.

My turn. Untap, Upkeep, Descendant's Path activates.

I say; "Please...any big Eldrazi. Any big Eldrazi."

I don't look at it and put it face up on the table.

Queue gasps and "you lucky bastard"s. I look.

Oh, Hi Emrakul The Aeons Torn. Thanks for the extra turn and Annihilator 6

@1656 I usually play goats and sheep as having roughly the same stats, as honestly they're extremely similar in terms of size, strength, and even ecological niche. But based on what I've seen sheep regularly do in a game I'm running (where it admittedly gets boosts from being a paladin's mount... yes, seriously, I allowed that), the fact that a goat would be MVP in a party of commoners is about the least surprising thing I could imagine.

"...you're a paladin." "Yes." "Why are you riding a sheep?!?" "When your god demands humility, your god means humility."

I mean, at this point, that sheep is probably the least funny thing about that paladin, but to give a fuller background...

I'm running the "Giantslayer" adventure path in Pathfinder. Realizing the party was a bit low on healing and defense, one player wanted a paladin. For the most part, the idea was to play vanilla, but never let it be said that a player would never want the oddball option. In this case, the player wanted to be a halfling paladin, for starters. I figured this wouldn't be so bad - smite covers for a lot of the problems with a small-sized melee character, plus gives various defensive bonuses. The player also wanted to be able to take advantage of mounted combat in cramped quarters, which is much easier on a small character. Also, of course, totally within the rules.

The question came when it was time to pick a potential mount. Ordinarily, of course, a pony or a riding dog is the mount of choice for a small paladin, but the player asked about the feasibility of a sheep instead - the player had in mind a backstory of a sheep herder called to serve Iomedae. Well, sheep are in the book as a CR 1 creature (look for Herd Animal, Ram in Bestiary 2). And that's the same CR as a riding dog, so I figure this is a fair substitution. The slightly odd part is that the player specifically wanted a ewe instead of a ram, and wanted it to have horns. In the interests of good game mastering, I researched sheep, and discovered that not only do some breeds of sheep have horns regardless of gender, but some even have two sets of horns on both gender. I figure that if real life can have horned ewes, so can Golarion.

Mind you, this sheep is now a bounding engine of woolly destruction that can ignore difficult terrain while carrying a lance-wielding halfling, but seriously, that's the least funny thing about the character.

So, I been playing some DnD Encou - I mean Adventurer's League - for awhile, and man, should I have resumed posting here ages ago.
So, the campaign sessions are on Mondays, but sometimes enough people are free Wednesdays for us to do a one-shot. No League rules, just homebrew.

In one such session, which was awhile ago, we had randomized character sheets. Completely randomized character sheets, with random races, classes, stats, levels, and magic items. I was a human female paladin whose stats I completely forget (I think she had shitty Charisma and barely-okay Strength, although it might've been the other way around) and whose best melee weapon on hand was a quarterstaff.
This one guy, who was kinda that guy and who was not invited to nor informed of the Monday campaign, was a druid of some high level or other;
and the guy who plays a Balladin (multiclassed and slightly-munchkinned Bard/Paladin) in the Monday campaign was a bard who, notably, started with a magic instrument (as did I, because random). And, like, other people were there too but I forget what anyone else was or did; when I get to the clusterfuck, you'll see why. To be sure, as the DM would lament wistfully afterwards, we never did get to fight the dragon that was under the inn.

The druid starts us off by talking about his adventures; the bard starts playing music to lend his story some atmosphere; the druid decides he doesn't like it for whatever reason, and smashes the bard's magic instrument. Suddenly, the druid is attacking the bard, half the party is attacking the druid, and the other half of the party is trying to stay out of the way.
And then I have the genius idea of using my Dust of Disappearance.
One invisible druid, one invisible paladin, and one invisible bard later, nobody has any idea what's going on, I'm trying and failing to find the bard so I can drag him out of the inn to safety, and the next three bright ideas (in, I'm pretty sure, this order) are:

1. The druid tries to attack the bard again, while in dire wolf form, and thereby becomes visible again.
2. The bard casts Feign Death to guilt-trip him and/or get him in trouble (I think the guards had shown up by this point but am not sure), also thereby becoming visible.
3. Someone else uses one of their magic items, namely Dust of Sneezing and Choking; naturally, the druid saves and I don't, so I'm just kinda invisibly hacking and coughing and being useless for a bit.

Eventually, it becomes established that we're all fighting the druid to the death. To that end, into play comes my magic instrument. It can cast, among lots of other things, Levitate.

That one-shot gave me an unimaginable appreciation for the combat utility of that spell. The druid became a pinata, and I got to smash him open with a stick and a Smite.
Stay tuned; I'mma try and cram as many AL posts in here as I can before I get tired/bored and get ready for bed.

edited 5th Sep '16 10:05:43 PM by Knowlessman

So, I got into the current Monday AL campaign, Out of the Abyss ^note (if anyone's worried about spoilers, let me know and I'll spoiler future posts about it), a couple sessions late, and at 1st level; other party members are still a level or two ahead of me. I also got into it not knowing that you start without any equipment. At all.
For a Rogue with a 16 Charisma and Charlatan (Snake Oil Salesman) background (I wanted to try something a little different, since I usually dump Charisma and don't really roleplay), this was a tad annoying.
That I recall, not very much noteworthy actually happened in the first session beyond escaping from a drow prison and getting better armor than my starting equipment (and getting a measly 142xp), but the second one...

At one point, we wasted time sufficiently that the overleveled drow priestess on our tail actually caught up to us, and just as we were sailing away into the Underdark, too.
She, ah, dumped a Cloudkill on the boat. :|
Both myself and the other new player died. Instantaneously. (5th edition's variation on the Chunky Salsa Rule is that you insta-die if you take enough damage in one go to drop you to negative your HP maximum.)
Twenty minutes or so later, the boat sailed into a patch of Wild Magic, which resurrected us, just in time for us to get over one-and-a-half thousand xp for "evading" the priestess, which bumped us straight to level 3.
I says: "Maybe since I came back via Wild Magic, I should multiclass into the Wild Magic sorcerer, since I have the Charisma anyway." DM says: "Dude. Do it."

Ours is a pretty fun DM. ^note (I crossed off the "You cast Fireball at 3rd level centered on yourself" result on the Wild Magic Surge table I printed out and suggested fudging it to the next-closest result; not sure if the DM ever did so when he was rolling it (he let me start rolling it after awhile, since it says I'm supposed to in the book), but I did get "You cast Magic Missile at 5th level" a lot, and haven't rolled Fireball myself yet.)^note (Haven't turned blue or gotten another permanent result yet either, but hope springs eternal.)

edited 5th Sep '16 10:14:42 PM by Knowlessman

Aaand another one-shot, before I go to bed (Well, start thinking about going to bed).

DM says we gonna be 5th level. I asks, Can I use homebrew? DM says go nuts, just don't be too overpowered. I makes a Tsukumogami (see Youkai) Rogue but don't get to use any of his racial features anyway.
Also when I get to the table, turns out DM's decided we'l be 10th level instead, and can each have a magic item, and lets me have a Sunblade. A radiant damage lightsaber longsword that is also finesse, and therefore works with Sneak Attack.
So, the DM has this... leprechaun reality-warper guy? create for the party a dungeon, in which we don't actually do any dungeoneering, but do fight some hobgoblins.
One of whom is riding a triceratops.
...Uh, long story that I don't really remember short, one of the party members knocks the hobgoblin guy off the dinosaur and manages to take it for himself... and then the DM/demigod decides to unmake the dinosaur so he can't use it anyway. :| Go figure.

Last part of the session (I think we also fought orcs? I think kind of the whole thing up to here was easy), the Lepregod teleports us to... a grassy field, with mysterious orange things and vines. Those mysterious orange viney things turn out to be pumpkins.
And there is a small boy with a blanket sitting on one.
He is waiting, he says...
...For the Great P - yeeeah, turns out Linus actually is the Great Pumpkin (Where exactly the DM got his stats, I don't know) and has a killer AOE attack and holy shit, the whole party's dead except for the Rogue who has Evasion and an ungodly Dex save and a Sunblade and that one Weapon Master feat that lets him give himself advantage to hit with his radiant-damage lightsaber and oh, would you look at the time, store wants us out of here so we gotta stop it here, but yeah, you're probably all dead, including the still-unscathed Rogue if he manages to flunk the save a few times.

More to come tomorrow, probably, unless I spend the entire day playing CivRev again.

edited 5th Sep '16 10:20:32 PM by Knowlessman

Dust of disappearance doesn't wear off when you attack, because it functions as Greater Invisibility.

In 5th edition, it only lasts on a creature for 2d4 minutes or until that creature attacks or casts a spell. Looked it up, then and just now; DMG p166.

The duration was much shorter in 3.5 and Pathfinder (2d6 rounds). But it didn't end for a creature that attacked or cast a spell (as Greater Invisibility) and it foiled magical vision (such as See Invisibility and Invisibility Purge).

So, lemme see... There was a bit where the monk kept falling into the lake we were on and getting et up by piranha... There was that one-shot that I ran, but nothing really funny happened in that... There was that other one-shot that was a bit ridiculous, but I wanna see if there's another AL session that's funny enough first...

Well, last session, I tried to Levitate a giant spider, it made its Con save, and Wild Magic blasted the damn thing apart with 5th-level Magic Missile, so I'm pretty sure I ain't gonna be levitating any party members for awhile without some Persuasion checks.
Also, I was thinking of taking Absorb Elements from Elemental Evil (in case of Fireball), but it's not on the Sorcerer spell list. :| If I take the next two levels in Rogue and go into Arcane Trickster, I guess I can take it then, but I dunno if I plan on evening out my levels like that. 'Course, I'm not sure what I want to use a feat for, either; Dex and Cha are near about equally important for me, and other than Lucky I dunno what I would take.

edited 10th Sep '16 7:08:51 AM by Knowlessman

Eh, might as well get into the last one-shot we had.

So, I and the only other player to show up (who used two characters, since he has eleventy billion of them on his phone) were checking out this iceberg'd ship, which turned out to be haunted. Turns out, mimics. Bunch of 'em. And all three characters are ranged; I have a halfling Ranger with a crossbow and a pet flying snake, and he has a sorcerer and an aarakocra archer.
So, by the time we're a third of the way through the ship, I'm poking every chest we see with crossbow bolts. At one point, we find a chest with an extradimensional space in it, so we go down into it.
Guess what's in there. Yup, another mimic.
At one point, we meet the ghosts of the crew, who want us to kill the monster who snuck onto the boat and killed them. To that end, we gotta snatch up all the magic items said monster strew around the boat, in the mimics. We get a floating shield, potions of heroism, and a Ring of Genie Summoning, among other things.
Turns out the monster's a Sea Hag. Unfortunately for the DM, the whole party, even my pet snake, makes the save vs her initial Frighten, so she doesn't get to scare anybody to death; given that she's kind of weak as shit, CR 2 (I think), and we're all level 5, she doesn't last very long past that.

So we beat her and go back up to the top deck, and that's when the Kraken shows up.
That fight goes about predictably, with us trying to hit the thing for a bit then just resorting to trying to dodge the tentacles, forgetting the Ring of Water Walking we picked up, and forgetting the functioning ballista and catapult that were on the deck.
So. I decides we might require a cheesy solution.
I use the Ring of Genie Summoning, and open the MM on my phone to see what Robin Williams can do to help us.
His attacks aren't bad, but still probably won't kill the Kraken before it kills us. However, it does turns out that he knows Plane Shift.
The Kraken makes its save; Plane Shift doesn't work.
Okay, what about Wish? DM decides that yeah, he's a genie, so we get one Wish (It's put as optional in the MM).
I trawl through the PHB, looking for spells that Wish can copy, and settle on Polymorph.

By the end of that round, the Kraken is a sheep drowning under an iceberg, and we are beating a hasty retreat, because we don't know the mechanics for drowning well enough and it'll transform back if it gets to 0 hitpoints without dying outright.

edited 12th Sep '16 11:56:23 AM by Knowlessman

Barbarian's player, re: that Levitate: "You'd never make it in Vegas."

Me, later, in the group text:
"Wingardium Leviosa!"
*scanners.gif*

edited 10th Sep '16 12:49:15 PM by Knowlessman

@1668 Uh... what edition are you playing? Because in every version of polymorph any object that I'm familiar with would not end in effect until the creature was dead, not just at 0 HP.

5th edition. Also, this was regular Polymorph, not True Polymorph; True Polymorph is 9th level in 5th, and so can't be replicated by Wish. Even that requires the spell to last for an hour before it becomes permanent.

To be honest, I dunno how many versions of DnD you are familiar with, because both spells have that clause in 5th. :/ I guess they don't want you instakilling things by turning them into sheep; the way the clause is worded, even if the second form is instakilled, the first form returns at however many hitpoints it had left and just takes any remaining damage, not even falling unconscious unless the overkill takes it out.

edited 12th Sep '16 7:00:08 AM by Knowlessman

I'm very familiar with all of the editions prior to 4th. I'm sure that such a change to how polymorph works on others was one of those hotly debated ones - using polymorph other, polymorph any object and baleful polymorph (the specific spell used varying on the edition and your character level) is an extremely popular "save or suck" tactic in previous editions, in no small part because they don't have a "revert upon hitting 0 HP" clause in them.

Baleful polymorph did have the advisory that the affected creature got a +4 to its save if the new form couldn't survive its new environment (such as what you did with the kraken), but that's still a small price to pay (also, I think that's one of the reason frogs/toads are popular choices to turn targets into - easy to squish, and they don't get that +4 unless you target something in midair).

I imagine other places have had arguments over whether "reversion at 0 HP" is a good move or not, so I'll leave that to other threads. For this situation, yeah, getting out of dodge was a good call (because how quickly it would hit 0 HP depends on how the game handles drowning, but in previous editions, it'd probably be within a minute, tops, and even that depends on the former kraken acing its constitution checks).

Turns out, drowning/suffocating in 5th actually doesn't involve rolls until you start rolling death saves. You get 1+Conmod minutes of holding your breath (minimum 30 seconds), and then Conmod rounds (minimum 1), and then you drop to 0 and start rolling death saves (straight d20 DC 10 rolls; accumulate 3 wins, you stabilize and gain one hitpoint after 1d4 hours, accumulate 3 failures, you die; 1 is two failures, 20, you regain 1 hitpoint)(wait, no, according to errata, if you can't breathe you can't stabilize or regain hitpoints, so I guess you just keep rolling saves each turn until you get three failures or somebody manages to save you).

But yeah, mostly nobody wants to get familiar with 4e, but 5e is basically a less-broken, more comprehensible, slightly more lenient 3.5. I like to think it's a defragmented 3.5.

Those suffocation rules are much more generous than 3.5's rules. For one, the amount of time you can hold your breath is twice your constitution score in rounds (so for a hale and hearty Con 15 character, that's 3 minutes), and once you hit that, you have to make constitution checks (with a cumulative penalty) to keep holding it. But you fail one, and you start drowning. And if you don't get pulled out quickly enough, you die, no saves. 5th makes it much more heroic (also, even if they kept the old polymorphing rules, much less likely to die).

Still, it sounds like you had a pretty small retreat window, and good call on taking it.

I think the DM was pretty sure we'd just killed it until I started talking about it mattering whether it went to 0 HP or just died (which it didn't even anyway), but yeah. Kinda wish Plane Shift'd worked, though; was going to send it to the Elemental Plane of Fire.

Also... Coulda sworn there was something I was forgetting from an AL session, but it's not coming to me. I did catch it up to the last session, so I guess not - oh, wait.

The spiders. So, we basically beached the boats we were on in a giant spider cavern and met this coupla goblins who were basically web surfers. ...Okay, like surfer types but they clown around in spiderwebs. The DM decided they were basically Bill & Ted.
They asked us to give them money to guide us out of the webs, but instead, I finally got to use my character's +7 Deception score and Charlatan background, and traded them a shiny rock I'd found several sessions ago; I'd found it by critfailing a Perception check... and convinced them it was a Shiny Rock of Springing and Jumping with a natural 20. It was awesome.