Thursday, February 18, 2016

Day 30, D&D challenge

I made it through 29 days of this challenge using only 140 characters. Couldn't even get close for this question. the prompt is:

Best Playing/DMing experience

Trigger warning: gaming stories. enchanted panties.

I played an ongoing 2e AD&D campaign with my little brother for something like 5 years. It was just the two of us, so while I technically DMed, and maybe dominated the worldbuilding, we each played numerous characters and we built the story very cooperatively. The world of the Double Island, the adventures of Roonta (the ferocious alaghi) and Zosheus (the centaur wizard), it is part of the fabric of my childhood. In total, it is the best playing experience I've had.

And then there was the first time I tried giving a party a dragon egg to see what they'd do with it. I have repeatedly reused and resknned this idea because of how wonderful the reactions from players tend to be. The first one was amazing, though. Amethyst dragon egg that they protected and raised (the players actually asked me to retire their characters and play their kids/another generation so that they could see how the dragon grew up), and made it the city mascot/protector of their hometown.

Then, there was the time I saw an idea online for starting out a group - the PCs all share a contact with an NPC who has helped them out at some point, and he calls in favors which get them together. I decided he could be the villain, too. He set them up to unwittingly transport stolen crown jewels out of the kingdom. When they discovered it, the collective anger in the group was overwhelming. He got away and plagued them from afar, but it became the undying side quest of the game to kill Avery Skint. Finally they did it, caught him completely unawares; I got to watch as my players, so emotionally invested, suddenly dealt with the fact that they, mostly good-aligned, had killed this man in cold blood, in his sleep, driven almost entirely by vengeance.

But what about the X-Crawl ogre! Look up X-Crawl if you're not familiar (http://www.goodman-games.com/xcrawl.html) but basically it was the players' first crawl, boffer league. Pre-game, they had some fun getting to know each other. The metal-guitarist sorceror partied with some college ladies and was given someone's panties as a favor to 'ride into battle' with. They did well, defeating each challenge in the crawl, then got to the boss, a hulking, angry hill giant, magically controlled to play by the rules of a boffer crawl. What the players never found out: the girls from the party were member of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Monsters (PETM) movement. And the panties were a magical item - activated remotely to break enchantment. The PETM members activated them from the stands, waiting for the giant to dramatically break free from the crawl and run home to the wilderness, but he instead improvised a deadly weapon from the crawl environment, and decided to smash the PCs for real. When the players realized what had happened (I described some magical energy emanating from the panties, and reactions from the "groupie" in the stands), they were suddenly on their feet around the game table, realizing they were in way over their heads. It was one of the most dramatic combat moments I've ever GMed, and one of the most successful long-form traps I ever managed to spring.

If you actually read all that, Thank you and I apologize for the time you just lost.



1 comment:

  1. I feel the same way about our childhood game! Sometimes I think my ongoing love of D&D is a search for that same joy and mystery.

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