Not everything a DM tries works out as intended. Sometimes a story arc falls flat, or a little extra description causes the party to halt for a few hours to fiddle with a rock…. it happens.
I was in a Lovecraftian GURPS campaign set in UK in the 1980s that ground to a halt for a solid hour because one of the players was adamant that we calculate the exact cost of plane tickets for our team.
Truly, rules lawyers are an eldritch abomination.
lifehack if the players are obsessed with something give it to them. Often a small interesting answer will make them stop faster than a hundred boring ones.
once my players rifled through some dead goblins’ clothes and i didnt expect that (dumb, i know) so i put a “very smooth pebble” in a pocket and the players were so interested in it they almost started a fight over it
i was one of the players and we were valid
very early in my campaign – like, 2 or 3 sessions in – the party went to explore a shipwreck. among the loot in the wreck was a black marble statue of a goddess called Blibdoolpoolp. I found her name in a list of d&d deities and thought she sounded cool. her domain is crustaceans and madness, which fit with the overall tone of my bullshit campaign, so I threw her in for a bit of ~flavor~
the party got… attached.
they lugged that statue back with them when they left the shipwreck, even though they were being chased by a sea serpent. they brought it back to the inn where they were staying. in-character, they started seeking out all the information they could about this silly throwaway goddess.
out of character, they started flooding the group chat with lobster memes.
eventually – and I mean, like, several months later – I just gave in and let them have a whole adventure fighting a cult that worked for Blibdoolpoolp, defeating the cult, and letting them take over as Blibdoolpoolp’s primary worshippers. she’s their patron deity now and showers them with crustacean-themed blessings.
reblog to be showered by crustacean-themed blessings
“crustaceans” is an INCREDIBLE domain, what powers do you get as a cleric if you take the crustaceans domain
crab hands
just crab hands but they’re real good at pinching
I had this moment where a player of mine was standing on a beach and I described a crab scuttling by. She fed it bread. So I desrcibed two more crabs coming back, which she also promptly fed. Then four, then eight, then 16, so on and so forth, increasing at exponential levels until she was out of bread. It was truly a ridiculous mount of crabs.
I was trying to teach her not to feed the crabs. But thereafter for the rest of their stay in this beach city, she would bring food to the crabs and feed them. She fucking INSISTED on feeding the crabs every morning from their beach villa and always made me go through this exponential bullshit I had created.
Cut to them being tested by a religious order as worthy emissaries of the sea goddess. They have to fight some giant monster crabs on a platform surrounded by water. The paladin can’t swim and they’re getting all sorts of checks for wet surfaces.
The paladin falls but manages to grab the edge of the platform. She starts to haul herself up but needs help. The other two party members are squishy and getting fucked up by the crabs.
And so she rolled a d20 to see if she could call on her goddess to help her. Fucking nat. 20. Natural 20.
I panic. What do I do?
Then brilliance! I had all the crabs she had helped burst into the arena and pull her to safety while also helping to keep the giant crabs from hurting the others. Just imagine a tide of tiny, bread and fruit fed crabs over running an arena, Christmas Island style. Crabs everywhere saving the day, a blessing from her goddess!
They of course won and after that, have gone out of their way to be kind to crabs. The paladin has even adopted a pet one named Clamps that she takes with her where ever she goes.
In TTRPGs, its always about the small things. And the crabs. Always the crabs.
D&D players will always come up with the most bizarre, workable solutions to problems when you least expect it.
In one game I ran, the party needed to find a magical artifact and didn’t have any idea where it was at all. So they decided to use Commune to figure it out – but Commune as a spell only lets you ask yes or no questions, and get an answer out of it. So they took a map of the continent, drew a line down half of it, and asked “Is the artifact on this half of the map?”. They then continued, narrowing the artifact’s location down further and further, until they were able to pinpoint the exact building in question.
This reminds me of the last campaign I was in, when my husband played a Telepathic Psion. When we were coming up with our inventories at the beginning of the game, everyone else is putting down normal shit like horses, packs, travel provisions, money.
My husband asked for a bear trap.
The DM (who happened to be coolkidmitch) asked him what the hell he could possibly need a bear trap for, to which my husband only said, “You’ll see.” After about twenty minutes of figuring out what this bear trap would weigh, the skill my husband would have to roll in order to use it, and a bunch of other minutiae, my husband had a bear trap in his inventory.
Now, all of us kind of forgot about the bear trap while we were adventuring along on our escort quest (during which my husband’s Psion regularly tried to convince one of our employers that there was a golden acorn/tree of life/fountain of youth/whatever the fuck in the forest so she would wander off and get herself eaten by bears – she was really rude) until we run into a situation where we’ve been surprised by the locals and nobody can draw a weapon without causing a real problem.
My husband pulls the bear trap out of his saddlebag, holds it out to the nearest goon, and says the goon needs to roll a will check. When asked why the goon needs to roll a will check, my husband calmly replies, “He’s being offered the fanciest hat he’s ever seen in his life, and he really wants to put it on.”
Moment of silence around the gaming table as all of us realize that my husband is trying to end the encounter by convincing a goon to put a bear trap on his head like a hat.
The goon failed the will check.
I gotta share The Grand Show story now.
So my D&D campaign is comprised of four newbies, one guy with a lot of tabletop experience, and me, the newbie DM. The crew is trying to break into a walled manor, in part to find out if the Lord inside had anything to do with some culty plot shenanigans (P.S: he was dead the whole time, so no one would have detected them from inside the wall regardless).
I am very explicit to them about the fact that they are trying to break into the Lord’s manor, in the middle of the day, across from the main thoroughfare of the town, with no cover or disguise of any kind, and they are all level 2 – so no teleportation, invisibility, illusions – nothing. They do not heed my warnings, and our gnome paladin and halfling rogue toss a grappling hook over the wall and start to climb it. Meanwhile the other three in the party – a totally inconspicuous group consisting of a dragonborn with a cat, a tiefling in a chainmail bikini, a half-vampire warlock with a mask and a swordcane, and an NPC satyr who was along for the ride – are just hanging out below the wall watching.
After a minute I say, “behind you, you notice that a crowd of about ten or twelve peasants have gathered and are whispering in worried voices. You notice two guards approaching from down the road.”
Halfling rogue – one of the more-or-less newbies of the crew – whips around and immediately shouts “WELCOME TO THE GRAND SHOW!”, and scores an excellent deception roll. Dragonborn starts making his cat do tricks and rolls a sick animal handling check. Tiefling cleric begins pole-dancing on her spear and also rolls high. The warlock starts doing special effects with Minor Illusion and rolls ok. They nudge the satyr into playing music for them, who crits his performance check and charms half the audience as a result. The paladin, from the top of the wall, starts juggling his hammers and midway through throws one at the window of the Lord’s manor, breaking it so they can get in.
I was already going to give them that, and then nearly every last fucking NPC rolled an insight check of less than 10. So the group also made 10 gold for their “busking” and got into the manor completely unhindered. o/ goddamnit.
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