Ugh, that last story was pretty bad. Especially the NPC wanting to die cuz she got hit in the mid section. DM definitely has unhealthy views on women and a disturbing fetish...
Demons having fancy titles rather than names not only makes them easier to remember, but also can fit thematically as it could tie into the whole power-through-names thing.
As one of the players from that session, imagine what was we thinking and feeling :"D Right before the conflict she gets milk like my papa. And I'm a very simple fighter, waiting 3 years to hit three times after that i wait another 3 years to hit free times.
To the first story, i know that dnd is normally pkayed around a table, but me and my friends play on couches with TV trays for the DM and anyone who uses a pc for character sheets. We throw up roll20 on the tv and its super comfortable and fun!
The "Just don't CARE" story hurt. I had a friend express interest in D&D, and excitedly started a campaign for them. While I was understanding this the first few times, I had to remind them every single time to roll the d20 for an attack or skill check. They were a druid but only alternated between Produce Flame and Ice Knife. They also seemed frustrated about not being able to romance NPCs, but their roleplay was minimal. The session I knew it would end soon is when their recently deceased father's favorite football team was playing and they were watching the game throughout the session, drinking beer and cheering as if the D&D game weren't happening. They really should've just indicated a conflicting engagement. The worst part is I had invited a really good friend to the campaign and assured him it would be ongoing. I tried changing the setting to make myself more excited, which worked for *my* involvement, but I quietly stopped scheduling games and never heard anything from the new player about it. I know D&D isn't for everyone and that's totally valid. In this case I'm sure my friend's social anxiety kept them from conveying their feelings about the game. Edit: Was that Blake Roman in the "tail was wagging" cutaway? 😍
In Dissidia Duodecim, when you first turn on the game, it will try to take you through the tutorial. before it starts you have an option to say im already a master at the game. the game will ask again and if you continue to say you are a master of the game it forces you to fight the final super boss of the game at level 1.
As the origin of the second story i'm very glad that my unpleasant experience gave you so many fun skit ideas ;D A little update on the story to anyone who is intrested: I'm still friends with both Jack and Rose, they know we restarted the game and they haven't approached me or any of the players either to ask why they weren't invited or anything. So they probably don't rly care much for it. They aren't bad people by any means, Rose just has something that I would call "people pleaser syndrome" and she probably thought I would get offended if she said she isn't intrested in dnd.
From what I see, some versions of those dice only have a number of sides equal to the highest number. They look lumpy and awkward. But some versions have double the sides of the highest number. Which makes them look symmetrical and nice. I assume they use each number twice on the die sides.
My first dice were handmade. The d10's tended to fall on 7's, the d20 was crooked too. My 10 yrs old self and others still loved them. It took me a few years to buy proper dice, not because I was broke, because I didn't feel the need to.
Crispy, the skit with the character thinking until one of the players is all but dead only to cast fireball ("after carefully considering all my options") had me in stitches... Fantastic work!
But how am I supposed to know that she’s a FEMALE if the author doesn’t describe her voluptuous body, feminine biology(that is definitely how girls work), and breathtaking beauty in extreme and borderline creepy detail? That’s, like, the whole purpose of females in stories, right? To make my willy go Awooga?
If I am allowed to say, and my apologies if this is unwelcome, I would like to add that, yes, this is good advice but only superficially. Like any group, some characters can only come from a place that's specifically tied to a specific background. A female character whose main flaw is being unable to trust men doesn't come from "just writing a character who happens to be female", it comes from the specificity of womanhood and how it works both internally and externally. Young girls are told to keep their guards up, told that if something happens, it's likely their fault, they learn early on the imposed fragility and vulnerability of their gender. Many become afraid. Some even develop serious issues because of that. This is the kind of nuance that "write humans who happen to be X Y Z" loses, humans are diverse, are different, and a lot of experiences can only come from being a specific kind of human. What I mean to say is that, while it is certainly good advice, it's not a great one and it ignores pretty much anything that's more centered around social factors.
@@KalinTheZola it isn't bad advice at all, it only depends a lot on what kind of story you're trying to tell :). Although I find that a lot of great deeper stories actually use the character's labels as a means to explore it further. Yellowjackets comes to mind as it is a very specifically teenager girl story that would be completely different should another social group had suffered the accident. Overall, nuance is good but it can be overwhelming, so the "write a person who happens to be X" is a good way to keep it simpler yet functional and tasteful
Shadow of the demon lord is a system designed to be a meat grinder. we played a pre-written adventure and ended up having 5 deaths (and a BUNCH of near-misses). The rules for DMs has an explicit section on how to introduce new characters as quick as possible and for players to keep backups.
@@Davtwanit's meant to be a fantasy horror game, the whole premise is that the world is dying, the devils want to thin the veil that protects reality from the eldritch being known as the demon lord and the best people can do is delay it, you know what you signed up for when you create a campaign based on that, and character creation and combat is meant to be fast and deadly with lots of stuff to do and choose on character creation, and there's things like a corruption system that mildly punishes your character for making bad things (and condemns their soul to hell) and a insanity system Not only that i don't know about that module but as far as i am aware demons in sotdl are less interested in killing people randomly and more interested in corrupting them
@@sator2766 tbf, if your entire game design relies on your game being impossible and as unfun/tedious for players as possible... maybe you should rethink the game design. Its nothing like dark souls because dark souls is challenging but fair when you play by its rules and learn it, and it works because it doesnt inherently rely on a chance system which makes it even less predictable.
@@Mabufu381My players have kept requesting me to run SotDL. At this point, I have declared that I won't run it anymore until one of them runs it for me to at least level 3. The irony I see with the game is that it's a lot easier to balance a battle in that game than in D&D or Pathfinder. Something that does strike out as interesting is that the adventure uses a Demon during level 0. Demons are some of the toughest enemies in the game. Said demon in the video seems to be a "Small Demon" according to what is described, which is just barely takeable for a group of level 0s according to the difficulty table in the GM's section, but I don't think I'd lightly throw even a Tiny Demon at my group of level 0s. Higher group levels in the game changes the game a lot, though. It was nigh-impossible to kill my most recent SotDL party at levels 7-10, unless I specifically tossed some of the highest difficulty creatures as opposition at them, and they still could win. They fought a Demon Prince at the end of the game and came out victorious without me pulling any punches! What I will say, however, is that level 0 is less about actually fighting creatures head-on, and more about trying to use your brain to survive. I like that Level 0 is a thing, especially to learn the mechanics before you play the rest of the game (There's a good amount of mechanics), but it is also the most difficult level in the game, as you don't have your path tools yet. This turn into a pretty long post, apologies.
We had a Rose in our game. Never payed attention in combat, constantly had to ask for rule clarification and one time she was asked to roll two d20 and pick the highest number, she preceded to not roll, pick up both dice and inspect them whilst rotating them. When asked what she was doing and why didn't she roll she said 'I'm trying to find which one has the biggest number on it.
As a DM I would MUCH rather have someone say that they don't want to play than deal with trying to accommodate someone who really doesn't care. You don't have to be super hyped at everything, but at least paying attention and participating should not be that high a bar for something you are doing supposedly out of enjoyment. I know sometimes people are sometimes tired, or sick, or distracted by life stuff, but at LEAST try. If you can't, it'd be best for all involved if you left.
18:22 hey that’s my story! Nice! Glad I could give a somewhat lighthearted story as a refresher between these other ones. Yes, my dm understands how absurd it is to have a modern zombie apocalypse dnd game. And yes, our mutual friends who aren’t in his game poke fun at it all the time. It’s become an in joke between us. It’s all in good sport though! Currently, it’s a competition to see if Paladin or Ranger will die first. My backup character will absolutely be hated by Ranger Update: I shared it with ranger and we are currently laughing over this. It was very funny sending this video to them and trying to explain “yes it’s about you no you’re not a horror story”
2nd story reminds me of the Monk in my campaign. She only tries to attack once and gets pouty if she misses. No extra attack, no Flurry of Blows, not even an attempt to use the broken quarterstaff DM homebrewed for her. One time she was absent, DM played her Monk for her in combat and did so much better, it was honestly depressing. And for the record, this isn't me dunking on a newbie, she's claimed to have played before, she just doesn't care about learning or improving. Or participating tbh
Nah, with the ranger being the leader of a cult to the flesh i'd say it's more like OP created someone from the church of the broken god and their friend was a sarkic
I’ve been scrolling through the comments to see what people have said abt my story and lol yeah, the similarities are unintentional but that’s 100% the vision
The last story reminds me of a book I read where magic is contained inside tattoos on people's bodies. Some are born with them, but they can also be transferred from one person to another. The catch is that every time magic is used, the tattoo fades a bit more and when it's completely gone, that person can no longer practice any magic at all and becomes a normal human being. The protag is a girl whose tattoo never fades and after some shenanigans, a party forms around her and it is decided she needs to be protected and escorted to a place where she can safely learn to use her powers. The first third or so of the first book is pretty lighthearted, with several bright, happy moments in it. Then partway through the escort, several of the group die in brutal fashion and the books suddenly dips into gruesome detail about how they die. I don't remember the name of the book, because it's been many years since I read it, but the tonal whiplash of the first part compared to the sudden slaughter and great detail to describe it was so fierce, it made me put the book down and never pick it back up. It felt like the book couldn't commit to a tone. Either that, or the author wanted to go for a sudden twist where things suddenly get really dark, really fast, but he failed to transition into it properly. It felt like it came out of nowhere and completely turned me off from finishing that book or any of its sequels. I prefer a consistent tone in my books or, if you're going to shift tones over time, it needs to be done in a way that makes sense. Going from 0 to 100 in a single page is not the way to do it.
I dunno about anyone else, but I absolutely love Noire Detective Crispy.... Also, that last story was just pure cringe mixed with high-octane nightmare fuel & squick.
For my money, the D&D adventure "Rime of the Frostmaiden" has some of the most absurd random encounter tables I've ever seen. Spoilers for Frostmaiden below, you have been warned. Anyway, since you can hit random encounters anytime you're traveling through the frozen wastes of Icewind Dale, you can potentially encounter any of these things, starting at level one: * 1 to 4 Yetis (CR 3 each) * 1 Abominable Yeti (CR 9) * Some cute little elemental things that will give you a gift if you're nice to them (CR Awww) * Arveiaturace, an ancient wyrm white dragon (CR Get Fucked, Nerd) Now, obviously you can always try to run away, but that's not always an option, and it is *entirely* possible to TPK before you even reach your first destination for your first quest.
@@OneHandDan I haven't played Sekiro yet (it's on my list) but I'm fairly certain Elden Ring does this as well with the Grafted Scion boss in the very beginning
As for unbeatable bosses, my first thought is Beatrix from Final Fantasy 9. You can't just let her win, you have to do enough damage before she instantly kills the party. She does this 3 times relatively close to each other in the plot. Very annoying and aggravating. Would bug me less if the party could beat Beatrix once or something happens to show the party surpassed her. The plot around her doesn't help, just making it more frustrating how she gets away with it.
Rose does not want to play dnd!! And that's ok! The conversation w her doesn't have to be a confrontation, just nicely say "it seems like you're not having fun, it's ok if dnd isn't your thing, and I don't want you to feel obligated to play if you don't want to". She clearly either enjoys hanging out w this group but dnd is the only time the group gets together, or she was happy to be included but now feels like it's too late to back out and doesn't want to be rude (not realizing that stringing the group along and being flaky is just as rude). You can invite her to a group hangout that's something more casual, playing videogames or just socializing. Give her the chance to quit the campaign if she wants to, or if she wants to keep playing just lower your expectations for her commitment and make up an in-game reason for her character not always being there. Some players need to be able to pop in and out of a campaign if needed, or if your game needs more commitment let your friends know that. Honestly ending the game and restarting with a group that you know all wants to play isn't a bad solution.
There are times when I get surprised by a monster and I'll add a stipulation like needing a short rest or it has a restricted movement space. The real trick with this is you have to be quick and creative as why the creature has this temporary condition. (I.e. it's not fully resurrected, there's an ancient spell that hadn't dissipated yet, it's missing it's legendary weapon, etc)
Second Story: Oh yeah, no, screw these people. The fact that she would leave in the middle of the game to go to the store after making everyone wait an hour is such blatant disrespect. OP made the 100% correct choice; these people aren't just not invested in the game, it sounds like they aren't invested in OP as a friend. Seriously, who does that? Who comes to hang out with their friends, and then midway through just decides to leave and run errands? That's bad.
This episode reminded me about the only time I had cancelt a campain. The reason was a player that was extremly hard to plan with and half of the time had something to do in real life that cancelt out our planned time. My problem was that he was not a bad player when we played and since I usually have an open ear and take some time after every session to talk about the game with players on how they liked the session and if they need something, he had all chances to say if something was wrong. But he never did, I only got that he had fun and liked that I used his character background to motivate him to fallow the main plot by combining both. So that way I gave to many chances until other players felt bad about how slow we where moving since it was simply to much time between sessions. So in the end it started to fizzle out and simply called the campain done. Its not a big drama but it was very draining to allways try to find at least one or to fitting days in a month and having to cancel half of them again. Long story short I never played with that player again.
I once had the awkward situation of wanting to leave a game i really wasn't giving with but the GM really not wanting me to and I eventually just couldn't work up the energy to care about it. Doesn't sound like the same thing as that story though.
Regarding D3s, there are a few ways to do that without using physical d3s. You can roll a d6 and halve the results, rolling up (so 1 and 2 are "1", 3 and 4 are "2" and 5 and 6 are "3") or rolling a d6 and subtracting 3 from any result over 3 (so 4=1, 5=2 and 6=3). I can think of one method with a d10, but d6s are a much more elegant substitution. Also, I have played Kingdom before too, albeit on my iPad. It's alright, not quite my cup of tea. Regarding that last story... YIKES. Just plain yikes. It's a shame when a game starts great only for something that's unpleasant yet the Storyteller is getting a little TOO into.
25:00 On one hand, this is pretty standard WW1 description stuff in media. I don't think it's necessarily bad. On the other hand, the fact that OP only points out this incident implies it was unique.
Admittedly, I played a multi year Shadow of the Demon Lord campaign with some very tough fights and pre-written modules included, I only had one PC death and it was in the final boss room, the dungeon prior to that killed off two characters. It is a deadly game. But! Looking at the character creation, it's very streamlined and you can whip up a character in 10-15 minutes, including rollable tables for character traits, backstory professions, starting equipment etc. Lvl 0, especially year without rain are rough and benefit from having a backup, because usually the levelling is fast paced (one level per story, usually makibg it level per 4h session)and unless played safe, characters will die off. If you're a bit put off by the difficulty but want a streamlined but deep d20 game, keep your eyes out for the second edition called 'Shadow of the Weird Wizard' its a perfect game for more dark fantasy and has a lot of personality, i recommend it a LOT
Story 2: I have been there with that feeling that *I* was the problem. The problem for me is it was half my table which bleed over into the other half. First one only would do exactly opposite what i planned, it was like he knew even when i tried to plan for the chaos. I am pretty sure it was just to push my buttons. Second one never paid attention and was always on her phone. I would have to recap everything and she still would do things like "i cast summon X" ... but your fighter is at 0 hp, i just told you that and your the only healer.. "oh.. oh well" *back to phone* she also would take extra long on her turns to decide since she didnt plan anything. The other two one was completely new (i feel bad for her) and the other just didnt interact at all (hes in my newest game and he plays fine ... with good tablemates..) Only i was stupid and tried a second time, I was just lucky the second time was with my best friend who pretty much sat me down and said i wasnt the issue. Now I have a wonderful group, they are all the type players and GM would adore (3 of 4 of them are note takers even!) Edit to add: that first group of 4 are all my friends. Im still friends with them but i never want to play a ttrpg with the first two ever again. It sucks when it comes up with Slow.. because I play two games and run a third.. and she is always hounding me to run a game for her.. I dont understand why
re: using real life languages, we made a one shot with a few friends where, coincidentally, every character that spoke elvish was also a breton speaker irl. So we just. Made elvish be breton in this one. Instead of being like "I say this in elvish" we'd just say it. It was really fun.
I'm not sure if this would qualify as an rpg horror story because it really wasn't in the game itself, but the last story in this video reminded me of this. In the 90s we were playing at one of the player's homes instead the library like we normally did back then. We were all kids, ranging from about 14 to 17, and we had never been at this kid's house before. He was a regular player, a little quiet but nice and never caused any issues. The problem came when we started getting reference books (2e had a ton of them) from the shelf in his bedroom. One of us knocked over a binder which fell open and showed that it was filled with pages with cut-outs of pictures of women's hands, all meticulously organized, glued in, and labeled. They ranged from celebrity images in magazines to photos of some of our classmates at school. And there were dozens of pages, too. I don't know if it was my imagination, but I thought the pages also looked...used, if you understand me. The player refused to talk about it, and the game, which had been going strong, came to a screeching halt. We all left after that. When the next session came around, he didn't show up, but he did show up for a few more after that one. He never would talk about what we had found, literally just refused to utter a word. Eventually he just stopped showing up. Thirty years later, I still don't know what to make of that, and what would have been an appropriate response.
My unreasonable fight story comes actually from the very first session in my very first campaign. Our DM was also a first time DM. We went out of town and had a run in with a band of bandits. We were all lvl 1 and I think four or five characters. We faced off against a group of bandits on our level and a lvl 4 bandit chief. This guy proceeded to kick our butts single handedly and pretty much one shot even my tank. Our DM figured that five lvl 1 equals to one lvl 4 character, simple math, right? Yeah, it was a complete wipe. He rolled the whole thing back though and we did a new start to the adventure the next session but man, that was a doozy.
I’ve actually run into the whole “kept playing because they didn’t wanna make the DM/other players feel bad”. My roommate and I (the other DM in our group) were beginning to suspect one of our players/former roommates was just not really cut out for DnD. She came up with some really potentially good character concepts (super young paladin looking for a god/cause? Shifter artificer? Good ideas!) but she was just… never into roleplay. It didn’t help that she has some pretty extreme social anxiety and isn’t really very great at people stuff, even with her closest friends (and her mental health issues and how she’s handled/not handled them are another, far more personal thing that I only bring up because it does impact things). Honestly I could probably submit the whole thing as a horror story here but it turned out pretty good. Suffice to say, she ended up moving back home (only about 20 minutes from me, my roommates, and our other friends) and ended up saying “I’d like to drop out of the campaign because of transportation issues (she doesn’t drive)”… even after I heard through the grapevine that she realized DnD wasn’t her thing and I straight up told her she didn’t need to have a practical reason, if she wasn’t enjoying herself she could just leave. That whole campaign’s been a bit of a thing at times tbh, but it’s almost over, and now I can focus on running Curse of Strahd and playing in my roommate’s homebrew! Yay!
This isn't a "horror story", but that bit about unreasonable boss fights reminded me of something worth sharing. Rewind about 15 years, myself and a roommate are hosting a weekly D&D (3.5) night with a fairly large group (something like 8 PCs and a DM who's a major wargamer). Our party finds themselves in a large cavern at the end of a grueling dungeon, and the final encounter involves a pair of Iron Golems. None of the players know the IGs' features off the top of our heads and we don't want to cheat, so we all roll for relevant knowledge, but come up empty. Alright, time to fight. I'm a sorcerer and at this point in the campaign I'm the biggest damage dealer. My favourite combat spell is (of course) Fireball - I have a few spell slots of the appropriate level and a staff that's nothing but Fireball, so I figure I can reduce these iron beasts to slag. Well, the combat goes about 6 rounds, I've dropped most of my available spells in addition to the damage our mundane ranged combatants can manage while the melee fighters stay mobile, trying to soak up the IGs' attacks, but they're not showing any sign of slowing down - we even rolled perception checks to see if there were any visible indicators of damage, but high rolls told us they were immaculate. Things are looking desperate. A Dwarven worshipper of Moradin, God of Smiths remembers that this campaign includes something like Divine Favor points that allow us to call on our gods about once per level, so he burns every point he has to get us out of this mess. Our DM of course is a genius, he puts a globe of invulnerability around the party, and suddenly the rest of the cavern heats up beyond any ironmonger's forge, melting the Golems to a puddle on the floor and cooling again before releasing us from the shielding spell. After the combat ends I can't help myself anymore, the Monster Manual was literally on my lap so I finally give in and look up these beasts. Not only were they immune to magic, but Fire magic specifically heals them, so I had been undoing my companions' damage the whole time. I don't think we ever laughed as hard as we did that night!
I actually enjoy some in-character conflict from opposing views. Now, this is highly dependent on the table I’m playing with and the campaign, and also how early those “cracks” show, but I play some roleplay/storytelling heavy campaigns so this is more where the fun for all of us is. As an example of what I mean, I am playing a linguistics scholar (samurai fighter though). We have an artificer who is from the same faction as mine. Both are researchers and deeply passionate about their craft and area of studies. The cracks for our two is that they have opposing views on how and why they acquire information and even what it might be used for, if at all. Basically, on paper these two seem like they could get along but that’s more like professional respect (and they do have professional respect for each other) and not a friendship. And the funny part in all that is these two are particularly stubborn when it comes to the exact traits that they would have to compromise on to get along. Let’s use the example of the topic of gods. Due to his past, the artificer has a deep distrust and near hatred of the gods. If he could keep them all out of the job and prevent a god from lording over any one ever again, he would. My fighter on the other hand, while not deeply religious, thinks of the gods as part of the natural magical ecosystem of the universe and thinks of the relationship between the gods and the mortals as more symbiotic than anything, regardless of whether the gods themselves recognize that. As below, so above, so they say. These two opposing philosophies are on a crash course of conflict soon, especially considering the story going on and that some of us are all ready chosen champions of some of the gods. Another example is probably tamer and was a recent banter the two had. During our time investigating a dragon hoard, we had come across a bunch of books, scrolls, maps, and information that the dragon had collected over the centuries. The artificer and I were immediately interested and started copying the information down in our own way (since we were at that hoard with permission from the dragon we weren’t removing anything we didn’t have permission for). The artificer used his tech to make a copy of everything while my character pulled out their notebook and other tools (calligraphy, painting, and forgery proficiency) to hand write everything. The artificer and I had a debate on how my character was being “inefficient” and my own saying “even the inefficient has value too.” This was in reference to my character having taken up writing as a hobby and using it to de stress in their past. But yeah, that was one of the first cracks. The two characters we still play as having a healthy professional respect for each other but this is dnd and no doubt that things are going to become tangled up in such a way that these two will need more than that. At the moment, one major thing they can agree on is that they both care deeply for the group and are highly protective of them and anyone coming to harm actually triggers both our characters into being reckless and brutal, which is a big deal because both of our characters are the strategic calculating type in battle. Makes it so these two work pretty seamlessly together which is nice. Honestly the party jokes that our characters are like the mom and dad of the group already. We do, as players, all get along, and frankly, our characters do too. None of our characters are made in such a way that the possible conflicts between them could not be overcome. the artificer's player and I have already discussed our characters and how to proceed. Heck! Any time there is character conflict, we take time to check in with each other above table. Its always been alright but I think its reassuring to all of us to do this and keep it open for when things do become heated or upsetting. I feel keeping that communication open lets us feel more at ease and more trusting of each other.
Paladin from that story here! I have definitely grown to enjoy the character conflict, and it helps that my table is also rp and story heavy. It’s just so funny to me how I have made two characters that are opposite of each other, and both are hated by the same character 😅
@@skippykay599 Lol that is hilarious 😂 I’m also glad you have grown to love that aspect of gameplay for that style. It can be quite enjoyable for those who do. Wishing you many more fun games in the future!
Haven't run it yet but Langderossa from HotDQ, comes off to me as nearly impossible to beat for a solo level 1 character. That is assuming the party adheres to the agreement to not interfere lest a hostage Langderossa has getting executed.
That guy is annoying as heck to deal with. Ended up saving the guard that took up the duel though because I was the emergency healer of the party. Dove before the final killing blow and dragged him into the keep and stabilized him. Got a spear to the back for my troubles but it was a risk I took and survived. Still, our fighter recently took him on at lvl 3 and, while he did amazing because battlemaster, I will have to pull the same trick as the party breaks the deal and finishes the guy off. Trust me, you’ll want to put alternate win conditions with this antagonist, perhaps if they impress him, that he will leave them alive to grow stronger, that type of thing. Just a suggestion as a player who has had to face him, not just recently but also in a different campaign at a different table in the past. It’s been brutal every time. He is set up to easily tpk the party and/or just make an unsatisfying situation for the players (like the hostage one).
Hell yes Kingdoms games. My go to for when I'm depressed and want a soft dopamine game while rotting in my chair or on the couch in a blanket with laptop. Absolutely gorgeous, simple gameplay, and yet pretty challenging to survive and thrive.
One fight I was when the party consisted of 2 level 7s and 3 level 6, contained 3 bugbears, 2 bugbear chiefs, an orc berserker, a begin, 2 young dragons, an sire of insanity and some CR14 aberration one after the other because the DM got annoyed we managed to beat his over the party’s intended CR rating enemies.
Just Don’t CARE Yup. Had this and talked about her many times. Despite playing with use for 1-2 years, she needed help just to make a character sheet and still did not know what advantage/disadavantage was. She also needed someone to keep track of HER spell slots and HP because for whatever reason, she could not. She did not know her class features. And yes, she would drop games at the last minute. She would go afk mid session for long periods of time with no word to us. And yeah, she was in a bunch of our campaigns and all those games got held up because of her. We eventually had to have the talk with her and let her go. It also did not help that she was also dropping occasional homophobia and biphobia. Yeah, she was homeschooled in a christian household… but it sucked hearing her say she hated the problem player for being bisexual instead of, ya know, a two faced arsehole (especially since she was in the same group as a bisexual woman who, if she paid enough attention, would know I has very open about being bi).
Unreasonable boss fights huh. There is a boss early on in Pathfinder's Abomination Vaults module that has spells with the Death trait. This means that any spell that does damage with this trait kills anyone who is reduced to zero hit points by the damage. Won't say what or who the boss is for spoiler reasons, but fair warning to new Pathfinder GMs, run the beginner box adventure first if you intend to run Abomination Vaults or just start the party at Lvl 3.
Speaking of Pathfinder and unreasonable boss fights, I'm in a group that's in the endgame for Tyrant's Grasp, and we're just a few sessions away from facing the Whispering Tyrant. After he flexed on us by one-shot disintegrating our previously nigh-unkillable paladin (though we do have resources to bring him back before the fight proper). But at least in this case, we've spent an entire campaign building up that this isn't a fight that we can be expected to win in the traditional sense, disregarding spoilers inherent in 2nd Edition materials.
Paladin here! It was all accidental and I had to google it to make sure I was remembering it right but yeah pretty much lol. I’ll definitely have to mention this to ranger too, might give us both inspiration for future rp
"Murder by Boss Fight" That module is for Novice (level 1-3) adventurers in Shadow of the Demon Lord. It's not designed for the level 0 characters (those are Starting adventurers). The other 2 tiers are Expert (4-7) and Master (8-10). The system itself is fairly difficult (I've run it so many times and my group loves it), but it's not a total horror story like the story makes it seem. Edit: My (old) PDF download of the module from when it first came out says Novice, but DriveThruRPG lists it as Starting/Novice, and the description says Starting. That's so weird. I have run this module as a Novice adventure but wouldn't use it for a Starting group for sure. It's *really* tough at level 1.
I, for real, have a padded folding chair I bought just for games to help with the fact most people don't have that many chairs. It's not super comfortable but it's better than nothing, and any chair is better than no chair.
Hey! Paladin from that story here! I had to search up the Adeptus Mechanicus and. Yes it’s spot on. My character’s mantra is LITERALLY “technology is strong but the flesh is weak”
There’s a dungeon in Skyrim that led to me learning in the first place that there is difficulty adjustment in Skyrim! Who knew! I don’t remember the exact name of the dungeon or quest or character, but the boss is a vampire who waits behind a door at the bottom of a set of stairs in a cave or crypt full of lesser vampires. Those were fine. But you open that door, even as an invisible stealth archer, and you are immediately hit by, just, SO MUCH lightning magic. I died immediately several times. Could have easily been save locked. No idea why that guy was so strong, I don’t even remember it as a major quest. I turned the difficulty down, lived long enough to heal and buff, killed him, and moved on. I never encountered even a main boss or DLC main boss that was so hard to survive a single hit from again.
Four words: Dragon priest near Whiterun. Just out in the open, near a dragon-wall with a chest full of goodies. Was cocky - figured it'd be easy, I just got done with the very first dungeon in the game, got some nice gear and plenty of potions - then BAM! Old bastard rose up from the coffin, told me to get off his lawn, and blasted my ass to Oblivion. Got humbled REAL quick. Also, made a witch-hunter build because of that encounter.
The game, Morrowind. The dungeon, Addamasartus (sp?). The mage . . . might as well be named F*** You In Particular, because he is rough on your first few playthroughs. AOE spells in a tight corridor, and he's supposed to just be a test to see how well your character can perform in combat.
I remember Puffin Forest' story on Hoard of the Dragon Queen. If the first chapter (the one with the blue dragon) was rough as hell, I don't wanna imagine how hard is the rest of the module. I read it's also quite railroad-ish.
I have a very similar excitement-for-DMing thing where I was really excited to write and play a small oneshot for my sister and I, since she's never played before and she said she wanted to (she likes dnd in stranger things), and multiple times we've had the time set up or both been free and she's just gone "hmm i don't really want to rn" meanwhile I've been doing what she wanted instead and it's been so long with her just completely uncaring about a oneshot where I put it all together myself and helped her with her character sheet and everything and now I just don't even care. It's just kind of an empty feeling where before I was so excited that she wanted to share an interest with me and now I'm probably not gonna try DMing for a long time yet.
Me and some friends were running a one-shot, where we WERE supposed to fight a giant sandworm, and fail. Two party members were on a hill trying to escape it, low on health. I didn't have time to draw my sword, so I punched it. Rolled a nat 20, so the DM said I punch it so hard in the face, the punch basically shot its brains out the other side.
OP here! For context DM just really likes to homebrew and wanted to see how far he could push it. We have two new players in the group and they wanted to learn dnd. The veteran players in the group haven’t experimented with/haven’t enjoyed many ttrpgs outside of dnd. Instead of everyone learning a new system, now only two people are learning, dm is free to homebrew as he pleases, and me and the other veteran have a refreshing different take on dnd
@@skippykay599 you do what you do but it really sounds a lot of unnecessary work when there are like, 60-100 page long systems that offer unique mechanics and settings for your campaign and are even more flexible than d&d 5e when it comes to rule bending and homebrew You could play skyrim with mods for the rest of your life and no other video game and it sure will be fun but you're closing yourself to a whole world of experiences in similar or majorly different video games There's nothing wrong with it, and if you guys are having fun no one has the right to stop you, but i think you guys are losing some good stuff
@@sator2766 I mean, we did briefly consider doing another system, but dm was very particular about what he wanted to do. He found zombie apocalypse ttrpgs but they didn’t have the same feel he was going for. He accepted the fact that, no matter what, he’d have to homebrew to hell and back, so he would much rather do that in a system we were already familiar with. It actually has been running really well! Most of the time it’s just changing the descriptions of how attacks or monsters look, which we already do in our other games
Men writing women I noticed a little while ago that I tend to use a lot more female NPCs than male, and I often wonder if I'm portraying them in a well rounded, respectful way. Could be some underlying imposter syndrome talking.
First Story Prompt: I'll never forget when I started off playing D&D, making my level 1 3.5E Rogue, having him sit down at a bar, talk to a lady, and get smacked in rejection, taking 3 points of damage. As a level 1 Rogue. With 7 max HP. And then immediately going into a dungeon. To fight an adult blue dragon. At level 1. With 4 of my 7 Hit Points left. Needless to say, the guy DMing that game was more about wanting to kill the players and 'win' than anything else, but we were, like, 15 at the time, so we've all grown a lot since then.
I'm running Curse of Strahd. The game had to go on hiatus, so I decided to scare the party a bit by Strahd deciding it is now time to actually kill the party, at lv5. They found a method to get revived, so even if someone died, they can come back. This party of LV5s floored Strahd on turn 2. I didn't sandbag him or anything, I need a new strategy, cause Strahd is now scared OF THEM.
I've fallen asleep at a meet up game. Me an a group of my coworkers had all gotten together for a table, I ended up falling asleep mid game simply cause we played pretty much first thing in the morning and I had just gotten off a 10 Hour overnight. It was pretty regular for me to be exhausted for session but that was the first time it actually happened. I liked the table and dm and they liked me. We also had a Problem player, the dude himself wasn't bad, but his character decisions really didn't make sense. They froze the campaign but later brought it back and tried to invite me but I was just too busy at the time sadly.
Damn the “don’t care” story is the same with the campaign I’m in when the Paladin player didn’t know what Smite was or that he had spells n were at session 30 in a year long campaign. 🤦🏾♀️ he didn’t know anything about the world, kept adding to his backstory that doesn’t fit in said world n not tell the DM, just randomly blurt it out during a session in roleplay.
I love shadow of the demon lord, but I see how people may not like it, I love the meat grinder aspect and the class (or “paths” as it calls it) system in this game.
The paths are the best part, you have to know what you're hopping into when you're making a campaign in that system, a fucking guard can kill your player character easily and you should fear for your life knowing full well the world is dying and you're not any better
I once had the opposite problem of that murder boss fight story, I ran a boss fight that was too easy in a game that was advertised as being hard as nails. It was a game of Mork Borg, which is notoriously deadly, and I had several backup plans in case of player deaths and TPK. But nobody ended up dying due to lucky rolls and good strategy. Players had fun though so I don't mind.
My game horror story was my very first one shot I DMed. There was a psudo zombie beholder in a pool. I accidentally decintegrated one of my players. They were lvl 5. Fortunately, I believe the party successfully ran away before another encounter where I didn't want them accidentally falling ontop of the main badie of that area and then ended up burning the whole manor down. Not what I had planned at all obviously, but we all seemed to have fun.
In the demon lord game, the players were given strong examples that the enemy would easily over power them, b4 they entered the well. It seems obvious that the enemy was supernatural, & that they would need to discover some kind of weakness b4 proceeding. This is incorporating problem solving. Problem solving is what keeps encounters from being just number crunching. There R tons of actions that were necessary b4 entering that well. Warning the population. Advising the town's people to avoid areas when it was active. Having a local cleric put a ward on the well, to keep it from escaping the well, & possibly all the sewer exits. Finding out the nature & habits of the creature. Seeking a sage for advice. Acquiring helpful tools like holy water. These R all actions that improve the role playing aspect of the game, get the players involved in the community, creates relations with helpful NPCs. This is what makes the game more than a series of Macguffins & just being lead around with a carrot on a stick. Players needed to do anything other than just deciding to have a suicidal confrontation, with a creature, that they already knew had a power that caused instant death. Adventuring is all of these things. Scaling encounters cannot be required for all enemies. There was plenty of warning that this encounter was a likely TPK, & the party decided to walk eyes open into that TPK. Problem solving is an essential part of the game. Scaling is not. The lvl zero start & lack of class features emphasizes that the PCs R squishy & fragile. I cannot think of how it could be made more obvious, that a thoughtless confrontation would cause a TPK. The billboard sign for this message was HUGE. Big sign over the well said, "For TPK Enter Here." They went in. Destroying characters that decide to trade blows with an enemy that severely outclasses them, when they take zero measures of preparation, & do next to nothing in terms of investigating, is exactly what every TTRPG needs to be designed to do.
One time our dm put us up against a roc, out on the open sea. Apparently we were supposed to flee? But where do you flee to on the open ocean? Fortunately, our assassin rogue had a pirate background, and successfully argued that as she was captaining the ship, she should get assassination with the ship's cannon, since she was attacking it before it attacked her. Do you know how ungodly much damage a level nine rogue assassin can do with a mfing cannon? Didn't one hit kill the roc, but made it manageable for my illusion wizard and our other rogue (don't ask) on a hippogriff I had summoned (for reasons) to finish it off before it reached the ship. Of course, then we had to figure out how to survive the wave from it hitting the water, but still, we made it in the end. Even wrote a song about it afterwards
Have played Kingdom. Fun game, but gets *quickly* challenging, oof. Also, I appreciate you including more wholesome stories, not just all horror 24/7 :)
Unreasonable video game boss fight stories? Yeah, I'm going to need a bit. I've only a had few, dozen, dozen in my time as a gamer. Oddly enough, none from time with D&D though.
Chrono Trigger mention! That’s my favorite video game ever (as you could probably guess from my username). I love your videos, thank you for making them!
Glad to see others who played Shadow of the Demon Lord had the exact same experience our group had trying to run this mess of a game. I can top it with bullshit levels though, i got screwed before id even started the game by character creator. I had rolled a goblin character, who is fae in that game. You have to roll quirks for your character, and mine ended up being that they were obsessed with a piece of jewellery, in my case a ring, that they couldn't remove. Fae receive negatives to all rolls due to being allergic to metals in this system. Needless to say it was *so fun* being a completely useless character, but it did make the part where my character actually managed to kill the well demon with a sling after she oneshot two of our party members far more hilarious than it should have been.
if a person cant attend a session last second because they PLANNED to do something else you literally just need to kick them out they clearly showed they dont want to play, they literallly purposely planned something else when yall already had a schedule.
Hey! This is gonna sound like a very weirdly specific question but at 28:02 there was a still of some art of check in cards from what seemed to be another video and I was wondering what video its from? Im actually the artist that drew those cards on commission a few years ago now at this point! made me genuinely delighted and surprised to see them again haha Love your videos also!
My husband and I have been playing DnD with his cousin on and off (at most six months between failed campaigns) for 5 years now and she still doesn't really know how to play. I have a potential horror story that I'm writing to submit (to you) but, it's not done yet because we're right in the middle of this multiple-session cluster fuck and potential TPK that cousin started with her stupid "but this is what my character would do" actions.
I don't have any full blown horror stories because I stopped things before they reached that level. So, I guess we can call them horror seeds(?). The first was about 10 years ago. I was the GM and we were playing a Pathfinder 1e homebrew campaign. One of the players is someone I've game with for literal decades. He's the King of Misogynists but usually keeps his views to himself at the table. For example, he refuses to read a book written by a woman, play a game with a woman as the GM, watch a movie or tv show with a woman as the leader (think Star Trek: Voyager. That was his reason to not watch it), and mumbles under his breath when we have women in the group. A quote from him - "Women should not get any of the reward in games. They should be PART of the reward." I'm not making that up. Anyway, the players had stopped in a large-ish town to replenish supplies and rest up. He announced he was going to find a brothel (bear in mind we're all in our mid 40s to early 50s at this time). He said he wanted to hire the hottest girl in the brothel, so he forked over a handful of gold and took her to a room. He then asked ME to describe the things they did in detail, which I flatly refused because a) it was weird as hell, and b) there was a woman playing in the freaking campaign! He literally sulked and at the end of the night he just gathered his things and walked out. Our next game, two weeks later, he was back to "normal" and didn't do any of that crap. The second one happened in late 2022 or very early 2023, also in a Pathfinder 1e homebrew game where I was the GM (always the GM). A longtime friend and fellow gamer asked if a friend of his could join the group. I said sure, trusting that his friend would be like his other friends (you know, us). No. He wasn't. The character he wanted to play was an underaged halfling street hustling umm...sex worker/rogue named (oh God) Chlamydia Stench-Trench. I flatly said no. He then asked if he could just call her by her first name because, "Chlamydia sounds sort of like a medieval woman's name". I had two adult women and another player's 15 year old daughter in the group. I stopped that crap before he even showed up for the first game. He even tried to start beef with me over it by text and email. He finally relented and played an adult male human rogue. The dude was 58 years old (same as me) and he pouted about it in texts for a week. I became ill in May and decided to retire from gaming, or at the very least GMing. Haven't played anything since. So, there you have it. Horror stories stopped before blossoming into true mind bending terror. Love your videos. They make me glad I've played with some of the same bunch since 1987. Really.
"It it still be a horror story if the game itself was the horror story?" ...I mean, we've all heard tale of FATAL... (d3s are usually double labelled d6s. Or improvise with a 1d6 and then either transform to 1-3 by halving and rounding up, or subtract three if the number's over 3 (or, my preference; 1 or 6 = 1; 2 or 5 = 2; 3 or 4 = 3 so both 1s are opposite each other, etc.)
“My Grandma has died for the fifth time”😂 I don’t know why but that got me!
Why are you so shocked she died five times? I’m more shocked she found the strength to live four times,
Ugh, that last story was pretty bad. Especially the NPC wanting to die cuz she got hit in the mid section. DM definitely has unhealthy views on women and a disturbing fetish...
And I have a feeling someone sent a copy of his hard drive to the FBI, and that's why he went they never heard from him again.
Demons having fancy titles rather than names not only makes them easier to remember, but also can fit thematically as it could tie into the whole power-through-names thing.
The "she's going to the store" on session FOURTEEN is sending me 😂 like. BRUH. JUST SAY U DONT WANNA BE THERE
As one of the players from that session, imagine what was we thinking and feeling :"D Right before the conflict she gets milk like my papa. And I'm a very simple fighter, waiting 3 years to hit three times after that i wait another 3 years to hit free times.
To the first story, i know that dnd is normally pkayed around a table, but me and my friends play on couches with TV trays for the DM and anyone who uses a pc for character sheets. We throw up roll20 on the tv and its super comfortable and fun!
That's the way I've done it for years. No figures or battle mats, just theater of the mind.
The "Just don't CARE" story hurt. I had a friend express interest in D&D, and excitedly started a campaign for them. While I was understanding this the first few times, I had to remind them every single time to roll the d20 for an attack or skill check. They were a druid but only alternated between Produce Flame and Ice Knife. They also seemed frustrated about not being able to romance NPCs, but their roleplay was minimal. The session I knew it would end soon is when their recently deceased father's favorite football team was playing and they were watching the game throughout the session, drinking beer and cheering as if the D&D game weren't happening. They really should've just indicated a conflicting engagement.
The worst part is I had invited a really good friend to the campaign and assured him it would be ongoing. I tried changing the setting to make myself more excited, which worked for *my* involvement, but I quietly stopped scheduling games and never heard anything from the new player about it. I know D&D isn't for everyone and that's totally valid. In this case I'm sure my friend's social anxiety kept them from conveying their feelings about the game.
Edit: Was that Blake Roman in the "tail was wagging" cutaway? 😍
The first story gave me a chuckle. Glad Gramma is fine❤
Me too! I was rooting for Wizard Grandma!
In Dissidia Duodecim, when you first turn on the game, it will try to take you through the tutorial. before it starts you have an option to say im already a master at the game. the game will ask again and if you continue to say you are a master of the game it forces you to fight the final super boss of the game at level 1.
And if you, by divine miracle, manage to defeat him, the game doesn't even acknowledge XD
As the origin of the second story i'm very glad that my unpleasant experience gave you so many fun skit ideas ;D
A little update on the story to anyone who is intrested:
I'm still friends with both Jack and Rose, they know we restarted the game and they haven't approached me or any of the players either to ask why they weren't invited or anything. So they probably don't rly care much for it. They aren't bad people by any means, Rose just has something that I would call "people pleaser syndrome" and she probably thought I would get offended if she said she isn't intrested in dnd.
I'm so glad you were able to find your love for the game again.
You want poor looking dice, look up the d7 and the d5
From what I see, some versions of those dice only have a number of sides equal to the highest number. They look lumpy and awkward.
But some versions have double the sides of the highest number. Which makes them look symmetrical and nice. I assume they use each number twice on the die sides.
Never…!
Thanks, I hate them.
My first dice were handmade. The d10's tended to fall on 7's, the d20 was crooked too. My 10 yrs old self and others still loved them. It took me a few years to buy proper dice, not because I was broke, because I didn't feel the need to.
No, the d9 is the fucking worst
Crispy, the skit with the character thinking until one of the players is all but dead only to cast fireball ("after carefully considering all my options") had me in stitches... Fantastic work!
I lost it at the MenWritingWomen Noir skit
"Can a game system be a horror story?"
*Crispy clearly doesn't know about F.A.T.A.L.*
Also MOTHAFUCKIN BEAST WARS!
Nah people think sotdl is a horror story? They've not known shit
Bold to assume Crispy would WANT to know about F.A.T.A.L.
"Write a human being, and happen to make them female" best advice
But how am I supposed to know that she’s a FEMALE if the author doesn’t describe her voluptuous body, feminine biology(that is definitely how girls work), and breathtaking beauty in extreme and borderline creepy detail? That’s, like, the whole purpose of females in stories, right? To make my willy go Awooga?
If I am allowed to say, and my apologies if this is unwelcome, I would like to add that, yes, this is good advice but only superficially.
Like any group, some characters can only come from a place that's specifically tied to a specific background. A female character whose main flaw is being unable to trust men doesn't come from "just writing a character who happens to be female", it comes from the specificity of womanhood and how it works both internally and externally.
Young girls are told to keep their guards up, told that if something happens, it's likely their fault, they learn early on the imposed fragility and vulnerability of their gender. Many become afraid. Some even develop serious issues because of that. This is the kind of nuance that "write humans who happen to be X Y Z" loses, humans are diverse, are different, and a lot of experiences can only come from being a specific kind of human.
What I mean to say is that, while it is certainly good advice, it's not a great one and it ignores pretty much anything that's more centered around social factors.
@@jinfox8182 I would call it incomplete advice but not bad for sure. I think your more nuanced advice is better overall though.
@@KalinTheZola it isn't bad advice at all, it only depends a lot on what kind of story you're trying to tell :).
Although I find that a lot of great deeper stories actually use the character's labels as a means to explore it further. Yellowjackets comes to mind as it is a very specifically teenager girl story that would be completely different should another social group had suffered the accident.
Overall, nuance is good but it can be overwhelming, so the "write a person who happens to be X" is a good way to keep it simpler yet functional and tasteful
@@jinfox8182 100 percent
Shadow of the demon lord is a system designed to be a meat grinder. we played a pre-written adventure and ended up having 5 deaths (and a BUNCH of near-misses). The rules for DMs has an explicit section on how to introduce new characters as quick as possible and for players to keep backups.
At least that sort of group gets their own published adventure? 🤷
Can’t help but feel this system is a smidge bit off though.
@@Davtwan It's a fantasy horror game, so think of it less as DnD and more as Call of Cthulhu mixed with DnD
@@Davtwanit's meant to be a fantasy horror game, the whole premise is that the world is dying, the devils want to thin the veil that protects reality from the eldritch being known as the demon lord and the best people can do is delay it, you know what you signed up for when you create a campaign based on that, and character creation and combat is meant to be fast and deadly with lots of stuff to do and choose on character creation, and there's things like a corruption system that mildly punishes your character for making bad things (and condemns their soul to hell) and a insanity system
Not only that i don't know about that module but as far as i am aware demons in sotdl are less interested in killing people randomly and more interested in corrupting them
@@sator2766 tbf, if your entire game design relies on your game being impossible and as unfun/tedious for players as possible... maybe you should rethink the game design. Its nothing like dark souls because dark souls is challenging but fair when you play by its rules and learn it, and it works because it doesnt inherently rely on a chance system which makes it even less predictable.
@@Mabufu381My players have kept requesting me to run SotDL. At this point, I have declared that I won't run it anymore until one of them runs it for me to at least level 3. The irony I see with the game is that it's a lot easier to balance a battle in that game than in D&D or Pathfinder. Something that does strike out as interesting is that the adventure uses a Demon during level 0. Demons are some of the toughest enemies in the game. Said demon in the video seems to be a "Small Demon" according to what is described, which is just barely takeable for a group of level 0s according to the difficulty table in the GM's section, but I don't think I'd lightly throw even a Tiny Demon at my group of level 0s. Higher group levels in the game changes the game a lot, though. It was nigh-impossible to kill my most recent SotDL party at levels 7-10, unless I specifically tossed some of the highest difficulty creatures as opposition at them, and they still could win. They fought a Demon Prince at the end of the game and came out victorious without me pulling any punches!
What I will say, however, is that level 0 is less about actually fighting creatures head-on, and more about trying to use your brain to survive. I like that Level 0 is a thing, especially to learn the mechanics before you play the rest of the game (There's a good amount of mechanics), but it is also the most difficult level in the game, as you don't have your path tools yet.
This turn into a pretty long post, apologies.
I agree with you on monster names. It's scarier/interesting to confront something that is beyond names and is just a description.
Not Crispy cencoring the word fetish in the story but saying it out loud in the skit XD Love ya Crispy, stay monetized.
We had a Rose in our game. Never payed attention in combat, constantly had to ask for rule clarification and one time she was asked to roll two d20 and pick the highest number, she preceded to not roll, pick up both dice and inspect them whilst rotating them. When asked what she was doing and why didn't she roll she said 'I'm trying to find which one has the biggest number on it.
Well, that first story was a fresh departure from the usual sort of DnD “horror story”! Glad grandma’s alright, she sounds awesome.
As a DM I would MUCH rather have someone say that they don't want to play than deal with trying to accommodate someone who really doesn't care. You don't have to be super hyped at everything, but at least paying attention and participating should not be that high a bar for something you are doing supposedly out of enjoyment. I know sometimes people are sometimes tired, or sick, or distracted by life stuff, but at LEAST try. If you can't, it'd be best for all involved if you left.
I live for your reenactment scenes Cripsy lmaoo. They're so good! The noir one had me dead 😂
18:22 hey that’s my story! Nice! Glad I could give a somewhat lighthearted story as a refresher between these other ones.
Yes, my dm understands how absurd it is to have a modern zombie apocalypse dnd game. And yes, our mutual friends who aren’t in his game poke fun at it all the time. It’s become an in joke between us. It’s all in good sport though!
Currently, it’s a competition to see if Paladin or Ranger will die first. My backup character will absolutely be hated by Ranger
Update: I shared it with ranger and we are currently laughing over this. It was very funny sending this video to them and trying to explain “yes it’s about you no you’re not a horror story”
2nd story reminds me of the Monk in my campaign. She only tries to attack once and gets pouty if she misses. No extra attack, no Flurry of Blows, not even an attempt to use the broken quarterstaff DM homebrewed for her. One time she was absent, DM played her Monk for her in combat and did so much better, it was honestly depressing. And for the record, this isn't me dunking on a newbie, she's claimed to have played before, she just doesn't care about learning or improving. Or participating tbh
I'm 38 and I'm absolutely wrecked by uncomfortable chairs
20:40 wait, so the Paladin sees the flesh as weak and wants to replace it? My mans is just an Adeptus Mechanicus member.
Nah, with the ranger being the leader of a cult to the flesh i'd say it's more like OP created someone from the church of the broken god and their friend was a sarkic
@@TheScarletMenagerie that actually also makes a lot of sense too
From the moment he understood weakness of the flesh...
I’ve been scrolling through the comments to see what people have said abt my story and lol yeah, the similarities are unintentional but that’s 100% the vision
On another note I am learning so much about 40K today lol
The last story reminds me of a book I read where magic is contained inside tattoos on people's bodies. Some are born with them, but they can also be transferred from one person to another. The catch is that every time magic is used, the tattoo fades a bit more and when it's completely gone, that person can no longer practice any magic at all and becomes a normal human being.
The protag is a girl whose tattoo never fades and after some shenanigans, a party forms around her and it is decided she needs to be protected and escorted to a place where she can safely learn to use her powers.
The first third or so of the first book is pretty lighthearted, with several bright, happy moments in it. Then partway through the escort, several of the group die in brutal fashion and the books suddenly dips into gruesome detail about how they die.
I don't remember the name of the book, because it's been many years since I read it, but the tonal whiplash of the first part compared to the sudden slaughter and great detail to describe it was so fierce, it made me put the book down and never pick it back up. It felt like the book couldn't commit to a tone. Either that, or the author wanted to go for a sudden twist where things suddenly get really dark, really fast, but he failed to transition into it properly. It felt like it came out of nowhere and completely turned me off from finishing that book or any of its sequels. I prefer a consistent tone in my books or, if you're going to shift tones over time, it needs to be done in a way that makes sense. Going from 0 to 100 in a single page is not the way to do it.
I dunno about anyone else, but I absolutely love Noire Detective Crispy.... Also, that last story was just pure cringe mixed with high-octane nightmare fuel & squick.
For my money, the D&D adventure "Rime of the Frostmaiden" has some of the most absurd random encounter tables I've ever seen.
Spoilers for Frostmaiden below, you have been warned.
Anyway, since you can hit random encounters anytime you're traveling through the frozen wastes of Icewind Dale, you can potentially encounter any of these things, starting at level one:
* 1 to 4 Yetis (CR 3 each)
* 1 Abominable Yeti (CR 9)
* Some cute little elemental things that will give you a gift if you're nice to them (CR Awww)
* Arveiaturace, an ancient wyrm white dragon (CR Get Fucked, Nerd)
Now, obviously you can always try to run away, but that's not always an option, and it is *entirely* possible to TPK before you even reach your first destination for your first quest.
I actually managed to win the "forced loss" fight in Rogue Galaxy but it just played the cutscene like normal iirc lol
Sekiro does this well, if you win the first fight I believe there is a slight variation in the cutscene where someone hits you with a shuriken
@@OneHandDan I haven't played Sekiro yet (it's on my list) but I'm fairly certain Elden Ring does this as well with the Grafted Scion boss in the very beginning
@@jayniir-pd8jl you're right!
As for unbeatable bosses, my first thought is Beatrix from Final Fantasy 9. You can't just let her win, you have to do enough damage before she instantly kills the party. She does this 3 times relatively close to each other in the plot. Very annoying and aggravating. Would bug me less if the party could beat Beatrix once or something happens to show the party surpassed her. The plot around her doesn't help, just making it more frustrating how she gets away with it.
Rose does not want to play dnd!! And that's ok! The conversation w her doesn't have to be a confrontation, just nicely say "it seems like you're not having fun, it's ok if dnd isn't your thing, and I don't want you to feel obligated to play if you don't want to". She clearly either enjoys hanging out w this group but dnd is the only time the group gets together, or she was happy to be included but now feels like it's too late to back out and doesn't want to be rude (not realizing that stringing the group along and being flaky is just as rude). You can invite her to a group hangout that's something more casual, playing videogames or just socializing. Give her the chance to quit the campaign if she wants to, or if she wants to keep playing just lower your expectations for her commitment and make up an in-game reason for her character not always being there. Some players need to be able to pop in and out of a campaign if needed, or if your game needs more commitment let your friends know that. Honestly ending the game and restarting with a group that you know all wants to play isn't a bad solution.
25:07 I was half paying attention while doing other things during this bit. Then my Undertale brain just got suddenly activated LMAO
There are times when I get surprised by a monster and I'll add a stipulation like needing a short rest or it has a restricted movement space. The real trick with this is you have to be quick and creative as why the creature has this temporary condition. (I.e. it's not fully resurrected, there's an ancient spell that hadn't dissipated yet, it's missing it's legendary weapon, etc)
Second Story: Oh yeah, no, screw these people. The fact that she would leave in the middle of the game to go to the store after making everyone wait an hour is such blatant disrespect. OP made the 100% correct choice; these people aren't just not invested in the game, it sounds like they aren't invested in OP as a friend. Seriously, who does that? Who comes to hang out with their friends, and then midway through just decides to leave and run errands? That's bad.
This episode reminded me about the only time I had cancelt a campain.
The reason was a player that was extremly hard to plan with and half of the time had something to do in real life that cancelt out our planned time.
My problem was that he was not a bad player when we played and since I usually have an open ear and take some time after every session to talk about the game with players on how they liked the session and if they need something, he had all chances to say if something was wrong. But he never did, I only got that he had fun and liked that I used his character background to motivate him to fallow the main plot by combining both.
So that way I gave to many chances until other players felt bad about how slow we where moving since it was simply to much time between sessions.
So in the end it started to fizzle out and simply called the campain done.
Its not a big drama but it was very draining to allways try to find at least one or to fitting days in a month and having to cancel half of them again.
Long story short I never played with that player again.
My raven’s 1d1 damage will always be my favorite
I once had the awkward situation of wanting to leave a game i really wasn't giving with but the GM really not wanting me to and I eventually just couldn't work up the energy to care about it. Doesn't sound like the same thing as that story though.
Regarding D3s, there are a few ways to do that without using physical d3s. You can roll a d6 and halve the results, rolling up (so 1 and 2 are "1", 3 and 4 are "2" and 5 and 6 are "3") or rolling a d6 and subtracting 3 from any result over 3 (so 4=1, 5=2 and 6=3). I can think of one method with a d10, but d6s are a much more elegant substitution.
Also, I have played Kingdom before too, albeit on my iPad. It's alright, not quite my cup of tea.
Regarding that last story... YIKES. Just plain yikes. It's a shame when a game starts great only for something that's unpleasant yet the Storyteller is getting a little TOO into.
25:00 On one hand, this is pretty standard WW1 description stuff in media. I don't think it's necessarily bad. On the other hand, the fact that OP only points out this incident implies it was unique.
The slide shows always bring good cuts to these. Also the last one, wasn't expecting a noir style, but it was cool
In the first story, I'm reminded of the Eclipse from Berserk. Rip Band of the Hawk.
Admittedly, I played a multi year Shadow of the Demon Lord campaign with some very tough fights and pre-written modules included, I only had one PC death and it was in the final boss room, the dungeon prior to that killed off two characters. It is a deadly game.
But!
Looking at the character creation, it's very streamlined and you can whip up a character in 10-15 minutes, including rollable tables for character traits, backstory professions, starting equipment etc. Lvl 0, especially year without rain are rough and benefit from having a backup, because usually the levelling is fast paced (one level per story, usually makibg it level per 4h session)and unless played safe, characters will die off.
If you're a bit put off by the difficulty but want a streamlined but deep d20 game, keep your eyes out for the second edition called 'Shadow of the Weird Wizard' its a perfect game for more dark fantasy and has a lot of personality, i recommend it a LOT
Story 2: I have been there with that feeling that *I* was the problem.
The problem for me is it was half my table which bleed over into the other half. First one only would do exactly opposite what i planned, it was like he knew even when i tried to plan for the chaos. I am pretty sure it was just to push my buttons. Second one never paid attention and was always on her phone. I would have to recap everything and she still would do things like "i cast summon X" ... but your fighter is at 0 hp, i just told you that and your the only healer.. "oh.. oh well" *back to phone* she also would take extra long on her turns to decide since she didnt plan anything. The other two one was completely new (i feel bad for her) and the other just didnt interact at all (hes in my newest game and he plays fine ... with good tablemates..)
Only i was stupid and tried a second time, I was just lucky the second time was with my best friend who pretty much sat me down and said i wasnt the issue. Now I have a wonderful group, they are all the type players and GM would adore (3 of 4 of them are note takers even!)
Edit to add: that first group of 4 are all my friends. Im still friends with them but i never want to play a ttrpg with the first two ever again. It sucks when it comes up with Slow.. because I play two games and run a third.. and she is always hounding me to run a game for her.. I dont understand why
re: using real life languages, we made a one shot with a few friends where, coincidentally, every character that spoke elvish was also a breton speaker irl. So we just. Made elvish be breton in this one. Instead of being like "I say this in elvish" we'd just say it. It was really fun.
I'm not sure if this would qualify as an rpg horror story because it really wasn't in the game itself, but the last story in this video reminded me of this. In the 90s we were playing at one of the player's homes instead the library like we normally did back then. We were all kids, ranging from about 14 to 17, and we had never been at this kid's house before. He was a regular player, a little quiet but nice and never caused any issues. The problem came when we started getting reference books (2e had a ton of them) from the shelf in his bedroom. One of us knocked over a binder which fell open and showed that it was filled with pages with cut-outs of pictures of women's hands, all meticulously organized, glued in, and labeled. They ranged from celebrity images in magazines to photos of some of our classmates at school. And there were dozens of pages, too. I don't know if it was my imagination, but I thought the pages also looked...used, if you understand me. The player refused to talk about it, and the game, which had been going strong, came to a screeching halt. We all left after that. When the next session came around, he didn't show up, but he did show up for a few more after that one. He never would talk about what we had found, literally just refused to utter a word. Eventually he just stopped showing up. Thirty years later, I still don't know what to make of that, and what would have been an appropriate response.
My unreasonable fight story comes actually from the very first session in my very first campaign. Our DM was also a first time DM. We went out of town and had a run in with a band of bandits. We were all lvl 1 and I think four or five characters. We faced off against a group of bandits on our level and a lvl 4 bandit chief. This guy proceeded to kick our butts single handedly and pretty much one shot even my tank. Our DM figured that five lvl 1 equals to one lvl 4 character, simple math, right? Yeah, it was a complete wipe. He rolled the whole thing back though and we did a new start to the adventure the next session but man, that was a doozy.
I’ve actually run into the whole “kept playing because they didn’t wanna make the DM/other players feel bad”. My roommate and I (the other DM in our group) were beginning to suspect one of our players/former roommates was just not really cut out for DnD. She came up with some really potentially good character concepts (super young paladin looking for a god/cause? Shifter artificer? Good ideas!) but she was just… never into roleplay. It didn’t help that she has some pretty extreme social anxiety and isn’t really very great at people stuff, even with her closest friends (and her mental health issues and how she’s handled/not handled them are another, far more personal thing that I only bring up because it does impact things). Honestly I could probably submit the whole thing as a horror story here but it turned out pretty good. Suffice to say, she ended up moving back home (only about 20 minutes from me, my roommates, and our other friends) and ended up saying “I’d like to drop out of the campaign because of transportation issues (she doesn’t drive)”… even after I heard through the grapevine that she realized DnD wasn’t her thing and I straight up told her she didn’t need to have a practical reason, if she wasn’t enjoying herself she could just leave. That whole campaign’s been a bit of a thing at times tbh, but it’s almost over, and now I can focus on running Curse of Strahd and playing in my roommate’s homebrew! Yay!
This isn't a "horror story", but that bit about unreasonable boss fights reminded me of something worth sharing.
Rewind about 15 years, myself and a roommate are hosting a weekly D&D (3.5) night with a fairly large group (something like 8 PCs and a DM who's a major wargamer). Our party finds themselves in a large cavern at the end of a grueling dungeon, and the final encounter involves a pair of Iron Golems. None of the players know the IGs' features off the top of our heads and we don't want to cheat, so we all roll for relevant knowledge, but come up empty. Alright, time to fight.
I'm a sorcerer and at this point in the campaign I'm the biggest damage dealer. My favourite combat spell is (of course) Fireball - I have a few spell slots of the appropriate level and a staff that's nothing but Fireball, so I figure I can reduce these iron beasts to slag.
Well, the combat goes about 6 rounds, I've dropped most of my available spells in addition to the damage our mundane ranged combatants can manage while the melee fighters stay mobile, trying to soak up the IGs' attacks, but they're not showing any sign of slowing down - we even rolled perception checks to see if there were any visible indicators of damage, but high rolls told us they were immaculate. Things are looking desperate.
A Dwarven worshipper of Moradin, God of Smiths remembers that this campaign includes something like Divine Favor points that allow us to call on our gods about once per level, so he burns every point he has to get us out of this mess. Our DM of course is a genius, he puts a globe of invulnerability around the party, and suddenly the rest of the cavern heats up beyond any ironmonger's forge, melting the Golems to a puddle on the floor and cooling again before releasing us from the shielding spell.
After the combat ends I can't help myself anymore, the Monster Manual was literally on my lap so I finally give in and look up these beasts. Not only were they immune to magic, but Fire magic specifically heals them, so I had been undoing my companions' damage the whole time. I don't think we ever laughed as hard as we did that night!
I actually enjoy some in-character conflict from opposing views. Now, this is highly dependent on the table I’m playing with and the campaign, and also how early those “cracks” show, but I play some roleplay/storytelling heavy campaigns so this is more where the fun for all of us is.
As an example of what I mean, I am playing a linguistics scholar (samurai fighter though). We have an artificer who is from the same faction as mine. Both are researchers and deeply passionate about their craft and area of studies. The cracks for our two is that they have opposing views on how and why they acquire information and even what it might be used for, if at all. Basically, on paper these two seem like they could get along but that’s more like professional respect (and they do have professional respect for each other) and not a friendship. And the funny part in all that is these two are particularly stubborn when it comes to the exact traits that they would have to compromise on to get along. Let’s use the example of the topic of gods. Due to his past, the artificer has a deep distrust and near hatred of the gods. If he could keep them all out of the job and prevent a god from lording over any one ever again, he would. My fighter on the other hand, while not deeply religious, thinks of the gods as part of the natural magical ecosystem of the universe and thinks of the relationship between the gods and the mortals as more symbiotic than anything, regardless of whether the gods themselves recognize that. As below, so above, so they say. These two opposing philosophies are on a crash course of conflict soon, especially considering the story going on and that some of us are all ready chosen champions of some of the gods. Another example is probably tamer and was a recent banter the two had. During our time investigating a dragon hoard, we had come across a bunch of books, scrolls, maps, and information that the dragon had collected over the centuries. The artificer and I were immediately interested and started copying the information down in our own way (since we were at that hoard with permission from the dragon we weren’t removing anything we didn’t have permission for). The artificer used his tech to make a copy of everything while my character pulled out their notebook and other tools (calligraphy, painting, and forgery proficiency) to hand write everything. The artificer and I had a debate on how my character was being “inefficient” and my own saying “even the inefficient has value too.” This was in reference to my character having taken up writing as a hobby and using it to de stress in their past. But yeah, that was one of the first cracks. The two characters we still play as having a healthy professional respect for each other but this is dnd and no doubt that things are going to become tangled up in such a way that these two will need more than that. At the moment, one major thing they can agree on is that they both care deeply for the group and are highly protective of them and anyone coming to harm actually triggers both our characters into being reckless and brutal, which is a big deal because both of our characters are the strategic calculating type in battle. Makes it so these two work pretty seamlessly together which is nice.
Honestly the party jokes that our characters are like the mom and dad of the group already. We do, as players, all get along, and frankly, our characters do too. None of our characters are made in such a way that the possible conflicts between them could not be overcome. the artificer's player and I have already discussed our characters and how to proceed. Heck! Any time there is character conflict, we take time to check in with each other above table. Its always been alright but I think its reassuring to all of us to do this and keep it open for when things do become heated or upsetting. I feel keeping that communication open lets us feel more at ease and more trusting of each other.
Paladin from that story here! I have definitely grown to enjoy the character conflict, and it helps that my table is also rp and story heavy. It’s just so funny to me how I have made two characters that are opposite of each other, and both are hated by the same character 😅
@@skippykay599 Lol that is hilarious 😂 I’m also glad you have grown to love that aspect of gameplay for that style. It can be quite enjoyable for those who do. Wishing you many more fun games in the future!
Haven't run it yet but Langderossa from HotDQ, comes off to me as nearly impossible to beat for a solo level 1 character. That is assuming the party adheres to the agreement to not interfere lest a hostage Langderossa has getting executed.
That guy is annoying as heck to deal with. Ended up saving the guard that took up the duel though because I was the emergency healer of the party. Dove before the final killing blow and dragged him into the keep and stabilized him. Got a spear to the back for my troubles but it was a risk I took and survived. Still, our fighter recently took him on at lvl 3 and, while he did amazing because battlemaster, I will have to pull the same trick as the party breaks the deal and finishes the guy off. Trust me, you’ll want to put alternate win conditions with this antagonist, perhaps if they impress him, that he will leave them alive to grow stronger, that type of thing. Just a suggestion as a player who has had to face him, not just recently but also in a different campaign at a different table in the past. It’s been brutal every time. He is set up to easily tpk the party and/or just make an unsatisfying situation for the players (like the hostage one).
Hell yes Kingdoms games. My go to for when I'm depressed and want a soft dopamine game while rotting in my chair or on the couch in a blanket with laptop. Absolutely gorgeous, simple gameplay, and yet pretty challenging to survive and thrive.
I don't about anyone else, but I think that anyone who has a snuff fetish needs SERIOUS HELP!
One fight I was when the party consisted of 2 level 7s and 3 level 6, contained 3 bugbears, 2 bugbear chiefs, an orc berserker, a begin, 2 young dragons, an sire of insanity and some CR14 aberration one after the other because the DM got annoyed we managed to beat his over the party’s intended CR rating enemies.
Just Don’t CARE
Yup. Had this and talked about her many times.
Despite playing with use for 1-2 years, she needed help just to make a character sheet and still did not know what advantage/disadavantage was. She also needed someone to keep track of HER spell slots and HP because for whatever reason, she could not.
She did not know her class features.
And yes, she would drop games at the last minute. She would go afk mid session for long periods of time with no word to us.
And yeah, she was in a bunch of our campaigns and all those games got held up because of her.
We eventually had to have the talk with her and let her go.
It also did not help that she was also dropping occasional homophobia and biphobia. Yeah, she was homeschooled in a christian household… but it sucked hearing her say she hated the problem player for being bisexual instead of, ya know, a two faced arsehole (especially since she was in the same group as a bisexual woman who, if she paid enough attention, would know I has very open about being bi).
d3s are usually rolled by rolling a d6; 1-2 is 1, 3-4 is 2, and 5-6 is thee. They're used a lot in old school style games :)
Unreasonable boss fights huh. There is a boss early on in Pathfinder's Abomination Vaults module that has spells with the Death trait. This means that any spell that does damage with this trait kills anyone who is reduced to zero hit points by the damage.
Won't say what or who the boss is for spoiler reasons, but fair warning to new Pathfinder GMs, run the beginner box adventure first if you intend to run Abomination Vaults or just start the party at Lvl 3.
Speaking of Pathfinder and unreasonable boss fights, I'm in a group that's in the endgame for Tyrant's Grasp, and we're just a few sessions away from facing the Whispering Tyrant. After he flexed on us by one-shot disintegrating our previously nigh-unkillable paladin (though we do have resources to bring him back before the fight proper). But at least in this case, we've spent an entire campaign building up that this isn't a fight that we can be expected to win in the traditional sense, disregarding spoilers inherent in 2nd Edition materials.
In polar opposites they really just accidentally perpetuated the conflict between the church of the broken god and sarkists didn't they?
Paladin here! It was all accidental and I had to google it to make sure I was remembering it right but yeah pretty much lol. I’ll definitely have to mention this to ranger too, might give us both inspiration for future rp
"Murder by Boss Fight"
That module is for Novice (level 1-3) adventurers in Shadow of the Demon Lord. It's not designed for the level 0 characters (those are Starting adventurers). The other 2 tiers are Expert (4-7) and Master (8-10). The system itself is fairly difficult (I've run it so many times and my group loves it), but it's not a total horror story like the story makes it seem.
Edit: My (old) PDF download of the module from when it first came out says Novice, but DriveThruRPG lists it as Starting/Novice, and the description says Starting. That's so weird. I have run this module as a Novice adventure but wouldn't use it for a Starting group for sure. It's *really* tough at level 1.
While we’re talking about impossible bosses:
Demon King Piccolo and Tao Pai Pai’s first fights in Dragon Ball Advanced Adventure
I, for real, have a padded folding chair I bought just for games to help with the fact most people don't have that many chairs. It's not super comfortable but it's better than nothing, and any chair is better than no chair.
Bruh, your skits have only gotten better over time! XD
4:45 didn’t expect my two current hyperfixations to just collide in a video during a 2 second gag
The Paladin in the second to last story wasn't a member of the Maelstrom, he was clearly a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
Hey! Paladin from that story here! I had to search up the Adeptus Mechanicus and. Yes it’s spot on. My character’s mantra is LITERALLY “technology is strong but the flesh is weak”
There’s a dungeon in Skyrim that led to me learning in the first place that there is difficulty adjustment in Skyrim! Who knew!
I don’t remember the exact name of the dungeon or quest or character, but the boss is a vampire who waits behind a door at the bottom of a set of stairs in a cave or crypt full of lesser vampires. Those were fine. But you open that door, even as an invisible stealth archer, and you are immediately hit by, just, SO MUCH lightning magic. I died immediately several times. Could have easily been save locked. No idea why that guy was so strong, I don’t even remember it as a major quest.
I turned the difficulty down, lived long enough to heal and buff, killed him, and moved on. I never encountered even a main boss or DLC main boss that was so hard to survive a single hit from again.
Four words: Dragon priest near Whiterun.
Just out in the open, near a dragon-wall with a chest full of goodies. Was cocky - figured it'd be easy, I just got done with the very first dungeon in the game, got some nice gear and plenty of potions - then BAM!
Old bastard rose up from the coffin, told me to get off his lawn, and blasted my ass to Oblivion.
Got humbled REAL quick. Also, made a witch-hunter build because of that encounter.
The game, Morrowind. The dungeon, Addamasartus (sp?). The mage . . . might as well be named F*** You In Particular, because he is rough on your first few playthroughs. AOE spells in a tight corridor, and he's supposed to just be a test to see how well your character can perform in combat.
I remember Puffin Forest' story on Hoard of the Dragon Queen. If the first chapter (the one with the blue dragon) was rough as hell, I don't wanna imagine how hard is the rest of the module. I read it's also quite railroad-ish.
Is it one of his the worst games I ever played videos?
@@DrawciaGleam02 it's the dnd story "An Abserd-ly Difficult Mission". The only difference he made was that the mayor of the town was Abserd.
I have a very similar excitement-for-DMing thing where I was really excited to write and play a small oneshot for my sister and I, since she's never played before and she said she wanted to (she likes dnd in stranger things), and multiple times we've had the time set up or both been free and she's just gone "hmm i don't really want to rn" meanwhile I've been doing what she wanted instead and it's been so long with her just completely uncaring about a oneshot where I put it all together myself and helped her with her character sheet and everything and now I just don't even care. It's just kind of an empty feeling where before I was so excited that she wanted to share an interest with me and now I'm probably not gonna try DMing for a long time yet.
Me and some friends were running a one-shot, where we WERE supposed to fight a giant sandworm, and fail. Two party members were on a hill trying to escape it, low on health. I didn't have time to draw my sword, so I punched it. Rolled a nat 20, so the DM said I punch it so hard in the face, the punch basically shot its brains out the other side.
Wait... that modern fantasy homebrew... Did the GM want to be running Shadowrun?
Some people would rather hack D&D beyond recognition than play another game that already matches what they’re going for
5e players will literally do anything other than read another book lol
OP here! For context DM just really likes to homebrew and wanted to see how far he could push it. We have two new players in the group and they wanted to learn dnd. The veteran players in the group haven’t experimented with/haven’t enjoyed many ttrpgs outside of dnd. Instead of everyone learning a new system, now only two people are learning, dm is free to homebrew as he pleases, and me and the other veteran have a refreshing different take on dnd
@@skippykay599 you do what you do but it really sounds a lot of unnecessary work when there are like, 60-100 page long systems that offer unique mechanics and settings for your campaign and are even more flexible than d&d 5e when it comes to rule bending and homebrew
You could play skyrim with mods for the rest of your life and no other video game and it sure will be fun but you're closing yourself to a whole world of experiences in similar or majorly different video games
There's nothing wrong with it, and if you guys are having fun no one has the right to stop you, but i think you guys are losing some good stuff
@@sator2766 I mean, we did briefly consider doing another system, but dm was very particular about what he wanted to do. He found zombie apocalypse ttrpgs but they didn’t have the same feel he was going for. He accepted the fact that, no matter what, he’d have to homebrew to hell and back, so he would much rather do that in a system we were already familiar with. It actually has been running really well! Most of the time it’s just changing the descriptions of how attacks or monsters look, which we already do in our other games
My d3 is my prized possession! I'm actually bringing it to college tomorrow because my teacher has never seen one.
Men writing women
I noticed a little while ago that I tend to use a lot more female NPCs than male, and I often wonder if I'm portraying them in a well rounded, respectful way. Could be some underlying imposter syndrome talking.
First Story Prompt: I'll never forget when I started off playing D&D, making my level 1 3.5E Rogue, having him sit down at a bar, talk to a lady, and get smacked in rejection, taking 3 points of damage. As a level 1 Rogue. With 7 max HP. And then immediately going into a dungeon. To fight an adult blue dragon. At level 1. With 4 of my 7 Hit Points left. Needless to say, the guy DMing that game was more about wanting to kill the players and 'win' than anything else, but we were, like, 15 at the time, so we've all grown a lot since then.
For 1d3 roll 1d6, 4=1, 5=2, 6=3. Didn't know there are actual 1d3.
I thought it was divide by 2
I'm running Curse of Strahd. The game had to go on hiatus, so I decided to scare the party a bit by Strahd deciding it is now time to actually kill the party, at lv5. They found a method to get revived, so even if someone died, they can come back.
This party of LV5s floored Strahd on turn 2. I didn't sandbag him or anything, I need a new strategy, cause Strahd is now scared OF THEM.
I've fallen asleep at a meet up game. Me an a group of my coworkers had all gotten together for a table, I ended up falling asleep mid game simply cause we played pretty much first thing in the morning and I had just gotten off a 10 Hour overnight. It was pretty regular for me to be exhausted for session but that was the first time it actually happened. I liked the table and dm and they liked me. We also had a Problem player, the dude himself wasn't bad, but his character decisions really didn't make sense. They froze the campaign but later brought it back and tried to invite me but I was just too busy at the time sadly.
Damn the “don’t care” story is the same with the campaign I’m in when the Paladin player didn’t know what Smite was or that he had spells n were at session 30 in a year long campaign. 🤦🏾♀️ he didn’t know anything about the world, kept adding to his backstory that doesn’t fit in said world n not tell the DM, just randomly blurt it out during a session in roleplay.
Now I should go find that video to see what you think about that dragon module.
Got Kingdom on sale a few years ago, and it CONSUMED me and my friends' lives for a month!
I love shadow of the demon lord, but I see how people may not like it, I love the meat grinder aspect and the class (or “paths” as it calls it) system in this game.
The paths are the best part, you have to know what you're hopping into when you're making a campaign in that system, a fucking guard can kill your player character easily and you should fear for your life knowing full well the world is dying and you're not any better
I once had the opposite problem of that murder boss fight story, I ran a boss fight that was too easy in a game that was advertised as being hard as nails. It was a game of Mork Borg, which is notoriously deadly, and I had several backup plans in case of player deaths and TPK. But nobody ended up dying due to lucky rolls and good strategy. Players had fun though so I don't mind.
My game horror story was my very first one shot I DMed. There was a psudo zombie beholder in a pool. I accidentally decintegrated one of my players. They were lvl 5. Fortunately, I believe the party successfully ran away before another encounter where I didn't want them accidentally falling ontop of the main badie of that area and then ended up burning the whole manor down. Not what I had planned at all obviously, but we all seemed to have fun.
Grandma rolled a Nat 1 on her dex check
In the demon lord game, the players were given strong examples that the enemy would easily over power them, b4 they entered the well. It seems obvious that the enemy was supernatural, & that they would need to discover some kind of weakness b4 proceeding. This is incorporating problem solving. Problem solving is what keeps encounters from being just number crunching. There R tons of actions that were necessary b4 entering that well. Warning the population. Advising the town's people to avoid areas when it was active. Having a local cleric put a ward on the well, to keep it from escaping the well, & possibly all the sewer exits. Finding out the nature & habits of the creature. Seeking a sage for advice. Acquiring helpful tools like holy water. These R all actions that improve the role playing aspect of the game, get the players involved in the community, creates relations with helpful NPCs. This is what makes the game more than a series of Macguffins & just being lead around with a carrot on a stick. Players needed to do anything other than just deciding to have a suicidal confrontation, with a creature, that they already knew had a power that caused instant death. Adventuring is all of these things. Scaling encounters cannot be required for all enemies. There was plenty of warning that this encounter was a likely TPK, & the party decided to walk eyes open into that TPK. Problem solving is an essential part of the game. Scaling is not. The lvl zero start & lack of class features emphasizes that the PCs R squishy & fragile. I cannot think of how it could be made more obvious, that a thoughtless confrontation would cause a TPK. The billboard sign for this message was HUGE. Big sign over the well said, "For TPK Enter Here." They went in. Destroying characters that decide to trade blows with an enemy that severely outclasses them, when they take zero measures of preparation, & do next to nothing in terms of investigating, is exactly what every TTRPG needs to be designed to do.
Any odd number dice will always be off looking the d9 is my favorite lol
One time our dm put us up against a roc, out on the open sea. Apparently we were supposed to flee? But where do you flee to on the open ocean? Fortunately, our assassin rogue had a pirate background, and successfully argued that as she was captaining the ship, she should get assassination with the ship's cannon, since she was attacking it before it attacked her. Do you know how ungodly much damage a level nine rogue assassin can do with a mfing cannon? Didn't one hit kill the roc, but made it manageable for my illusion wizard and our other rogue (don't ask) on a hippogriff I had summoned (for reasons) to finish it off before it reached the ship. Of course, then we had to figure out how to survive the wave from it hitting the water, but still, we made it in the end. Even wrote a song about it afterwards
Can’t speak for shadow of the demon lord, but warhammer’s d3 system has you roll a d6: 1-2 is a 1, 3-4 is a 2, and 5-6 are 3s
Have played Kingdom. Fun game, but gets *quickly* challenging, oof.
Also, I appreciate you including more wholesome stories, not just all horror 24/7 :)
Unreasonable video game boss fight stories? Yeah, I'm going to need a bit.
I've only a had few, dozen, dozen in my time as a gamer. Oddly enough, none from time with D&D though.
funny thing. you mentioned Maelstrom from Cyberpunk. I took it a different way and was thinking more along the lines of the AdMech in WH40K. lol.
Chrono Trigger mention! That’s my favorite video game ever (as you could probably guess from my username). I love your videos, thank you for making them!
Glad to see others who played Shadow of the Demon Lord had the exact same experience our group had trying to run this mess of a game. I can top it with bullshit levels though, i got screwed before id even started the game by character creator. I had rolled a goblin character, who is fae in that game. You have to roll quirks for your character, and mine ended up being that they were obsessed with a piece of jewellery, in my case a ring, that they couldn't remove. Fae receive negatives to all rolls due to being allergic to metals in this system. Needless to say it was *so fun* being a completely useless character, but it did make the part where my character actually managed to kill the well demon with a sling after she oneshot two of our party members far more hilarious than it should have been.
if a person cant attend a session last second because they PLANNED to do something else you literally just need to kick them out they clearly showed they dont want to play, they literallly purposely planned something else when yall already had a schedule.
Hey! This is gonna sound like a very weirdly specific question but at 28:02 there was a still of some art of check in cards from what seemed to be another video and I was wondering what video its from? Im actually the artist that drew those cards on commission a few years ago now at this point! made me genuinely delighted and surprised to see them again haha
Love your videos also!
25:08 as an Undertale fan, I love the electro swing megalovania
My husband and I have been playing DnD with his cousin on and off (at most six months between failed campaigns) for 5 years now and she still doesn't really know how to play. I have a potential horror story that I'm writing to submit (to you) but, it's not done yet because we're right in the middle of this multiple-session cluster fuck and potential TPK that cousin started with her stupid "but this is what my character would do" actions.
I call Shadow of the Demon Lord a pizza cutter game when my group tried it. All edge, no point.
16:35 "Discretion is the better part of valour"
Rose should just have said that it's not for her. No need to waste everyone's time by showing up and not caring.
I play two crowns a lot with my sister. Its our thing for chillaxing :-)
11:48 me thinking it was my phone for a moment
I don't have any full blown horror stories because I stopped things before they reached that level. So, I guess we can call them horror seeds(?).
The first was about 10 years ago. I was the GM and we were playing a Pathfinder 1e homebrew campaign. One of the players is someone I've game with for literal decades. He's the King of Misogynists but usually keeps his views to himself at the table. For example, he refuses to read a book written by a woman, play a game with a woman as the GM, watch a movie or tv show with a woman as the leader (think Star Trek: Voyager. That was his reason to not watch it), and mumbles under his breath when we have women in the group. A quote from him - "Women should not get any of the reward in games. They should be PART of the reward." I'm not making that up.
Anyway, the players had stopped in a large-ish town to replenish supplies and rest up. He announced he was going to find a brothel (bear in mind we're all in our mid 40s to early 50s at this time). He said he wanted to hire the hottest girl in the brothel, so he forked over a handful of gold and took her to a room. He then asked ME to describe the things they did in detail, which I flatly refused because a) it was weird as hell, and b) there was a woman playing in the freaking campaign! He literally sulked and at the end of the night he just gathered his things and walked out. Our next game, two weeks later, he was back to "normal" and didn't do any of that crap.
The second one happened in late 2022 or very early 2023, also in a Pathfinder 1e homebrew game where I was the GM (always the GM). A longtime friend and fellow gamer asked if a friend of his could join the group. I said sure, trusting that his friend would be like his other friends (you know, us). No. He wasn't. The character he wanted to play was an underaged halfling street hustling umm...sex worker/rogue named (oh God) Chlamydia Stench-Trench. I flatly said no. He then asked if he could just call her by her first name because, "Chlamydia sounds sort of like a medieval woman's name". I had two adult women and another player's 15 year old daughter in the group. I stopped that crap before he even showed up for the first game. He even tried to start beef with me over it by text and email. He finally relented and played an adult male human rogue. The dude was 58 years old (same as me) and he pouted about it in texts for a week. I became ill in May and decided to retire from gaming, or at the very least GMing. Haven't played anything since.
So, there you have it. Horror stories stopped before blossoming into true mind bending terror. Love your videos. They make me glad I've played with some of the same bunch since 1987. Really.
"It it still be a horror story if the game itself was the horror story?"
...I mean, we've all heard tale of FATAL...
(d3s are usually double labelled d6s. Or improvise with a 1d6 and then either transform to 1-3 by halving and rounding up, or subtract three if the number's over 3 (or, my preference; 1 or 6 = 1; 2 or 5 = 2; 3 or 4 = 3 so both 1s are opposite each other, etc.)