There was a flame trap in a dungeon. After getting past it, I, an artificer, asked the DM if I could take the flame trap and make a flamethrower. DM didn’t know how to counter that point considering my character had 24 intelligence and was an artificer so would obviously be able to turn the thing into a weapon. It ended up having to use a 25gp of alchemists fire per shot but still, pretty cool weapon
Ayy! I was the player in that Curse of Strahd game that had the incident with the catapulted rock! Glad the story brought you some laughter. I've listened to this channel for a long time and I'm really glad I was able to contribute with the story. You rock!
I allowed my player who was downed while the rest of the party was about to die to posses his animated armor in exchange his body and all hopes of resurrection being destroyed in order to save the rest of the party
At one point in our campaign, our party’s ranger wound up purchasing 150 gp worth of fireworks for what was at the time a joke. We had no use for them aside from firing one or two off at random points in the next few sessions for fun. A few sessions later, we wound up fighting a VERY strong enemy with a bit less than 1000 hp, if I remember correctly. We had been fighting it for a while and had just gotten it bloodied, but two of our three PCs were very hurt and our NPC who this enemy was trying to kill was also doing poorly. The ranger, suddenly remembering about the fireworks, told our DM that he turned our bag of holding inside out, spilling out all of the fireworks we had purchased onto this thing before lighting one up and frantically running away. Our DM was impressed with the idea and wound up letting it do 1d4 per gold spent (1d4 per firework essentially), and it would up doing 344 damage in that one turn. After that the enemy was injured to the point where it immediately fled, and while we haven’t had the chance to kill it properly yet it still remains one of the coolest combat moments we’ve had so far.
My favorite rule of cool moment I've witnessed as a DM: Early in our campaign, our party was clearing out this mine that was infested with rust monsters. That's when they met a kobold named Klanky, whose family was taken away and was trying to take back the mine. Klanky wore a suit of armor made from stuff he scrounged from people's garbage, and although he didn't flinch in the face of monsters, he was terrified of literally everything else. Needless to say, the party immediately fell in love with him and swore to protect him at all costs. When they finished their job, they heard the owner of the mine would offer them a handsome reward for turning Klanky in. Since the rust monsters have practically devoured all the iron in the mine and devastated the town economy, the townspeople have resorted to capturing the kobolds who lived in the mountains and selling them into slavery, and Klanky was the only one to evade capture. Instead of turning them in, they fed Klanky a ton of growth potions and a firebreathing potions and let him rampage across the town like Godzilla.
@@grahamkristensen9301 I was just saying that this campaign sounds oddly specific to some other adventure that took place some time at the swordcoast :D not talking about this rule of cool
@@grahamkristensen9301 yeah so there’s story about an offspring of a dead god which starts during a time where people are trying to start a war and turn all iron in the close by iron mines into brittle and useless iron which breaks.. and then have their own mine where they produce good iron for themselves. Also in the first mine is a lot of kobolds. So it wasn’t rust monsters but kobolds who did something to kinda make the iron rust
Oh boy do I have a tale. This happened in the sixth session of the campaign I'm currently a part of. The party, after an event involving a magic crystal, was taken into a councilor's private laboratory to be tested, read experimented, on. After realizing he was shady as hell and some actions taken by the rogue and monk, we made an escape attempt. Unfortunately the guy had the stat block of a mind flayer and we were all level 4. So our cleric got grappled by magic tentacles. In an attempt to save him, I the fighter, attacked the guy and used the push ability of the shield master feat. I rolled a nat 20 for strength and he rolled a nat 1. The DM ruled it as me shoving him into the wall and knocking him prone. In all the attacks and shove did 25 hp of damage, about a third of his health. At this point me and the other players realized we could actually win the fight if we got lucky. Fast forward to the end and the rogue down a critical hit with a enchanted dagger, dealing the last 20 hp of damage needed, winning is the fight and enough exp to almost level up twice. All in all, good session.
Man, I got a good one today. Five years ago, two-person party, my male Human Fighter - Lars - and my party member: a female Elven Assassin - Veletha - (we were playing a homebrewed system, so Assassin was its own class entirely), the two honestly didn't like each other very much but stuck around because they had the same goal and could trust each other when things went south. They were in a run-down tavern Lars was trying to talk a rude ex-explorer into getting a map of the area, while Veletha sat at the bar and waited for things to happen. After a bit of conversational navigation, Lars gets his hands on the map, and one of the drunken patrons gets a little to grabby and... wordy... with Veletha. She shoves him away while the ex-explorer disrespectfully flicks a copper coin at Lars as he turns around while telling him to "know his worth", I ask if I can shield bash the coin and I'm asked to roll perception, and then an athletics check. I nat 20 both rolls, and the DM sat there for a second before describing Lars bashing the coin using his massive shield with enough force to embed it into the skull of the handsy man and leave him slumped over the nearby bartop. To this day, I've never seen or heard another event where a man died directly via copper coin.
The catapult rock story reminded me of a game I'm currently in where I'm playing a Giant Bardlock and did something much the same. We were about to fight a lich in her forest camp -though we didn't know the enemy was one at the time- and I had on a Ring of Size Reduction that we ruled as bringing me down to Medium size, instead of my usual Huge. While our sorcerer bantered with the lich and our rogue raided her tents, I quietly snuck off into the brush and cast Fly, and only the GM knew I'd cast it. After the fight started, I flew up over her, used a custom spell to give her disadvantage on WIS saves, then dropped my concentration on Fly to cast Hold Person as I took off my ring. GM ruled that despite the lich being immune to bludgeoning damage, there isn't a whole lot one can do about a man the size and weight of a semi truck falling on her, so she took the full fall damage. In the time it took for me to get in the air and debilitate her, the rest of the team had whittled her health down JUST enough for the Elbow Drop to do her in. We've all agreed not to do that again, because my poor guy can't really handle taking 80-something damage on a regular basis.
DND 5E campaign, early encounter. We were investigating an abandoned town when a group of 7 bandits and their leader moved in and decided to establish a stronghold. They called themselves "the Seven Snakes" and each of them had a 7 with a snake wound around it painted on their armor. We moved through the town, picking off bandits as the last 3 and their leader fortified themselves in the town's inn. As we crouched in cover, watching them prepare for us to attack, my character retrieved one of the corpses, used the deceased's blood to cross off the 7 and draw a 3 on his armor and threw it into the town square in full view of the inn. Some intimidation checks don't need words to succeed. Or, the GM decided, rolls.
In my previous campaign, the party was taking part on an army amassed by the big bad. Among said army were several dragons. One of the players, a human melee fighter who had obtained wings through some shenanigans, flew right at one of the dragons, a red dragon. And the dragon in turn, flew right at him, intent on gobbling him whole. Now, 5his was epic levels, and he had a spiked chainx and epic magic boots that gave him ridiculous speed. He decided to slip his chain around the dragon's neck to try and strangle it. Several checks later, and he didn't strangle it. No, instead the dragon's weight combined with the character's ridiculous strength score, and the ludicrous momentum in opposite directions made the dragon's neck snap, killing it instantly.
I'd like to think I'm a 'rule of cool' DM. I've got an idea for how my homebrew campaign is going to go, the story beats and all that, but I'm letting my players build their characters however they like (within reason), complete with unique special abilities, traits, and even limit breaks, and I'm going to build all the encounters around them, so they can have as much fun as possible.
Here’s another moment out of my Thieves Quest campaign that I like talking about in the comment section; the party is exploring a dungeon full of illusions and they come across a chest which, surprise surprise, is a mimic. My boyfriend who’s playing the Water Genasi fighter wanted to DROWN the mimic. Because he’s a water Genasi, and since he’s basically a walking water source, I gave him two things; one, a homebrew spell to sense the closest source of water around him, and two, the fact that he can only cast his ‘create/form water’ spell when there is a said source of water nearby. Since he can sense water around this dungeon he wants to create a wall of water where the mimic is standing to drown it. I agree to his big brain idea, I roll, and the mimic does in fact drown. He then proceeded to do this to another mimic and to check other chests he finds in the dungeon
Had to get rid of a baddy on a pier in the harbour. DM presented the details and asked what we wanted to do. We recently reached level 4 and had 2 druids in the party. I remembered they get their "aquatic" options unlocked and the scene from "Free Willy" immediately came to mind, making me smile. DM noticed and kinda used to my unorthodox ideas, immediately asked me to share. After he heard my idea and the others found it great too we went with it. He did acknowledged that the killer whale is much higher challenge rating than the druid is allowed to wildshape into but he allowed it anyway. That's how the baddy minding his own business on the tier suddenly found himself bitten in half as a killer whale jumped over him and the pier. Only his boots left in his place. I also have to include that when the DM agreed to it, he made the druid, my girlfriend make an attack roll. She did and then with a surprise she announced it was a crit. It was 10d6 damage, enough to oneshot the guy. It seems even Tymora wanted this to happen.
Finally, a topic for which I have a good story! At the time, i had been DMing for a year or so, for a group of new players/close friends. I usually stick to the rules as much as possible, since I want the game to be as consistent and fair as possible. This session, two friends joined for a guest appearance. One had never played before, the other had just once, and It was a really bad experience for him (basically, shitty DM killed his character within the first hour and didn't let him make a new one). So ofc, he was a bit reluctant to play again, but gave it a try since everyone else wanted to play. We rolled up characters for them, a goblin rogue for the noob, and the other player made the same character he had had prior; a gnome monk of the open hand. The session was going to be a treasure hunt, the OG party had found one half of the map, and the new players had found the other. They were at sea, and the map led them to an island populated by slaadi. On the island, they met a single human NPC, Castor, who told them that he had befriended the slaadi, but was on a secret mission to find a treasure hidden somewhere on the island. Since Castor knew the island well, they teamed up with him to look for the treasure. The map led them to an underground temple with a few puzzles and easy encounters, and I think everyone was enjoying the session. Time for the final room, deep down in the dungeon, the treasure chamber. Some of you may know about slaadi, and you probably guessed it. Castor was no human, he was a death slaad in disguise, who had purposely led them down in the chamber to kill them all. He dropped his disguise, blocked off the only exit. and initiative was rolled. Even though it was a 6v1 fight, the party had some trouble, failing most of their saves against his spells. Most of them got charmed/frightened, so the monk was basically up on the slaad by himself. Before the fight, the rogue had triggered a spiked pit trap in the middle of the room that was now visible. Monk desperately tried to get behind the slaad, using his monk powers to knock the slaad into the spiked pit. He kept failing over and over, spending most of his ki points. When he finally got in behind and landed a good hit, he did not have enough ki points to use flurry of blows and push him into the pit. Could I deny a new player, with previous bad experience from dnd, the honor of killing the final boss of the session by kicking him into a spiked pit? hell naw, you go gnomeyboy, finish him. He was low on HP anyway, damage dice were rolled but they didn't matter, he was dead. They got the treasure and got to safety, and we called the session. Afterwards, monk was really happy with the session, and and thanked me for giving him a good experience of dnd! And I think that moment was a big part of it.
I let my level 7 Monk who was 5h away from dying from the Gas Spore death burst disease use a version of the level 10 monk ability that makes you immune to disease. I did this by making it a skill challenge through a guided meditation with his monk master, using perception checks, medicine checks and insight checks to locate the spores within his blood and then attempt to "shunt" them out of his body consuming all his ki-points with a final constitution check. The successes and failures on the different wisdom checks changed the dc for the final con check. It took them 3h to get to his monk master, so he had 2 in game hours to do this. He failed the first time and had to go through it one more time (taking 1 more in game hour to regain his ki, putting him mere minutes away from death) and only succeeded thanks to the bardic inspiration. One of my all time favourite moments playing dnd
I'm a DM, and how I run Rule of Cool is like Bardic Inspiration. If a character wants to do a team combo that's creative enough (i.e. The Dragonborn Barbarian tossing the Gnome Rogue so hard that he bursts through a bandit's torso) and they pass the checks needed to pull it off (Strength checks to pick up the gnome and to toss him at the bandit), then I'll give them a 1d6+6 of Rule of Cool Inspiration for the attack roll, normally with results that gets the table cheering.
I have invoked the rule of cool once, for a non-combat situation. It was after defeating the BBEG invading our hometown, the grand finale of our first campaign with that party. Some background: My character, Olga, is a female half-orc cleric of Sune (goddess of love and beauty), and her father is a human bard who's a retired adventurer. She's married to a half-elf tailor NPC (child of one of her dad's adventuring buddies). The situation: After the post-battle meet and greet of making sure everyone important is alive (hug dad, heal the injured, kiss the husband). Then she picked up her husband bridal style, said "excuse me, I have to go, uh, do a thing" and walked away towards her home. Her strength is average at best, so I invoked the rule of cool to avoid rolling strength for carrying all her gear and her hubby at the same time.
I actually really needed to hear that ending part. was super worried about a DnD session earlier this week because it felt like I was too railroady for my players. But in reality, they've told me what they thought of it, what they thought I did wrong or right, and overall it seems like everyone enjoyed it, but I've got anxiety and hearing that ending bit really did help out a lot. Thank you!
My DM seems to favor rule of cool, if it makes sense in-character (and it's not game-breaking). The character I am playing at the moment is a Warforged Druid. It is important to note that he is Lawful Neutral, and the "law" he follows is logic. I am acting as the party tank (pun intended), and as the tank I look for ways to boost my HP and AC, and one of the best ways is through armor and shields. While we were still low level (maybe 2-3), the party enters an armor shop to get some supplies and upgrades. I find some half-plate armor that would boost my AC a few points, and I have the coin. Another player points out that, per the PHB, Druids "will not wear armor or use shields made of metal." Since half-plate is metal, he says I shouldn't be able to wear it, and the DM initially agrees. I ration that since organics (what he calls flesh-based characters) wear leather armor, which is analogous to their own flesh, it is only logical that I be permitted to wear metal armor and shields as it is analogous to my own "flesh." The DM applies the rule of cool, agrees that my logic is sound enough (as does the party), and I have been wearing that half-plate ever since (along with a nifty +1 Shield)
My party discovered that a cult had been disappearing townsfolk in order to sacrifice them to some kind of special evil moon, or something. My wizard had exhausted their spells along with the rest of the party on the slog to find the main sacrifice chamber. I had one first level spell slot left Due to my character having a negative 3 CON modifier, I had a shadow deer that carried me to and from battles since I was too weak for practically anything else. Being a shadow deer I could have it turn intangible at will. In the moment before the cult leader could sacrifice their victim, I rode that deer straight at the alter. Full bore, as fast as it could go. It turned shadow at the exact right moment and my puny body went flying straight at the cult leader. In the air I made a very good grapple attack, put one hand over each eye, and use my Magic Missile. Probably at least one action too many for a singular round, but the rule of cool was not on the side of the cult leader that day.
Not on topic of this video (great and hilarious btw :D) but still two stories i'd like to tell, both in terms of "How in the 9 hells did we survive that?" First one, we are playing in a homebrew world so bare with it. We went through a portal and got teleported onto a Githjanky spacestation that was currently besiegded by mindflayers. And after we explored a bit came into a hangar for spaceships, completly empty except for a few crates. That was the first time our characters actually saw out into space, where a bunch of broken spaceships were visible, one of them a Mindflayer ship, we got to roll a perception check and one of us got a Nat 20, thankfully. There Was something approching from the Mindflayer ship and we decided to book it back to where we came from. Turns out that was an Elderbrain Dragon, yup one of those CR22 enemys. WE WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO FIGHT IT and we didn't really fight it in a conventional way. Our wizzard wanted to throw it out of the Airlock, Alien Movie style, but the dice had a different Plan resulting in the wizzard being swallowed by the dragon. We knew there was a Tank a room over and basicly decided "Yup, let them fight eachother" because the tank was blocking the short way to the exit. Long story short, the tank critted the Dragon, blew open his stomach and our wizzard at 2 HP came tumbling out. The Elderbrain dragon died shortly afterward and we escaped the tank while running to the exit back home. The second story takes place two level after the above one (did I mention we were 5 people at lvl 7 against the Elderbrain Dragon?) so we were lvl 9 in a good old sever dungeon crawl. While discussing if we just want to teleport out of the and if we had the material components, on the Paladin got sick of just talking and continued to check out the severs, the Rogue followed him so that the Paladin wasn't alone. It's a story about not splitting the party, if it wasn't obvious enough already. So these two went ahead, split again at one point to cover more ground, all while the rest of the party finally stopped discussing teleporting out. The problem now was that the part of the group that stayed behind didn't see where the Paladin and Rogue went and of course we accidentally decided to have the Cleric go the way the previous two didn't take, while the rest waited if the Paladin and Rogue came back as to not pass them up. I think our DM is great and funny because it all culminated in a moment where the ones who stayed back just heard different crashing sounds, explosion and monstrous sounds from three different ways as the Cleric triggered our "Main" boss of the dungeon, the Paladin triggered an optional boss for a huge amount of Gold and the Rogue spawned a miniboss for a magic item. We somehow survided that without anybody dropping to 0 HP, through sheer luck, use of enviroment, kiting the enemys a bit and the fact we had a long rest beforehand. We had all resources availible beforehand, afterwards not anymore. Sure some might think that the DM was fudging roll, but no that's not his style, so we can rule that out. And yeah, those were the two things I wanted to tell, thanks for reading to the end ^^
Not a DM yet, but I have a rule about Rule of Cool. The first time a player does something not RAW, I might RoC it with or without a roll. The second time they use it, it’s established canon in the world, _and I can use it against them._ That Boulderpult? You can use it for one encounter. Second encounter, expect a bunch of lower level wizards making a volley coming for you.
One of my favourite moments as a DM was in the House of Lament from Ravenloft. Long story but I actually switched from player to DM partway through the session and was running on 20 minutes of skimming the module, was trying from a quick brief to follow the sub-storyline the previous DM had chosen, and was improv-ing around the level being upped from 1 to 4. The party was fighting a poltergeist at the top of a tower, who sounded like someone falling off that tower. No more info given than that. Because characters were higher than the module was written for, I pulled out a ghost statblock to use and gave it poltergeisty behaviour. In the battle, ghost possesses the heavily armoured cleric. Possession rules say the only way to end it is either to use an affect that dispels the ghost, or to drop the body to 0 HP. Problem is, only one who could potentially dispel ghosts is the possessed cleric. And the ghost gets the physical stats of the possessed body, which happens to have the highest AC in the party. Then. The sorcerer goes: "I have an idea. The ghost died from falling, right? So I think it's gonna be traumatised from that and not want to relive its death. I want to hold a feather fall spell, someone knock it off the tower to scare it into leaving before it hits the ground, and I'll cast feather fall on the cleric after it leaves." Me, the DM: "I love it." Unfortunately, no one can hit this cleric's AC to shove him. It's coming up to the end of round, held spell is going to be lost, and I'm sad this plan won't happen. But then, someone--incidentally, the troll-y player with the most mechanically useless character--casts Tasha's Hideous Laughter. Ghost fails save, falls prone. Me, DM, getting an idea: "...the ghost is going to roll a dex save to not fall over the tower railing as it goes prone." I procede to roll so vigorously the die falls off the coffee table and into my bowl of ramen on the floor. It still managed to land clearly with one side up in the soup. It was a 3. I love creative solutions, and players coming up with things I haven't thought of. I'm also proud that I as DM, was able to help out to make it work. And that's how my party ended a hopeless-looking posession with pyschology, a broken troll character, and a bowl of ramen.
For a while, my group had something called a "badass check". Basically, after rolling a nat 20 (or nat 1), or making a particularly difficult roll or making the last kill of a fight, you could roll a d20 and, how good you rolled told the GM how much to embellish whatever you just did. So something like "I rolled a critical and killed the orc" happens, and if I got a good roll on the check, the GM would describe it as "you swing your sword and kill the orc by decapitation, it's head flying off."
I use a prop dubbed "The Coin" by the party as my justification of the rule of cool. This coin sits in front of the DM screen and functions as a party-wide Hero Point (kind of like inspiration for those who haven't played Pathfinder 2e) but I also often offer the party "something cool" as a third option for its spending. The catch is that any time that it is used, instead of being consumed, it is flipped to the bad side. At any point, I can spend the bad coin to give the opposition something cool (let the BBEG escape, reinforcements arrive, etc.) And then it flips back to the good side for the party to use. My players LOVE this thing. I start some sessions with it on the bad side to represent that the general vibe looks pretty grim, but that means that when I spend it, the players are even more likely to use it for balance instead of hoarding it. Having a physical justification to GM Ex Machina or Rule Cool makes it feel way less cheap, especially because they know it'll come back to exact the toll later.
First session of a Weird Wild West campaign using 5e. PCs were attacked by bandits while traveling by train. Some of the PCs were fighting with the bandit leaders who were on the roof of the train. The druid PC casts heat metal on the roof. Bandit leaders took damage for a few rounds until they could find a way into the train car.
A time where the rule of cool was denied: I wanted to play a fairy barbarian who was obsessed with food. I thought it would be cool to play a fragile looking creature that was insanely strong, who ate all the monsters we killed. DM liked the idea in theory, but did not allow getting Proficiency with kitchen utensils from my background and also imposed penalties on Carrying Capacity and some barbarian Features.
Created a monk/rogue/sorce with the true strike spell once. Rounded him off with the snake blood feat for the dex and dodge boost, epic dodge, flurry of blows, finesse, specialization in unarmed strike, extra stunning fist attacks, improved strike (unarmed), improved crit (unarmed), defensive roll, armor manipulation (an old gladiator feat which allows bracers and greaves to act as official armor for an otherwise unarmored opponent). I was wearing gauntlets of force (as per ring of the ram but adapted for pugilism. DM ruled 68k to make and required an arch mage to make), boots of speed, a girdle of storm giant strength, and a cloak of protection +5. Situation: A boss drow warmaster with great cleave and bull rush was holding an alleyway against the militia and party while his matron and her raiding party murdered an entire city block. Although the official city guard were working their way around the road blocks, they'd need time. Realizing this and the fact the drow was just playing a deadly game of "You Shall not Pass!" I opted to risk my perfected monk body of Sune to save lives. Now here's where it all mechanics and flare.Upon entering strike range the drow attacks with his war axes, epic dodge negates his most accurate attack that round, while two more lucky shots roll off my gauntlets due to armor manipulation. I respond with flurry of blows and hit two crits with gloves that add basically a bull rush to each punch, coupled with the ki attacks of a monk and the girdle of giant strength, that's a punch that could send a semi backwards at about half the speed it was rolling forward. The drow gets hit so hard in the gut he's lifted into the air thirty feet and punched back into the street, clearing the alleyway! It's not over yet! See, a monks movement speed increases as he/she levels up and boots of speed double that movement, and I just won round 2 initiative! The DM laughs helplessly as the failed strength save sends his full plated drow warmaster skittering backward making sparks on the cobbled street beyond the alleyway, on his back, from the last round. Capitalizing on round 2's bounty my monk seamlessly crosses the measely 60 feet to attack his rising opponent with Flurry of blows still actiive and scores 1 crit and four hits, effectively pounding the drows armor into his ribcage with massive dents. The DM rules he's effectively dead and not even salvageable by the surprised drow matron a few yards away from him but his iron will feat forces him to his feet for one last attack, which missed due to my epic dodge feat. The DM now jumping out of his seat in sheer ecstasy of the moment of "eureka!" storytelling asks "Anything you want to say to the defeated?" and I tell him that I throw a burning sheet over his head so I can use my rogue sneak attack ability, saying flatly "You are already dead..." before critting him in the face with a Hide in Plain Sight backstab attack that turns the sheet, and his head, into modern art End Result: A bit of laughter at the table, a drow retreat, and a drow matron staringly longingly into her crystal ball watching my character bathe each night. XD
I had the party fight a Cat 2 Krasis. One of its hits was a crit on a zombie that was forming Golomov's raft. Crit blasted the zombie over the mountain SSB style. Rikah, the backup character (Kobold Paladin) missed a perception check and saw something flying overhead.
First session of a d&d 5e high sci fi campaign. The party had to escape from a transition facility (temporary prison for low level criminals and holding for higher level criminals until transport). The (at the time) barbarian/warlock minotaur used the chest chassis of a prison security drone to block the stun cannon at the end of the hallway. I didn't even roll damage for the cannon. It was just too damn cool and too much of a good start. I just gave them a few rounds of cover before the chassis got shredded.
I’m the DM of a Curse of Strahd game. One mechanic that I have been using is when a player is absent their character falls unconscious for the session. It keeps the tension high. Anyways we’re towards the end and the party was I the catacombs of the castle. Three players couldn’t make it. The party did have a portable hole they could put the party members in but it has a limited supply of air. So I decided if the party could convince me the DM about why the air supply would not be an issue using their knowledge of the realm I would let it slide. One player made an attempt but didn’t quite get to where I could be convinced. So had him roll persuasion against me the DM. He rolled like an 18. I decided to roll against it for fun and got a Nat 1. I go, yeah that makes sense. We all had a blast
Long story: My party and I played a Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign that had some amazingly chaotic moments. The cause of most of these hijinks was our shifter eldritch knight, Pan, who essentially got his abilities through reading magic picture books (he was illiterate). One of our other party members was a firbolg druid who was friendly but could throw down when needed. In the mad mage there is a circlet of human perfection which makes its wearer look like an attractive human, but retain all of their normal stats. Of course, we found this and gave it to our druid. This was the most broken thing our DM let us do and she didn't even realize it yet. Essentially, he would be in animal form (giant elk, toad, etc.) but look like a normal dude. So enemies would wrongly assume, attack, and get absolutely pulverized by him. But it didn't stop there. Later on, we face off against an undead beholder, and we're getting pretty hurt. Pan, in the midst of battle, rips the circlet off of druid's head and grabs an antler- boom, the giant elk shoots up, Pan holding on. Druid is essentially an elevator. Pan succeeds a dex check, and lands on the undead beholder, twin swords plunged into the top of its head and knocking it onto the floor with extra damage. We were awestruck- he killed it. It made a death save, being undead and all. ...Pan got incinerated. We got him back with wish later due to our very nice DM, but to date this is the coolest in game thing I've seen yet.
I didn't exactly have a rule of cool per se. But once I roleplayed so well that my DM let me roll at advantage for intimidation. One of the other players admitted that they got chills from it.
I was playing a homebrew game. My character was basically a monk, although I had an ability where, once a day, I could use a super punch capable of crushing down walls. Our barbarian was challenged to a duel by a drunk nobleman at the tavern (as you do). This caught the city guard's attention. Before the duel starts, we're all surrounded by guards and the nobleman acuses us of murdering his sister, which was a false claim, but the SOB figured he would get away with it, being a "respectable noble" (yes, he was THAT kind of noble). Before the guards try to apprehend us, I use my super punch on the nobleman's chest. DM told me that was supposed to be used on structures, but still allowed it. I then punched this POS so hard that his entire torso went flying and his head and limbs just stood there in mid-air for a couple of seconds before collapsing to the ground. Everyone at the table thanked me, except the DM, cause this nobleman was suposed to be an important NPC. So the moral of this story is: never give your players power if you want to tell a story.
For me it was when my dm allowed my human ranger to basically do the iron sheik chokehold on a owlbear who was larger. After rolling a successful grapple and attack the full hp owlbear was out cold, left by their owners and was then taken by me as a pet. Sadly he only lasted a few days as one of the players had some backstory shenanigans that made me lose him in a nightmare realm. Last time we checked the owlbear is basically massive like a titan and is wandering the plane (a lot of context needed but basically we had a berserk eclipse that fused our plane with the nightmare plane)
I'm running my own homebrew campaign that's in a custom setting a couple of my other friends and I worked on to make. My group is met a threat from another plane, as the gate opens to let it though they see a towering gargantuan behemoth that radiates heat and feels like pure rage incarnate. The barbarian forgot to rage for the fight and was promptly taken out. We have a paladin with a tower shield providing protection for the others where he can, a bowwoman firing where she can to get the beast's attention. They managed to ally themselves with a blue dragon and not even that was enough to stop it, a beam clash of a pure heat beam from the behemoth and the lightning breath attack. I decided to roll a beam clash as a flat d20, critical failures spelling disaster. The dragon failed the struggle and had just enough time to bail out and lose its left arm and leg from the beam as a straight line of heat erases a portion of the forest they were fighting in. We have a slime monk/fighter with echo knight. They wore down the creature enough that I allowed him to scale the creature, use his echo knight and summon it just above it's head, with both copies of him attacking straight at the neck until they severed it's head. He didn't roll enough damage but the spectacle enough was good enough in my book go warrant the kill
A Barbarian (Pathfinder game) I'd been playing as started a round of combat (as you do) by raging and getting into position. For context of the story, we were in basically a vertical city near the top fulfilling a quest for a Magistrate, and when we returned found her being ambushed due to some political backdealings and so on. As soon as the bad guys went, one of them successfully used 'Hold Person' on me and I then proceeded to fail every single check afterwards. Our bard had to spend every one of their turns using crowd control abilities to keep me from getting coup de graced every turn while the rest of the party fended off the bad guys. Eventually they beat down all but one (finally disrupting the cast maintaining a hold on me) and the last guy managed to escape and started to book it through the city. Naturally I chased after him as a pissed off barbarian who'd been stuck in the same spot for the entirety of combat, I didn't even get to hit anything! So while the rest of the party is dealing with making sure the Magistrate is okay and there's no more enemies, a chase scene ensues where I now start to pass all my acrobatics and dexterity checks to go after him. The assassin eventually makes his way to a tower at the edge of the city overlooking the lower levels (biiiig drop) and after climbing along the edge throws himself off onto a shadow floating in the air. Naturally without thinking I yeet myself dramatically (another passed skill check) through the air after him and land on what was an emergency Flying Carpet left in place for this exact scenario. So this poor guy is trying to control the carpet while my big dumb barbarian self is raging trying to murder him. I pull out my large sized Greatsword (Titan Mauler) entirely ignoring the fact that even if I kill this guy I have no idea how to operate a carpet this high off the ground. Then I crit fail my attack roll, and with the way the guy is steering to try and throw me off I lose my sword in the air. So now instead I just use a knockback attack to simply shove this guy off the carpet to presumably fall to his death. Now I'm on an out of control flying carpet with no idea how to steer it, and I try to drift close enough to a wall of the city to be able to grab onto something, and here I start failing checks left right and center. I fail to grab onto anything, I can't see anywhere I could just crash into in order to stop my descent, nothing. Eventually I ditch the carpet and just try to use my whole body (feet, hands, even my face at this point) to cling anywhere onto the wall. Critical fail. At this point the DM is out of potential saves for me, I just botched every roll for any feasible way to not plummet down entire tiers worth of city levels, but knowing that I'm about to die I put forth a proposal. I want to find the guy I pushed off the carpet since we're both falling. I want to bullet myself down to fall faster, find that bastard in the air, and make sure if I'm going down I kill him too. The DM at this point is like 'Well, since you're going to die anyways...' On the way down as I increase my speed I even pass the large Greatsword I dropped earlier, snatch it out of the air, and spot the guy I shoved off the carpet. Turns out he had even MORE layers of 'Not die' in the form of a squirrel suit, so he was trying to catch himself on the air as he fell to control his descent, when out of nowhere this absolute unit of a Barbarian drops from the heavens, plunges a huge greatsword through his chest, and I just rode his body down into the city below. The party eventually found our absolute crater of an impact with unrecognizable levels of gore, and a single still intact Greatsword. Was honestly the most badass moment I think I've ever had in D&D.
My group talked two bandits into to help them fight a dragon for a cut of the gold after they had just killed the bandit leader, while the rest fled in fear. One of the bandits a Dwarf named Boris The group has found a green dragon in a broken tower and had woken it up so they had to act fast as there was only three of them and they knew they were outmatched. They weren’t in the tower but outside planning on how to deal with it. Then one gets an idea. “You said the Druid we met fought and the dragon and was able to injure it a little?” “Yes however little damage he did there was he manage to break a few scales and get a few good hits in before fleeing.” There plan I’ll admit was a bit far fetched damage wise for what they were hoping for but otherwise worked normally and I loved the idea. They’d bought a single stick of dynamite last session. My creative as ever party proceeds to tie it to a spear, scale the tower to the second story window, vortex warp Boris into the second floor staircase and the mad dwarf jumps onto the dragons back and plung the dynamite spear into the weak point before setting it off. Unfortunately he timed it wrong and it went off with him in range and then fell two stories knocking himself out, but it’d worked. My part had used effectively a thunder spear from Attack on Titan to severely injure the dragon. It was so well done I let the dynamite and spear do triple damage for being imbedded into the dragon and said it completely shredded it’s should making him unable to use his left wing. They trapped him, cut off all exits, and the one who came up with the idea now being at the top of the tower started breaking it more to cause half of it to fall on the dragon. They demolished that dragon only having one person go down for a single round near the end. Sadly Boris died one turn short of anyone being able to reach him. After this he was remembered as ‘Boris the Bombardier’.
As a pretty laid back DM, I allow my players to do "cool shit" that's not necessarily by the book. Especially if it's purely cosmetic. Non-cosmetic examples are like fitting in an extra attack as a bonus action, ricocheting an arrow/bullet to hit another enemy, or anything else the player may want to try. To balance this I have them roll for this unforseen action with disadvantage, but they are allowed to use their highest modifier at lower levels, I'm still working a way to balance this at higher levels. Although at higher levels my players usually pick up a feat or two to make up for it. My players love this and enjoy the "high risk/reward" for unorthodox things.
My party was fighting a group of kidnappers, and the main fighter of the party, a half giant, rolled a crit on his attack, cleaving one of the kidnappers in two. I asked him to roll intimidation as well, and almost all of them failed, except for one that I quickly turned into a bandit captain. What I had planned to be an hour, hour and a half long fight was over in half an hour.
I was in a campaign where everyone needed to have some degree of spellcaster (every time we level up, we level in both classes. So a level 20 would effectively be 40). But one of my declared classes for my character was Barbarian. I was allowed to spellcast during rage, so long as my spells made sense for the character (pretty fireballs and lightning, and shield). I also was allowed to use Phoenix Spark (Phoenix Sorcerer) to withstand Power Word Kill because the DM said "rules as written, that doesn't work, but I love the flavor there". I should specify that was a hypothetical question I put forward,he never actually used power word kill
It was the first campaign for half the party (me and someone else) after leveling up from level 3 to 5 (the dm always started us at level 3 and leveled us up by 2 levels everytime we leveled up) I discovered the artificer class, as someone who chose fighter as they wanted a battlefield engineer type of character the gear logo of the artificer instantly caught my eye, at level 7 (3 in fighter 4 in artificer) I noticed scorching ray, as a player who had no intention of using spells and just noticed scorching ray pop up in their actions (after, funnily enough, having my hand crystallized a few sessions prior and seeing if I could shoot lasers from it) the DM was really kind and I didn't even have to abide by spell slot rules
I only ever played World of Darkness one time as a oneshot. It was a game set in a zombie apocalypse, all of us playing human characters. Our party consisted of Dude the Stoner, Roxie the Street Kid, and my character Beth, the a buff MMA fighter who was essentially built to act as our modern barbarian. We were rummaging through an office building when the zombies found us. The other two were on the lower floor and could escape normally. I had to jump out a second story window, and subsequently broke my leg. With the zombies closing in, I asked the DM if I could use a burst of adrenaline to try and escape. Now it's been a long time since I've played WoD so I forget WHAT the dice roll was, but apparently I rolled something STUPID high. "Fuck it, why not," said the DM. Queue Beth not only ignoring the pain of her broken leg to make a getaway, but snapping it back in place and full on SPRINTING PAST THE REST OF THE PARTY to their safehouse at the local Denny's. Haven't played it since, but those were some good times.
This was in pathfinder 2e and i was playing a ganzi gnome inventor with the weapon innovation (bladed gauntlet) having climbed up a tree to either avoid or lura away a grizzly bear i fell out trying to tree hop, and instead had to use the entangling form as a grappling hook which not only succeeded but also with some help from the party actually scared the bear away with the swinging allowing to repel away from the tree towards the rosemary we had been sent to collect allowing my charecter to grab an entire bush and take off running
Someone told my friend a story where their character has a gun that shot Reduced cannonballs with a sort of ring of anti-magic at the end of the muzzle. They basically had a literal Hand Cannon
I think my Tuesday game is my favorite party I have had so far. Fairy Soulknife Rogue, Duegar Spore Druid, Kalishtar Bear Totem Barbarian with Tiefling Paladin who they are the “Dad” of, Air Genasi Genie Warlock with Half-Elf Wizard worker, and finally the dumb as a bag of rocks Gold Kobold Drakewarden Ranger. So much variety and only a little bit of min-maxing
Once played 2 mimic fighters in Pathfinder that worked together as one being. Each was half the level of the other players and I took team work feats on both (Pathfinder). I think we had improvised weapon feats and throw anything. The DM let me abuse their shape shifting to add pizazz to my attacks like shooting one out of the other (using throw anything) and other stuff. When not fighting they appeared together as a single suit of armor half blackish metal and half white. Their only drawback was we couldn't speak.
this story comes from a recent session in an on going campaign. I play a warlock hexblade / fighter multiclass character. She is the ruler of her home who is seeking to take over the kingdom as ruler and is trying to recruit people to help her doing so. This brings her to the capital city where her allies have talked about recruiting the council on her side. But a mindflayer is secretly hiding among them. after talking with the council and looking into the matter the party decides to take care of the problem and go into the underground city. Upon entering the city we find there are a few more things than expected, 3 neolithids, 4 mindflayer, and one extra special one i forget. the overpowered NPC companion dealt with the neolithids leaving the mindflayers to us. Two mindflayers come down to fight us while the others are casting magic at us. Unknown to us a mindflayer hive is active in the area. This caused us to lose or Prof bonus and the party to panic which left the party in a sore state. One of my allies ended up killing the first one and i attacked the second with my flaming whip. Killing it in two hits i used my chance for a free action. I tell the Dm i want my character to kick on of the falling slices of meat at one of the other mindflayers...and i get a nat 20. So this frail woman with no strength foot ball kicks a piece of mindflayer meat at another mind flayer and hit's it dead on. This dealt 3d8 damage and caused the mindflayer to fall off the building taking 5d6 falling damage. Truly it was one of the best moments we have had in that campaign so far.
With the DM who lets his players do almost anything if it fits with their character, I got something similar from my DM in one game. My character is literally just straight-up Victor Frankenstein. I built him as an Artificer, but my DM gave me clearance for him to learn any spell from the Necromancy school so that he can raise the dead. I've been careful not to abuse that privilege, but at level 10 I already have Animate Dead and Revivify. If the dead need to walk, to Frankenstein you should talk.
in my curse of strahd campaign, one of my fellow players, a dwarf drakewarden ranger, was allowed to hook up an empty coffin to his drake and create a chariot he could ride around in
I was playing a Dhampir blood domain cleric. My dm and I agreed that there’s no reason that teeth shouldn’t count as light weapons so he let me make two bite attacks in a turn (of course as per the two weapon fighting rules with the second attack I subtracted the constitution moodier as I didn’t have the dual wielder fighting style). I bit the BBEG’s neck and tore his throat out, killing him. Wasn’t all that much but it’s always cool to me hearing a DM and a player agree that “No, this rule is stupid. This is how we’re running it because it makes sense.”. The same DM even let me get a silver grill to counteract some resistances.
My first mage was a peasant wizard ( member of royalty hiding out) he had his mum's staff as his only inheritance. He screamed feel the wrath of the staff of magus, and told people he was Bigby of the spells Bigby fist etc. By 3rd game, everyone parried by staff attacks out of fear of what it could do. By the 5th game my catch cry doubled damage to undead, by th 8th doubled damage against demons. By the 13th game, it had bigby crushing fiat once per week. Of course by the 2nd game the whole party was pissed at me for the catch cry.
we had the task of dealing with a fortress full of necromancers our goblin alchemist (pathfinder winged marauder) came out with the design for a rocket to launch at the fort, not to break it, no it was to deliver a payload of gallons of holy water Needless to say when we arrived the defenders had no skeleton or zombie allies, it was all just them. Defientally made the fight easier and was pretty awesome
Sort of halfway rule of cool, used scorching ray in the first round of combat to free the party from chains we were tied to in a trial by combat which was very reminiscent of the attack of the clones execution, 2 nat 20s and an 18 with a +5 making it a 23, DM effectively said "ok, I'm not even going to have you roll damage, you are all free," then the session ended, next session my first two rolls were a nat20 and an 18+5=23
We had been doing a dungeon raid against Kobolds, I was playing a Hombrew Race and Class from the DnDwiki that ended up giving me an insane level of strength/ grapple/ carrying capacity, my Character got Floured by the Kobold who sat behind the walls and laughed at him, this ticked him off, when we began our attack, my character was extremely brutal to the kobold cutting some in two and cause actual terror in others, my DM didn't even have me roll intimidation on one when he saw me enter through one of their secret doors and brutalize his two friend that were right there with him, before turning to look at him. The party went to find the Boss, and I went to find the Kobold that floured me, my favorite part though was one of the traps I triggered was a cage trap, a big cage dropped over me and the 2 Kobold that triggered it pointed and laughed at the big dumb brute who was ignoring their traps, well, they stopped laughing when my Character picked up the Cage that should have been too heavy to lift and used it as an improvised weapon, bouncing it off walls until in sandwiched them into a wall killing them painfully. My DM told me it fit my character's edgy rage too well to let it be any different
Dm here. Last week we had a session of our long running camping for 5 years. I use rule of cool quite often. I even have a sistem where at the end of a session everyone points at a player they thought played their character best and the winner gets a point the can invest in modifications, items, feats etc as a story element . And oh boy. Last was special. A bit of back story.(dnd 5e homebrew) The group are the riders of the apocalips and are working to alighn with the celestial spirit that haunts them in order to unfuck reality. They made some powrfull friends including a whole ass citty that basically worships them but know them to well to actually Revere them The group just managed to get their friends underwater city back from the depths of the sea back to the surface with the war forged population (they used to be halflings) when suddenly they discover the whole world is at war, the sky is burning and a human war ship is headed their way. They weponized the warforged and managed to salvage a whole ass tank (used for ground support) And when diplomacy faild (as it does) they went biblical! (One player, war, was sick that day so he is not in the story sadly but i will tell of his many , many, many arms another day) They used their flying ship called alice(dont fucking ask.... its a really really long story). The antichrist saved all her strong spells secretly and unleashed them for the fist time breaking enemy formation in an instant and killing all spell casters. Pestilance identified and killed their leader on the first turn and let chaos ensue Famin devoured and killed 10 men enough to finally allighn with his pirit and manifest as the full rider of famin(we developed amechanic for that) and his stead is the now dead three headed dog the party had that died and he ate lon long ago. Now charging and kiling all who remained And by the end only two knits survived. Both of them looked at death And one said "to the last breath?" "See you on the other side" the other replied. As death used blight . I just let him yank the soul and hold it. The other knight went to say "my soul for his" But famin had other plans. He sruck down death(who was with 4 levels of exhaustion and 7 espresso at the time) and devoured the other soul so that they can never meet again The session ended with him saying "Never steal my food again" As death passes out. 2/5 riders manifested . The end is nigh
Occasionally I'll play in a session with my younger sister in her first campaign (14y/o), my mum and some of her colleagues. We were hired to take out the 3 heads of an underground fighting ring. We convince the one of the bosses (idk what he was, didnt live long enough to tell) go talk business with my little sister (a war forged warlock) to which she cast chill touch in an attempt to push him off this 150ft balcony (70ft to the floor, another 60 into the fighting pit bellow). The dm allowed it but was told it would be a high DC. Nat 20. Her first Nat 20. She wanders back in, emotionless as ever and sits back down, claiming the other boss is outside still allowing me (swashbuckler rogue) to position myself to auto crit sneak attack the boss (human wizard, easy work) and the others to start trying to curb stop the final boss (a love child between Hulk and Bane powered by some homebrew meth+bathsalts) and some of their minions. We still almost got killed with all of us downed at some point in the battle, only being saved by another lucky Nat 20 for a death save, putting my back up to 1hp. Still dont know how we managed to pull this shit off...
My only rule of cool story is short. Im a rogue with a short sword... Rolled a natural one while surrounded by 6 goblins and DM said my sword flew out of my hand arcing behind me through the air. he rolled a die or 2 and proclaimed My Sword hit the leader in the face and took him down to one hit point. At which point my fellow adventurers took him down that last point scaring off his troop of goblins.
Let’s see… Our barbarian got gauntlets of ogre strength and got the finishing blow on a big goopy bird thing, so she decided to spin in a circle while holding the birds foot, and slam it onto the ground causing an explosion of goop Our warlock(a Scourge Aasimar) activated his wings, grappled an enemy, flew into the air and used radiant consumption. In rules it’s a damage over time ability, but he uses it to turn into a concentrated bomb of radiant damage melt the enemy and a couple buildings Our Echo Fighter caused his echo to change shape(like disguise self) and touch a pillar that needed a specific person to touch it(and it worked) Our Bard(Me) used Warding Wind to walk through a big fire towards a trapped team member, warding wind extinguishes small fires, but it was ruled that it didn’t extinguish the flame but could part the flame around her for a short time We are a very homebrew and rule of cool campaign
the dm liked my idea of my new character with the new path of the beast barbarian. we are always fond of more out there characters, and now i have a gnoll character and manage to stay permanent as one...
My players consisted of a wizard Aasimar and a fighter human. They were supposed to go around the areas killing all 9 “corrupted” heroes. Anyway they got to the Orc Hero and they were supposed to go to the orc camp, fight waves of orcs and meet the boss orc. And fight him. Instead the fighter lured them out in a field of dry grass, after he dowsed the area he was standing in with water, I mean at least 4 gallons. And the wizard who was flying up, at night, and his skin was blue and purple; lit the field ablaze. I literally just knocked over all the minis and said WELL HES DEAD. NEXT BOSS
So we had to fight a Hag with an Animated Tree. When my friend's turn came up (he plays a Rogue), he was like, "If I can, I would like to pull my Dagger out..." At this point, I was wondering what he was doing because he was a Dual-Wield Shortsword Wielder like myself (I play a Ranger). He then continued, "...then pull out a rag, wrap the blade in the rag, and light it on fire with my Flint." In my mind, I was like, "Is he serious?!" Our DM was like, "Okay I'll allow that, but it will take your whole Action to do it." My friend agreed. So while he was busy making a Homemade Flaming Dagger, I rushed in and killed the Hag. She tried to attack me (her turn came first) and missed, so I just flavored my attacks, all of which hit hence why I was able to kill her, as my Ranger ducking her attempted strike, taking two swipes with his Main Hand Shortsword at her legs, then finishing with an Uppercut Slash with the Off-Hand Shortsword, effectively Shoryukening her into oblivion with a Reverse-Gripped Shortsword. The rest of the round finished with whoever was left dogpiling the tree. Then it came back to my friend's turn. Being, up to this point, a pure Melee Rogue, I expected him to run up and attack. Nope. He was like, "I throw the Flaming Dagger at the Animated Tree." He hit with it and rolled damage. My DM was like, "Ok well... it's a fucking tree... that's now on fire... How Do You Want To Do This?" I couldn't believe it. This man had just improvised a Flaming Dagger to smoke a living tree.
Hey I wasn’t really paying attention and then suddenly BOOOOM CRY BECAUSE YOU HAVENT BEEN TOLD YOURE A GOOD PERSON IN A LONG ASS TIME. Thanks, even if I’m a little mad at how sad it made me to hear that advice.
I’m currently playing in a live play homebrew game and playing a cleric to a homebrew death god. My Dm and I worked out a rule of cool divine intervention where if it works, I trade cleric levels for paladin levels for fights that start going south. The way we balanced it is that this form only lasts 1 minute and requires a d6 roll after the form ends, causing that many levels of exhaustion. This means that at any time, I can die from exhaustion due to the extreme ware on my body from the change in my characters stat spread, and there is no return from a death caused by this form.
In a 3.5e game, our DM gave out a Dwarven Thrower as treasure for our party's Dwarf Fighter, but the Dwarven Thrower was cursed; whenever you tried to throw it, instead of the Wielder actually throwing the weapon, all Dwarves within 60ft of the Wielder were launched at the target. The first time the Dwarf Fighter used it, the DM described how the Fighter was thrown face first into the Goblin he had tried to throw his weapon at. At first the player was dismayed, but then he got an evil grin on his face. The DM asked him what he planned on doing about this. The player said "When we get back to town, my Dwarf is buying spiked platemail." The DM had a look of "Oh shit, what have I done" on his face, but allowed it to happen. And from then on out, our Dwarf literally threw himself into battle, hoping to have 250 pounds of Dwarf in spiked armor impact the closest enemy.
My war forged eldritch knight was being beaten by bandits he thought were military punishing him for screwing up. My DM came up with the idea I modified it slightly since I wanted be an innocent character. Anyway when the other characters found him and were attacked he finally rolled a insight check to realize that were not proper soldiers I broke my bonds and casted thunder wave wiping out most of the bandits.
DND is about role-playing stories, and while the stuff like dice rolls and levels make it somewhat realistic, it’s all really about story time, so I feel its allowed for some Accommodations be made for certain scene, to get some points across in the story. Yeah some exceptions should be made. So I’m fine with player characters getting over powered items or custom classes from a character point perspective to smoothing out the story.
More Rule of Funny, but I let them instantly derailed the campaign for the Rule of Cool. In a sort of Combat tutorial session to let the players get familiar with how to play and myself to familiarize with being a DM, I set a bunch of Zombies and Skeletons to attack the party in the ruins of a small fort. They set about defeating them, except one zombie kept making its Undead Fortitude saves until it was just a torso and 1 leg aggressively bumping into them(no threat just there to give the other zombies flanking) they defeated all of the zombies, and Skeletons except that one. They asked me if they could tie it up and get it under their control, Necromancy not being an inherently Evil practice in my world i allowed it, and ruled that they would each give up half of their starting money(i like to start at lvl 5 so they had plenty of gold to spend as a start up) so that the zombie, which they called Chestbump since that's all it was doing after a while, into a non-combat Flesh Golem. I was going to have it be a kind of pack-mule/beast of burden/servant and give them a chance to get a Cart or Wagon. In the first session they all decided that they wanted to turn their Chestbump into a walking warmachine, and were having more fun in planning that than the Fiend vs Aberration war that was brewing under their feet, so I let them go with it. If the campaign didn't end shortly after due to scheduling conflicts, that zombie would have went from the basic fodder enemy to being as scary as the Deathtroopers in The Mandalorian.
We were playing Shadowrun 4e and we had infiltrated a facility by posing as legitimate guards. Our face, who was a mage, went to do some reconnaissance in Astral after our decker day an anomaly on the cameras she was watching. He found another team of runners cloaked in invisibility and immediately cast orgasm on the other mage. This caused the enemy mage to... um...lose concentration and the entire enemy team was suddenly visible and was set upon by the legit guards. We used this as a distraction to evacuate and then lock down the scientists who were blocking our access to the data and items we were hired to steal. As we started to leave the GM remembered that type of spell couldn't be cast in Astral on a target that wasn't dual natured but it was too cool a moment to not let it stand, though with a reminder that it wouldn't be allowed to happen again.
Hell yeah Cyberpunk Red Stories. Been running a campaign for that game for about a year now, it's complicated compared to DnD but we have lots of fun with the rule of cool.
Whenever my group hears "go ahead and roll for it," they know I'll usually uphold my end of the bargain. An example is when the ranger jokingly said he'd try to seduce the old, obviously evil, egregiously more powerful elven witch that the party was visiting. Gave him a half-elf baby to take care of in the epilogue. In the same campaign, the group's paladin was frustrated with the group's situation, and decided to throw a d100 Hail Mary to any god in the void willing to listen to her. She summoned the god of law to rewrite parts of reality to turn the ranger's horse companion into a tiger, as well as rewrite the warlock's contract and change her subclasses. Recently, I had a nearly 1-hour combat encounter planned. The party needed to go through a bandit base to rescue the brother of one of them. Throughout the week leading up to the session, the player whose brother was being rescued had started messaging me about his merchant family's human resources. I worked with him on the rough numbers, and I had no idea what he was planning. So, session time. The party walks in a forest toward the bandit base, and they're accosted by some of the bandits' scouts. Merchant character demands to be taken to the bandit leader. When talking with the bandit leader, the player unveiled a 5-minute speech, detailing all of his family's military resources and tactics, in an effort to intimidate the bandits into releasing their hostage. I didn't have him roll. I didn't have a combat. The situation was resolved.
DM here. My "rule of cool" moment came during combat on a ship with my PC's. The Barbarian was getting ganged up on by the enemy pirate captain's minions with the captain right in front. He was seriously hurt and was in need of some saving. The Paladin, who was at the top of the mast, asked if she could pull out her flying carpet, land on it uhm surfboard style, ride down to the enemy pirate captain and jump off attacking when she lands on him. You can sure try, first I'll need an Dexterity (Acrobatics) check, natural 19 + 6. You jump on and start surfing down to the baddie. Now roll me an attack, NAT 20. Total damage ended up being some 80 - 90 points of damage, of course smiting the shit out of him as well and fall damage on top! Needless to say, he was awarded with the ever loving, how do you want to do this? She describes she jumps off the carpet and with her longsword slices him in half. Was probably the best "rule of cool" moment I've had so far!
I just realized I couldn't be a cool DM. Making something cool happen even though I know it's unrealistic just rubs me the wrong way and frustrates me in the process.
I just want to let the world know that my weird brain is weird. XD I don't know why, I don't know where it came from, but every time I hear Bryan say "bye for now" my brain says "bifurcated." Like, my brain just wants him to say, "Bye, for now, bifurcated." Yes, it makes no sense. Don't ask me what the deeper philosophical meaning is. I guess because "parting ways"? Maybe just because it rhymes? Hopefully, not splitting the party in two. Honestly, it's just a random word that pops up in my brain on cue.
This reminds me of Xibalba Amassa. All of this reminds me of Xibalba Amassa. Captain Xibalba, The Bloodthirsty Wielder of the Twins, Lover of the Churro, Lord of Murderization, Police Commissioner Fuck You, Literally a Beyblade, Master of the Kebab, Yeeter of Boi, Blender of People, Holder of Way Too Many Titles, Crusher of Penus, Destroyer of Hopes, Crusher of Dreams, Assistor of Seppukucide, Castrator of Gideon, Wielder of the BeyBLADE, Master of the People Smoothie, Dragon Deli Slicer, Taker of Only the Longest Naps, Chairman of Taco Tuesday, Official Wedding Officiator, Best Man to the Whining Blight, Edgy Anime Sword Boi, Drinker of the Boozeois Bourge, Yeeter of Dragons, Margarita Mixer, Kingman to the Wing, King of the Mercenaries, 1000 Man Army, Demon of the Skies, Kicker of Spine, Seriously What Is With All These Titles, Black&Decker, Survey Company President, Chain Gang Slang Swang, Mathemagician, Tosser of Dinosaur, Tidal Title, Strategerie Formulationizer, Ship Carrier, Arsenal Thrower, Title Wave, Intimidator of Cake... Wielder of the BIG STICK... With Pointy End... 3 And Knuckles DX Amassa, The Envoy of Death, The Titular Character Each of those titles apparently has a story to it, amd I've already covered Intimidator of Cake in other areas.
My players where jokingly asking if there was a sandwich shop so I said if I rolled a nat 20, there is now a tavern named Jimmy and Johnsons that specializes is sandwiches.
Archer Fighter: "I'm done listening. I roll to shoot that asshole in the face."" **Throws d20 15 yards from refrigerator, it strikes the Big Bugbear Boss Bandit mini toppling it with a Nat 20. Calmly walks back, picks up the d20, walks back to the refrigerator and replicates the shot, the crit confirm roll landing on the downed mini perfectly. This was a long shot in game, too.** DM: Uhh, so yeah, the bug bear _fucking dies_ Group: **Is silent as they watch the sniper lord calmly retrieve victory a beer from the refrigerator, in awe of the hero that walks amongst them.**
This is my current character. Because we're playing a module there are some class restrictions so druid and ranger are out. My work around is my human nature cleric with the magic iniate feat in druid. I asked my dm if my bent oak staff which also doubles as my spell focus could change between a staff and a shortbow. Since I'm a follower of Silvanus the nature ranger god it all checked out. Some rp goes on and I ask in the downtime to craft some stone tipped arrows. Later we get into combat and in my turn I announce as a bonus action to cast magic stone on 3 of my arrows. My dm just looks over at me and smiles while clapping.
As a person wanting to dm i actually made something for the rule of cool i called bad ass tokens. If you made a rule of cool event work you get a token. Each token was an equivalent to ana automatic nat 20 but they have to roll with disadvantage to get it and you cant use it on bbs so its not a one sided fight for plot. Comment if you like or hate ill take any criticism
Alchemist fire chain bomb. They tied 15 bottles of alchemist fire to a rope, and they through it at a sleeping dragon from above. It was 15d4 fire damage and ended in equaling 56 damage. The thing is that the dragon was a white dragon, and white dragons are vulnerable to fire damage. It took 112 damage and it had 133 (young white dragon). Ya they killed it pretty easy.
So i was gming a game of pathfinder where the party was on a ship they owned and got attacked by some Adaro. Because some of the crew fell i to the water the fighter jumped in to try and save people. One of the things Adaro van do is use a paralitic poison on there spears and tjey often use it to paralize someone and drag tjem deep under water to drown them. This happened to happen to one of the npcs and the Adaro coukd swim faster than the fighter. Instead of letting this happen the parties bard (who has been levitating roughly 10 feet off the waters surface) decided to do something odd. They decided to use a spell called water to wine on the ocean around the last Adaro. This spell will turn any non alcoholic liquid into an alcohol, a ragular show he would do on the ship for the crew. This effectivily ment the creature was breathing in alcohol. After having it roll two saves and failing horrible the creature died do to massive alcohol poisoning and there gills being basically destroyed by the alcohol
Executing enemeis in combat. Everytime when I DM, and a player gets a hit that reduces an enemy to 0, I always ask them: "How do you want to kill them?" and notify that they're allowed to do anything, that is cool, brutal, gory or everything. The fun factor for everyone just went up thousandfold, everyone discribing gruesome executions. Last one, made from the College of Swords Bard, who is a Pirate IC, vs a Yeti in my campaign: Stab through the skull by brining his rapier from under and pushing it up, then finishing it off with a Pistol Shot, point-blank into the skull. Most brutal execution I have done as a player: A Large creature, so my Half-Dragon Barbarian cut off the legs to make it stand shorter them himself, then he drops the sword and grabs on to the head of the creature with both hands and literally rips the skull, skin, bones and everything in two... and spits down the exposed neck before the body collapses.
![Diggy Graves - Red Vineyard [Official Lyric Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/8Ro085T0mnQ/mqdefault.jpg)
There was a flame trap in a dungeon. After getting past it, I, an artificer, asked the DM if I could take the flame trap and make a flamethrower. DM didn’t know how to counter that point considering my character had 24 intelligence and was an artificer so would obviously be able to turn the thing into a weapon. It ended up having to use a 25gp of alchemists fire per shot but still, pretty cool weapon
24 Int????
@@onepangaean3018 base 20, IIRC there are a few things in 5e that can push that +4.
That or a headband of intellect variant.... I think?
@@JimDA1000 that table may have also homebrewed being able to go over 20 points in a stat
Cue the Metal Slug flamethrower sound effects.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Fellow artificer here, why make a flame thrower, just use the alchemists fire, heck just cast fireball, artificer artillerists unlock it at level 9
Ayy! I was the player in that Curse of Strahd game that had the incident with the catapulted rock!
Glad the story brought you some laughter. I've listened to this channel for a long time and I'm really glad I was able to contribute with the story. You rock!
One day you'll kill something with that rock, and itll probably be my character.
@@pipsqueak8401 My artificer misses you every day, but her aim is getting better.
Is that 'You rock' a pun?
This is the most wholesome comment chain I have ever seen
I allowed my player who was downed while the rest of the party was about to die to posses his animated armor in exchange his body and all hopes of resurrection being destroyed in order to save the rest of the party
Something something Fullmetal Alchemist
At one point in our campaign, our party’s ranger wound up purchasing 150 gp worth of fireworks for what was at the time a joke. We had no use for them aside from firing one or two off at random points in the next few sessions for fun.
A few sessions later, we wound up fighting a VERY strong enemy with a bit less than 1000 hp, if I remember correctly. We had been fighting it for a while and had just gotten it bloodied, but two of our three PCs were very hurt and our NPC who this enemy was trying to kill was also doing poorly. The ranger, suddenly remembering about the fireworks, told our DM that he turned our bag of holding inside out, spilling out all of the fireworks we had purchased onto this thing before lighting one up and frantically running away. Our DM was impressed with the idea and wound up letting it do 1d4 per gold spent (1d4 per firework essentially), and it would up doing 344 damage in that one turn. After that the enemy was injured to the point where it immediately fled, and while we haven’t had the chance to kill it properly yet it still remains one of the coolest combat moments we’ve had so far.
My favorite rule of cool moment I've witnessed as a DM: Early in our campaign, our party was clearing out this mine that was infested with rust monsters. That's when they met a kobold named Klanky, whose family was taken away and was trying to take back the mine. Klanky wore a suit of armor made from stuff he scrounged from people's garbage, and although he didn't flinch in the face of monsters, he was terrified of literally everything else. Needless to say, the party immediately fell in love with him and swore to protect him at all costs. When they finished their job, they heard the owner of the mine would offer them a handsome reward for turning Klanky in. Since the rust monsters have practically devoured all the iron in the mine and devastated the town economy, the townspeople have resorted to capturing the kobolds who lived in the mountains and selling them into slavery, and Klanky was the only one to evade capture. Instead of turning them in, they fed Klanky a ton of growth potions and a firebreathing potions and let him rampage across the town like Godzilla.
Some dm is not very creative lol
@@maomaeramnon3870 It was my player's idea, not mine. Plus it was my first time playing as DM and I was still learning.
@@grahamkristensen9301 I was just saying that this campaign sounds oddly specific to some other adventure that took place some time at the swordcoast :D not talking about this rule of cool
@@maomaeramnon3870 I've never seen/listened to Swordcast, so any similarities are purely coincidental.
@@grahamkristensen9301 yeah so there’s story about an offspring of a dead god which starts during a time where people are trying to start a war and turn all iron in the close by iron mines into brittle and useless iron which breaks.. and then have their own mine where they produce good iron for themselves. Also in the first mine is a lot of kobolds. So it wasn’t rust monsters but kobolds who did something to kinda make the iron rust
Oh boy do I have a tale. This happened in the sixth session of the campaign I'm currently a part of. The party, after an event involving a magic crystal, was taken into a councilor's private laboratory to be tested, read experimented, on. After realizing he was shady as hell and some actions taken by the rogue and monk, we made an escape attempt. Unfortunately the guy had the stat block of a mind flayer and we were all level 4. So our cleric got grappled by magic tentacles. In an attempt to save him, I the fighter, attacked the guy and used the push ability of the shield master feat. I rolled a nat 20 for strength and he rolled a nat 1. The DM ruled it as me shoving him into the wall and knocking him prone. In all the attacks and shove did 25 hp of damage, about a third of his health. At this point me and the other players realized we could actually win the fight if we got lucky. Fast forward to the end and the rogue down a critical hit with a enchanted dagger, dealing the last 20 hp of damage needed, winning is the fight and enough exp to almost level up twice. All in all, good session.
Man, I got a good one today. Five years ago, two-person party, my male Human Fighter - Lars - and my party member: a female Elven Assassin - Veletha - (we were playing a homebrewed system, so Assassin was its own class entirely), the two honestly didn't like each other very much but stuck around because they had the same goal and could trust each other when things went south. They were in a run-down tavern Lars was trying to talk a rude ex-explorer into getting a map of the area, while Veletha sat at the bar and waited for things to happen. After a bit of conversational navigation, Lars gets his hands on the map, and one of the drunken patrons gets a little to grabby and... wordy... with Veletha. She shoves him away while the ex-explorer disrespectfully flicks a copper coin at Lars as he turns around while telling him to "know his worth", I ask if I can shield bash the coin and I'm asked to roll perception, and then an athletics check. I nat 20 both rolls, and the DM sat there for a second before describing Lars bashing the coin using his massive shield with enough force to embed it into the skull of the handsy man and leave him slumped over the nearby bartop.
To this day, I've never seen or heard another event where a man died directly via copper coin.
that's really freaking awesome
You shot a man with a penny. Good job! :D
The catapult rock story reminded me of a game I'm currently in where I'm playing a Giant Bardlock and did something much the same. We were about to fight a lich in her forest camp -though we didn't know the enemy was one at the time- and I had on a Ring of Size Reduction that we ruled as bringing me down to Medium size, instead of my usual Huge. While our sorcerer bantered with the lich and our rogue raided her tents, I quietly snuck off into the brush and cast Fly, and only the GM knew I'd cast it. After the fight started, I flew up over her, used a custom spell to give her disadvantage on WIS saves, then dropped my concentration on Fly to cast Hold Person as I took off my ring.
GM ruled that despite the lich being immune to bludgeoning damage, there isn't a whole lot one can do about a man the size and weight of a semi truck falling on her, so she took the full fall damage. In the time it took for me to get in the air and debilitate her, the rest of the team had whittled her health down JUST enough for the Elbow Drop to do her in. We've all agreed not to do that again, because my poor guy can't really handle taking 80-something damage on a regular basis.
DND 5E campaign, early encounter. We were investigating an abandoned town when a group of 7 bandits and their leader moved in and decided to establish a stronghold. They called themselves "the Seven Snakes" and each of them had a 7 with a snake wound around it painted on their armor. We moved through the town, picking off bandits as the last 3 and their leader fortified themselves in the town's inn.
As we crouched in cover, watching them prepare for us to attack, my character retrieved one of the corpses, used the deceased's blood to cross off the 7 and draw a 3 on his armor and threw it into the town square in full view of the inn.
Some intimidation checks don't need words to succeed. Or, the GM decided, rolls.
Holy shit that would be terrifying.
In my previous campaign, the party was taking part on an army amassed by the big bad. Among said army were several dragons. One of the players, a human melee fighter who had obtained wings through some shenanigans, flew right at one of the dragons, a red dragon. And the dragon in turn, flew right at him, intent on gobbling him whole. Now, 5his was epic levels, and he had a spiked chainx and epic magic boots that gave him ridiculous speed. He decided to slip his chain around the dragon's neck to try and strangle it. Several checks later, and he didn't strangle it. No, instead the dragon's weight combined with the character's ridiculous strength score, and the ludicrous momentum in opposite directions made the dragon's neck snap, killing it instantly.
I'd like to think I'm a 'rule of cool' DM. I've got an idea for how my homebrew campaign is going to go, the story beats and all that, but I'm letting my players build their characters however they like (within reason), complete with unique special abilities, traits, and even limit breaks, and I'm going to build all the encounters around them, so they can have as much fun as possible.
Here’s another moment out of my Thieves Quest campaign that I like talking about in the comment section; the party is exploring a dungeon full of illusions and they come across a chest which, surprise surprise, is a mimic. My boyfriend who’s playing the Water Genasi fighter wanted to DROWN the mimic. Because he’s a water Genasi, and since he’s basically a walking water source, I gave him two things; one, a homebrew spell to sense the closest source of water around him, and two, the fact that he can only cast his ‘create/form water’ spell when there is a said source of water nearby. Since he can sense water around this dungeon he wants to create a wall of water where the mimic is standing to drown it. I agree to his big brain idea, I roll, and the mimic does in fact drown. He then proceeded to do this to another mimic and to check other chests he finds in the dungeon
I am going to have to remember that trick.
The message at the end of the video was seriously powerful. Thank you, hearing it even from a stranger is still a kind of comfort feeling
Had to get rid of a baddy on a pier in the harbour. DM presented the details and asked what we wanted to do.
We recently reached level 4 and had 2 druids in the party. I remembered they get their "aquatic" options unlocked and the scene from "Free Willy" immediately came to mind, making me smile.
DM noticed and kinda used to my unorthodox ideas, immediately asked me to share. After he heard my idea and the others found it great too we went with it. He did acknowledged that the killer whale is much higher challenge rating than the druid is allowed to wildshape into but he allowed it anyway.
That's how the baddy minding his own business on the tier suddenly found himself bitten in half as a killer whale jumped over him and the pier. Only his boots left in his place.
I also have to include that when the DM agreed to it, he made the druid, my girlfriend make an attack roll. She did and then with a surprise she announced it was a crit. It was 10d6 damage, enough to oneshot the guy.
It seems even Tymora wanted this to happen.
Finally, a topic for which I have a good story!
At the time, i had been DMing for a year or so, for a group of new players/close friends. I usually stick to the rules as much as possible, since I want the game to be as consistent and fair as possible.
This session, two friends joined for a guest appearance. One had never played before, the other had just once, and It was a really bad experience for him (basically, shitty DM killed his character within the first hour and didn't let him make a new one). So ofc, he was a bit reluctant to play again, but gave it a try since everyone else wanted to play. We rolled up characters for them, a goblin rogue for the noob, and the other player made the same character he had had prior; a gnome monk of the open hand.
The session was going to be a treasure hunt, the OG party had found one half of the map, and the new players had found the other. They were at sea, and the map led them to an island populated by slaadi. On the island, they met a single human NPC, Castor, who told them that he had befriended the slaadi, but was on a secret mission to find a treasure hidden somewhere on the island. Since Castor knew the island well, they teamed up with him to look for the treasure.
The map led them to an underground temple with a few puzzles and easy encounters, and I think everyone was enjoying the session. Time for the final room, deep down in the dungeon, the treasure chamber.
Some of you may know about slaadi, and you probably guessed it. Castor was no human, he was a death slaad in disguise, who had purposely led them down in the chamber to kill them all. He dropped his disguise, blocked off the only exit. and initiative was rolled.
Even though it was a 6v1 fight, the party had some trouble, failing most of their saves against his spells. Most of them got charmed/frightened, so the monk was basically up on the slaad by himself.
Before the fight, the rogue had triggered a spiked pit trap in the middle of the room that was now visible. Monk desperately tried to get behind the slaad, using his monk powers to knock the slaad into the spiked pit. He kept failing over and over, spending most of his ki points. When he finally got in behind and landed a good hit, he did not have enough ki points to use flurry of blows and push him into the pit. Could I deny a new player, with previous bad experience from dnd, the honor of killing the final boss of the session by kicking him into a spiked pit? hell naw, you go gnomeyboy, finish him. He was low on HP anyway, damage dice were rolled but they didn't matter, he was dead.
They got the treasure and got to safety, and we called the session. Afterwards, monk was really happy with the session, and and thanked me for giving him a good experience of dnd! And I think that moment was a big part of it.
I let my level 7 Monk who was 5h away from dying from the Gas Spore death burst disease use a version of the level 10 monk ability that makes you immune to disease. I did this by making it a skill challenge through a guided meditation with his monk master, using perception checks, medicine checks and insight checks to locate the spores within his blood and then attempt to "shunt" them out of his body consuming all his ki-points with a final constitution check. The successes and failures on the different wisdom checks changed the dc for the final con check. It took them 3h to get to his monk master, so he had 2 in game hours to do this. He failed the first time and had to go through it one more time (taking 1 more in game hour to regain his ki, putting him mere minutes away from death) and only succeeded thanks to the bardic inspiration. One of my all time favourite moments playing dnd
I forgot what race he was, but our MASSIVE barbarian popped rage, then proceeded to rip the mast of our ship out and use it as a club.
I'm a DM, and how I run Rule of Cool is like Bardic Inspiration.
If a character wants to do a team combo that's creative enough (i.e. The Dragonborn Barbarian tossing the Gnome Rogue so hard that he bursts through a bandit's torso) and they pass the checks needed to pull it off (Strength checks to pick up the gnome and to toss him at the bandit), then I'll give them a 1d6+6 of Rule of Cool Inspiration for the attack roll, normally with results that gets the table cheering.
I have invoked the rule of cool once, for a non-combat situation. It was after defeating the BBEG invading our hometown, the grand finale of our first campaign with that party.
Some background: My character, Olga, is a female half-orc cleric of Sune (goddess of love and beauty), and her father is a human bard who's a retired adventurer. She's married to a half-elf tailor NPC (child of one of her dad's adventuring buddies).
The situation: After the post-battle meet and greet of making sure everyone important is alive (hug dad, heal the injured, kiss the husband). Then she picked up her husband bridal style, said "excuse me, I have to go, uh, do a thing" and walked away towards her home. Her strength is average at best, so I invoked the rule of cool to avoid rolling strength for carrying all her gear and her hubby at the same time.
I actually really needed to hear that ending part. was super worried about a DnD session earlier this week because it felt like I was too railroady for my players. But in reality, they've told me what they thought of it, what they thought I did wrong or right, and overall it seems like everyone enjoyed it, but I've got anxiety and hearing that ending bit really did help out a lot. Thank you!
My DM seems to favor rule of cool, if it makes sense in-character (and it's not game-breaking). The character I am playing at the moment is a Warforged Druid. It is important to note that he is Lawful Neutral, and the "law" he follows is logic. I am acting as the party tank (pun intended), and as the tank I look for ways to boost my HP and AC, and one of the best ways is through armor and shields. While we were still low level (maybe 2-3), the party enters an armor shop to get some supplies and upgrades. I find some half-plate armor that would boost my AC a few points, and I have the coin. Another player points out that, per the PHB, Druids "will not wear armor or use shields made of metal." Since half-plate is metal, he says I shouldn't be able to wear it, and the DM initially agrees. I ration that since organics (what he calls flesh-based characters) wear leather armor, which is analogous to their own flesh, it is only logical that I be permitted to wear metal armor and shields as it is analogous to my own "flesh." The DM applies the rule of cool, agrees that my logic is sound enough (as does the party), and I have been wearing that half-plate ever since (along with a nifty +1 Shield)
"We need to hear more arsony, this is great!" why is this so amusing to me?
My party discovered that a cult had been disappearing townsfolk in order to sacrifice them to some kind of special evil moon, or something. My wizard had exhausted their spells along with the rest of the party on the slog to find the main sacrifice chamber. I had one first level spell slot left Due to my character having a negative 3 CON modifier, I had a shadow deer that carried me to and from battles since I was too weak for practically anything else. Being a shadow deer I could have it turn intangible at will. In the moment before the cult leader could sacrifice their victim, I rode that deer straight at the alter. Full bore, as fast as it could go. It turned shadow at the exact right moment and my puny body went flying straight at the cult leader. In the air I made a very good grapple attack, put one hand over each eye, and use my Magic Missile. Probably at least one action too many for a singular round, but the rule of cool was not on the side of the cult leader that day.
That outro hit different today, thanks man. Love your stuff.
I always love your feel good outro! Thank you Brian!
Not on topic of this video (great and hilarious btw :D) but still two stories i'd like to tell, both in terms of "How in the 9 hells did we survive that?"
First one, we are playing in a homebrew world so bare with it. We went through a portal and got teleported onto a Githjanky spacestation that was currently besiegded by mindflayers. And after we explored a bit came into a hangar for spaceships, completly empty except for a few crates. That was the first time our characters actually saw out into space, where a bunch of broken spaceships were visible, one of them a Mindflayer ship, we got to roll a perception check and one of us got a Nat 20, thankfully.
There Was something approching from the Mindflayer ship and we decided to book it back to where we came from. Turns out that was an Elderbrain Dragon, yup one of those CR22 enemys. WE WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO FIGHT IT and we didn't really fight it in a conventional way. Our wizzard wanted to throw it out of the Airlock, Alien Movie style, but the dice had a different Plan resulting in the wizzard being swallowed by the dragon.
We knew there was a Tank a room over and basicly decided "Yup, let them fight eachother" because the tank was blocking the short way to the exit.
Long story short, the tank critted the Dragon, blew open his stomach and our wizzard at 2 HP came tumbling out. The Elderbrain dragon died shortly afterward and we escaped the tank while running to the exit back home.
The second story takes place two level after the above one (did I mention we were 5 people at lvl 7 against the Elderbrain Dragon?) so we were lvl 9 in a good old sever dungeon crawl.
While discussing if we just want to teleport out of the and if we had the material components, on the Paladin got sick of just talking and continued to check out the severs, the Rogue followed him so that the Paladin wasn't alone. It's a story about not splitting the party, if it wasn't obvious enough already. So these two went ahead, split again at one point to cover more ground, all while the rest of the party finally stopped discussing teleporting out. The problem now was that the part of the group that stayed behind didn't see where the Paladin and Rogue went and of course we accidentally decided to have the Cleric go the way the previous two didn't take, while the rest waited if the Paladin and Rogue came back as to not pass them up.
I think our DM is great and funny because it all culminated in a moment where the ones who stayed back just heard different crashing sounds, explosion and monstrous sounds from three different ways as the Cleric triggered our "Main" boss of the dungeon, the Paladin triggered an optional boss for a huge amount of Gold and the Rogue spawned a miniboss for a magic item.
We somehow survided that without anybody dropping to 0 HP, through sheer luck, use of enviroment, kiting the enemys a bit and the fact we had a long rest beforehand. We had all resources availible beforehand, afterwards not anymore. Sure some might think that the DM was fudging roll, but no that's not his style, so we can rule that out.
And yeah, those were the two things I wanted to tell, thanks for reading to the end ^^
Not a DM yet, but I have a rule about Rule of Cool.
The first time a player does something not RAW, I might RoC it with or without a roll. The second time they use it, it’s established canon in the world, _and I can use it against them._
That Boulderpult? You can use it for one encounter. Second encounter, expect a bunch of lower level wizards making a volley coming for you.
I really needed that ending message today. Thank you.
One of my favourite moments as a DM was in the House of Lament from Ravenloft. Long story but I actually switched from player to DM partway through the session and was running on 20 minutes of skimming the module, was trying from a quick brief to follow the sub-storyline the previous DM had chosen, and was improv-ing around the level being upped from 1 to 4.
The party was fighting a poltergeist at the top of a tower, who sounded like someone falling off that tower. No more info given than that. Because characters were higher than the module was written for, I pulled out a ghost statblock to use and gave it poltergeisty behaviour.
In the battle, ghost possesses the heavily armoured cleric. Possession rules say the only way to end it is either to use an affect that dispels the ghost, or to drop the body to 0 HP. Problem is, only one who could potentially dispel ghosts is the possessed cleric. And the ghost gets the physical stats of the possessed body, which happens to have the highest AC in the party.
Then. The sorcerer goes: "I have an idea. The ghost died from falling, right? So I think it's gonna be traumatised from that and not want to relive its death. I want to hold a feather fall spell, someone knock it off the tower to scare it into leaving before it hits the ground, and I'll cast feather fall on the cleric after it leaves."
Me, the DM: "I love it."
Unfortunately, no one can hit this cleric's AC to shove him. It's coming up to the end of round, held spell is going to be lost, and I'm sad this plan won't happen. But then, someone--incidentally, the troll-y player with the most mechanically useless character--casts Tasha's Hideous Laughter. Ghost fails save, falls prone.
Me, DM, getting an idea: "...the ghost is going to roll a dex save to not fall over the tower railing as it goes prone."
I procede to roll so vigorously the die falls off the coffee table and into my bowl of ramen on the floor. It still managed to land clearly with one side up in the soup. It was a 3.
I love creative solutions, and players coming up with things I haven't thought of. I'm also proud that I as DM, was able to help out to make it work.
And that's how my party ended a hopeless-looking posession with pyschology, a broken troll character, and a bowl of ramen.
For a while, my group had something called a "badass check". Basically, after rolling a nat 20 (or nat 1), or making a particularly difficult roll or making the last kill of a fight, you could roll a d20 and, how good you rolled told the GM how much to embellish whatever you just did. So something like "I rolled a critical and killed the orc" happens, and if I got a good roll on the check, the GM would describe it as "you swing your sword and kill the orc by decapitation, it's head flying off."
"Big fuck off robot man" is so damn funny.
I use a prop dubbed "The Coin" by the party as my justification of the rule of cool. This coin sits in front of the DM screen and functions as a party-wide Hero Point (kind of like inspiration for those who haven't played Pathfinder 2e) but I also often offer the party "something cool" as a third option for its spending.
The catch is that any time that it is used, instead of being consumed, it is flipped to the bad side. At any point, I can spend the bad coin to give the opposition something cool (let the BBEG escape, reinforcements arrive, etc.) And then it flips back to the good side for the party to use.
My players LOVE this thing. I start some sessions with it on the bad side to represent that the general vibe looks pretty grim, but that means that when I spend it, the players are even more likely to use it for balance instead of hoarding it. Having a physical justification to GM Ex Machina or Rule Cool makes it feel way less cheap, especially because they know it'll come back to exact the toll later.
First session of a Weird Wild West campaign using 5e. PCs were attacked by bandits while traveling by train. Some of the PCs were fighting with the bandit leaders who were on the roof of the train. The druid PC casts heat metal on the roof. Bandit leaders took damage for a few rounds until they could find a way into the train car.
A time where the rule of cool was denied: I wanted to play a fairy barbarian who was obsessed with food.
I thought it would be cool to play a fragile looking creature that was insanely strong, who ate all the monsters we killed. DM liked the idea in theory, but did not allow getting Proficiency with kitchen utensils from my background and also imposed penalties on Carrying Capacity and some barbarian Features.
Yeah you got a good dm there.
Created a monk/rogue/sorce with the true strike spell once. Rounded him off with the snake blood feat for the dex and dodge boost, epic dodge, flurry of blows, finesse, specialization in unarmed strike, extra stunning fist attacks, improved strike (unarmed), improved crit (unarmed), defensive roll, armor manipulation (an old gladiator feat which allows bracers and greaves to act as official armor for an otherwise unarmored opponent). I was wearing gauntlets of force (as per ring of the ram but adapted for pugilism. DM ruled 68k to make and required an arch mage to make), boots of speed, a girdle of storm giant strength, and a cloak of protection +5.
Situation: A boss drow warmaster with great cleave and bull rush was holding an alleyway against the militia and party while his matron and her raiding party murdered an entire city block. Although the official city guard were working their way around the road blocks, they'd need time.
Realizing this and the fact the drow was just playing a deadly game of "You Shall not Pass!" I opted to risk my perfected monk body of Sune to save lives. Now here's where it all mechanics and flare.Upon entering strike range the drow attacks with his war axes, epic dodge negates his most accurate attack that round, while two more lucky shots roll off my gauntlets due to armor manipulation. I respond with flurry of blows and hit two crits with gloves that add basically a bull rush to each punch, coupled with the ki attacks of a monk and the girdle of giant strength, that's a punch that could send a semi backwards at about half the speed it was rolling forward. The drow gets hit so hard in the gut he's lifted into the air thirty feet and punched back into the street, clearing the alleyway! It's not over yet! See, a monks movement speed increases as he/she levels up and boots of speed double that movement, and I just won round 2 initiative! The DM laughs helplessly as the failed strength save sends his full plated drow warmaster skittering backward making sparks on the cobbled street beyond the alleyway, on his back, from the last round. Capitalizing on round 2's bounty my monk seamlessly crosses the measely 60 feet to attack his rising opponent with Flurry of blows still actiive and scores 1 crit and four hits, effectively pounding the drows armor into his ribcage with massive dents. The DM rules he's effectively dead and not even salvageable by the surprised drow matron a few yards away from him but his iron will feat forces him to his feet for one last attack, which missed due to my epic dodge feat. The DM now jumping out of his seat in sheer ecstasy of the moment of "eureka!" storytelling asks "Anything you want to say to the defeated?" and I tell him that I throw a burning sheet over his head so I can use my rogue sneak attack ability, saying flatly "You are already dead..." before critting him in the face with a Hide in Plain Sight backstab attack that turns the sheet, and his head, into modern art
End Result: A bit of laughter at the table, a drow retreat, and a drow matron staringly longingly into her crystal ball watching my character bathe each night. XD
I had the party fight a Cat 2 Krasis. One of its hits was a crit on a zombie that was forming Golomov's raft. Crit blasted the zombie over the mountain SSB style. Rikah, the backup character (Kobold Paladin) missed a perception check and saw something flying overhead.
First session of a d&d 5e high sci fi campaign.
The party had to escape from a transition facility (temporary prison for low level criminals and holding for higher level criminals until transport). The (at the time) barbarian/warlock minotaur used the chest chassis of a prison security drone to block the stun cannon at the end of the hallway.
I didn't even roll damage for the cannon. It was just too damn cool and too much of a good start. I just gave them a few rounds of cover before the chassis got shredded.
That one about using napalm and a fire axe to light a ship on fire had to be my favorite.
I’m the DM of a Curse of Strahd game. One mechanic that I have been using is when a player is absent their character falls unconscious for the session. It keeps the tension high.
Anyways we’re towards the end and the party was I the catacombs of the castle. Three players couldn’t make it. The party did have a portable hole they could put the party members in but it has a limited supply of air.
So I decided if the party could convince me the DM about why the air supply would not be an issue using their knowledge of the realm I would let it slide.
One player made an attempt but didn’t quite get to where I could be convinced. So had him roll persuasion against me the DM. He rolled like an 18. I decided to roll against it for fun and got a Nat 1.
I go, yeah that makes sense.
We all had a blast
Long story:
My party and I played a Dungeon of the Mad Mage campaign that had some amazingly chaotic moments. The cause of most of these hijinks was our shifter eldritch knight, Pan, who essentially got his abilities through reading magic picture books (he was illiterate). One of our other party members was a firbolg druid who was friendly but could throw down when needed. In the mad mage there is a circlet of human perfection which makes its wearer look like an attractive human, but retain all of their normal stats. Of course, we found this and gave it to our druid. This was the most broken thing our DM let us do and she didn't even realize it yet. Essentially, he would be in animal form (giant elk, toad, etc.) but look like a normal dude. So enemies would wrongly assume, attack, and get absolutely pulverized by him.
But it didn't stop there.
Later on, we face off against an undead beholder, and we're getting pretty hurt. Pan, in the midst of battle, rips the circlet off of druid's head and grabs an antler- boom, the giant elk shoots up, Pan holding on.
Druid is essentially an elevator.
Pan succeeds a dex check, and lands on the undead beholder, twin swords plunged into the top of its head and knocking it onto the floor with extra damage.
We were awestruck- he killed it.
It made a death save, being undead and all.
...Pan got incinerated.
We got him back with wish later due to our very nice DM, but to date this is the coolest in game thing I've seen yet.
I didn't exactly have a rule of cool per se.
But once I roleplayed so well that my DM let me roll at advantage for intimidation.
One of the other players admitted that they got chills from it.
Oh good idea! Definitely do creepy stories for Halloween. Do a whole vid on people's creepiest D&D and role-playing stories
I would be absolutely stoked for more pirate arson shenanigans!
No one let MrRipper in the kitchen with that chef’s kiss
11:11 YES! We do need more Arson stories!
My friend got us all hunted down by guards for the whole campaign. He burned down the tavern we met in.
I was playing a homebrew game. My character was basically a monk, although I had an ability where, once a day, I could use a super punch capable of crushing down walls. Our barbarian was challenged to a duel by a drunk nobleman at the tavern (as you do). This caught the city guard's attention. Before the duel starts, we're all surrounded by guards and the nobleman acuses us of murdering his sister, which was a false claim, but the SOB figured he would get away with it, being a "respectable noble" (yes, he was THAT kind of noble). Before the guards try to apprehend us, I use my super punch on the nobleman's chest. DM told me that was supposed to be used on structures, but still allowed it. I then punched this POS so hard that his entire torso went flying and his head and limbs just stood there in mid-air for a couple of seconds before collapsing to the ground. Everyone at the table thanked me, except the DM, cause this nobleman was suposed to be an important NPC. So the moral of this story is: never give your players power if you want to tell a story.
For me it was when my dm allowed my human ranger to basically do the iron sheik chokehold on a owlbear who was larger. After rolling a successful grapple and attack the full hp owlbear was out cold, left by their owners and was then taken by me as a pet. Sadly he only lasted a few days as one of the players had some backstory shenanigans that made me lose him in a nightmare realm. Last time we checked the owlbear is basically massive like a titan and is wandering the plane (a lot of context needed but basically we had a berserk eclipse that fused our plane with the nightmare plane)
I'm running my own homebrew campaign that's in a custom setting a couple of my other friends and I worked on to make.
My group is met a threat from another plane, as the gate opens to let it though they see a towering gargantuan behemoth that radiates heat and feels like pure rage incarnate.
The barbarian forgot to rage for the fight and was promptly taken out. We have a paladin with a tower shield providing protection for the others where he can, a bowwoman firing where she can to get the beast's attention. They managed to ally themselves with a blue dragon and not even that was enough to stop it, a beam clash of a pure heat beam from the behemoth and the lightning breath attack. I decided to roll a beam clash as a flat d20, critical failures spelling disaster. The dragon failed the struggle and had just enough time to bail out and lose its left arm and leg from the beam as a straight line of heat erases a portion of the forest they were fighting in.
We have a slime monk/fighter with echo knight. They wore down the creature enough that I allowed him to scale the creature, use his echo knight and summon it just above it's head, with both copies of him attacking straight at the neck until they severed it's head. He didn't roll enough damage but the spectacle enough was good enough in my book go warrant the kill
A Barbarian (Pathfinder game) I'd been playing as started a round of combat (as you do) by raging and getting into position. For context of the story, we were in basically a vertical city near the top fulfilling a quest for a Magistrate, and when we returned found her being ambushed due to some political backdealings and so on. As soon as the bad guys went, one of them successfully used 'Hold Person' on me and I then proceeded to fail every single check afterwards. Our bard had to spend every one of their turns using crowd control abilities to keep me from getting coup de graced every turn while the rest of the party fended off the bad guys. Eventually they beat down all but one (finally disrupting the cast maintaining a hold on me) and the last guy managed to escape and started to book it through the city. Naturally I chased after him as a pissed off barbarian who'd been stuck in the same spot for the entirety of combat, I didn't even get to hit anything!
So while the rest of the party is dealing with making sure the Magistrate is okay and there's no more enemies, a chase scene ensues where I now start to pass all my acrobatics and dexterity checks to go after him. The assassin eventually makes his way to a tower at the edge of the city overlooking the lower levels (biiiig drop) and after climbing along the edge throws himself off onto a shadow floating in the air. Naturally without thinking I yeet myself dramatically (another passed skill check) through the air after him and land on what was an emergency Flying Carpet left in place for this exact scenario. So this poor guy is trying to control the carpet while my big dumb barbarian self is raging trying to murder him. I pull out my large sized Greatsword (Titan Mauler) entirely ignoring the fact that even if I kill this guy I have no idea how to operate a carpet this high off the ground. Then I crit fail my attack roll, and with the way the guy is steering to try and throw me off I lose my sword in the air. So now instead I just use a knockback attack to simply shove this guy off the carpet to presumably fall to his death.
Now I'm on an out of control flying carpet with no idea how to steer it, and I try to drift close enough to a wall of the city to be able to grab onto something, and here I start failing checks left right and center. I fail to grab onto anything, I can't see anywhere I could just crash into in order to stop my descent, nothing. Eventually I ditch the carpet and just try to use my whole body (feet, hands, even my face at this point) to cling anywhere onto the wall. Critical fail.
At this point the DM is out of potential saves for me, I just botched every roll for any feasible way to not plummet down entire tiers worth of city levels, but knowing that I'm about to die I put forth a proposal.
I want to find the guy I pushed off the carpet since we're both falling. I want to bullet myself down to fall faster, find that bastard in the air, and make sure if I'm going down I kill him too. The DM at this point is like 'Well, since you're going to die anyways...'
On the way down as I increase my speed I even pass the large Greatsword I dropped earlier, snatch it out of the air, and spot the guy I shoved off the carpet. Turns out he had even MORE layers of 'Not die' in the form of a squirrel suit, so he was trying to catch himself on the air as he fell to control his descent, when out of nowhere this absolute unit of a Barbarian drops from the heavens, plunges a huge greatsword through his chest, and I just rode his body down into the city below.
The party eventually found our absolute crater of an impact with unrecognizable levels of gore, and a single still intact Greatsword.
Was honestly the most badass moment I think I've ever had in D&D.
My group talked two bandits into to help them fight a dragon for a cut of the gold after they had just killed the bandit leader, while the rest fled in fear. One of the bandits a Dwarf named Boris The group has found a green dragon in a broken tower and had woken it up so they had to act fast as there was only three of them and they knew they were outmatched. They weren’t in the tower but outside planning on how to deal with it. Then one gets an idea. “You said the Druid we met fought and the dragon and was able to injure it a little?” “Yes however little damage he did there was he manage to break a few scales and get a few good hits in before fleeing.” There plan I’ll admit was a bit far fetched damage wise for what they were hoping for but otherwise worked normally and I loved the idea. They’d bought a single stick of dynamite last session. My creative as ever party proceeds to tie it to a spear, scale the tower to the second story window, vortex warp Boris into the second floor staircase and the mad dwarf jumps onto the dragons back and plung the dynamite spear into the weak point before setting it off. Unfortunately he timed it wrong and it went off with him in range and then fell two stories knocking himself out, but it’d worked. My part had used effectively a thunder spear from Attack on Titan to severely injure the dragon. It was so well done I let the dynamite and spear do triple damage for being imbedded into the dragon and said it completely shredded it’s should making him unable to use his left wing. They trapped him, cut off all exits, and the one who came up with the idea now being at the top of the tower started breaking it more to cause half of it to fall on the dragon. They demolished that dragon only having one person go down for a single round near the end. Sadly Boris died one turn short of anyone being able to reach him. After this he was remembered as ‘Boris the Bombardier’.
As a pretty laid back DM, I allow my players to do "cool shit" that's not necessarily by the book. Especially if it's purely cosmetic. Non-cosmetic examples are like fitting in an extra attack as a bonus action, ricocheting an arrow/bullet to hit another enemy, or anything else the player may want to try. To balance this I have them roll for this unforseen action with disadvantage, but they are allowed to use their highest modifier at lower levels, I'm still working a way to balance this at higher levels. Although at higher levels my players usually pick up a feat or two to make up for it. My players love this and enjoy the "high risk/reward" for unorthodox things.
Head shot story: “Hey, Peppin. I see you got Charley Crawford down there with you”
My party was fighting a group of kidnappers, and the main fighter of the party, a half giant, rolled a crit on his attack, cleaving one of the kidnappers in two. I asked him to roll intimidation as well, and almost all of them failed, except for one that I quickly turned into a bandit captain. What I had planned to be an hour, hour and a half long fight was over in half an hour.
I was in a campaign where everyone needed to have some degree of spellcaster (every time we level up, we level in both classes. So a level 20 would effectively be 40). But one of my declared classes for my character was Barbarian. I was allowed to spellcast during rage, so long as my spells made sense for the character (pretty fireballs and lightning, and shield). I also was allowed to use Phoenix Spark (Phoenix Sorcerer) to withstand Power Word Kill because the DM said "rules as written, that doesn't work, but I love the flavor there". I should specify that was a hypothetical question I put forward,he never actually used power word kill
I really need that pep talk today
It was the first campaign for half the party (me and someone else) after leveling up from level 3 to 5 (the dm always started us at level 3 and leveled us up by 2 levels everytime we leveled up) I discovered the artificer class, as someone who chose fighter as they wanted a battlefield engineer type of character the gear logo of the artificer instantly caught my eye, at level 7 (3 in fighter 4 in artificer) I noticed scorching ray, as a player who had no intention of using spells and just noticed scorching ray pop up in their actions (after, funnily enough, having my hand crystallized a few sessions prior and seeing if I could shoot lasers from it) the DM was really kind and I didn't even have to abide by spell slot rules
I only ever played World of Darkness one time as a oneshot. It was a game set in a zombie apocalypse, all of us playing human characters. Our party consisted of Dude the Stoner, Roxie the Street Kid, and my character Beth, the a buff MMA fighter who was essentially built to act as our modern barbarian. We were rummaging through an office building when the zombies found us. The other two were on the lower floor and could escape normally. I had to jump out a second story window, and subsequently broke my leg. With the zombies closing in, I asked the DM if I could use a burst of adrenaline to try and escape. Now it's been a long time since I've played WoD so I forget WHAT the dice roll was, but apparently I rolled something STUPID high. "Fuck it, why not," said the DM. Queue Beth not only ignoring the pain of her broken leg to make a getaway, but snapping it back in place and full on SPRINTING PAST THE REST OF THE PARTY to their safehouse at the local Denny's. Haven't played it since, but those were some good times.
This was in pathfinder 2e and i was playing a ganzi gnome inventor with the weapon innovation (bladed gauntlet) having climbed up a tree to either avoid or lura away a grizzly bear i fell out trying to tree hop, and instead had to use the entangling form as a grappling hook which not only succeeded but also with some help from the party actually scared the bear away with the swinging allowing to repel away from the tree towards the rosemary we had been sent to collect allowing my charecter to grab an entire bush and take off running
Someone told my friend a story where their character has a gun that shot Reduced cannonballs with a sort of ring of anti-magic at the end of the muzzle. They basically had a literal Hand Cannon
I think my Tuesday game is my favorite party I have had so far. Fairy Soulknife Rogue, Duegar Spore Druid, Kalishtar Bear Totem Barbarian with Tiefling Paladin who they are the “Dad” of, Air Genasi Genie Warlock with Half-Elf Wizard worker, and finally the dumb as a bag of rocks Gold Kobold Drakewarden Ranger. So much variety and only a little bit of min-maxing
Once played 2 mimic fighters in Pathfinder that worked together as one being. Each was half the level of the other players and I took team work feats on both (Pathfinder). I think we had improvised weapon feats and throw anything. The DM let me abuse their shape shifting to add pizazz to my attacks like shooting one out of the other (using throw anything) and other stuff. When not fighting they appeared together as a single suit of armor half blackish metal and half white. Their only drawback was we couldn't speak.
PANR has tuned in.
this story comes from a recent session in an on going campaign. I play a warlock hexblade / fighter multiclass character. She is the ruler of her home who is seeking to take over the kingdom as ruler and is trying to recruit people to help her doing so. This brings her to the capital city where her allies have talked about recruiting the council on her side. But a mindflayer is secretly hiding among them. after talking with the council and looking into the matter the party decides to take care of the problem and go into the underground city. Upon entering the city we find there are a few more things than expected, 3 neolithids, 4 mindflayer, and one extra special one i forget. the overpowered NPC companion dealt with the neolithids leaving the mindflayers to us.
Two mindflayers come down to fight us while the others are casting magic at us. Unknown to us a mindflayer hive is active in the area. This caused us to lose or Prof bonus and the party to panic which left the party in a sore state. One of my allies ended up killing the first one and i attacked the second with my flaming whip. Killing it in two hits i used my chance for a free action. I tell the Dm i want my character to kick on of the falling slices of meat at one of the other mindflayers...and i get a nat 20. So this frail woman with no strength foot ball kicks a piece of mindflayer meat at another mind flayer and hit's it dead on. This dealt 3d8 damage and caused the mindflayer to fall off the building taking 5d6 falling damage. Truly it was one of the best moments we have had in that campaign so far.
With the DM who lets his players do almost anything if it fits with their character, I got something similar from my DM in one game. My character is literally just straight-up Victor Frankenstein. I built him as an Artificer, but my DM gave me clearance for him to learn any spell from the Necromancy school so that he can raise the dead. I've been careful not to abuse that privilege, but at level 10 I already have Animate Dead and Revivify. If the dead need to walk, to Frankenstein you should talk.
in my curse of strahd campaign, one of my fellow players, a dwarf drakewarden ranger, was allowed to hook up an empty coffin to his drake and create a chariot he could ride around in
I was playing a Dhampir blood domain cleric. My dm and I agreed that there’s no reason that teeth shouldn’t count as light weapons so he let me make two bite attacks in a turn (of course as per the two weapon fighting rules with the second attack I subtracted the constitution moodier as I didn’t have the dual wielder fighting style). I bit the BBEG’s neck and tore his throat out, killing him. Wasn’t all that much but it’s always cool to me hearing a DM and a player agree that “No, this rule is stupid. This is how we’re running it because it makes sense.”. The same DM even let me get a silver grill to counteract some resistances.
My first mage was a peasant wizard ( member of royalty hiding out) he had his mum's staff as his only inheritance.
He screamed feel the wrath of the staff of magus, and told people he was Bigby of the spells Bigby fist etc.
By 3rd game, everyone parried by staff attacks out of fear of what it could do.
By the 5th game my catch cry doubled damage to undead, by th 8th doubled damage against demons. By the 13th game, it had bigby crushing fiat once per week.
Of course by the 2nd game the whole party was pissed at me for the catch cry.
we had the task of dealing with a fortress full of necromancers
our goblin alchemist (pathfinder winged marauder) came out with the design for a rocket to launch at the fort, not to break it, no it was to deliver a payload of gallons of holy water
Needless to say when we arrived the defenders had no skeleton or zombie allies, it was all just them. Defientally made the fight easier and was pretty awesome
I thought the Chuul smoothie story was good, but the napalm one just takes the cake.
Sort of halfway rule of cool, used scorching ray in the first round of combat to free the party from chains we were tied to in a trial by combat which was very reminiscent of the attack of the clones execution, 2 nat 20s and an 18 with a +5 making it a 23, DM effectively said "ok, I'm not even going to have you roll damage, you are all free," then the session ended, next session my first two rolls were a nat20 and an 18+5=23
We had been doing a dungeon raid against Kobolds, I was playing a Hombrew Race and Class from the DnDwiki that ended up giving me an insane level of strength/ grapple/ carrying capacity, my Character got Floured by the Kobold who sat behind the walls and laughed at him, this ticked him off, when we began our attack, my character was extremely brutal to the kobold cutting some in two and cause actual terror in others, my DM didn't even have me roll intimidation on one when he saw me enter through one of their secret doors and brutalize his two friend that were right there with him, before turning to look at him. The party went to find the Boss, and I went to find the Kobold that floured me, my favorite part though was one of the traps I triggered was a cage trap, a big cage dropped over me and the 2 Kobold that triggered it pointed and laughed at the big dumb brute who was ignoring their traps, well, they stopped laughing when my Character picked up the Cage that should have been too heavy to lift and used it as an improvised weapon, bouncing it off walls until in sandwiched them into a wall killing them painfully. My DM told me it fit my character's edgy rage too well to let it be any different
Dm here.
Last week we had a session of our long running camping for 5 years.
I use rule of cool quite often.
I even have a sistem where at the end of a session everyone points at a player they thought played their character best and the winner gets a point the can invest in modifications, items, feats etc as a story element .
And oh boy. Last was special.
A bit of back story.(dnd 5e homebrew)
The group are the riders of the apocalips and are working to alighn with the celestial spirit that haunts them in order to unfuck reality.
They made some powrfull friends including a whole ass citty that basically worships them but know them to well to actually Revere them
The group just managed to get their friends underwater city back from the depths of the sea back to the surface with the war forged population (they used to be halflings) when suddenly they discover the whole world is at war, the sky is burning and a human war ship is headed their way.
They weponized the warforged and managed to salvage a whole ass tank (used for ground support)
And when diplomacy faild (as it does) they went biblical!
(One player, war, was sick that day so he is not in the story sadly but i will tell of his many , many, many arms another day)
They used their flying ship called alice(dont fucking ask.... its a really really long story).
The antichrist saved all her strong spells secretly and unleashed them for the fist time breaking enemy formation in an instant and killing all spell casters.
Pestilance identified and killed their leader on the first turn and let chaos ensue
Famin devoured and killed 10 men enough to finally allighn with his pirit and manifest as the full rider of famin(we developed amechanic for that) and his stead is the now dead three headed dog the party had that died and he ate lon long ago.
Now charging and kiling all who remained
And by the end only two knits survived.
Both of them looked at death
And one said "to the last breath?"
"See you on the other side" the other replied.
As death used blight .
I just let him yank the soul and hold it.
The other knight went to say "my soul for his"
But famin had other plans.
He sruck down death(who was with 4 levels of exhaustion and 7 espresso at the time) and devoured the other soul so that they can never meet again
The session ended with him saying
"Never steal my food again"
As death passes out.
2/5 riders manifested .
The end is nigh
Occasionally I'll play in a session with my younger sister in her first campaign (14y/o), my mum and some of her colleagues. We were hired to take out the 3 heads of an underground fighting ring. We convince the one of the bosses (idk what he was, didnt live long enough to tell) go talk business with my little sister (a war forged warlock) to which she cast chill touch in an attempt to push him off this 150ft balcony (70ft to the floor, another 60 into the fighting pit bellow). The dm allowed it but was told it would be a high DC. Nat 20. Her first Nat 20. She wanders back in, emotionless as ever and sits back down, claiming the other boss is outside still allowing me (swashbuckler rogue) to position myself to auto crit sneak attack the boss (human wizard, easy work) and the others to start trying to curb stop the final boss (a love child between Hulk and Bane powered by some homebrew meth+bathsalts) and some of their minions. We still almost got killed with all of us downed at some point in the battle, only being saved by another lucky Nat 20 for a death save, putting my back up to 1hp. Still dont know how we managed to pull this shit off...
My only rule of cool story is short. Im a rogue with a short sword... Rolled a natural one while surrounded by 6 goblins and DM said my sword flew out of my hand arcing behind me through the air. he rolled a die or 2 and proclaimed My Sword hit the leader in the face and took him down to one hit point. At which point my fellow adventurers took him down that last point scaring off his troop of goblins.
ah yes, the rule of nat 1 = you fail so badly that it succeeds
Let’s see…
Our barbarian got gauntlets of ogre strength and got the finishing blow on a big goopy bird thing, so she decided to spin in a circle while holding the birds foot, and slam it onto the ground causing an explosion of goop
Our warlock(a Scourge Aasimar) activated his wings, grappled an enemy, flew into the air and used radiant consumption. In rules it’s a damage over time ability, but he uses it to turn into a concentrated bomb of radiant damage melt the enemy and a couple buildings
Our Echo Fighter caused his echo to change shape(like disguise self) and touch a pillar that needed a specific person to touch it(and it worked)
Our Bard(Me) used Warding Wind to walk through a big fire towards a trapped team member, warding wind extinguishes small fires, but it was ruled that it didn’t extinguish the flame but could part the flame around her for a short time
We are a very homebrew and rule of cool campaign
the dm liked my idea of my new character with the new path of the beast barbarian. we are always fond of more out there characters, and now i have a gnoll character and manage to stay permanent as one...
My players consisted of a wizard Aasimar and a fighter human. They were supposed to go around the areas killing all 9 “corrupted” heroes. Anyway they got to the Orc Hero and they were supposed to go to the orc camp, fight waves of orcs and meet the boss orc. And fight him. Instead the fighter lured them out in a field of dry grass, after he dowsed the area he was standing in with water, I mean at least 4 gallons. And the wizard who was flying up, at night, and his skin was blue and purple; lit the field ablaze. I literally just knocked over all the minis and said WELL HES DEAD. NEXT BOSS
Wow, the dislike ratio on this video is one of the best I've ever seen. 2k to 5. I'm kind of curious who the 5 people that disliked the video were?
So we had to fight a Hag with an Animated Tree. When my friend's turn came up (he plays a Rogue), he was like, "If I can, I would like to pull my Dagger out..." At this point, I was wondering what he was doing because he was a Dual-Wield Shortsword Wielder like myself (I play a Ranger). He then continued, "...then pull out a rag, wrap the blade in the rag, and light it on fire with my Flint." In my mind, I was like, "Is he serious?!" Our DM was like, "Okay I'll allow that, but it will take your whole Action to do it." My friend agreed. So while he was busy making a Homemade Flaming Dagger, I rushed in and killed the Hag. She tried to attack me (her turn came first) and missed, so I just flavored my attacks, all of which hit hence why I was able to kill her, as my Ranger ducking her attempted strike, taking two swipes with his Main Hand Shortsword at her legs, then finishing with an Uppercut Slash with the Off-Hand Shortsword, effectively Shoryukening her into oblivion with a Reverse-Gripped Shortsword. The rest of the round finished with whoever was left dogpiling the tree. Then it came back to my friend's turn. Being, up to this point, a pure Melee Rogue, I expected him to run up and attack. Nope. He was like, "I throw the Flaming Dagger at the Animated Tree." He hit with it and rolled damage. My DM was like, "Ok well... it's a fucking tree... that's now on fire... How Do You Want To Do This?" I couldn't believe it. This man had just improvised a Flaming Dagger to smoke a living tree.
Hey I wasn’t really paying attention and then suddenly BOOOOM CRY BECAUSE YOU HAVENT BEEN TOLD YOURE A GOOD PERSON IN A LONG ASS TIME. Thanks, even if I’m a little mad at how sad it made me to hear that advice.
I’m currently playing in a live play homebrew game and playing a cleric to a homebrew death god. My Dm and I worked out a rule of cool divine intervention where if it works, I trade cleric levels for paladin levels for fights that start going south. The way we balanced it is that this form only lasts 1 minute and requires a d6 roll after the form ends, causing that many levels of exhaustion. This means that at any time, I can die from exhaustion due to the extreme ware on my body from the change in my characters stat spread, and there is no return from a death caused by this form.
Okay, that's cool as hell.
In a 3.5e game, our DM gave out a Dwarven Thrower as treasure for our party's Dwarf Fighter, but the Dwarven Thrower was cursed; whenever you tried to throw it, instead of the Wielder actually throwing the weapon, all Dwarves within 60ft of the Wielder were launched at the target. The first time the Dwarf Fighter used it, the DM described how the Fighter was thrown face first into the Goblin he had tried to throw his weapon at. At first the player was dismayed, but then he got an evil grin on his face. The DM asked him what he planned on doing about this. The player said "When we get back to town, my Dwarf is buying spiked platemail." The DM had a look of "Oh shit, what have I done" on his face, but allowed it to happen.
And from then on out, our Dwarf literally threw himself into battle, hoping to have 250 pounds of Dwarf in spiked armor impact the closest enemy.
My war forged eldritch knight was being beaten by bandits he thought were military punishing him for screwing up. My DM came up with the idea I modified it slightly since I wanted be an innocent character. Anyway when the other characters found him and were attacked he finally rolled a insight check to realize that were not proper soldiers I broke my bonds and casted thunder wave wiping out most of the bandits.
DND is about role-playing stories, and while the stuff like dice rolls and levels make it somewhat realistic, it’s all really about story time, so I feel its allowed for some Accommodations be made for certain scene, to get some points across in the story. Yeah some exceptions should be made. So I’m fine with player characters getting over powered items or custom classes from a character point perspective to smoothing out the story.
More Rule of Funny, but I let them instantly derailed the campaign for the Rule of Cool.
In a sort of Combat tutorial session to let the players get familiar with how to play and myself to familiarize with being a DM, I set a bunch of Zombies and Skeletons to attack the party in the ruins of a small fort. They set about defeating them, except one zombie kept making its Undead Fortitude saves until it was just a torso and 1 leg aggressively bumping into them(no threat just there to give the other zombies flanking) they defeated all of the zombies, and Skeletons except that one. They asked me if they could tie it up and get it under their control, Necromancy not being an inherently Evil practice in my world i allowed it, and ruled that they would each give up half of their starting money(i like to start at lvl 5 so they had plenty of gold to spend as a start up) so that the zombie, which they called Chestbump since that's all it was doing after a while, into a non-combat Flesh Golem. I was going to have it be a kind of pack-mule/beast of burden/servant and give them a chance to get a Cart or Wagon.
In the first session they all decided that they wanted to turn their Chestbump into a walking warmachine, and were having more fun in planning that than the Fiend vs Aberration war that was brewing under their feet, so I let them go with it. If the campaign didn't end shortly after due to scheduling conflicts, that zombie would have went from the basic fodder enemy to being as scary as the Deathtroopers in The Mandalorian.
We were playing Shadowrun 4e and we had infiltrated a facility by posing as legitimate guards. Our face, who was a mage, went to do some reconnaissance in Astral after our decker day an anomaly on the cameras she was watching. He found another team of runners cloaked in invisibility and immediately cast orgasm on the other mage. This caused the enemy mage to... um...lose concentration and the entire enemy team was suddenly visible and was set upon by the legit guards. We used this as a distraction to evacuate and then lock down the scientists who were blocking our access to the data and items we were hired to steal. As we started to leave the GM remembered that type of spell couldn't be cast in Astral on a target that wasn't dual natured but it was too cool a moment to not let it stand, though with a reminder that it wouldn't be allowed to happen again.
Hell yeah Cyberpunk Red Stories. Been running a campaign for that game for about a year now, it's complicated compared to DnD but we have lots of fun with the rule of cool.
Whenever my group hears "go ahead and roll for it," they know I'll usually uphold my end of the bargain. An example is when the ranger jokingly said he'd try to seduce the old, obviously evil, egregiously more powerful elven witch that the party was visiting. Gave him a half-elf baby to take care of in the epilogue. In the same campaign, the group's paladin was frustrated with the group's situation, and decided to throw a d100 Hail Mary to any god in the void willing to listen to her. She summoned the god of law to rewrite parts of reality to turn the ranger's horse companion into a tiger, as well as rewrite the warlock's contract and change her subclasses.
Recently, I had a nearly 1-hour combat encounter planned. The party needed to go through a bandit base to rescue the brother of one of them. Throughout the week leading up to the session, the player whose brother was being rescued had started messaging me about his merchant family's human resources. I worked with him on the rough numbers, and I had no idea what he was planning. So, session time. The party walks in a forest toward the bandit base, and they're accosted by some of the bandits' scouts. Merchant character demands to be taken to the bandit leader. When talking with the bandit leader, the player unveiled a 5-minute speech, detailing all of his family's military resources and tactics, in an effort to intimidate the bandits into releasing their hostage. I didn't have him roll. I didn't have a combat. The situation was resolved.
Had a DM that was a huge fan of Boondock Saints. So we ALWAYS took rope with us, everywhere. The shit he let us get away with was ridiculous.
DM here. My "rule of cool" moment came during combat on a ship with my PC's. The Barbarian was getting ganged up on by the enemy pirate captain's minions with the captain right in front. He was seriously hurt and was in need of some saving. The Paladin, who was at the top of the mast, asked if she could pull out her flying carpet, land on it uhm surfboard style, ride down to the enemy pirate captain and jump off attacking when she lands on him. You can sure try, first I'll need an Dexterity (Acrobatics) check, natural 19 + 6. You jump on and start surfing down to the baddie. Now roll me an attack, NAT 20. Total damage ended up being some 80 - 90 points of damage, of course smiting the shit out of him as well and fall damage on top! Needless to say, he was awarded with the ever loving, how do you want to do this? She describes she jumps off the carpet and with her longsword slices him in half. Was probably the best "rule of cool" moment I've had so far!
I just realized I couldn't be a cool DM. Making something cool happen even though I know it's unrealistic just rubs me the wrong way and frustrates me in the process.
I just want to let the world know that my weird brain is weird. XD
I don't know why, I don't know where it came from, but every time I hear Bryan say "bye for now" my brain says "bifurcated." Like, my brain just wants him to say, "Bye, for now, bifurcated."
Yes, it makes no sense. Don't ask me what the deeper philosophical meaning is. I guess because "parting ways"? Maybe just because it rhymes? Hopefully, not splitting the party in two. Honestly, it's just a random word that pops up in my brain on cue.
This reminds me of Xibalba Amassa.
All of this reminds me of Xibalba Amassa.
Captain Xibalba, The Bloodthirsty Wielder of the Twins, Lover of the Churro, Lord of Murderization, Police Commissioner Fuck You, Literally a Beyblade, Master of the Kebab, Yeeter of Boi, Blender of People, Holder of Way Too Many Titles, Crusher of Penus, Destroyer of Hopes, Crusher of Dreams, Assistor of Seppukucide, Castrator of Gideon, Wielder of the BeyBLADE, Master of the People Smoothie, Dragon Deli Slicer, Taker of Only the Longest Naps, Chairman of Taco Tuesday, Official Wedding Officiator, Best Man to the Whining Blight, Edgy Anime Sword Boi, Drinker of the Boozeois Bourge, Yeeter of Dragons, Margarita Mixer, Kingman to the Wing, King of the Mercenaries, 1000 Man Army, Demon of the Skies, Kicker of Spine, Seriously What Is With All These Titles, Black&Decker, Survey Company President, Chain Gang Slang Swang, Mathemagician, Tosser of Dinosaur, Tidal Title, Strategerie Formulationizer, Ship Carrier, Arsenal Thrower, Title Wave, Intimidator of Cake... Wielder of the BIG STICK... With Pointy End... 3 And Knuckles DX Amassa, The Envoy of Death, The Titular Character
Each of those titles apparently has a story to it, amd I've already covered Intimidator of Cake in other areas.
My players where jokingly asking if there was a sandwich shop so I said if I rolled a nat 20, there is now a tavern named Jimmy and Johnsons that specializes is sandwiches.
Did you roll a natural 20?
@@jonathanmarks3112 yes. I got a nat 20.
Archer Fighter: "I'm done listening. I roll to shoot that asshole in the face."" **Throws d20 15 yards from refrigerator, it strikes the Big Bugbear Boss Bandit mini toppling it with a Nat 20. Calmly walks back, picks up the d20, walks back to the refrigerator and replicates the shot, the crit confirm roll landing on the downed mini perfectly. This was a long shot in game, too.**
DM: Uhh, so yeah, the bug bear _fucking dies_
Group: **Is silent as they watch the sniper lord calmly retrieve victory a beer from the refrigerator, in awe of the hero that walks amongst them.**
This is my current character. Because we're playing a module there are some class restrictions so druid and ranger are out. My work around is my human nature cleric with the magic iniate feat in druid. I asked my dm if my bent oak staff which also doubles as my spell focus could change between a staff and a shortbow. Since I'm a follower of Silvanus the nature ranger god it all checked out. Some rp goes on and I ask in the downtime to craft some stone tipped arrows. Later we get into combat and in my turn I announce as a bonus action to cast magic stone on 3 of my arrows. My dm just looks over at me and smiles while clapping.
As a person wanting to dm i actually made something for the rule of cool i called bad ass tokens. If you made a rule of cool event work you get a token. Each token was an equivalent to ana automatic nat 20 but they have to roll with disadvantage to get it and you cant use it on bbs so its not a one sided fight for plot. Comment if you like or hate ill take any criticism
Alchemist fire chain bomb. They tied 15 bottles of alchemist fire to a rope, and they through it at a sleeping dragon from above. It was 15d4 fire damage and ended in equaling 56 damage. The thing is that the dragon was a white dragon, and white dragons are vulnerable to fire damage. It took 112 damage and it had 133 (young white dragon). Ya they killed it pretty easy.
So i was gming a game of pathfinder where the party was on a ship they owned and got attacked by some Adaro. Because some of the crew fell i to the water the fighter jumped in to try and save people.
One of the things Adaro van do is use a paralitic poison on there spears and tjey often use it to paralize someone and drag tjem deep under water to drown them. This happened to happen to one of the npcs and the Adaro coukd swim faster than the fighter.
Instead of letting this happen the parties bard (who has been levitating roughly 10 feet off the waters surface) decided to do something odd. They decided to use a spell called water to wine on the ocean around the last Adaro. This spell will turn any non alcoholic liquid into an alcohol, a ragular show he would do on the ship for the crew. This effectivily ment the creature was breathing in alcohol. After having it roll two saves and failing horrible the creature died do to massive alcohol poisoning and there gills being basically destroyed by the alcohol
Executing enemeis in combat.
Everytime when I DM, and a player gets a hit that reduces an enemy to 0, I always ask them: "How do you want to kill them?" and notify that they're allowed to do anything, that is cool, brutal, gory or everything. The fun factor for everyone just went up thousandfold, everyone discribing gruesome executions.
Last one, made from the College of Swords Bard, who is a Pirate IC, vs a Yeti in my campaign:
Stab through the skull by brining his rapier from under and pushing it up, then finishing it off with a Pistol Shot, point-blank into the skull.
Most brutal execution I have done as a player:
A Large creature, so my Half-Dragon Barbarian cut off the legs to make it stand shorter them himself, then he drops the sword and grabs on to the head of the creature with both hands and literally rips the skull, skin, bones and everything in two... and spits down the exposed neck before the body collapses.