443
I love DnD
(lemmy.world)
There's always a relevant xkcd.
Wait, is the 404 one a meta joke? Neither my browser nor my xkcd-bot can load it.
Yup meta joke.
The joke is that XKCD #404 is a literal HTTP 404 error.
Rule 51
Rule 51?
Rule 51: Don't worry, there is probably a whole website devoted to whatever you are inquiring about. It definitely has its own wiki at the very least.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RulesOfTheInternet
At D&D last night we were playing a module with an orb on a pedestal that shocked you if you touched it with anything more than single finger. The blue dragonborn touched it about 5 times, taking (half) lightning damage each time. Apparently he was a scientist this whole time.
In an online game I used to play, we were infiltrating deep in necromancer territory and encountered a rune on the floor that would summon an incredibly strong undead specter when a player touched it. One of the players wondered if there was a cooldown between summons, and decided to test this by pressing the rune several times in quick succession.
One total party kill later, I can confidently state that there was not in fact a cooldown, and that three nightshades will kill your entire group faster than you can run away.
See, that's just idiocy. Sure, test the device to see if it suddenly gives you spiffy new armor, but ya'll are freaking adventurers, ready to cut and kill and slay anything in your path! SET UP A TRAP FIRST! Put a hot tub of holy water where the first spawn location was! Scatter circles of salt in eighteen strategic locations around the room! Write the verses of ancient positive energy across the walls! Summon the ancient daedra of yore, hallowed be their sigilic runes, and let fly the chaos of the universe into the demesnes of horror where cometh light's foe, wherein the bane of life finds new fears etched prebirth into the slaverings of its blasphemous mental cavity!
SET UP A TRAP FIRST!
The mentality that separates an "Oops, we screwed up" PC group versus an "Oops, I screwed up" DM.
The goofy party will stumble around slapping every button in the fun-house, just to see what happens.
The pro-gamer move party will key in on "Unlimited Resource" and turn the Generate-A-Spectre button into a steam engine.
The pro-gamer move party will key in on "Unlimited Resource" and turn the Generate-A-Spectre button into a steam engine.
A good GM would realize they can have the theoretically "Unlimited Resource" run out between 5-10 uses
The pro-gamer move party will key in on “Unlimited Resource” and turn the Generate-A-Spectre button into a steam engine.
See, he could have gone about things the smart way, but this was way funnier and made for a better story. It was also 100% in-character for him to do something like that - the guild he was a part of was commonly mocked in-universe for thinking with their swords rather than their brains.
Plus I was able to hold it over his head for years afterwards. I was a cleric and he didn't even wait for me to do the bare minimum preparations that might have let us survive before summoning them.
I still get flak from my players about the time they rang a church bell and were surprised the baddies heard it and all came inside and killed them.
I know it’s not the same, but what did they expect?
Take that rune, put it in a portable hole, build a clockwork or magical button-pressing machine, unleash chaos and destruction on demand.
That trap's gotta be worth a million gold pieces.
So, one day my college group is doing a dungeon. In the middle of the dungeon there's this giant ass bell. Don't ring it. We're not ringing the bell.
We get through the dungeon, we succeeded, everyone is giving props... and one of our guys "I ring the bell." I forget exactly what all hell it spawned, but it was nearly a party wipe.
The next year we as a group we go to the local renaissance fair. They had one of the things where if you pay them, a group of guards with halberds will follow you, arrest a friend, bring them back to a cage where they have to do something stupid to get out. They wouldn't go into stores because they didn't want to interrupt selling, but they'd wait outside and you pat the shoulder of the person you're wanting arrested. They even had a checklist of "crimes" they committed. I checked EVERY crime naturally... and at the end there was the other...
So I find my friend in a store, walk in, hand on shoulder asking if he found anything, nope, okay, wander on. Then as he steps out the guards are there "FRIENDS NAME By the Royal Decree of his Majesty you are under arrest!" and surround him on all four sides and walk him back. The whole time he is CONFUSED as are the rest of my friends. There's a lot of "what is going on?" When he gets to the cage and they put him inside, the herald there then reads off the list of his crimes. It was a list... and the whole time my friend was so confused... right until the end "And for ringing the damned bell!"
The expression he gave me along with the "YOU!" when he heard it is the sort of thing that soothes my soul every time I remember it.
giant ass bell
good bot
I mean, demons, at least I think it was demons, were coming out of every orifice so might as well have been an ass-bell
Now I want to organise a renaissance fair, just so I can have that group of guards as well. Cool idea, love it!
“Tell the ghost sharks I said Hi. 💋”
Sure, D&D is fine but have you heard of our lord and savior Pathfinder 2?
Okay, I'm going to be a bit pedantic, but none of that is D&D specific; you love your GM or whoever wrote that for your party.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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