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I was wondering about some of the moments that people used item in unusual ways. If they are mundane items or magic items it should be interesting to see what comes up.
To start it off one of my characters used a decanter of water to give a water elemental health regeneration. I heard about a monk(I think that’s what it was) that used a grapping hook to latch on to flying enemies and do some acrobatic combat.
What about a ring of regeneration to facilitate long-term torture?
Have you read A Song of Ice and Fire?
Spoiler
Think about how awful it was to be Theon Greyjoy when he was flayed just a little bit, and imagine how awful it would be to have the very top layer of your skin, with all its nerve endings, ripped off day, after day, after day, quite possibly forever.
Last edited by EmperorNortonII : 11-19-2012 at 12:30 AM.
Reason: Justification for Spoiler
Zero to creepy in a single post. Way to go EmperorNortonII.
It's not really unsual per se, but I've seen a pc activate his quaal's feather token: tree after being swallowed whole as a means of making a quick and spectacular exit from the creature's gullet. I think it was a purple worm. (?)
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Originally Posted by ThiagoMartell
Kelb, recently it looks like you're the Avatar of Reason in these forums, man.
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Originally Posted by LTwerewolf
[...] bringing Kelb in on your side in a rules fight is like bringing Mike Tyson in on your side to fight a toddler. You can, but it's such massive overkill.
I had a barbarian kill....something, don't remember what, but something nasty and end-dungeon-ish...with a shovel once. Granted he had filled that shovel with the Grey Slime hazard from Dungeonscape and whacked the thing in the face with it moments before the cleric fired off a merciless round of Light spells.
Shovels and 0 lvl spells, masterful tools of the 8th lvl PC
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5th level PCs are hired to clear a coal mine of goblins/hobgoblins. Sorcerer has a penchant for fireball, brown mold had infested parts of the mine.
Relevant background:
Spoiler
Brown Mold (CR 2)
Brown mold feeds on warmth, drawing heat from anything around it. It normally comes in patches 5 feet in diameter, and the temperature is always cold in a 30-foot radius around it. Living creatures within 5 feet of it take 3d6 points of nonlethal cold damage. Fire brought within 5 feet of brown mold causes it to instantly double in size. Cold damage, such as from a cone of cold, instantly destroys it.
What about a ring of regeneration to facilitate long-term torture?
Heh, reminds me of Prometheus's punishment.
While I have never done so, never played a character that kind of evil, I have considered the implications of using cure spells in a similar manner.
Looking over the rules, we may be breaking them here, but it has become common in our group to use the ability to dismiss a casting of light as a way of sending a silent signal when a party splits up for scouting purposes.
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Originally Posted by Calanon
Raven_Cry's comments often have the effects of a +5 Tome of Understanding
Most fun you'll ever have with an improvised weapon.
Party is holed up in the armoury of a castle we just busted into. It's infested with goblins and we've frankly bit off more than we could chew, we're only around 5th level, all melee types, there's something like a dozen baddies out there, mix of goblins, gnolls and something larger that escapes me at the moment and more reinforcements can be heard assembling.
My character, a Half-Ogre barbo, eyes the door up, figures its just about the right size, that is a little smaller than the corridor outside.
Party busts out the armory, I go left, with the door, while everybody else goes right. Use the door as a giant over-sized tower shield and start bull-rushing down the corridor which fortuitously turns into corner only about 20 feet back.
One massive raging bullrush check later I turned 4 gnolls into chunky paste against the wall and rush back the way I came to join a fight that suddenly looks like we might win.
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5th level PCs are hired to clear a coal mine of goblins/hobgoblins. Sorcerer has a penchant for fireball, brown mold had infested parts of the mine.
Relevant background:
Spoiler
Brown Mold (CR 2)
Brown mold feeds on warmth, drawing heat from anything around it. It normally comes in patches 5 feet in diameter, and the temperature is always cold in a 30-foot radius around it. Living creatures within 5 feet of it take 3d6 points of nonlethal cold damage. Fire brought within 5 feet of brown mold causes it to instantly double in size. Cold damage, such as from a cone of cold, instantly destroys it.
My friends love testing every possible way to use items in this way. Possibly the coolest thing that's ever happened in one of my games is a friend ordered a squad to smash into the enemy's phalanx, with a battering ram. It was oddly effective.
Looking over the rules, we may be breaking them here, but it has become common in our group to use the ability to dismiss a casting of light as a way of sending a silent signal when a party splits up for scouting purposes.
Sadly, you are (you have to be in range to dismiss). Much like the old tricks with troll finger telecommunication and what-not, the rules don't quite support it.
Anyone knows blue is for sarcas'ing in · Use of gray may indicate nitpicking · Green is sincerity · "Take 10 SAN damage from Dark Orchid"
I often hop into threads for just one thing
Sadly, you are (you have to be in range to dismiss). Much like the old tricks with troll finger telecommunication and what-not, the rules don't quite support it.
Hmm, troll-finger telecommunication, how was this supposed to work?
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Originally Posted by Calanon
Raven_Cry's comments often have the effects of a +5 Tome of Understanding
My old DM had a point when we were in the Underdark when we wanted to get up somewhere high. Underneath this point were a whole lot of strange mushrooms. The spores of these mushrooms, when someone touched them, caused a Reverse Gravity effect. The idea was that a creature would blunder along, get thrown up into the air, smash against the roof, and then smash dead into the ground, providing nutrients for the new baby mushrooms. You had to be very careful when you used it, but if you were it was a handy way to get up in the air. One of the characters managed to harvest several doses of the spores for future use.
Nothing much happened with them for a long time. That campaign ended, and I started mine from that point, continuing on with the same characters. I had them ambushed by a group of bandits. Their leader, I would like to point out, had a name. He was a named NPC, guys! He could have joined them if they wanted him to, even, or come back as a recurring villain! Either way!
So this bandit leader confronted the party, the usual "stand and deliver" type stuff. While they were talking, and when it became clear that the peaceful method wasn't working, one of the party members remembered the anti-gravity spores they'd collected months, probably, before. They passed it on to another PC, who then... hoiked it at the bandit leader. All of it.
He was thrown several hundred metres into the air, before plummeting back to earth again.
I believe he survived, but only just, and he was promptly handed over to the authorities.
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Last edited by Serpentine : 11-19-2012 at 04:37 AM.
In one game the DM made diamonds very very rare. We needed to raid a heavily guarded mine for their diamonds to get us out of trouble with a big gang. My idea was to grab a couple dozen decanters of endless water and fill the mine up, then have the wizard cast water breathing on everyone else. Unfortunately we were on a time limit so it wasn't possible for the mission, but the DM said if we had the time it could have been an effective strategy.
Hmm, troll-finger telecommunication, how was this supposed to work?
If memory serves, the idea was for a party to leave a troll at their base in a cage, and minions with instructions to chop it up into little pieces if they needed help urgently. The party would then take a severed hand with them on their travels far away, and if at any point the hand started to regenerate a new troll, they would know that it was now the largest piece. A low-bandwidth means of communication, but useful for emergencies.
Of course, this doesn't work, because severed members die after a while.
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That's RAW for you; 100% Rules-Legal, 110% silly.
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Originally Posted by hamishspence
"Common sense" and "RAW" are not exactly on speaking terms
Anyone knows blue is for sarcas'ing in · Use of gray may indicate nitpicking · Green is sincerity · "Take 10 SAN damage from Dark Orchid"
I often hop into threads for just one thing
Last session we encountered an ooze [0]. I didn't have any weapons [1]. Rest of the party had only slashing and piercing weapons. and one alchemist fire. Luckily we had some ancient furniture around to use as improvised bludgeoning thrown weapons
Oh and when I was playing a cleric we sold as slaves to a necromancer who used mindless undead as guards in mines. The moment we were alone with undead I used dusty floor to make a holy symbol
[0] I think it was a Black Pudding.
[1] My new wizard character. I decided only on crucial equipment and adding equipment mid combat seems a bit like cheating.
On the run and trapped within a harem, confronted with a 50' wall and no rope, surrounded by beautiful defenseless women, I casually asked the DM if he could remember how long the human intestinal tract was.
Coal seam fires burn entirely underground - as in the coal that's completely encased in rock is burning. Also, technically by RAW the growth would be exponential, since each round the patch would double in size.
A jar of honey with oil and alchemists' fire apparently a sticky bomb makes.
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One of the primary qualities that a Germanic hero exhibits almost universally is a sharp wit and never being caught at a loss for words and always always come out on top because he's more clever than the other guy. A riddle is very much like a verbal Rorschach test in that if you're doing it right, there is never one definitive "right" answer; It's supposed to be an exercise in lateral thinking and problem solving.
First campaign I played in, we were traveling through the desert. A large sandstorm came upon us, so we tied ourselves together so as not to get separated. Unfortunately, the person who tied me on failed… and I was a gnome.
I was promptly blown away from the party, when I had this strange idea: why not use my cloak to steer myself. The DM had me roll an INT check to see if I could think of it and a DEX check to see if I could pull it off. One Nat 20 and Nat 3 later…*"You think you might be able to fly yourself back to the rest of the party, but your arms don't quite bend that way."
If only I rolled a bit better on the DEX check…
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Originally Posted by Welknair
*Proceeds to google "Bride of the Portable Hole", jokingly wondering if it might exist*
So in a recent episode of our ongoing campaign, the McGuffin, a box with tons of magical protection on it, notably a spell that functioned similar to a symbol of death (on the inside), got stolen by pirates.
One uncharted island and a dungeon later (with enough shocker lizards to down the level 4 rogue and the wizard, which isn't saying much) we wandered outside to find the pirate ship crashed and rotting on the shore. We quickly deduced that the pirates must have been foolish enough to open the box, and as we reasoned this out, we came across a few issues.
0. The pseudo symbol of death only needed to be looked at to trigger, establishing its 60 ft radius AoE of death.
1. We did not know if it was satisfied with all the HD it had consumed
2. We did not know its location within the ship
3. No one wanted to get close to the ship.
So we decided to use summoned monsters to check if it was still up. Going one step further, the wizard decided to levitate to a position above the ship with the aid of a push.
Once in position, he waved the wand and uttered the magic word. And what did he summon to drop into the potential zone of death? A puppy, a cute, innocent celestial puppy that shouted up at him the question of "Why?" which only my Cleric could understand, before it went splat against the sand some 100 ft below and was whisked away to the outer planes.
Next round he did it again
third round the puppy survived the impact with the wooden deck, actually broke through, and supposedly 'died' against the second deck.
Don't know if it is really smart, but I once used a summoned dog from my wand of summon monster I and told it to charge in a direction I predicted an invisible wizard was. The DM didn't accept this tactic and gave me a 5% chance of success on a d100 but I found the guy anyway and barely gave us the victory.
I, later in the campaign, used the dog once again to actually hide an evil book my party's cleric wanted to destroy. That way I didn't know where it was so it is impossible to find it via detect thoughts etc. Locate object won't work, neither will discern location since the caster, who is going to be an npc, hasn't touched the object in question. I personally kept a page of the book inside a booby trapped vial and I will give it to the NPC when i want to have discern location cast on the book in order to retrieve it ;)
Another much smarter and really overpowered thing that i've heard of is using an armor of photosynthesis or whatever it is called (casts regen 3 on yourself as long as it gets hit by any kind of light source) along with a torch with Continual Flame cast on it. Not really useful in a fight but your HP gets back to full after every fight without having to rest!
Once in position, he waved the wand and uttered the magic word. And what did he summon to drop into the potential zone of death? A puppy, a cute, innocent celestial puppy that shouted up at him the question of "Why?" which only my Cleric could understand, before it went splat against the sand some 100 ft below and was whisked away to the outer planes.
Next round he did it again
third round the puppy survived the impact with the wooden deck, actually broke through, and supposedly 'died' against the second deck.
Summoned creatures don't die, the spell is just broken or somesuch.
As for shovels: A shovel with a sharpened edge is not only a decent halberd, it can make half-decent fortifications (as long as you're not in a rocky mountain area). Axes are good for this too in forested areas.
Another much smarter and really overpowered thing that i've heard of is using an armor of photosynthesis or whatever it is called (casts regen 3 on yourself as long as it gets hit by any kind of light source) along with a torch with Continual Flame cast on it. Not really useful in a fight but your HP gets back to full after every fight without having to rest!
A wondrous item granting fast healing 1 forever (as per lesser vigor) is shockingly cheap too, I like your trick better though, its got more flavor to it. :D
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A man once asked me the difference between Ignorance and Apathy. I told him, "I don't know, and I don't care"
Ok strangely someone just killed a guy using grass. Well daggergrass*. An ambush was discovered in a large patch of it so my friends decided to use wind magic to make the daggergrass sway. The result was a raiding party being slowly slashed to death.
Spoiler
Daggergrass
CR 0-? (Depends on size.)
A common grass-like plant with a sharp, serrated edge. Can grow as tall as the average human and deals 1d4 physical damage to anyone stupid enough to run through it. (1d6 when tall.) It's assumed that it can be brushed aside before dealing damage while walking. (Note: This has been slightly edited so it could be fit into a D&D format.)
Immovable rods are not to be used as suppositories.
Invisible Immovable rods are excellent for keeping castle drawbridges open before an attack. Simple disguise ones self as a peasant or someone bearing gifts for the castle's master, and carry a bag full of gifts or whatever peasants carry. Drop the bag and set the invisible rod while picking your stuff up. Because of the lever effect, the strength of the rod to hold the gate open will be magnified.
Write a book with shrieker paste (and a gentle repose spell to keep it from breaking down). Anyone with darkvision can read it, anyone without it will get screamed at and the words on the page will disappear.
Cut off your small toe, submerge in quintessence, give to cleric. Get res'd easy. You can also use this to enable the previous troll trick, just take it out every so often, like single bit voice mail. Or when fighting trolls without fire and/or acid, hack off a big chunk, submerge in quintessence, hack the remainder into smaller pieces. The biggest piece is now locked out of time, stalling the regeneration until it's convenient. You now have a portable instant troll.
In fact, quitessence, if you can't figure out a way for it to make your current situation better, you might not be that creative. (As a note better in terms of interestingness and possible sadism, not necessarily direct resolution)
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