Atlantic Roleplay Community Boards

[Bailos]

---

So let me explain how I racked up 50 Trillion+ Player kills this winter in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign!

I run a game for several of my friends and co-workers. We played 2 nights a week. The setting is a city building campaign in which the players have managed to grow a few dozen citizens into a burgeoning city of several thousand people but it has not been without its problems. There were times when the city was literally days from total and complete starvation, where people were getting 1/4 of a ration once per day for their entire daily food intake. Long story short, the group pulled through with a solution and most of the people lived.

Thanks to a lagging economy, social instability and the generally patchwork nature of the city a lot of problems evolved organically. As such, there were several instances of organized crime and various other unsavory activities. Add this together with the general morally questionable nature of the party (whom were all town leaders, naturally) and eventually...a few villains (and super-villains) emerged from within their own town. Enter into the scene Doctor Phinneas G. McTavish, Esquire...a former mill worker with a love for tinkering who turned to engineering ever-worsening traps in an effort to catch some wild game to feed his family. Unfortunately sickness and malnutrition claimed his wife and he went mad with revenge, creating a terrible new weapon.

There is a system in DnD for creating potions that contain spell effects. On top of that, there is a system for what happens when two potions mix. Normally the results are fairly "tame" in that if two spell-potions mix, bad stuff happens like an explosion. Well. I found this COMPLETELY awesome table that contain ten thousand (thats 10,000) possible results for mixing two spell potions together and I asked the party if they would like me to use them. They all agreed this was too awesome to pass up and they wanted me to use it. This table contains a truly remarkable mix of completely harmless, completely awesome and completely horrible effects. For example, the nearest PC may suddenly gain +6 to a physical stat. Or...if you roll a 10,000, the nearest star explodes in a super nova, killing you all and the planet you are on.

This device that the evil genius made is basically like a ghostbuster pack. A liquid is dumped into the tank in the back and you select what spell you'd like to "fire" and then you made a ranged attack. If you get a 1 or 2, this device malfunctions, regardless of the final roll's total. There are things you can do in the event of a malfunction in order to delay the inevitable, but it DOES still malfunction.

So my players are in a heated fight with the good Doctor Phinneas G. McTavish, Esquire when he unleashes a spell from his pack. I roll a 1 on the dice, and it malfunctions! I proceed to roll the ability "Delay Malfunction" which basically let's me keep fighting before the machine goes kaboom. I succeed and it's explosion is prevented for a few rounds. I roll up the random table and I get an effect that states: "Nearest player character loses all cohesion between all his cells. Each individual cell in his or her body becomes its own, independent and symbiotic organism. These cells still make up the character as before but now he is something of a "swarm" instead of just a player. You may choose to treat the player as any number of Fine or smaller sized creatures that occupy the same square". I decided to interpret this quite literally. I declared to the player that he was now 50 trillion individual Fine sized organisms.

Next turn, the device was used again and I chose a Chain Lightning type spell. I rolled to randomly target someone with this. The dice don't lie, it came up with the player I had just turned into 50 trillion dudes. Oh dear. So I start reading this wonderful chain lightning spell thinking I can hit the entire party with this sucker! But then I read the whole rules for it. I make an attack roll with the spell and then deprecate the roll with each additional target to a minimum of +10. This is bad. I read on. Apparently, if any creatures are occupying the same square, I can attack them with the same bonus as the original attack made against the first person in the square, I Just have to reduce the damage as normal. Well...The spell does a minimum of 1d6+5. I don't know about you, but I doubt an individual cell has more than 11 hit points, let alone the minimum damage of 6. Unfortunately, thanks to changes in template and combat circumstances, there is no way this chain lightning can fail to hit any of the 'cells'.

So this poor individual became 50,000,000,000,000 players kills. Thanks for buffing my kill count...Oh how I love DnD

[Malicite]

---

That game, and event, both sound pretty awesome.

(Edit)
P.S.- It appears my signature is working again by no action of my own...?
_________________
"Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife."
-Justice Holmes

[Bailos]

---

Reading and enjoying my story has fixed your issues. Thank you.