Meanwhile...
Me: You guys find a key woth a triangle on it
Later that session
Me: There is a locked door with a triangle on it.
Party: This door is literally impossible to open.
Me: ...why don't you check your inventory...
Party: Aha, maybe this tomato we found can open the door if we shove it into the lock.
Me: I don't... you have a key!
Party: When did we get a key?
Me: THIS SESSION!
Party: Ohhh we didn't write it down.
Me: IT'S ONLY BEEN 5 MINUTES! GOLDFISH, ALL OF YOU!
There have been multiple times in our games where one player (the same one every time) asks the DM if their character has something.
"Why do you not know what you possess?"
"My character has ADHD, too."
Roll a history check to try to remember or a perception check to look through your bag.
3
You're pretty sure you took someone elses' bag at the last inn by mistake. Why would you have this many doorknobs?
You appear to have acquired a bag of hammers.
Please make a contested INT check to see if you are smarter than it.
Maybe he's a kender XD
This reminds me of when I had a player take the keen mind feat and it was an absolute God-send for drip feeding lore. "Kat, you've seen this shape before, the bartender had a symbol like this on their ring"
I had to drop in a few irrelevant observations to balance it out, but it was great.
Contact Other Plane is also one of my favourite spells a player could take at my table. It makes them get lore questions answered for practically nothing.
I even turned the spell into a small sidequest where he goes to the same entity everytime, trades memories to it in exchange for it digging informations better than what the spell normally provides.
It's why it's better to say Yes and rather than No
"yes and" is such a wonderful thing.
Hahahaha yeah. I am very lucky as a DM.
My same group took 20 minutes to get past an unlocked door.
Thats classic XD
You can't link this without explaining the item.
It reflects a single target spell back to the caster once per day. Its an armor. It was made for npcs before being looted.
A uno reverse card?
Yup. For one spell once per day. To relativise, they are level 14 now. So it's not like they didn't had access to 15 different game breaking options. But I was sure that the character would die... for like 1 session before one of the 5 ways of bringing someone back to life would be used.
It is hard to make a decent challenge for high leveled players. If I can make them nervous, even if they win easily I call it a DMing win. And I certainly managed that last night so I'm fine with it.
Seconded. Did it bring them back? Some kind of counterspell? Teleported them to the Astral plane?
See above :)
Happened yesterday. I was exactly 50 % amazed and 50 % shocked of the result
Okay but what does the item do?
Something amazing and shocking!
See above :)
Turns a single target spell back to the caster once per day. I was very undetailed since it was npcs using it at the time.
I would probably reword it that it absorbs the spell and then casts it back at the spell caster. That way they would still roll a save/have a chance to counterspell it.
These sorts of Uno Reverse Card moments are both frustrating and gratifying to me as a DM. I of course try to roll with them, but occasionally they do mean I need to toss out half my mental notes for the rest of the campaign and seat-of-my-pants a whole new plot branch right in the moment.
There was one campaign I was in, I'd estimate it lasted about five years of real time, where my character stabbed the final Big Bad of the campaign with a weapon that we had picked up in the very first adventure of the campaign. We'd been toting it around ever since then without using it because it seemed like a very special purpose item. It wasn't pivotal to defeating her but it was still fun to tie the campaign together like that.
I think its fair that if your players do something that breaks your campaign in half, to say : guys, we can do this, but if we do then I have to redoe everything I have prepared. Would it be ok if we didn't please ?
But that is also why I rarely prep more than 3 sessions in advance. The more you have prepared, the more youll be tight with player freedom or loose more.
I've been a player for a few years and a dm for a few months now.
Hearing this as a player would completely kill my immersion and turn the campaign into an arcade game in my head. If you are allowed to say this, then I am allowed to hot reload when doing something stupid because having my pc die would throw out all of the work I've put into them and their back story.
There should be consideration given to both sides of this. The campaign is, in a sense, the DM's character. In an ideal world the DM would account for everything and the players won't be able to derail it utterly, but in the real world occasionally something will slip through and I think the players should allow for this kind of whoopsie. Just like if a player who had a deep investment in a character did something that unexpectedly and pointlessly killed their character off, I would be open to giving them "backsies." As long as they were open to it.
Might be worth adding this to the session-zero discussion.
If the idea of Boromir knowing he's been killed but still fights until the very end ISN'T something you want, nobody forces you to my friend. We all have different tastes for when we'll go out.
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