Howdy,

bbarsh wrote:Paul - that was a great story. But...strength does not help to hit rolls with a bow and neither does blind fighting (I think). Not trying to be a rules lawyer, but it stuck out.

Heh! He didn't use a bow. The vampire was on top of him the whole time. The arrow was rammed into vampire by hand. Thus the non-proficiency penalty and the blind fighting bonus. Like I said, I was desperate to save my character's bacon.


Futures Bright,

Paul

The Collector's Trove wrote:Howdy,

bbarsh wrote:Paul - that was a great story. But...strength does not help to hit rolls with a bow and neither does blind fighting (I think). Not trying to be a rules lawyer, but it stuck out.

Heh! He didn't use a bow. The vampire was on top of him the whole time. The arrow was rammed into vampire by hand. Thus the non-proficiency penalty and the blind fighting bonus. Like I said, I was desperate to save my character's bacon.


Futures Bright,

Paul

Beautiful. I like that kind of thinking! Besides I have this complete disdain for anything vampire...that monster has been so saturated that I can't stand them. Especially when they make movies and try and portray them as some sort of sympathetic character. Please. Kill'em all.

In virtually all TSR modules there are several encounters that can wipe out an entire party - even if the players are careful. That is just part of the game. On top of that, there are always those encounters that seem innocent enough, but a couple bad dice rolls or twist of fate and bam! Dead PCs everywhere.

I ran I6 on Halloween night back when it came out. Everyone was pumped and we started early around 3-4 p.m. It must have been on a weekend because a few of the guys would have still been in high school. We played until they finished - at least til midnight if not later.

I thought they would get wiped out several times, but they made it through and defeated Strahd - killed his moldy undead ass, actually.

The next module I ran for those characters was A1. They got trashed after about five encounters. The fighters couldn't roll for shit and nobody could make a save for anything...I had no intention of killing that group. We had been building them for at least six months. But there it was. I think I was as disappointed as the players. But we simple regrouped and started again. That next campaign was even better and lasted a couple years with the PCs retiring.

MShipley88 wrote:
 I also enjoyed playing an NPC from the village, named Ivan. He went along with the party, trying to rescue his sister from Strahd. Ivan was 0 level, but he survived the whole thing.

 Ivan would provide helpful advice in a thick Romanian accent:

Player One: "Hey, look at this portrait!"

Player Two: "A protrait? What is it?"

Ivan: "Ah, jyes...jyou see...eet eez a painting of a person."

 Strangely, the party did not kill Ivan to shut him up. Much fun.  :lol:

Mark

    There is NOTHING better than the NPC whose purpose is to annoy the shit out of players, yet they can't kill the guy because of alignment, the guy is essential to the plot, they need his skills for something, etc.
   I had three characters like this in my DMing career.  One was Elvos, an elven ftr mage npc I rolled up at the last minute to go through White Plume Mtn with the party (one of the regular guys was out of town for a month and he had a ftr/mage that went out of town with him...).  At the spur of the moment I decided to make him an egotistical ass, yet oddly likable....probably the kind of guy it would be great to have a brew with, but not be stuck in a dungeon with for hours.  He spoke in my best Sean Penn from "Fast Times" accent, constantly wondering "where the babes and brewski were" in this dungeon, could the rest of the party check out his "mondo bad ass sword, look at the flames man" (he would do this every combat), and call out "Gnarley monster at 12 oclock, dudes!" and crap like that. The problem was the party needed him for the adventure, and he was actually pretty competent in battle, so I had the joy of causing them great agony throughout that entire WPM and beyond (of course he took a liking to the party and decided to follow them back to Greyhawk when they returned the weapons).  No one ever tried to kill him although they came close.  They nicknamed him "Elvos the Infuriating", unfortunately I couldn't use him again because they said if they saw him again they would butcher him on the spot. He was great fun to run...
   The second was Captain Quantos.  The same party, I believe, had gotten a small boat as a result of an adventure, and had to hire a captain to run the ship. Having little money, they dug into the bottom of the barrel and found Captain Quantos.  The Captain was capable seaman, most of the time, except when he was roaring drunk, which was all of the time.  I had a lot of fun playing him as a drunken, slobbering lout that would experience memory loss after every bender and swear he never remembered calling the elven thief "a tights-wearing homo", the dwarven fighter "a sawed off little fuck" or the female illusionist "a sweet hot piece of ass" (and she was an NPC married to another player's LG cleric, which made it worse...)  I made the crew absolutely loyal to him, letting the party know that if they let Quantos go, the crew walked to, so they were going to be stuck with him. Basically, a nice character to get into when I wanted to say what I REALLY thought about the party without giving up my DM hat.  Ironically, they actually came to like the drunken lout and continued to employ him even after they could afford better.
   The other character was Crawley. In another party, I ran a Forgotten Realms campaign that started out in Phlan.  Eventually, after about a year of adventuring the party had cleared the city and surrrounding areas out, and basically appointed themselves the rulers of the city by placing themselves at the head of every guild. However, Crawley, a lowly NPC  1st level thief, somehow became head of the "Beggar's Guild", which the characters denied existed yet somehow there were beggars everywhere and Crawley was their leader.  He would make his presence known every council session as he would saunter in, wearing his filty stinking beggars outfit and hawking large, foul smelling hunks of snot and lung tissue left and right, peeing his pants during the walk up to the podium, and always start out his long, rambling speeches with "Beggin yer pardons, great and poweful sirs..." and would eventually lead up to the beggars getting some sort of concession or special treatment or donation "...fer the starvin little beggars and their mothers, you understand, sirs?"  It was great having lowly Crawley frustrate the high level, super powerful characters by just being disgusting and annoying.  Now, you say why not just kill/charm/banish/utterly destroy Crawley, well, I made Crawley indispensible.  It turned out being basically the "head" of all beggars in Phlan, he knew everything, everyone and where everything was in the city.  The characters quickly found out that  Crawley was 100% percent accurate about everything they might need to know, even in cities farther away like Zhentil Keep or Hillsfar (the beggars have friends far and wide).  This bit of worth kept Crawley alive through the entire campaign, forcing the characters to have to go visit Crawley in his lair whenever they were looking for someone or something in the campaign, of course he lived in the sewers and they would have to sludge around getting covered in mud, filth and crap, battling rats and albino crocodiles,  just abasing themselves to go look him up.  They also started liking the old coot because sometimes it got comical just what he would know, some of the utterly ridiculous tidbits he could pass along ("The Kuo Toan shrine? Well, I herd tell from around here, never you mind who from, that their base camp is, oh, 20miles or so in the Northwest underdark tunnell past the magic mouth marker the mage Klempton made a couple centuries ago.  You sure you guys cant stay for stew?" I eventually found an old picture of Red Skelton in his "tramp" costume (for those of us older or with good memories) and would toss it up on the table whenever it was time for Crawley to make an appearance, elicting groans and whining from the players. It was great!

Mike B.