Game Masters can be nit-picky sticklers with wands up their butts. It’s a respectable mode for navigating the endless charts and dice rolls and idiosyncratic mechanics of tabletop RPGs. Seriously, I respect you, stickler GMs. Without you, I wouldn’t know the difficulty class for reaching across the table and grabbing a Cheeto. Is that a Dexterity check?
Anyway, last Saturday, an honest, upright Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master couldn’t find a by-the-book approach to a comically specific role-playing scenario: drinking a potion underwater, one-handed. Puzzled, he asked a role-playing forum what to do:
Ah, come on man, just fudge it! Whatever!
As any good Dungeon Master knows, sometimes you’ve got to wing these fussy scenarios to keep the story moving. A player wants to spin plates on a dire rhino’s horns while it’s moving at approximately 4.57m per second Northeast? While the moon is a waxing gibbous, can the necromancer delight in the blood of ambidextrous dark elves resistant to tree sap if her Charisma modifier is below 3? Chill. Seriously. Let’s just say it’s a Constitution check with a DC of 12, for all of it.
Dungeon Master Eikre, a self-proclaimed “huge dumb nerd,” decided to go the opposite route. Using a bath tub, a bottle of Red Guitar wine and just one thumb, he discerned exactly what mechanic was necessary in this highly specific scenario:
Eikre added that there was a strong possibility that those gulps of Red Guitar weren’t the first of the night.
Comments
11 responses to “Serious D&D Player Chugs Wine Underwater To Settle Rules Dispute”
One of our groups was an all bard group and this is pretty much how every rule squabble resulted (or started it it wasn’t actualy about alcohol).
I was all fun until a dispute about a tavern drinking competition required one of our players to prove that he could drink four pint glasses faster than an npc (in order to fix a bad roll).
That session ended poorly for the one guy that never drank, but still thought it would be easy to smash out.
It’s this kind of nonsense that stops me playing D&D with my friends. I went once, and not even an hour passed before ‘THAT GUY’ started arguing with the DM about some super-contrived way he came up with to enact some really oddly specific action that ran the possibility of turning the whole party into newts. And of course ‘THAT GUY’ spends the ENTIRE evening popping off Holy Grail quotes, and speaking on that faux-Medieval Python-esque ‘accent’.
Is it just my weirdo friends, or is that what D&D is all about? Is it obligatory to have ‘THAT GUY’? In the absence of your group’s usual ‘THAT GUY’, does another just take his place by attrition?
The one time I played I couldn’t deal with the idea that my magic helping hand was able to generate enough torque to turn a doorknob, yet somehow unable to be used in the same manner to enact some testicular torsion on the giant loincloth-wearing demon that was attacking our team. I can’t remember whether he let me get away with that one in the end or not.
I DM a group of close friends and I would totally allow testicular torsion of this nature.
What if you said that this species of giant loincloth-wearing demon had evolved so that their nether-regions had been replaced by doorknobs? Alternatively, their nether regions were in fact doorknob shaped?
Doorknob, Giantknob, they’re basically the same thing
Definitely your weirdo friends. (plus your DM should have slapped him down straight away if he was going too far )
Reading that makes me super glad I’ve DMed whenever I have played D&D… I’d have told him to cut the shit and remind him that the campaign didn’t in-fact revolve around him and his antics, albeit perhaps in a more fitting way.
Like a not-so-subtle bolt of lightning suddenly striking his character… Repeatedly if required.
I don’t even like following the rules to the letter, or anything of the sort, but people like that absolutely go too far and try to make the whole night a spectacle about themselves… Which almost always ruins the enjoyment of it for others.
People that incessantly quote Monty Python are the worst, that was one of the reasons I never joined in with a group of friends. The other main reason was that half of my “friends” seemed to be playing to mock the other half that were actually into it which was pathetic and left a bad taste in my mouth.
People, what a bunch of bastards.
Thats horrible. I don’t even know people like that…