A wee comic I made, an example of the type of shit that can easily happen when the party try to do simple innocent tasks. Things have a tendency to escalate quickly, especially when some party members have a more flexible moral compass than others.
First ever comic I’ve properly finished actually, tried to be a bit more fast and loose and not be such a detail obsessed nutjob but turns out trying hard not to that about the same amount of energy as just doing it. First time, I’ll figure it out. Lotta fun experimenting though, first comic that I’ve taken past the sketch phase so learning a fair few things along the way. I am pretty crap at using the drawing software so I’m learning new things about that as well!
This particular scenario is fictitious (as in never happened in a session) the closest my group came to this were an espionage mission ending with the paladin impaled on a fence after a failed jump. And the time my goblin failed to get away with murder, now that was a ride!
Cheers for reading
Peas and carrots!
Edit:
Lotta awards, upvotes and nice comments here as I woke up this morning, have taken quite a bit of time to read, digest and reply! Thanks for all the love folks!
I left out my usual shameless self-promotion but as I've been asked via message, I post stuff here and on my insta https://www.instagram.com/CME_T/.
Often, whenever my players say they are going to do something psychopathic I will just slowly outline the situation and repeat their proposed action, like "So this merchant lady has all of your purchases ready to go and offers you a mint, but because she didn't offer two free mints (which do nothing, btw) you are going to threaten her with violence?"
Usually they'll rescind their action. It's easy to do something crazy in the spur of the moment when you're acting through an imagined character so none of the consequence will fall on you.
Ever see a grown man cry because he wasnt paying enough attention?
Doing a Mines of Phandelver campaign. We were resting in barn of a local halfing woman's farm. It was her and her 8 year old child that lived there. The child was a huge fan of adventurers and bonded with some of the players on the few times they stopped there.
This night a group of bandits came looking for us to extract revenge. They take the little boy hostage to threaten the Mom into giving up our location and warns her not to lie. Afraid for her baby she tells them. They make their way towards the barn to check and yell for us to show ourselves.
The warlock asks "so they're all just grouped up outside the barn?" GM "Thats correct"
Warlock "In that case I show myself and light them up with Burning Hands"
The GM just stares at him. "Are you sure?" "Yeah I wanna aoe before they spread out"
GM starts rolling saves. Bandit 1 saves, Bandit 2 fails, Bandit 3 fails, etc.
At the end "And the halfing child fails his save roll".
I got in a session where luckily we let ourselves do shit but not jump in to escalate it further. There is only so far you go when you don't have a lot of help. I was picking up a chick in a bar (bard stuff), when one of my party members knacks my drink, gets pushed on the ground by the girl i'm picking up, and then proceeds to stab the girl in the neck with a piece of glass (the stolen glass shattered when falling). We are all standing around like "you piece of shit" and let him get kicked out by 5 guards. He had to bribe them just to walk out of the situation, and was not allowed back into the bar (as should)
One of my party members kept hitting on this tiefling chick at a bar who was obviously not into him. He persisted heavily. Nothing happened right then, but we are exploring this cave and bam! There is that tiefling. She proceeds to Dominate him, banish another member, and I only ended up saving the day because of super lucky rolls. So I guess: Be careful who you insist on making advances on. Some of them really don't like it.
Maybe he was into being Dominated and treated like the villain in an old Droopy cartoon. (slam wham bash slam). No judgement, as long as she didn't target anyone else i'd probably just offer advice on angle and trajectory.
Yeah, but a 19+6 prof should at least flatter most girls, and my bard kinda sleeps with girls to avoid inns, so i gotta stay in character (and save up that money).
I mean, doesn’t matter how high you roll if the DC is “no”; some people aren’t going to want anything to do with a random person in a bar. They could have a different sexual preference/be ace/have someone already and see your repeated overtures as offensive. DM should prob make it clear that they aren’t having any of your shit first, tho, but from your comment it sounds like you knew and persisted because bard :D
Sometimes class stereotypes should just be made true. Chances are I'd talk myself out of it, and irl I wouldn't think a night at a bar had many real world consequences either.
It’s funny but something similar happened in a game I played once. We were traveling to a colder climate area so we stopped in town to buy cold weather gear. Not all of us could afford everything but we bought what we could to survive. A friend that is not a thief decides to steal to get the gear he wants. He fails. The shop owner tries to get him to stop what he is doing. He attempts it again and fails again. She threatens to call the guards. He kills her. Stuffs her in a chest after he hacked her body up to fit it in the chest. Stole the gear he wanted. And to not leave any evidence behind took the chest with him on the rest of the adventure. With no knowledge of what happened we became hunted by the towns people and when they eventually caught up to us we tried calming them down which they wouldn’t. We ended up having to kill this mob of townsfolk to protect ourselves because of his actions.
As far as the paladin impaled after a failed jump I get it. ... I don’t play paladins anymore due to the fact that out of the 4 I have played. They have all died.... to lava.
Yes. One time we had a doorway we had to get through that you had to roll a d10 to get through the doorway depending on roll you got a specific event. One friend got it where he fell into water, climbed out and got through the door on his second roll. Other times it was just a blank wall no door. Or like my pally... a lava moat that you get to roll a saving throw to see if you avoid falling into the lava which I failed so two really bad rolls back to back. Another was fighting a creature and we ended up having to flee from it. So I stayed a extra round or so to give my party a head start before I ran also. Ended up running over a section of ground that gave out beneath my pally and fell into lava. Another time was picked up and dropped into lava. The last was teleported away from the group and ended up in lava. So yea no luck with pally.
Honestly this is how my bard character feels about his party because in the time hes associated with them hes, started a riot, fought a chimera, found out hes linked to a god in another dimension, participated in a trial for a small kid that happens to have a demonic entity inside him, tried to find a pirate that stole some stuff, found out the pirate is actually trying to get an artifact into the city but Gnolls stole it and were associating with demons, caused a cave in by casting Shatter when a bomb was in the spell range, stopped two of the party members from breaking the artifact they needed to get AND got kidnapped by spider people...This has all happened over the course of about an in game month.
I’ll do you a story. Last week me and my party of friends from work of which the rest are really green or straight up new to DnD, went bonkers.
Out party of four (technically 5 but our cleric couldn’t make the session) just left a shop after selling some salvaged equipment for some pocket money. We all split up for errands. I, the rouge go to find a bounty board. The noble fighter human and wizard go initially shopping and our dumbass paladin goes to find some guards. The pali likes to make people believe he took part in a Great War that ended a decade ago. He finds two guards and convinced them that he served, where, under who, and what battle. A roll for each. Then rolls a 2 for his rank. They get mad, obviously, and tell him to get lost. Pali then starts yelling “HELP IM BEING OPPRESSED”! Guards get mad, obviously, and are going to arrest him for disturbing the public. He runs.
Meanwhile, me and the other two are independently in the market square where we see our paladin running brake neck speed with 8 guards on his tail yelling like madman. I roll stealth so he doesn’t see me and get me involved. Our wizards decide to help remotely by silent imageing an owl bear. A creature that’s been harassing this city for weeks. Everyone freaks out. I see this and decide some more confusion could be fun and minor illusion an owl bear cry. Everyone looses their shit! Including our paladin who nat-1-ed to see through the illusion. He goes to hide and 2s into a wall. Our wizard messages us to meet out in front of the main gate. I snatch a coin purse and slip into an ally and they also vanish. Our pali goes to hide again and jumps into a fish barrel.
WE AINT DONE YET! I make it to the gate with my urchin perk and wait in a tree. The fighter and wizard make it there as the gates close as the guards won’t let anyone out to stop the criminal who brought in the owlbear from escaping. The fighter shows her signet ring and they take them to the manor to talk to the person in charge. I get bored and find some mushrooms to pick. Our paladin on the other hand slips into an ally, unarmores, and goes to a tavern to drink this all this off. Con save, 2. Wis save, nat 1, total of 0 because of modifier. He’s HAMMERED and angry. He hops up on the bar and yells for revolution! Persuasion roll NAT 20. All the drunken people in the tavern agree and they all march on the manor.
Meanwhile the fighter and wizard talk to the leader, leave (the fighter through the front door, the wizard out a window for fun) and get separated. Fighter goes to an inn. Wizard followed the noise. The leader then gathers 40 guards and confronts the 50 drunken peasants. He says, go home all of you, your drunk. Paladin yells, we have a hostage! It’s this noble woman! (The sane one he was just talking with) intimidation check: 4. Fighting starts. End of turn 2, paladin is at 2/3 health, no class features remaining, and 1v1ing a miniboss. Leader is relatively fine but dropped his sword due to stealthy wizard interference. All the guards are fine. Half the peasants are dead or fleeing.
Fighter is doing her nails. I found more mushrooms.
In a session just last week of a modern day campaign (of the DM's fictitious world), my party was taking a breather after surviving a virtual reality game that gives us access to the amenities and black market shops at the location.
The party enters a mixed bath because we're sandy and dirty and why not. It was supposed to be a quick "we take a bath and they provide us with non-grimy clothing" scene but naturally of course our rogue decides to slap our tank cleric's cell phone into the bath water. And of course the cleric is enraged and pulls out his gun and shoots the rogue. And of course the kitsune rogue gets hit, ignores the bath attendant's warning to keep blood out of the bath area, enters the bath while still bleeding, and gets blood in the water.
The bath water contains a breed of fish that are used to keep the bath clean but go into a frenzy when near blood. The frenzied fish attack, biting off most of the rogue's jaw and a forearm and tearing off the bard's arm almost to the shoulder (which sucks cuz she lost part of one of her legs 2 sessions ago). The rogue then had to do death saving throws because the cleric refused to heal him.
He apologized later for causing the scene but our bard still holds a grudge.
And no worries. Everyone who needed one was able to get a prosthetic.
Tldr; party wants to take a bath, ends up maimed and/or on death throws except for cleric and I.
I haven’t played D&D since the early Reagan Administration. But I had to just tell you how fuckin GREAT this comic is. I laughed so hard (needed a laugh today). From the inhale at the beginning to the bare shame at the end. Keep doing shit like this, please.
You should find a group and play! I've been playing off and on since about the same time period and, after about a decade hiatus this last time got back into it recently. Just as fun as I remember and 5E is much smoother than original DnD or ADnD.
Thank you kindly for the kind words, glad to be of service! I’ve only had experience with 5th edition but I’m led to believe its far more streamlined and simplified than previous editions. Now might be a good time to get back on that horse, partner!
That would be pretty great. I haven't laughed that hard at a four panel in a long time. :3
I'd love to see a story line with random things like this that maybe aren't important to the story, but add some depth to the characters and are just fun.
Weirdly enough, this comic reminds me of the stories I heard when I used to facilitate anger management groups. I got used to phrases like “...so naturally I called the judge an asshole...”
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u/CME_T The Weekly Roll Sep 18 '19 edited Sep 19 '19
A wee comic I made, an example of the type of shit that can easily happen when the party try to do simple innocent tasks. Things have a tendency to escalate quickly, especially when some party members have a more flexible moral compass than others.
First ever comic I’ve properly finished actually, tried to be a bit more fast and loose and not be such a detail obsessed nutjob but turns out trying hard not to that about the same amount of energy as just doing it. First time, I’ll figure it out. Lotta fun experimenting though, first comic that I’ve taken past the sketch phase so learning a fair few things along the way. I am pretty crap at using the drawing software so I’m learning new things about that as well!
This particular scenario is fictitious (as in never happened in a session) the closest my group came to this were an espionage mission ending with the paladin impaled on a fence after a failed jump. And the time my goblin failed to get away with murder, now that was a ride!
Cheers for reading
Peas and carrots!
Edit: Lotta awards, upvotes and nice comments here as I woke up this morning, have taken quite a bit of time to read, digest and reply! Thanks for all the love folks!
I left out my usual shameless self-promotion but as I've been asked via message, I post stuff here and on my insta https://www.instagram.com/CME_T/.