@The Harbinger of Ferocity

The DM just decided to assume we're all retarded and to not bring cute animals into the mix XD

An always fun, short experience to be shared here and a slight bit of generic advice. That being, Dungeon Masters, never make any puzzle or event too complicated. If your party is spending two hours on a puzzle, it is probably outside the scope of reasonableness, even more so if said puzzle is woefully complex, involving stepping on the right tiles, going down the right hole, arranging the right letters, and then knowing the Dungeon Master's birthday - something none of the characters reasonably know themselves - and dealing with two doors, one that always lies and one that always tells the truth. Then, when we catch you on that last one and ask what color red is, the doors do not suddenly fall silent and teleport us back and make us restart the process.

As such, please do not act surprised or angry then when someone with the ability to ignore object hardness, say with the Mountain Hammer strike, decides to just bust down the seemingly impenetrable doors and starts smashing holes through the walls to just keep going. Some of us would like to play the game.

And yes, that is indeed some good advice
When I do puzzles, I prefer to sprinkle seemingly unimportant information through the area

"Huh, that's a neat sculpture"

*two hours later*

"Hey, something needs to sit on this pedestal"

Simple puzzles are the best puzzles as they don't screw with pacing too much

At least I am not the only one who makes puzzles of that level of "complexity", @Metadude. I admit, Skyrim sort of stole the template of pattern I used, such as matching objects, placing objects, arranging them and the like. At least the developers too there seemed to have the same mindset as myself. In rarity, very sparing rarity, do I use riddles, particularly because they are "All or nothing." type scenarios, where the party either figures it out or doesn't. Usually I just resort to having them roll for it if it takes too long or if their character should know more than the individual.

For myself? I absolutely loathe puzzles, riddles, or similar such games. I have many bad experiences with them, especially ones that make no sense or do not have a "theme" to them that resonates throughout or elsewhere to give me insight into what they mean. They tend to just be there for the sake of a dungeon having a puzzle, just like Dungeon Masters who feel totally obligated to put dragons into their games because of the genre.

@The Harbinger of Ferocity

The only puzzles I hate are Sudoku ones. Why do I hate them? Mass Effect Andromeda. Some of those just got ridiculous. If not for guides, I legitimately could not have finished the game.

So there was a room with six chests. Two were mimics. My fighter triggered a mimic. It attacked me but I had the opportunity to grapple. Took it. Ended up riding it like a bronco.

"I'm gonna try and tame it!"

DM: "Okay, give me an Animal Handling roll."

*Nat 20*

I now have a pet mimic.

I was DMing a game where a player rolled a critical fail on his attack, fumbled and dropped his weapon, then the enemy also rolled a crit fail, fumbled and dropped his weapon. And they just sort of stood there, awkwardly staring at each other in quiet mutual embarrassment.

That reminds me of the reason I decided once and for all critical fumbles and critical hits did not need much help, @RabidRabbit. My Dungeon Masters loved using random tables they found which had everything from, "You just miss, as normal." to "You kill your entire party." Needless to say, you can imagine when we rolled back to back fumbles of "You kill your entire party." we threw those rules out the window once and for all. There are only a few times critical tables, good or bad, come to make sense in my experience, and most tend to be significantly more punishing to attack roll based classes than they should be. Magic is already good enough, rather exceptional, no reason to make bad worse!

@The Harbinger of Ferocity

Our DMs use an app that generates fumbles, generate five or six, and pick one.

You know you're fuckied when you roll a fumble, they pick up their phone, are silent for a few seconds, then "Oho!"

Very similar an experience then, @Silver Carrot. As if rolling it is not bad enough it is the Dungeon Master being giddy they ruined your night or upset you only missed.

Ahh.... The joys of trying to herd low-intelligence PCs through a town...

Step 1. "we want to go see the burgomeister."
Step 2. "You find his mansion surrounded by guards. They deny anyone entry."
Step 3. "Persuasion. (it fails).
Step 4. "Ask for 'guard of captains' get confused results, no clear answer even when question is clarified.
Step 5. Get told "Leave or be locked up." players leave.
Step 6. Head to a gate. Ask the guards there for the 'guard of captains' or somesuch.
Step 7. Proceed to discuss how to get past the guards around the burgomeister's mansion, while standing in front of the gate guards. Ideas that pop up include waylaying guards to take their clothes.
Step 8. Come up with the bright idea of using 'Suggestion' to convince guard to let them past and into the burgomeister's mansion.
Step 9. Discover that a spell that targets one target is not very effective when it goes against the orders the target has received, and there are 10+ other guards also there, who are not affected by the spell, with the same orders.
Step 10. Use minor illusion to try to distract the guards and create an opening to sneak in through. Two of the guards proceed to roll nat20 on perception to notice the (not particularly) sneaky monk.

To sum it up: they couldn't possibly get past the guards.

>BE DM
>Have two level 1 players enter my dungeon.
>Female warlock
>male warrior. Both human.

The warrior peeks through a door in an hallway after quickly dispatching some skeleton servants. Manages to do so without being detected. He spots a blackened, shady figure and a skeleton servant cooking something in a kitchen. He calls for the warlock. She wants to check it out.

Sticks her fucking face in and snorts up the air. There is a giant cloud of smoke coming from whatever they are cooking.

Make her roll con: rolls a 1.

She IMMEDIATELY vomits out of disgusts. Alerts the god damn mini-boss I put in that room and his servant with her loud vomiting.

She realizes this and starts running down the hall...while vomiting...gets it all over her robe and shoes. Enemies come out and notice a giant vomit trail leading down the hall.

They start to follow. She manages to stop and runs into the library. They go up to the door "How did they manage to find us"

I inform her that she stepped in her own vomit and all the evil undead saw was two foot prints of puke leading directly into the library.

Time again for another wondrous story of players gone afoul in a situation where the stakes for failure could well be life and death, once more borrowed the urban supernatural setting. This particular one is born of the reality that some players, many, all too often forget their abilities or how they function, as well as their mission objective. Mind you, the latter's few rules consisted of, in this case at least, bringing the least amount of attention to one's self as possible, while the former is simply absentmindedness and the power of legitimate autism, namely its obsessive component.

The aforementioned psion in my other stories was indeed autistic and his favorite thing was in Dungeons and Dragons the system of psionics, the powers of the mind. However, he was not so interested in the mind-bending components, no, he loved the idea of being able to just think things into reality, namely elemental forces. He did not want to be a sorcerer, much too introverted for that and disliked magic as a whole, but powers of the brain? Any and every excuse in game to telekinetically move things, spontaneously combust things, flash freeze enemies, create storms of pure electrical energy among others. So we entertained his eccentrics and he was certainly one of the best players we had, memorizing just about everything in the game but suffering with deciding what he would do each turn - the "short" turns of his were five minutes long at times.

So he, the two rangers, and the occultist ventured into a drug den that had become the lair of "crazies", sent there by their mysterious benefactor to put down whatever unnatural threats were arising. The most important part of all of this? The building was a cluttered mess and a fire hazard. After encountering the first slavering lunatic, who died only to a hail of panicked gunfire over the course of a few turns and beat the pointman senseless, the party was nervous. Nothing but rooms and doors ahead of them, some old apartment building gone awry. They could hear their almost zombified foes above, screaming, yelling, flailing, but had discovered they fell silent whenever they discovered their prey.

The cleared all the rooms, tediously, and shot anything that wasn't them copiously, all while trying to find the source and working up. Soon they came to the stairwell, the dreaded, dreaded stairwell, which they wished not to fight upon, lest they be knocked down them and swarmed, but they had nowhere to go but up - the crazies unaware of how to open the door and reach them, too addled in the brain. So they were forced to stage, for one reason or another deciding to set the psion up there to spring the trap while the rest of them waited down below, guns at the ready, hoping he would open the door, attract them, sprint down and run into an open room while they would unload upon the madmen with a barrage of rifles and shotguns when they chased him.

Solid plan one might think, but the psion had decided to attract the attention of the crazies in a way they hadn't expected and he had forgot about.

As soon as he flung the door open and saw one of several meandering the hall, his mind reached out and manifest a massive detonation. Not of utter cold or crackling electricity, not even acid or a blast of sonic vibration, no, he chose fire. Because of course fire would do the most damage and that was his role as a damage dealing class, so it would surely get their attention and do the most harm, making them easier to kill, no? No less it had escaped him the exact details of his powers not including the line that they do not set things aflame. His pyrokinetic power unleashed, all of the crazies immediately combust and were ignited... along with the building. But things did not end there, oh no. Maddened by alchemical concoction and gibbering mad, the lunatics frenzied like barbarians. Some sprinted into rooms, others charged him, some screamed and thrashed, but their burning bodies soon ignited the floor they were on.

The party downstairs, hearing the madness up and above and the psion running desperately to them wondered, wisely, what in the devil had happened up there. What did he do? When the old, rickety fire sprinklers and alarm came on, they soon realized all hell had broken lose, especially as the psion ran down the stairs and to safety, a few flaming bodies after him - one falling down the railing and smashing twenty or so feet into the concrete before peeling himself off. The cacophony of gunfire erupted as planned, but they worried and for good reason.

Not because the building was a neck and neck battle between small, starting fires and the sprinkler systems, but because of two things. If a crazy leapt out the window and began running amok would it spread? Mind you they had no idea yet what caused the near zombie-like attitude and madness, rabidness almost, but another, certain danger was the fire alarm would reach the authorities and they would be here in minutes, bad side of town or not.

Needless to say they hustled and soon opted for the worst; they burnt the entire building down to destroy all the evidence, losing nearly all the loot in the process and never quite answering what happened there, though an explosion in a part of it would come back to inform them another day on a separate mission.

My party and I were walking up to a ruined structure of some kind and upon arriving in its front lawn the elf, mage, made a knowledge history roll finding that it was a barracks. The Human, warrior, of the group made a knowledge history check with a +7 knowing it was a barracks to see if he could place who it may have once belonged to, and found it was once part of the Old King's FOBs. The Half-Orc, Barbarian failed his knowledge roll cuz Half-Orc. I the Dwarf, Cleric, didn't want to be left out of rolling, but didn't have any knowledge skills to help said. I want to appraise the ruin. Everyone lost it when I rolled nat 20 and an 18 confirm. I looked to the group and said. "This was once a magnificent barracks with THICC mahogany doors, and a skill fully crafted stain glass mural of the Old King... It was a sight to behold in it's time.

The joke for the rest of the session was "Hey Dwarf, how 'bout you appraise this for me."

Probably one of the best story based uses of a skill rather than some sort of exploit as a houserule, certainly not off the level there too with what appraise and its expanded incarnations can do. Best that the dwarven cleric of the entire party know such details anyway, makes all the more for the theme. I approve of such ridiculousness.