Adventurers! I want to hear your tales! - Dungeons & Dragons Discussion

[Higanbana]

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Hello! I'm DamnTheGacha! I'm a decently experienced Dungeon Master at this point, at least I'd like to believe I am! I'm forever a DM, but not for why you may think! I simply love when my players are engaged in my settings and fall in love with their own characters. There is simply nothing more rewarding than seeing people around the table smile, laugh, and go home with new memories of friends and adventures that they will never forget. To me, this is the heart of the great game Dungeons & Dragons!

So I'll get to the point, I want to hear YOUR stories! Yes you, right there, you reading this right now. Your story. Tell me about a character you're proud of or the tale of a glorious success or failure that lead you to a moment you'd never forget! Please, I insist, I want to hear!

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My Rules

My Rules are simple!
1) Don't be a jerk to others
2) Don't get smutty here
3) Feel free to discuss, I'd love to
4) I'm not here to hear about D&D green text memes, I want to hear about YOU! Please don't copy or repost those here.
5) I played in 3.5, 4th, and 5th editions, I don't mind what edition the story came from or even if you wanna do another table top
6) Please no ranties

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If you want to show off your character, follow standard character sheet protocol with a hider like so.

My Character

Name:
Class and Level:
Race:
Alignment:

Stats -
Hit Dice:
AC:
Str:
Dex:
Con:
Int:
Wis:
Cha:

Anything you want to put that's relevant here like skills or proficiencies:

(Backstory if you wanna):

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I really look forward to hearing about your favorite characters and stories! Please don't be shy!

[Yankee]

So I'm... not entirely sure what it is exactly you want here but I do have a story from one of my earlier TTRPG experiences. Hope this is what you're looking for...?

Anyway, this was when I was still new to playing tabletops. At the time I used to do online RP over places like livejournal (remember that site?) but I was kind of awkward trying to roleplay out a character in real life. Tangent: I could never do LARP because I get too embarrassed, TTRPGs are the furthest I go with that. Now, my regular D&D group are amazing, we know when to goof off and when to get serious, and this particular campaign was a great mix of both.

It was Final Fantasy. Now, I didn't know jack shit about Final Fantasy back then, still don't now, but I'll play any dice campaign with that group. I made a big lizard man beast tamer. I had a hawk companion named Clint because I'm really creative with names I really liked my character! I bonded with Clint, did little side quests with him, somehow tamed a behemoth really early on with a bunch of nat 20s... it was fun. Then Clint died in a boss fight.

I wasn't sad IRL, but I went about the next couple sessions with my character depressed. Eventually, we came across a soul train or something like that, with departed spirits aboard it. Clint's soul was there! He had a chance to come back to life!

One of my party members had his soul in their hand. They had a choice between letting my beloved bird companion return to life or... sacrificing it to get an artifact their god wanted them to get. The person that played this character is a good friend of mine, there was no bad blood between us at all. Throughout the RPG thus far our characters had always cooperated and went above and beyond to help each other. I suspect you know where I'm going with this.

He crushed Clint's spirit right in front of my character, making him Dead Forever^TM. Props to them for following their character's goals, but... at the table I suddenly burst into tears. I hadn't felt any sadness at all prior to that moment, and suddenly I was so distraught. I left the room to get a hold of myself. Obviously this ended the session since everyone felt weird about it even though I assured them I wasn't mad! Even I was confused at my own actions. The GM and player both apologized to me but I wasn't upset with them, just felt the same thing I think my character might have. I think that was the first character I actually really connected with, so when his BFF bird was for sure gone I just got overwhelmed.

Thankfully the campaign didn't end after that or I would have felt awful. Now our group looks back at that moment and laughs Still love playing TTRPGs, but haven't quite had a profound experience like that since.

[Higanbana]

@Yankee

That’s precisely the kind of thing I wanted! A moment that meant something to you in your experience playing at a table with your friends! Not gonna lie I’m a big fan of Final Fantasy myself and a Lizardman beast tamer named clint is something I would believe seeing in there. Anything goes as long as there’s one person either playing someone named or there being an NPC named Cid!

My table had an animal experience with a Dark elf player who tried to scare the druid’s cat off the table and knocked down an oil lamp. Burned the cat pretty badly, but when the dark elf was confronted by the druid he just went “He did it” and pointed to our Champion Fighter who was building a strong friendship with our bard. Deception roll Nat 20 against a insight Roll nat 1. From that point on Champion and Druid’s friendship was completely over and it became a running joke that she held a grudge against him for almost killing her cat.

It’s wonderful that you got to experience a session that you were so heavily engaged in that you felt the weight of the decision over your animal companion. That sounds like it was an intense and immersive game to suck you into it that well. Thank you for sharing that with us all!

[Tetrakarn]

Something I rarely get to experience, in Dungeons and Dragons 5e, is personalized interactions for my player character(s).

I had joined a sortof pickup game for Adventure League with a brand new level 1 Aasimar Cleric. I entered the story where several other low level players had failed to take a small stronghold held by orcs, and ogres. Additionally, one of the player characters had been captured in the previous session. It was incredible daunting and I was concerned how we could succeed at all. My first decision was to use all my limited healing to restore the melee characters as they planned to soon try a rescue attempt. I was the youngest and most inexperienced at this table and my character's physical description must have inspired the dungeon master to craft the most uncomfortable but interesting roleplay experience I've ever had.

Our strategy was to lure away a majority of the forces while the remaining players did the rescuing - however I had no idea if any of us had the place mapped out for any of this to work. Our mage and rogue attempted to start reconnaissance but due to poor dice rolls we were discovered instantly and faced a horde of barbarian like orcs. Their leader "Beserga" took one look at me and instantly struck me down with her reckless attack, and her forces captured two other characters.

We awoke, stripped of our gear, in binds, and circled by the orcs along with the captive player and two npc hostages. Beserga took an interest in my character's motivation "to help others" while being ignorant to the events established in the module. Her tribe had been kicked out from their home by a dragon, forced to raid local settlements, and take back...captives for mating. I agreed to my ignorance but threatened her that my race carries infernal as well as celestial blood but she wasn't concerned by hereditary curses. I, as a player, was stunned and impressed where the session had gone. With more time I could have provided a better response to Beserga but I was busy with other issues at the time.

Beserga made us an offer: For every player character that stayed, she would let an NPC walk free. Despite my personal feelings, my character agreed to stay. However, the other player characters, true to their own natures, rebelled. They put up a good fight but were cut down. I was moved into a separate holding cell with the rogue (he offered to stay too) while the NPCs were set free. At this point the DM told us that the guards had fallen asleep which presented us with a moral dilemma: stay and honor your promise to the orcs - or escape. The rogue had no qualms escaping. At this point I couldn't bear to sacrifice this character and left.

Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have to present sympathetic villains for every goblin, dragon, or evil necromancer you encounter. In fact, it makes combat difficult with the knowledge that you could solve a problem nonviolently. But, boy does it make the world feel real. Afterwards the dm and other players congratulated me for my engagement with the game; the dm revealed the story set this encounter for level 6 which made me feel a little better about getting rekt.

My drawing of my character:
images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2…

[Tsar Gatto]

Two good stories and good experiences there. Thanks for sharing.

I’ve been running a 5e campaign for the past two years with the same group. We’ve made it through Horde of the Dragon queen and are on the penultimate chapter of the rise of Tiamat (all-be it with plenty of changes and PC driven tangents).

That being said I’d say my most memorable experience was as a player in another campaign.

I joined a group playing The Curse of Strahd part way through. I was a Tabaxi Cleric ‘charlatan’ which was interesting. Worshipped a Tabaxi goddess of hedonism, which was fun. Dex based cleric with a few feats that made his Passive perception 26 or something rediculous.

Anyway, the group consisted of an Half-Orc barbarian and Tiefling rogue (who were a couple irl and married in the game) and a Tiefling ranger (who later turned out to be a traitor all along, but I digress).

We were moving through a little town when Strahd and his cronies attacked. It was an intense battle anyway, but became even more so when Strahd used some ability to mind control our Orc and promptly ordered him to attack his wife.

With failed saving throws it worked and in one round he downed her. I had been attempting to flee into the nearby church but instead now attempted to move towards the rouge to heal her.

Sadly Strahd’s second, a powerful vampire servant named Rashad or something, had other plans and then also managed to down me after a brief scuffle. Following this he proceeded to literally kill my character - the soul of my cleric left his body and ascended into the ‘caress of Sharess’ (Sharess being his Goddess).

Now our DM at the time was a hard dice man. The dice decided the fate of everything, so a total party kill and loss of the campaign was a real possibility here.

An NPC priest (commonor stats) rushed out of the church and used his action to revivify me. Yanking the Tabaxi’s soul from the eternal peace he had just embraced he awakened bleeding as a swarm of vampire bats then proceeded to critically hit and therefore ‘strip the flesh from his shrieking form as the swarm reduces the old priest to nothing but bones’.

Following that I managed to pull the rogue into the church. The half-orc attempted to follow to kill me once more, but stepping across the threshold for the church lifted the curse - whilst also keeping the undead vampire types outside who after a short while retreated. (Would have been nice to figure out sooner that churches were safeground…)

It was very intense and satisfying to make it through by the skin of our teeth.

My cleric took the bones of the priest and reverently stored them in his pack with the intention of one day casting a resurrection spell upon them to return the favour to the man who’d through his actions saved us all. As his body did not remain I did not currently have a spell that could revive him.

A good time was had by all.

[Zmija Sebastian]

I slayed a bunch of fey on one of their traveling sky-ships. And used the sail to parachute to the crash site where I ripped out their hearts and organs to eat later on for myself. I so far have made it to the continent where I played Tomb of Annihilation at my Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League. I'm 4 levels from making it to the "starting" point of my quest there. I joined with a notation packet on January 16th 2019 to be a Weapon-Master, with a Sell-Sword subclass and Shadow-Bringer background. Since they were already in adventure I got in as a level 10 Champion.

I'm currently out of an underground arena where I slew like 27 lizardmen and am nearing an entrance to the Tomb of Annihilation underground. There's about 1000ft or 3000ft from a stone wall that will turn when I get to it. But there's nothing but skeletons in my way. I already went in scything it up and reaping them down but had to return to the beginning, even through the first skeletons(which became hordes), pass the skeletons I'll probably fight a dracolich in the next room. I have online intel about becoming a Dragon-Slayer. I need to make full dragon armor by level 8 and have created a dragon bastard sword by level 6. I'm 5. I don't really care about those stuff- as I started as a Champion with just my scythe and leather armor. After I return to that level 10 questly through this opening story to it all I'll don what you see to the left.

But yeah I'm totally going to slay the dracolich after all these skeletons.