Grrl Power #882 – The slippery arm of the law
Just be thankful it’s freshly summoned lube.
Sydney’s not actually correct about it being a cantrip. It’s like the level 6 version of “Lube.” Honestly I feel bad for whoever has to clean up after this fight. That stuff does not wash off easily, and the duration is about 500 hours. Because succubi wildly overestimate every other races’ endurance.
Dabbler is one of those adventurers who knows that in a universe of infinite possibilities, it doesn’t matter how many guns you have, or grenades or cool gadgets. They’re tough to use if you can’t stand. While the average merc or adventurer has good traction, it takes exceptional traction to resist a spell like that. And the ones who are prepared for that eventuality might not be ready for the web spell, and the ones ready for that might not be ready for the insect swarm spell.
Don’t get me wrong, Dabbler is a bullets and swords kind of gal most of the time, but she knows it’s the oddball attack that gets the job done.
Anyone have any unusual takedown stories from your tabletop games? I was in a D&D party once that wound up stripped of all their equipment and facing off against a bunch of vampires. The problem being that vampires in D&D can’t be hurt unless you use magical weapons on them. A friend of mine playing a barbarian with 18/100 strength and 3 intelligence (I watched him roll the character up – he had the craziest dice karma) logiced that vampires can’t be hurt by non-magical weapons… because they’re magic. So, one successful grapple check later and our barbarian was beating one vampire to death with another. If vampires can hurt each other in a fight, they can certainly hurt each other if one of them is being used as a maul.
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Sydney should have her shield up. Really, it’s important.
One thing I’m noticing is how day-at-the-office Sydney is taking this.
She’s really turning into a veteran.
All that is interesting the part that really caught my attention is that while Sydney is treating this like it’s a normal part of life in the background with multiple battles taking place at the same time maybe one of them (Heatwave ) will get a close-up like how Achilles stole a piece of the Limelight
>the background with multiple battles taking place at the same time
Musashi wrote in The Book of Five Rings that all battles degenerate into a series of duels
How a half hour battle royal can have the excuse of spitting same time focus across a dozen or more fights to occupy several hours worth of episodes.
Musashi was catastrophically wrong on several matters and that’s one of them. Even back in the pre-gunpowder era battles only degenerated into a bunch of individual duals if both sides totally lacked discipline.
Indeed, one of the reasons that the Romans often won against their enemies in Gaul and Germany was their discipline and their enemies propensity for single combat.
Yeah, I was going to say something about that, too. In a properly run duel, you don’t have to worry about the enemy behind you stabbing you in the kidneys, while the guy you’re trading blows with tries not to laugh.
Hell, forget discipline, which basically allowed the Romans to turn a mass of guys into a tank. Even without that, how often do you think people neatly grouped up into twos, in a whirling melee? You see someone near you from the other army, you stab the bugger, even if he’s fighting someone else and doesn’t see you … particularly if he doesn’t see you. Best time for it.
If you see someone who’s down and vulnerable, kick him. If you aren’t willing to kick an enemy when he’s down, don’t kick him when he’s up. Fuck honor on the battlefield. Honor is for the diplomats and logistics types to figure out, before and after the battle.
Alas, she can only hold 2 orbs at once, she needs the light hook to hold the stasis pod thing, and she is flying with the other orb, so she can’t have her shield up. I’m assuming she considered the maneuverability of flight to be currently more important than her shield. And she has gotten quite fast with the orbs, she can probably grab the shield and drop the light hook without much delay. Although human reaction time is still not a risk she should necessarily be taking.
I see they appear to have a Sontaran on their team…
I think that’s a Sontaran nurse waiting and watching for any wounded enemies to treat to make up for a previous disgrace.
No, that’s the one we saw earlier (and now getting punched in the face by Morph)
Don’t worry Sydney every human has been there and feels your pain
A page that I do believe Bill Paxton would enjoy. XD
If he was alive yes. RIP Hudson.
I was hoping to see someone get that reference quickly. Good job sir.
Slick move!
Guh-ROAN!
You may want to read some of Ursula Vernon’s D&D RP logs on her blog.
(Yes, that Ursula, of Digger fame)
https://tkingfisher.dreamwidth.org/
Use the tags link to find the posts.
Digger is one of the best reads on the interwebz and I will die on that hill.
I don’t think we live in a world where your statement needs defending. HAVE A NAME. NAME IS ED.
Oh blood and shale
TOO SOON, MAN!
[sniff] Ed was too pure for this world. Er…that world. You know what I mean.
Do you have any idea how old that hill is?
I absolutely loved Digger. I miss Digger terribly.
I don’t miss digger…
I have the Hardcover Omnibus edition…
signed.
Don’t you love Kickstarter?
The most unrealistic part of this conflict is the lack of looky-loos with phones out festooning the sides of the street. Yeah, some have the smarts to head for cover, but we all know that the average mob of people is essentially a critter is in of itself, and a pretty stupid one at that.
Yep. Because, as Terry Pratchett observed in his Discworld series.
“Ordinary Ankh-Morpork citizens are inordinately fond of street theatre, and have a very liberal definition of such. They will gather and watch anything occurring in the streets, while something that is actually interesting can bring the city to a complete halt.”
What book’s that from, I can’t find it…
I’d guess Guards! Guards!
I think you are right. I know it’s a Sam Vimes line. And he makes that reference multiple times. Maybe that or Feet Of Clay
Yep. Because as Terry Pratchett observed in his Discworld series, “Ordinary Ankh-Morpork citizens are inordinately fond of street theatre, and have a very liberal definition of such. They will gather and watch anything occurring in the streets, while something that is actually interesting can bring the city to a complete halt.”
Sorry for the duplicate, my post vanished and I thought it hadn’t gone through.
Using a Watery Sphere to pickup and drag a monster through a sickening cloud OVER AND OVER again.
We named it the vomit comet
“Just be thankful it’s freshly summoned lube.”
Wait. Are you implying that Dabbler has a spell to summon old used lube?
I think I know from *where*…
That’s … not summoning
Wow all that fancy poachers tech, be a shame if some back water planet inhabited my metaphysically powered high level physics breaking beings were to confiscate and research it.
Always a good idea to search after a battle. Never know what you may find.
Comics, gaming OR real life.
Rule #1 Loot then burn. Sadly this is an occupied location so they’ll have to use plasma torches to sterilize the location as using the nuclear option is frowned upon in occupied locations. Definitely have to search carefully to make sure no civilians are left or their personal property. (any loose items are going straight to be sorted.)
Also did we just learn Dabbler watched Dragon Ball Z Abridged?
For those not familair with Team Four Star and their work, here is a (non team four star) youtube link to the “I’m bored” dialogue. : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLyTC4XBohM
They made a fantastic parody of Dragon Ball Z, and only the first 3 episodes or so haven’t aged, the rest if gold.
And they’re known for their callbacks, so much so, that some of them have leaked into other memes.
There’s also the ‘acceptance speech limit’ girl from the Ignobel award ceremony
It doesn’t pay to bore Dabbler. It doesn’t pay to be overconfident when facing the unknown. And Dabbler mating rituals probably involves sweeping her “date” off their feet. Literally.
https://youtu.be/4fcSm2RZJpw?t=12
“If vampires can hurt each other in a fight, they can certainly hurt each other if one of them is being used as a maul.”
That sounds like the logic Halo used on that guy with the impenetrable skin and the claws that could cut through anything.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-212-premature-articulation/
I mean vampires are a great weapon regardless, ask Dr Mc Ninja
Or a rocket surfboard, either way.
Not really, her logic was you can’t have both “claws that cut anything” and “skin that nothing can penetrate”. It is either one or the other.
the example logic is more: Vampires can’t be hurt by normal weapon, vampires can hurt each other, hence vampire count as magic weapons. QED.
My ranger, while airborne on her Dragonnel mount, spiked several enemy soldiers with a bunch of Tanglefoot Bags. After the soldiers were well-stuck together, a high Riding check by my ranger and a high strength check by my Dragonnel resulted in the soldiers being lifted and used first as a wrecking ball, then as a bowling ball against their compatriots.
Not a takedown exactly, but from Champions back in the late 80s/early 90s…
Our superhero team was assisting insurgents on an alien world, up against some nasty shapeshifters. We were fighting their leader, who had embedded in his body a chunk of mineral with weird properties – it immunized against psychic powers, and couldn’t be phased through.
My character, Micromax the Sizeable Man, had a combination of Hank Pym’s and Vision’s powers – he could grow or shrink, and phase or increase his density, and combine any state along those two axes. So that’s when I had a brainstorm.
I grew to maximum size, went intangible, and swept my phased hand entirely through his blobby body. And then pointed out to the GM that I couldn’t phase through Magician’s Quartz.
So yeah, I ripped the rock right out of him and our team psychic was suddenly effective.
No. It’s a Can-Trip spell all right. See! They’re tripping!
Half level spells ftw. Let’s just hope none of the would-be kidnappers know the 1/2 level knock spell… (Material component: hand grenade)
That’s more like a low full level spell, because you can only carry a big limited amount and recharging requires time.
Furthermore nearly nobody in this fight doesn’t have at least resistance against that spell.
Funniest takedown I have ever seen in a D&D game was on a red dragon.
It wasn’t supposed to die in the very first fight. It was supposed to annoy our characters, capture them and then hound them through multiple games. After all, it is a dragon, right? Big, tough, scaly…
Dwarf gets mad at being chomped on (not killed because dragon was amused, not angry) throws hammer at dragon at point blank range. Not a magic returning hammer, just a regular one. Players rolls several natural 20s and dragon DIES!
We debated rather than played the rest of the night. I mean, it was a DRAGON! A magical beast killed with a regular non magical hammer? Player argued that the hammer hit the dragon handle first in the eye. That pretty much the only way such a puny weapon could do such damage. Dragon was too stunned by such a silly attack to blink, it seemed. Dragon died. DM was PISSED.
He made our life hell for the next few weeks and yes, that dwarf player got the brunt of it. But the look on the DM’s face when red dragon went down and stayed down was priceless.
>KILL DRAGON
WITH WHAT? YOUR BARE HANDS?
>YES
That’s idiotic. There are no mechanical rules for that, so the only way that happens is with DM permission. The DM literaly controls everything about the world. If the DM is pissed after that, it’s entirely his own fault.
Even being generous, I wouldn’t allow that to kill the Dragon. At most, poke his eye out. Which would make for a very satisfying session.
Yeah, there’s no rules for repeating crits, if you roll a 20 you just roll damage.
But if he really liked that rule, he could jsut say the dragon had an old injury or somethign that made the point where he hit it a super weak point
Best Dragon Takedown I had? Pathfinder game, DM decides to be a bit of a dick and puts an adult Red in our way over this massive stone bridge over a bottomless canyon. My Monk, who’s picked up this pair of Magical Tonfa earlier, happened to be part of a two-man team scouting the lay of the land on a nearby cliff. This however, happens to be when this small NPC army we’re assisting decides to rush the Dragon, and ofc it takes off and starts roasting them, narrowly missing the rest of the party, but makes the mistake of passing close to said cliff, So my monk takes a running jump into space, spinning the tonfa, which generates lightning, frying its eyes, landing on its head, then backflipping off as it flies low enough that our Alchemist/Ranger puts a couple of explosive crossbow bolts into the shoulder socket of its left wing and blows it clean off, causing the Dragon to faceplant into the bridge into the bridge hard enough to kill itself while my monk does a superhero landing in front of it.
Needless to say, the DM’s jaw dropped a bit, but hilariously, we also lost a party member because our Oread Barbarian got knocked off the bridge because he was also staring in shock at what just happened.
In his defense, that WAS 30 years ago…
Things have changed a bit in D&D since then. Good and bad.
Did love the Gnome Paladin whose mount was a giant spider. He used a Holy Avenger +5 longsword as a two handed weapon . He would ride up onto the ceiling or whatever and get free shots past enemy defenses because few if any looked up while facng our mighty band of nutcases. He rarely needed his armor and his spider was just as scary as he was.
True, that. The dragon didn’t HAVE to die. It could have just been hurt, disoriented, and lost an eye to the damage, such that it decided to retreat. And become the bane of their existence, heaping curse upon curse.
Dragon with an eyepatch – totally a missed opportunity for a pirate dragon. Possibly one with cursed treasure and an Ahab complex.
Funny take-down stories – these are from various games of Exalted I’ve been the GM for:
One time my then players were being chased by an army of dragon-blooded monks. They had magical power armor, some of which granted the wearers flight. To handle the fliers, the players outfitted their giant flying mammoth with armor plating and then simply rammed the fliers mid-air. Killed the fliers quite effectively, splattering him all over a mountainside.
Another foe with magic power-armor was dispatched quite gruesomely after having been pinned by one player, when another used her ability to speak with animals to call on all the insects in the area to burrow into the armor and eat the person inside.
In another game, with different players, my players knew they would soon be attacked by a potentially very powerful vampiric warrior of sorts, so they fortified their manse and built a huge steam-canon with the muzzle of the barrel right at the front door in chest height. To their surprise the guy attacking them actually tanked the first hit, leading to a combat encounter, but during that they managed to get the steam gun reloaded and shot him again after pinning him to hold him in place. That worked, very messily so.
a third group had a super stealthy player, but he didn’t use knives or swords for sneaky takedowns. He had a huge magical golden mallet. We coined the term “back-sledge” to describe what he did to people.
They had a giant flying mammoth? o_O
It’s exalted, giant flying mammoths fit right in.
One time I was in a group fighting an iron golem. Using full 2H power attack, my fighter was the only one who could barely crack its’ DR, but the golem’s AC was high enough that my power attacks wouldn’t hit. So the sorcerer cast grease, the monk grappled it to keep it prone, the bard used his song and the sorcerer and the druid aided my attacks. We chipped it to death 3hp at a time.
Is it just me or does it look like Dabbler just summoned a Lightsaber-like weapon to her hands in the 5th panel?
Well most likely either a magical not-lightsaber plasma bladed sword, or her version of the Wand of Watoomb.
or a VERY big tube of lube…
anyone else supprised sydney has not crushed the stasis pod like like it was an empty pop can?
also im going to guess the guy sydney was dealing with decided to “peaceably” surrender (and did not decide to be wrapped up in the lighthook tendril and broken)
I’m thinking the alien she caught is actually inside the Stasis Pod.
Or maybe she plans to use it on another of the Mercs.
Crush the Stasis Pod when they have several potential guests waiting for it already?
For a super-powered police group that handles super-powered villains, something like that is worth its weight in gold/gold-pressed Latinum/credits/cocoa beans or any other easily-trasported valuable.
Also it is a collapsible stasis pod in its collapsed state. Not that crushable.
Why would she crush it?
to make a “very convincing argument” for surrender and the pod it the centerpoint of the plan crushing it means that sydney no longer has to tote it about and guard it so no one can get ahold of it and that free’s her up to aid the others
Destroying evidence and priceless alien artifacts is frowned upon under military personal and cops.
Regarding unusual takedowns, two come to mind.
Background: We were playing a free German system called Orbis Incognita, with your basic humans, dwarfs and elves and not-so-regular trolls as playable races. The trolls are basically 2+ m tall, 150+ kg humanoids with lots of hair, lots of strenght, oversized teeth and a generally pseudo-Viking nature.
1. takedown:
One of my players played a troll destroyer, basically a melee fighter focused around a special kind of warhammer and one of the special classes of the trolls. During character creation, each class had a D6 roll for additional gear beyond the standard – stuff ranging from funny-to-slightly harmful on 1 to awesome on 6, with increasingly more nice to have in between. Our destroyer rolled a 2 and got a really good stone for throwing (+3 on attack rolls) weighing 1 kg. He was quite bad at throwing, since he did not invest into throwing weapons as a skill much.
He basically spent our whole first adventure lowkey bitching about said stone (the player was a bit of a powergamer). In the confrontation with the final boss of the adventure, in the process of said villain robbing a bank, the boss was in the process of getting away when our destroyer used his handy stone to throw at him. He scored a critical hit with his stone, caving the bad guy’s ribcage in then and there.
And he never bitched about his stone again.
2. takedown:
Two adventures later, the group was investigating the woes around the inheritance of a trading house, having been hired by the most competent of the possible inheritors to shed light on the recent occurrences. Middle of the adventure, our blue-blooded duelist locked horns with the fiancé of another possible inheritor, another blue blood that hope to restore his destitute financial situation if his fiancé inherited the trading house. They went to have a duel the next day, and our duelists opening attack unfortunately hit the bad guy in the family jewels. Bad guy goes down and our duelist wins. So far, the adventure is still on track, giving even better reason for further antagonism from this bad guy.
Unfortunately, in the next moment, the doctor treating the wound rolls a critical failure on his First Aid roll, and the bad guy dies. As mean as it sounds, the whole group was laughing at the turn of events, and fortunately for the GM, that guy was not the main villain of this adventure.
It’s not exactly a takedown, but a friend of mine once was in a D&D campaign and wanted a magical item in case the party ran into something that demanded a magical item from each member of the party, so he went to the bizarre (that’s how he said the DM referred to it) and bought an ornate wand, and then took it to a Magic User to have a Magic Mouth spell put on it, so it would say “Bang!” when activated.
He carried that wand for several years of game time, occasionally speculating whether things were bad enough to use the wand (he liked playing that up), but never used it until the party was being charged by an overwhelming force of mounted nomads. Figuring there was nothing to do but go out with style, he drew the wand from its ornate scabbard, assumed an heroic stance, and activated the wand.
The DM pulled out a piece of paper, looked it over, and told everyone to roll saving throws.
It seems that the DM had privately decided that when my friend had paid that Magic User to put that Magic Mouth spell on the wand, he drastically overpaid him, and the MU gave him his money’s worth. When the wand was activated, it did, indeed, say “Bang!”
At 300 decibels….
At 194 dB, sound waves become pressure waves. At 200 dB humans die. At 300 dB, it would be like standing on the edge of the caldera when Krakatoa blew it’s top. That’s wand was a weapon of mass destruction.
Good weapons can be deceptively small.
‘Bizarre’ (i.e. ‘weird’), or ‘bazaar’ (a type of market, especially common in Eastern countries such as India or Persia)?
Yes.
Is Sydney supposed to be landing in panel 5? I can’t really tell if she was flying or walking.
Flying, that’s why Mr Buble is no longer around
“Intergalactic”? Is the merc just using the wrong word or does the star traveling community in Grrl Power really have the ability to travel not only across our own galaxy but into neighboring galaxies as well?
Even the lesser Magalenic Cloud is about 200,000 light years away and that’s the closest galaxy to ours. For reference our own galaxy is pretty large as such things go and is about 50,000 light years across. So in theory if you could travel from one side of the galaxy to the other in a reasonable amount of time, I suppose you could get to the lesser Cloud in about 4x that time. Which isn’t impossible, but it seemed that the people who were doing star travel were taking a few days to get from star to star which does make traveling across the galaxy a years long trip.
That of course assumes that travel time is only determined by distance. If the ‘flatness’ of the gravity matters, you may be able to travel faster in the ’empty’ space between galaxies.
and wormholes(such as what Sydney can create fortravel) not only throw the rulebook away, but it sets it on fire first.
You know she’s intergalactic by her rendition of “We’ve got everything” ;)
Those slavers better hope that Dabbler favors water-based lube, otherwise Heatwave might set the whole puddle ON FIRE.
Ooo, that would be fun, specially when retelling the tale
“So, how did you get those burns?”
“…”
“Come on, it can’t be that bad, can it?”
“We were doing what should have been a simple snatch’n’grab on a pre-FTL world, when this succubus used lubricant to trip me, then one of her colleagues set the lube on fire.”
It’s magical lube, ergo it’s made of lube and not a specific petrochemical formula.
But then again, this is Dabbler, so I guess a spell of Create 1,1,2-Trimethylbenzeindole is not entirely out of the question.
If LUBE exists as an element within science OR magic, I trust Dabbler will find it, weaponize it, and use it recreationally for sex.
Both at the same time. I’m sure she’s weaponized recreational sex before… Why just kill them when you can f— them to death and get a meal out of it also.
The railgun-style dildo launcher…
The trick isn’t making a combination of viagra, XTC, and roofies into a lube, it’s making it skin permeable while still acting as a lubricant.
My wizard has killed enemies with a handful of ball-bearings. Animate Objects allows you to being ten tiny non-magical objects to life, and they then each get +8 to attack and do 1d4+4 damage. Attack with all of them and that’s 10d4 + 40 damage. Enemies die quickly to that.
That said, that’s a relatively well-known way to powergame that spell, so it may not qualify as anything unusual.
Let me see… Back when we were playing 3rd edition, my Sorceror once defeated a hydra by polymorphing it into a sheep. The party’s ranger then proceeded to tame said sheep and hauled it around with him as his pet for a number of sessions. We lost it when we were racing through a collapsing ruin, opened a door and were confronted by a room full of beholders (automatic anti-magic zone from the main eye). The ranger threw the sheep into the room, slammed the door, and we kept on running. We all got a good laugh out of imagining the beholders’ reactions when a sheep flew at them only to suddenly transform into a hydra.
Dennis E. Taylor wrote up a particularly hysterical takedown of a red dragon in his new novel Heaven’s River. I almost felt sorry for it….. But, you know….RED DRAGON.
The spell literaly has the word LUBE in the spell formation. XD
I checked the comments hoping someone else would notice this.
It took me multiple views of the page to even notice that.
So nobody mentions the X-Men phoenix move in the background?
RIGHT?! I would have thought more people would have noticed that than the Sontaran, but nope. Nothing, for such an obvious reference. Nothing.
The problem might be that it’s TOO obvious. We’re just taking it for granted that Heatwave’s gonna do that from time to time.
Considering Heatwave’s powers, Firestar would be more apt than Phoenix. ;-)
It was Hero Quest. I was a wizard and my friend a Britonian knight, sworn against magic.
We came against a wind elemental and I was knocked out. Only magic or a magic weapon could harm or touch a wind elemental according to the GM, so the knight was stuck without a way to retaliate… until he realised… a wizard is pretty magical…
So, wielding my wizard’s unconscious body, the Britonian knight pummelled the wind elemental to its death.
I actually heard a similar story a long time ago, but with somebody using an unconscious Monk as a Holy weapon to kill some undead/demon.
I vaguely remember my character dying from the experience and the Britonian knight simply noting that there was not only one less magical creature but one less magic user as a result of the battle… All together a double win as far as a Britonian knight is concerned.
I don’t know if a wizard is actually magical of body in that game but the GM found it so hilarious he allowed it.
I often play a grappling type character in D&D 5th edition and there’s nothing quite like explaining to the DM that you’re dual wielding and the guy you’re grappling in one hand is your weapon… Not much damage you can do with him but still funny and funnier still when you’ve grappled two dudes.
Seriously, a good grappler guild in that game is somewhat OP. Armour is useless against it and they can hardly do a thing if you’ve built your character to send them prone as well. DM just hates it when his big boss spends round after round eating dirt and getting dragged around, sometimes back through the dungeon traps I had to weather just to get there. Do some climbing or find a good pit and ask them how well the magical armour fends off fall damage. Whats that? Turns out the boss wizard had feather fall and is gently floating down below me? Oh dear, all I have left is a minor action which allows me to do something like flick a switch… or let go of the wall I’m hanging on to… Well I’m a nice tough fighter, how’s that wizard gonna enjoy my fall damage as it doubles into him/her?
“Beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker” was a standard part of our arsenal back in AD&D. They never expected it, it was great.
TBH I was actually thinking that Dabbler got her idea from watching Isekai Smartphone’s Slip spell, but then again…
They say that the gladiators in the Roman arenas who lived through multiple fights were the ones who left semicircle tracks in the sand from not lifting their feet. They had traction, and traction won the day for them every time. A “slip” type of spell is probably the most useful for a fight out of any of them.
Sometimes there’s just no kill like overkill. In our adventures my character got two trowing knifes that explode into dragon breath fireballs, given to him by the eldest of dragons (long story).
I used one to dispatch of a vampire elf who was so sneaky and fast, that the only thing we ever saw of her (apart from the remaining chunks after the fireball) were her arrows – that managed to completely bypass our tank’s armor… I needed to focus on locating her for a round or two to be able to even remotely make out her location – good thing fireballs aren’t a precision weapon.
The second one I used when our house was attacked by a demon (we kept pissing off demon summoners – even longer story). It made our tank and main powerhouse run berserk, the rest were focused on not dying to them or the minions. So I threw a regular knife at the big demon, to test his reaction. He didn’t care much, so I threw again. He thought it would do as little as the first one – but then he exploded. A+ mind game.
DM gifts well spent.
Would you look at all that stuff
They’ve got allen wrenches, gerbil feeders, toilet seats, electric heaters
Trash compactors, juice extractor, shower rods and water meters
Walkie-talkies, copper wires, safety goggles, radial tires
BB pellets, rubber mallets, fans and dehumidifiers
Picture hangers, paper cutters, waffle irons, window shutters
Paint removers, window louvres, masking tape and plastic gutters
Kitchen faucets, folding tables, weather stripping, jumper cables
Hooks and tackle, grout and spackle, power foggers, spoons and ladles
Pesticides for fumigation, high-performance lubrication
Metal roofing, water proofing, multi-purpose insulation
Air compressors, brass connectors, wrecking chisels, smoke detectors
Tire gauges, hamster cages, thermostats and bug deflectors
Trailer hitch demagnetizers, automatic circumcisers
Tennis rackets, angle brackets, Duracells and Energizers
Soffit panels, circuit breakers, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers
Calculators, generators, matching salt and pepper shakers
Clearly, they went to Space Ikea
And the ONLY thing they didn’t buy was a clue!
Shame they didn’t bother to pick up a spare clue or two :P
They were close. So very very close, but no cigar.
Going to the Hardware Store!
Standing outside the Hardware Store, counting visitors, so I can time my entrance to score a free ball-peen hammer.
Thank you for being men of culture.
Too much stuff = choice paralysis. Unless you have access to hammerspace you have to schlep all of that stuff to and from the site. After you go backpacking a time or two you figure out that there are a lot of things that you can leave at home. While tentacle head boy was riffling through his list of stuff Dabbs disabled him with what she had at hand. As noted elsewhere, the aquisitioneers don’t seem to have done their research. Unless, he was just monologuing to keep Dabbler occupied.
the DM let me use all my spells via arrow launch but it took an extra turn to ready the arrows. kind of an arcane archer. round 1 I used glue trap on the bridge where the bandits were all standing. round 2 I used blinding flash in the same spot. as our tech was getting ready to snipe one of them, I asked why we dont just run them over with the truck or wal kup and slit throats since they couldnt see or move for the next 5 minutes. the chat was silent for a full 30 seconds before the DM started telling us how much XP we got. didnt make us go through taking out the last 10 bandits.
I’ve got a couple amusing stories..
First one:
A friend of mine did this… decades ago. VERY early edition of D&D (pre-Red Box rules).
My friend was playing a lvl 1 fighter, somehow encounters a dragon. (Aren’t unleveled encounter tables grand?)
This was in a dungeon, the only access was a human-sized door. (Dragon in a bottle). My friend somehow enters the room before seeing the dragon, then becomes aware of it. Figuring he might as well die grandly, he slams the door, turns back to the dragon and shouts “HaHA! I’ve got you now!” The DM decides to have the dragon make a morale check, with only a 1% chance of failure, then rolls the dice. Dragon blows the roll, apparently panics, wants to make a get-away.
The fighter, seeing the dragon try to scramble back INTO the far wall, decides to do something smart, knowing that creatures are at their most dangerous when trapped, says “I am not without mercy, however. I will release you… for half of your treasure.”
Given a chance to get away from the little mad-thing and keep part of its treasure, agrees!
-End Story 1-
-Story 2-
Playing Talisman, the same friend that intimidated the dragon in the dungeon had his character get turned into a toad. (happens to everyone, basically) In his 3 turns hopping about, he encounters a lion. (Strength 5) Here he is as a toad (Strength 1) He figures he’s about to lose a life, so he rolls his die, getting a 6. He’s still almost certain to lose, but has a slim chance. The next player rolls the die for the lion, getting a 1! The toad WINS! Everyone at the table stares for a moment, then start imagining how the fight must have looked. Lion pounces near bush, where it thought it saw motion. Suddenly, from the bush, a pink blur snaps out, wraps around the lion’s neck, and snaps it!
Gamer at the table shakes his head and says “That toad has a mean streak a mile wide!”
-End Story 2-
One of my friends literally plays Talisman *as the Toad.* Not like he gets turned into a toad and doesn’t ever try to change back, no, he grabs the Toad character card during setup.
He was overall in the lead when we ended two of the three Talisman games that me and him were both involved in…
So, what’s the starting craft score of the toad?
My favourite takedown was fighting uber trolls in a cave. The trolls didn’t have their usual weaknesses, so were hard to put down. I took one that had been polymorphed into a snail by reaching into a narrow crevice in the wall, sticking it to the back wall, then crushing it. He turned back to full sized troll, in a crack in the wall.
A few sessions ago my D&D group was fighting a large group of goblins on a mountain. The whole terrain was inclined and somewhat slippery. After a while of maneuvering and killing a bunch of them, we end up with the higher ground. Then the cleric decides to wash the rest of the goblins down the mountain by casting “Create food and water” on top of them. Cue 5 minutes of unrestrained belly laughs by the whole table, including our DM.
“Give up Anakin, I’ve the high ground”
Actually there is not a lot evidence that the high ground is beneficial in melee combat. It can even be argued that it’s counter… blublub, crunch, crunch.
Who said anything about melee?
“I’ve the high ground” is also a phrase meaning ‘I am in the right’ (or, ‘you know I’m right’)