Genius D&D Player Expertly Outsmarts The DM

[jesternario]

I love this. When you take what the GM is doing and don't wreck his campaign with your actions, but instead make the story so much better, that is such an interesting thing.

[GoldenSunAlex]

'They didn't die - they were just sent to another dimension.'

"I banish you to the Shadow Realm!"

[Gravity_Fish]

DM from story 1 here!
Big thanks to CritCrab for telling my story and thanks everyone for the kind words!
Dnd for me it's always about collaborative story telling, I'll never tell my players they can't do something if it's something their characters can and would do. In return they help shape the world i make in ways I'd never be able to ❤
Saw a few comments about being incapped after banishment. But RAW, that's only if they're native to the plane and they go to the demi plane. But as someone else said, even if it wasn't the case, it's way too awesome of a moment to not let it happen.
Rule of cool 🤘
And yes, i have biiiig plans for the soul eater 😈

[Saavryn]

That first story is full of unintended consequences... They let a soul devourer into the plane of souls. I don't forsee anything good coming of this.

[WulfgarOpenthroat]

"I pull the door" "Ok, you pull the entire ship" is some serious troll logic from the GM there. No way a reasonable person could have expected that, even with the "are you sure?" warning.

[redstoneraptor]

Instead of “are you sure you want to do that?”, maybe DMs should be asking, “What do you expect to happen when you do this?”, and then with brutal honesty just say, “Yeah, that’s not how it would go down, but you’re welcome to try.”

[MagnaFae]

I exploited an unintended mistake made by my DM and defeated his CR 10 mini-boss with a single spell.

In a campaign session four months back, the party was storming a magic college to stop the headmaster from completing a ritual that would ascend him to godhood. Because of the ritual, space-time was distorting, causing the interior dimensions of the college to change and expand/compress when we passed into a new area.

We passed through one door into the middle of a possibly infinite stairwell. We dropped a stone down the shaft and we never saw/heard it land. It just got swallowed up by the darkness below.

We climbed the next few hundred stairs up, and the next door we needed to get through was being guarded by a hulking golem of flesh and stone, inlaid with magical gemstones for eyes. The headmaster had presumably stationed it here to deter anyone like us who might stop him. Our DM makes a big point about how massive, heavy, and imposing this golem is, and how it sees all of us, waiting for us to make the first move.

So our fighter, who recently acquired a gun, got into position and tried to shoot at it. The bullet hit but glanced off the stone, which probably meant that it was resistant to non-magical weapons.

I’m detailing all this to stress the fact that the DM built up this golem to be a very difficult enemy, and based on past fights, we could expect this combat to take about 1-2 hours.

But I had a stroke of brilliance, and a devious plot began to brew in my mind.

We rolled initiative to start combat. My warlock rolled highest with a total of 23, and I told the group, “I’m gonna do something that will either achieve nothing, or end the combat immediately.”

The other players are intrigued, and the DM has no clue what shenanigans I’m about to pull.

I casted a 5th Level spell called Telekinesis, which (if my Charisma roll beat his countering Strength roll) would allow me to move the golem 30 feet in any direction.

I roll 20 Charisma. The golem is very strong, but only rolls 10 Strength.

“Okay, ” says the DM. “Where do you move the golem?”

And I tell him my plan. “I move the golem 30 feet diagonally off the stairs, so that it’s suspended directly over the endless chasm. And I drop concentration on the spell at the end of my turn to make it fall.”

And the golem falls. It has no ability to fly, and no nearby ledges to grab onto. It falls, and falls, into the abyss.

The other players lost their shit (in an excited way) and the DM said he couldn’t even be mad that I outsmarted him.

[Debatra.]

...While I'm not going to defend someone ignoring "Are you sure about that?", or Varok's conduct in general, that crash definitely seemed to come out of nowhere. I can't really blame him for not forseeing "open door = instantly crash ship".

[ronodenthal]

Recently had players realize a boss had reasons to value a bridge they needed to cross for their mission more than they did. So they just bypassed the fight entirely by threatening to cut the ropes. Boss was on the other side and I had intended for this to be an hour+ long slog of them trying to cross while under fire and being intercepted by mooks. Turned into a pretty terse negotiation session that was pretty cool.

Yeah it was both terrifying and hilarious at the same time. They apologized but I was pretty pleased with their ingenuity.

[biancaesteban]

Bianca Esteban
11 minutes ago
I just started watching this video (posted by our DM) thinking it would be similar to our campaign. As the story went on, I realised “Hang on a sec. That’s exactly what happened in our campaign!” And then…OMG THIS IS OUR CAMPAIGN!!! I was sitting right next to the Cleric when he pulled that move and all six of us were stunned into speechlessness. I started to tear up. Our Cleric is the heart and soul of our party. He’s the glue that keeps us all together. That he sacrificed himself for us was perfectly in character, but we were ruined afterwards. We were doing so well in the fight…right up until the Ultroloth started sucking the life out of our allies. We couldn’t save everyone, but our Cleric saved everyone who was left. We just this past session finally found him in the Beastlands and, OMG, it was another tearjerking moment 😭 so unbelievably poignant and bittersweet. We absolutely still have the Ultroloth as a huge problem (and it’s not even the biggest problem we have, btw), but we’ll be better prepared next time, and of course, we have our Cleric 😍 We love you!!

[ZorotheGallade]

The portable hole and bag of holding planar implosion is the kind of Godzilla Treshold you cross when you absolutely need everything in close distance to disappear and don't care if that includes you. Ballsiest move you can pull.

[kayq]

My dm once confessed to me that, for a while, whenever I'd make a plot related guess that was right, he'd change what was going to happen so he could keep the element of surprise. (He'd previously mentioned that he made hooks and foreshadowing really, really subtle.) He realized it was a jerk move and swore to himself that he wouldn't do it again. But by that time I'd decided I wasn’t going to discuss my serious theories with him anymore because I was tired of always being wrong.

[hackcubit]

Another excellent green flag: when the DM is happy to be outsmarted. I read so many crazy stories where the GM refuses to process the curveballs that their players throw at them, when as far as I'm concerned, these curveballs are always the best parts of the roleplaying experience.

[JKevinCarrier]

That first story was brilliant! Good on the Cleric for coming up with the plan, and good on the DM for allowing it.
That last story -- I'm tempted to say Everyone Sucks Here. Varok was obviously being irritating. But instead of trying to talk it out with him, OP deliberately pushes his buttons and makes things worse. And then the DM doubles down by deciding to have his powers go wonky at the worst possible moment ("You open the door so hard that the ship crashes". Seriously?). The result is a completely predictable and preventable disaster. Bad form all around.

[carolynwilliams]

Ahh, I love smart players. A number of mine tend to find as many ways to exploit certain mechanics because they can. This is how my party ended up with a plan to 'hug' Tiamat, which involved the ridiculous triple-classed barbarian/rogue/fighter becoming huge and grappling the Dragon Queen to stop her from moving about the battlefield when she emerged from a portal. I wasn't even mad, I just made sure I had a suitably epic looking Tiamat figure and a suitably big figure for the character. It was GLORIOUS!

Incidentally, my husband is lovingly 'banned' from playing control wizards, because he's REALLY good at it. This man has beaten two liches in two different campaigns with Bigby's hand and various enviromental factors.

[MGlBlaze]

Casting Banishment on yourself to go to your own home plane is a really funny example of lateral thinking. I don't know if I would have thought of that.

[mellsfunni]

The second story’s campaign seems to be directly inspired by the start of the Sith Inquisitor story in SWtOR.

[wolfleclair]

The first story was good, but in the second.... Without criticizing the characters The force pull should have just ripped the door off directly at Varok, either injuring or possibly killing him. The whole ship would not have moved as the pull was only focused on a small part of the whole, also it's not like ships in Star Wars are diecast and assembled in only a few pieces. I've ran Star Wars games before and that is just not how you properly utilize force power manipulation or ships. Thank you CritCrab for another brain tickling experience. =^_^=

[EwMatias]

To be absolutely honest, Verrick was playing a perfect Sith. I don't think it's fair to blame him for that. I also don't believe "force pulling a door"="force pulling apart the entire ship" is foregone conclusion that anyone should have seen coming.

[AshleyBeby]

0:01 players derailing the campaign sounds like the fun of D&D (as someone who has only just made a character sheet)