 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Previous in DM of the Rings: DM of the Rings CXXXIII: Strategifications | Next in DM of the Rings: DM of the Rings CXXXV: There and Back Again |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Players tend to treat horses like motorcycles: They are vehicles which can go anywhere you can walk, will never wander off, have no fear, feel no pain, and can travel at top speed for as long as you like.
And if you think players abuse the rules surrounding backpacks, just wait until they get their hands on the greatest of all interdimensional containers, saddlebags.
|
|
|
|
|
Previous in DM of the Rings: DM of the Rings CXXXIII: Strategifications | Next in DM of the Rings: DM of the Rings CXXXV: There and Back Again |
150. There are now n+1 comments, where n is a ridiculous number.
I find your lack of pants disturbing. . .
The DM should know better than to try to part a player from their loot, even if it defies all logic for them to still have it.
Hilarious
I love this
Once my DM actually gave me a magical teleporting device, just so everyone could avoid the inconveniences of mundane cross-continental travel.
I miss that little magic box.
Riverdale…
Riverdale? Far more likely he left his pants in Edoras…
it gets worse in campaigns were there is loot and the party is carrying a city sized pile of gold coins between them
When I play I often refuse to ride (and put no points into the skill), and insist on travelling by cart. The players hate me right up until it comes time for an encumberance check, when I become the bestest friend everyone ever had.
Steve.
Every Dm should know that when the time arrives all players are Guybrush Threepwood and have all the loot they could possably ever want on them when they see a merchant.
I think the next comic should be a screen-cap one based on Citizen Kane.
Yes, this is my “Hearst Post”.
Steve.
Man, ain’t that the truth? They either abuse horses and saddlebags, or they go through horses like water, buying one at each town they come to, since they always seem to be going into places that are inaccessible to horses (and yet, they buy them to travel TO these places…then end up leaving them at the entrance). Amusingly, as a result, the players in my current campaign have a rule: never name your horse. Hehehe.
Spot on comic, as usual, Shamus
Gondor has no pants. Gondor needs no pants.
Perfect, I once played a BESM campaign where i was a gnome mage with “hammerspace” or literally, the area behind my back underneath the trenchcoat was a garage sized area that could hold a car (modern setting) and all the weapons and gear that we could need. saved us time and worries, but we abused it horribly.
My DM does fear checks on the horse. Getting bucked off in the middle of battle while the horse runs off to save its own hide is always fun.
Aaahhh… The “we didn’t leave the horses behind” argument. It’s like a rite of passage every DM must suffer through.
Always hilarious Shamus!
The hardest I have laughed yet in the series was the “wearing enough metal to make a buick” so if he could swim it so could the horses. Caught me off-guard. I look forward to reading it every MWF.
Beckyzoole: Bwahaha!
I laughed myself silly; my wife asked what’s so funny. The pants… the pants… Jesus, this was one of the best strips ever.
Just as a side note, I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that was “Rivendale”, not “Riverdale”. I don’t recall seeing a member of Archie’s gang in that section.
Ahaha saddlebags. They transcend RP phenomena. Anyone remember the magical saddlebag (permanently attached to horse) in Harvest Moon: Back to Nature? Anything you put in the saddlebag would automatically go into the sales bin. It didn’t matter how many squishy tomatoes you stuffed in it.
Um, El Capitan? You do know that it’s a running gag in this strip that the players can’t remember the names of any of the people and places, right?
The author knows it’s Rivendale. The player probably can’t remember his own character’s name. ;)
It’s a joke, Capitan. The name of the city is Rivendell.
Ooh, ninja’d!
Rivendell *groans*
“Gondor has no pants. Gondor needs no pants.” – someone’s watched the Bakshi cartoon lately?
(Aragorn, for some reason, forsook pants in favor of a leather loincloth for that movie.)
There is one way to get around this: have 1 player make a character that is completely attached to his/her horse at the hip. A knight with a lance. A peddler with a cart. Etc. This guarantees that (1.) all horses traveling with the party get considered in methods of travel, and (2.) nobody violates encumbrance rules. It’s a win-win situation for players and DM alike.
Best of all, (3.) dead horses can be rendered down for emergency food rations.
“Rivendell” says the fanboy…
Ah, the horse – source of more RPG arguments than anything but Diplomacy. Having a player with some horse experience is invaluable in a game.
Aside: I once got flamed on the WotC boards for suggesting that a person would move slower through shin-deep mud than a horse would. I was told that deep mud kills horses; having grown up in a rural area, this was news to me.
(Yes, horses can catch some pretty nasty conditions from deep mud, but that’s like saying that a cut from a rusty nail kills you instantly.)
Cenobite Says:
There is one way to get around this: have 1 player make a character that is completely attached to his/her horse at the hip.
Force players to be centaurs? Radical, but it might just work.
Steve
[Telas] Silly boy. You must know by now that facts and actual experience are of no importace in a net brawl.
Steve.
Always…ALWAYS ask the PC “What are you doing with your horses”. If you forget and you can’t convince they players they shouldn’t have them, kill the horses off at the next most inconvenient for the players.
Did Aragorn just used logic?? 0.o. I’m shocked Shamus! You should know better than to have him use logic!
My gaming groups will beg/borrow/steal/buy a portable hole as quick as they can. NOT ONLY will it hold all the loot. It can carry the dead/petrified PC’s and even be an offensive weapon.
Two characters, an illusionist and a bard, found themselves in a treasure room with a statue of a rather nasty dwarf with a hammer for one hand and a spike for the other. Spidy-sense told them it was a guardian.
Knowing they would get pulped if they activated it, they opened up the portable hole immediately in front of the statue. One character touched a chest while the other stood by the hole. The golem animated and fell into the hole where he was wrapped up.
The illusionist and bard made off with the loot and the golem was saved for the following week when the party’s fighters would rejoin the game.
Of course Aragorn is using logic now. Ever since he found out he was king, he’s been going to night school to learn how to be a king. (Next week, he learns the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow. The week after, he finds what he had learned the previous week is only for African swallows.)
Ahhh the bag of holding! I managed to stuff a cooler of body parts in mine. Don’t ask…
Consulting this map should remind them where they left the horses.
http://www.ooblick.com/text/tomordor/
The “Whose side are you on” line is paraphrased differently in our group. The absolute, never-forget, don’t do under penalty of character death A#1 rule above all others is:
“Don’t help the DM!” (usually yelled loudly in chorus)
OldschoolGM “If you forget and you can’t convince they players they shouldn’t have them, kill the horses off at the next most inconvenient for the players.”
I definitely agree with oldschoolGM, if a player abuses a rule and gets away with it, I usually make them pay in spades later. It’s a karma thing :)
P.S. – I once had a player cry when I killed her dapple grey gelding she named Shadow Mist. She spent 30 minutes writing its description and personality, I think I killed it the first five minutes of game play. C’est la gare
Sorely McFister Says:
C’est la gar
“It’s the station”????
Steve.
“We leave the horses behind.”
“We leave the horse’s behind.”
/snicker
what a difference an apostrophe makes! :)
drezta Says:
it gets worse in campaigns were there is loot and the party is carrying a city sized pile of gold coins between them
In the campaign I’m currently part of, a significant amount of gold was stolen from the town coffers. We managed to find it… only to discover that 30,000 gold pieces in a large-ish chest is just a *bit* more than the Earth Genasi Barbarian with 20 STR was able to carry.
At least he was able to push the chest to where the horses were. Quadrapeds get that extra bonus for bein’ 4-legged, dontcha know.
Absolutely Brilliant!
I was hard pressed to keep the laughing to a low enough level that my fellow cube-farmers were not disturbed/curious/jealous. :D
My players have never let me forget the time they left their horses securely hobbled so they couldn’t wander off while the PCs were in the dungeon. Shame they forgot they were in stirge country…
The ultimate soln to the horse problem…
a flying horse that turns into a human that also serves as a squire. I have no idea how our paladin got this person/creature’s loyalty, but it works.
I was in a campaign recently when the departure of a player happened to coincide with our party entering a dungeon. Throughout our dungeon crawl, I kept voicing my fear that Alestor was sitting up there in his camp, eating our horses. When we made it out of the dungeon, discovering that several months had passed, we discovered the DMs had been listening; Alestor had indeed eaten the horses.
@38, I think that was “c’est la guerre”, spelt American. You probably new that, but you know, compulsive pedant here.
Cheers, lovely comic with a great clou :)
But horses can also be fun for a referee. I have a player in one game who has a horse that faints whenever it feels threatened. Now sometimes the horse is actually fainting – especially when blood splashes nearby – but most of the time it has learned that if it falls down that #1, his owner runs over and kills all the monsters nearby and then #2, the horse then gets a big food treat when it ‘wakes up’.
“Enough metal to make a Buick” was one of the best lines ever, Shamus.
Great, Tardis backpack, Tardis Saddlebag.
roxysteve & Cenobite Say:”There is one way to get around this: have 1 player make a character that is completely attached to his/her horse at the hip.
Force players to be centaurs? Radical, but it might just work.”
I once played a centaur (well, a polymorphed dwarf to be technical.) It was great fun until I was faced with a ladder…