T w e n t y S i d e d
If the DM is against you, it doesn’t matter what you roll. You’re going down.
Every day I’m grateful that I get the privilege of playing with people I actually like.
From The Archives:
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Top 64 Videogames
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
Spoiler Warning
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
To be fair to the DM, what Aragorn wants to do sounds pretty dangerous. Even with a non-evil DM, I’d expect both the skill check and the hilarious consequences after he rolled a critical failure.
“Roll to fall off a charging animal” is honestly pretty reasonable even for a DM who doesn’t have it out for a player, there are a lot of ways it could go really badly (such as getting caught in the harness and failing to separate and being dragged). I fell off a horse once in my early teens and while thankfully it just knocked the wind out of me it certainly opened my eyes to the potential dangers of attempting an uncontrolled rapid dismount of a moving animal.
“No saving throw for nature’s call” is also low-key a pretty funny line.
Oh, it’s super dangerous. Everyone knows a horse is basically a car.
Worse. A horse is like a motorcycle that can kick you.
Oh yeah, requesting some kind of a roll here is perfectly reasonable of the GM (even if this one is doing it for the wrong reasons). What’s more they’re actually doing the right thing (though again, probably for the reason) by making the consequences more interesting than just “fell off bad, take some damage”.
Oh yeah, and especially because Aragorn specifically tried to jump off right before it fell of the cliff – there are a lot of ways that could go wrong. Jumping off too early and giving the warg a chance to skid to a stop before falling and facing you would certainly be another fail-state.
Though, I will grant that at this point the players are definitely predisposed to be in an adversarial relationship with the GM, so it makes perfect sense for them to be combative about the roll by this point.
The best savage of Peter Jackson in the DMOTR comic.
This brought a smile to my face, and to my girlfriend too :)
This always made me rofl!
Gold comedy! :D
My son’s DM seems to delight in killing players. They enjoyed the comic and said “yep, that’s our DM”.