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 2014
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
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”.