Sometimes Adversarial DMs Can Be Fun…

Long, long ago we were playing in a campaign and had a flying ship. We hired troll shock troops. A little more expensive than normal mercenaries, but the extra cost was offset by reduced materiel costs — we didn’t have to pay for parachutes, the trolls would aim when they dropped on enemy troops.

time passed, we were away from our ship and the DM evidently forgot we had one…

The DM had ruled that ‘only fire and acid damage’ didn’t regenerate, so we couldn’t do the ‘chop it up and burn the bits’ solution. So on a later adventure we didn’t have enough fire solutions to completely cook the (not-our-employee) trolls and took to basically mincing them, reducing their hit points to deep negative values so we’d have time to do our thing and escape before they reconstituted enough to be a threat again.

This made our DM sad, so he ruled that it wasn’t the biggest chunk of troll that regenerated, but that trolls were rather like worms and each piece could reconstitute. He established this as a hard rule in the campaign.

We called them ‘mincelings’ for a while, but he ruled that they would grow back to full size and the name never stuck.

more time passes, we returned to our ship and some time later, to war

Me: “Rules define the world physics, right?”

DM: “Yeah.”

Me: “And house rules are as strong as published rules, right?”

DM: “Stronger, they overrule the published rules.” smug look

Me: “Okay. I make some changes to the ship’s facilities.”

Later:

“‘Awright boys! I learned something about you lot while we were on the ground. I pay normal rate for each of you what drops, but if you want to make even more money, I’ll pay the same again for each and every one of you boards later if you go through this woodchipper on your way down!'”

The look of horror on the DM’s face was amazing. But I’ll give him full points for honesty and integrity, and openness to the sheer awesomeness of the vision — even if it was nasty and sticky — of a trollential downpour of regenerating monsters to crush the Alliance of Light.

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2 Comments

  1. That’s an awesome story. Reminds me of the way my first OD&D campaign broke in ’75 when the rule for potion duration was off by itself, and vaguely optional by potion and I did not rule it in for the various monster control potions, so the PCs were riding their controlled dragons dropping their controlled wraiths and specters on villages to make and control more wraiths and spectres in a pyramid scheme of doom.

  2. Jay Dugger

    You would have loved the Eclipse Phase campaign I ran. Its main McGuffin was a Santa Claus machine which had, among other things, plans for pure fusion weapons. I could make these, or a factory for making them, out of sunlight and dirt.

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