From Adventuring Apocalypse Dragons to the PC Pile of Bugs, What the 3 Wise DMs Learned From Our (Mis)Adventures That Crossed the Line
Have you ever wanted to give your PC party a pet dragon? What about when it turns out to be unbelievably OP? Well, we’ve done it and hundreds of other DM stunts that ranged from “unconventional” to “ill-advised” to “Are you C-R-A-Z-Y?!” Here are the stunts we’ve pulled DMing TTRPGs that even we thought might have gone too far. Including how we implemented them in the game mechanics, how they worked out, and what we wish we did differently.
These stories cross many editions of D&D, including 5E, but the lessons apply to any RPG you play. This is system-agnostic mayhem. … We just hope you’ll still respect us in the morning.
3:00 Stunt 1: My Pet Dragon … The Super OP Spawn of Tiamat
11:00 Stunt 2: The +50 Sword of Dragon Slaying
18:00 Stunt 3: Turning a PC into a Pile of Undead Bugs … and Letting Him Continue to Play the Character
26:00 Can you do something crazy with one player without alienating the other players?
31:00 Stunt 4: Fighting Cthulhu in an Airship
34:00 Stunt 5: The Christmas Game –Satan Claws and the Epic-level Gifts
36:00 Stunt 6: Beef, the Impossibly Strong Gnoll Warrior NPC with a Giant Ballista
41:00 Stunt 7: The World’s Most Wholesome Evil Campaign Where the PCs Destroyed Each Other (Perhaps the perfect evil campaign?)
46:00 Tips for running an evil campaign
48:00 Stunt 8: The Homebrew Werewolf PC Race (and why Thorin toned down his homebrew)
50:00 Stunt 9: “The Wizard Knows What He Did!” Warping Overpowered Magic Users to a World Where Magic Is Blocked!
55:00 When is it OK to take away PC powers?
62:00 3 Rules for pulling off a successful depowering campaign
64:00 Stunt 10: The 1st-Level PC Necromancer Who Could Not Be Killed … And His Doppelganger NPC Nemesis
70:00 The Stunt We Didn’t Pull: Allowing a PC Ghost
72:00 Stunt 11: The Samurai That Was Reincarnated as a Satyr
75:00 Tips for adapting higher-level monsters into PC races (benchmarking and balancing)
76:00 Stunt 12: The Deck of Many Things at 5th Level (This one killed a game and spawned a Storm Giant Wizard)
82:00 How we made the Storm Giant Wizard PC
85:00 Stunt 13: Players Decided to Keep Orcus’s Wand and Become Monsters Who Conquered Dimensions*
93:00 The Big Takeaway and Final Thoughts
*Note: The being that finally killed Tony’s multiverse-conquering character was called a Draeden, and they were from the TSR-published Immortals Rules boxed set. And, yes, they have up to 200 HD:
Draedens are feared and respected by all who are aware of their existence. A draeden’s true but rarely-seen appearance is a cluster of 20 tubular strands, all symmetrically attached at a central node and fanning out at both ends. Each strand has a mouth at each end, and contains a digestive passage leading to the central node.
https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Canon:Draeden
The node is the equivalent of a stomach, and contains several thousand boulders to aid digestion. These boulders range in size from 1-20 feet, and are made of solid diamond, worn to perfect smoothness by the acidic fluids. A draeden’s intelligence resides throughout a neural network that spans most of the form. The creature’s total length is about 1,000 feet per Hit Die. The width at the central node is 10% of the total length.
Although the six standard ability scores are inappropriate for describing this life form, treat each as maximum for Immortals (100). No ability score modifiers apply to a draeden’s attacks in melee.
Draedens have no Aura, but can understand Aura communication
used by Immortals.”