Pissing on a Fire Elemental- A Cautionary Tale.
Way back in the dim past of 1998, I was running a game of 2nd Ed D&D with some of my college buddies. This was before I met my wife, and I was foot loose and fancy free. My buddy, Pete, asked if his brother could join the group.
Since said brother was 17, and we were a bare 19, I saw no reason not to allow him. We walked through character generation, and the basics of the game. Then we gave him the PHB to buy equipment.
He looked over everything and said "Why is there a barrel on here? What's the point in that?"
"To put liquid in. There's a table a page or so over." I said as he flipped through the book.
"Beer?!? I can buy BEER in this game?!?" he said in amazement.
"Sure knock yourself out, its your gold." I replied, knowing that at some point EVERYONE buys a barrel of ale, especially those who are not yet of the magic drinking age.
So the night continued. The game was relatively unremarkable, since everyone was a low level PC. Whenever I asked what everyone was doing, Pete's brother would invariably reply with "I drink more beer".
This was all fine and dandy, until they came to the room with the Fire Elemental. It wasn't there to be fought, it was an obstacle to overcome with trickery. They weren't supposed to kill it, just get it out of the room. I did the traditional go around asking everyone what they were going to do, getting to Pete's brother, I was expecting another "I drink more beer", which is not what I got. What I got was this;
"I've been drinking this whole time, right?" he asked with a gleam in his eye.
"Yes" I stated, dreading what I knew was going to come next.
"I want to piss on it!" he said with a mad grin on his face.
"Wait a second, this is a fifteen foot tall pillar of pure fire, that requires a magic weapon to hit. It's burning at like a couple thousand degrees! Are you sure you want to do that?" I said hoping that he would get the hint and leave his junk in his pants.
"Yup! Going to piss on it. Roll this orange one to hit, right?" he said picking up a d20.
"Are you really sure?" I pleaded with him.
"Hell yeah!"
"It's on your head. Roll." I replied with a dejected sigh.
"BOOYA! 20!" he yelled as he jumped up and down with glee.
"Um, ok. You do one point of damage with your urine as your dick burns off seconds before the rest of you gets incinerated." I said as I shook my head in sadness.
"Totally worth it."
I learned something that day. First off, PCs will do stupid things. Second, they deserve to pay for their mistakes. Third, sometimes that stupid stuff is worth it-to them. Every time I get a new PC, or meet a new gaming buddy, I tell them this story. All of them laugh at the stupidity. Very few of them groan. Only people who have been DMing for years realize what the point of this story is. No matter what you try to do to persuade a PC, they will do whatever they want, damn the consequences. That's the beauty of pen and paper RPGs. You can go totally off the rails, and do whatever you want. This story illustrates that very well in a humorous way, do what you want when you want to. It's a great story for new players to learn that fact.
No comments:
Post a Comment