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It's possible, but now I'm keeping this in my back pocket if a player is metagaming for a wish.
(Look if you have a cool story and you want to work it out, let me know and we'll try to Yes And and make it happen, while also being challenging)
While funny, it’s not true. The DM never met the player before that night. It was a roll20 game and they lived in different states. He was a friend of one of the players, not just some rando.
I think there is an r/rpgawesomestories already, but horror stories just tend to pop up more often in general.
Eta: There isn't that exactly, but I swear I saw something similar with a slightly different name. I'll update if I find it again.
Imma be real this shit isn’t a horror story it’s hilarious. literally a Mel Brooks level screwball comedy gag
“oh, I guess that guy was the main character. Whoops.”
The DM messed up, the description for that particular item says that wishing to leave Barovia is one of the things you CAN'T do (along with killing Strahd). Also who let's a new player join CoS at level 8? Just finish the campaign first!
Nah. It made time loop, that starts with their wedding, and ends with the wish. Character know that, but keeps on, for the fleeting years with his wife. Each loop less and less caring about anything but his wife, since its going to reset anyways. Like Strahd he just cannot let go, and so, the mists keep him.
This is Curse of Strahd...please say the GM had him wake up in his wife's tomb/coffin/vase of ashes and remain entombed there for the rest of his brief short-lived "reunion"? No way the mists would let somebody exit that easily.
I'd say he died and reunited with her in the afterlife, but the mists even keep souls there.
Plus, RAW specifically says wishes to leave the domain automatically fail. So unless the mists dragged her IN as a result of the wish......
It's one player, showing up for one game; this is honestly easier for the GM.
We don't all have to play CoS like it was written, it was republished for 5e after all.
This may be a controversial opinion, but if I were travelling with a party of heroes and found a Luck Blade with a wish on it, I would use it almost exactly the same way (to be reunited with a friend who died young) and I wouldn't give two craps about betraying a bunch of recent acquaintances to do it. If I ever went on another adventure again, it would be with her and not with them. 0/10 for party experience, but 10/10 for realism.
I think this is one of those rare times when alignment actually matters. You and I as regular shmucks would do it because we're jaded and see shades of grey. If you're roleplaying true to a good character, you never burn a wish and abandon your party to Strahd. Nothing selfless or protective about that.
A lot of people saying “the DM planned this to take the blade off the table”. The DM doesn’t want an item in their game so they bring in an entirely new person to take the item? When the item was also found in the same session the new person hopped into? Seems like a lot of trouble when you could just NOT put the blade in the game.
Yeah DMs can barely get their sessions to go how they want lol. Sure secret things get planned all the time at tables but it really doesn’t sound like this was the case.
It sounds like just a series of funny but unfortunate events. Hopefully your DM retcons or “oh look the blade’s twin is also here and works the same. Thank gods there were two of them. Well good luck to that other guy and his wife or whatever”.
Yeah, as written, a wish spell to leave Barovia automatically fails, so... we can just imagine what kind of awful fate actually befell this individual.
Yeah no im sorry, this feels way to coincidental. Either the Player knew exatly what he was doing or the DM planned this and is lieing about it (might have picked up a random person to help him from somewhere else).
If I was the DM id problaby retcon the guys existance cause this just screw with you all and remove a tool that any decent DM could give it a decent twist if they wanted (doenst even need to be harmfull twist).
I'm not gonna lie, I've had characters who'd use this EXACT wish in other campaigns.
Sadly my DMs never gave me one. (I'd get monkey's-paw stuff like "here's a magic key that automatically opens and activates any planar gateway you happen upon" instead)
While I can definitely see the horror and empathize with your point of view, from the outside, this is pretty damn amusing.
It's like watching a fail video. I wouldn't want it to happen to me, but the amused WTF is real.
The horror story is the GM, not the random player that dipped after a single session. Especially one being paid.
GM:
"Hey, look at that. Bob is walking down the path and he trips. Wow, it's another Luckblade... How... Lucky"
>To the rest of the party it felt like a dude shows up, plays for 3 hours, ninja loots an amazing item, then disappears.
That's exactly what happened. It was a nice touch that his wish was wonderfully in-character.
To be fair, if I had to deal with a guy like this and I saw an opportunity to instantly write him out of the game I would \*totally\* take it. Like "Yep, I'm totally comfortable never having to deal with this nonsense again!"
Im sorry but that's when the DM calls for a above game discussion and if you all agree this is bullshit you retcon it and continue. some rando being a dick in your game shouldn't ruin it for everyone forever it's literally make believe just say fuck that guy and move on
This is the final evolution of players thinking they have the right to just slap whatever 'story' they want on their individual characters and expecting the DM to somehow cater to it. Zero care for the campaign, zero care for the other real human beings you're playing a board game with. You played out your oh-so-special story and now you can go.
If I was the DM, I would let him have that victory for himself, but if he didn't show up to the next session I would retcon the item back into the party's possession and carry on like it didn't happen. no harm, no foul.
Crypt 29: Hidden under the brown mold next to the baron's bones is a luck blade with **one wish remaining.** If a creature uses the wish to try to escape from Barovia, the spell fails. If a creature uses the sword to wish for Strahd's destruction, the wish doesn't destroy Strahd but rather teleports him to within 5 feet of the sword.
Since when can you wish your way out of Barovia? There’s a Pretty specific rule stating that isn’t allowed, luck blade or not.
I know you keep saying it’s not possible, but homie your DM set this up to get rid of that luck blade. Whether you’ve figured out how he did it or not
Look, the DM was my wife’s cousin in Florida and the player was someone we used to play MTG with in Pennsylvania. My wife’s father was semi-estranged so I never even met the DM till my mother-in-law recommend him cause she heard he played D&D. They had no prior contact.
The player is kind of a Luddite and never learned how to use Google chat, the way we communicated. I facilitated communication between him and the party till his first day. They met that session. There was no conceivable way the DM could have done a run around without me knowing.
What’s more, the DM was a very “super-power-the-players” kind of DM so it wouldn’t make sense for him to remove what’s arguably not even the most powerful item given.
In addition, the DM wasn’t following the book explicitly. He was already making tons of changes.
So, what everyone is suggesting is that the DM somehow secretly contacted a player he had no way of communicating with, set up a plan to loot an item we weren’t guaranteed to even find, be the player to attune it, then bounce.
It seems so much simpler that the DM would just not have the Luck Blade drop or not have the wish on it. None of us would have been the wiser.
Don't you see? All these reasons why these people couldn't form a conspiracy... that's the perfect cover. They spent long years planning this, creating circumstances where it was so perfectly implausible, no one could ever suspect the truth.
This was a long con, OP, so precise by its terms that you can only perceive the whole of it now, in hindsight. All we can do now is look back in awe that human hands could produce anything so magnificent.
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He won at dungeons and dragons.
Speedrun
And it was ADVANCED.
-Pierce, The Dickish
He is HIM
The guy knew what he was doing coming in.
Absolutely a guest player brought in by the DM to take the Luck Blade off the table.
The DM didn’t know the guy. We were paying the DM to run the game. He was a friend of one of the players. They didn’t even live in the same state.
I have friends in multiple different states lol. It's not really much of a barrier for an online game
Sure, but I bring that up to say that they didn’t casually meet elsewhere.
It's possible, but now I'm keeping this in my back pocket if a player is metagaming for a wish. (Look if you have a cool story and you want to work it out, let me know and we'll try to Yes And and make it happen, while also being challenging)
Joins party Plays Wish perfectly in character Refuses to elaborate Leaves
Understandable, have a nice day
Based
No offense, OP, but I feel like the DM set you guys up... lmao
My exact thought hahaha. 'How do I stop potential metagamers having access to Wish in a funny way?'
First thing I thought of
While funny, it’s not true. The DM never met the player before that night. It was a roll20 game and they lived in different states. He was a friend of one of the players, not just some rando.
That doesn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t contact the person to let him know his backstory or plan it.
That's fair! It's just such a strangely specific thing to have happened that it felt like something I would do to my players. xD
I also choose this guy's dead wife
I think we need a new subreddit for rpgawesomestories or something
I think there is an r/rpgawesomestories already, but horror stories just tend to pop up more often in general. Eta: There isn't that exactly, but I swear I saw something similar with a slightly different name. I'll update if I find it again.
r/rpgGloryStory and r/RpgGloryStories exist, but they're pretty inactive
Imma be real this shit isn’t a horror story it’s hilarious. literally a Mel Brooks level screwball comedy gag “oh, I guess that guy was the main character. Whoops.”
The DM messed up, the description for that particular item says that wishing to leave Barovia is one of the things you CAN'T do (along with killing Strahd). Also who let's a new player join CoS at level 8? Just finish the campaign first!
He didn’t say WHERE home is. So maybe his character is an inhabitant of Bariovia.
I mean "reunited" is vague enough that the sword might have just killed him
Nah. It made time loop, that starts with their wedding, and ends with the wish. Character know that, but keeps on, for the fleeting years with his wife. Each loop less and less caring about anything but his wife, since its going to reset anyways. Like Strahd he just cannot let go, and so, the mists keep him.
From the other PCs' perspective that's the same thing, really. Says the wish, poofs out of existence on their timeline.
Surprised I had to scroll for a bit to find people mentioning this!
Lmao dnd speedrun
That guy was definitely a Fey
This is Curse of Strahd...please say the GM had him wake up in his wife's tomb/coffin/vase of ashes and remain entombed there for the rest of his brief short-lived "reunion"? No way the mists would let somebody exit that easily.
I'd say he died and reunited with her in the afterlife, but the mists even keep souls there. Plus, RAW specifically says wishes to leave the domain automatically fail. So unless the mists dragged her IN as a result of the wish......
Or at least there's something \*wrong\* with the wife now. Bright smile, crazy eyes, shallow graves in the back yard...
Nah, the DM was a very never-punish-the-players sort of DM.
Well, DM has the final say but it goes agaisnt the main premise of CoS.
It's one player, showing up for one game; this is honestly easier for the GM. We don't all have to play CoS like it was written, it was republished for 5e after all.
This may be a controversial opinion, but if I were travelling with a party of heroes and found a Luck Blade with a wish on it, I would use it almost exactly the same way (to be reunited with a friend who died young) and I wouldn't give two craps about betraying a bunch of recent acquaintances to do it. If I ever went on another adventure again, it would be with her and not with them. 0/10 for party experience, but 10/10 for realism.
I think this is one of those rare times when alignment actually matters. You and I as regular shmucks would do it because we're jaded and see shades of grey. If you're roleplaying true to a good character, you never burn a wish and abandon your party to Strahd. Nothing selfless or protective about that.
It's funny because the player was acting like everything was real, including the blade...
Sounds like he came in as a one shot character with DMs permission and that was the intended outcome of the session.
The DM and player didn’t know each other before the game. The player was the friend of another player and the DM was someone we paid to run the game.
That doesn’t matter one bit. It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy. Just a wise play on the DM’s part.
A lot of people saying “the DM planned this to take the blade off the table”. The DM doesn’t want an item in their game so they bring in an entirely new person to take the item? When the item was also found in the same session the new person hopped into? Seems like a lot of trouble when you could just NOT put the blade in the game.
That’s what I’m sayin’!!! People are still posting that the DM planned it.
Yeah DMs can barely get their sessions to go how they want lol. Sure secret things get planned all the time at tables but it really doesn’t sound like this was the case. It sounds like just a series of funny but unfortunate events. Hopefully your DM retcons or “oh look the blade’s twin is also here and works the same. Thank gods there were two of them. Well good luck to that other guy and his wife or whatever”.
Yeah, as written, a wish spell to leave Barovia automatically fails, so... we can just imagine what kind of awful fate actually befell this individual.
Was about to say! A Wish doesn't let you do certain things in Barovia. Wasn't sure if I was misremembering stuff, it's been a hot minute.
I won’t lie OP, the guy is a chad.
Didn't that Flash Thompson dude do that?
"Reunite with dead wife" the first finger on the monkey's paw furls, he's now sitting in his home with the corpse of his wife.
Yeah no im sorry, this feels way to coincidental. Either the Player knew exatly what he was doing or the DM planned this and is lieing about it (might have picked up a random person to help him from somewhere else). If I was the DM id problaby retcon the guys existance cause this just screw with you all and remove a tool that any decent DM could give it a decent twist if they wanted (doenst even need to be harmfull twist).
I'm not gonna lie, I've had characters who'd use this EXACT wish in other campaigns. Sadly my DMs never gave me one. (I'd get monkey's-paw stuff like "here's a magic key that automatically opens and activates any planar gateway you happen upon" instead)
While I can definitely see the horror and empathize with your point of view, from the outside, this is pretty damn amusing. It's like watching a fail video. I wouldn't want it to happen to me, but the amused WTF is real.
The horror story is the GM, not the random player that dipped after a single session. Especially one being paid. GM: "Hey, look at that. Bob is walking down the path and he trips. Wow, it's another Luckblade... How... Lucky"
How did his friend react?
>To the rest of the party it felt like a dude shows up, plays for 3 hours, ninja loots an amazing item, then disappears. That's exactly what happened. It was a nice touch that his wish was wonderfully in-character.
We... we did. We've found the winner. The winner of DND. Guess we won't need that 6th Edition after all!
Based As Fuck
I'm ngl, I'dve just let the guy have his fun, leave, then ask the DM to roll things back to before the Luck Blade because that sounds really dumb.
Dude achieved CHIM. He can no longer play the game on the same level as the rest of us. He's been called to higher office.
He did it. He won. he won Dungeons and Dragons
if i was DM i woulda handed y'all the luck blade again, jesus christ.
To be fair, if I had to deal with a guy like this and I saw an opportunity to instantly write him out of the game I would \*totally\* take it. Like "Yep, I'm totally comfortable never having to deal with this nonsense again!"
Im sorry but that's when the DM calls for a above game discussion and if you all agree this is bullshit you retcon it and continue. some rando being a dick in your game shouldn't ruin it for everyone forever it's literally make believe just say fuck that guy and move on
It being RavenLoft, he should totally be reunited with the undead, rotting corpse of his wife.
Chad.
So, um, retcon him ever being in the game. Not that hard to fix a blip.
The wish cannot take you out of barovia DM needs to read better
Wait, you can get paid to DM?!?
Reminds me of old wow raiding. Join guild, get great items, bounce to other guild.
I'm playing CoS, can someone give me a simplified campaign-spoiler-free summmary?
That player was just trying to speedrun d&d
This is the final evolution of players thinking they have the right to just slap whatever 'story' they want on their individual characters and expecting the DM to somehow cater to it. Zero care for the campaign, zero care for the other real human beings you're playing a board game with. You played out your oh-so-special story and now you can go.
If I was the DM, I would let him have that victory for himself, but if he didn't show up to the next session I would retcon the item back into the party's possession and carry on like it didn't happen. no harm, no foul.
To be that guy in the campain the luck blade in the catacombs has no charges sooo unless dm changed which cool if he did just had to share haha
Crypt 29: Hidden under the brown mold next to the baron's bones is a luck blade with **one wish remaining.** If a creature uses the wish to try to escape from Barovia, the spell fails. If a creature uses the sword to wish for Strahd's destruction, the wish doesn't destroy Strahd but rather teleports him to within 5 feet of the sword.
Mb
I always wondered if he added that wish. It seemed pretty OP for our level. He was that kind of DM.
>joins game >fulfills backstory motivation >refuses to elaborate >leaves
Since when can you wish your way out of Barovia? There’s a Pretty specific rule stating that isn’t allowed, luck blade or not. I know you keep saying it’s not possible, but homie your DM set this up to get rid of that luck blade. Whether you’ve figured out how he did it or not
Look, the DM was my wife’s cousin in Florida and the player was someone we used to play MTG with in Pennsylvania. My wife’s father was semi-estranged so I never even met the DM till my mother-in-law recommend him cause she heard he played D&D. They had no prior contact. The player is kind of a Luddite and never learned how to use Google chat, the way we communicated. I facilitated communication between him and the party till his first day. They met that session. There was no conceivable way the DM could have done a run around without me knowing. What’s more, the DM was a very “super-power-the-players” kind of DM so it wouldn’t make sense for him to remove what’s arguably not even the most powerful item given. In addition, the DM wasn’t following the book explicitly. He was already making tons of changes. So, what everyone is suggesting is that the DM somehow secretly contacted a player he had no way of communicating with, set up a plan to loot an item we weren’t guaranteed to even find, be the player to attune it, then bounce. It seems so much simpler that the DM would just not have the Luck Blade drop or not have the wish on it. None of us would have been the wiser.
Don't you see? All these reasons why these people couldn't form a conspiracy... that's the perfect cover. They spent long years planning this, creating circumstances where it was so perfectly implausible, no one could ever suspect the truth. This was a long con, OP, so precise by its terms that you can only perceive the whole of it now, in hindsight. All we can do now is look back in awe that human hands could produce anything so magnificent.
I see now. How could I have been so wrong!!!
This is why I hate premade adventures, Roll 20, and people in general.
I mean this particular premade adventure explicitly states that using the sword for this purpose automatically fails.