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  • A dragon has been attacking trains going into and out of a mining city. The party has been hired to deal with it. They planned on taking an empty train out of the city, hoping to lure the dragon into a fight. I was thinking it would be cool, an epic dragon fight on a train. "Hey, this is a mining town. They have explosives right? Can we borrow some?" Roll for persuasion. DC20 persuasion check, passed.

    I don't have the math on me anymore, but I spent a couple minutes working out how much damage the dragon would take based on how much blasting powder they had, and how close the dragon was before it ignited it, and it was just enough damage to bring the dragon down to like 20 HP

    I realized later on that I forgot to convert pounds to kilograms, so it should have still had closer to half its health, but whatever. The idea of a dragon basically killing itself by accidentally blowing up a train car full of blasting powder is sick as hell

    • The question is, how did the mining town feel about the party cratering their lifeline in and out?

      • It's a lot easier to fix a railroad than it is to remove a dragon.

        Besides, the town provided the explosives after a charisma check, they had to know what they were going toward.

  • During Lost Mines of Phandalver we've entered an orc cave and seen an ogre among them. Since we knew ogres aren't that intelligent and we all had some form of telepathy (no darkvision though), we've decided to convince him that he's a champion of Kelemvor (my paladin's god).

    Our sorcerer cast prestidigitation to get their attention, and our fighter used her telepathy to tell the ogre "listen to the short guy in heavy armor that will come here in a minute",roll deception... Nat 20.

    A fight with orcs later, I've explained the basics of my religion to the ogre and renamed him Shrek. Now he's running a church in Conyberry.

  • This was with the AD&D rule books in the mid-80s, so rules were simpler and it was more off-the-cuff.

    I had a dwarf fighter in the party, and we were in a dungeon at the end of a corridor in front of a door. I explained to the DM I wanted to run at and jump into the door, bashing it open, do a roll, and land on my feet with my axes in my hands. He told me I'd be successful with a natural 18 on a D20, and I rolled a 20. He described it really well, embellishing with how the door splintered and all; it was fantastic.

    The room, however, was completely empty, which turned it into an epic tale we'd refer to the rest of the time we gamed together.

  • I think the most epic was when I was DMing my party at 5th level. They were trying to free some Yuan-Ti slaves from a large complex with a pyramid in the middle. After selling two of their party into slavery to get someone on the inside they rallies the Vanara (monkey folk) to help with their prison break by defeating a Yuan-Ti patrol to prove their worth. So they had some scouts (CR 1/2) backups along sides some commoners in the complex. So they had a tough fight. There was a deadly fight at the main entrance, a hard guarding the slaves and another hard inside with a full dungeon worth of reinforcements inside the temple. So doable if they could be to kept apart.

    Before they started their prison break they wanted a big entrance. So they stole a triceratops egg to get them as their distraction. So the barbarian is rushing towards the entrance with these beasts while the wizard and artificer teleported in the gate to give the hard and ranger (inside as slaves armed with daggers) their main weapons. They got inside to arm the party and few of their slaves. The dinosaur and barbarian in front of them hit the front gate causing chaos. At the same time the slaves with the rest of the party turned on the hard encounter of Yuan-Ti guarding them. During this time the bard cast major image of a dragon to draw some fire, while the blade singer and the artificer are killing the melee crew around the fleeing ex-slaves.

    The barbarian is taking hits while running towards the party. The dinosaur made some good distractions if the front guards but the reinforcements were coming around to attack the party and the temple alarm was being raised. I figured they would turn tail and run because it was looking bad.

    But then the spell that turned the tide was cast. The bard cast Plant Growth. The entire massive battlefield became 4x movement to get through. The reinforcements which were 1 turn away now became 4 turns away if they dashed every round. The bard made a path for the barbarian to catch up to the party while everyone enemy was either dashing to get nowhere fast or barely taking pot shots with their weak ranged. The tide flipped and the Yuan-Ti tried unsuccessfully to retreat back inside before the ranged attacks rained now.

    The entire battle took like 20 rounds over 3 play sessions. It was an epic fight all around

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