Court Cases, Plz!

To the magnanimous court and ascendant bailiff: I am the player (he/him) and my DM (she/her) threw a lord of snails at us. We have another paladin in this story. We were running yawning portal and we ran into this giant snail in a cave, who the DM described as “intelligent” and could speak in primordial. His name is Tecuziztecatl, Lord of Snails, don’t ask me how to pronounce it. I, a wild magic sorcerer, ran up to it and attacked it (don’t ask me why I went into melee range, okay?). The snail attacked me with two swipes of his pseudopods, and because I was low on health, the paladin cast Shield of Faith on me to give me +2 AC. The snail then chose to cast Spit Acid on me to get around my AC (dex save) and downed me, leading me to my eventual death, and to the DMs credit, dramatic plot armor revival. The DM posits because the snail is intelligent (int 13), he would see the shimmering wall around me and decide to acid spray instead of swinging at me like he was to get around my AC boost. I argue that this snail lord was metagaming, because regardless of any lands or titles he may have claim to, he has lived in a cave his whole life and wouldn’t know what shield of faith looks like. He also would not know to change strategies from attacking AC to using dex saves just because a shimmering wall surrounded me, and I argue a more reasonable strategy would be to attack someone else or just hit me harder. We both await your swift judgement and long for our worthy punishment. P.S. we will both be at the Chicago live show in January, very hype.

Drake White

May it please the Court, I bring a D&D grudge from 2006. Much like the recent case, Dead Warforged vs Substitute Player, my character was also unjustly killed while someone else was controlling my character. In my case, I was playing a six-armed Insectile Gnome Ninja who could alter self at will into any Monstrous Humanoid. My character sheet had several years of illegible pencil marks listing all the stat bonuses from different monster shapes, and the player controlling me did not notice my tremorsense ability that should have allowed me to detect the burrowing Nightcrawler that ambushed me. I respectfully request that you ignore this extenuating circumstance and inflict a terrible punishment on everyone who was present at this session, all of whom I am still in contact with.

He did have the option of collecting the souls of monsters and evil humans as part of the deal. I really appreciate the feedback though!

I think that's less railroading and more getting the train back on the tracks. You wouldn't want the players to stop playing with each other over this. But I'd suggest this all goes back to giving the Ranger the cursed dagger in the first place and setting up the deal with the demon. If the Ranger player is true to his character, of course he might end up killing innocents to save his sister. So as the DM I might have made the deal a bit more alignment-friendly: perhaps taking down a rival demon, or retrieving a cursed relic from an ancient labyrinth the demon can't access.

May it please the Supreme Crit Justices and the Most Honorable Bailiff, I bring before you a grave sin against Dice Christ. I present the case of the Rampaging Ranger. This happened a while ago, but this is still a call I question as a Dungeon Master nearly two years later. My friends and I were playing a homebrew game that I was the DM of. Our party at the time consisted of a Fighter, a Ranger, a Cleric, and a Bard. For context, a session before the incident, part of the Ranger's character arc was that his sister's soul was stolen by a demon and the demon told him that if the Ranger brought him souls equal in value to that soul, he could have his sister's soul back. The Ranger was given a cursed dagger to use toward that end. Fast forward to the incident. The party was sieging a city in order to liberate it from a vassal of the BBEG and after defeating the vassal, they broke into his castle. His wife and child were in there. The cursed dagger made the Ranger have to roll a WIS save to avoid being influenced to kill the civilians. The Ranger passed by a high margin. The Ranger's player, however decided to intentionally fail the save and kill the vassal's family. I want to emphasize that the player had earlier said that he had no interest in killing innocents, hence the save. In the resulting fray, PvP occurred and the Bard was killed by the Cleric. The Fighter was so distraught by this that he decided to leave the party all together. To remedy all of this, I had a Demi-God show up and send them back in time so that the Ranger didn't commit the murders. My question to you dear Justices: was I right to railroad the campaign like that or should I have allowed the game to continue in the darkest timeline?

To the honorable justices and baliff, I come to you with a case of the player who refuses to learn. I’ve been playing with the same group of four guys for the past three years and two of which were brand new to D&D. In classic new player fashion they both wanted to play murder hobos in some capacity and kinda goof around. Knowing it was their first time playing, myself, the other experienced player, and our DM were more than happy to give them the opportunity to play that way while we supported them through the story arc of the campaign. We both would have their character sheets open to help them out as well to make sure the knew how to navigate it since we were playing online. Once the story took a more serious turn, and backstories were revealed, one of our murder hobos decided he wanted to take the game a bit more seriously and began to play with the same tone the rest of us were playing and didn’t need help with his character sheet. We still had one murder hobo in the party, but he barely participated in role play after this tonal shift and after two years still didn’t understand how to navigate his character sheet, or really anything about playing d&d at all. He didn’t know what dice to roll, where his stats were, or even what his own character could do. Majority of the time I’d have his character sheet open and would be helping him play. I chalked it all up to just being a new player and chose to forgive him for it all. Once we wrapped that game we choose to move into Curse of Strahd and I assumed he wouldn’t be joining us because he didn’t seems all that interested anymore. However he did and decided to play a bard. I warned him that support spell casters are a bit challenging when you’re still not used to the game but he INSISTED on taking the class anyways. Fast forward to the first combat and he has zero idea what he can do, doesn’t understand spell casting even though we’re trying to help him we can’t playing his character for him, when we’re trying to play our own. At this point I want our DM to kick him out. But we’re all childhood friends and I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Should we boot him from the party, or am I just behind a dick? What say you supreme judges of the crit court?

Taylor H

May it please the bailiff and the lowly crit justices, I present a case where my DM designed an encounter in order to force a player death. After solving a puzzle that forced my character to enter a ruin alone while the other four players held up the door, I met a witch made of black goo. The witch turned amorphous to try to fly into my mouth to possess me. Being a paladin, I cast a spell that prevents me from being possessed. The DM said it didn't work. As I came out of the cave the witch took over my body to use all my spell slots to hurt other the party members. They dispatched me easily, but the goo witch infected another player. That player used the feign death spell which imitates death to try and force the witch out. The DM decided that wouldn't work. The group also tried to summon animals such as a goat or frog to become infected instead, but the DM killed the animals. At this point an hour has passed where I am down but stable along with a nother player who is effectively dead and nothing is working to eliminate this witch. Finally we ask the DM for a hint and he states "I thought one of you would have sacrificed yourselves by now, you can only get rid of it by dying." Everyone in our group is very attached to our characters and some of their backstories have yet to be told. I feel this was unfair and quite frankly, unfun behavior by the DM. What say ye?

Justin Gayler

Here ye here ye May it please the court I have a DM versus player problem. So I have something that happened to my group and I a while ago but I just found out about the dungeons and dragons court. So my character had got killed by werewolves we are still a little bit triggered by them by the way. Before that my other player and I had used the marriage ritual to get the plus to AC and other benefits it gives. We discovered that when one person dies that is part of the ritual you can preform it again………… We just happened to have 3-4 scrolls of revivify and had a thought. We asked our dm if he would allow us to slit each other’s throats and die so we could always have the marriage ritual. I think we almost made our DM sick af he wasn’t a happy camper. Is it really that fucked up? Is it even more fucked up my friend and I had the idea at the same time. Sounds like true friendship to me.

Eugene

Dear esteemed and benevolent crit-justices,(More so Daddy Murph because he inspired my current campaign) and that lovely bailiff in the corner. If it may please the court: I am currently running a game for some friends where recently, I had intended for my high level evil artificer bad guy to send one of his automaton clones to appear during a prison break they were performing, to monologue and taunt them with some lord and story hints. Instead, they immediately grappled the robot and attempted to beat and break it. During all this, one of my PC characters who is playing a blood hunter, attempted to use one of his abilities to deal psychic damage to my bad guy, but I said he was immune given he was a remote controlled robot. However, he argued that with he a feature with his power of his power to ignore immunities, he should still be able to do it. This argument happened in the middle of combat so I eventually just vetoed him so that we could move on. My question to you wise judges is should I have let him deal the psychic damage? Or was I right in saying being a remote controlled robot prevents that? Thank you so much fir hearing my case and I await your absolutely correct decision

mugabi rubamba

May it please the highly esteemed crit justices and the honorable bailiff, whom toils tirelessly picking up the Cheerios thrown by the justices from their highest of high chairs, I bring to the courts attention The case of the “one player army loot goblin” I play a reborn twig blight cleric in an “Out of the abyss” campaign with some friends. The module is very fun and the DM is great the issue is with one of my fellow party members who plays a symic-hybrid fighter/rogue. The party is currently level 8 and this player already has a 25 ac with a shield, a passive perception just as high as their ac and their other skills and saves aren’t far behind, and they deal enough damage in single round to half a bosses Hp without criting. Now I’m not against power builds but in this circumstance I feel it’s a bit too much. On top of them being practically unkillable. They consistently roll checks without asking or being asked or even when another player was asked to roll specifically. They have also on multiple occasions abandoned the party mid fight to grab loot before anyone else, they got their current weapon by abandoning the party mid fight with 3 PCs down to grab it first. On top of all this they’ve also tried to skip other players turns to deal the killing blow to a boss and complained after the session when another player got to deal said killing blow, and during a shopping session convinced the party to pool our gold only to turn around and try and use 2/3 of it to buy themselves an item that only they could use and preceded to throw a fit so bad we had to cut the session short when no one would let them. It’s gotten to a point where me and my friends are thinking of leaving the campaign as we feel like the only reason the rest of the party is around is to give the bad guys someone else to hit when they inevitably miss this other player as they can basically do every classes job better than the actual class and do so every chance they get and even on chances the don’t get. I await your benevolent ruling oh great justices. Please what should I do.

ShrimplyAwesome

😂

To the esteemed Supreme Crit Justices and the noble bailiff Jake. May it please the court: My players collectively decided that the warforged starry druid of the party named Worf Orfed has a monster schlong. Being a gracious DM, I decided to let the dice tell their story, and let him roll a d10 plus a d4 from Guidance to determine the length of his hog. He got an eleven and now all my encounters are sidetracked because my players can't stop giggling about Warf's massive member. I have attempted to reason with them that the roll was a joke, but they insist on making his literal and figurative wood a lead-in to many social encounters. How can I move past Warf's forged phallus to get my campaign back on track?

How dare you

James

You're feeling lazy.

I Love Not Finishing My Sentences

DND court spam feeling lazy tbh. Trinyvale and mavrus chronicles are absolute bangers, idk why they don’t do those instead

James

May it please the esteemed court, and may the bailiff sit idly by since this case has nothing to do with the fighter class. I was a player in the final session of a 2 year campaign for our rugby team in college. Kalarel the Undying was our bbeg and we tracked him down to his tower for the final battle. We beat him down to a near pulp after he had used two of his three wish spells given to him from a magic item. 3 of our 5 party members were down, and it was just me and our Aarokokra monk remaining. I, the level 17 Moon Druid of the party, had true polymorphed into an adult gold dragon on my previous turn. On Kalarel’s turn he tried to use his final wish spell to summon the demon Baphomet to his aid. I used my reaction to cast counter spell. The DM allowed it at the time and I rolled a nat20, thus preventing him from summoning the true enemy of our campaign. On the next turn our monk did the finishing blow to Kalarel and we succeeded in saving the world. As we were unwinding after the session it was brought to our attention by another player, the barbarian who went down first in the fight, that in my true polymorphed state, I shouldn’t have been able to cast spells. I argued that since dragons had innate spell casting that a nat20 should have allowed it anyway. Our DM, clearly tired after our 5 hour session allowed it in order to finish things up and not have to backtrack. But as I look back on this memory I feel a deep guttural guilt in my stomach for having possibly cheated in the pivotal moment of our entire campaign. My question to you, esteemed judges, is do I deserved to be punished for my transgressions? Was I a dirty cheater? I await your humble ruling.

Ross