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What Happens When The Otherwise Kind DM Turns Sadistic
Hi everyone.
All Things DnD is back with another story.
This story was submitted by our viewer, Valtion!
I love the way that this DM uses the game as therapy for his players.
It's a refreshing outlook on the game that I think we can all adopt.
Of course it isn’t always sunshine and rainbows.
Listen to how his players react to the darker side of this sweet DM.
This is a glory story about the best group of players that I’ve ever had the pleasure
to DM for, and how they dealt with the sudden emergence of a cursed item.
I have an online group on Roll20 and Discord that my wife and I put together out of a bunch
of our friends at the outset of COVID-19.
We had been planning to run a game in person for months, but hadn’t found the players,
didn’t have the room, and a half dozen other, smaller reasons.
Odd as it is, a sudden worldwide plague actually made it easier to put the group together and
curate just who we wanted to play with.
We’ve had a few near misses with some potential problem players, but those were always dealt
with pretty quickly, before they could do too much harm.
Pretty much everything involved in this game is homebrew, including the races, classes
and subclasses, balanced by the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Tabletop Role-Playing Game online
community, mostly, I have a few fun things in there for myself.
The cast that we’ve settled on for this Skyrim-themed game is as follows:
Aisla - an Orsimer (Orc) Glamour Bard played by my sister
Atais - a Redguard Crusader (Paladin equivalent) played by the youngest of our group
Olivia - a Breton druid-equivalent with a dire wolf pet named Leto, and the newest addition
to our group Quinttiss (Kwin-tiss) - an Altmer mage who
I homebrewed a metamagic option for, which will come into play later in an epic way.
Sisa - a Bosmer necromancer played by my lovely partner, and the dedicated healer
Tazita - a khajit thief who is literally a child, and is the heart of the party
Wender - our Orc Barbarian, played by one of my old friends from Boy scouts and the
unfortunate victim in my maniacal schemes.
The story starts properly with a bit of explanation about the way our group plays.
Almost to a T, every player in the game, including myself, suffers from a mental illness of some
kind, including but not limited to Borderline Personality Disorder, Manic Depression, Manic
Anxiety, Autism of varying degrees, and a few others.
As such, I encourage the party to make use of my addiction to D&D as a coping mechanism,
a safe place, and light therapy as the need arises.
If someone just can’t play that night because they’ve had a bad day or are out of spoons,
we stop everything to do something else.
Maybe I’ll reveal a secret magic item or story clue that they can look forward to,
with vague hints about how they can go looking for that, maybe we’ll play a game online,
or just chat on discord for a while about our lives and the random stuff that we deal
with.
And when I’m out of spoons and need to reschedule the game, they’re all extremely understanding.
It fills me with pride when my players say that they count the days remaining until we
play again, or how they don’t think anything in the world could prevent them from wanting
to play the game with us again and again.
I gave them some happiness, something that can help them through some of their worst
days or weeks, and knowing that I helped that happen helps me to get through my own bad
days.
But sometimes…
Sometimes I’m just a messed-up a-hole.
In the previous session the party cleared out a bandit-claimed castle.
They fought against the dreaded JIM, a werebear leading a pack of assorted lycanthropes as
well as a castle full of goblins.
I’d made him to be hard, but not too hard and… they destroyed him rather easily.
They’re a hyper-competent bunch, and I frequently have to edit encounters to be much, much more
than deadly to make it fair.
Tazita scored a lucky hit on Jim with a Dagger of Venom, meaning that for the rest of the
fight he was making all of his attacks at disadvantage.
He was quickly dismantled after that, and the loot dispersed between the party and the
party funds.
Wender, of course, immediately claimed the +1 Keen Elven Greataxe that Jim had been wielding
for that fight while everyone else focused on the gold and the gems.
Due to real life reasons my partner wasn’t able to make that session, and so the voice
of paranoia in the party was absent.
Quinttiss never took the Identify spell, and so the party frequently makes use of various
skill checks to figure out the magical properties of an item, get a sense for what it was used
for and maybe get a vibe check from the item to determine if it was cursed.
Nobody checked the axe.
And so I schemed.
My partner has survived much worse DMs than myself, and so their paranoia has saved the
lives of the party multiple times.
But if my players wouldn’t pick up on why they were so paranoid, perhaps I could train
them, show them the consequences.
In that moment, I was, most definitely, the a-hole.
Two words: BERSERKER AXE
From the castle the party had also looted and intercepted communications leading them
to a nearby Dwemer ruin that Jim had apparently helped to supply with slaves to work the mines.
Up until this point they’d effectively been sellswords, all working together because they
were being paid to do so.
There was certainly an element of found family, of course, but it was in this moment that
they decided to go out and fix something that was wrong merely because they felt they should.
The players collectively realized and said, “Hey… should we go be heroes?”
“Yeah, why not?”
The next session picked up with them descending the Dwemer elevator.
There were elements of people having been through there recently, a corpse of a slave
found nearby, and a hidden pair of magical boots resized to fit the wearer.
This made them smile, but they didn’t know what was to come.
The party moved into a room with a tall ceiling and dwemer pipes running along the walls,
but only a couple of them had a passive perception high enough to notice the hundreds of red
eyes on the ceiling, blinking.
Swarms of skeevers raced down the walls, activating the defenses of the room and releasing a few
Dwemer Spiders to deal with the threat.
They were quickly dispatched, and I was so happy when Wender reached for his new axe
to cleave a spider in two.
It worked like a charm, two attacks, enraged, spider was gone.
But these spiders explode in a shower of sparks when destroyed, dealing half damage on a successful
save, and so I asked Wender to make a Wisdom Saving Throw.
“12”
“Alright then,” I said, and moved on with the fight.
Not even a round later the last of the enemies were dispatched.
But I didn’t close the initiative tracker; I moved to the next turn in the initiative
order: Wender.
Wender’s player was sitting across the table from me that night.
I handed him a D3 I’d picked up at our local game store and told him to roll.
He got a 2, and so I told him to make 2 attacks with the axe against Leto, Olivia’s wolf.
Leto dropped to zero in no time flat.
I moved on to Quinttiss’ turn, and described how he saw Wender’s eyes glazed over, a
slight red hum coming from the axe where the blood had spattered on its edge, and how Wender
was now turning towards him with murderous intent.
The Collective “Oh no... did we ever check the axe?
No!
We never checked the axe!
Why did we never check the axe?” was too delicious, and Wender’s player, being the
Chad he is, laughed it up.
The first problem was that Wender was a Barbarian who was enraged, so the big three damage types
were immediately resisted.
The second problem was that he was a sack of 75 HP, almost double any other character
in the party.
The third problem was that because of his subclass and a magic item his AC was 19.
It did not look good.
After all, this was the first fight of the dungeon!
But then again… this was the first fight of the dungeon.
Everybody still had most all of their resources.
Quinttiss maneuvered deftly around Wender as he unleashed a Lightning Bolt, but Danger
Sense makes a Barbarian dangerous, and the bolt was not very effective.
I allowed Aisla to make a History check as a reaction to figure out what the Axe was,
and I happily complied.
I showed them all the item card for a Berserker Axe, and claimed that it had attuned to Wender
against his will.
DM bull tactic, I know, but I stand by it.
Aisla followed it up by using a Mantle of Inspiration to get everyone away from their
former ally.
Most evacuated, Tazita moved to try to stabilize Leto, and Atais, the Paladin, moved in.
Only his heavy AC could stand up to Wender, and everyone knew it.
They worked in perfect unison, isolating which targets he could go after, getting out to
where they could be more useful, and healing the wolf.
Then Aisla changed the game on me, as I would expect of my sister, by casting Suggestion
on Wender.
“Drop the axe.”
He rolled a Wisdom Save and failed miserably.
He dropped the axe.
But by then, it came around to his turn again, everybody’s attacks against him being more
or less fruitless, with the notable exception of Atais using his sword’s ability to switch
the damage type to Cold so it couldn’t be resisted.
Dropping the Axe didn’t end the mindless rage, so Wender grabbed his Maul off his back
as a move and made two attacks against Atais.
A Nat 1 was his first roll, and based on the crit table we use he was barely able to hold
onto the Maul.
His second attack also missed.
Apparently the story that the dice were telling that night was that Wender, from deep inside
that blind, bloodthirsty rage, was fighting back and almost winning.
It came back up to Quinttiss’ turn.
He used Mage Hand to pull the axe next to him.
Then… then he spent 3 of his metamagic points.
2 were spent to quicken a lightning bolt, focused directly into the ground beneath him
where the axe was.
The third was to use Chromatic Spell, a metamagic option I had homebrewed for him that allowed
him to alter the damage type dealt by a destruction spell.
That lightning bolt transformed into a LASER BEAM.
He focused this 100-foot, 20 square LASER BEAM directly down onto this axe and the ground
beneath it.
If Lava can do it, I figure a concentrated Laser Beam can as well.
I told Quinttiss to roll a d20.
When he rolled a five I ruled that given the close and powerful force being focused into
this single point, it was difficult for him to control, and the laser ran around beneath
his hands like a drill bit that skitters across the surface of metal, not finding purchase
but dealing massive damage.
I went ahead and multiplied the damage dealt to this axe by 5.
And no, the axe didn’t get a saving throw.
It was an axe.
First he cut through the haft of the axe, then the axe shoulder and through the butt
of the head, finally cutting away the edge from the rest of the blade.
The axe was destroyed, the pieces falling down a 20 foot hole, and Wender was knocked
unconscious, taking a point of Exhaustion as well.
And that was where we ended the session.
This is a fantastic story about teaching players fun lessons in a great way.
You know the next time they get an item they are going to be overly paranoid but eventually
they will slip...and when they do...this DM will be waiting.
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