Legendary Showdown: Presidential Edition is now more than 30% funded! Don’t miss out on this President-battling card game that can be combined with the Ctrl+Alt+Del themed ‘Gamer’s Quest’ version of Legendary Showdown for even crazier battles!
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The look of a DM whose campaign just got slammed to a (probably permanent) halt.
😀 JUST KIDDING….made my day 😀
just a prank, bro
Don’t have much experience with pen and paper rpgs, but is this really something you should roll a dice check on?
Technically, you could probably distill just about anything down to a dice roll if you wanted to.
In general, this sort of thing would have likely been a lot more complicated at the table, but for pacing/entertainment reasons, it’s a dice roll here 🙂
You can roll a dice to see if your berserker survives with his brains exposed, and you can roll a dice to see if your berserker can throw his brain, and another to see if it hits, and another to see how much damage it does.
Roll dice for those breathing checks, failure is dire.
I’ve been in those situations XD
Me: Seriously I need to roll for that….
DM: This time you do…
Me: ok…
DM: ok… since you botched…
Now all zombies trip and die from trying to step over corpses based on president….
Yeah, there are so many boni you sometimes forget what you had yourself.
Okay, I can admit when I’m wrong. The god is indeed a dick. Other guy did call it.
You don’t have to. The dice rule the game, the god is still lawful good. The god said you only could receive his blessing if he was of “pure character”, or whatever. A god isn’t going to just give away free power to people who aren’t worthy.
Having run, and played in, several campaigns where this has happened to myself or other characters, I know exactly how 3 feels! Plus, being a player watching THE player (the guy who really needs to pass this check otherwise we all die) get skragged like that, I’ve had the same look on my face as 1&2! That last panel is exactly how I see this happening in my mind when they find the bonus they’ve been forgetting to add into the entire game! So yeah, BTDT, still makes me want to find a corner and throw up!
If your game is at a point that one player has to make a roll or you all die, either your GM is bad at his job, your GM is a dick, or the party has seriously screwed up already. Making everything hinge on a single roll is a terrible idea and a decent GM will try to avoid it whenever possible.
I beg to differ if its done right…and sparingly it can be a fun twist to a campaign now and then!
The 3 different times over the years where my group of assorted gamers that i did this with intentionally or not based on their actions they had a hoot and remember it fondly.
Yes, but did they ever fail that single die roll?
Twice in fact! It led to some fun times, the one failed roll ended the current campaign set in a modern era to stop a terrorist group from unleashing some bio wep virus…..long story short the fail led to running as they then died but led flowing into a undead world spreading virus campaign with new pcs living the ermging horror
I guess that answers my question from last comic. The capricious Luck of the Dice hold Destiny, Life, and Death in their grasp.
Which is why you go thru your modifers stuff first and add all of them up first with a note on the side of your player record saying which stats were boosted first. Then you roll.
Yes. But no. Nobody does that, otherwise the game slows to a mind-numbing pace. We’ve all had that item that we forget about because we rarely roll using it. It might be something that only affects deception rolls or something when you’re in a smash-em-up campaign.
If you’ve got an item thats extreamly specific such as improves sneak checks vs direwolves then sure its easy to forget and you probably wouldnt bother to note it on your character sheet in a quick referance format. However if you had an item that gives +2 sneak in all situations it makes more sense to just have that written next to your sneak skill to save time whenever you need a sneak check. For common checks and saveing throws its not all that uncomon to put an agrigate number next to it that adds up all the equipment/stat bonuses… Read more »
Yep. That is what I was thinking of. The “boots of radioactive defense give you a +100 on your defend but reduce your agility to -25” so write next to your agility the your base with the modifier there. Heck, one GM when I used to play Rifts had our character sheets laminated after we created our characters and would give us grease pencils to write in the new numbers as we added or subtracted certain items of wear or even spells. The odd “stick of defense against bad 80s cover bands by mutant turtles” would be forgotten about unless… Read more »
Typically, you’re supposed to treat bonuses from gear as permanent increases. Hence, this bonus should have been written down on his sheet accordingly.
Judging from his paper-staring in panel 7 he did have it all properly written down, he just didn’t bother to manually check his sheet before rolling. Not that unusual if you know your basic stats by heart and want to keep the game rolling smoothly. (It kinda hurts the story immersion if you need to pause and recheck your sheet every time you do something).
I don’t think you understand what I mean.
His circlet’s bonuses should have already been added to his Wisdom because it’s considered a permanent increase. As in, if his base Wisdom is 16 and the circlet gives a +2 bonus, then the number recorded on the character sheet should be 18. That’s how a large majority of players record their ability scores because it’s extremely rare for a PC to need to take off his gear (except armor) before a battle.
A majority is not every player. 3 might be of the group that doesn’t add equipment bonuses to their base stat. Besides, we don’t actually know how his circlet works. It might be only a conditional bonus (for example, only active when directly acting on his beliefs), which you could easily forgot about..
Your argument is heavily dependent on which game you’re playing. I know for a fact that this is not how it works in DSA for example. You write down your base stats and the modifier, but you don’t add them up on the sheet because there are a lot of situations in which you don’t wear your gear. It depends on the dm/gm and the campaign of course but still.
“Treat bonuses from gear as permanent increases”
What, really? Then where’s the fun in situations where you’re caught sleeping or bathing or in ceremonial gear and not wearing your special armor or silly hat or whatever? You’ve really got to keep track of which bonuses come from things not attached to your body.
“Lemme just put this back together”… That was the perfect response Tim. I am truly loving the way this is playing out!
“Death is whimsical, today.” – Zen, Overwatch
This is what the GM gets for boiling this entire adventure down to a single check. Especially an ability check, which tends to be very swingy. I started to believe that maybe that the “god” is a fake deliberately placed by Thyros. The true test of faith is whether or not his followers question the false avatar and directly confront their doubts. A lesson that true faith lies with strengthening one’s beliefs by constantly re-evaluating their faith. Just as the light (Thyros’s element) always casts a shadow, faith always casts a shadow of doubt. To ignore this is to be… Read more »
Huh. I was expecting Thyros to go all MMBN4 and be Duo by creating a shadow clone of 3 thus forcing him to fight his own dark side, proving good can surpass evil, etc. etc. (The “flick” shown could have been meant as extracting the evil side which being a ciritical part of any person is incredibly painful) Still, your idea is also brilliant. Kudos for that. Regardless, each character has had to do more or less a near solo battle with a monumental foe who was incredibly strong whether for emotional or physical reasons (1 had his father, 2… Read more »
Honest to god(s), this basically happened to me once while I was playing.
This so happens in every game, every time. Great comic!
Oh wait I get +1 so I hit. No you’re beyond 30 feet so you lose 1. But I took (blank)!
@Tim , Were there going to be a few more Ctrl+Alt+Del 1.0 Box Sets that were going to the EU?
I would love a box, but 125 for shipping costs is waaaaaay out of my range.
I sold all of them but 10. The ten are on hold in the event that any packages got lost or damaged in transit and I need to make a replacement. Once I’m certain all orders are safely in the hands of customers, if I have any of those ten left, I will put them up for sale. So stay tuned and keep an eye out for a post to that effect ?
yea i think that last i been like err …. you passed the tet of um er purty of the um heart. or something like that
In the players world where death is of little consequence as they will immediately respawn at their res-pod yet theyre making drama over a dead Table Top RPG character. This has run into the “Dragon Ball Death” trope. If it dies it can be revived with (comparatively) very little effort and killing any main character is just done for dramatic and in the particular case of the players comedic value. In occasions with off-panel ultra violence. And the best part? When they were all like “Fuuck” and yet he revives within the next 3 panels of the same page. I… Read more »
First of all, as death in their real lives is not permanent, there is a novelty of permadeath that the tabletop provides them.
Second, nobody was “miraculously revived” through some contrived plot point. It looked, for a moment, like the character had been killed. An overlooked stat bonus proved that to not be the case, and what momentarily looked like the outcome was walked back. It happens all the time in tabletop games.
I mean… did you even read the comic? XD
Well I wasnt expecting a reply, much less from the author and it comes as more of a surprise since i posted this a whole day after the comic was posted making my opinion less relevant. So in your perspective there was a do over and Panel 3 didnt happen at all to begin with… then whats the deal with the last panel where he is getting rebuilt from his ashes (I do know this is his spiritual form and that im nitpicking waaay to much) if panel 3 didnt happen? Anyway I have been a fan for years and… Read more »
The last panel is the gag of the strip. What you see in the in-character panels is what the players are imagining as they play this tabletop game. So, based on the rules and rolls, it was declared that 3 did not succeed his difficulty check, and was “purified”. Everyone at the table saw that play out and imagined it in their heads. But then, “oh wait, we miscalculated this stat, it actually succeeds” means they had to roll back the outcome a bit, hence them imaging the god undoing his mistake. Also, I’m always a bit torn when someone… Read more »
That happens a lot? Because when I read that I was all “Oh he’s trolling Tim, now…”
The fun of P&P consists a great deal in situations like this one.
But: no respawning for P&P chars, no sir. /taking a moment of silence to mourn the loss of my (first) archer character in Earthdawn/
“making drama over a dead Table Top RPG character”
Well, over two dead characters, since Tobyn dying likely means they aren’t going to be able to save Cake. (I’m not counting Strudel, who was always disposable.) If he can’t pass the test, the other two aren’t likely to throw themselves at it, not knowing what they know about its survivability. At which point the campaign may be over, which is generally worth an “oh fuuuuck” to players who are into their characters.
Good lord. I lost count of how many times I’ve dealt with those same seconds of terror for myself and my players. It’s surprisingly easy to forget about a bonus point here or there and you don’t realize it until you’ve already stained your shorts.
That last panel is pure gold!