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A friend of mine were talking and we found we were each playing separate Dungeons and Dragons, 3rd Edition, campaigns at the time. My friend was playing a Samurai (from Oriental Adventures) in his, and I was playing an incoherent, evangelical, dual-dagger wielding Cleric in mine. Both characters, it turned out, were the same (low) level, and not occupied with dungeon crawling, so we arranged a mutual friend to be dungeon master for a duel. He drew up a map, a plateau with crevices and a bridge, put us on opposite sides of it, and the fun began.
After a few turns of combat things turned sour for my character. My friends Samurai turned out to be a complete tank, and my character was just...fun to play. We were obviously playing quite different types of campaign, and his character was simply out of my league. I realized that I had a specific advantage, though. His character was a noble warrior, and my character was just a crazy person.
I try spells, magic trinkets, and similar gambits with little to no success. The DM declares, around the same time I'm facing imminent defeat, that it begins to rain. I decide to run for my life, and in a stroke of inspiration, I run across the most precarious rocks I could spot, suggesting to the DM that such an action might require a Balance check. It's not a very difficult check and I pass easily, but my friend scores a critical failure. He falls down into a crevice but catches himself hanging just out of reach on a Reflex save. At this point I only have one spell left prepared above level 0, and it's Command.
Command, for those of you unfamiliar, is a 1st level spell that causes the target to obey a single-word (verb) spoken command for one turn. Suicide is a noun, so there are surprisingly few actual uses for this spell in the course of a game. After careful consideration I pick up a stick, and gently toss it over the edge.
"Fetch", I say.
He never really forgave me for that one.
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