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The Saving Throw
Most Ridiculous Gaming Moments Feb. 1, 2006
These are the gaming moments that defy comprehension or are simply truly stupid or ridiculous.

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Go Directly to Jail
featured on Feb. 1, 2006 contributed by Matt "Wonderslime" Demers

Having only participated in two Dungeons & Dragons campaigns ever, I found that my DM was both unforgiving and unrealistically realistic at the best of times. How so? Well, read on and you'll see.

Early in our very first campaign, we were a little bit of a rambunctious group, perhaps. We took it upon ourselves to have a little bit of "fun" in town, mostly by needlessly killing one person after tightrope-walking on some merchant's clothesline and putting a few monks to sleep. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but we found ourselves thrown in jail by the end of the first night of play.

That was fine and dandy, sure, but the fact is that our DM was a bit ruthlessly realistic. We tried to escape more than once, but of course, every time we attempted to, some critically-important dice rolls would inevitably fail miserably. The problem was, that rather than come up with a creative alternative, it was always "back to the cells with you!"

We spent almost the next full day of gameplay actually working our way out, but our troubles didn't end there. Thanks to his need to be over-realistic, he made sure that we were the most wanted folk in all the land. That's right, the baron's men chased us all over the countryside, so if we weren't fighting goblins, we were certainly watching out for the thought police.

I understand the need to keep things semi-realistic to make the game believable, but it gets a little bit tiresome to have the same situation drag on and on for months of playing-time. In the end, we wound up in jail no less than three more times over the course of the next year, before we made an attempt at an escape that ended in a dramatic ocean battle in which most of us suffered salt-watery deaths, marking the end of a not-so-grand story.

The moral of the story, I suppose, for all you DMs out there: Let your players off the hook every once in awhile, or at least let a few things slide every now and then. It can make the difference between the dull and the incredible!



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