What are the Best Running jokes in your D&D campaigns #3
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- čas přidán 8. 07. 2024
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That the wizard in the party doesn't bathe. He just uses prestidigitation, which has been established to make him smell sterile like a hospital.
also, Nat ones almost always mean your character punches themselves in the dick or boob
One of my own wizards did something similar. He used the spell on his hands so he could keep using his gloves at all time. That one was because his fingernails were torn out though
Not surprising. For a ship that we have in the campaign I'm currently in. We bought cleansing stones for that purpose.
My next character who has Prestedigitation will be hydrophobic, thank you for the inspiration
Not gonna lie, if I was a wizard I'd do that, too. Who needs to waste money on soap, dish detergent, laundry detergent, deodorant, or toothpaste when you can just magic everything clean?
I have never heard "Ostentatious" pronounced as "Ostentanious" in my life, and now that's going to be one of the running jokes of the channel.
And done twice!
@@MrRipper I mean, Brian wouldn't be Brian otherwise, and we love him for it. Our party sometimes teases our ranger Hadari by calling him Hadar-eye like Brian did. And thus, another running joke was born. XD
Thrice
He said it three times
It's a Mortem!
I always introduce my character as “I’m Elmatath, my friends call me Crashous.” He hasn’t let anyone call him Crashous yet.
Oh...how sad😢.
Everytime the paladin has used divine sense they sense a celestial. The party has a find familiar that is celestial.
My group has many running jokes, like how whenever someone get a low number on an attack roll they immediately fall into a puddle of mud, even when there should be no way mud can form where we are... there's still mud to fall in. But our favorite running joke is that anytime are party does something chaotic or goes overkill killing an enemy, a random villager just happens to be in the line of fire and dies. They all look identical except for a sticky note on their forehead with number on it. This is because they all come from the Luckless family, a family so unluckily, they die all the time!
In my dnd campaign we went to a "cheese bar" so I ordered a cheese champagne and my sister ordered a cheese whiskey
They gave us the same thing, so my sister rolls a perception check and sees 2 barrels , they are labeled cheese and *cheese* in italic
So now every time something bad happens my sister screams " IT WAS THE CHEESE I KNEW IT"
That’s perfect
We play on roll20, and when a monster is slain, I typically put an X on it and send it to the map layer. Instead of leaving it on the token layer.
Eventually, we started saying. "He's been sent to the map layer!" Or "send him to the map layer!" Instead of saying,"He's dead." Or "kill him!"
We had hired a group of guards to watch our stuff while we entered a haunted manor. There were 4 of them all named a variation of Steve. Throughout the next several sessions we established that the four Steves were brothers and had aspirations of greatness. They would sometimes get involved with combat. We would do everything we could to prevent their deaths. During the final boss fight two of them even managed to score critical hits on the enemy spellcaster, AND the boss.
Since then every single guard who scores a critical hit or does close to max damage, we announce another relative of Steve has been found
I imagine they all look identical or nearly identical,like Nurse Joy or Officer Jenny haha
@@ArtByKarenEHaley And I'll bet that, with one exception, everyone has trouble telling them apart, with that one person having no trouble whatsoever and wondering what everyone else's problem is lol.
The running gag in the game I'm in is "birds cant see glass". This includes all races and monsters with bird-like features as well as glass in all forms. This is how the DM explained why people hate Kenku in the world. Its not them being vagrants/vagabonds. Its them constantly walking or running into windows. Most taverns have signs outside saying "No bird people" because they can't help but go into hysterics when they see a glass of water or a wine bottle.
That's just dumb IMO.
@@shanerasmussen5225
You are not wrong. However, it made for some seriously funny RP, especially when we got a new player that actually wanted to play a Kenku knowing he would be unable to see glass.
In my CoS campaign, we had two:
1. Our party ended up underwater in a magic lake. We fought some sharks underwater and afterwards our ranger was confused whether or not the lake was really a lake or an ocean. Every time some brings up a lake, that joke returns
2. Our changeling rogue had a 6 in con. Whenever that rogue is about to get hit with a ton of damage, his player just shouts “Six con baddies!!!”
The group I DM for has a running gag with one player "Don't pee on the dragon."
Context the group was 6 players lv.5 and around 6 NPCs (Don't ask). They came across a sleeping adult black dragon and one player (Rogue) decided to sneak up to the sleeping dragon, climb the dragon, and woke it up. It used its Frightful Presence ability and the Rogue rolled so low that they peed their pants on the back of the dragon. The group hasn't let that down yet and I don't know if they ever will.
My party has a joke that one of the players (I’ll call her Estrella because that’s her current character’s name) must always have a phobia of curtains. This is because in our first campaign we were exploring an abandoned castle, but instead of doors separating the rooms, it had curtains. This made Estrella very nervous, as pretty much anything could be behind these curtains, and we soon picked up on this and said that her character (at the time, a dwarf cleric named Angelica) had a phobia of curtains. Skip eight months, we’re onto our second campaign and come across another place that has curtains instead of doors, and as the DM is describing it, everyone looks at Estrella, who just sighs and says
“Did I forget to mention that this character has a fear of curtains as well?”
My buddy Sam is a busy guy. He misses an adverage of about 1 in 3 sessions due to life stuff. As such, it's always his turn to do the recap. Every. Single. Week.
In our current Candlekeep Mysteries campaign, we got a number of trinkets. One of them being a mechanical crab that doesn't move when you look at it. This crab has since become the equivalent to The Game. We always forget about it until someone brings it up, and then we notice it doing an amusing pose like a crab rave freeze frame, or attempting to graft the parts of real dead crabs to itself in dominance.
Our Dragonborn has a vengeance quest against the Welcomers, who's members have only one ear. He has no ears . . . . So any reference to ears leads back to the same jokes. Our warlock even forgot and gave him a piece of jewellery to warn him of enemies near (a magic mouth spell on an EARING)
The jokes have become so weird and elaborate the it is now cannon that the dragonborn has a bag of ears. This resulted from listening in at a window by "pressing his ear against the glass" and descriptions of him placing an elf ear (cupped in hand) against it 🤣
In high school I was part of a Pathfinder campaign, and the most relevant running jokes we had were,
1. this one only applied to one of our players who was a fighter class. Whenever he rolled low on a physical attack, the joke was he got his sword stuck in his cape again.
2. Whenever someone rolled high enough to completely destroy an enemy, the DM always liked to say that "they've been reduced to a red stain."
"Enjoy the festival..."
Started as a line I kept constantly saying at the start of one of my campaigns during a festival. Our group's motto that reminds you of the fact that there is no such thing as a quiet festival in d&d.
Our group mostly plays D&D, but once in a while I'll run a superhero game as a change of pace. The players sometimes have a little trouble adjusting to the different expectations of the genre. At one point, a player yelled at a supervillain, "We're going to kill you!" The other players pointed out that this is not a thing superheroes typically do. "Oh, right. (ahem) We're going to take you to jail!" Ever since, "I'm going to kill...I mean, take you to jail!" has been a running catchphrase.
One of my friends decided to do a character named gregory, he was just a regular person... Except that he was a 2-foot tall goblin and decided to give himself a sawed-off shotgun. Gregory could now move around just by shooting. They eventually acquired an enchantment that AUTOMATICALLY RELOADS the shotgun. They can fly from pure kickback, and ended up killing an entire cult of about 100 people that lived in the sewer, hereby dubbing them: the shotgun man. We have made a vow to always mention the shotgun man atleast once per campaign, like saying that a guard has somekind of recollection of a small figure blasting the heads of a bunch of random people off. The goblin just so happens to be chaotic evil too... So, we had fun.
9:50 I WAS A PART OF THIS CAMPAIGN!!! I was in the Rime of the Frostmaiden and Dragonlance parties, playing as a Dragonborn Hexblade named Vasya and a Kobold Artificer named Kyle respectively. The quote was usually used in Rime when two party members, a Kobold Artificer named Teo and a Dragonborn Fighter named Korin, would come up with stupid and out of this world ideas with my Hexblade that would seem to never work. Some particular examples include:
Flooding a cave with gasoline and setting it on fire
Stealing a headless golem and turning it into a mech suit
"The PK Grenade", where one of us would take Teo, tell her that one of the enemies insulted her, and chuck her into said enemy as she goes into a blind rage
And making an underground city fly using a bunch of magic, diplomacy, and an endless amount of dynamite
We did the Pathfinder Campaign Emerald Spire. There were ALOT of player deaths. My character personally died 2 or 3 different times. Ever since whenever something becomes brutal or alot of deaths we say, "People die in the Spire." And someone always repeats it with confirmation.
Dm here. My wife is playing her first character in this campaign. A sorcerer, with a nature motif, elf reflavored as a naiad. Her character is bit more wild and does not have common manners of the ‘civilized folk’ which has made for some interesting moments in the game. Our best running joke comes from a session before the actual campaign started with the rest of the group, to teach her the rules and let her get a feel for her character. I had no idea that after this session a bag of goblin hands would be the groups go to item for the whole campaign. She’s decided that in order to show proof she’d completed her mission she would cut off an arm from each goblin. Now each session one player will ask how bad the arms are getting and remind her she should really throw those away now, meanwhile the other player the Rogue/Bard wants to weaponize them. An example being to light one on fire using an eternal flame they found and throw them at their enemies. What a creative group.
I had a quest for a group I dm for here and there with a running punchline that still gets said to this day almost a year later. The quest was to subdue a nest of goblins that have been pillaging caravans. These goblins had psychic powers and compound eyes that allowed them to see great distances and even invisible objects. The quest was in a frosty mountain pass with an equally cold swamp below. In this uniquely magical region, there’s a species of frog tailored to this environment called Sneutz that are medium in size and bear thick fur. They’re also fairly docile and easily trained so the goblins used the Sneutz as mounts. After the quest was said and done, the party was quite intrigued by these furry frogs with unique abilities and asked more about them. With a grin that could shake the heavens and dismantle the hells I asked them the question, “oh, you mean the mind goblin thieves Sneutz?” Absolute pandemonium
In every one of our campaigns, there is always at least one point where we go to a town and get kicked out of a tavern because of the fact that our group is well-known for getting into devastating bar fights
We had a Kenku in one game who (this was well before Mordenkainen's came out) Communicated through interprative breakdancing. Oddly enough my Barbarian was the only member of the party who could roll insight checks high enough to understand him. The DM took it as a running gag and every now and then in a campaign we will see a kenku, or even just a random person dancing, and we are forced to roll insight checks to understand if they are actually speaking to us. It's a hoot.
climb checks in pathfinder are our running joke of something to dread to do. we fought a blue dragon ancient, giant spiders who have web alteration, a djinn who eats souls for wishes. but a 35 ft muddy wall in a gulley nearly killed us because we kept failing the climb check at the top of the near shear wall. as luck would have it, we had to leave our rope in the collapsed temple to a frost deity. it still kills us more than the other creatures in the campaign long climb checks.
Edit: there's a second one below the first.
My Friday group, whenever we enter a dungeon, almost always start chanting "Cult of Down! Cult of Down!" Meaning if any path slopes downward, includes ladders/stairs to go deeper, or (if no other indicators are present) curves South, we often take those paths first. One of the DMs in this group intentionally put an evil trap three crossroads Down of one dungeon's entrance to mess with us for doing so.
Another one: one player character just keeps adding titles after every significant boss fight, and having an NPC lackey introduce him by the full title for every new NPC we met
My characters have a tendency to be very unlucky in very specific scenarios. My first character, a Human Paladin, got constanty swallowed by giant toads, that the BBEG send after us, and kept failing the checks to free himself. After he died I started playing a Kobold Artificer, who got into a rivalry with our Rogue/Ranger/Druid. Whenever he is really pissed off by me, he casts Primal Savagery and keeps critting constantly. I have an Armor Class of 22, but I can never escape his anger.
The Morteming jokes were the best joke. Especially the second Mortem.
May Mr. Mortem continue to Mortem for many years to come!
The horny dragon our dragonborn bard banged kept coming back to save our lives
Running jokes are always some of my favorites. It's always something you don't write in that was a mistake or something like that.
Queue Jamie, the Androgenous.
We were playing Third Edition D&D. Jamie was a halfling adept. I had given the players access to NPC class cohorts to handle the things that adventurers might not want to deal with mid-dungeon, such as handling their horses on the outside of the dungeon so they don't get eaten by wandering monsters or stolen by wandering bandits. Someone to help the fighter don his armor and clean it at night, someone to help make scrolls for the casters, craft useful alchemical items, etc.
My players decided they didn't want to use them for such mundane means and instead kitted them out for combat. The adepts were using wands and staves, the warriors were using bows and swords, and the experts were picking locks, disabling traps, and the like.
The player that had Jamie as his cohort was the party healer. Jamie was incredibly lucky. Jamie also had hardly anything filled out on Jamie's character sheet so Jamie's only pronoun is Jamie. The party was routing a fort that had been taken over by a tribe of orcs. They wiped out the trash mobs and were fighting the big bad of that arc when the big bad realized he wasn't coming out alive so he decided to book it. Jamie wasn't having it. The Orc cast feather fall and jumped off the tower of the fort attempting to run. Jamie jumped after him and managed to grapple him mid-air and carry him out of the are effect of the spell, riding him down to the ground. The orc died on impact and Jamie hardly took any damage.
Jamie also took an adult red dragon's breath weapon to the face, failed the save, and stared down the dragon. I rolled a lot of 1's on that one.
When they were facing off against the big bad of the big bads, a Son of Gruumsh, a demi-god, they were facing down a purple worm. Jamie got swallowed and managed to crawl out of its mouth and survived with just a few HP left before the party was able to kill it.
Thus the trials of Jamie, the Androgenous. The players were always joking about how Jamie must be a god.
I made Jamie a deity that day.
The Wizard’s player made a joke about the NPC but misspelled it: “So he was sitting there, bbq sauce on his tiddles”
"Hashtag Vegepygmy Moment" everytime somebody does something that's a little dumb, but not like super mega dumb. We call it a "hashtag Vegepygmy moment".
This is because in session zero when we were talking about our characters, I showed the AD&D vegepygmy monster, and said "look at this silly guy" and everybody started chuckling, and then it was followed up with a meme about low intelligence, and then I replied with the titular running joke. And now it has stuck.
I was GMing an Edge of the Empire campaign when one of the players said that they hopped off the ship. I was pretty drunk and told him to roll athletics. He fails, falls on his face, and gets a mouth full of sand. The rest of the group thought it was hilarious and have been hopping on and off the ship for the past three years.
Reminds me of my psyker in dark heresy. I often joke that his best stat was insanity points.
During a trip in a swamp, my character was lookout. He spotted bubbles in the water. What did he inform?
-"It's a shoe!"
The others, not gonna react on the crazy psyker ranting about shoes, we were therefore all almost murdered by the massive sheatfish which the arbiter, who couldn't swim, had to kill with a knife underwater.
Since that, he often referred to enemies as shoes. Like the cybernetic Ogryn we ran into in a sewer system.
Once, he got hold of some weird whistle in a bag. It was evidence.
He tried blowing it, but trying to be smart, kept the bag on.
The warp doesn't care about silly things like plastic and summoned the flesh-hound of Khorne.
But it was gonna take a few turns, so my psyker realized what was gonna happen and in an exasperated voice yelled to the party.
-"WORSE THAN A SHOE!!!"
Everyone ran faster than they'd ever ran before.
We got away in time.
Once in world of darkness, we needed to show a bunch of scared civilians out of a dungeon we'd cleared. We were all explaining how we were helping, except one of us who were sleeping.
So we described how he was bunny hopping, pointing and saying -"THIS WAY, THIS WAY!!!" Constantly. It's our default for his characters behavior if he's asleep.
One of us often has a few mispronounciations. Probably thinks faster than his mouth.
But in scion, we got the glorious event.
"Walking down from the raised section of the pirate ship, the dread captain himself slowly walks down the steps.... the dread captain.... BLACKBIRD!!!"
Upon where it became an immediate running gag that it was USA's stealth bomber the blackbird, but with a black beard tucked on and with a sabre.
Valley girl succubus: "oh my gawwww" she says as she violently throws one of the party members through a wall.
Every tavern is just called “the prancing pony” it’s a franchise
In our TTRPG group the running jokes are:
• _"Spirit of Helen"_ - after a girl who was playing with us for a while and then left, might come back later. She sometimes had exceptionally bad luck with dice, then she had exceptionally good luck with dice, and immediately someone else had bad luck - as if she sapped luck from them. Now when we have bad luck with dice all session long, we call it "spirit of Helen is with us today" or "you've been haunted by spirit of Helen".
• In Warhammer game: _Warp rifts everywhere._ Happen all the time (I think our GM was confused at first about how psyker powers work, and then he made it just a feature of the space hulk we're on), one was opened accidentally by my Dark Angel Librarian, then GMPC Space Wolf Runepriest berates my character with "I suspect you might be a heretic" tirade, next session he accidentally opens another rift.
• In Fallout game: _sombreros._ It just so happened that one of the original party members was a custom protectron wearing a sombrero and talking like a cowboy from old Westerns. Then he domesticates a pig-rat we name Piglet and fashions him a mini sombrero. Then comes another dude, ranger in a big hat. Then comes yet another dude, traitor of Brotherhood of Steel, wearing a gas mask and a sombrero. Then our supermutant finds a sombrero and decides to wear it. My character is the only one wearing a helmet. May be I should wear a sombrero too...
• In Star Wars game: _caf collection and "the kitty-cat"._ Our party includes a Jawa Engineer played by the same dude who plays the protectron in Fallout, and the first thing he decided to build/fix on our decrepit spaceship was a caf machine. He's trying to collect caf from all over the galaxy, for now his most precious sample is Black Bantha (it's like Black Elephant coffee, but Black Bantha caf). My character is a Togorian Berserker - very large, tough, but surprisingly chill cat-like humanoid. His name is an anagram to a common cat name in our country. After the party realized it, they refer to this 2.5-meter-tall sharp-clawed beast as "the kitty-cat".
Our best running joke is this one : one time our party encountered a bridge and a bard on it. Bard said pay me a silver coin and I'll let you pass this valley safely. We didn't and bard disapeared in a poof. We crossed the bridge and get embushed by bandits.
We ran an other time to a another bridge with the same guy on it. This time we payed him a silver, then he told us to go around the valley because the bridge is a mimic. One of our member didn't believe it and touched the bridge, which was indeed a very large and sticky mimic.
From that on we were afraid of bridges
From our DM the most frustrating thing he would say was “perhaps”. “Can we trust this NPC?” “Perhaps”. “Will my crazy idea work?” “Perhaps” Are we going to die?” “Perhaps” Now he has us all doing it to the point that we say it more than “You can certainly try”.
going to teal this to torment my players now lol
@@ResidentEvilFan686 oh no. Let me apologize to your players for the trauma I unwittingly released upon them. 😏
I'm a rune fighter with dark vision. I famously joke that I'm going to use my dark vision that all humans have
My character simply raises his hand, much to the dismay of the npc speaking, and usually just asks, "Why?". The acting involved is always funny
Ok, running joke from when I was a DM: “He chipped a tooth!” Started when I had a group of Wererats attacking the party an decided to hit them with the lycanthropy dilemma. One of the wererats went for a bite attack and rolled a Nat 1 so I declared that he missed his bite and chomped down so hard he chipped a tooth. This happened another time in the same battle and I stated it again “He chipped a tooth”. Later in another battle, an enemy rolled a Nat 1 on a sword swing, I told my players he rolled a Nat 1 and one of them declares through laughter “HE CHIPPED A TOOTH!” From then on, anytime an enemy rolled a Nat 1, either i or a player would state “He chipped a tooth.”
Late as hell, but mine's probably the "CEN" or "Crowspawn Earring Network".
There's this one ruler in my campaign called Marissa Crowford, who in thirty years in power has managed to have nearly 100 daughters with noblemen across the continent (which, of course, makes no sense). Her daughters are coloquially known as "Crowspawn". Considering she's got so many kids in positions of power there's a shit tonne of suspicion on them at all time, from both the NPCs and for a long time, the player characters, especially since if you tell one Crowspawn something they seem to all know it very quickly. The party eventually learned that they all had long rage earrings of whispering, which made the party even more suspicious up until one of my players decided to actually play one. At which point they found out that there's nothing sinister about it and that they actually just use it to gossip, argue and post the fantasy equivilent of memes. They basically have discord.
Now if a player ever has a Crowspawn as a character, they're subjected to near constant brainrot from their legion of annoying sisters and it's become a running joke that if they run into one, they're probably upset because on an arguement that's happened off screen.
The dwarf is a mermaid with a glowing foot, the halfling pees holey water, and toasters occasionally appear out of random pockets
Our DM has a name that rhymes with CONstitution. So every time I’d do Stunning Strike, I’d joke “Save ‘em, CON!” As the DM rolled the Constitution Saving Throw.
I honestly don’t know if anybody in our group laughs at that, but they haven’t told me to stop yet 😂
"Just say it's a nature check"
For some reason I always roll exactly 16 on those... (18 after bonusses).
Never worked on other things though...
In my group we have a running joke, to say "For Grandpa" whenever anyone is about to do something that could be conceivably bad or ridiculous. One of the players lost her grandpa during the campaign and it hit her hard, the campaign obviously took a hiatus while she mourned. She returned eventually and we picked up the game where we left off and right before she had her wizard do some crazy stunt she said the words, "For grandpa" and rolled her dice getting a natural 20. It was clearly a therapeutic moment for her and she has encouraged all the other players to invoke "for grandpa" for lucky rolls. At times it feels like less of a joke and more of honoring her family member but it always gets laughs from the group and smiles from her whenever "For Grandpa" is used.
In my current party, the last three towns we've been in, we've had to run away from the town due to extentuating circumstances. First was a law that meant all adventurers will die, the second was because we stole a wagon, and the third was because a really important person was going to kill one of our party if he found out we were there.
It was a RuneQuest Campaign, the Party were fighting a band of Broo (Chaos Goat Men) Their Shaman was described as a huge naked beast armed with a staff covered in enchantments. He was a tough bugger until he fumbled, dropped his Staff and one of out group manged to kick it away out of reach. The GM reacted, telling how the Broo 'pulls out' a two handed mace as a replacement. Group responds, 'Where from? His Naked' there's a pause.. 'From his Arse! His a Broo!' So that become a running joke when ever anyone needed something..
"If you roll an 83 on a percentile die, Ember will blow up."
It came from one of my groups' first campaign, one of the PCs, Ember, was a suit of armor that was also a wild magic sorcerer. I think it happened like once (and it was actually cool bc he got his magic boosted for a minute), but even though we've since switched parties and are in a different campaign now, every time a percentile has to be rolled, someone will bring it up.
Personal favourite Morteming moment: Me, as the dm, forgetting the word 'pond'. In two different sessions. English is my only language.
Party had to "rapidly vacate the local area" after pissing off the wrong people. What followed was a mad dash through a cyberpunk desert city while evading security drones and a full-on drone tank.
Our minotaur barbarian/warlock went full juggernaut through like... 3 buildings, several courtyards, two streets, alleyways and a farmer's market equivalent. Well, while he was running through the farmer's market, a chicken got caught up on his horns and was essentially abducted to the crew.
So now there's a random space chicken hanging out in the ship, occasionally doing random crap in the background.
Yeah, so I play my party’s only cleric Esther, she’s a reborn,she was a Tiefling before she died and has a British accent so now, every time anyone talks to me, they call me either the antichrist or the British child. Esther was 17 when she died and was 4’8”.
Our Bloodrager shouting at the start of his turn "TAKE THEM ALIVE!" proceeds to roll a critical and bisected the guard in half with his greatsword. Now every time we one shot a mob the table utters "Take them alive!"
My paladin has a habit of running out of spell slots and yelling " I CAST WARPICK!"
I'm always adding these far too late, but these make me think of these inside jokes we have in our group. Like "misting" an enemy when you accidentally overkill them. or having "a great view of your thumbs" when botching a perception check. (accompanied by the action of holding your thumbs over your eyes.)
One of our favorites comes from one of our first games when the youngest guy in our group (22 when we were all 35+) decided to play the classic "elf ranger". We were traveling and when we stopped to take a long rest he opted to "be useful" and "go hunting". Since he had announced this the DM figured he wanted to act it out so he rolled for a random creature for him to encounter. He got a snow leopard.
I don't remember if he was actually forced into combat or if he was trying to befriend it (he wanted a companion) or what, but at that point, we were all level 2, so he probably shouldn't have been trying. The DM did try to go easy on him, but the player kept botching all of his rolls. He ended up being left for dead by the angry floof with maybe 2HP left.
After that we'd always make jokes that the player "might run into a snow leopard" or "ran into a snow leopard" or ask "Is it a snow leopard?" and he'd act frightened or traumatized. The DM even had the party encounter snow leopards a few times and he'd go into "fight or flight" mode. We've been playing together for almost 10 years now, and he still gives a far-off stare if you mention snow leopards. XD
Ever since I ran my urban fantasy campaign, two have been popping up over and over.
THE DEAGLE WITH THE +1 (expressed in shock to unexpected loot with magical properties)
and "Can I run over a guy with my car, non lethally". This has lead to players immediately trying to determine the damage and asking if nonlethal can be delt the moment vehicles of any kind are introduced as a system into my campaigns, regardless if they are airships, or just horse drawn carriages. They are gonna ask.
I was running Lost Mines of Phandelver. (No real spoilers as the story isn't really relevant to this story.) one of the treasures after the first area of encounters is a golden frog statue. one of my players decided to investigate it. Me: "You suddenly notice a frog sitting on it". Little did I know that, with that single sentence, I created a god. Bartholomew the Frog God. Same player had a character IN A DIFFERENT CAMPAIGN that worshipped Bartholomew. Now in the LMoP campaign, they carry the frog with them everywhere they go, even having a goblin "employee" (payed a small amount) carry him around. I fully intend to actually have bBartholomew return as a god that had been trapped in the statue for centuries, but I think it would be just as funny if he was just a normal frog.
Our campaigns have a recurring character that shows up in pretty much every universe we run. His name is Chet, the mind flayer. He shows up selling random trinkets out of the back of his car (think an old station wagon). He shows up to give our group random… things. One player got a 3 foot USB cable. Another got a teddy bear. I got an empty glass jar. No matter how USELESS or mundane the items are, they always manage to become a crucial plot point and save the party from doom in one way or another. So you’d better protect that glass jar with your life, because there will come a time when you need that exact jar for something.
Our running gag is that every time we do combat, we use an online tool, and so, i paste a 1000ft big picture of gobbo from joecat just outside the arena. Every. Time.
My group has kept a goblin tied up on a stick that our barbarian Carrie’s on their back. He was an npc from our very first campaign and decided to never release him after he ran away from us. We call ourselves the green cross now going on our third campaign and it’s hilarious. The barbarian’s player even made an irl recreation with a stuffed animal tied to a stick it’s hilarious!
One of my players who has had very… creative names for his characters. Names such as Brad and Dave, actually his simple average names are a fun contrast to the other player’s complex names like Marumi or Azrail. Anyway, one of his characters, Aegis, he couldn’t think of a last name for, so we just said “it’ll be a placeholder for now” and literally made his last name placeholder. Then, my brain did it’s normal thing, and got working. 3 years later, a stand in last name has developed into something so important to the lore as to have landmarks on a map named after Placeholder. Now every time my players and I see placeholder in any other piece of media we collectively loose our shit
Funny enough, Barry, Larry, Gary, and Harry are the names of the 4 mule deer bucks that hang out in our yard. Now, the herd has expanded to include Terry, Jerry, Sherry, Mary, Kari, and Joe.
Not sure if this counts, since the campaign hasn't started yet, but...
One of my players wanted to have their character be cursed (a la Fool's Gold), and while looking over the curse chart during session zero we (being me, the player in question, and the other three players who attended--the final player had a schedule conflict) discovered that one possible curse was "when you fail an investigation check, you find a live octopus instead of what you were looking for". So naturally all the players voted for that curse. They also decided that it is the same octopus each time.
This being a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon campaign, the octopus is actually an Octillery. Meaning there is now an NPC whose sole purpose is to be a running gag, as they are randomly teleported to the party when the cursed character fails their roll.
Any time anything goes prone in our D&D group (my mom is the DM) it is instead referred to as them “Doing the funky dance” because the only reason a creature went prone was because my melee-happy Dragonborn Artificer cast Grease right below them.
PANR has tuned in.
Not as good as GNR
@Steven-lz1vo I'm afraid I've never heard of it. As far as we are aware, PANR is the only source for the latest goings on in the little corner of the post apocalyptic wasteland we call home. There are things beyond, but many are unknown to us.
Long one, but damn good one:
First campaign I ever played, first session. We were infiltrating a random dude's house. Our artificer cast disguise self to look like the guy who lived there(and was a suspected cult member). Then he T-posed, flew onto the dude's balcony, floated in front of a window for a bit, stared inside intensely, got back down and asked several neighbors if he'd given them an extra key for the house in case he'd lock himself out. Somewhere in the process I commented: "The neighbors are probably all watching and thinking "what the fuck is Jürgen doing?"
We all decided that Jürgen was a good name. Another player also entered the house disguised as Jürgens wife because she had also found out there were cultists in that house. The two PCs both didn't know that the other was their disguised buddy so they tiptoed around each other while trying to search the house. Meanwhile my PC was chilling with Jürgen, not knowing who he was. My party started yelling at each other over a network of magic rocks(we call them rockie-talkies) because they were both panicking at the sudden apperance of "their" spouse, Jürgen got wind of what was going on so he headed home. Simultaneously, Jürgens real wife also headed home for unknown reasons. Now there were Jürgen, his wife and two party members pretending to be Jürgen and his wife in the house. None of them knew about the others. The inevitable confrontation lead to an epic 1v1 between Jürgen and our artificer disguised as Jürgen before the rest of the party arrived. Jürgen, who took out our healer twice and nearly killed the artificer, was later revealed to be the mayor, the cult leader and the only blacksmith of the local town. We named the campaign Rise of Jürgen and he became an absolute legend. Whenever we bring him up, we say "We're all Jürgen deep down".
We were casting "cloud of fog" in any remotely difficult situation, and it solved the problem half of the time
For my group, it was on Mutants and Mastermind where in the early session my character was infiltrating through pretty much the super hero version of Azkaban. During the infiltration to save my group, I had a surprise encounter with one of the prisoner and my respond with a Spongegar stance while making a grunt and now throughout the whole campaign, whenever our group has some sort of surprise happening, we would all do the Spongegar stance while making a grunting noise. We even forced a NPC that was with our group temporarily to do the Spongegar stance when a boss for that session appeared out of no where.
The Moonbeam incident sounds like a funny Wild Magic effect
Not just a running gag, but a bare fact: Since our first campain it happens that the same guy brings himself in dangerous situations. For example: Sneaking in a Skyrim themed campain into a Draugr grave and as an edgy rouge he was, beginning to sneakattack the skelletons laying in a great hall. Went good till the middle of the room where he Nat Oned. Guess who mopped the floor after 20 Skelly boys resurrect at once. Or later in the same Story: Setting the old Tavern on fire in front of every one just to run in the back to tell the evil guy we want to interrogate he has to leave because of the fire (1vs5 fight starts he survived suprisingly). Next time in a WH 40K only war setting: As Cadians in a special mission on a Hive Citys lower levels. After a fight against a Underground Organisation we found out there was an Ogryn enemy on the loo. He decided then, to throw two Fragnades over his locked door. Well, they showed little effect to the, now very angry, Ogryn which sormed out the loo and ripped our friend appart, left him die in agony (and stupidity).
The Broadside Maneuver:
Not D&D, but I'm doing a Transformers RPG campaign with some friends, and one party member is a triple changer who can turn into a helicopter and a battleship. Well at one point, my character with a skunk beast mode stunned some enemies with his spray, before the triple changer transformed into her battleship mode midair, squashing them, based off a scene from the G1 cartoon where Broadside did exactly that to Devastator.
As such, the two of us now make it a point to look for places where we can do it again, constantly referring to it as 'the Broadside Manuever'.
Friend of mine did the same by flying up in the shape of a bird before shape-changing into a whale.
I have a good one from my group. This story is of my Kenku bard named Applause and how the group accidentally created KFK.
KFK (short for Kentucky Friend Kenku) started when the party was split, with most of the party fighting ash zombies. Applause and one other party member weren’t near by the others and ended up being ambushed by twig blights. The blights surrounded Applause but weren’t doing much damage just yet. The other person decided that it was a good idea to use fire, having succeeded a check to determine it as a possible weakness.
One problem to the plan though. Instead of using normal fire spells, they pulled out a flask of oil and splashed it into the group… I feel you can see where this is going.
Before Applause could get out of the way, they lit the oil. The resulting fire damaged knocked Applause unconscious and the DM described that while disturbing, the air had a nice smell to it.
As this was an Adventure League game and we were under level five, with no cleric, I would remake Applause. Using the K.O. from the fire as a plot point, I made him into a forge domain cleric.
And so, KFK was born, and the hilarity of that day was cemented into the history of the gaming group. Now it’s a constant reminder to always, ALWAYS, watch for where your party is when doing potentially dangerous area effects.
My gaming group occasionally encounters Larry the Bandit. It's always the same Larry, and he remembers us. He tries to warn his fellow highwaymen about us, and he always gets ignored.
"Stand aside and let us pass."
"Guys, you REALLY should do as they say!"
"Shut up, Larry."
After the first session no one thought it a good idea to get an axe for anything. The first actual shopping session the dwarven artificer decided to ask how much an axe would cost. Using the PHB cost they were very confused how a simple townsfolk could afford an axe. From there on out the entire economy of the world was based on axes.
In the very first campaign I ever played, (very slight Wild Beyond the Witchlight spoilers ahead! You have been warned!) our party went to a traveling carnival to find a portal to the Feywild. After an hour and a half, we finally found the portal and went through. The first thing we saw was that we were standing on a bridge over a huge casm (about 100 feet or deeper). The catch about that part is, there was a thick fog below us, so we couldn't tell how far down it actually went. Our DM told us that there were large gaps between the wooden planks making up the bridge. Also along the sides were these large mushrooms that were growing beside the bridge that looked big enough for one of us to fit on top of it, although it might not support our weight. Before we can do anything, our biggest party member, a 250 pound Dragonborn shouts, "IM CLIMBING THE MUSHROOMS."
He was joined by three other party members, a small drow elf, another dragonborn and an even smaller Tiefling bard. We all watch in horror as the mushroom breaks underneath their feet and all three go plummeting down into the casm, instantly dying. The the other three party members left standing on the bridge, (me included) had no idea what happened. The DM didn't even let them make death saves. This was our first five minutes in the Feywild.
Ever since that incident, everyone always compares our choice to a literal or metaphorical jumping off a bridge. My character especially likes to bring up the incident.
The funniest thing about this situation is, as we're watching these party members descend into the fog, the original drow elf of the party turns to me, and pulls a bundle of rope out. She looked at me for a minute before speaking in the most unimpressed, monotone voice,
"We had rope."
I brought in the guy from the hell raiser movies who sold the puzzle box in the first place.”what’s your pleasure” was his line. I added. “You like money? You like travel?”
He has made a few appearances over the last 20+ years. And every time. My long time players flip and either try to kill him unprovoked or just nope their way out of the raven he is in. 😂😂😂
Way back in the days of 4th, one of my friends had a passion for playing dwarves and giving them the last name ‘stoneforge.’ Funnily enough, by some strange twist of fait, his character would die almost every session, and he’d arrive at the next one with a new stoneforge ready to go. Now, every time the DM needs to kill an NP for effect, they’re a dwarf named stoneforge.
-All the gnomes that my forever DM has in his campaigns have a Southern accent.
-For my very first one shot, I used a generic boulder JPEG to block off an area, and form now on I use it at every opportunity.
Our party was running Candlekeep before pivoting to other stories. During Mazfroth's Mighty Digressions, our wizard gets his turn against the Gingwatzims; "I throw a book at it!"
Books have been an inside joke ever since. From a homebrewed book that acts as a +1 Improvised Weapon, to a mace made from books, and we even joke that his Magic Missiles look like small books flying at enemies' heads.
A running joke in the Waterdeep game im in is that all the wizards refer to people as wizards, wizard adjacent or non-wizards
Pickles. Its a year into this campaign and the third session our rogue hid in a barrel of pickles to avoid a 2 silver cost of travel. Running jokes of smelling like pickles. Finding pickles and acting like a sacred treasure. Things like that. Its been fun
in a heavily homebrewed campaign, my character has an ability that allows his to teleport, a lot, he uses it to dodge most attacks, and to gain advantage on his opponents. Though part of the trade off is that he is going insane. The running joke here is that he's not 'supposed' to exist, and is often hit or as of recently almost hit by lightning. To a point where it doesn't matter what the weather is, it's one of those "This guy is why the 'average' is so high" situations.
Our group is playing Pathfinder 2e. The first time a player used an ability that dealt persistent bleed damage for some reason another player echoed "persistent bleed." then another, and another. Now any time persistent bleed is said at the table everyone chimes in "persistent bleed." No one knows why this started, but we continue to keep the tradition alive.
our Monk was killing it in an encounter we had with apes and giant apes, he critted with every attack on one perticular giant ape and killed it in 1 round
now we make jokes that the monk has a repressed hatred for apes and whenever we want to get some good luck going we go "Hey monk, There's still a Monkey!"
and he will go beserk and attack whoever we dubbed "the monkey"
kinda like pokadot man from suicide squad with the "ITS YOUR MOM" scene
My PC always makes overly complicated plans that usually go wrong.
Our party of 5 were setting up an ambush to catch some thieves in the act of stealing precious mining equipment. The "thieves" ended up being a Large Spider Crab Monster that our DM had expected to be quite the challenge. But we'd had a few hours to prepare, and I had asked the fated question:
"Does this count as loose earth?"
Not seeing anything wrong with allowing me to dig a 5x5 hole in the ground in front of the entrance, our DM chuckled as I proceeded to cast a Minor Illusion over the hole, probably thinking to himself that the Large 10x10 miniboss would simply walk over it. As soon as Crabulon stepped a claw through the fake dirt, I cast Enlarge/Reduce, opting for Reduce, diminishing it's size to Medium, causing it to fall straight into the pit after a failed Dex Roll.
We proceeded to absolutely bully Crabulon: every time it tried to escape the hole it had to roll an athletics check as we were actively trying to kick it back in, to which Reduce gave disadvantage to. When it did eventually escape it barely made it 20 feet away before being lassoed by our Artificer and put into another hole created by yours truly. I dug the pit another 5 foot deeper the next turn, and then the next, all the while we were pelting it with ranged attacks (the Artificer even threw his robot cat in there with it for extra carnage).
After we made crab soup, our distraught DM went on a very deep forum hunt to determine what counted as "loose earth" to find out if my shenanigans were within the rules. After some soul searching, he agreed that whilst it had worked this time, he would take extra care with any "loose earth" conveniently lying around me in the future. Now every time I'm at an impasse and am running out of options, my Gnome will slyly ask the DM: "Say, that patch of brown I see on the map, that wouldn't happen to be some loose dirt now would it?" to the groans of the DM and the laughter of my teamates.
My group (pre migration to a new DM) had a very controlling, beginner, DM, that added more custom rules and restrictions than the actual 5E books themselves.
Think 5E + 4E + Homebrews.
Once our party was skulking through a short tunnel (5 feet high) while tracking a group of bandits that gave a group spiders advantageous conditions to ambush us because “you didn’t look up”… the shortest among us was 5’ 7”.
Now though… when the dice are against us, someone usually dusts off, “Of course! I forgot to look up!”
Another is a situation that the DM wanted me to explain how my Rogue is detecting secret doors and later traps on a chain-pulley system, I told him that I place my tin cup against the wall, ear against the cup, and tap with the pommel of my dagger.
Apparently the DM pictured something dramatically comical and his laughter sent us all into waves of laughter.
Every now and then I’ll mention to him, “Hey, if it helps I have a tin cup in my mess kit.”
I’m not quite sure I would call this a running gag, but I’m running a Strixhaven campaign where one of my players, a Warforged Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer, just kind of constantly ends up with an existential crisis every few sessions or so. I do not know how this keeps happening, but it’s very funny to me at least, and this very very sheltered boy keeps learning more and more about the multi-verse, and keeps developing a new existential crisis with every new bit of information that is out of his depth
That last one about not being able to word very good during descriptions should be a thread all its own
The jester of our party had barely managed to survive almost every major battle of the campaign. And by barely managed to survive, I mean like being KOed and swallowed by a remorhaz and would've 100% been digested had the rest of the party not hit it hard enough to puke up the pc on MULTIPLE OCCASIONS. His near death experiences happened so often that he started playing the character as believing that he had plot armor. And whenever he would tell an npc that he had plot armor, the rest of us would say "hello, I'm plot armor" since we were always the ones bailing him out. Our DM managed to turn that joke around on us when a beloved npc used the line just before sacrificing himself for the party.
This is from the second session I had. The joke had been brought up before the first session happened, but in the second session, it actually became a real thing. My character had a -4-wisdom modifier with a chaotic good alignment. There was this fight where I had a one-on-one with a random bandit on level 1. My character wanted to take the guy back to the capital, but the guy is clearly trying to kill me. So, my character decided to make the guy prone by slicing at his legs and then knocking him out. Until suddenly I roll very high for damage on one of my hits, and it apparently sliced the dude's leg off. The guy was left on 1 HP, and I was panicking because I did not realize how fragile this man was. The others came to the room this situation was happening but by the time anyone with a healing spell walked in, I had already tried to do a medicine check to try and stabilize him. I rolled a 6 but then with the -4 modifier, I got a 2 instead. So, then my character ripped out the dude's side bone which killed him. When this happened, the entire party was watching and then I was covered in a ton of blood. Since then, the entire party are afraid of me trying to save them from any sort of medicine check-related rolls. (I purposefully try to put my party members in situations where they need a medicine check.) Then a party member started choking on water, (This party member was an old man btw) then my character immediately punched the old man in the guts to stop the choking. This happened in the middle of a guild, and everyone saw that too. Now I am seen as a horrible doctor that scares the crap out of people every time, I try to stabilize someone.
The closest thing to a running joke we have centers on our Ranger, whose name has become a verb in our group due to a few sequence of events where he accidentally single handedly deleted an encounter on his first turn, paired with his propensity for rolling either very low or horrifyingly high. The first instance was an 1v1 fight, where, due to a combination of house rules, the DM's bad habit of giving the party *VERY* powerful weapons and a nat20 he dealt nearly 3 times his opponent's HP worth of damage with a single arrow. Second one was him deleting my character's father from existence with an accidental burst of Wild Magic (honestly the goal of that fight was to put him back in the Forever Box in which my character had essentially suplexed him so I'm not even complaining, especially because it was the culmination of a really cool moment of teamwork between three characters to just thoroughly give my character's pops a bad time). There have been a few other instances since but they are not *quite* as remarkable as these, especially since the weapon has actually been somewhat nerfed since at Ranger's request. It's still strong as all hell, granted, but more in line with the shit the rest of us can do.
Back on track, that verb more or less means "to fuck something/one up", "to remove from existence", with us often telling the guy "Ranger him up, Ranger" when his first turn comes up. We're gonna need him to live true to the running joke next session though, I made the boss at the DM's request (long story, I'm better at balancing monsters than he is [man threw a level 20 wizard and a CR12 dragon at us when we were four level 6s, even if somehow we won] and I'm pretty good at compartmentalising my knowledge away from my character's) and well. I'm sure my group can beat them (we got a lot of DPR, Ranger just is the most terrifying example) but it's gonna be rough on all of us.
In my game world I have an NPC that reappears in nearly every settlement. If the party needs a general store, they’ll find the Gnaw and Lock Emporium being run by a goblin named Snobby Knobble Robber. My initial idea was for him to be a fence in a campaign that is still in the works.
I’ve gone on to other campaigns, but I wanted to use Snobby. He is, therefore, to be found in any settlement, offering whatever wares the party might need.
our running joke was that we had a dwarf barbarian who loved to play golf. now this dwarf barbarian was far and away the best character in the party in terms of combat prowess at the beginning of the campaign. she was also unusually lucky with crits specifically when the enemies were on less than 5 hp (her greataxe was 1d12 + 2 i think? its been a while), meaning it was almost impossible/literally impossible for her to not kill. eventually, one time the dm described her beheading the enemy and the head flying off and hitting another enemy (which was on 1hp at the time and the character who had been focusing it was up next anyway, we were just finishing the last enemies) due to her perfect golf skills, dealing 1 damage and killing it. this became a running joke, and after that, whenever this barbarian killed with a crit, the head would fly off and deal 1 damage to a random enemy.
In my first 5E campaign I played a homebrewed zombie class. ( Don't worry, if anything it was underpowered, I'd have been better off playing PHB Beast master ranger.) So a few sessions in we enter this town and the guards are wary of allowing a zombie, me, into the town. They ask for my papers to prove proof of ownership. My whole group is confused but apparently, in this frontier town, necromancy isn't technically illegal. However you must go to the morgue and register your undead servants, preferably buying a cadaver from the city to use in your work. My group promises to have me registered and speak to the mortuary assistant. We then spent the next 2 *hours* of real time trying to forge the paperwork to fake my registration, then eventually gave up.
Turn out it's bureaucracy at it's finest: There is a 2 GP fee, 5 if buying a corpse, where you give the zombie a pendant to show it is registered and sign some paperwork. That's it! If we had just gone in there and paid the fee it would have taken MAYBE 10 mins of real time.
So now, even to this day, if it looks like we are going to be doing some crazy over-complicated thing someone will throw their hands up and say: "Zombie papers!" In frustration.
Captain Draco was very theatrical Clawdite (shapeshifter) space pirate. I had an habit of forgetting that the doors are made of steel and trying to kick them open only to hurt my feet.
4 SKELETONS
&
Rowan Can’t Hit Anything
"we got druided". On one of our earlier sessions, a new player joined us. They forgot their character sheet and forgot they were a druid(we had no combat up until now). So when we needed to break into a guys house to gather information, we wanted a druid to sneak in there but we thought we didnt have one, so we sent our bard in there. Cue nat 1 on first stealth role. This started a chain of events that led to us becoming terrorists after going to war with the police. We remember this moment as the time we got druided
I run a homebrew campaign with my siblings and some friends, in it my brother plays a cyber-cowboy bard, and one of his cantrips is minor illusion. He always tries to use it in combat to look like a grenade that he's throwing in an attempt to fake-out intimidate the enemies, but every time he rolls for deception for it he rolls low, so in the game its pretty much him throwing out a little confetti fart grenade. Usually the enemies will stare confused for a second, insult him if they're the type of character to do that, and keep fighting