DnD Story #232 – Don’t tell me I broke the rafter.

This is the story about how I got one of my party members to join a gang and got him beat up twice, because I broke a rafter.


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So in a Wednesday game I play, we have 5 players (including me) which are a Goliath Barbarian, Kenku Rogue, Mountain-Dwarf Sorcerer, White Dragonborn Paladin, and (me) Blue Dragonborn Revenant Warlock. The session almost didn’t happen because our Barbarian, Rogue, and Paladin didn’t show up, but luckily our DM’s brother decided to join in for the night because he was on spring break (we’ll get to him later). It starts by recapping what happened last week, our barbarian and sorcerer had joined a small tournament and the barbarian won in a wrestling match against a Gorgon. Me and the paladin had just joined up with the group (we all started in separate areas of the game world) on our search for a falling purple fireball and it had only recently become dark. The rogue had already reached the fireball and unfortunately died because of some Warlock Knights that guarded the body of Telos. Back to the rest of the group, the barbarian and sorcerer had won a free room for participating in the tournament and I was stuck with the paladin to find our own place to stay. Now that I’ve recapped, this is when the session began. We were on a busy street when I lose the paladin in the crowd. Me being chaotic evil, I don’t really bother to look for him in case he gets in trouble (and because he’s not there to begin with). I find my way to a few inns and insult their staff for not letting me stay for free. It’s getting late so I instead go into a nearby alley and attempt to use my spear to break my way into the inn. Obviously I’m heard from the inside and they send two bouncers, on either end of the alley to corner me. I manage to fight them off with my breath weapon and using Hex to help get out of a grapple. I run through the crowd and lose them only to run into another alley to hide. This one happens to have a window which I peer into and see the sleeping barbarian and a sorcerer who is awake (because the barbarian snores). I climb into the window, having been bloody from the fight and at exactly half health because of being a revenant, I decided to fall asleep after insulting the sorcerer a bit and telling him I’m going to crash for the night. Throughout the night the sorcerer stays awake because he doesn’t trust me (which is fair) and because the barbarian, so he suffers one exhaustion.

He goes through my stuff and places my blanket over me because he's still a neutral good character. He finds a ring nearby and suspects it's mine, but wants to wait until morning to find out. In the morning, the barbarian surprisingly had vanished (we all have really low passive perception, like 10 passive, and the sorcerer was watching me closely all night). I wake up and ask where the barbarian went to which he doesn't know and so I insult his intelligence because of it. It's at this point that our characters have come to realize we don't like each other. As we argue about where the barbarian went we both hear something strange only to find that a pixie is trying to sneak in through the window I left open. It was a character played by the DM's brother. I stand up and try to swat the thing from annoyance with a successful unarmed attack, I knock him across the room (closer to the ring) in which I now notice. I ask about the ring to the sorcerer who says he found it and ask if I can look at it. When we look back at it we find that the pixie was trying to lift it. He tries to catch it, but fails his check because of exhaustion and the pixie flies to the rafters with it. I shoot an Eldritch Blast at him and miss, hitting one of the rafters and breaking it. THIS is where the fun begins... I look to the sorcerer and tell him "You're paying for that." to which I get the response "Why am I paying for it if you're the one who broke it?" to which I respond simply with "Prove it!" now at this point I feel I should remind you that a Warlock's spellcasting stat is Charisma which consequently gives you better results when taking to people. For me that specifically means I'm good at lying. We argue for a bit about who broke the rafter and he's getting nowhere with me because my flaw is "I am inflexible in my thinking" meaning once I'm convinced of something, I don't like to change my mind and I've very clearly decided that HE broke the rafter and not ME. So I decide to leave through the window again and go to the front of the inn. I walk up to the service desk and tell them I'm here because my boss wants me to teach someone a lesson, roll a 22 in deception. Now that they'll essentially believe anything I say I tell them that the tournament was supposed to be rigged and the barbarian was supposed to take a dive against the Gorgon. Rolled a 19 in deception and got them to show me the room. I open the door, smile, and yell "Hey guys, they broke your rafter!" then mouth

Check Mate. A few moments later the employee comes running into the room, looks up and says "Why'd you break the rafter? You're paying for that!" he tries to persuade them that I broke it, but rolled a total of 4 on persuasion (a 1 on the die). They call security and he gets tackled while they yell "stop resisting!" They beat him up a little and I hand them a vase from the service desk to help. They then drag him into the alley and beat him up until he's unconscious. All the while he's failing his strength checks because of his exhaustion level and because he has a -1 to strength. Once unconscious they ask me where my boss wants him so I say "oh you know, the usual spot." And so the I follow. The pixie who had watched all of this decided to tag along so he could find things to pickpocket. We arrive at a courtyard where a bunch of thugs are hiding. The leader who is a goliath steps out and questions me about the situation at hand. I roll a total of 25 (natural 20) on my deception and tell him this. "You see, I took him here because he lost us money on the arena fight. I'm a newer recruit, joined 25 years ago before I died and came back recently. I was a red dragonborn before this (which are typically chaotic evil in this campaign specifically). I thought you'd like to see that I did my job so I could get my payment." I was extremely confident until he said simply "We didn't bet on that fight." I panicked a little and apologized saying it must have been a mix up or something, but I swear this guy is still a problem. At this point the pixie had already pocketed 4 more gold and a bracelet. The sorcerer was also awake at this point and listening to me basically selling his life to this gang. The boss then tells him he has to make a choice. He can either die or he can join the gang. The sorcerer decides to join and so they start the initiation. He places his hand on a fountain and the Goliath smashes it with a pair of brass knuckles and flattens it. A medic comes over and fixes it, but not after he screamed in pain. I sit there quietly laughing to myself the whole time in character. Shortly after the leader looks to me and says "your turn" and tells me to hit him. Now something else I haven't mentioned is that I was able to purchase a magical item at the beginning of the game, but if I did I would start with basically nothing else. So when I did, I decided on "Gauntlets of Ogre Strength".

I proceeded to bash his face in so I wouldn't suffer the same fate, and little did my character know, this group had a specific number of times you're supposed to hit the new recruit before stopping. I had hit him 1 too many times and the leader tried to turn it against me. Luckily when I rolled deception I rolled a 15 against his 10 so he believed me when I reminded him I'd been dead for 25 years and it must have slipped my mind. Things calm down from there and the leader lets us go. Everyone goes back inside and I turn to my bloody party member who just got beat up twice and forced into a gang. I look at him and simply say...


"So what did you learn today? Don't EVER tell me that I broke the rafter."


The End


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