My oldest brother DM'd for me a few times when I was young, back with the D&D modules by TSR were first coming out (To give you an idea, my family had gotten an Apple IIe a few years beforehand, "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" and "Forgotten Realms" weren't yet even a thought and "Pools of Radiance" hadn't been released yet). Since there weren't any other kids around my age to play with, he let me roll up a whopping twenty characters...
Actually, he only told me to roll up "as many as you want", which cascaded quite a bit because he left me with all of the character sheets he had at the time.... :sweat:
He often played a lot of the campaigns as close as possible, though cheating on my behalf because I was too young to comprehend the devilish trap setups and the like, at least not to the level of an adult gamer would.
And seriously, even looking back on them now, those traps are still vicious and unforgiving.
In one incident, we were going through a dungeon and half of my characters were over a massive pit trap when said trap activated. My characters were generously allowed to survive, though the cleric who'd fallen with them had to do a LOT of healing to get everyone back up again.
The dungeon described the pit as having sheer walls that were slippery, and all of the characters who were carrying rope were the same guys who'd just fallen into the pit, and it was too deep to try to haul anyone up with the single 10' pole that one of my other miscellanious characters had. My thief, after three attempts, managed to make it up to the other side with a pair of ropes when a pair of gargoyles started to attack him.
My brother was generous, but very few of my characters had much in the way of magical weapons or offensive spells.... except my wizard.
My wizard was unique in that my brother, knowing that I'd never be able to figure out the spells well enough to plan strategically for situations like this (fireballs, flame arrows and lightning bolts were all I knew were useful), so his system was that I could roll two dice and if I wanted, I could cast whatever came up on his spell chart immediately and at whomever I wanted.
The spell that popped up was Polymorph Other.
Being a kid, I made one of the gargoyles into a giant pair of buttocks.
At least, my thief could at least harm it. :sweat:
My brother, laughing at my choice, rolled with it and had the giant ass crush the other gargoyle, seeing as it would take too long for anyone with a magical or blunt weapon to aid my thief.
We just had to kill the enormous ass, and my brother played it up as a serious threat. That giant ass might as well have been a Balrog for as devastating as it with it's "Stinky Cloud" attacks.
Luckily, we didn't need to do anything too drastic to get it out of the way (it reverted upon death)
That's as close as I can recall getting to an "asshole" moment with D&D. :snigger:
