Hold On, Your Character’s Named Sephiroth?
Did I ever tell you about the fourth level fighter who tried to dual-wield greatswords?
In my first, terrible session in the DM’s chair I had the PCs encounter the villain only for him to catch them in one of those sphere of force items. I realised this was dumb because they couldn’t get out and so I had him challenge someone to a duel. A greatsword duel.
The villain was a tiefling wizard, and this was back when Skip or someone had just ruled that all outsiders got martial weapon proficiencies, which would include tieflings. The player, whose character is named Sephiroth and names his greatsword Masamune or something, defeats the villain and kills him abruptly before he can finish his “you haven’t seen the last of me!” dying speech. The player takes his +1 greatsword.
The player refuses to give up Masamune, and so when he reaches level 4 decides to take Ambidexterity (this was back in the day when you needed two feats to fight with two weapons). Why? In order to finally take advantage of the +1 greatsword, he was going to dual-wield it with Masamune.
The penalties were atrocious and he rarely hit anything. When he did, though, he’d splatter it in one hit. However, he had this remarkable knack for rolling natural 1 on his attacks! “Oh, I guess I drop the +1 greatsword then” — after which he’d start being able hit things. “Alright,” I said, eager to end the combat more quickly since he’d spent most of it not hitting, “The +1 greatsword flies from your hand, decapitates a skeleton and embeds itself in the wall.”
Thus, he decided that every single time he rolled a criticle fumble, that +1 sword would embed itself into the nearest wall, no matter how far away that wall was. It became a running joke. I eventually decided that the sword had been cursed to leap from its wielder’s grasp when he least expected it, and that’s why it had been embedding itself in so many walls.
I gave up trying to get him to give up Masamune when he tried to climb down a cliff face without a rope, fell a hundred and twenty feet, survived–I gave him a broken leg–and he tied the legendary sword to his leg as a splint.
June 28th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
Sepiroth dual weilding Masumes…. Ouch.
Funny story, I can imagine how that must have been. I kinda did the same thing, but with longswords. My guys a Sorcerer