Calling for Court Cases

To the most honorable crit justices and the puny putrescent pallid bailiff Jacques I come to you with the case of the wasted nat 20 strength check. A few years ago I was playing a campagin with friends. We were foolheartedly trying our hand at Strahd, for many of us it was the first time playing 5e (most of us having played pathfinder in the past). I genuinely cannot remember the greater context all I remember is as follows as it has stuck with me to this day. We were trapped in jail cells in a dungeon somewhere. We were each in our own cell and we needed to get out obviously. I was playing a bard and tried my hand at picking the lock to no avail. We continued to fail at various escape attempts until our barbarian asked if he could attempt to straight up rip off the padlock on the door keeping him in. The DM asked him to make a straight strenght check. Dice Christ smiled upon us with a nat20 and our DM ruled that he STILL didn't break out. He reasoned that 20s cannot magically make us succeed on anything and breaking a padlock with you bare hands is impossible. We argued that we are heroes/adventurers who possess abilities beyond that of normal people. Our barbarian's strength score meant he could casually carry 270 lbs of equipment around (18 str * 15 as per rules) so surely a nat20 could let him break metal with his bare hands. I beseech you all, I know nat20s cant succeed on everything but were we wrong to ague? Why make a roll if there is no chance of success? I prostrate myself at the mercy of your ruling as I will be bringing this to the friends who I played with

To the most honorable justices and my burpless brethren the baby bailiff, My it please the court and give you all the most supreme crit. ;) I'd like to submit the case of the quiet Kenku. My table was running a home brew campaign and we were getting close to finding and fighting our BBEG. Our party included a kenku, Crowbar, who played by the mimic rules that he could only repeat words and sounds he had heard before. The BBEG was hidden away on another plane and to get to him, we had to enter a cave full of grueling puzzles and traps to reach a portal. We barely made it through alive. At the end of the cave, our DM announced that we would be silent and communicate only in written form or telepathically, (though no one one in our crew had the message cantrip). We were presented with a written riddle (think "speak friend and enter" style puzzle). Part of the riddle was solving for the answer, the other part was determining who could say the answer. If we answered wrong, or the wrong person spoke we were told the reaction would be TPK bad, and we were very weak already from the cave. We sat around the table passing notes, and determined the answer to the riddle was "Onomotopoeia" and the person to give the answer was a choice between either the youngest member of our party, or the physically smallest member of our party. The problem? Crowbar was both. Crowbar vehemently insisted there was no way he would have heard the word onomotopoeia before and therefore could not speak it. Our DM knew going into this that Crowbar was both the smallest and youngest and seemed to be gleeful about our predicament. After several pleas to both the DM and Crowbar to try to find a loophole we conceded we could not solve the puzzle currently. I suggested we take a long rest, exit the cave, teach Crowbar onomotopoeia, rest again, and come back, as it seemed the only solution. In the process, we ran out of potions on the way out, and on the way back our cleric, the party's only healer, went down, and she failed her death saves. My hexblade warlock attempted to call upon my patron for help without success. In the end only 3 party members of our 6 member crew, including myself and Crowbar made it to the end concious. Crowbar triumphantly said Onomotopoeia and the gate opened. Our session ended feeling empty and hollow. In real life there was a fight after the session. The players expressed we were upset at Crowbar for being so stubborn and at the DM for intentionally putting us in this situation. Crowbar argued that's how his character has always been and we shouldn't expect him to change because of a bad in game situation. The DM argued that we could have been teaching Crowbar words throughout the campaign before this so we wouldn't be here. I said it was an intentionally obscure word and we had no reason to teach it. Our DM laughed at me for being so upset, so I got up and left with the cleric, saying we were going to start a new campaign. Later, Crowbar texted me and said I had overreacted to a simple difficult scenario, and that if that's how I reacted when things didn't go my way, then no one would ever want me in their dnd party. I feel justified in being mad, but wonder if I didn't react too strongly. So I come to the mercy of the court asking, was I wrong to take the Murph response of "find new friends" or was my DM being unreasonable? I humbly await your judgement and accept whatever punishment I may receive.

2fastBicurious

To the Juicy justices and the bearable baliff I bring to you the case of Berries Gone Wild I am a newer DM in a homebrew pirate campaign with my group of four friends. They are all at 3rd level, and it ended up that the only 1 of the four PCs were capable of decent healing: the druid. I decided to homebrew a buff to the druid's good berry spell, allowing a character to fit as many of the 10 berries in their mouth as an action instead of the 1, with the caveat that if it's more than 5 berries you have to beat a DC 10 Con Save or you cough them all out with no effect. I thought this was a neat and funny idea to buff healing for the party that would rarely come up. However, it came to a head when in the end of the groups toughest fight yet, when the cornered wizard attempted to eat 8 goodberries at once and ended up failing, wasting an action. This lead to a death spiral with the near-dead wizard going unconscious in the next hit in attempting to run away, dropping concentration on an important spell that was protecting another PC, and leading to their death. The party ended up barely winning, and had to jump through some hoops in the next session to revive their dead PC. But half of the party is still mad at me for being a hardass about the berries, saying that choking on any amount of those 10 berries is unrealistic, and that it can be done "easily" in 6 seconds. The night ended with everyone logging off after a heated argument about goodberry sizes, characters' jaws, and strength scores. It has since been unresolved. To the court I ask: Did I go too far in standing firm with the berry estimation in my homebrew? ie. Is it possible to eat up to 10 berries without it being a choking hazard? Should my party just get good? Or are they reasonable in getting berry mad? I humbly seek judgement.

George TJ

I prostrate myself before the bodacious bishops of dice christ to seek repentance for the most dire of sins: the rejection of a nat 20. Last Halloween I was playing in a low level horror one shot as a sweet, slightly senile gardening druid grandma. The party got ambushed by a small group of wendigoos and it quickly became clear we were outmatched. We managed to escape by the skin of our teeth, but grandma and another party member were cursed with endless hunger. It became clear that we were turning into the beasts and, when the change was inevitable, I found the character sheet of my sweet Marigold Sneezeweed whisked away to be replaced by a challenge rating 5 wendigoo. 2 wendigoos, against 3 horrified level 2 party members. Bishops, I did my best to go soft on my ex party members but the dice just were not having it. Nat 20 after nat 20 fell upon my desk and the party was getting ripped to shreds. Over the course of 7 rolls I rolled four nat 20s and two 1s. When the final nat 20 fell I mumbled something about it bouncing off my pen and quickly rerolled, missing the crit that would've guaranteed a TPK. I come seeking forgiveness from dice christ, and at long last, peace of mind for my blasphemy.

Daniel Kishen

Your immaculate bailiffs and the guy who eats their food today i have the case of the invisible lizard. I am currently playing in a hardcore campaign where i play as a Lizard folk monk who during an invasion of an enemy base found a room where 4 bug bears were torturing a goblin. My character ran in to try to save the goblin and was promptly squashed. the wizard thinking fast in an attempt to save her cast invisibility on her corpse which we thought would work since the dm had been playing the bugbears pretty dumb. But the dm instead had them make insight checks to find my characters unconscious body. The leader bugbear succeeded and commanded to other bugbears the ones who failed the check to attack my unconscious, invisible body They of course do this and cause me to auto fail my death saves and permanently loose my character. The party thought the the was unfair since i was unconscious and invisible but the dm said that this was a hardcore game and we would have to deal with more challenging encounters. So i roll it to the court was the dm right to have the bug bears single me out til i was dead in the name of a hardcore game? or should i have been given some grace due to the wizards quick thinking. I humbly await your judgement.

Alexia VV

To the extremely charismatic, wise, intelligent, strong and dexterous judges. Jake, continue in your attempts to grow as a person. May it please the court as I bring forward the case of the neutered barbarian. I've been playing in a group for a few years now and at one point our DM swapped with one of the players. The player DM has a story to tell and its mostly been going fine. He likes making overpowered battles which he then clearly has to fudge/debuff mid fight - I get it, it happens but he also likes making rules - flanking now just adds a +2 to attack instead of advantage etc. There are 7 players so I get that as well. My one main pet peeve though is his interpretation of a barbarian. One of our players has a kickass pirate dragonborn barbarian. Though a lot of battles he keeps being told that the damage dealt to him while in rage is not halved as its from a magical weapon or the creatures attacks are deemed magical for their slashing/bludgeoning/piercing damage. In my mind the rage ability does not mention magic as it halves any version of those 3 damage types and our DM is basically wiping out the whole point of this class as all our fights his monsters or NPCs tend to be OP. Are they wrong or is my interpretation of the law incorrect? I await your judgement and anecdotes.

Thunderous Turtle