Various Dungeons & Dragons Stories

Double Natural One

Ah yes... everyone loves rolling a natural one!

For those of you that don't know... a natural one is when you roll the twenty-sided die that basically decides your fate in the game (commonly referred to as the "d20") and you land on the number one. Yep. The absolute worst role you can get from the die.

So let's give a bit of background for this.

This is a fifth-edition campaign set in a world named Cajaerathrad where a strange plague has been ravaging every city, killing most of the citizens, but has left one particular town named Norbury unaffected. At the time, we had a party of about six. In our party, we have Sykoris, a half-elf fighter, Thokk, a half-orc barbarian/paladin multiclass, Larry, a halfling rogue, Nerian, a human monk, Faeyra, a high elf rogue, and Caramip, a gnome wild mage. Our characters had just rescued a child from a goblin hideout in an abandoned temple, returning him to his father, when they decided to celebrate their victory in various ways. Sykoris and Thokk immediately head towards the nearest tavern, deciding to have a bit of fun through the night. Larry and Nerian head to the nearest shop to try and.. "bargain" their way into buying cheap equipment. While all this is happening, Caramip and Faeyra decide to scout out the town and see if anything is suspicious. This is when things go horribly wrong.

Caramip and Faeyra decide to stand back to back to observe their respective sides of the city. Faeyra decides to just look around and see if anything seems out of the ordinary, thus the DM told the player to roll a perception check. Caramip decides to cast Detect Magic on the surrounding area, thus the DM told the player to roll a d20 to make sure it wasn't wild magic.

Side Note: I should mention that in our campaign, even if the spell Caramip casts doesn't require a roll of any sort, the DM always had the player roll a d20 to see if it landed on a natural one, triggering a wild magic surge.

Just for fun, both players decide to roll their dice at the same time. We all watch the dice roll towards the center of the table and...

They both roll a natural one at the same time.

For a second we all laugh as Faeyra essentially tries to look at the back of her head, but we all stop and look towards the DM with horrified looks on our faces as he says "Time to roll for wild magic!"

Our DM rolls the percentile dice and lands on a nine, then begins looking through the wild magic table. Once he finds the effect, his jaw just drops, which of course sends us into a panic because if a DM looks horrified, you know it's bad! Then, he says the following sentence very slowly:

"You cast magic missile as a fifth-level spell."

Now, for those of you that don't know what magic missile is, it's a first-level spell that sends three missiles towards a target that each cause 1d4 damage. However, each spell slot above first sends another missile towards that target. If you're good at quick mental math, that's now SEVEN missiles that Caramip has just sent wildly flying into the town.

Luckily, since our characters were relatively low-level, our DM spared us and essentially made the missiles into a firework show into the sky, not destroying any buildings (or innocent citizens... whoops!) After that, our characters partied through the night, and their adventures continued the next morning.

So... that's basically it for this story! If you enjoyed, please be sure to let me know by leaving a vote, and comment if you would like to hear any specific stories either surrounding a certain aspect of Dungeons & Dragons, more stories from this campaign, or anything you can think of! If you would like others to see the nerdy randomness that is this collection of stories, please be sure to click that share button and tell all of your peers!

As always, thanks, guys!

~Jeff