Have you ever wanted to give your PC party a pet dragon? What about when it turns out to be unbelievably OP? Well, we’ve done it and hundreds of other DM stunts that ranged from “unconventional” to “ill-advised” to “Are you C-R-A-Z-Y?!” Here are the stunts we’ve pulled DMing TTRPGs that even we thought might have gone too far. Including how we implemented them in the game mechanics, how they worked out, and what we wish we did differently.

These stories cross many editions of D&D, including 5E, but the lessons apply to any RPG you play. This is system-agnostic mayhem. … We just hope you’ll still respect us in the morning.    

3:00 Stunt 1: My Pet Dragon … The Super OP Spawn of Tiamat

11:00 Stunt 2: The +50 Sword of Dragon Slaying

18:00 Stunt 3: Turning a PC into a Pile of Undead Bugs … and Letting Him Continue to Play the Character

26:00 Can you do something crazy with one player without alienating the other players?

31:00 Stunt 4: Fighting Cthulhu in an Airship

34:00 Stunt 5: The Christmas Game –Satan Claws and the Epic-level Gifts

36:00 Stunt 6: Beef, the Impossibly Strong Gnoll Warrior NPC with a Giant Ballista

41:00 Stunt 7: The World’s Most Wholesome Evil Campaign Where the PCs Destroyed Each Other (Perhaps the perfect evil campaign?)

46:00 Tips for running an evil campaign

48:00 Stunt 8: The Homebrew Werewolf PC Race (and why Thorin toned down his homebrew)

50:00 Stunt 9: “The Wizard Knows What He Did!” Warping Overpowered Magic Users to a World Where Magic Is Blocked!

55:00 When is it OK to take away PC powers?

62:00 3 Rules for pulling off a successful depowering campaign

64:00 Stunt 10: The 1st-Level PC Necromancer Who Could Not Be Killed … And His Doppelganger NPC Nemesis

70:00 The Stunt We Didn’t Pull: Allowing a PC Ghost

72:00 Stunt 11: The Samurai That Was Reincarnated as a Satyr

75:00 Tips for adapting higher-level monsters into PC races (benchmarking and balancing)

76:00 Stunt 12: The Deck of Many Things at 5th Level (This one killed a game and spawned a Storm Giant Wizard)

82:00 How we made the Storm Giant Wizard PC

85:00 Stunt 13: Players Decided to Keep Orcus’s Wand and Become Monsters Who Conquered Dimensions

93:00 The Big Takeaway and Final Thoughts