Okay, I was trying to do a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon thing with the thread title, but I'm pretty sure I failed miserably.
At any rate, our group's DM lost his notes for our old campaign (I contest that he never had any to begin with, but no matter). We've been running a new campaign for a few sessions now, and I'm playing an alcoholic halfling by the name of Oxceau Cobblecrusher. (He's gained the nickname Oxceau Goblin-Eater, but that would require a greater summary of the first session that I don't want to dive into at the moment.)
At the very end of our second session, we had just slain a rather large group of goblins and orcs, along with some homebrew lizard beast. The goblin mage that was riding the giant lizard beast happened to drop a suit of masterwork half-plate, which I dragged back to town. Now, rather than selling it and raking in something on the order of a thousand gold, Oxceau saw the short-term problem of a beer-money shortage, and just took the armor right into the tavern, asking the barkeeper if he could get a keg in exchange. The session ended with a "Sure, why not?"
Tonight we had our third session, starting with a lesson on how the Arms and Equipment Guide handles adventurers that kick back too much booze. Hmmm... Small halfling, medium keg, and a medium tankard to manage the ale in between keg and mouth. That made each tankard require two fortitude saves, which seemed to start out increasing linearly, then around the fifth save or so, went exponential. Each failed save meant 1d2 DEX and WIS damage. Now, with a wisdom score of eleven to start off with (which is pretty low in a campaign where the stat-generation method was rolling an insane 6d6, dropping the lowest half), it wasn't going to take too many failed saves to get me hammered.
I made the first three easily. Multiclassing Fighter and Barbarian nets you a pretty high fortitude save, after all. I got cheated out of my fourth save by a roll of three, but I was still speaking in coherent sentences. Granted they were on the order of, "Now, Mister Keg, you understand you've run up quite a tab, but I'm willing to forget about that if you buy me another drink. You will? HOORAY FOR MISTER KEG!" I nailed the fifth save, and then the DCs started doubling, quickly entering the realm of epic impossibility. Before passing out, more antics ensued... "Hey! Someone tell the innkeeper that the pool is MUCH too small!" (Shouted before diving into the keg.) After climbing out, Oxceau was a bit hungry, and remembered the goblin arm stowed in his backpack. By the time he pulled it out, however, he thought it was 'Mister Keg' that was hungry, and tossed the arm into the beer. The next tankard he pulled up came with one of the gobo's fingers, which Oxceau stripped the meat from before downing the mug-full of ale. The final fortitude save DC I was rolling against was 140 after finishing fully one quarter of the keg. (My DEX dropped from 20 to 8 over the course of that drinking game, and my Wisdom dropped from 11 to -1, when I passed out.)
In an odd way, my character has been given an opportunity to gain experience from this....err....experience. Ten doses/five tankards of alcohol has been set as a baseline. In the future, when I drink more than that, I gain experience points (and up the limit for future attempts) in a sick, twisted Zelda mini-game fashion.
Is it wrong that my character is the one with the most weaponry in the party?