Vera the Munchkin Bersker

(originally posted in Discord chat, hence the halting cadence)

I shall celebrate the creation of this channel with a hilarious and awful power-gaming story from my youth, way back in the dawn of the ancient “3rd Edtion” of Dungeons & Dragons.

A local gaming store made the mistake of running a D&D 3rd Edition “multi-player convention with optional PvP”…

It was all fun and games, until me and my gaming group decided to build a synergistic team of unstoppable destruction.

Strategy was well executed, but simple. I played “Vera” the mighty female Frenzied Berserker character. She was very aggressive, not all that bright, but she managed to attract the attention of Skelter, the very creepy old Wizard who, for some reason only used “touch” spells to buff her and make her even more beefy and deadly.

Later, we were joined by the Halfling Bard Shazben, who basically just healed Vera and occasionally cast “Grease” on her weapon, which was the only way to prevent her from killing the whole party while she was frenzying.(edited)

Anyway, we played this group for a while, wrecked the campaign of this poor GM who wasn’t a very good storyteller and only used prewritten adventure modules which we would constantly throw unexpected curve balls at.

And THEN, ONE DAY, our moment came

our 5 minutes

of magnificent glory

The convention, which only lasted 2 years, because we killed it with our broken tag team, the convention known as “Conquest”

(please note that if you search the Open Legend rules text you will find references to Vera. Indeed, she is the one and only)

AAAAAaaanyway

So, basically the idea was that all of the resources got dumped into Vera – Stoneskin (SUPER OP in 3E), Mirror Image, … Polymorph to turn her into a troll with a 24 strength score and regeneration(edited)

…trying to think if there were others

And then we even had an extra character, the mythical Kensei, a legendary fighter who, in classic legendary fashion, never actually attacked but used his one never-normally-used ability to transfer is base attack bonus to another character

Now mind you, younglings, that in those days, if you had a +6 base attack bonus, you got an extra attack at +1 (e.g. -5 lower bonus)

So, when he dumped +8 into her base attack bonus for a combines total of +16
You can imagine things got pretty scary

So when, Skelter, the pervy mage who was set up only to protect and buff Vera infiltrated another group of players that was at the convention, we had our first PVP set up.(edited)
The poor saps never knew what hit them

They each got their turn, perhaps knocking 7 points off of my 50 HP damage immunity from Stoneskin

And then Vera stepped up to the plate

And LO, with a mighty swing, she didst power attack for -30 which was for some reason tripled or something like that

And then didst she mete out, with tremendous force (a triple range critical threat that could CRIT for X 3 with a confirmed crit roll on any 12 - 20 on the d20) an attack dealing, somewhere in the vicinity of 120 damage. :joy:

And LO, the first adversary, a poor and sad Bladesinger who “didn’t quite realize it was a PvP event” was fallen.

And YET, Vera didst have an unlimited supply of attacks remaining.

As many, in fact, as there were persons (currently 4 more) within her melee weapon’s reach which she cold both kill and attack.

The rest, as they say, my friends… is history

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