Just Dumb Things Intermission part 1

Haven't posted in this topic in a while, but wanted to keep you guys in the loop. 


This is Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, played with a bunch of Psych Grad Students, an Elementary Education major, and a malcontent.  Drewbacca is running this game and gave me the relatively simple directive "Do something dumb and break the gameworld for me."  I obliged, and ended up with an extraordinarily large pile of coins and items that a character of my level (5 I believe) shouldn't have.  Not my fault, he told me to break things.  We're having one of those days where the Malcontent is doing something and the situation plays out like this...

We're exploring the ruins of a broken town that's been ravaged by a horde of orcs and goblins, and we've managed to get ourselves trapped in a slum.  The rest of the party is starting to run low on resources, and they are kind of panicking.  I have a ring of regeneration and heavy adamantine armor (I'm hard to injure at that point, and when I do get hurt, I heal quick).  So I'm standing in the center of the square with a growing pile of orc and goblin bodies. 

Ettins come charging down the street, and our dear Malcontent, who's so pleased he's been able to break out the Book of Vile Darkness, declares "HA, I'm going to cast Dance of Ruin, and deal 3D20 points of damage to every Non-demon within 90 feet of me."  Drewbacca looks sat me with a WTF look and I shrug and read through the spell as Malcontent starts rolling his dice of damage."Ha, I rolled 51 points of damage! SUCK IT ETTINS!" And then the bad news.

"Uh, this says every Non-Demon within the area of effect." 

"Ettins aren't Demons." 

"Neither are you?"  He grabs the book, furiously reading the spell.  It doesn't omit the caster from the effect, because most of the things that are going to cast a spell like this are demons.  Why would you consider casting it otherwise?

The sad face began to turn to the angry face.  He hadn't read the spell's description and had been so keen on using his new doomsday spell that he didn't pay attention to the actual text of the spell.  He'd also spent most of the day raising corpses with animate dead to loot portions of the town, but this time he actually blew himself up with his own spell.  He dropped one of the Ettins, the rest of the party dropped the other, and we managed to drag his unconscious ass back to safety. 

Moral of the Story: Read the Effing Manual.