I like gaming!

We finished off the 50 Fathoms mini-campaign I've been running today and it was a good time, with the final big encounter going completely differently than I'd thought. Basically, the players had a pirate ship full of ill-gotten loot. Another, bigger pirate ship had caught up to them. Meanwhile, one of the pieces of ill-gotten loot was the Hand of Vek-Na.

What I anticipated was that the two ships would duke it out, with the players having a dramatic chase/getaway and the NPC pirates possibly boarding the ship; meanwhile, the Hand had taken control of one of the PC's crew, and, for reasons of its own, would try to hinder the PCs getaway and try to have the NPCs board.

Instead, this happened:

1. In the first round of cannonfire, Eric rolled the best attack/damage roll I've ever seen. If you roll the max on a damage die, you get to roll again and add. He did that about 5 or 6 times on his damage roll of 3d6 with a huge bonus from his awesome attack roll. So, on a 3d6+3, he ended up doing over 40 points of damage. That one shot was enough for him to destroy the pirate ship outright.

2. The Hand, suddenly robbed of options, panicked. It started scampering around the deck trying to get control of someone so it could control the ship. It had all these spells and could raise dead and everything! If it could've gotten to a PC it could've done some serious damage. Instead, in the second round of combat, Laurie made an amazing spellcasting roll and rolled over double what she needed to kill it. Oops.

They killed 45 fierce pirates and an undead terror with two rolls. Brilliant!