In an online game I used to play, we were infiltrating deep in necromancer territory and encountered a rune on the floor that would summon an incredibly strong undead specter when a player touched it. One of the players wondered if there was a cooldown between summons, and decided to test this by pressing the rune several times in quick succession. One total party kill later, I can confidently state that there was _not_ in fact a cooldown, and that three nightshades will kill your entire group faster than you can run away.

The other day my Costco food court order was Order 66. My spouse didn't get it until we got to the car so I had to hold in my jokes for however long it takes to make 3 hotdogs.

There's always a relevant xkcd.

See, that's just idiocy. Sure, *test* the device to see if it suddenly gives you spiffy new armor, but ya'll are freaking adventurers, ready to cut and kill and slay anything in your path! SET UP A TRAP FIRST! Put a hot tub of holy water where the first spawn location was! Scatter circles of salt in eighteen strategic locations around the room! Write the verses of ancient positive energy across the walls! Summon the ancient daedra of yore, hallowed be their sigilic runes, and let fly the chaos of the universe into the demesnes of horror where cometh light's foe, wherein the bane of life finds new fears etched prebirth into the slaverings of its blasphemous mental cavity!

> SET UP A TRAP FIRST! The mentality that separates an "Oops, we screwed up" PC group versus an "Oops, I screwed up" DM. The goofy party will stumble around slapping every button in the fun-house, just to see what happens. The pro-gamer move party will key in on "Unlimited Resource" and turn the Generate-A-Spectre button into a steam engine.

Like that locked door in Jedi Fallen Order?

Fuck that, own your freak! Next time call it out in your best Palpatine impression. Those who get weirded out weren't worth caring about and you never know what other awesome folks you'll see. Make your day and someone elses <3

I'm very much guilty of being one of the people who tried that lol

See, he _could_ have gone about things the smart way, but this was way funnier and made for a better story. It was also 100% in-character for him to do something like that - the guild he was a part of was commonly mocked in-universe for thinking with their swords rather than their brains. Plus I was able to hold it over his head for _years_ afterwards. I was a cleric and he didn't even let me do the bare minimum preparations that might have let us survive before summoning them.

Yeeeess.....**DO IT!**

> The pro-gamer move party will key in on "Unlimited Resource" and turn the Generate-A-Spectre button into a steam engine. A good DM would realize they can have the theoretically "Unlimited Resource" run out between 5-10 uses

> The pro-gamer move party will key in on “Unlimited Resource” and turn the Generate-A-Spectre button into a steam engine. 

I still get flak from my players about the time they rang a church bell and were surprised the baddies heard it and all came inside and killed them. I know it’s not the same, but what did they expect?

Take that rune, put it in a portable hole, build a clockwork or magical button-pressing machine, unleash chaos and destruction on demand. That trap's gotta be worth a million gold pieces.

“Tell the ghost sharks I said Hi. ”

Relevant: https://www.xkcd.com/404/

Wait, is the 404 one a meta joke? Neither my browser nor my xkcd-bot can load it.

Yup meta joke.

Sure, D&D is fine but have you heard of our lord and savior Pathfinder 2?

The joke is that XKCD #404 is a literal HTTP 404 error.