On Monday, the party in the Ravnica game I run had found a secret graveyard behind a manor house belonging to a powerful devkarin house within the Golgari Swarm. In Ravnica, and particularly the Golgari, the idea of a graveyard is a serious violation of their worldview, as all bodies should be recycled through either decomposition or undeath (ultimately both in most cases). Decrepit members of the family rose out of their graves as Vampire Spawn and attacked the party. The Cleric used Turn Undead, causing every one of them to flee - but one of them fled back into the manor house, where there was a party going on.
With the House Captain and several elite warriors coming to investigate after calming the fleeing vampire and convincing the partygoers that everything was all right, the party tried to think of a way to keep the guards away. Initially planning to use Stoneshape to close off the tunnel leading to the graveyard, instead, the Artillerist Artificer cast Shatter on the tunnel above, just as the first two guards entered the area.
They rolled only 9 damage, so what I did was determine that that was 37.5% of the total damage one could do with a base level Shatter. I then had them roll percentile dice - if the roll was under 37.5, the tunnel would cave in. They rolled a 37.
So, rocks fell and the guards died (the house captain had not caught up,) and the Druid, who was standing nearest them, had to make a dexterity saving throw, but only took a little bit of bludgeoning damage from the rocks.
It was not remotely what I expected for that encounter - the guards weren't even supposed to be part of it, mainly serving as a bunch of passive Perception beacons for when they were navigating the party - but it actually solved a big problem for me, which was how to keep the players in the sprawling, multi-level dungeon they had just entered.
Last night, we were playing in our Wildemount campaign, and I was on my level 2 Triton Wizard. We were going to rescue a guy who had been captured by the gang that he and his brother had been trying to get out of - only when we flushed the gang's leader out of his house, he came with the "kidnapped" guy, who seemed to have not actually wanted to leave in the first place.
While we might have just tried to slip away, one of the paladins didn't see this and just decked one of the gang members. Things went very bad very quickly as both paladins went unconscious and we found ourselves surrounded by eight gang members (I assume bandit stats, but at this level, anything can be a deadly threat). So, after doing a bit of pitiful damage with Mind Sliver, I pulled a Hail Mary play - I cast Silent Image in a nearby alleyway, showing a phalanx of Zhelezos (the law enforcement on the Menagerie Coast) coming toward the fracas, shouting "oh shit, is that the zhelezos?" Given that these armored guards were moving silently, the DM had me make a deception check - on which I got a 9. But then, the other Wizard (we are not a well-balanced party,) who is a Chronurgist, used Chronal Shift to allow me to re-roll, and I got a 19.
The bandits each rolled insight checks - and none of them succeeded. Thus, all but the gang's leader and the not-actually-kidnapped brother fled the scene, totally turning the tide of battle. (In fact, we didn't kill anyone - we used nonlethal damage and the other wizard used the Sleep spell to take down the gang's leader - whom we then took off to the nearest zhelezo station, claiming a reward.)
Anyway, these are two examples of what I love about D&D. You'd never be able to come up with these kinds of outside-the-box solutions in a video game - the programmers can't anticipate every possible idea a player might have.
It's a fun game. You should try it.
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