My Curse of Strahd D&D players have taken a lot of punishment lately. It didn’t surprise me, then, that they were reluctant to leap into another battle in our first session of the year. Spell slots were in short supply after a brutal crawl through Castle Ravenloft, and long rests looked unlikely. What did surprise me was the way they chose to cheese their way around combat – fishing zombies out of a room full of water, then blowing them up.
The scene of the shenanigans? A flooded torture chamber, its floor submerged in three feet of inky black water. Our heroes stood on an overlooking balcony, feeling nervous about the mysterious moving shapes below the surface. Someone tossed a rotten meat pie into the pool, and a slimy grey hand snatched it greedily. A scouting familiar spotted five more of these hungry beings below.
Moving through the chamber was essential, but nobody wanted to risk another fight. Then came the bright idea: “what if we fished them out?”
Fishing Tackles do exist in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, but even if the party had one to hand, it probably wouldn’t have been able to nab a Medium humanoid. Instead, the group fashioned a makeshift tool out of rope and ration bait.
Without a fishing minigame ready to go in my DM toolkit, I had to improvise a series of DnD skill checks. The Paladin and War Cleric handled the rope, performing Athletics checks to yank the zombies high enough out of the water once they took the bait. The Light Cleric, Wizard, and Warlock all readied cantrips to fire once their target was visible. And all the while, the Bard stood at the back, inspiring their friends with a zulkoon and mocking any zombie that came into view.
Mechanics-wise, this was a simple montage – Athletics checks, attack rolls, damage. At a measly 30 hit points and 9 AC, it was easy for three or four level-seven attackers to land lethal hits in a single round. And it just felt right that the rotting corpses would explode upon second death.
As a Dungeon Master, I’m generally pretty anti-minigame. Every gambling session or foraging mission I’ve ever experienced in D&D has felt like a dull excuse to throw more dice, with very little material reward. That’s why I’m in favor of keeping scenarios like this simple – and a little silly.
A skill challenge where a certain number of successes to lure, reel, and destroy the target is more than enough crunch for me. With six targets to eliminate, I even averaged the damage taken to save extra calculation time, instead focusing on visceral descriptions of the flying offal scattering across the room.
If I’d had time to prepare a minigame, however, I might have added one extra element. I’d have let one player, preferably one who doesn’t get to roll many dice, act as the zombie ‘fish’.
Picture it like this: a Survival check is made to cast the line and lure the fish. One player makes an Athletics check to reel in the catch as usual, but another player rolls a contested Athletics or Acrobatics check on behalf of the zombie to escape. Essentially, the two take part in a grappling contest. The ‘fish’ player uses the modifiers from the zombie’s stat block, and they’re heavily encouraged to narrate the zombie’s wriggling, panicked attempts to escape.
It’s an extra step in a series of skill checks, but it ups the storytelling – and participation of each player – significantly. My colleague Tim Linward has, however, suggested bringing an actual magnetized fishing game to future sessions. That could also be a great way to add some levity to Curse of Strahd, an otherwise grim and Gothic horror campaign.
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