D&D commercial, accurate depiction of actual play! (except for the lightining bolt part)

So the Champions of Cauldron defeated a pyroclastic dragon. Not surprising, considering they have also killed a lich, a draco lich, a room full of mustache twirling villians, and eradicated an entire thieves guild. How they bested it was the shocker for me.

Going into this fight, I was pretty sure this bad mamba jamba was gonna kill one if not all of them. They decided to chat with it first, which was a good thing. Slight chance they might be able to achieve their goal by cleverly lying to him. Seemed possible, they did roll enough to change his attitude from hostile to friendly. The lying part though... well he had a sense motive of +31. Not so easy to fool. Especially when you come in telling him you are gonna kill his employers.

The fighting starts, and the party wizard tries yet again to disintegrate. On paper, disintegrate seems like whoop ass in a can. Never seems to work though, after the ranged touch attack roll, overcoming spell resistance and save, the baddies get at least one lucky roll. I roll a two on the save, which is still enough. Now my stomach drops, because I can tell I'm gonna have to kill characters now. Lots of them, unless the Champions get really really lucky. This thing has like 312 hp, and breathes superheated ash for 14d6. Its favorite tactic is to bull rush people into the lava, then grapple to keep them cooking. Painful, very very painful.

They try to banish it. Banish is turning out to be a super useful little spell, considering everything seems to be extra planar at high levels. Knowing that only a botched save on baddies part is gonna save them, I roll it right out in the open. I roll a one. It was kinda weird, it was like everyone was really too shocked to react. Plus it was like the first round of combat. I'm thinking if this had happened a little deeper into the combat, when like two or three cohorts had been toasted, there would have been whooping and cheering like in the commercial. It was more like "huh, wow, umm.. no fricken way... huh" Awesome, utterly awesome. I'm glad after like twenty years, the game can still surprise me.

Also, that's Jami Gertz and Cameron from Ferris Buehler in this commercial rocking it with the polyhedrals. I guess it originally aired only a couple of times, once of which was during Saturday Night Live. That table looks pretty damn uncluttered for a gaming session.