Roll for initiative

Oh no! It is a mimic! Roll for initiative.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a mimic.”

“You now have a fork in the road. Add it to your inventory.” “Do you mean a fork?” “No.”

I don’t wanna fork on the road. I wanna fork in the bed.

DM: “Why are you skanking…?”

Congratulations! You’re now the proud owner of the Cursed Fork of Missile Attraction!

Every ranged attack targeting you has advantage which cannot be negated by anything until you break the curse at the next “Y-INTERSECTION” several days out of your way

Role a strength check

Unfortunately you are not strong enough to lift the fork in the road.

What! Oh my god Magic Fork!

What? No it’s just a normal fork in the road.

I must have been hit by some kind of weakness magic.

No, you’ve been hit by stupid.

De-intelligence magic? But why would that effect my strength? Unless I’m so dumb I think I’m stronger than I am, an I actually a fairy? We have to find a wizard to turn me back.

Yeah let’s throw away my novel I wrote for this and go off on some random Bs side quest.

“The fork rejects your advances.”

“As you bend over to pick up the fork, you slip a vertebral disc. Your health is reduced to 30%, and will stay capped there for the following three days.”

DnD in your 30s.

I shoot the gazebo with my bow.

oh no! it’s the cursed fork of splitting!

I cast magic missile at the darkness!

Reminds me of “dungeon crawler carl.”

Uncle Sheo is spreading the fork of horrirpillation around the kingdoms again…

You better not fork in the road, you son of a beach!

Watch what happens when the party encounters a gazebo.

Lol, that reminds me of my first DM session …

Anyways, my actual first DM session — everyone loved the memes. Like the classic “hitting a gazebo with a sword” one. The meme they really liked was the “forever DM,” so everyone was joking like, “Not me, you have to come back from vacation just to DM!” etc.

I, on the other hand, jumped at the opportunity to be DM. I had no idea what I was doing. When I was designing the enemies, I was a bit annoyed that our regular DM’s encounters were so easy, so I thought I needed to get a gauge on how much damage they could take before dying.

So, I invented a boss. What it was — was a creature that, when you hit it with a sword, would psychically protect itself. I knew my meme-loving players couldn’t resist hitting it, since that was the meme of the week.

They had no idea it was the gazebo.

So the gazebo kept spawning more and more enemies. I waited until they were almost dead so I could see how much they could take. My initial plan was to wait until they were entirely dead, but they started getting angry that my first session was about to be a TPK.

So I gave them a hint to kill the gazebo. They didn’t understand what I was doing, and I got some very strong pointers about the encounter being too hard. The rest of the night was… a bit bitter.

I hope you like the beautiful punctuation you hypocrites just made AI take my job

This would be my take.

Make them roll a strength check and and on a natural 19 or 20 an extreme random act of fate allows them to pick up the fork in the road. It also tears a hole open in the prime material plane fucking their current objective sideways.