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Doc Hawkins
Jun 15, 2010

Dashing? But I'm not even moving!


For as long as there have been separate threads for Best and Worst Gaming Experiences, there have been claims that someone or other is posting in the wrong thread. But who the hell would only follow one or the other? I propose a union of the two towers.

What should I post here?

Anything that happened in a non-computery game that you were party to or witness of, which you think deserves to be recounted. It can be funny, triumphant, disgusting, adorable, whatever.

Keep in mind that we reserve the right to advise and nitpick.

As a personal favor to me, please don't tell us about the time you rolled a number when you really wanted another number, unless what a player described as the result of that roll was really, really terrible/hilarious/fantastic.

Feel free to repost the fittest and most vigorous stories from the old threads:


What's the worst experience ever?

There are many contenders, but this remains my favorite (emphasis mine):

Samej posted:

Most annoyances aside, the overall worse experience I've ever had in tabletop would have to be during last years LGS 40k tournament. I was playing my 1000 point Necron army and my brother had his Chaos Space Marines.

Anyway, the drama occurred during an argument between the owner and one of the other players, a guy who had a very well painted Tau army. The guy had apparently lost versus a Dark Eldar player yet was begging the owner to let him stay in the tourney. People were asking him to calm down and the owner was being adamant about him losing; the guy he lost against took some verbal swings at him that he probably shouldn't have.

I was in the back of the store talking to another grognard when we both heard this loud popping noise from the front of the store. Turns out the guy drew a revolver and unloaded the whole thing at the owner. He promptly got tackled by these two hulking neckbeards.

Turns out the only bullet that hit got the owner of the place in the hand, almost taking out his pinky. The police got there pretty quickly, and the guys Tau army somehow disappeared in the process.

What's the best experience ever?

The next one you get to have with your cool friends.

What the gently caress does cat piss have to do with anything?

quote:

RETAIL: THE WRATH OF CAT PISS MAN
BY PAUL T. RIDDELL

- - -

It's a distasteful subject, not fit for family reading, but it's time. It's time to relate the origins of everyone's least favorite comic shop fixture, Cat Piss Man.

Back about three-quarters of a decade ago, I was a regular at a local comic shop in Dallas, and was yakking with the staff about the new issue of gently caress Science Fiction (yes, that was a real magazine, and I bawled like a baby went it went under) when I met my first Cat Piss Man. Ever comic shop in every city has at least one, all seemingly grown off this one like cuttings off jade plants. About six foot four he was, weighing in at least 200 kilos if an ounce, and the perfect cliche of the comics aficionado. The lank, greasy hair that wasn't long enough to tie back but also wasn't so short that it took care of itself without combing. The heavily abused "Marvel" T-shirt, with holes that suggested that cotton polyblend was the only fiber he got in his diet, since most of the rest was covered in a thick layer of Cheetos crumbs. Facial pores that suggested that gnomes sneaked into his bedroom in his parents' house and broke off the tips of No. 2 pencils in them. Beady little eyes behind Buddy Holly birth control glasses. If one's dental apparatus was a city, his mouth obviously took a direct hit with an H-bomb, and the mixture of nose hairs and crusted boogers protruding an inch past his nostrils and down his moustache guaranteed that he breathed through his mouth, producing a charitable impersonation of "The Creature From the Black Latrine". The last of the Olmec had taken to living in cliff dwellings in the shelter between his double chin and his gut, reasonably assured that nothing would disturb their mushroom and cave cricket farms.

However, Cat Piss Man's name was pure olfactory onomatopoeia. The first time I encountered him, he was walking up to the store door when one of the staff said "Oh God, it's Cat Piss Man." I was about ready to ask why he said that when Cat Piss Man stepped inside. Now, Texas heat has a tendency to make everyone exposed to it somewhat less than fresh, but this was the end of December, and his odor literally brought tears to my eyes. This wasn't a minor case of body odor: he literally smelled like a mile-wide overloaded litter box, left out in the Australian outback to cook in the sun, with enough power to kill a silk ficus. This stench wasn't just an affront to God, Satan, and Elvis: this was positively Lovecraftian in scope. I suddenly attained insane insights into the magazine distribution business, and I think a lack of available oxygen had something to do with it. Other customers would simply run the moment they saw him waddling toward the door, and he could clear the entire shop within seconds if the store's air conditioner wasn't on at full blast.

If this wasn't nauseating enough, his behavior was even more horrifying. Since this store didn't carry "adult" comics, he didn't disappear into the back area to wank off (to steal from the "Republicans Attack!" trading card set from Kitchen Sink, I doubt if he nor anyone else had seen his genitalia since 1984), so he felt compelled to follow people around. Someone would be reading the back copy on an issue of The Comics Journal when he'd come trucking over, not saying anything, and just kinda stare. Every time the customer would move away because Cat Piss Man was melting their Mylar baggies, he'd just follow along, not saying a word, and reposition himself like a corpulent vulture over a dying prospector. And Arioch help us all if the customer was female: Cat Piss Man would sidle over closer, trying to stun her with his natural perfume, and apparently he once tried to feel up one woman who wasn't able to get away fast enough.

The last time I ever saw Cat Piss Man, he was at a science fiction convention in Austin, Texas a few years back, hogging space in front of a dealer's table, doing the same thing. This time, he was dressed semi-formal, in a homemade Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform with a thick layer of human grease clogging the uniform's fabric in a band starting at his armpits and ending at the tops of his hips. He apparently couldn't afford or find a prop communicator pin, so he had one appliqued with Elmer's Glue-All and glitter, and the grease was making the symbol peel free. For some reason, this made his assaults even more terrifying.

Oh, and did I mention that this guy almost never bought anything during his regular visits? Or if he did, he nitpicked everything in an effort to scam as much free stuff as possible?

Okay, so you think it's cruel to make fun of the socially challenged. We've all been there at one point or another in our lives (I cant' read one of Evan Dorkin's Eltingville strips without getting flashbacks of 1985, and when I remember how much I used to be like Bill from the Eltingville Club, I want to borrow a time machine just so I can kick my former self's rear end into the next time zone), but this is different. This isn't making fun of someone different from us. This is explaining why so many people stay away from comic shops.

Let's put it another way. If Cat Piss Man were to act like this on the street toward random passersby, he'd probably get arrested or at least given a stern warning by a local cop. If Cat Piss Man were to do this at a restaurant, he'd be thrown out for bothering the customers. If Cat Piss Man were to do this at a nightclub, about eight big burly guys would take him out back and beat the poo poo out of him. If Cat Piss Man were even to smell like this in the Army, he'd get a good scrubdown with lye soap and wire brushes. (I had Cat Piss Man's brother in my Basic Training platoon in the Army, and we finally had to give him a blanket party a la Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket to convince him that bathing and changing clothes were good things, because every other method simply didn't work.) In a comic shop, though, this isn't only tolerated, its example just acts as encouragement for others. Every time I mention Cat Piss Man to a comic shop owner, no matter where in the country the comic shop is located, s/he laughs and says "Oh yeah: he's in here all of the time." It's not the same guy (sometimes Cat Piss Man is skinny, and sometimes he actually combs his hair), but this new Cat Piss Man is a glob off the original.

I'm willing to concede that Cat Piss Man buys something every once in a while, and that we can't afford to alienate customers in this depressed market. However, even if his Mommy's allowance gave him the opportunity to buy $200 or more in comics and other goodies a week, Cat Piss Man drives off easily twice that many paying customers, who would come back to a comic shop again and again if they weren't subjected to nasal rape every time they walked inside. This also holds true for the "Tragic: This Gathering" players shrieking at the tops of their lungs in the back (that is, except in the comic shops where the owners realized that they lost less money in sales to card game players by closing the gaming areas than they lost from items that "liberated" themselves when the gamers left for the day), or the guy who pesters customers into buying loose action figures out front because the store owner didn't want a box of dog-chewed Spawn figures. And let's not forget the fanatics who threaten violence upon anyone who dares scoff at the idea of an Action Girl/Witchblade crossover event. Comic store owners just don't seem to realize the lesson that the shantytowns out in front of movie theaters for Star Wars: Episode One taught movie theater managers: the last thing most patrons wanted was to be harangued by some dork in a Jedi costume who had been living in it for the last four months, and the fear of even getting close to the "Episode One" line meant that customers didn't come to see other films, either.

And for those store owners and patrons who don't think that Cat Piss Man and his brothers are a problem, look at it this way. Imagine going into a pet shop in a world where every pet shop had a big, smelly incontinent St. Bernard in the back. The dog doesn't belong to the store: it's just some stray that comes in every day, eats straight out of the bulk dog food bins, drools all over the copies of Reptiles Monthly and Tropical Fish Hobbyist up front, rapes the hamsters and dry-humps the legs of every customer that comes in, and doesn't contribute a thing to the operation of the store. If anything, it gets in the way of normal operation, and pet supply proprietors find that their business is directly affected by customer perceptions of the ordeal of trying to get around the St. Bernard poo poo piled around the front entrance. This world doesn't exist, although I've seen some pet shops that have come close. One of two things happen to pet shops like this: they go out of business, or the owner does an Old Yeller to the mangy beast and burns its carcass in a big bonfire out front.

The latter is what comic shop owners and managers need to do to their resident Cat Piss Man: throw the bums out. Don't joke about the stench or put on gas masks while Cat Piss Man is in the store, because he's spent years ignoring the comments of every other human about his appearance. Simply say "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave until you take a bath and leave the customers alone," and back it up. In the best scenario, he realizes that cleaning himself from time to time is at least as important as wearing pants, and comes back after realizing that his body isn't made from pure sodium and that soap and water don't necessarily burst into flame on contact. Otherwise, he'll throw a temper tantrum and stomp off to another comic shop; the other comic shop gets his pittance, and his old shop gets a whole passel of customers who apologize "I would have come in sooner, but that guy in here was melting the windows..." Either way, the problem is solved, and his old shop may even get a whole new contingent of customers who say "I used to go to that shop across town, but this guy who smells like he sleeps in a cat box came in and took over."

I'm not advocating setting up a dress code for comic shops, although I have to say that a dress code for comic shop managers and customers might not be a bad idea. (C'mon, guys: you don't need suits from Barneys, but have you ever wondered what people think when they see you behind the counter in sandals, ratty jeans, and a Lady Death T-shirt?) What I am advocating is considering the benefits of getting the shop Cat Piss Man to bathe or getting him to leave. And since none of the other customers are going to say anything, he's there until the store staff gets rid of him, and he'll cost you. Oh boy howdy, he'll cost you.

http://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-36461.html

Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Oct 9, 2015

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FoliatedFold
Apr 9, 2008

order out of ordered chaos

Doc Hawkins posted:

For as long as there have been separate threads for Best and Worst Gaming Experiences, there have been claims that someone or other is posting in the wrong thread. But who the hell would only follow one or the other? I propose a union of the two towers.

Good move

Doc Hawkins posted:

As a personal favor to me, please don't tell us about the time you rolled a number when you really wanted another number, unless what a player described as the result of that roll was really, really terrible/hilarious/fantastic.

Exactly. I once recounted a game of D&D to my son's ex and I left out the good bits and described a few successful rolls. She said "You sound like Rimmer recounting his Risk game". She was a "first-class nerd" (the Red Dwarf quote gives it away) and would have enjoyed tabletop RPing.

Anticheese
Feb 13, 2008

$60,000,000 sexbot
:rodimus:

Crossposting a recent experience from the Greg Stolze thread.

quote:

After getting my group pumped for an Unknown Armies game, I started paging through the conspiracy theories/ideas section. I had a laugh remarking to my players that the section on Elvis simply reads "He's dead."

One of the players then piped up with the following suggestion.

"Maybe the reason Elvis is 'just dead' while all this other stuff is flying around is because the universe needs someone to be 'just dead' while people wish it were otherwise. Perhaps there's a secret cabal that assassinates people trying to resurrect The King, because if they didn't, the universe would split apart."

God drat.

Unknown Armies owns.

My players own.

A good, solid group really is the greatest treasure in gaming.

Dr. Quarex
Apr 18, 2003

I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA
Sweet.

The campaign I ran over the last summer, the intro game of which I talked about here (non-clickers: started as one-shot Call of Cthulhu D20, everyone plays themselves, discovers occult conspiracy where former members of their gaming group are trying to sacrifice the group to Tsathoggua to gain supreme gaming power, cult leader driven off but not defeated, players beg for campaign), was collectively my best gaming experience, as it finally showed me that it could be as much fun to gamemaster as to game, something I could never understand before.

Once the game resumed, the players/characters went immediately and appropriately crazy with occult investigation, and networking with everyone they could think of to try to figure out if they had missed any conspirators the first time around (they ended up being arrested for manslaughter and awaited trial for the six months that passed between the first and second games, and had plenty of time to make plans in-game). One of their first plans was to try to bust into a place they were pretty sure was a former cult safehouse.

Well, one of the players had taken a flashbacks Hindrance (I converted to Savage Worlds' "Realms of Cthulhu" for the campaign), and the very first time they tried to coordinate an ambush on the water tower they thought cultists were inside, he blew his Spirit roll, and immediately thought he was back in the park where they had been assaulted by supernatural forces the last time they were planning an ambush; through re-enacting his past behaviors, he got into his nearby car and managed to botch a driving roll and drive over one of the other PCs waiting in the bushes, who of course thought he was being attacked and opened fire on the car, which managed to trigger the OTHER PC who had taken flashbacks, who then began furiously struggling against imagined cultists trying to drag him into the darkness (knocking himself out in the process through a botched Fighting roll). All while the single member of the party not either having flashbacks or being attacked by someone with flashbacks had no idea any of this was going on (I think he was wearing ear protection and did not hear the shooting), and went through with the ambush all by himself. And this was all in the first new session. I think we all were pretty sure the party was going to kill themselves before the end of that game.

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!

Quarex posted:

Well, one of the players had taken a flashbacks Hindrance (I converted to Savage Worlds' "Realms of Cthulhu" for the campaign), and the very first time they tried to coordinate an ambush on the water tower they thought cultists were inside, he blew his Spirit roll, and immediately thought he was back in the park where they had been assaulted by supernatural forces the last time they were planning an ambush; through re-enacting his past behaviors, he got into his nearby car and managed to botch a driving roll and drive over one of the other PCs waiting in the bushes, who of course thought he was being attacked and opened fire on the car, which managed to trigger the OTHER PC who had taken flashbacks, who then began furiously struggling against imagined cultists trying to drag him into the darkness (knocking himself out in the process through a botched Fighting roll). All while the single member of the party not either having flashbacks or being attacked by someone with flashbacks had no idea any of this was going on (I think he was wearing ear protection and did not hear the shooting), and went through with the ambush all by himself. And this was all in the first new session. I think we all were pretty sure the party was going to kill themselves before the end of that game.
At what point in all this did you begin looping Yakety Sax? Because really, that seems like a mandatory thing.

substance1987
Mar 29, 2008

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations
If quoting yourself isn't out of bounds, I'd like to quote the most notable experience I've ever had or likely will ever have with a tabletop game:

substance1987 posted:

While it doesn't hold a candle to the guy who shot someone over Warhammer 40k earlier in the thread, I remembered a bad experience of my own.

Last summer I started playing Magic: the Gathering again semi-seriously, mostly sticking to Friday Night Magic but occasionally hitting larger events. A few months back, I was attending a tournament nearby in Florida (don't want to name the shop here) and we started with quite a few players and had a cut to top eight. While I was playing, I couldn't help but overhear the game behind me - one of the players was getting louder and louder as he got frustrated with his opponent.

This game shop, like many that host tournaments, sells snacks and so on. This became relevant when the following exchange took place:

:black101: "I cast Goblin Bushwacker, kicked" (In essence, playing a creature that would temporarily make his other creatures stronger)

:hehe: "Stoic Rebuttal" (In essence, cancelling the other player's action).

:black101: "Well, gently caress you too then."

With that statement, :black101: picked up his bottle of Jones soda and smashed it over :hehe:'s head. I (somewhat foolishly) grabbed :hehe: and pulled him back over onto my table while someone else basically tackled :black101:. The police showed up, the guy is banned for life from the shop, but confusingly I don't think he has a ban from the DCI.

I've gotten irritated with people playing control decks, certainly, but never hit anyone with a bottle over it.

which spawned this reply:

Yawgmoth posted:

I guess his rebuttal was a little too stoic. :smugdog:

Which still makes me giggle.

Doc Hawkins
Jun 15, 2010

Dashing? But I'm not even moving!


Feel free to fertilize the new thread by strewing about past posts, even when they're by yourself.

Nostalgia4ColdWar
May 7, 2007

Good people deserve good things.

Till someone lets the winter in and the dying begins, because Old Dark Places attract Old Dark Things.
...

Nostalgia4ColdWar fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Mar 31, 2017

Sandwich Anarchist
Sep 12, 2008
A few years back, I was running a 3.5 game with my friends, Forgotten Realms setting. Schedules required us to all make our characters individually, and they didn't really know how to play, so I was there for each one. We had our standard mix of fighter/rogue elf, human paladin, etc etc. But one guy, Burt, made everything worthwhile.

He made a sorcerer, who was a worshiper and agent of Cyric, the setting's mad evil god of treachery and whatnot. The rest of the group were all working for the church of Mystra, one of Cyric's arch enemies, to find some artifact. He wanted to join the party under the guise of a Mystra agent, and secretly sabotage the group's plans, and report his findings to Cyric.

Of course, he spent all of his money (they started at about 5th or 6th level) on some belt or something that boosted his bluff, and focused on that skill. And we proceeded with the game, the other players completely unaware of Burt's secret.

Until one session, when the party was faced with this wounded demon in some temple, and were basically all about to die, when Burt pops up:

:hehe: What languages does the demon speak?
:eng101: Um, lemme see...common and abyssal.
:hehe: Oh, ok, good. I speak abyssal! Can I bluff him to talk him down?
:eng101: Sure, go for it.

Rest of group just kind of stares at him while he rolls, and successfully convinces the demon that he is an agent of Cyric, and is trying to work against these fools to foil Mystra's plan. Nobody else in the group speaks or understand abyssal, so he tells them "oh, I just told him that we are an elite strike team from the church, and that there has been some kind of mistake".

This continued for the campaign, with the group growing more and more suspicious of Burt until he finally revealed his true nature. Along the way, he'd been turned to the ways of neutrality by THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP, so the group let him keep going with them. It was a glorious campaign.

Dr. Quarex
Apr 18, 2003

I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Yawgmoth posted:

At what point in all this did you begin looping Yakety Sax? Because really, that seems like a mandatory thing.
THIS IS REALMS OF CTHULHU ONLY SERIOUS SPOOKY MUSIC IS ALLOWED but everyone was laughing so hard, particularly as every new action ended up compounding the previous ones, that we would have undoubtedly drowned out Yakety Sax anyway.

The best part is that this was probably not even the worst flashback-chain-reaction in the campaign. They ended up investigating the deaths of two cemetery keepers, and discovering that basically every newly buried body was being stolen. This eventually led them to climbing a ladder down into an underground tunnel complex filled with deformed stunted humanoids, and hilarity.

The second player with flashbacks from above was leading the party, when he was jumped by one of the aforementioned humanoids (ghouls, naturally), and he ended up beheading it on a critical success. This triggered #2's memory of beheading a masked assailant, only to learn he had just beheaded one of his old friends. So #2 started freaking out, particularly since one of the other masked attackers from that scenario had turned on his master and was now a member of the party, and was right behind #2 in the marching order--and was carrying a readied tear gas grenade he was about to throw down the tunnel. Naturally #2 then tried to behead the reformed-cultist, just as he had previously. Shocked reformed-cultist dropped the grenade when trying to defend himself, which looked to the first player with flashbacks (just arriving in the tunnel) like reformed-cultist had turned on the party (which #1 had been predicting would happen), leading to #1 freaking out and scrambling back up the ladder and pulling it out of the warren to save himself.

This time, the hilarious "people entirely uninvolved with this catastrophe" were the two players waiting a few hundred yards away at their vehicle, trying to get a cell signal, casually smoking and talking about e-readers as the rest of the party imploded.

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!
Nothing will ever convince me that CoC was intended as anything other than a dark comedy game.

Dr. Quarex
Apr 18, 2003

I'M A BIG DORK WHO POSTS TOO MUCH ABOUT CONVENTIONS LOOK AT THIS

TOVA TOVA TOVA

Yawgmoth posted:

Nothing will ever convince me that CoC was intended as anything other than a dark comedy game.
Certainly even the most serious games of Call of Cthulhu I have seen had a pretty hard time avoiding dark comedy, but I fully embraced this before the game even began, knowing both that I have a hard time not running with funny player ideas even if the setting suggests I should not, and because playing yourselves is virtually guaranteed to result in funny player/character incongruities.

I just sent out an e-mail to my players recently saying that, after careful consideration, the movies that come closest to the feel I am trying to capture are Killer Klowns From Outer Space and Monster Squad. Both genuinely funny b-movies that also somehow manage to be terrifying in unexpected and disturbing ways nonetheless. If you have never seen either, I guess you have to trust me, but they both do a fantastic job playing the villains completely straight--which works wonderfully via the absurd nature of the entire endeavor, as well as the unsurprisingly comic nature of the protagonists. For example, capturing people in cotton candy cocoons should be hilarious, but then you see the fattest clown stick a crazy bendy-straw into one such cocoon and drink blood from the corpse inside, and you just do not know what to think anymore. Also I firmly believe that movie set everyone who saw it as a child on the lifelong path to clown-fear.

Etherwind
Apr 22, 2008
Probation
Can't post for 107 days!
Soiled Meat
I'd like to stress this qualifies as a worst experience for the GM, who was trying to run a serious, terrifying game until Donnie got hold of the plot and headbutted it into submission.

Etherwind posted:

I'll try to remember it in full. It's a worst experience, so it fits in here.

A friend of mine, one of my regular players, borrowed my Call of Cthulhu material and decided he was going to run a game at the gaming society we both attend. This was a bad idea for a couple of reasons, the first being that it's hard to do evocative horror when you have a busy, happy background going on around you (unless you're specifically playing up the social alienation angle). The second, and more important, reason it was a bad idea was because he invited Donnie to play.

Donnie is a good guy. I ran a Blue Rose campaign, he played in it, and it was great fun for all involved. However, Donnie is not a subtle guy, and he's not the sort of guy who can experience horror or exercise fearful judgement when it's required. As evidence toward this, when the group was rolling up reasonable, urbane, ordinary Call of Cthulhu characters, he decided to make a doctor.

With maximum ranks in the "headbutt" skill. More points in "headbutt" than he had in "medicine", and his character was a doctor. My friend convinced him to at least make his "medicine" skill equal to "headbutt", and the game proceeded on track.

You know the old saying, "Give a man a hammer, and everything looks like a nail?" Well, when you turn a man into a hammer, the same thing is true. Donnie tried to headbutt everything even vaguely problematic. It started with a door that wouldn't open, escalated to an ATM (which he scored a critical success against, and landed some free cash) and climaxed with him headbutting a skeleton after stumbling out-

Let's wind it back a bit. During the course of the adventure, when they started encountering horrific skeletons that stalked their every move during the night, the party decided to tool up on weaponry. They visited a mall, broke in, and decided to ransack some of the shops to acquire weapons. Someone got a fire axe from a hardware store. Most got guns from a gun store. Donnie, since he liked fireworks, decided to drive to the local mining supply depot while this was happening, and after headbutting his way into a badly locked supply shack he made off with a backpack full of dynamite.

Eventually they tracked the skeletons down to an old well in the back garden of a manor house, and after a bit of research discovered that it had a cursed stone in at the bottom. Being pro-active, Donnie suggested they lower him into the well with a flashlight and his dynamite, and he'd rig it to blow. It sounded plausible, so they lowered him down with the flashlight and a pistol, and waited until he was in place.

Messing around in the thick mud at the bottom, his flashlight soon failed. Not alarmed, Donnie started feeling around to find the cursed stone, and was in the process of feeling its edges when the cursed blood he was sloshing around in began to form into yet more skeletons, as it was so dark down there it might as well be night. A skeleton grabbed the rope and pulled it down, and then began wrestling with him, dragging him into the mud.

Donnie let out a shout. Up at the top of the well, the rest of the party thought he was asking for the dynamite, and tossed it down. Desperately, Donnie began to headbutt the dynamite, hoping to set it off before the skeleton flayed him alive. Cue the following exchange:

"He's taking a long time down there."
"Can you see what's going on?"
"No, my flashlight isn't working."
"Give me those matches."

The player fumbled and dropped the match, and Donnie simultaneously landed a critical hit with his headbutt.

A massive explosion blew the well to smithereens. Rolling on the resistance table, Donnie survived the initial explosion, was thrown several blocks away, and crashed into some lady's house, breaking his legs. Understandably panicked, the lady called an ambulance, and five minutes later it turned up. At this point Donnie regained consciousness, and rather than be taken to hospital, he held the ambulance crew up with his pistol and stole the ambulance.

Meanwhile, a horrible, rapidly decaying, muddy skeleton made from blood and charred, broken stone clawed its way out of the well in the shadow of the (now wrecked) house and began to advance on the party. Cue a massive combat that grew rapidly more tense, until it was interrupted by the sound of...

Sirens? The ambulance crashed through the fence, ran over the skeleton and screeched to a halt. Donnie, his legs broken, staggered out of the ambulance and fell to the ground, right beside the pinned monster. It proceeded to try and grab him, and he responded the only way he knew how.

With a headbutt.

Edit: and remember, it's Doctor McHeadbutt. He worked long and hard for that PhD in Aggressive Phrenology.

J Bjelke-Postersen
Sep 16, 2007

I have a 6 point plan to stop the boats.....or turn them around or something....No wait what were those points again....Are there really 6?
Donnie is exactly the kind of person I would always want in my game crew.

Cygna
Mar 6, 2009

The ghost of a god is no man.
The funny thing about this is that the Best Gaming Experiences thread was originally created because too many people were posting awesome experiences in the Bad Experiences thread. But times have changed.

Anyway, I've been saving up some of my favorite posts from the past two threads for a while now. Unfortunately I do not remember who posted most of these, and Google isn't helping, so if anyone knows, please tell me so I can edit it in.

Wandering Knitter posted:

I once gamed with a man who spent an entire session rubbing the flat side of a knife against his neck while glaring at the other PCs.

We never invited him back.

quote:

One game, we were going along the side of a mountain, and we were ambushed by something, so the dm let me summon orcas on the slope so I could cause whale-alanches.

I also dropped a celestial bison from the roof of a building, through a skylight, onto an unsuspecting gaurd below.

quote:

Pure sandbox games can be pretty fun, but they are entirely dependent on DM creativity. If you're drawing a blank that session the game grinds to a halt. I remember a D&D game where the players fought a Manticore on 3 separate combats because I couldn't figure out what they should be doing. I think I ended up fluffing it that the succession of Manticores were each avenging the previous Manticore, Inigo Montoya style.

quote:

the bard spent the entire fight a little distance away, breakdancing so hard that it filled the other pcs with righteous courage. occasionally he would cast some sonic damage spell and yell "bam!" while striking an insolent you-got-served pose. one of these spells struck the deathblow.

the bard served the huge terrifying monster so hard that it died.

quote:

Every Sabbat game I ever saw was nothing but one big munchkin wet dream. If it wasn't random slaughter and carnage (equestrian demolition derby anyone?), it was nothing but goth-Dragonball episode. In fact I know one game where the characters wanted some more experience so they got on bus and drove to a series of warehouses full of ninjas just so they flex their potence/celerity/obtenibration/vissicitude/temporis.

quote:

Someone once told me a story about RIFTS being played in a gaming shop, he said something about rolling a crit with a knife, and that the crit rules said to roll every die readily available. Well they were in a drat game shop, so naturally being total nerds they rolled the store's entire inventory of dice. Ended up destroying a planet.

Don't know exactly how RIFTS works, or if the story's legit, but from whats been said it wouldn't surprise me.

quote:

Lionel's biggest achievement came when Bob asked him to make a new character. Lionel found a demonic form power he really, really liked. It let him eat anything with no penalties.
We made our way into some corporate building to steal some information. Most of us chose stealth, but Lionel had a different solution. After the alarm sounded, he told us, "I'm assuming my demonic form and then I'm going to eat the security guard".
:what:
Play stopped. We tried to talk him out of it, but he was adamant that we couldn't have any witnesses. Bob tried to reason with him, letting him know that it would take a long time to eat an entire person and we'd definitely be caught.
Lionel's response: "No way, it only takes one turn! The book says I can take man-size bites!"
That took a moment to sink in. We had to call the game for the night.

quote:

Well, the guy would show up with his books and stuff, then five minutes or so after we started he would slip out a bayonet and whetstone and start sharpening the bayonet. He'd randomly slam it down into his pile of books, interrupting whoever was talking and leaving the rest of the table wondering if he'd finally snapped and was going to kill us or something. He never did, nor did we ever find out if he had the gun that the bayonet would have attached to. Very quiet otherwise, played a mild-mannered elf wizard whose goal was to build a peaceful tree house with a library and alchemical lab. Guess he counts as an "American Psycho" type dude. All of his books had little triangular puncture wounds that went from the hardcover front to the hardcover back. His PHB was like swiss cheese, and was always the one given to newbies who didn't have their own gear.

quote:

The paladin, as his FIRST course of action, drops chain-trow and declares he shall bugger the unicorn awake.

Angry Diplomat posted:

I had an important villain flee to an impregnable fortress once. he was hiding inside this tower made of evil purple stone that was stronger than steel, with an enchanted door made from the same stuff. when they found out they couldn't put a dent in the walls or penetrate them using magical means, the bard says, "alright, I want to go to town and hire a wizard and a druid of at least these levels to accompany us for a day or so."

I figure, what the hell, they'll try throwing more spells at it but I can't see how they'd get through the tower that way. I ask him if he's sure he wants to spend the money and yes, he is quite sure. so the bard returns to the big evil tower in the mouth of an extinct volcano, hired spellcasters in tow.

he had the wizard animate the door, then had the druid cast awaken construct on it, so that the door was sentient. then he threw his nearly +40 diplomacy modifier at it and politely asked it to open.

the villain was very surprised to see them :negative:


And my personal favorite

quote:

Oh, man, the first campaign I DMed fits squarely into this thread. It was 3rd edition, and the PCs were a half-orc barbarian, a halfling rogue, a human bard, and, because the party was looking a little fragile, my DMPC, a human fighter. I realize DMPCs are usually terrible and all that, but seriously, with an unoptimized fighter, what could go wrong?

Well, DMPC or not, a lot went wrong. The biggest problem was that I was a very permissive DM and the bard's player was incredibly clever and imaginative.

Rogue does the fighting, fighter does the rogueing

Ironically, the fighter NPC ended up being quite useful to them. The rogue preferred stabbing people and picking pockets to disarming traps, and I had built the fighter to be a pure-constitution, hitpoint-packed supertank, reasoning that a resilient meatshield would be useful for keeping the bard alive while the other two went ballistic on monsters' faces. The bard's player looked at Toughguy McSoakalot with his crazy Fortitude save and said, "hooray! You get to spring the traps!"

Hilariously enough, the NPC's background was that he had been framed for a crime and was lying low until the heat died down, so he really didn't have much choice but to stick with the party. They threw him into poison gas traps, spiked pits, goblin ambushes, collapsing caverns, and all manner of other madness, and if he complained the bard would just roll Diplomacy and score a 35 or something similarly ridiculous while basically patting him on the head and offering him a cookie. In retrospect it was extremely funny, but as an inexperienced and overly-permissive DM, it frustrated me quite a bit.

Hello, I'm Bardsby von Singerson, and this is my petting zoo

Every monster the party defeated, the bard would try to tame (he had maxed ranks in animal handling, obviously). Every NPC the party met, the bard would try to fast-talk (maxed ranks in bluff, diplomacy, and intimidate). If neither of these worked, he would use a spell or wand with a charm effect or something similar. He later took Leadership and got a negative-channeling cleric cohort so he could rebuke and control undead. This loving guy had a sack full of trained stirges, giant angry mosquitoes, that he could (and did) unleash on NPCs who angered him and appeared to have more blood than they really needed.

The party also developed a propensity for gathering prisoners/slaves. This came about after I had the fighter offhandedly comment that butchering defeated opponents was a little different than he was used to; he didn't really like killing in cold blood. What I intended as a bit of characterization became a weird obsession for the party - they would tie up and drag around every single NPC who didn't die immediately after the fight, sometimes leading around comical prisoner trains of dozens of duergar, drow, bandits, gnolls, orcs, and hell knows what else. This persisted, becoming ever more absurd as the bard used lies, intimidation, and magical fuckery to keep everyone in line, until...

You get HOW many wishes!?

We were playing through the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil module, which is really quite a good mega-dungeon if I remember right. It's got all kinds of cool poo poo, with a pretty interesting storyline, and a good DM could weave it into a campaign quite well. Unfortunately, one little bit of strangeness in a flavor-text paragraph ended up sending the campaign flying so far off the chain that it smashed into an alternate universe and destroyed it.

One of the clerics of Tharizdun carries a weird tentacle-covered staff thing that does crazy poo poo to any sane person holding it, unless they make certain will saves. In another part of the dungeon, controlled by a rival faction of crazy murder priests, is an altar used to sacrifice living beings to Tharizdun. A little sentence in the altar's DM-only description notes that Tharizdun grants a Wish in return for the sacrifice of a sentient being on the altar, if the person conducting the ceremony has that crazy staff. Whatever, interesting bit of flavour, right?

Oh, no. The bard was still playing Pokemon with the NPCs, and he inevitably captured and managed to subdue the mad priest with the staff. Through some weirdness - I think an antimagic field was involved - he managed to make him harmless enough to interrogate, and then promptly passed all his intimidate rolls with flying colours. As soon as the priest mentioned wishes in exchange for sentient lives, rear end in a top hat Bard found inspiration.

The party smashed their way through that part of the dungeon, enslaved everyone within, found that loving altar, and set up the ritual. Then rear end in a top hat Bard took the staff in hand, succeeded his will save, and, with the help of the barbarian's brute strength and judicious use of various mind-affecting spells, started feeding his hilarious prisoner train into the altar like some kind of horrible, bloody, Lovecraftian clown car. I frantically read and reread the flavor paragraph, and was eventually forced to concede that, yes, it did specify one wish per sentient life, and there was no mention of a limit to Tharizdun's generosity.

After the altar swallowed up the two dozen or so guys they had with them, the party went raiding and enslaved a group of gnoll workers in a nearby cavern, then sacrificed them too.

They ended up with something like 36 wishes before I finally managed to break through that "everything within the rules is acceptable" early-DM barrier and told them that the altar had broken and wouldn't work anymore.


I wish I was Superman

The first thing the bard did with all those wishes was to dig through obscure splatbooks/adventure modules/God knows what and find these weird evil rituals that turn people into powerful guards. The first one was some transformative spell that, despite almost nobody in the multiverse knowing it, was apparently of a low enough level for a Wish spell to duplicate. This caused the rogue to turn into a half-shadow, which made him automatically succeed every move silently check ever, as well as being able to turn ethereal and having +6 or so to Dexterity. The rogue thought that was pretty cool, since his idea of "roleplaying" amounted to "I pick his pocket, then congratulate myself on being an awesome pickpocket".

The bard then turned his attention to the fighter. He showed me an adventure from somewhere or other that involved people being turned into crazed half-golem monstrosities. The rules for the ritual to do so were in there, and he could, by wishing for the golem arm as a magical item and wishing he knew how to carry out the ritual, do the same to the NPC! But he wouldn't be crazy because the rogue would knock him out first, and the pain wouldn't drive him mad. I, being a first-time DM, didn't know what the hell to do about this, so I just shrugged helplessly. The bard got his confused half-golem bodyguard (but not upset, because he rolled over 40 on his bluff check to convince the fighter that the cultists did it), the rogue got to laugh about how he knocked out the perpetually-unfortunate NPC with a sock full of copper coins, and the fighter got damage reduction, spell resistance, and haste or something like that.

The barbarian wasn't having any of this "diluting my strength with evil book magic" nonsense, but that turned out okay because a basilisk later turned him to stone and then the bard had him animated as a golem and then had a druid Awaken him and that meant that he was basically the same character except with Hardness 8, construct immunities, and a shitload of strength. I don't even know, all I could do was stare dumbly at this crazy bastard as he pointed out the different spells and how they worked.

The party later had a portable hole installed in rockbarian's mouth so that he could "eat" useful items and retrieve them later, though this ended up getting used as a halfling pillbox instead, with the rogue peeking out of the terrifying stone berserker's open mouth and peppering everyone with arrows. Also, they wished for a Lifedrinker Axe, and the bard gleefully pointed out that its level drain did not affect constructs, meaning that the barbarian could use it without negative effect, meaning that every enemy they ever fought after that wound up with a boatload of negative levels within the first few rounds.

The bard chose not to apply any silly templates to himself, instead settling for some combination of magic items that made it mathematically impossible for him to ever fail at any charisma-based skill check likely to arise before early epic levels. He spent the rest of the wishes on a shitload of money and powerful magic items for everyone in the party.

I don't understand how giving 36 wishes to my enemies could turn out this badly

The party was easily able to bulldoze the rest of the module. Highlights include:

- The barbarian becoming angry when a gnome tried to cast Enfeebling Ray on him, declaring "I pick him up and eat him," and then rolling double 20s on the unarmed attack after grappling him, instantly killing the gnome with a bite (in fairness, this one isn't really a worst experience; it was hilarious)

- The bard somehow clearing 50 on a diplomacy check and convincing an angry dragon that it should take the time to listen to the party, then launching into a ten-minute salesman schpiel trying to hock his tamed stirges as guards for the dragon's treasure room, and succeeding

- Killing an entire army of 100 or so first-level fighters by throwing a single Ochre Jelly in a jar at them and then running as far away as possible ("they all have bastard swords, and Ochre Jellies just divide when hit by slashing weapons!" Yeah, too bad you have to figure out how to kill 700 Ochre Jellies when this is done)

- Discovering that, rules-as-written, the barbarian could destroy four cubic feet of solid stone with a single full power attack

- Killing Imix, Prince of Elemental Fire, a 14th-level giant super elemental with all kinds of scary templates and magical items, in two rounds

...and that's how I become a millionaire, or maybe King. Can I be both?

rear end in a top hat Bard was not content to slay a demigod in twelve seconds. No, he wanted to bring the whole world to heel.

The first thing you should know is that the Return module takes place in a huge fuckoff mine in an extinct volcano. Having killed or enslaved literally every living creature in this entire sprawling cavern complex, the bard promptly went to the nearest city and diplomacy'd up a few hundred workers, who he would hire to refit the mine and get it up and running again. The Stronghold Builder's Guide was consulted, money was counted out and spent, and pretty soon rear end in a top hat Bard was a wealthy gold magnate with one of the richest mines in the region.

But, hey, why mine gold when you can command gold to rise out of the ground? A little searching, more diplomacy, and he was able to gain a cleric with the Earth domain as one of his (many, MANY) followers. In exchange for rations and the occasional 50 on a charisma-based roll, this cleric heaped even greater quantities of money in rear end in a top hat Bard's lap. rear end in a top hat Bard took this money to a local wizard, had him create some magical items with uses per day, and rented out these items for a fee, making back the cost of creation within a few in-game months. All extra money went into more "initial cost, no upkeep" ventures, until this guy was basically just printing money on a grand scale. Rockbarian and Shadowrogue were his shady enforcers, while Fightergolem did odd jobs.

The party went on a couple of brief adventures before rear end in a top hat Bard's player came up to me with a little spreadsheet detailing the time that had passed and the income he should have. I don't remember the exact figure, but I do remember that it was basically enough to buy one of everything in the Stronghold Builder's Guide and then heap even more enchantments on top!

To make a long story short, they ended up with a flying castle, and a flying galleon, and a crystal in the castle that could cast Earthquake and Reverse Gravity so that an entire city would fall apart and smash into itself, and a fountain that could cast Heroes' Feast, and a personal army (everyone took Leadership), and...

The barbarian, at least, had a great sense of humor about the whole thing. Instead of being an annoying powergamer, he was a hilarious powergamer; his magic items included a Monocle of Searing Ray and a flying Rowboat of Doom (anyone whose shadow it fell upon was affected by the Doom spell). He even had a wizard make a Butt of Stinking Cloud, which was a golden butt which, when squeezed, would cast Stinking Cloud once per day. Height of high school comedy, right there. I don't think he ever used it, but he sure did love his dapper eye laser.

To make an already long story short, that campaign ended with the party fighting gods at level 14 and deciding that basically nothing was a threat anymore and it had stopped being fun. I have to admit, though, that even with all my frustration as a DM, the insane amount of godmoding and gleefully over-the-top powergaming was actually incredibly fun in its own way. I started sending great wyrm dragons at them, only to have them shot down by their flying galleons with batteries of Maximized-Fireball shooting cannons.

So. As a DM, worst experience with roleplaying. In terms of hilarity and fond memories, surprisingly not that bad.

I also loved the story about the guy whose friend had a homebrew campaign with superpowered elves who needed to touch a tree every 24 hours, and then the players blew a hole in the planet and it turned into a post-apocalyptic campaign, and all the elves died. I only have a small excerpt from it saved, though. :(

Cygna fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Jan 13, 2012

Dear You
Nov 1, 2011

J Bjelke-Postersen posted:

Donnie is exactly the kind of person I would always want in my game crew.

Donraj
May 7, 2007

by Ralp
Posted this in one of the old threads, but probably my most memorable gaming moment/session was from my first Exalted game.

quote:

It was set during WWII and the premise was that suddenly Exalts were coming back. My character was Exalted Lenin, risen from near death and determined to kick Nazi rear end. After the intro Exaltation session the GM and I reached an impasse. He wanted the various characters to make their way to England to join up under the auspices of the supernaturally aware M16. I pointed out the difficulty of this, but since Lenin was on the run from Stalin he had to go somewhere. So my plan was to have Lenin manifest a hammer via Glorious Solar Saber, disguise himself as Thor and sail ashore with his followers, make his way to Parliament and publically join the fight against Hitler. I reasoned that there was no way the British could see this coming and that it would probably work on the grounds that once you have a magic-wielding demigod appear on your shores the last thing you expect is for him to be someone else in disguise. Also only crazy people would see this coming.

So the GM insisted that if I wanted to do this we'd have to roleplay it out. So we log onto IRC and commence the strangest chapter in the life of the Sonne der Freiheit. Lenin proceeds to arrive in England, with Authority-Granting Stance or whatever it's called active. He quickly gathers a crowd of followers. As he debarks a woman shows up and casts some sort of charm that prevents him or anyone else from remembering or thinking Lenin's name. Oh well, that's odd.

So Lenin and his followers rampage down the streets towards Parliament, drinking massive amounts of alcohol. Lenin arrives and tries to command the guards into letting him pass. They refuse.

Uh-oh.

Then more (apparently also Exalted) guards arrive led by Winston Churchill, who offers Lenin a drink and ushers him somewhere private. He then demands to know who Lenin is, saying that he knows he's not who he says he is, CANNOT be who he says he is. Lenin stays silent.

Churchill proceeds to radiate lightning, conjure up a short-handled hammer and shout, “"I REMEMBER THE BLUSHING CHEEKS OF MAIDENS IN THE FAIR NORD. I REMEMBER THE HALLS IN WHICH WE FEASTED, THE HORRORSOME BEASTS IN THE SEAS, SKIES AND LANDS OF OLD. I REMEMBER THE BATTLES, THE SCARS, THE BLOOD I HAVE SPILT WITH MY MIGHTY HAMMER. AND YOU DARE ADOPT MY NAME?"

gently caress.

So the one thing that could possibly have gone wrong with my plan did. Winston Churchill is Thor reborn.

“gently caress. You.” I say to the GM, and proceed to take the only logical course of action.

Lenin proceeds to dismiss the hammer and summons a scythe and say, “I am, and always shall be, the enemy of all thrones and the ruin of all monarchs. I am the bringer of chaos, the breaker of dynasties, the bringer of change. I am the ender of war and the friend to the masses trode underfoot by tyrants and priest-kings. Do you really not recognize me, dullard? Can you not guess?"

Lightbulb goes on in Churchill's brain. He says he thought Loki was just a legend, a story made up to add to his own.

Some more back and forth goes on between Churchill and Lokinen, followed by Churchhill saying, “"I have sworn an oath once, Loki. And I intend to stand by it. Once, I swore that I would ally with the devil, if he were to war with Hitler. Now, Devil - will you accept that offer?"

So Churchhill bites open his wrist and holds it out. Lokinen slashes his own and does the same. Blood meets blood.

Then the charm is dismissed and Churchill suddenly recognizes who he's dealing with. And so Lenin managed to join the group organized by M16.

Other highlights of this campaign included Lenin blowing up the Eiffel Tower with a Red Sun Hadoken while duking it out with that Nazi guy with the glasses from Raiders of the Lost Ark while disguised as Loki disguising himself as Thor, watching Hitler be killed by a young, lightning-wielding Pope Benedict, realizing that Lenin was the reincarnation of Sun Wukong and riding at high speed through the streets of Berlin tossing off fireballs randomly while shouting, “I'M BACK!” and “SHABBATH SHALOM MOTHERFUCKERS!” while the Jewish martial artist Imi Lichtenfeld car-surfed up top wearing the Shroud of Turin as a cape and flashing his circumsized penis at passing Nazis. Also Megazords.

It was pretty fun.

Tempest_56
Mar 14, 2009

In the previous Worst Experiences thread, I talked about my current D&D (3.5) group and my worries that it had all the elements of becoming a Worst Experience. Much to my pleasure, it hasn't and actually has gone smashingly. (As a side note for those who remember, the DM has in fact gotten the girl he was interested in, and they've actually been amazing together despite the initial rocky start.)

Probably our best moment thus far was the halfling-breathing dragon. As we neared the end of the campaign, our party encountered a heavy magic shield around a fortress we needed to get into. After a bit of painful experimentation, we discerned that it was too powerful to dispel and would prevent entry by anyone who wasn't a dragon. Now, we could get around this - the party's druid had picked up an item that allowed her to wildshape into a dragon once a day for a while. This was obviously designed as a solo challenge for her to get in, grab what was needed, and escape back to us. That meant we were morally obligated to bypass it and ruin that plan.

Our GM, being dragon-obsessed, had granted access to the splatbooks he had. Which were all dragon-based and more or less useless to us. But our solution was in there, too. In the Dragon Magic splat, there's a couple of spells meant specifically for dragons. One is a quirkly little level 1 spell called Hoard Gullet, temporarily giving the dragon a second stomach that acts as a bag of holding to carry around a small hoard. The weight limitations were pretty strict, but when half your party is halflings and the wizard has a Staff of Size Alteration, you can get away with a lot.

So we rode through the shield inside the dragon's magical stomach.

In a bit of a panic that we used this obscure utility spell in such a way, the DM tried to be clever and had our druid intercepted by a pair of guardian wyrms. For all her talents, Bluff was not a skill the druid had, and things started to go very badly. The rest of the party decided to strike. When she next opened her mouth, we came out like an avenging army.

Using Telekinesis, the invisible halfling rogue/assassin turned into a guided missile and promptly got two sneak attack crits on the one wyrm, bringing it down to under 10hp. It was killed a moment later by the dwarven fighter's magic throwing hammer. The other wyrm ate a full attack action from the halfling ranger/rogue, who was optimized for maximum fire volume. I think he made something like eight attacks in one round, each with various damage bonuses that instantly reduced the wyrm to a dead pincushion.

Weeks later, the dragon's halfling breath weapon is still one of our favorite moments from the campaign.

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.
I ran a session today and I'm still not sure if it was a good experience or a bad one. It was certainly a harrowing one to run. I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the GM Advice thread, but I'll put it here because I'm pretty sure the best advice is just going to be "talk to your group and figure out what they actually want out of the game" anyway.

For the past several sessions, the party's been tracking down a wizard who's been breeding huge swarms of insects, which have been getting loose and attacking people. They break into his tower and after surviving a couple of traps and some difficult fights with giant insects set by the wizard as guardians, they find out that the wizard's abandoned the tower and continued his research in a hideout deeper into the swamp they're in.

Since they're all tired and wounded, they aren't confident of beating the wizard in a fight in their current state, and they finally have hard evidence proving that the wizard has gone totally off the deep end, everyone decides that their best course of action is to head to the nearest city and petition them for help -- that is, everyone except the party's archer, who thinks that the wizard's going to do something terrible very soon, and wants to go and stop him right away, even though the party is wounded. So far, that's not totally unreasonable given what the party knows. What is unreasonable is that when the rest of the party refuses to change their minds, he decides to go off on his own and confront the wizard with or without their help. The party's mage and healer, not wanting to see their ally get killed, respond by tackling him to the ground.

So here are three members of the party, all wrestling with each other in swamp mud that they know is infested with flesh-eating worms, over whether they should go fight the wizard now or later. The archer manages to break away and at this point the rest of the party finally decides: gently caress it, we're tired enough already without following this idiot to our deaths. So they all find a nice fallen log to sit on, set up camp and wait a while, hoping against hope that he somehow gets back alive. This wasn't as bad as it could have been, because the game was online so the players weren't literally sitting around a table watching as I spent most of the last hour of the session interacting solely with the archer's player, but I still feel like it was a bit of an unsatisfying end to the session for them.

Anyway, the archer reaches the wizard's lair and finds him in a relatively lucid state, so he manages not to get horribly killed. Instead, the two of them strike a deal: the wizard will move his experiments further away from civilisation and refrain from troubling the local people, as long as one nearby city signs an agreement not to disturb his swamp and another dismantles a dam that's causing the swamp to dry up. The archer accepts the offer, and heads back to the party to see if they're willing to cooperate. And that's where the session ended, and where we'll be picking up next week.

Here's the issue: I think that the archer's player was within his rights to do what he did, even though it was reckless and stupid, and in hindsight I'm almost glad it happened. His decision had meaningful and interesting consequences that would probably never have happened if the party had stayed together, our group had an explicitly stated understanding that PCs aren't required to all work as a group toward the same goal at all times, and there had been situations in the past where the party was split up or working at cross purposes that turned out well and were fun for everyone. So if my sympathies in this situation lie with anyone, they're with the one player who went off on his own, not with the four players who wanted to keep the party together at all costs. But at the same time, his decision did make the game less fun for some of the other players at the time -- one said that he felt as if he was being blackmailed into following the archer in order to keep the party together, even though that wasn't the archer's player's intention.

I don't want to tell the players that the party has to stay together or try to curtail their arguments, because I want them to be able to decide what to do for themselves without my interference: that's something I've been clear about with my group right from the start of this campaign. But if they're disagreeing to the point where PCs are coming to blows with each other and players are getting frustrated as a result, when do I step in and how?

Benagain
Oct 10, 2007

Can you see that I am serious?
Fun Shoe
I think you can divide PCs into those who want to end their careers in quiet retirement, those who want to become gods or the nearest possible equivalent, and those who want to stand before the gods (or equivalent) and bellow "NO GODS! NO MASTERS!" before launching The Revolution.

General Ironicus
Aug 21, 2008

Something about this feels kinda hinky
I'm in a new level 1 4e campaign. The party is in a tourist trap 'dungeon' run by kobolds like a D&D version of Chuck E Cheese. The kobolds die with a wink and the acid pit trap is corn starch in water with dye. After the midpoint concession stand we find an actual dead kobold killed with a safety weapon stolen from our Ardent.

After some investigation while other party members hold the doors for time, the next round of enemies manage to burst in and see their murdered family member. My halfling bluffs them into believing his day job is as a crime scene investigator for the local sheriff, so they'll be better off if they calm down and don't disturb the evidence. The rest of the party continues piecing clues together as I handle the employees. As things come to a head this exchange happens:

"I assure you we will apprehend the fiend. It is my duty for king and country."
:rolldice: natural 1 on bluff
"This is an elected republic short stuff."

Yawgmoth
Sep 10, 2003

This post is cursed!
I've talked about this game/group a few times in the old Worst Experiences thread. The system is basically the Marvel Superheroes RPG with a bunch of houserules, an the setting is Every loving Thing Ever. If it's another RPG, it exists in his game. If it's a card game, it's a world. If it's a movie, a comic book, a novel series, a TV show... anything. Some worlds are combinations of >1 of the above. You can play literally any combination of anything if you bullshit your "I have a concept for a new character" pitch well enough. It's a game that makes RIFTS look simple and focused by comparison and it's a pretty enjoyable game if you can completely stop giving any fucks towards balance or sane mechanics and just have fun with it. It's also a totally ongoing world kind of thing, where he just uses the "setting" as it is forever. He's been doing this for the past 20 years or so. It can be fun, but a lot of times it's a total pain in the rear end because he has no understanding of game balance and is one of those "I need total realism as I understand it in my game" kind of guys.

So for my last story with them, we all made new characters who were chosen for whatever reason to fight Zadkiel and stop him from taking over heaven and then reality itself. Did I mention he likes to take comic book/movie/game plotlines and run them without even filing the serial numbers off? He does that a lot. Anyways. Since he likes to give his bad guys super awesome powers that we never get access to despite him repeatedly saying that he wouldn't prevent us from getting anything if we found a way, I decide to make a character that would have a way: a Blue Mage. A blood elf blue mage, because blood elves from WoW eat magic. Makes sense to me, and him as well. And then he asks if I want to have WoW Mage spells as well as the blue mage power-learning ability! I say yes because why not, who turns down extra powers? So now I have a mage that has a bunch of utility powers and learns new ones by getting hit by them. I had also taken a bunch of flaws like "overconfidence", an addiction to pain and to gaining new powers, a nemesis, high curiosity, etc. for advantages like "lucky" (get a certain number of rerolls per session) and "daredevil" (getting a huge bonus whenever I attempt something exceptionally dangerous to myself, like for example throwing myself in the way of an oncoming attack!), and basic things like good reflexes, iron will, that sort.

And thus we play and we, by strange coincidence, all have ways of learning enemy powers. I can learn them by being hit by them, another player can learn them by consuming the souls of the dead, and another can learn them by seeing them being done and practicing them in downtime. Only one can't, and she's the GM's wife. She starts out with stats well over everyone else's, a god-level tracking power, constant regeneration, and a slew of demon powers. Because she's a demon with amnesia so she doesn't remember being evil. So she's a good demon. :what: We largely ignore her because she always does this poo poo and almost always fails to capitalize on her ridiculous overpoweredness. We roll our eyes and push on.

Long story short(er), we assault heaven and fight Zadkiel and his minions to try to take back heaven after chasing a guy inadvertently working for him around multiple worlds and fighting the D-list villains of Marvel. I have picked up a number of interesting powers at this point from them, as well as a couple pokemon and some new characters he thought up on his own. We were also given amulets that gave us Ghost Rider powers so he couldn't just immediately kill us all, since apparently he can't directly kill them. So instead he has his black angels try to do it. We all get a secondary form that does the ghost rider flaming skull thing, and makes all of your damage have added hellfire damage.

Now, in his game he's got this thing called Purefire. Purefire is sentient, divine fire that angels and really good mages can wield. There's also Hellfire, which is used by demons and really evil mages, and also the ghost riders. And then there's anti-Purefire, which is like corruption incarnate and used by these guys. Try as they might, no one has ever gotten a character allowed to use any of these, regardless of backstory or plot. We've got character who have caused literal genocide who can't access these. So when one of them conjures up a bow and arrow made of anti-purefire, I take the opportunity and try to catch it. And I catch it with my left hand, only because of the huge boost from my daredevil merit. I takes half my hp in damage from the arrow, then another 30% from the resulting fire in my soul. Then Gabriel (specifically, the Gabriel from the end of the Prophecy movies, who was helping us because the GM always needs to have at least one GMPC with us) jumps into the fray, with his purefire, the anti-purefire I just caught, and the hellfire from the ghost rider amulet all struggling for dominance when I activate my blue magic learning.

The GM goes for a bathroom break and tries to figure out what exactly the gently caress happens, because a lot of setting material is in his head only, including the exact workings of these divine fires. His decision? I get the power to summon up a bow that is made of and fires arrows consisting of all three at once. The one that takes the fore is the one that will hurt the most. I conjure up my new bow, and fire off an arrow. It hits Zadkiel in the head, and it goes through, doing x4 damage. He's not dead, but he is weakened so much that God can banish him to hell to be torn apart by demons, which is just as good (and lets the GM bring him back later, slasher movie sequel style). Then God requests we return the amulets and we will get our rewards for aiding in returning things to the way they should be. But I can't take mine off! Also, my fire has turned completely black. The amulet fused with me, and now I permanently have a secondary form that makes me look like this along with some damage reduction. Really awesome way to end the game for me, I thought.

Then he tells me that he is planning on sometime soon running his game over IRC for some other people who have moved out of the area, and would love to have me join in and play this character in said game. So I shall be guaranteed many more stories of memorably good and memorably bad quality!

oh wow this got long.

The Eyes Have It
Feb 10, 2008

Third Eye Sees All
...snookums
I along with a couple gaming friends once joined a play-by-email game of Magic Realm someone was organizing.

If you don't know, Magic Realm is a very complex fantasy boardgame of the "RPG with no DM" sort; it's wargame-y but has surprising depth. It's also kind of grognardy and the rulebook is amazingly incomprehensible (but has since been rewritten in plain English more than once, thankfully.)

Anyway, playing this game pretty much consists of MOVE CAVES-12 and so on (again, it's old school wargame-y) so the actual gameplay is pretty dry.

Except that right off the bat, one of the players takes it upon himself to launch things off by posting a big freeform-RPG style wall-o-text intro about his character (the Elf). I remember it starting with something like

Some Weirdo posted:

You're downing your ale and planning blah blah [note: he's telling you what your characters are doing and thinking in his post, that's usually a red flag] when suddenly a horrible stench assails your nostrils. It permeates the room and you look around to see the door open, and the Elf walks in taking no notice of :words: (it went on and on)

His email didn't even contain a move.

The rest of us were just :wtf: and wondered if he emailed the wrong list or something, but no.

And what the hell was it with the Elf "stinking"? :wtf::wtf: There's nothing even vaguely suggesting this anywhere in the rules, or flavour text (which is almost non-existent, it being an old school wargamey grognardy game) or anything. The guy just up and decided that not only were we playing some in-character freeform RPG, but somehow decided that elves stink, too. :psyduck:

God, this was probably almost 20 years ago and it's still a profoundly WTF gaming moment. Its like the guy was from a different planet.

sighnoceros
Mar 11, 2007
:qq: GOONS ARE MEAN :qq:
Shadowrun. Shadowrun never changes.

Our runners were based in Seattle. We received a job that, as part of it, required us to drive a freight truck from Point A to Point B. But both points are in Boston, which, in Shadowrun, is essentially in an entirely different country with its own police force/government. We got into Boston illegally with forged papers and it all went downhill from there.

The driving part seemed like such a secondary aspect of the job that we didn't put much thought into it. Collectively as a group we're like "Who wants to drive?" and our big troll street samurai "Jack" pipes up, "I'll drive."

So we're cruising through some Boston neighborhood in our big truck loaded up with soda, Jack's driving, I'm in shotgun, we've got some guys in the back, and a rigger in his own vehicle pulling up the rear.

Cue gangers. Some guy on a bike pulls up beside us and shoots out a tire. "Roll your Drive skill," says the GM.

[Game System note: In Shadowrun, your skill is a number that determines how many D6 you get to roll against a specific target number. Most skills range from 1-6, plus you can usually augment your roll with extra dice from various dice pools once per round, but you can usually only add up to a total of your skill. So if you had a 4 in Drive, you could roll 4 dice plus 4 from your Combat Pool and have a really good chance to succeed at whatever task you might need to perform. Most target numbers start around 4, plus or minus modifiers for added difficulty.]

Jack's player's eyes go wide and he looks down at his sheet for a moment, then solemnly grabs two dice.

"You have a Drive of 2?!" cries the rest of the group.

"No, I get 1 from my combat pool."

He rolls his two dice... snake-eyes. And in Shadowrun a result of all ones basically means a catastrophic failure.

So basically we ended up jack-knifing a semi in the middle of an intersection, taking out several pedestrians and the ganger that originally shot out the tire in the process. More gangers pull up, and Jack proceeds to fire his huge assault rifle out the window at them, full-auto, mowing down any other innocent bystanders who happened to avoid the truck hurtling down the street.

Fire-fight commenced but the damage was done. Our rigger picked up that police were on their way and we basically fled into the neighborhood, leaving the truck and everything else behind. Then it was just a series of unfortunate events even trying to get back to Seattle. I vaguely remember jumping out of the third story window of a brothel, getting shot at with laser weapons by military personnel wearing power armor, and "escaping" into the sewers. And we didn't even get paid because we messed everything up.

Moral of the story: Stay out of Boston.

sighnoceros fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Jan 14, 2012

Error 404
Jul 17, 2009


MAGE CURES PLOT

Benagain posted:

I think you can divide PCs into those who want to end their careers in quiet retirement, those who want to become gods or the nearest possible equivalent, and those who want to stand before the gods (or equivalent) and bellow "NO GODS! NO MASTERS!" before launching The Revolution.

I've noticed that every character I've ever made does this:
-All my fighter/melee/big strong dude characters always seem to be striving for quiet retirement, owning a tavern, opening a school, etc.
-All my greedy/sneaky/thiefy characters end up nursing a huge god complex. They want all the money/power and will stop at nothing to become the gods of money/power.
-And all my Mages/wizards seem to be the NO GODS! power to the people revolutionary types.

Your post just sort of brought all of that into focus for me.

Doomsayer
Sep 2, 2008

I have no idea what I'm doing, but that's never been a problem before.

I was feeling nostalgic and pulled all my little stories from the Best Experiences thread (who's ready for WAY TOO MUCH TEXT!?):

Doomsayer posted:

One of my best experiences with roleplaying was with, shockingly, an evil campaign. I thought it was a horrible idea, but all the players were really insistent on playing evil. It actually ended up with them playing as the bad guys from the campaign (With a few of the same players) we had played during the summer. So while before they were fighting the Generic Dark Lord Meyas, now they were working for him.

After a couple months of playing, and the PCs had gotten up to level 12 or so, they find out that they used to actually be powerful Heroes, fighting evil and righting wrongs. Meyas had tried to kill them, and in the process destroyed their memories. Realizing this, he decided to use them to his advantage, conscripting them in his army and making them rear end-kicking machines. Upon realizing they used to be good, 4 of them decided to turn back to the side of good, and 3 wanted to continue working for Meyas (Who payed well.). What the good guys didn't know was that Mike (a splat-booked-to-hell mage/bird/illithid monstrosity who no one liked. The character and the player.) was still working for the bad guys, keeping an eye on the good guys for them. However, to "make it look good", the bad guys stole his book and staff on their way out the door.

In the meantime, Meyas had been marching on the capital city of Circadia (He was trying to conquer the world, you see) to finish his conquest. Mike teleported to their camp, to try and get his staff and book back. Marcus (the assassin) told him to walk into the tent so they can talk without the common soldiers hearing. Marcus then made a successful death attack against Mike, killing him instantly.

After that, the "teams" were balanced, and they embarked on an epic, massive-scale mass combat/PvP game as the bad guys tried to conquer the city to capture an artifact, ending with Marcus destroying a Staff of Power, killing everyone except the currently-ethereal evil cleric, who resurrected the Druid while their army conquered the city. The cleric and the druid, left alone with Meyas as he tried to harness the power of this artifact, turned on him, and managed to barely kill him.

The druid, being the only surviving member of the original party, decided to use his newfound power to take Meyas' army and conquer the world, ushering in the Age of Pestilence.

It was awesome.

Doomsayer posted:

[Later that year] that same group has managed to (in a near-future Sci-Fi game) clear a skyscraper full of terrorists (ala Die Hard) when they were trapped at a party, shot said terrorist leader through a plate glass window (into an explosion), blew up a gang with a motorcycle (with a flaming rag jammed in the gas tank), rammed a jeep into what was effectively a dire tiger, killed a sniper by heaving a (different) motorcycle through the window he was shooting from, convinced a group of gang members that the pilot was God and the talky character His prophet, fist-fought a clan of extreme sports barbarians, blew up multiple bars, fought several invisible space ninjas, stole a helicopter (in mid-flight), managed to entirely circumvent the Big Bad's monologue using a summoned skeleton (whose ribcage was stuffed full of C4), used said stolen helicopter to fight a demon (the Big Bad) on top of a skyscraper, and the pilot killed that demon in free-fall as he, the demon, and the torn-apart helicopter all plummeted to the earth; all in the same campaign.

Oh, and they blew up a planet.

Doomsayer posted:

So, tonight we wrapped up a campaign. It was a weird sort of "accelerated" campaign where we wanted to start a new campaign, but were invested enough in this one that we wanted to see it through. Long story short, it ended up with the party split, 2 working with the BBEG, 4 working against. It was an incredibly intense battle, taking place on a floating chunk of rock hurtling through the air above a massive war between earth and the heavens occurring below them. Towards the end of the battle, they finally bring the BBEG (named Finnoc) to his knees. The Sorceress blasts him off the edge while the fighter hurls his sword into Finnoc's chest to seal the deal and finish it; yet just before it connects one of the players fighting alongside Finnoc uses a move where they switch positions, leaving Finnoc unconscious and the Paladin (the one who sacrificed himself) with a sword in his gut several yards away. Finnoc rises to his feet, attempts to charge the sorceress, she dodges and hurls a bolt of ice into his chest, sending him stumbling off the edge, plummeting to the earth below and he's dead before he hits the ground.

After the island crashes into the city below (effectively ending the war as the combatants stop to watch this whole scene, entranced), it's revealed that Finnoc was actually a god (through a convoluted series of circumstances), making the group demigods and free to make their own destiny. The two players who worked for Finnoc ended up becoming the twin gods of war (ala Ares and Athena). On the other side, the bard decided to become the god of music, and the warden left to use his new found power to establish a small, quiet wooded island retreat where he could live in solitude. The sorceress basically became a lich.

This left only the fighter (the one who threw his sword) who rejected his true divinity and chose to become a living demigod, ruling pretty much all of the world as a benevolent monarch. The people lost some freedoms, since he was effectively a tyrant, but they lived in peace and safety. His name also happened to be Finnoc. And he accomplished exactly what the "real" Finnoc wanted to do, namely take over the world.

We're still not sure if it was just a weird coincidence or some kind of giant Fight Club-esque multiple personality thing.

Doomsayer posted:

My group is playing a modern zombie campaign right now, using D&D 4e rules. The game takes place on the tourist trap resort island of Isla de Vida, sort of a Barbados type of thing. The characters are:

Cassie, a ditzy sorority girl who was caught on the island while on Spring Break (woo!). She currently wields a trashcan lid and a baseball bat with a nail in it, and has developed a nasty meth habit while on vacation. (Paladin)

Daytona, a country/hip-hop fusion star in town for a concert. Wields her trademark acoustic keytar. (Bard)

Hank McCain, the Mattress King. Bashes zombies with a 3-wood (he kept hooking with the 1-wood), shouts out at allies using his trademark Mattress King Commercial Voice ala Billy Mays. "THIS IS HANK MCCAIN THE MATTRESS KING AND I WANT YOU TO gently caress UP THAT ZOMBIE ROYALLY!" (Warlord)

and Jacqulene, a drag queen who used to work at a local club before the zombies attacked. Fights with a dressmaker's mannequin with razor blades stitched into the sides.

Roughly 3 weeks after Case 0, the players were informed that the Isla de Vida was about to be carpet bombed by the military. They managed to get in contact with a soldier who informed them that if they could get enough survivors together in one place, the military would be willing to send in a rescue copter before they began the bombing op. On their way to find a stronghold, they rescued a woman and her young son, along with a bartender still oddly tending bar. They found a yacht out in the marina that they converted into a floating stronghold, planning to float out to sea should the worst happen.

The next night, they trekked into the city proper to try and find some survivors, maybe pick up some supplies. They noted the offices of a pharmaceutical company near the outskirts of the city and decided to explore, hoping to find some medical supplies. As the entered, the building was strangely untouched. The fountain in the foyer had ceased working, but otherwise all the lights were on and there were no signs of the undead anywhere. Daytona inspected the fountain while Hank went to go search the reception desk for information. The fountain had the names of several shareholders inscribed on it,as well as an octagonal indentation set in the crest. Hank didn't find much, just a listing of employees, a photo of a family, and an odd unicorn statuette in one of the desk drawers. After a few minutes, the video screen above them that had been playing a prerecorded marketing shill turned black and displayed a red countdown timer, ticking down from 10 minutes.

Thinking fast, the players race around the foyer, searching desperately for a way out. Unfortunately, security shutters had shut over all the exits. Realizing that their options were limited, they began searching for explosives to blast their way out. In a last-ditch effort, Daytona snatched the unicorn statuette out of Hank's hand and jammed its octagonal base into the fountain. With a slow grinding noise, the entire fountain slid away, revealing an elevator underneath. They hurried aboard and descended into the long shaft below. It was then that they noticed the Parasol Corp. logo emblazoned on the elevator floor.

Meemmmoriieeesss... I have the best groups. :allears:

More recently I'm playing a really awesome game of Dark Sun PbP, but that has less stand out awesome moments and is just more or less consistently excellent.

Doomsayer fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jan 14, 2012

TehWarsmith
Jul 3, 2010
I have only ever tabletop gamed once, and it was mediocre, but parts of it, I think, need to be recounted.

DnD 4th edition. Dragonborn paladin, dragonborn cleric, elven wizard, halfing rogue, and me as a half-elf Star warlock. Everyone is really interested in playing but no one other than the paladin actually knows what they're doing, and the GM is a great guy but has no clue how to GM. We're running Keep on the Shadowfell and being generally incompetent, but fun is occasionally achieved. Now there are two things you need to understand. One is that the name of the guy playing the cleric was Luciano. Everyone called him Luc, which I always mangled the pronunciation of and called him "loosh" or "looge".

The second is that the guy playing the wizard is the best kind of completely insane guy. The character's name is Quarion, who always refers to himself as QUARION, THE GREAT WIZARD. The player always gets in character and puts on a crazy high-pitched voice. Quarion is always going off on tangents about how he is THE GREATEST OF ALL WIZARDS and that he's TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, DON'T YOU KNOW, and he's basically the craziest old man except an elf and with the ability to blow up a battlefield with fireballs. He also constantly casts Ghost Sound or whatever it's called to make it sound like other party members are farting at inappropriate times.

At one point, we fight kobolds, and Quarion takes a tiny amount of damage from a javelin. He immediately freaks the gently caress out and makes a beeline for the cleric, screaming that he's horribly wounded and needs healing. The cleric, not quite sure what to make of this, does so, and Quarion proclaims "Ah! You have saved my life! In gratitude, I believe I shall create a new kind of recreational sport, the sport of sliding rapidly down iced slopes, and I shall name it Luge in your honor!"

I very nearly died from laughing.

(as a side note, the dragonborn paladin's backstory said that he was a member of the Order of the Broken Fist, who are so named because their founder once faced a deadly opponent without any weapons, so he just punched his enemy into submission and broke both of his hands in the process :black101: )

Would anyone be opposed to me posting stories from RPing in City of Heroes here? Been there a long time and I have quite a few both best and worst stories.

Section Z
Oct 1, 2008

Wait, this is the Moon.
How did I even get here?

Pillbug

TehWarsmith posted:

Would anyone be opposed to me posting stories from RPing in City of Heroes here? Been there a long time and I have quite a few both best and worst stories.

I've always been too fearful of what madness I may find to poke my head into the Virtue server, even just for giggles. So at the very least you have one guy's morbid curiosity.

Elector_Nerdlingen
Sep 27, 2004



Best experience just happened. It will pale in comparison to some of the others, I guess, but it's pretty cool.

Two of my friends and I have been gaming since we were 8, and gaming together since we were 13 or so. My one mate's wife has played with us a few times, and my girlfriend hasn't played before (RPGs, that is, we've been doing regular boardgames for a year now). We haven't played any tabletop RPG for about 3 years, apart from a brief foray into 4th ed (hosed up by using Keep On The Shadowfell, which isn't a terrible adventure, but the combats are pretty dull). We're in our 30s now, and started on red box OD&D.

My mate said on New Year's Eve that he was going to run a new 4e game as his new year's resolution, and we played tonight.

It was wonderful. He managed a really classic D&D feel in 4e, which is accessible to his wife and my girlfriend (in that they don't have to learn a million arcane rules just to play). There were rumours of an evil cult, an investigation, and a short dungeon crawl with two longish encounters and a puzzle. The whole thing only took 4 hours, and that's with three people not familiar with the system and two people who've never played 4e, one of whom has never played any RPG. The DM used puzzle pieces from Mansions Of Madness, but mixed up the mechanics (the rune puzzle, if you're familiar with it, but doing it in the "wrong" order resulted in a small burst of necrotic damage and the puzzle resetting). The encounters were tough but acheivable - I burned through most of my healing surges, my action point, and all my encounter/daily powers by the end, but nobody died - mostly due to great positioning by the newbies.

I had heaps and heaps of fun, it feels good to be gaming again, and we're going for fortnightly games until this adventure is finished, a short break while I gear up the sequel which I'm DMing, and then fortnightly again until that's done. Then we'll see if we want to go to a different system or campaign.

Error 404
Jul 17, 2009


MAGE CURES PLOT

AlphaDog posted:

Best experience just happened. It will pale in comparison to some of the others, I guess, but it's pretty cool.

Y'know, this story may not be a tale of insane stunts, or driving a DM to drink. but I think it's one of the best stories of any of the threads so far. Friends having fun with the hobby, and introducing newbies to it in non-horrifying ways. Kinda the entire point of RPGs in my opinion. :3:

Doc Hawkins
Jun 15, 2010

Dashing? But I'm not even moving!


Ahem.

Doc Hawkins posted:

What's the best experience ever?

The next one you get to have with your cool friends.

Everything is proceeding as I have forseen it.

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran
As long as we're feeling nostalgic, I'll repost my contribution to the last thread and add a new one that I just remembered from ages ago.

Kestral posted:

Had one of my best moments from the player side of the screen on Saturday - one of those sessions where the game is over, you're turning out the lights, cleaning up the dishes, putting the chairs in order, and you can't stop thinking about the game. I woke up thinking about this scene today, and it's clear I'm going to have to write it down somewhere to get it out of my head, so it might as well be here.

For context, my group is playtesting a game for a would-be indie publisher friend, Jay. The system is one of those (wonderful) dirty hippy storygaming systems where your "stats" are more representative of how much narrative control you have at the moment rather than how strong, fast and tough you are on an absolute scale. The setting is that old sci-fi chestnut, a far-flung colony of Earth fallen from technological grace back into barbarism after some long-ago unspecified disaster, with enough handwavium to edge it into “science fantasy” mode. We're playing members of one of the many small human grasslands tribes who happened upon setting-shattering information during their rite of passage into adulthood which propelled them into Protagonist Mode.

We have three PCs in this game. Ihsan is a driven, uncompromising outsider who's become a hard-core convert to the religion of our enemies, but is still one of Our People. Sevilen is a tribal champion who leads the group of warriors who protect the shamans. I'm playing Sadri, the apprentice and designated successor to the shaman of our tribe. Due to the peculiarities of the setting, Sadri started play around ten years old when the other characters were in their late teens. He was – and still is – totally useless in a fight, but his social status makes him untouchable and he's the only character in the group who can communicate effectively without the threat of force. He's basically a good kid at heart, but he's been forced to grow up way too fast and has seen some Bad Things Happen.

We're sixteen sessions into this game. Ten or eleven sessions ago, Ihsan and Sevilen strong-armed our tribe's well-meaning but ineffectual shaman into stepping down prematurely so that Sadri could take his place. They wanted a pawn and a mouthpiece at a tribal war council, and Sadri was their ticket. It was a great scene – he begged and pleaded with them not to put him in this position, desperately trying to convince them that he wasn't ready, that his training was nowhere near complete. It went to the social conflict mechanics and I got absolutely wrecked. As a result he's been acting as shaman, but leaning heavily on his friends and former master for advice.

Since then, Sadri's been rapidly losing control over his life. His friends have enormous power over him, both because he badly wants their approval and because they deliberately engineer situations which force him to make choices – usually life-or-death choices - he doesn't want to make. We're all aware of this happening out of character, and it's been fascinating to play through. We've watched with varying degrees of amusement and mild horror as the quiet, happy, peaceful kid from session one turned into a deeply troubled war-weary youth with profound self-esteem issues.

Cut to Saturday. We've entered the Eternal City, stronghold of our former enemies and the only real bastion of civilization to arise post-apocalypse. We're there to talk to their “gods,” which are Lord of Light-esque reincarnating consciousnesses, plus one other thing which I'll call the Oracle whose nature we haven't quite pinned down yet. We're told that the Oracle will answer one question for any given person, and we've won the right to go and ask it our questions, one by one. I went last, so I got to see out of character what the Oracle's deal was mechanically: it assumes your form, interacts with you as your doppelganger, and gives you visions of ways in which you could have made different decisions and become a different person as a result. When it's over, you can cherry-pick elements from the alternate timelines to incorporate into your own, making them “real” to you. If you're familiar with FATE or other games that use descriptors or “tags” for your stats, picture being able to swap around Aspects you've acquired in play with an alternate version arising from making a different choice at some critical moment in the campaign.

Out of character, I knew exactly what my plan was here. This was the moment when Sadri would face his demons, take charge of his past, and turn the tables on the people who've been controlling his life. He would become a different person at a stroke, stronger, self-confident, able to defy Ihsan and Sevilen. It was going to be amazing.

I had no idea.

When one PC had gone in to see the Oracle, the other two players would get up from the table and just mill around in the room behind them, letting the GM, Jay, have a more one-on-one interaction with them. When Sadri's turn came around and I got into the hot-seat, I had this poo poo-eating grin on my face from confidence in my ~*~ master plan ~*~. Then Jay starts talking.

I have certain mannerisms for Sadri. It's a particular way of speaking, inflection, tone, words and phrases that crop up repeatedly, that are my way of getting into the mindset of a character I find very difficult to play. Jay, playing Sadri's doppelganger, nailed them all. It was startling. It felt like a slightly more innocent version of the character, one from closer to the beginning of the campaign, but at the time I didn't put much thought into that. We go back and forth for a bit, until the Oracle mentions regrets. That prompts Sadri to spill his guts. It was the first time the character's issues had all been laid out in detail, from his perspective. They were things we all knew, but to spell them out like that made it clear just how damaged this character is. In particular, it brought out that Sadri doesn't believe he is the person he's supposed to be, and that he is deeply unhappy with the way his life has turned out.

The Oracle's visions start with the scene where our shaman abdicates in favor of his apprentice. In the original timeline Sadri broke down and begged for this not to happen. In the visions, I have him flatly refuse. He takes a stand, refuses to accept the title, and tells his friends that they may get the shaman to step down, but it isn't right for Sadri to take his place. It works. There's a delicious Aspect-like trait on the table now labeled Decisive that I can take from this timeline which would solve his problems all by itself. I can already taste victory.

Then it falls apart. We go deeper and deeper into the new timeline, aggressively framing one scene after another where we revisit major events of past sessions from a new perspective. Decisive Sadri gets to make his own choices, and each one digs him into a deeper hole. Part of it is my deliberately choosing things that I know will turn out poorly for this timeline but which should represent a “healthier” version of the character, and part of it is Jay twisting the knife. Thirty minutes later, we've left the timeline in ruins. Sadri is crippled, his people are scattered to the winds, his relationship with his friends is destroyed, and the cause they're fighting for in the primary timeline is lost. At the end there's a list of amazing traits, things I would kill to have on my character sheet right now, and each and every one of them represents tragedy, failure and despair. If I want them, all I have to do is embrace that.

When it's all over, Sadri is a complete wreck. He knows now that all his fears and doubts about himself are true – that his decisions really do lead to disastrous ends, and that he doesn't have the wisdom to lead. Nearby, I hear Sevilen's player murmur “Oh god. We broke Sadri,” and I know he's right. Then the Oracle tells him that it envies him. Oracle-Sadri, all kitted out with those amazing traits, envies the person he's talking to because he was never challenged by his friends, was never forced into hard decisions that changed him and those around him for the better. Somehow, as bad as Sadri thinks he has it, and as badly as he wishes he could be someone else, that isn't possible. He is living in the best of all worlds. All Sadri has left is to ask “Why? Why isn't there anything better?” To which the Oracle replies, “Because you don't believe that there is anything better inside of you.”

And it's true. And it's heartbreaking. Jay has my character dead to rights in a way I hadn't even considered.

We end the session shortly thereafter. It's been the better part of two days now, and I still can't get it out of my mind. Possibly because I've never had another player or GM climb inside my head so perfectly that he has insights into my character that I've completely missed, which turned into knives for him to twist.

We've got a while until our next session, so I have time to think about where I'm taking the character from here. I didn't take any of the traits the alternate timeline offered; literally tearing the page of proffered traits to pieces was strangely cathartic. There's only one thing I'm sure of so far that has to go on the character sheet: a trait called ”Hates Himself.”


This next one is from almost six years ago, under Exalted 1E. I've posted it on RPGnet before under an old ID, and it's been making the rounds there and on a couple of other forums ever since whenever Exalted comes up. Needless to say I'm proud of it, but mostly I'm proud of my players since I had almost no hand in it whatsoever.

This was originally posted in a thread called "[Exalted] Actual Play Atrocities"

Kestral on RPGnet posted:

Hoo-boy. Guess it's time for this.

In our last Solar campaign we had agreed beforehand that the game was about a Circle of three Solars rising to power in the Eastern fringe of the Hundred Kingdoms, establishing the beginning of a new Solar Deliberative, and taking Creation to task in the name of the Unconquered Sun. Little did we know that the in-character dynamics of the party and a number of spectacular Limit Breaks would eventually cause a series of atrocities ending in... well, we'll get to that. I know I'm going to miss a few out of a 25+ session campaign, but here are the three critical events which can be grokked outside the context of the game:

1) The first big warning sign was in the third session, when the Circle, badly injured after a fight with a Garda Bird (all deep in the -2s at least), demanded from the local god of spring and renewal that they be regrown just as she regrew the trees of the forest in an ancient pact fueled by the prayers and blood offerings of the nearby city. They agreed to offer up the Essence in the lives of the very old and the very young of the city they had chosen to protect, and watched those lives be snuffed out in a rain of emerald arrows. Casualty count: Around four thousand - I never put an actual number on it, being too shocked (although hardly displeased) by the turn of events.

2) The Limit Breaking Night Caste with Deliberate Cruelty chained together two hundred captured Imperial soldiers and marched them deep below the earth, then spiked the chains immovably into the stone. He left them alone in the utter dark, but not before tapping on the stone to attract the unspeakable carnivorous monstrosities that they had found the session before...

3) Ah, the big one. For about six sessions the PCs had been aware of a growing Realm military presence in nearby Greyfalls, and that a powerful Wyld Hunt was approaching from the west, although they didn't have its exact position. Knowing that time was running out, they formed a plan to wipe out the garrison at Greyfalls before it could move against them.

The plan: infiltrate the city in disguise, summon the souped-up Garda from the first story arc which still longed for vengeance, defeat it, and allow its suicidal conflagration to obliterate everything around it while they employed Perfect Defenses to avoid harm. It had previously been established that the ancient bird's death throes could devastate a good-sized city or army - employing it here would, in theory, wipe out the garrison, the river fleet, and pretty much everyone inside the walls.

It took two sessions to pull off, mostly because the Circle was bitterly divided as to whether to carry it out, particularly when they discovered that some of their assumptions were incorrect; specifically, that the majority of the Realm soldiers were stationed in an enclave by the waterfalls rather than inside the city. The Zenith browbeat the kind-hearted but rather meek Twilight, and the Night was eventually convinced that it was the most efficient way to go about things. The Night's ronin Sidereal companion abandoned them in disgust, betraying them to the Bronze Faction and reappearing girded for war and fighting alongside of the Garda when it was summoned; they ended up cutting their ronin friend down, and would likely have killed her had the Garda not gone nova at the end of the round. In the end, the bird's dying fires consumed Greyfalls, its entire citizenry, about a third of the Imperial garrison, and the anchored warships.

Every Solar underwent Limit Break over the course of two scenes, giving rise to the second-most intense roleplaying and dialogue I have ever seen or participated in. The phrase "We are horrible people," which had been bandied about out of character as a half-joke several times, became "we are the utterly irredeemable monsters that the Dragon-Blooded say we are". It was true, and everyone at the table realized it. That, I think, is the precise moment when we realized what the Solar Great Curse was really all about.

To cut a long story a little shorter (and cutting out a great deal of background and story which would be better suited to a full-fledged Actual Play thread), the Solars ended up returning to their newly constructed temple to the Unconquered Sun and sat in judgment over the Night Caste by his request after his dark past all came spilling out (including the feeding of helpless prisoners to monsters, and the murder of the Solar who was the UC's High Priest before the party Zenith). They condemned him to death, as they would any of their citizenry, or else they would become tyrants who were above their own laws.

They shortly thereafter realized that, although the Night Caste had done horrible things, so had all the rest of them, all in the name of the Unconquered Sun. Eleven solid hours of play culminated in the Circle laying mass condemnations upon *themselves*, and, convinced that only the Sun could judge whether they were fit to live or die, they plunged knives into their hearts.

It took us another two hours to decide, out of character, whether the Solars lived or died. In the end we realized that it was the best ending we could have ever wished for, and we let them redeem themselves in death.

TehWarsmith
Jul 3, 2010
It occurs to me that the way we play CoH is more like tabletop than anything else. We have a close-knit group of friends with a lot of different characters, we come up with interesting things that could happen if you put different characters together, and then whoever is the primary architect of the current plotline acts as the ST. This is greatly assisted by the Mission Architect, the buggy but extremely flexible player-made content creator.

This particular story is about the single greatest thing I have ever seen someone do with the Architect. It's also rather short, which is nice.

A friend's character, who can best be described as a nerdy as gently caress teenager who wants to be both Green Arrow and Batman (tech bow, crazy trick arrows, detective skills, genius-level intellect) goes to investigate why the power has died in an office building. He calls in me, a psychic who, in addition to powerful telepathy and telekinesis, is capable of molding reality with her mind to produce protective shields and teleportation effects. She senses something very ... wrong inside the building, but does not sense any human minds, inside this large office building in the middle of work hours.

They head inside, and meet up with a police inspector who happens to have supernatural powers and a magical sword. (He's a pretty cool guy.) They search the building, and find the staff.

They have all been transformed into completely blank, white, faceless silhouettes that have been rendered mute. Then they realize that they can't talk, and indeed no sound can be produced inside the building. My character compensates by relaying thoughts between the three of them, but they are still freaked out, because the things are following them.

What the ST did was so amazingly simple. She put all the NPCs inside in blank white tights and blank masks. She set them as hostile to the players.. Then she removed all of their attacks and powers.

So these featureless things followed us through the entire building, crowding around our characters, trying to get closer to us, and the farther into the building we went, the larger the crowd got, until the rooms of the office building were packed full of mute shadows of human beings, surrounding us on every side and just ... standing there. And of course, she told us to turn off our sound as we went into the building.

We were so freaked out and tense that when some of the Silenced actually moved through the crowd and attacked us we jumped out of our costumes. These ones were different, they were actually wearing equipment, though it didn't make them any less terrifying. They were also brutally hard to fight, and if not for the detective we wouldn't have made it.

Eventually we made it to the top floor and went into an office. We looked out the window, and saw that the same thing was happening all over the city. The people, all the people, were being Silenced, and the buildings were being whitewashed into featureless white rectangles. I sent a mental message to a contact outside the city, who was still in control of herself, but confirmed that this was happening everywhere.

To make a long and tense story short, we stumbled upon a mage that had managed to protect himself from the phenomenon, who told us that the Silence was a manifestation of the Void, the nothingness between dimensions, that was attempting to absorb our world into itself. He told us that the only way to stop it was with the opposite of Nothing and Silence; Imagination and Creativity, and told us where we needed to go.

We met a girl who appeared to be made of ink. She left a dripping trail behind her, and wherever the ink dripped it turned to a rainbow of colors. The aggresive, armored Silenced had pinned her down, but we fought them off and saved her, and then she and the mage transported us to ... somewhere else.

What happened next wasn't clear, but when we returned to our own world, the Silence was gone, and we could speak and hear again. The world and the people were restored. My character actually did some loops in the air and shouted for joy. We asked the rainbow-girl, Inki, what she had done, and she just smiled and said that the Void was no more. She had "colored in the blanks."

We asked the ST why our characters had been spared, and she said that the inspector had been protected by the spells on his sword, and that the Silence had not touched the psychic because "it saw her as its own." For the archer there was no explanation, at least not one she could explain, and that disturbed both the players and the characters greatly. The ST in question never, ever does anything without a reason, and will fit plot points into place years later.

We all remembered what had happened, as did the mage, but no one else had any knowledge of how close the world had come to oblivion.

We agreed it was better that way.

Section Z
Oct 1, 2008

Wait, this is the Moon.
How did I even get here?

Pillbug
Always good to hear about the AE being used in nifty and creative ways (I didn't even realize you could make enemies with no attacks). All I've ever done was a gimmick short set where it boiled down to 'Robot Masterminds Robots are stealing a giant laser'. The rare occasions people ran through it they didn't hate it at least after I worked out some kinks (Long recharge single target to Summon only heals on enemies good. Empathy Area heals on summoners bad)

Testing in there for various gimmicks reminded me the hard way that NPC powers do not always = PC powers. I think it's fixed now, but at first NPC robot mastermind Protect Bots summoned those forcefield generators instead of casting single target buffs. Imagine a whole room full of shield generators. Now imagine the Empathy area heal mixed in. Yeah, that got out of hand fast.

Also, a bunch of enemies armed with nothing but damage auras. In hindsight that would be unfair to stalkers what with the damage breaking stealth, but that's no problem damage auras do like, half a Brawl's damage per tick-OH MY GOD why is it doing that much damage!? Oh, right. Enemies.

So an added layer of how impressed I am by your story, is what your ST probably had to go through to make sure the whole mission functioned.

EDIT: An added question. How did your ST go along for the ride? Did they follow along with stacked stealth? Did you run it in test mode with godmode/enemies ignore on ST so they wouldn't get distracted?

Section Z fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jan 15, 2012

TehWarsmith
Jul 3, 2010
The ST was actually playing the inspector, and narration was mostly delivered through him. We usually do something like that. At one point there was a series of missions where the main villain hired a bunch of our villain characters to help her steal weapons for her plan - the people she hired weren't important to the plot, but they let everyone follow along and show the players what was going on behind the curtain.

The Man From Melmac
Sep 8, 2008
There should probably be some sort of explanation for the thread title in the OP.

Malachite_Dragon
Mar 31, 2010

Weaving Merry Christmas magic

Benjamin Black posted:

There should probably be some sort of explanation for the thread title in the OP.

In a terrible group there's usually one person who smells like cat piss. In my groups it'd probably (unintentionally) be me. I have many cats. :sigh:

I remember a quote from one of the previous Best Experiences threads about a game of... I forget if it was Exalted or Five Rings or what, but one of the main characters was a demigod whose badass moment of the quote was getting every person in Japan and of Japanese descent to call out to Amaterasu to show they had not forgotten their mother goddess. I don't remember a drat thing about it beyond that, does anyone know what I"m talking about?

Flavivirus
Dec 14, 2011

The next stage of evolution.
Doesn't sound like Exalted or L5R, but maybe Scion?

Malachite_Dragon
Mar 31, 2010

Weaving Merry Christmas magic

Flavivirus posted:

Doesn't sound like Exalted or L5R, but maybe Scion?

It very well may be; I honestly have no idea what system it was, I only remember that it makes me warm and fuzzy and :3: every time I read it.

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FactsAreUseless
Feb 16, 2011

Malachite_Dragon posted:

I remember a quote from one of the previous Best Experiences threads about a game of... I forget if it was Exalted or Five Rings or what, but one of the main characters was a demigod whose badass moment of the quote was getting every person in Japan and of Japanese descent to call out to Amaterasu to show they had not forgotten their mother goddess. I don't remember a drat thing about it beyond that, does anyone know what I"m talking about?
That happens in the PS2/Wii game "Okami," I don't know if it also happened in another Japan-themed RPG.

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