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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug Ruff" data-source="post: 3334718" data-attributes="member: 49676"> Could you talk about a rockin' moment that happened at your table this year?Sure thing. This may take a while:This is from the homebrew campaign I’ve been playing in for over 10 years. I need to tell you a few things about it, to explain why this moment rocked so much. Firstly, we reset the game a couple of years ago after we lost one of our players. More on that later. We put all of our characters away, tweaked the rules and started in a new area of the map with a new story. Also, we regular run more than one character at a time, and each player has a “stable” of up to half a dozen characters in their folder at any one time. All of the play is based around a single city and the outlying settlements, so parties form and disperse from session to session and many of the characters know each other through former association or by reputation.So, for the last few sessions we’ve been investigating some attacks on one of the nearby villages, and it looks like we’ve just hit across the advance guard of a sizeable dark elf army (the first time this race has been introduced to the campaign). In the session before this one, we took a party deep into some underground passages, and we ended the session resting in an area we had just cleared out.This session, we’re taking another party, with different characters, to investigate another dark elf sighting. This also leads to an underground network of caves, and we start getting our butts kicked by some nasty hit-and-run attacks and magic we’ve never seen before.We press on, and after some more of the same the GM asks us to make some perception checks. He tells us that there’s a small force just ahead of us, we don’t know what, but they don’t appear to know we’re there. Can you see where this is leading?At this point, we pretty much realise (as players) that the other force might beour party from the last session, we’re underground, lost and we’ve been attacked virtually every inch of the way.So, naturally, we charge. Straight into the other party.What happens next is what rocked for me. Recently we’d been a bit protective of our characters; not wanting to take too much risk, getting a bit upset (as players) if anyone’s character had screwed anyone else’s character over (with large numbers of characters per player, each with their own agenda, this happens fairly often and is usually accepted as long as no-one kills anyone else).So we’re in a situation where we may be facing not one, but two total party kills, because the characters in each party don’t know the other party very well and the dark elves have been hiring mercenaries.Except this time, we go for it. We’re actively conspiring with each other and with the GM to come up with reasons why the characters might not realise what’s going on. We’re attacking each other’s characters, we’re attacking our own characters, we’re having a blast.Then the GM tells me that one of my characters, a priest in the second group who has been hanging back (no combat skills) that he recognises some of the guys in the other group and we’re fighting the wrong guys.What happened next was a different sort of rocking, but it wasn’t as good as what happened when we remembered that we’re playing a game, that it’s OK if things go wrong. It’s even OK if someone dies. The rest of us will move on.I've never written it down like this before. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to do so.Regards,Doug</blockquote>

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