Best Moments of Gaming

[Clarabell]

So I know that everyone has at least one story about a time they were playing and something amazing happened. Like the famous Gazebo Story. I'm interested in what your stories are.

Here are two of mine:

1: My Guitar Shoots in E-Flat.

I played a bard named Shurra who was also a mechanical engineer. I had an thought one day, What happens if my life is in danger and I'm performing on stage, guitar in hand. I don't want to break the guitar, but i don't have much time either.

So I trapped my guitar. A trigger on the backside of the neck, and a crossbow bold inside the body. Just one bolt.

So I go to test it out and hit a target perfectly. The string hum and the guitar sounds and I calmly say, "Huh, what do you know. My guitar shoots in E-Flat."

2: Why I never use Captains.

I use to have Captains in my games. The captain of the guard. No more.

It began one session with my players in a dungeon. The guards enter, and everyone is unarmed. One player asks if he can look for a loose floor tile. I say sure, thinking he wont succeed. He gets it. Ok, he finds one. He says he wants to toss it like a discus at the guards. I roll a d4, and it lands on 3, which I chose for the captain. Ok...roll to hit.

Nat 20.

You have to be kidding me.

Roll for instant kill.

Nat 20.

Into the captains face sails the floor tile and down he goes.

As they escape, another player, a bronze dragon, manages to eat the other captain on the way out.

I have never used a captain since.

 

[Lanefan]

We called it, afterward, the Battle of the Three Tents.

Party is camped on a wooded hillside. During the night a mixed group of Hobgoblins and Orcs (and a wolf or two? can't remember) blunder into our camp and a mass brawl breaks out. Our fighter types hold their own, but the magic-users make it memorable...

The party has two MU's in it at the time. One gets stuck in melee with two Orcs - she'd have been outgunned by just one - and against huge odds kills them both with her dagger!

The other one has a Ring of Telekinesis; he climbs a tree, finds a boulder, and gets it going using the Ring. (spells? what are those?) Problem is, it's dark, and the light from the campfire is so poor he can't really see what he's doing; so for the rest of this very long combat this wandering boulder becomes a random interrupt. He manages to destroy all three of our tents with it (hence the battle's name), clobber the party Ranger upside the head and nearly knock him out, narrowly miss several others of us, and never does a single point of damage to the enemy! Meanwhile, a classic open-field battle is raging all over the hillside.

Then, for good measure, after the last Orc goes down and the battle's over he lets the boulder go without bothering to look for what might be below it. It falls to the ground. On my foot, for 6 points damage.

This battle was played over 25 years ago. We still laugh about it today.

Lan-"my character in this battle was, in fact, Lanefan"-efan

 

[MortonStromgal]

As a Player

We had been playing this long Traveller campaign (most weeks for a couple years, 7+ hour sessions). Our planet is surrounded by this armada of alligator men ready to pound us and our home into oblivion. We have a few ships but way out gunned and outclassed. We used some EMPs, Comm jammers and other devices till finally its just us on the command ship and the enemy command ship. Our ship is swiss cheese barely hanging on. We are adrift the captain calls the engineer who tells him the only power we have left is life support and that low but should give us enough power to make it to whats left of the star base to land. The captain says ramming speed... We went out in a blaze of glory!

As a GM
I was running Vampire the Dark Ages and they started as mortals. One was a gypsy and he offered to read another PCs fortune so we broke out the tarot cards and all got to want him read her fortune, very cool.

 

[renau1g]

In a d20 Modern came we were running away from some federal agents out to capture our group (we were like the A-team). I was in the back of the Escalade and one of the other PC's was driving, I had the back open and was unloading with my AK into the enemy vehicle, trying to damage it, they were firing back. It was a great scene (oh, it was in a rural area) and the driver took the vehicle into a more open area. There were two enemy cars and our Escalade. The driver on our side says "F*** this, I'm ramming them" and we all look at him with blank stares (there's 2 other PC's in the car with us, one ko'd from a gunshot, the other was a medic and kept him stabilized). The DM says, ooooook, how fast do you want to go? He replies 3/4 speed.... As you can guess, 3/4 on an Escalade is pretty fast. IIRC around 130/hr. Anyways I hear this and yell, Ok I tumble out the back window. I manage to roll a pretty high roll and the driver slams the SUV into the other vehicle at that speed. Both are destroyed, but there's still the other vehicle, I was hurt in the explosion, but had my katana. I managed, despite all odds, to evade their shots and put down the agents. I pulled our crew from the wreckage and we just barely survived...we still laugh about it... 3/4 speed...

 

[Greyfeld]

I have a couple, though they might be funnier to me because I was actually there at the time

The first one, I was playing a cleric, and I don't remember what my friends were playing, but one of them was a dwarf and the other was a drow. Being the only character who couldn't see in the dark during a dungeon crawl game, I needed a source of light but didn't want to blind the other characters. So, the Drow walked in front, I walked in back, and I cast Light on the dwarf who served as my personal lantern.

Later in the same campaign, we ran into a small tribe of Kobolds living in the dungeon, and because we were outnumbered, I tried talking to them. I tried to bluff, telling them that I was a god and they should worship me. Remembering my dwarf-lantern from earlier, I cast Light on myself to make the bluff more convincing, but they totally didn't buy it, so we had to run away like total pansies.

And yet again in the same campaign, we managed to get thrown against a Blink Dog. By all rights, we shouldn't have, but we did. The fight, needless to say, was going poorly. And being a 3-man group, I had to heal and throw in my weight in melee as well. Being new to the game, I didn't know how to optimize my character in the slightest, so my stats weren't all that great. But I waded into the fray anyway and wailed away at the blink dog. Or at least I tried to.

Attack Roll: 1
Roll for critical miss: 20
Roll to verify: 20

Essentially what happened is my cleric with his little 1d6 mace missed the blink dog, slammed his weapon into the teammate next to him, and crit for fatal damage, instantly killing him.

Worst. Cleric. Ever.

 

[LurkMonkey]

Waaaaaay back in the (1e) days, I was running a 1 on 1 game for a friend of mine. There were a bunch of NPCs travelling with him to make a well-rounded dungeon delving party. One of which was a stock Dwarf fighter. Now, I don't know why, but that little runt of an NPC was jinxed. I would roll his attacks, and more often than not, he'd roll a 1. At the time I used houserule crit/fumble tables from Dragon, and that dwarf's hammer killed more of the party than the monsters ever did. Fortunately, I had also houseruled the old 'unconcious and fading until -10 hp' rule as well, or that party's career would have been very shortlived!

It got to the point that my friend asked me to have the NPC walk in front instead of the thief, because he didn't want to get accidentally flattened by this clumsy dwarf's hammer again.

So then the dwarf begins to attract crits instead of causing fumbles. Arrows, knives, even a ballista bolt one time would invariably score a 20 against him. And the concept of crit confirm hadn't been invented yet, so the 20 was a crit, and that was final. That Dragon crit table could be pretty vicious too. I think after the ballista bolt pinned him to the dungeon wall, my friend turned to me and said, "I think we're just gonna leave him up there."

 

[Diamond Cross]

As a DM I was running a 2e campaign with a girl who had never played it before. She was interested in being a Cleric because she like the idea of having the ability to heal people. She asked me what kind of weapons a Cleric can use and I told them that they can only use blunt weapons, such as a mace. So when buying equipment she bought a mace.

So during game play they encountered a black bear. She said she'd spray it with her mace.

The thing was she actually thought it was a spray and not a glorified metal club and wasn't making a joke.

During a Palladium game, another girl player noticed the stat called Physical Prowess. On the character sheet, she noticed it was abbreviated PP. She blurted out "What is a PP?" right next to her boyfriend, and his face turned really red and the rest of us burst out laughing.

During the a game of 1e when the first critical hit tables came out, we had a lot of fun with that. I had an oriental Kensai who had came across a Mallet Of luck. A Mallet Of Luck is a mallet that bestows a bonus to hit and saves, but the caveat is you have to strike someone to do it.

The fighter of the party asked me to bestow those bonuses on him. So I rolled to-hit him.

So I rolled a natural 20.

I ended up doing triple damage and major damage to an arm.

Nobody would let me give them a bonus anymore.

 

[Clarabell]

"I give you one of my apologies."

My friend was playing a werewolf who didn't understand normal speech very well, so when someone said, "I offer you my apologies," his character was confused. The npc tried to explain it and he got it...mostly. Later on he did something and turns to another player and said, "Here, you can have one of my apologies if you want."

Best roleplaying ever.

 

[Umbran]

Two great moments I had in a larp campaign...

I was playing a character from a post-apocalyptic American Midwest. I'm the engineer, the guy who keeps the cars running despite the corrosive radioactive dust and all. The first game of the campaign, we have a scene that's supposed to be a bonding moment for a group of us: a good old-fashioned bar brawl.

The fight breaks out, and I don't have a gun or a knife on me. I reach into my toolbox and pull out a huge wrench I had in there. The GM, running the combat dramatic-style, not worrying much about the rules, is describing Events as he resolves them. I'm waiting my turn in the round, standing there over the NPC that's fallen through my table, holding the wrench high over my head ready to dramatically bring it down on the bad guy's skull.

The GM says, "And Cody has this big-ass hammer..."

And everyone looks at him funny, 'cause we can all see it isn't a hammer, but is clearly a wrench. Now, we can't just go an contradict the GM, so we realized that what had happened was that he'd used the weapon's (immediately nigh-legendary) name: Asshammer.


Same campaign, about a year later...

This game had a number of BBEGs, and when starting a plotline, it was often hard to tell which one we were dealing with. Several times, we had cases where seemingly unrelated events all tied to the same villain. One known villain was Anton Mesmer (as in, the guy "meserism" is named for). Another we had simply taken to calling "The Emissary".

We have a big fight in the woods (live combat this time, so I'm working with a boffer version of Asshammer someone made for me without me asking). We'd just fought off a bunch of zombie-like things, and were waiting for the next wave when one of my compatriots gets an idea in his head. The character he's playing is a combat monster, not exactly the brightest bulb in the marquee. As we wait, he shouts across the battlefield, "Hold on, I got it! Emissary! Mesmer! Don't you see, they're... whatdoyacall'em, with the letters rearranged? Anagrams! Yeah! Mesmer and the Emissary are the SAME GUY!"

We all stand in stunned silence at his... logic, until I can no longer bear it and blurt out*, "There's no Y in Mesmer!"

At which point, the cast member who was just putting on a big rubber monster mask behind a bush (who also happened to be the guy who regularly played Mesmer as an NPC), collapsed in laughter at this exchange. The zombies lying dead on the ground start giggling. The giggling zombies are too much for the players to handle, and we too start laughing. It was ten minutes before we'd all regained our composure enough to finish the fight.



* in my best Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own voice like, "There's no crying in baseball!"

 

[Oryan77]

I have never used a captain since.

It sounds more like you shouldn't be using floor tiles anymore. They seem overpowered.