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Your favourite botches

My favorite had a great outcome (unexpected)

This combines to Monte Cooke modules I ran for my group - Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and Banewarrens. From the Banewarrens I let them keep the Staff of Shards, which was an intelligent staff of power that had been broken in the past.

They were nearing the completion of the RttToEE. Prince Thrommel Dominated the Gnome Bard in the party. The Bard had Puppeteer. So he got in position and cast the spell on the Sorcerer, who had the Staff (note this was the player of the Bard doing this .... eeeeevil :)). So, I said "make a Strength check - anything over a 5 it breaks since it was broken in the past (she had no strength mod). That, of course, makes the Staff of Power go Boom (and a biiiiig boom at that)

So all gathered around and the player rolled. The d20 bounced and rolled, and finally landed...on a 1! The table erupted! I have it on video somewhere.
 

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The only botch I remember off the top of my head was sandwiched between 2 crits.

I was playing Robotech back in the day and fired at a squad of Zentraedi battle pods. I rolled a natural 20, they rolled a natural 1 to dodge. Then the DM asked me to roll again and I got another 20. The last roll to see if I had my gun camera running.

Oh yeah, I remember a catastrophic botch in Mage the Ascension that caused a paradox storm, but it wasn't me or my character.
 



In a 4E game, our party was fighting two Bloodclaws, I think. (Nasty monsters with threatening reach and good damage).

Now the two of them were probably too much for our party, but luckily, our mage pout one of htem in a deep pit, where he stayed and stayed and stayed for endless rounds, unable to get out, while we had a terrible time killing the one still up on top with us.

Thanks to its botched climing rolls, we won, but I do not know how we would have otherwise.
 

I have had some really good fails in d6 star wars.

My character tried to swing on a rope onto the top of an AT-ST walker just like Chewie in ROTJ. I rolled my climb/jump for the swing. Rolled down and failed. So instead of landing on the top of the AT-ST i misjudged and swung out in front. The pilot then shot me with the blasters.

In another game as a group we were deciding on the best course of action to assault a heavily guarded compound. The GM asks for Knowledge rolls and everyone in the group rolls down. So we all decide a frontal assault in the flimsy airspeeder is the only option. We got to withing 50 meters of the front entrance before the speeder exploded into a fiery ball.

And the best of all. Another player in the group had a huge Barabel. The party got stranded on a planet without provisions and as a natural hunter we sent the Barabel out to get some food. While out hunting he finds a lone peasant sitting at a camp fire roasting some meat. So the lazy Barabel decides he is going to sneak up and scare the crap out of the guy and steal his food and come back to camp the hero. He rolls his sneak fails, he rolls his intimidation and fails. The peasant slashes the Barabel with the only weapon he had a small butter knife. The peasant rolls up on damage and keeps rolling up and up and up. The poor Barabel rolls down on strength and is killed instantly. After than we had a saying of watch out for peasants with butter knives.
 

In AD&D I had a caster with the specialty spell of "chromatic orb" which, regrettably, has a "to hit" roll.

I rolled so many 1's with that spell (especially early on), dropping it on my own feet, that I began choosing fire for the spell and keeping protection from fire on myself at all times.


I became locally known as the wizard who went into battle "wreathed in flames".
 



It was closer to this:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uHRSyBQNL0]Nothing to Lose - Scatman - YouTube[/ame]


In that movie, Tim Robbins (Nick Beam) then goes into that gas station at the end, shoes still smoking, and the proprietor says to him:

"You must be really fast."


I never got that response in game, though.
 

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