Your favourite botches

[Wednesday Boy]

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

With a 1 in 6 chance of fumbling, WEG Star Wars gives you lots of opportunities!!

WEG d6 Star Wars is where one of our more entertaining botches came from too. Our group was on a space station and got stopped by the local security. The head of security found our Jedi's lightsaber and started inspecting it to figure out what it was. I guess the Jedi got antsy so he tried to TK it out of the officer's hand. He botched the roll and instead of TKing the lighsaber he accidentally turned it on right as the officer was peering into the end of it. The fallout was a wonderfully chaotic scene!

 

[MarkB]

I had one character in Living Spycraft, a soldier named Hatchet, who seemed to have the most atrochious luck with critical failures - and in that system the GM could, and would, spend Action Points to activate those failures for adverse effects.

We had a mission to interrogate the CEO of a large corporation, who we suspected of being an agent of the villains we were tracking, and snuck into his skyscraper to do so. According to our varied gifts, half the party went in from the ground floor, using deception and disguise, whilst the others - my soldier and a fixer - went the stealth route, paragliding onto the rooftop.

The two of us snuck through the top floor and approached the executive suite, stopping to listen at the door before entering.

I rolled a 1 on my Listen check, and the GM ruled that, in my attempt to steady myself as I put my ear to the door, I'd leaned on the door handle. The result was that the door flew open and I fell in, landing at the feet of the CEO, who was relaxing on a sun lounger attended by his personal assistant.

He immediately leapt to his feet and pulled a gun. While my ally kept a bead on the PA, my character leapt up and grappled him, trying to disarm him.

Natural 1.

He stepped aside from my blundering charge, and I landed clumsily on the sun lounger. The GM gave me an Acrobatics check to try and recover before he brought his gun to bear.

Natural 1.

The GM was running out of bad things that could happen at this point, and ruled that my impact with the sun lounger had started it rolling, and my inexpert attempts to stand had only accelerated it, straight towards the plate glass windows that made up one entire wall of the suite. Not to worry - it would take only a very easy Acrobatics check to roll off the moving bed well before it hit the window.

Natural 1.

The sun bed smashed through the plate glass window, and the GM, in despair, gave me one last check to save myself.

Natural... 18.

I was left dangling by my bleeding fingers from the ragged frame of a skyscraper penthouse window whilst my ally successfully finished subduing the CEO and his PA, getting to me just in time to haul me to safety.

As for the rest of the party, making their way up the stairwell, their first hint of any trouble was the unexpected sight of a sun lounger plunging past the third floor window.

 

[steenan]

I don't remember any entertaining fumbles that happened to my characters. But I had a paladin in my party that had a lot of them - and as many criticals. We joked that when she rolled, it was more often a natural 1 or natural 20 than anything else.

We had a rule that you need to "confirm" a natural 1 (roll to hit again and miss) to get a fumble, otherwise it's just a miss. That didn't stop her from throwing her sword away several times (including throwing it into black pudding and into a chaos beast), tripping herself and injuring druid's animal companion.

It was most entertaining when she charged in, defeated most enemies by herself and then got a botch that left her nearly helpless.

 

[korjik]

My first one dosent really count as a botch, but the first time I played WEG d6 Star Wars, we ended up getting chased off a planet by a Sith. When we take off on one players ship, I get the wise idea to get in the belly gun and let the Sith have it with the ship-scale laser cannons. Needless to say, the resulting reflected blaster bolts did alot of damage to our ship. So I say:

There is no possible way he could do that again.

I didnt quite manage to pick myself off, but I got really close.

My second one is a true bungle. We were playing GURPS fantasy and I was playing a wizard (Korjik, oddly enough). GURPS uses 3d6 with low results being good. We had gotten on board a flying ship that the enemy army was using as a mobile HQ. We had recovered the artifact we were after when all heck broke loose. I ended up at the ships controls, where the ship's wheel would be on a normal ship, when my personal nemesis showed up and started kicking me all over the place. I got wounded and knocked over, and in desperation I did a Flame Jet spell at max power. I rolled to make the spell: 3! crit success! Time to crispy me a bad buy. I roll to hit: 18!?! I flame jet the ship's controls for max damage! The ship staggered around the sky for a bit before hitting the walls of the city we were defending. We ended up getting away, but only just barely.

My third was D&D. I was running the game, and my players had gone waaay off the reservation on what I had planned. They decided to scout out the bad guy army by disguising themselves as wandering entertainers and offering to entertain the troops. They talk there way in, then have to do their show. I have them do a skill challenge for the show, with them describing what they want to do to entertain. The 2 weapon fighter and the 2 weapon rogue decide they will do a display of swordfighting. The Fighter rolls a 1! The rogue rolls a 1! The Bard does a quick bluff check to cover for the fumbling display: Natural 20! The fighter and the rogue were now the clowns of the show, and rolled quite well in that roll for the rest of the challenge. They also roleplayed it really well, and used the amusment factor to cover for themselves when they were wandering the camp later.

 

[MarkB]

There was also the time in Traveller where I was the navigator for our ship, and rolled snake-eyes on the Astrogation check our very first time out. Two other players claimed they'd have checked my maths so the GM let them make checks, and neither got a success, so he ruled that they hadn't spotted the error in my calculations.

So, we mis-jumped and wound up in a distant star system without enough fuel to make it to civilisation, and had to investigate a creepy centuries-old derelict spaceship to recover the fuel we needed.

This was a fairly noisy table - our characters weren't wonderfully well matched for a trading crew, so people tended to start discussing in ones and twos where to go and what to do next, often talking over each other - so when the GM asked who was going to be making the astrogation check to jump out of system, I was the only one who noticed.

I waited a good 30 seconds, giving anyone else who wanted to the opportunity to jump in, but with no other responses, and seeing the chance for my character to redeem himself, I reached for the dice with a comment along the lines of "well, I can't do any worse than last time". Yes, I really should know better than that.

Somehow, where the GM's repeated requests for attention had failed to penetrate the other players' heated discussions, the words "Wow, what are the chances? Snake-eyes again!" did the trick perfectly.

There was much protestation that there's no way they'd have let me plot another jump after last time, which the GM dismissed on the grounds that he'd asked if anyone wanted to do it and nobody else had replied. He did allow everyone with any astrogation skill to check my character's maths this time, and again, while I was the only one to roll snake-eyes, nobody else actually rolled a success.

So we were off again into uncharted territory, and this time it wasn't just our fuel running low, we were critically low on supplies too.

This time, fortunately, there was a habitable world in-system, an Earth-like planet with oceans for us to syphon hydrogen fuel from, and an early-20th-century equivalent civilisation.

After fuelling up, we made our way to some farmland in a remote area and attempted to negotiate peacefully with the locals for some food, but they reacted with extreme hostility and were killed in the ensuing gunfight. We grabbed what stocks of meat we could, as well as a large quantity of the harvest from the strange purple-leafed crop they were growing, and headed home.

It wasn't until we were well on our way out (fortunately this time with a decent astrogation roll) that we discovered why that farm was so remote, and so well defended. It turned out that the plants they'd been growing there were of a somewhat medicinal, illicit nature, so when we finally popped back into normal space in a friendly system we were extremely well fed, but also stoned out of our minds on alien weed.

 

[TarionzCousin]

The previous week I had won the award for "most ineffectual combatant" with a series of natural 2's and 3's. So last Friday the woman who hadn't rolled under a 16 in combat (over a dozen rolls) loaned me a set of her dice.

My first seven rolls: 1, 1, 1, 11, 1, 11, 11, 1.

Since you asked, no the eleven's did not hit.

Things improved steadily after that. I rolled two 2's, then a 3 and a 4. Unfortunately, the combat ended not long after that.

I take over the DM's chair next.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My first seven rolls: 1, 1, 1, 11, 1, 11, 11, 1.

Was that on November 11?

 

[Evilhalfling]

When I roll a 1 on skill checks I tend to narrate the results for my character.

survival check.
"I think the best way to avoid the tropical heat is to perch out on those sunny wave-swept rocks, the breeze will keep us cool!"
then the tide came in...

Insight.
The person hanging blood drained animals at night, is friendly vampire, helping to provide food.
"hey look the vampire brough us breakfast again!"

Local knowledge.
yup those natives are definitely were-sharks. That's why they keep eating people. This almost led to us tieing up a captive and then throwing him over a cliff into the sea. Good PCs less confident in my were-shark hypothesis talked me out of it.

We also use a critical fumble deck (although I talked the DM into a reflex save to "confirm" botching on attacks)
a fumble (hit ally) and a crit (another card deck) resulted in 2nd level wizard removing another PC from play for 3 rounds, after hitting him with acid splash (a cantrip)

 

[possum]

I don't know if this really makes up a botch or not, but it took place during the second season of Encounters, which was Dark Sun. It has a weapon breakage rule where if you roll a natural 1, you can roll again with the understanding that no matter what with a subpar weapon it will break.

We had been captured by halflings and had managed to escape (I slipped out while the others bribed a guard to let them out). We crept up to the hut where our weapons and other equipment was being stored, armed only with clubs that we had broken off of the trees in the area. I was the first and snuck up on one of the halflings standing near a giant brass gong, opting to take him out before he could sound the alarm. I go up there and roll a 1 when I tried to hit him...

I opt to try again and manage to hit him hard with my reroll, not enough to kill him, but pretty well. The image of me running up and breaking my club over the sentries head was enough for the DM to award me a "Moment of Greatness" and the points that grants. Sadly, I don't think that it was enough to earn me a rewards card, but it helped.

 

[TarionzCousin]

I was the first and snuck up on one of the halflings standing near a giant brass gong, opting to take him out before he could sound the alarm. I go up there and roll a 1 when I tried to hit him...

"... and the DM ruled that I swung full strength into the sweet spot of the gong. Every cannibal halfling within 5 miles heard it and came running."

Fixed it for you.