Kai Lord
Hero
Once when I was GM'ing a Robotech adventure for some friends back in high school I took them all on an adventure where they were exploring a ghost ship in the debri ring around Earth thought to be the base of operations for a nefarious foe.
They explored the ship level by level, having small skirmishes with the Zentraedi forces inside. Through all of this a particularly proud player I'll call Tony was getting upset that he really wasn't getting to shine in combat. He had an Armored Veritech, which is one of the transformable space fighters that had tons of extra armor and missiles bristling out of every orifice. The cost for all of the extra hardware was that the fighter couldn't transform out of robot form, but that suited the current mission just fine.
After a couple hours of Tony being shown up in combat by his fellow crack pilots he was starting to get pissed. The situations and die rolls just weren't favoring him that day.
Well eventually they enter a corridor and face off against a towering Officer Pod and about a dozen Battle Pods all crammed together in the hall waiting to blow the players away. This is it, Tony thought. This is my moment.
Proudly describing his character stepping forth he proclaimed, "I fire ALL of my missiles at them!"
His Armored Veritech had about a hundred of them. Reminding Tony of the shear overkill of what he was about to do, Tony rescinded and stated he would only fire half of them. 50+ missiles. Down a corridor. At 13 Battle Pods packed together. You can't miss, right?
Well, even though the entire team of PC's were uberbadasses with Physical Prowess scores in the stratosphere and every combat skill you could think of, according to the rules missiles were autotargeting and so they only get +3 bonuses instead of the normal +17 or whatever the PC's attack bonuses were.
Now, in Robotech all you need to hit something is to roll a 5 or higher on a d20, and then your opponent rolls to dodge. A low roll is rarely hard to dodge but to hit something at all you just needed a 5. Something you could do with missiles was launch them as a volley so that with one attack roll you could hit one target or a group of targets with many more missiles than your rate of attack would normally allow.
So Tony unloads half of his missiles on the poor Zentraedi squad and rolls. He looked at his d20 in a state of pure disbelief. "Its a 1." 1+3 (missile targetting)=4.
All six of us just sat in stunned silence. Then I started laughing. Tony missed. With every single missile. In the most dramatic way I could, I described the hellfire barrage of missiles corkscrewing between all the battlepods legs and squeezing in between the tiny openings in the corridor that the pods didn't occupy flooding the hall with smoke and absolutely destroying the wall at the end of the corridor. When the smoke cleared, not one single pod had been hit.
I decided that after thoroughly crapping their pants the Zentraedi pilots were too stunned to move and the PC's finished them off quickly thereafter. But oh, poor Tony.
Anyone else have any embarrassing gaming moments to share?
They explored the ship level by level, having small skirmishes with the Zentraedi forces inside. Through all of this a particularly proud player I'll call Tony was getting upset that he really wasn't getting to shine in combat. He had an Armored Veritech, which is one of the transformable space fighters that had tons of extra armor and missiles bristling out of every orifice. The cost for all of the extra hardware was that the fighter couldn't transform out of robot form, but that suited the current mission just fine.
After a couple hours of Tony being shown up in combat by his fellow crack pilots he was starting to get pissed. The situations and die rolls just weren't favoring him that day.
Well eventually they enter a corridor and face off against a towering Officer Pod and about a dozen Battle Pods all crammed together in the hall waiting to blow the players away. This is it, Tony thought. This is my moment.
Proudly describing his character stepping forth he proclaimed, "I fire ALL of my missiles at them!"
His Armored Veritech had about a hundred of them. Reminding Tony of the shear overkill of what he was about to do, Tony rescinded and stated he would only fire half of them. 50+ missiles. Down a corridor. At 13 Battle Pods packed together. You can't miss, right?
Well, even though the entire team of PC's were uberbadasses with Physical Prowess scores in the stratosphere and every combat skill you could think of, according to the rules missiles were autotargeting and so they only get +3 bonuses instead of the normal +17 or whatever the PC's attack bonuses were.
Now, in Robotech all you need to hit something is to roll a 5 or higher on a d20, and then your opponent rolls to dodge. A low roll is rarely hard to dodge but to hit something at all you just needed a 5. Something you could do with missiles was launch them as a volley so that with one attack roll you could hit one target or a group of targets with many more missiles than your rate of attack would normally allow.
So Tony unloads half of his missiles on the poor Zentraedi squad and rolls. He looked at his d20 in a state of pure disbelief. "Its a 1." 1+3 (missile targetting)=4.
All six of us just sat in stunned silence. Then I started laughing. Tony missed. With every single missile. In the most dramatic way I could, I described the hellfire barrage of missiles corkscrewing between all the battlepods legs and squeezing in between the tiny openings in the corridor that the pods didn't occupy flooding the hall with smoke and absolutely destroying the wall at the end of the corridor. When the smoke cleared, not one single pod had been hit.
I decided that after thoroughly crapping their pants the Zentraedi pilots were too stunned to move and the PC's finished them off quickly thereafter. But oh, poor Tony.
Anyone else have any embarrassing gaming moments to share?
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