All-Time Classic Roleplaying Game Moments

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Allright, inspired by this thread and spinning off from this thread of mine I have decided to open a Memorable RPG Moments thread. Got any impressive or amusing stories of characters you’ve run, or campaigns you’ve GMed?

I have quite a few to share, some of which I’ve mentioned in my old thread, but here are a few new items.

Once, while generating a character for White Wolf’s *Mage the Ascension * game, the would-be GM asked me to roll percentile dice. I complied, getting a 42. He said. “Oh, that’s too bad. If you’d gotten 100 I’d have given you 15 bonus freebie points.” Not missing a beat, I replied “Oh, why didn’t you tell me what I needed to roll?” … picked up the dice, let’em fly, and bam! 100. We laughed so hard that he gave me the points anyway.

Continuing with White Wolf for the moment, in their Werewolf game, I once ran a big dumb warrior type … a Get-of-Fenris Ahroun Lupus, for those familiar with the system. This basically meant my character’s natural form as a Wolf. Two amusing things arose for this character… one, as he had five points of Pure Breed, it became a running gag that he basically looked ‘just like Fenris.’

Secondly, while visiting the apartment of a citified Werewolf PC (a Glass Walker) I had enormous fun roleplaying technological ignorance. He microwaved us pizza the first night we were there, only to be awakened the next day by my character, holding one of the frozen pizza boxes, with the quiet request to ‘Make warm.’

I got more, and they’ll be a-comin later.

2

No such thread would be complete without a mention of Eric and the gazebo.

3

On a superhero MUSH (online RPG setting) where I GM, the players were on the trail of a dangerous Ultron-style robot with aims of ruling the world. The characters had figured out (roughly) what the machine’s goals and capabilities were, and had identified the suspected location of its hidden base. One thing they had learned the hard way was that the robot could listen in on the secret team radios. Over the course of a several hour long brainstorming session half a dozen players hashed out an elaborate plan. Knowing it was far too dangerous to attack the machine in its lair, they worked out a sceme to broadcast false information on the team radios to lure it out into the open. Of course, key to the plan was making sure the robot didn’t learn of the ruse, or that the players were onto it.

After the brainstorming session, two of the players told me they were going to go, on their own, to scout out the suspected villain base location. Not telling anyone what they were doing, of course. In the scene that followed, they did a very good job of stealithily infiltrating the robot’s lair without being detected. After determining that the location was the lair of the machine, that it had multiple well-armed guards working for it, and that its plans were closer to fruition than they had suspected, one of the players turned to the other and said “You go tell the others what we’ve found. I’ll stay here and keep an eye on things”

He was expecting that she’d go and find the other players in person, or use a reasonably secure means of communication like a pay phone. Instead, she walked about 10 feet away, then switched on her team radio and said (in effect) “Hey everyone! We’re right outside the robot’s lair and need backup.”

:smack:

Things went rapidly downhill at that point.

4

For those of you not familiar with Torg, it’s a modern-day RPG set on an Earth where other, similar realities are ‘pressing in’ on our dimension … so some regions of our world have transformed to resemble those other dimensions.

One of these invader realms is Aysle, a medieval fantasy realm, which overlays much of England. Our group, consisting of a diverse set of folks from many realities, was in Aysle, doing one of the system’s pre-fabbed adventure modules. MY character? Winston Smythe, a British secret agent from the Core Earth reality, based on James Bond.

We were after a nasty wizard fellow who had something we wanted. He’d gotten to a dock ahead of us, conjured a favorable wind, and taken off in a boat. We proceeded to borrow a boat from the dock and pursue, but we were having difficulty gaining on him. Just then a seal flops up on our deck and transforms into a woman… apparently the local waters were home to selkies … were-seals … and she offered to help us, if she could, as they didn’t like the wizard much.

That’s when the gears in my head starting clicking.

First, I prepared my weapon. We had a spear-gun from an earlier adventure. To the spear I affixed a stick of dynamite. I intended to light it and fire the spear into the wizard’s boat’s mast, to stop him, you see. Quickly lashing my feet to some suitable boards, I tossed a loop of rope to some Selkies waiting in seal form below, and began improvisationally water-skiiing towards the wizard’s boat… humming the James Bond theme all the way, of course.

The GM was amused by this, and since the selkies speed was greater than the boat’s, I was making progress.

The wizard, on the other boat, saw my approach, and conjured an ally… a large Loch-Ness-like water dragon. My thought process faltered for just a second, then inspiration hit. “Where is the dragon in relation to me, and the wizard’s boat?” said I. GM : “It’s between you and the boat.” Inwardly, I chuckled evilly.

I had the selkies drag me on towards the dragon … lighting my makeshit dynamite-spear with the hand holding onto the ski rope and letting it fly into the dragon’s neck… doing minimal damage. The dragon retaliated with a tail-slap, which I evaded with an ‘Opponent Fails’ card. (Torg gameplay is enhanced by cards played by the players.) It was then my turn, and I uttered the following to the GM:

“I use the dragon as a ramp to leap up toward the boat’s sails, draw my sword on the way, and cut down the ship’s sails.”

The Bond theme practically pounding in my head at this point, and the other players were getting a kick out of it too. It was a diffuclt maneuver, but I made my rolls, sailing through the air… the wizard had a last chance to stop me, letting fly a fireball… which exploded, engulfing me… for almost no damage.

So now I have this image of the tuxedoed British Agent skiiing up a dragon’s back, whipping out the light-saber like sword he carries, bursting through a ball of flame only slightly singed, and slicing the sails in one fluid motion… then adjusting his tie. And that’s just what I got to do.

5

Jeez, I should spellcheck when I type fast. ‘Started’, ‘skiing’, ‘makeshift’ :o , ‘difficult’, and ‘skiing’ again.

6

Now that was beautiful. :slight_smile:

7

I can’t add specifics, but rather one of our players had a LONG series of self-induced bad luck. It carried him from D&D through Marvel into Rus, and a few other not well known RPGs.

Poor guy had a serious Napoleon complex, and our GM was just to the side of sadistic. If there was a hungry monster, Clay was devoured. The Not-So-Fun-Booby-Trap? He got it. For heavens sake, the man was killed off by a paper airplane! It became just as fun to watch what would befall the poor man as it was to actually be playing.

8

Thank you. It’s why I love the Torg system… it’s so cinematic.

Another interesting situation arose in that same adventure, but first I need to provide a bit of background. In Torg, when you meet someone who is of a different reality than yours, you can invoke a ‘Reality Storm’ … basically, calling upon the laws of the universe to ‘correct’ the aberration the other represents. This engages you and the target in a contest of wills, with the loser drained of the special ‘possibility’ energy the characters use to manipulate reality, and converted to the winner’s reality. To make an example, if my spy Winston was stormed by a native of Aysle, and lost, I might become some sort of medieval-fantasy foppish rogue. My core personality would be the same, but my appearance, abilities, and memories would change as if I’d grown up in Aysle.

Long explanation for a short anecdote : We had an Elven Martial Artist from Aysle with use, and as we boarded the boat, he got ahead of the party to confront the wizard. The wizard tried to blast the Elf with a lightning bolt… no luck, as the Elf was wearing the amulet we’d discovered in the wizard’s hideout. It apparently protected the wearer from the wizard’s magic. In desperation, the wizard tries to reality storm the Elf… but the GM remembers they’re both from Aysle. The Elf was the only party member from Aysle.

The wizard had to resort to a feeble attack with his quarterstaff, and was ultimately trounced.

9

Well…

I’m running my a homebrew game, for which I intend to publish and hopefully make some money.

One character decided one day that, he wanted to add to his innnate magic powers. Ok, fine, this is normal path of study. However, he wanted to become the human Ioun Stone.

Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with DnD, this means he wanted to gain the power to orbit around people’s heads. He proceed to do this regularly for several essions, getting many other characters in trouble. With his high sneaking and hiding powers, he managed to escape evey time the guards came.

Sigh

Another character had a habit of blowing himself up. So far in the game we’ve been in, he’s blown himself up once by “normal means” (i.e., explosives, we got him back later), leanred the cosmic principle of fire and turned into a star (we got him back later), got mostly killed after setting fire to everything in the area - another character totally converted all the heat to light, since it was burning everything aorund up to that point, and recently got turned into a star following his excessive desire for firepower. Currently he’s collapsing into a singularity, but is still sending his, um, sending out to help us.

Thus far sheer survival has forced him to become the following things: [Started as] Nezumi -> Sun -> Nezumi -> Fire Spirit -> Burned out shadow -> Firebat -> 2 daggers (he had a split consciousness or something) -> Sun again -> Big Bang…

Pretty much every character he’s had has been blown up by himelf or someone else.

10

It was my first time playing and not really knowing what to do, I made up a CN half-elf and from the get go, did anything and everything that I could, including annoying things like kicking the heels of my team members while we were walking.

At the end of our first night, we came to an inn that was run by Dwarves and sat down for a meal. A waitress came over to take our order and knowing how well Dwarves and Elves get along, I decided to hit on her. At first she ignored me and brought us back some broth and bread. When she came back with the ale, I hit on her some more until the DM told me that I was really pissing her off with my unwanted advances and that if I did it again, she might attack. Hearing that, I obviously did so and wound up getting hit over the head with a massive oak serving platter by a stout Dwarf and immediately lost consciousness and fell face first into my bowl of soup.

The other players, annoyed by my character, did nothing to help him and he died by drowning in his dinner on the first night of his campaign.
I now have a special affinity for CNs and play them every chance I get.

11

Was GMing a Star Frontiers game (scifi space opera) way back in the day…sometimes the dice themselves create the story…

Our space-pirate PCs had just brilliantly infiltrated the cruiser of the Star Police captain who had been their career-long nemesis (think Elliot Ness). Overcoming all odds, they ended up with him captive, bound to a chair on the bridge.

Being evil types who had their schemes foiled by the captain countless times in the past, they decided to just kill him right then and there.

The PC pirate ringleader raises his laser pistol and fires…as the GM it was evaluated as an automatic success but the rules always allowed a 2% chance of failure. The PC rolls…02.

Me: “You missed, the beam blowed a hole in the equipment panel behind the captain’s chair, sparks fly”
Player: “What? I was 5 feet away!!! That’s it…I fire again” rolls…01 “umm…”
Me: “Your arm twitches nervously as you fumble the grip, a blast sears another charred line across the bridge equipment panel. The captain smirks.”
Player: “No way, I can’t believe this!! Alright, enough is enough, I–”
Plaer#2:" Out of the way! I throw my heavy machine gun on full automatic, rest it right in the captain’s chest, brace myself, take a deep breath, and fire!!!" rolls…02 “Holy crap no!!!”
Me: (having a lot of fun now) “You are suddenly blinded as, right before pulling the trigger, the beleagured equipment panel explodes in a hail of glass and sparks…stunned and blinking, you try to regain your bearings as the bridge instantly fills with clouds of halon fire suppression from the vents. Coughing, flailing, you look about in vain for the captain…”

Foiled again :smiley:

12

Once, while playing Stormbringer, I found myself facing a Melnibonean noble wearing Demon Armor. (For those of you unfamiliar with Michael Moorcock’s novels or the game Stormbringer, this means that I was up against a serious badass.) When my turn came to attack, I rolled the dice. And rolled a fumble.

We rolled on the GM’s favorite Fumble Table to see what type of accident had occured. The result was “Dropped weapon. Weapon flies 1d6 meters in 1d6 direction.” Rolled for distance: maxed out. Rolled for direction: towards my opponent.

The GM laughed and rolled the dice, to see if, just by accident, the weapon might have accidentally hit the bad guy. And he rolled a Critical Hit.

So, I killed the toughest opponent in the game with a fumble.

13

Oh, dearie. Aesiron just reminded me of an incident I’d partially blocked.

I was running a campaign, AD&D2.0, and it was just getting off the ground. One of the players was someone we’d never gamed with before, and he turned out to be kind of annoying like that character of yours… but he wasn’t the one with the interesting incident. Nor was it the Wizard/Cleric who was allergic to everything, including his own goat familiar.

No, it was the party rogue, a tiefling, and a full cleric… specifically a pacifistic firbolg shaman of Thor. Now, the player of the firbolg was Eric, and aside from Eric’s linguistic malapropisms, he has a tendency to seek out and play the most unusual races and classes he can. So a pacifist giant priest of a war god who regards giants as enemies wasn’t so far out of the pale for him.

But Eric was having a bad night, and the party rogue was taunting him mercilessly as they all sparred with the guards of a keep in the courtyard thereof.

And Eric was getting Mad. Not just in character, but out of character. Finally, he struck down the irksome rogue after a short scuffle, and was about to finish him off. I was shocked and amazed, but had the NPC guards tell him that he needed to back down, because if he didn’t stop, they’d have to take him down.

Rather than surrender to the guards, the pacifist chose to bash the unconscious rogue’s brains in.

The firbolg was killed by the guards, and the party basically rebuilt from the ground up.

14

Hmm… a couple of mine.

I played for just over a year a vampire game called Purgatory, set in Dark Ages London. In this game I had 2 characters over that time. The first was Zil, a Gangrel from Scotland who was searching for the murderer of her sire.

After a few years of searching I heard rumors, that a Brujah by the name of Kell ap Morgan had a disagreement with my sire Cedric (who was Sheriff of Bath at the time). When I learned this I asked to speak with him… and speak with him I did. The conversation went something like:

Zil: "I have heard that you and my sire had a disagreement, around the time that he died. "
Kell: “That we did, he had detained my childe and refused to tell me why.”
Zil: “Did you kill have something to do with his death?”
Kell’s player: “Uhm… you know what? Hold on a sec…”

and he ran off to talk to the storyteller.

They had forgotten to tell him his character had killed my sire!

You see with this game you come up with a background before the start of the game and often the storytellers will stick in things to do with other characters where your history’s give them a chance to. It’s fun because you can learn things about them sometimes that you didn’t know, and you already have connections so you aren’t starting completely from scratch to make enemies and allies. Also the last game maxed out at around 56 players. Lots of paperwork!

Another time I played Werewolf with a bunch of the same people, different storytellers.

I was a Child of Gaia who had recently shifted for the first time by the name of Mara. She hadn’t known what she was as her father had been killed and her mother (kinfolk) wanted to protect her, had hoped she wouldn’t be a full werewolf in fact.

One day someone was attacked (I can’t remember who or why) and his body dumped near the cairn… of course everyone goes off to look and I follow, as a curious cub. He’s all cut up and looking rather gross, and I had the flaw squeamish.

Everyone gathers round the body and I get the attention of the ST as she starts to do something as an npc and everyone gathers around. “I’m back here… getting violently ill”

15

Uhm it’s “Did you have something to with his death?”

And for those curious we did fight, I got off with a serious ass kicking and promised not to continue my search for revenge. When Zil died during the lupine war it was in his arms after we came to a truce during the fighting.

16

Well, in the current D&D campaign I’m playing in, my character is a fallen Ghaele. For those of you who don’t know what a Ghaele is, it’s basically a type of celestial - effectively an angel. For those of you who do know what a Ghaele is, that is indeed as overpowered as it sounds. (The GM and I didn’t realise how badly overpowered until it was too late I’m afraid).

Anyway, he’s not evil. He’s just a bit… whimsical. Unsurprisingly he’s chaotic neutral. He’s also a fairly bright fellow, and rather prone to lateral thinking. This, combined with the fact that the campaign is a slightly strange one anyway, has led to some peculiar situations.

The first sign that the party had acquired a serious nut came with the following plan.

We encountered a portal to some endless desert place. It seemed relatively uninteresting at first - you could walk through, and you ended up near a big black tower. There was a slightly odd tugging sensation, but it didn’t seem to do anything much.

If you stayed on the other side of the portal for more than a few rounds, you were cut off from it - you could no longer see the tower or use the portal. Other people could come through the portal, and you could interact with them without a problem, and they could still see the portal. This was discovered by a stone giant member of the party, who happened to be carrying all our stuff… We were a bit upset by this.

Fortunately I came up with the following solution. We shrink the stone giant and put him in my backpack. Seems perfectly logical. :slight_smile: Specifically we had a cursed item - the hat of reducing - which causes you to shrink fairly rapidly while you’re wearing it (it can be removed without a problem, so it’s not too dangerous), and my backpack was a Heward’s Handy Haversack, so an extra dimensional pocket. So we shrunk him, put him in the backpack and brought him back through. Problem solved. :slight_smile: The hat was intended as a random joke item, but I’ve come up with a rather large number of uses for it.

Later we happened to encounter something called a swirling curse wall - it was basically an odd looking magic wall that fired wild magic effects at you if you did anything to it. Our party thief first found this out, but escaped relatively unharmed. Then a cleric in our party (Adiuvus) said something to the effect of “I think that it would be unwise to do anything further to this wall” and proceded to demonstrate this. He found himself surrounded by a wall of stone and rapidly running out of air. After some unsuccesful bashing at it, some of us wondered about getting the swirling curse wall to affect it. One party member fired a crossbow bolt at the wall, and was turned into a giant ant for her troubles, while I bounced a chain lightning off the wall of stone into the curse wall, getting the wall solidly hit by wild magic.

At this point the GM rolls a couple of dice on his wild magic table. He looks surprised, then laughs evilly.

“Ok. A jet of magic shoots out from the curse wall, hitting the wall surrounding Adiuvus. It turns into a blue dragon.”

This blue dragon was of course sitting on top of Adiuvus. It was also rather upset at having randomly appeared in this small room.

Adiuvus managed to persuade it to get off of him. It then glared at us and demanded to know what had happened and why it was here. After some explanation it wanted us to help it get out of this place. At the time, I was the only one with the key to get us out (we had come through a rather odd portal), and I wasn’t entirely keen on leaving people here because they had no way of getting back. Plus, my character isn’t very inclined to give in to threats. So he stands there, back chatting to the blue dragon. The dragon is getting more and more irate at this stage, and eventually when I say I flat out won’t take it anywhere without the rest of the party, it takes a deep breath and breathes out a huge bolt of lightning at my character.

Ghaele are immune to electrical damage.

Me: “Now, see. That wasn’t polite.”

Enter combat, in which we turn the dragon into steak. (Which the party quite happily breakfasted on the next morning). The Giant Ant was quite an asset for this. :slight_smile:

Unfortunately I failed the intimidate roll at the time, but I chuckled for quite a bit at the mental picture of the dragon’s face after that initial attack.

Then there was the time I broke up a crowd using a flower breathing dragon, but that’s another story.

17

My best fumble story:
The party had been hired as bodyguards to a merchant (who turned out to be a cleric in disguise in country that is definitely anti-religion). We were brought to a restaraunt where our patron was meeting someone with information he needed. As dessert was being brought out, one PC noticed the waiter was hiding a dagger underneath the dessert tray, some shouting occured, and we found ourselves trying to foil an assasination attempt on the nice man paying us lots of money.

Well, the table was a low-to-ground type where you sat on cushions on the floor, and Kriles (a human fighter) was on the opposite side away from the action. Well, going around the thing was just too long a trip for a hot-headed CN fighter, so he decided to hop up the foot or so to the table and sprint across it.

DM: Ok, roll a balance check
Me: {rolls…looks at the low number} Umm…not good
DM: {rolls some dice} Ok, your foot slips on a plate of figs, you fall on your back {rolls more dice} breaking the table in half.

I then spent my next two turns trying to stand up without falling on my butt again. At least another PC ended up pinning another party member to the wall with his trident instead of the waiter, so I wasn’t the only screwup.

The stupid half-elf bard even made a start on “The ballad of Kriles table bane”…

In my current campaign my thief (sorry: “rogue”) Tully seems to have the habit of collecting odd things.

We started the campaign with the module “The Sunless Citadel” a pretty straightforward romp for characters starting at 1st level. Well, the cause of most of the problems was the discovery of a Gulthas tree underneath it. This tree was formed when a vampire was staked with a piece of wood that was still green which sprouted, so it was basically a vegetable vamp. Well, we defeated the final guardians, chopped/burned down the tree, and Tully get’s an idea:

Me: I start digging around the roots of where the tree was
DM: Oooookay…
Me: {shamelessly prompting} Well, it grew from a staked vampire, right? Do I find any of his bones?
DM: Um…sure. [btw, I have no idea what’s supposed to happen to a staked vampire in D&D, so this may not be kosher]
Me: {chuckling} Do I find the skull?
DM: {rolls dice} Uh, yep.
Me: Cool! I take it!

So on the next visit to town, Tully gave a puppet show at the local tavern using a vampire skull.

And then there was the skeleton skull he picked up in another adventure that has permanent Greater Darkness cast on it. I’m still trying to find a good use for that. Maybe once he gets “blind fighting”…

18

A while back my friends and I were into Rifts. WE liked it it because it had both the magic and the tech we could abuse, and we’d keep having adventures to fight one or the other (or both) as our resources allowed.

At one game two of the mercenary players had been contracted to take out a group of bandits that had been harassing a small town for a while. The bandits had a small fort but were only armed with small-arms lasers; the players had full power armor suits and a variety of explosives, so it wasn’t too difficult a fight. After any resistence had been mopped up, they searched the fort for whatever they could carry home:

A: I look for the bandit chief’s room. He must have all the good stuff.
GM: You find a room that is more opulent than the rest - fancy rugs, that sort of thing. The bandit chief himself is hiding under the bed and screams “Let me live! I’ll tell you where the real treasure is!” as you enter.
B: Okay. I jump on the bed and start bouncing up and down on it, taunting him.
GM: You jump up. The bed collapses under the weight of your power armor, smashing the chief to paste beneath.
B: Oops!
Another adventure had a character who had found a magic hat that allowed him to fly (it was red had horns on it - the joke was that “red bull gave him wiiings!”). In a previous game the group had found a dud atomic bomb (classic “Little Boy” style!), and was keeping it around out of morbid curiosity. This player rigged up a saddle and handlebars on the casing of the bomb, then used the hat to fly around, making it look like he was piloting the bomb wherever he wanted. This got a lot of attention from all the wrong people - but who would risk shooting on a maniac riding a potential mushroom cloud?

This was the same character who decided that on a trip to Texas we needed to fit in - and bought a gigantic neon green foam cowboy hat for the mech the group was riding in.

A completely different adventure - last one, I swear! - had us taking on vampires to save another village. We had at least a month to prepare, so we used that time to our advantage. We had recently come into a large sum of money by saving the life of a king of a fairly major nation, so we bought an APC and hollowed it out, except for the driver’s seat and controls. Then we completely reworked the exterior with mirrors, crosses, silver spikes on the treads, and spotlights powered by “Ball of Daylight” spells. We then waterproofed the entire thing and filled it with water, replacing the main turret with a high-powered fire hose and giving the person in the driver’s position a scuba arrangement so he wouldn’t drown. Lastly, we found a priest and paid him ten bucks to bless the whole contraption - we did the math and figured that it had the better part of a thousand gallons of holy water. The vampires didn’t stand a chance.

19

That game sounds like a lot of fun, could you tell me where I can sign up?

20

Sweet Jesus, that rocks.

From a MUD I played called Gemstone III, way the hell long time ago…

A bunch of us newbies are hanging around the area just inside the sewers, bopping rats and chattering. Suddenly, we see a War Rat enter. This was apparently one of the GMs’ controllable characters and they’d come to pay us a visit. We, of course, had no idea what was going on, so we were debating whether to attack the damn thing, which was huge, when my friend Mike’s rogue utters that immortal line…

“Someone go to Town Center and tell em to bring back a big fucking cat.”

Man, this thread makes me wanna play! We need to get a game going on the Dope. We tried it once before, but it disintegrated.