Your most memorable pen and paper moments

The Game Room
21

This happened in our last Warhammer Fantasy campaign. We had been involved in a witch hunt in a small village, watching from the sidelines growing increasingly uneasy by the way the witch hunter did things given he was a lot more fanatical than our rather moderate party. Then dark elves attack and all that is forgotten for a moment as the whole village, all the witch hunter’s men and our adventurer party all rally to fight against a common enemy. We win a decisive victory but in the aftermath the witch hunter’s madness reaches new heights and he wants to basically wipe the village off the map, something we won’t allow. We reluctantly kill him and his remaining followers, but are feeling really up the shit creek without a paddle now - you just don’t kill witch hunters and live happily ever after.

Our Agent is looking at the witch hunter’s corpse and the player says: “oh, I put the chaos symbol I’ve been carrying with me into his pockets and then let our Sigmarite priest find it.” Every player goes silent and then starts laughing - he has been carrying that thing in his pockets in secret since the first adventure, roughly 20 gaming sessions. He easily succeeds in fooling my Int 2 priest, who raises the damning symbol high up in the air and starts proclaiming the dead witch hunter a traitor, a heretic and an agent of the Chaos, believing in every word he says.

Saved! He was evil guy after all. :smiley:

22

Star Wars RPG.
We were (naturally) Rebel agents, tasked with infiltrating a Star Destroyer in order to do some sort of sabotage or other. We considered sneaking on board in a supply crate or something, but then reasoned that it wouldn’t give us enough leeway to move around the ship. It was decided that we would instead try and get ourselves hired in a janitorial capacity.
The problem was that our group was made up of two humans, and an Ewok. So when we started talking to the hiring guy he was naturally suspicious of us, partly out of raw Imperial species-ism, and partly because, well, Ewok janitor. My friend, who played a Han Solo-esque smuggler, didn’t even blink: “Oh him ? He’s our air ducts cleaning specialist. What we do is, we shove him into the ducts then blow compressed air until he comes out the other side”.

The DM was laughing so hard he didn’t even make him roll for Bluff, it was too outrageous a lie to possibly fail :slight_smile:

Vampire:The Masquerade*
I’m the DM this time, and my PCs are still humans, all poor peasants & commoners, doing the bidding of a (unbeknownst to the characters, but the players were fully aware) noble vampire. To whit: transporting a coffin to an abandoned monastery out in the sticks and put it in the crypt there.

So they get to the monastery and it turns out it’s become an impromptu leper colony as paupers from the county have taken refuge there. At first the lepers hide from them out of fear, but once they notice the PCs aren’t sellswords or bandits, they tentatively come out of hiding, start asking for charity, food and whatnot. Trying to set up a heartstrings-tugging moment later in the scenario I tell the only woman-PC of the group, a shrewish fairytale-mother-in-law-from-Hell type (incidentally played by my GF), that one of the lepers is trying to get her to take a baby away from the horrible living conditions there. I ham it right up with the crying, the begging on her knees etc… After a moment’s awkwardness and hesitation, the player agrees to take the baby with her.

Then, some time later, as they’re leaving the monastery:
Her: As soon as we’re out of sight, I chuck the baby into the woods"
PCs: :eek:
Me: … what ?!
Her: I chuck the baby into the woods.
PC, blurted out: What on Earth would possess you do that ?
Her, right back in character: Well, I didn’t want to risk that dreadful woman getting us mobbed by this rabble, but what am I supposed to do with a baby ?
PC: But…but it’s a baby !
Her: It’s not mine. What, you think I can afford another mouth to feed ?! Besides, the mewling little wretch would surely have attracted wolves on our way back to the village crosses arms.

The rest of their journey was very silent, I’d imagine :). Is it any surprise her character would go on to become a Lasombra ?

23

Oh god, this one reminds me of another.
So we were playing the big famous Warhammer Imperial campaign, and we’ve reached a big prosperous trade fair after going through quite a bit of weird shit. The party decides to split up for a time with some wanting to hit the books, some wanting to talk to the local cops, me simply wanting to have a drink (and possibly fish info from the locals), and one wanting to play cards and make money.

The DM rapidly shifts from group to group, doing the results of one action, going to the next group and narrating one action etc… So he describes the gambling going on at the fair, there’s teamsters playing dice, pilgrims playing cards, etc… Our gambler decides to play poker with them.

DM: OK then, roll Gambling
Him: meh result
DM: OK, well, you lose but not too much. Next up, Kobal, what…
Him: What do you mean I don’t lose too much ? I didn’t lose much money ?
DM: absent mindedly Hmm ? Oh no, I meant you lose the hand you were playing but not by much, like you might have had a full house of 10s over 8s but one guy has jacks over knaves, something like that. Anyway, next up…
Him: Wait, I throw what’s left of my ale in his face and draw my weapon.
DM, thoroughly confused: Huh ?! Why ? :confused:
Him: I don’t know how they play poker in this dump, but I don’t like cheaters !

24

I just remembered some more:

We had a one-shot of Dark Heresy wich incidentally affected all games we played after, transcending universes, games and players. Me and a buddy played a power-duo by the name of Birger and Trond, an alcoholic and a speed-freak, with little going for them but insanely high constitution. Of all the PC’s Birger and Trond manages to survive, to everybody’s horror (they were quite annoying, and pretty much useless in most situations.) Anyway, some time later we had a DnD session, were we visited a bar, and the DM starts detailing our surroundings. He tells us there’s a couple of odd looking tramps, one short and fat, one tall and skinny, ranting in a corner. All players simultaneously face-palm while yelling “Oh no… Birger and Trond. We’re fucked.” The DM went with it, and after that Birger and Trond became ret-conned into every back story of every game we played, two npc’s beyond space and time, sort of like a pair of disgusting, wacked out time-lords on coke.

Now, in a game of Dark Heretics (Dark Heresy, but the other way around, playing heretics instead of inquisition.) we had a party of three. One of us played a big hairy rapist going by the name of the Bubba. Bubba managed through the campaign to wrestle a t-rex into the ground and bash it’s head in with his fists, wrestle an airplane mid air, rip out the control console of a space ship, again mid air, survive getting a temple falling down on him, and then at the end, stare a bloodletter of khorne down into submission in a battle of willpower. He also captured a human child after killing all of her family, raped her, while the rest of us flogged her with chains and read her passages from heretic tomes as bed time stories. We kept her capture in our gypsy wagon. It was truely a gruesome campaign.

A friend had a test session where I played a middle-aged undercover sniper cop posing as a hooker. The GM managed to come up with what I would call the most horrible daemon ever thought of. It was some kind of six-legged anus centaur, with one male figure walking on all fours joined at the anus with another male figure walking straight up.

25

I joined an AD&D campaign in progress that was running through the Dragonlance modules. The party had just been captured by a bunch of dragonkin (part of the plotline), and my character was an NPC who had already been captured by them, a ranger/archer type who also happened to be a local prince of the elves (Legolas much?). The GM gave me some information ahead of time about what was likely to happen due to my knowledge of the area. The other players knew nothing about my background and just though I was an elven ranger.

As the party is trundling through the forest in slave carts, I break the news that once we get to the Qualinesti forest, I’ll be able to use bird calls & such to signal the elves there and they’ll organize a rescue and break us out.

Other player: So, what are you, the king of the Qualinesti elves?
Me: No. (beat) I’m the son of the king of the Qualinesti elves.
Other player: Oh. Well, then, okay…

In other campaigns I’ve run, I’ve always given out a wand of wonder. The party usually plays around with it until they get one too many fireball in the melee and decides it’s too dangerous, and they never touch it again. This one time, a dwarven mage named Malverackkk got it and he had the luck of the gods. First time he used it (at level 4), he turned an ogre to stone. From that moment forth, I could not get the wand away from him, and it almost never went badly: when he needed darkness, he got darkness. When he needed a fireball, he got a fireball. When he needed to make grass grow, start a torrential downpour and shrink himself down to 1" tall, that’s what he got. He used up the entire wand through the course of the campaign and then bought another one. And, he was a mage. He almost NEVER ran out of spells, because the wand was his friend.

26

Some of you guys are fucking sick. But I suppose it better to release your sadistic impulses on imaginary ewoks and hobbits than on real ewoks and hobbits.

I wonder if porn increases or reduces the incidence of rape (perhaps broken down by type (date rape, prison rape, violent rape)).

27

Reported!

I will say, Plumpudding, that your tales are all of questionable taste, though.

28

If you have a problem with any poster, feel free to use the Pit, but try to keep from making posts like this in this forum.

Just noting.

29

Torg, but with some highly derivative elements of other RPGs thrown in: We’re on the trail of a lost artifact of awesome power which we’re a little unclear as to the nature of, and then we find out it’s the Ark of the Covenant. My character, who’s quite the holy Joe, is amazed but delighted, but his friend the reformed vampire countess exclaims disgustedly “Oh, well when we find it I’ll just fill it with water and have a bath in it, shall I?”. :smiley:

Anyhoo, we find the place just about the time one of the biggest, baddest vampires in the world, plus his minions, also turn up. And in the ensuing mayhem, my holy Joe guy decides to try the “Avaunt, foul spawn of darkness!” routine on the nasty vamp, and rolls an improbably high number (in Torg, natural 10s and 20s add and reroll). The GM rules that even a vampire of this guy’s power level is momentarily discomfited enough to flinch half a pace away and steady himself on the nearest handhold…

…which is the Ark.

Reformed vampire countess and the third member of our expedition, who’s more or less the living embodiment of speed, run for the exit far faster than the eye can see, while holy Joe ducks behind a solid object, closes his eyes, thinks pious thoughts and does not even entertain the notion of looking at what happens next, at least until all the screaming is over. :smiley:

30

Yes, some of them probably are. If someone has a problem with that, I’m sorry. I and some of my fellow playes do have a morbid sense of humour(my favourite sketch show is Jam), and I realise not everyone might appreciate that. When playing these games we usually let our imagination run wild, for better or for worse, quite often playing on extremes tasteful or not.

31

You know those plans you make which have one really cool element in them, but they have a key flaw which should have been obvious right from the start? In my regular gaming group, they’re named after me.

Dark Heresy
I used a psychic power to frazzle electronics in a fairly large radius around me. I forgot one of our party was a Tech Priest (basically a cyborg), who had to sit that fight out. (Could be worse - I heard of one guy who used that power in a space ship flying through the warp, and it knocked out their Gellar Field, opening them up to all sorts of nasty beasties.)

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
We were storming a pub with an adjoining cowshed. I decided a useful distraction / first attack would be to drive the cows through the pub. Turns out that when given the choice between a small closed door and a large open one, cows choose the open one, even when the way is blocked by a Halfling whacking a pot helmet with a stick. I had to spend the rest of the session with much-depleted health.

Kittens VS Superman
This was a very free-form one-off campaign, where three kittens were attempting to kill Superman. The GM allowed one of us to discern the location of some Kryptonite and gave us the choice as to where it was.

Our research kitten picked the Moon. :smack:

Do you know how hard it is to get on a NASA moon mission? Especially when you’re a kitten.

32

My Druid/Monk is the resident “screw the group by casting helpful spells” of my Pathfinder group :o. I blame the party’s Sorcerer who’s always showing off with his fancy tactical shit, prompting me to try and do the same instead of just knocking heads in rhino shape like the good Lord intended.

The most recent example was when we were fighting a boss-type stone giant buffed to the gills and getting steadily mulched. So I drop a patch of blizzard mist on top of the melee. Sure, it also affects us but it’s a flat 20% chance to miss each individual attack from the concealment. Since we have way more total attacks than him, and his do a ton of damage at once, we should come out ahead, right ?
Turns out the giant had the blind fighting feat, which none of our frontline fighters has yet. OH WELL.

Earlier that day I had also summoned a Satyr so he could cast a wide AoE Suggestion spell on a roomful of Ogres, ordering them to strip naked one item of clothing at a time. The only way to affect them all was to include half of the party in the AoE, but that’s OK 'cause we’re geared to the nines and have good Will saves… except our tank apparently, who was forced to start removing his armour mid-fight. He was not amused.

33

It seemed that the 4th Ed Wizard I played with had similar issues - almost all of his spells screwed up my longbow Ranger’s line of sight, leaving me with far fewer options.

34

We were starting a new Cyberpunk campaign. We rolled up our crew of corporate yakuza, bionic assassins, and hardened mercenaries, loaded to the gills with guns, cybernetics, and explosives, each of us trained in a dozen ways to kill a man. Assembled, we are given our target. Surely, this mans time on Earth will soon come to a bloody end.

“Okay,” says the GM, “How are you getting there?”

Turns out, none of us had a bought a car, or even trained in Drive.

We had to take a bus to the hit.

35

Character rivalry goodness:
-I was playing a genial charisma-based monk variant with a wisdom of 7; he was a naive kid who trusted everyone way too much and always tried to do whatever would be niftiest. The mean human-favored-enemy ranger found a magic bow which he suspected worked only on animals, but he wanted to test it out. “Hey you,” he said to me, “Hold out your hand.” So of course I did, and of course he shot me through my hand, finding out that the bow’s magic was indeed animal-bane only. I never forgave him and never trusted him again.
-Later the character underwent some hinky magic transforming him into a wizard, and he among other things specialized in creating pits. I trapped a troll at the bottom of a pit, getting it out of the battle but making it hard for the ranger to hit. “You can stand on the edge of the pit,” I said; “it’s an easy reflex save not to fall in.” He was reluctant to do so, but finally glared at me and said, “Fine!” and rolled his reflex save: Nat 1, of course, right into the pit.
-Later still we encountered an aquatic dinosaur. “Ooh! Ooh!” I said. “Don’t kill it, use your ring of animal friendship on it! How cool would it be to have a friendly dinosaur?” He thought it was an idiotic idea, but went along because I was just so excited by the idea. Of course it rolled like a 25 on its will save and turned to eat him.

It was only after that last encounter that he remembered my Wisdom of 7 and stopped taking my bright ideas mid-combat.

36

I’ve always said that any gamer worth his salt has at least one “so there I was” story. This is mine. (D&D)

So there I was… We’d been fighting an evil sorceress,she’d turned the King to stone, trying to start a civil war amongst his heirs.
Well, we’d rescued the king, & restored peace in the kingdom, so now it was time to confront her. We’d snuck into the keep with the help of a portable hole (a considerable oversight on the GM’s part) the other party members were fighting her champion (a formidable enemy in his own right) and I was in the courtyard when I spotted her up on the battlement wall. She was really powerful, twice as many levels as me. I was the cleric in the party, and a bit tired, frankly, of being a walking first aid kit.I saw one of the guys try to grab at her & miss. I thought well hell, might as well try the direct approach. I had boots of flying & dust of disappearance. So with a series of some very spectacular rolls, I flew up to the wall, grabbed Mortiana by her waist, flew up with her, & dropped her onto a burning catapult. Then I zoomed down, landed on top of her & beat her in the head with my Morningstar until she died.
The coolest thing I have ever done in any game, before or since.

37

I was expressing sarcastic outrage. I would have thought that the reference to “real ewoks and hobbits” would have given it away.

38

Years ago in an old Marvel Superheroes campaign (a super simple percentile dice based system that we used, abused and went waaaaay above the intended power level of) a teammate had the power of Probability Manipulation which, in game terms, reversed the die rolls of everyone around him within range to be most favorable to him (so a roll of 94 on 2d10 to hit him was actually a 49). We also used it as a catch-all excuse for things we overlooked, forgot or otherwise made a mistake about. “Oops, I just realized that four rounds ago I accidentally forgot to add my fire damage to my hit… oh well, probability manipulation!”

Through a series of events we found ourselves in some trouble and with no immediate weapons to defend ourselves from the closing danger until…

“Wait a minute, there’s a shotgun on my back!”

The player with the PM, as well as the GM and everyone else at the table, had completely forgotten that he had a shotgun he’d acquired much earlier strapped to his back. It was impossible to ret-con in as it should have been confiscated and its obvious presence would have likely changed the entire situation. With nothing else to do about it the GM just had to rationalize it… oh well, probability manipulation!

To this day whenever someone has a “eureka!” moment while gaming, we say, “Wait a minute, there’s a shotgun on my back!”

39

A recent awesome moment. My friend runs a supers game where we’re 1970s paranormal investigators by day, and superheroes by night. Mutants and Masterminds. Throughout the game so far, we’ve had encounters with this domestic terrorist group, called CRASH. A lot of their plots have been carried out by half-baked hippies trying to ‘stick it to the man’, but this past weekend, we got to see what their leader had been working on.

He’d had some ladies befriend U.S. Air Force personnel working at missile silos in Montana. He and his group were planning to take over one of the control centers on Christmas Eve, and give the gift of World War 3 for Christmas, resetting the world to a simpler state, wherein he believed ‘this time, they’ll do it right’.

So we caught wind of it, and after warning Air Force personnel, we jetted out to intervene personally. We found their abandoned commune after they’d left to go to the base, so we pursued - our psychic and the gal with the sonic powers stayed in our rented SUV, assaulting this massive convoy of terrorists from the rear, and I went up ahead to blunt their advance, as the brick.

So I made quick work of disarming their nastiest weapons (recoilless rifles) and knocking over a few of the lead jeeps. Then at the rear, the leader and his main henchmen got out and started attacking my squishier comrades - so I moved to intervene.

The GM described the leader as a “Heath Ledger as Joker” type, and this was amply demonstrated in my combat with him. I grabbed his assault rifle away, snapped it in half, so he pulled out a plastic tube … containing a LAW rocket. He presses it to my chest and fires, point-blank.

The thing has a 100 foot blast radius in the system, but the damage level diminishes every ten feet. Meaning he’s as likely to get hurt as I am. The GM rules that I don’t get the Reflex save to reduce the damage by half, since he did specifically press it to my chest, and I have to concur with him. So the reflex and damage saves are rolled for all in the radius…

… and I’m completely unharmed, as are my comrades and the chief CRASH lieutenant, who were all behind me, roughly speaking. Meanwhile, the CRASH leader and his mooks - in front of me - are all at least stunned, and many staggered.

“It’s like when Bugs Bunny sticks his finger in Elmer’s gun!” I observed. :smiley:

40

A GM I played with did something similar in a Villains & Vigilantes game. Since you can play yourself with superpowers, we’d elceted to do so, & he inserted himself as an NPC in the campaign. Not only did he kill himself off, he had one of the players’ nemesis do the deed, framed that player for the crime & the guy that ordered the hit was the head of the crime fighting organization we’d been working for!!
Needless to say, our shock was pretty genuine.