Gaming Stories

[pyxee]

Anyone here ever been a DM? If so... why can't we loot the peasants? XD Why do you insist on sending us thru boringness and why can't it always be fighting? Also, why do some DMs feel that they have to make us sit there growing cobwebs while they talk on and on?

Heh, you have not played in any of my games for sure. I like to keep things loose and fun. Plenty of slaughter and riches for all. But then I usually just run one shots to blow off steam.

The story that sticks out the most with me is from way back when my husband and I first began playing D&D. Our party was sent to meet a ship at some little port. But when we arrived everyone was dead, their bodies lay everywhere along the coast. There were trails of blood leading us to the water. Looking out to sea we could see our ship a little ways out being circled by some sort of large fish creatures.
We needed to gt on that ship for some very important reason, that I forget at the moment. So my husband has his character jump in and swim out to the ship! He made it less that a quarter of the way before being eaten. He still has not lived that down to this day.

[Lace Neil Singer]

Come on, your first act surely should have been to loot the bodies. Your games sound like a hell of a lot of fun. XD

[Dreamstalker]

One of our GMs would tend to make campaigns dependent on some item/ghost/weapon from a previous one-shot (or movie/cartoon canon if she was feeling particularly evil) that almost everyone had forgotten about.

Those usually turned into complete chaos in short order...a character went to great lengths to make a mock-up of one of the versions of the Necronomicon (the original one got incinerated by a stray shot, only afterwards was it discovered that was what we needed). What they failed to realize was that the spells did need to be legible.

[Kittish]

Alas, I don't do tabletop gaming any more, but once upon a time I did. And one of the stories that sticks with me to this day...

My group was running one of the D&D premade adventures, I forget just what it was called. At one point the party is faced with this wide chasm flanked on either side by frictionless floor. We, of course, must get across this chasm. One member tries the classic 'running leap'... and doesn't make it. If I recall, she slipped on the frictionless part before actually making her leap. So of course she falls into the chasm. Which has, at the bottom, a large number of very nasty, very sharp spikes.

Upon hearing of her predicament, what does she say? "I've fallen and I can't get up!" Laid us all out for 5 or 10 minutes lauging.

[RayvenQ]

I don't play dice games but here is a story of a similar vein from Fallout 2:

In order to get to an oil platform and defeat the Enclave (high-tech badguys) I had to convince an NPC to pilot an old oil tanker from SanFran. To convince him, I had to rescue his GF from the hold of the ship which had a lot of big monsters. Besides me there were three others in my party: Sulik a "tribal", a technician (I forget his name) and Marvin, a supermutant. I had earlier completed a quest where I obtained some nice weaponry from an abandoned military base. One weapon was a rocket launcher (bazooka only bigger) and I gave that to Marvin. We start to fight the monsters.

There is a pause.

Marvin shoulders the launcher....

AND BLOWS A MONSTER ACROSS THE ROOM!!!

One of the "effects" in the game is you knew how hard a weapon had hit an opponent by how far they "skidded" across the room (inertia.) This monster was blown to the back bulkhead, halfway across the room from where it was.

Vic? and Marcus not Marvin

I did something funny in Fallout 2 too, kicked a raider in the groin and sent him sliding, he reached the edge of the map...

[draggar]

A quick Car Wars story...

In a gaming club I belonged to, we went through about a year binge of playing Car Wars. For the uninitiated, it's essentially a combat game with armed and armored vehicles.

Car Wars was great. I wish I still had all of my sets - maybe I'll go on eBay for them.

Edit: http://cgi.ebay.com/Large-Car-Wars-L...3%3A1|294%3A50

Time to start the battle, which was estimated to take 2-3 hours. The GM says, "Okay, races starts in 3...2..."

And I hit the ejection seat on my car. My car was, essentially, a giant bomb. Weak suspension, crap tires, a base motor, fake weapons, an ejection seat, and about 1 ton of C4.

"...1..."

BOOM.

End result--seven charred vehicles, seven corpses, one winner.

Epic Car Wars Win. Epic.

[Eric the Grey]

Bu, breaking the canned adventure is the fun part!

Of course. I prefer to make my own adventures. I do a lot of asking of my players, "What do you want to do next?" It can be an eye-opening experience on just what your friends are really like. I often start out my campaigns with new players by laying a rope in the middle of the table. I tell them they've been given the rope. They can use it to hang their enemy's or themselves, it's up to them.

It's also interesting to repeat the same scenarios with different players. Their solutions can be as varied as their personalities. The last group I ran through one scenario involving a group of drug runners, had the party simply reporting the location of the mercenary troop who were protecting the real culprits. The King's men took care of them, and the players missed out on experience, and a lead-in to their next plot hook.

My current group negotiated with the mercenary group, convinced them of the harm the drugs were causing, and turned them against their bosses. They not only got the additional experience, but found the plot hook. I'm not certain how they're going to handle that yet, but I suspect they'll investigate...


Another tale:
I watched a friend of mine play a game of Paranoia in less than 10 minutes. He started out loosing all but one of his clones before actually getting to their "mission" before the rest of the party shut him up. His finale came when they were sent to the top of the Alpha Complex dome to repair some equipment. Once finished (this was not the entire plot of the game, just the lead-in) he instructed the air-car's AI to plot "the most fuel-efficient route back to the ground." At this point, the air-car's engine shut off, sending them plummeting... At this point he got up and left, having finished off all 5 of his clones.



Eric the Grey

[Rapscallion]

"Dawn breaks, take 1d6 damage."

"Damned random encounters - damn, I got a six!"

He meant it as well. He also fell for 'night falls, take 1d6 damage'.

Paranoia - took a group through Clones in Space. Got into a room with all their clones as per the scenario and lights started flashing with levers and buttons all over. A soothing voice told them that the space station was falling out of control and they should press this button, or pull that lever, and things just kept getting worse. Smoke out of vents time. We're talking major panic in a gaming group.

"You have failed this simulation. Please try again later."

Never have I been the target of so much gamer fury.

Rapscallion

[ArcticChicken]

I prefer to make my own adventures

Oh, yeah, we write our own adventures for serious RP, canned adventures are for over-the-top ridiculousness.

Such a Torvald Hardrada. He's a Ranger with favored enemy undead and ranks in profession: city planner.

He specializes in cities designed to prevent the undead becoming an issue. That character when on a 30min rant about the proper construction of a graveyard, then informed us that we should really do viking funerals, they burn the body so it cannot rise again, and if it turns into an unquiet ghost, well, it's out in the middle of the ocean where it won't bother anyone.

[LingualMonkey]

Another tale:
I watched a friend of mine play a game of Paranoia in less than 10 minutes. He started out loosing all but one of his clones before actually getting to their "mission" before the rest of the party shut him up. His finale came when they were sent to the top of the Alpha Complex dome to repair some equipment. Once finished (this was not the entire plot of the game, just the lead-in) he instructed the air-car's AI to plot "the most fuel-efficient route back to the ground." At this point, the air-car's engine shut off, sending them plummeting... At this point he got up and left, having finished off all 5 of his clones.

Ah, Paranoia...the only game with a higher death toll than Call of Cthulhu...

In my extended gaming groups, second place for fastest character death is from a Paranoia game. The character's first clone uttered a one-word question before being disintegrated. Mission starts. The computer says, "Please report to Room 114."

Character says, "Why?"

Computer says, "Character, please report to Room 115." Character is laser fried.


That said, the fastest player kill comes from a Dark Sun campaign. Characters are rolled up in painstaking detail. They are told that the group is camping on a hillside. One character takes watch. A random encounter is rolled--results: a wyvern. The wyvern flies down, picks up the watchman, and flies off. He never even drew a weapon.

[Setsunaela]

Dark Sun is inexorably tied to Metallica's "old" music for me. Every time we played, it was with my uncles, who played in a camper trailer thing in the backyard, and we always played with Metallica in the background.
I DM occasionally, usually one-shots but I'm working on a solo thing to play with my hubby for practice..I can be a mean DM or a wonderful one.. I learned that from my stepdad.

He was fond of giving our fairly low-level characters powerful magical items, but there was ALWAYS a catch. I once got a sword, that spoke to me, and was soul bound, while descending a dungeon full of traps and bespelled pools of "water" that held anything from poison, acid, monsters, or just plain water. The sword gave me a +5 to attack, +8 damage, +2 additional for fighting goblinoids that it just so happened were mostly what filled this dungeon. However it began demanding "food" which I unhappily discovered was MY LOOT!
It began eating my gold, silver, and platinum coins, and began moving on to my jewelry/gems. So, I began using it instead of copper pieces, to test if pools were acidic. It was worth its screams of agony as it was melted by an acid pool, given that it had "eaten" every last gold piece of "raw" coinage I had gathered over seven floors of dungeon.

[Eric the Grey]

That said, the fastest player kill comes from a Dark Sun campaign. Characters are rolled up in painstaking detail.

I only got to play Dark Sun a few times. We started new characters rolled up and raised to level 4 or 5. I rolled up a half-giant and as the GM watched, proceeded to roll max on my hit point rolls. After adding in CON bonuses, and I think some sort of racial bonuses (half-giants doubled their rolls if memory serves me right) I was either just under, or just over 100 HP.

I played him that way too, and almost got him killed in our first fight.



Eric the Grey

[El Pollo Guerrera]

Another CyberPunk story...

Just after starting to play the game, I learned that monowire comes in easy-to-use applicators... just touch the applicator to a solid surface, spool out length needed, touch-glue to the other surface and voila.

I also learned that if you are running from heavily armed antagonists, make sure your crew is already past the point where you placed your trap...

A fellow player lost a foot and was captured after I placed a monowire tripwire across the bottom stair as we were escaping...

[Eric the Grey]

Another CyberPunk story...

I ran a CyberPunk game briefly. My players were too smart for me.

In one encounter, one of my players decided to make a loop of zip-ties. These (in game terms) were designed for use as handcuffs, but he put some together, and dropped it over a man's head, and tightened...



Eric the Grey

[cinema guy]

One of my favourite player quotes. A Rohirrim in MERP: "I want to train my horse to whistle when I come."