Gaming Stories

[gremcint]

My brain has remembered a couple more.

1.
Going through the tomb of Infinite horrors, we were near the end. We entered a room that the door locked behind us and all of the magic in our items was disabled in this room.

So we start looking for a way out when all of a sudden a giant djinn appears looking for a fight. Now at the end of this tomb is a necromancer we were going to destroy to prevent him being raised.

I took one look at the Djinn that without magic would kick our ass and just yelled to him: "We are here to destroy *Necormancer*"

Dm goes: "make a diplomacy check"
for once I rolled high and the guy let us through to next room in exchange for helping him escape. Some very quick thinking saved us a lot of trouble.

2.
I discovered in 1st ed mutants and masterminds it was possible to get all of the powers in the game by using two powers. Summon allowed to summon minions that were only one level lower than you (you start at level ten) with whatever powers you want. Gestalt lets you combine with others who also have Gestalt into one being (think dbz fusion). Basically summon a bunch of creatures with different powers and fuse with them to create a creature with all of the powers in the game. (I never used it but the character sheet was terrifying.)

3.
In a different d&d game we were going through waterdeed, at the end of the session our dm tells us (a level 3 group) that we barely missed a cr 15 encounter, had we taken a different door we would have died guaranteed.

4.
same game as number 3, we came across a treasure room that was guarded by two helmed horrors (I think) that were about to kick our ass, but then I say to my group the words my dm dreads most: "I have a plan."
These monsters were nothing but animated metal armor. We had encountered a rust monster earlier and merely avoided it instead of fighting it. Rust monsters eat metal, and very well. My teammate had a ring that would let him teleport anywhere in waterdeep. He teleported to the rust monster, grabbed him and brought him back to us to sick on the horrors. we contained all three in a bubble of force (don't know the actual name) that lasted for three minutes. The horrors killed the monster but not before being severely weakened while we grabbed the loot and trapped a group of goblins that had followed from earlier in the room with horrors after the bubble wore off.

Yeah I'm a devious bastard.

[ArcticChicken]

Is anyone here familiar with Punpun, the Kobold druid?

[Jack T. Chance]

Several years ago, I was playing a multi-player session of Neverwinter Nights with 2 of my friends via LAN. This was after I had spent the better part of a year using the character generation system and the game's Tool Kit to see how many Masters of the Universe characters I could create as playable characters in the game! I custom created their distinctive outfits and weapons, and made sure that in the cases of the more powerful characters, their equipment magically enhanced them, to make them as powerful as they ought to be.

So, my friends are playing their normal, perfectly legal D&D characters...

while I'm playing using my pride & joy...

HE-MAN, THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE UNIVERSE!

They, of course, accused me of "god moding", my response to that accusation being something along the lines of "hey, this is He-Man, THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE UNIVERSE, not bloody Martin Smith from Croydon! He's SUPPOSED to be incredibly powerful!"

So, they proceeded to lead us into a dungeon the 2 of them had played through before, but which I had not. When we came to a hall of magic mirrors, some of which held treasure you could retrieve by looking into them, they gave me just an extremely vague warning, without telling me what to expect. When I asked for more info, they refused to say anything. So, I'm running around the room, seeing what items I can find...

and one of the mirrors spits out a DOPPELGANGER... of HE-MAN. Crap.

The last laugh was on them, though, because even with the REAL He-Man AND both of their characters... it STILL took us 20 MINUTES of continuous combat to bring him down! Their characters were having to really work for every point of damage they did to "Evil He-Man", while he and the Real He-Man just went toe to toe in melee, trading blows the whole time.

Because, yes, my playable He-Man really IS the Most Powerful Man in the Universe... or, at least the game, anyway.

For those that are interested, you can check out screen shots of and information about my MOTU characters for NWN HERE. But don't go in expecting to see the characters the way they looked in the 1980s... my inspiration to do this was the revamped MOTU property from 2002-2004, with updated and reworked character designs by the Four Horsemen. I based my character designs on those versions of the characters, whenever possible, because the 2002 continuity very quickly became my favorite version of the MOTU mythos.

[rvdammit]

"Dawn breaks"

I glue her back together.

[Nurian]

"Night falls" AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! *thump*

Using a rust monster against helmed horrors. I always wondered how that would turn out...

Love the He-Man sculpt. How long did that take you?

[Lady Legira]

Some of these stories make me think of the wise advise I heard at Dragon*Con from Emerald Rose...

Never Split the Party

[edible_hat]

During a game of Call of Cthulu...

Characters: A rock star, a detective, a stunt man and a McDonalds employee.

Setting: A McDonalds where there have been some shady goings on.

What happened: The guy playing the McDonalds worker completely ruined the GM's planned storyline by entering the restaurant through the back door. And the rock star was so drunk he didn't even notice his handburger contained an actual hand.

[Jack T. Chance]

Love the He-Man sculpt. How long did that take you?

I don't remember exactly, but there's no custom 3-D model work involved with him... not that I would've been able to generate such models if needed.

No, the character himself was just generated with the game's standard character generator, his head just one of the game's standard heads.

As for the costume, He-Man's outfit I created with the game's built-in Tool Kit. I wanted him to be a playable character in the game's official campaigns, so that outfit was totally created with all standard outfit pieces. The "He-Man Harness" is just the game's standard "barbarian" harness, you can see it used on the game's standard "Barbarian Clothes" and "Gladiator Clothes". So, all I had to do was create a new outfit, select the right boots, loincloth, "belt", the harness, the bracers, and then apply the right color scheme... and that was the hardest part. Took me a couple tries to get the color scheme just right. And once that was done, I just had to decide what magical enhancements to apply to it to make him play the way I wanted him to. It was really easy, actually.

And then, of course, I custom-made the Power Sword. I played around with the sword creator for awhile, until I figured out how to create a sword that would look as close as possible to the 2002 version of the Power Sword. I also made his battle ax, but I don't think I showed it off in any of the pictures I posted online.

Couldn't make his shield, because there wasn't a suitable round shield in the game. Even if there had been, his sword is a Great Sword and his axe is a Great Axe, both requiring the use of both hands. So, he wouldn't have been able to use the shield, anyway.

So, yeah, he was totally created with the game's standard set of tools. Some of the other characters required mods downloaded from the NWN community. Any character that's wearing a cape/cloak, that required a mod, because Bioware had a lot of trouble with the fabric simulations necessary to make capes and cloaks. Took them quite awhile to get that simulation working right. Evil-Lyn's skirt was from a mod, and several of the characters have custom heads that came from mods. Zodak's thighs came from a mod (the game doesn't normally apply tattoos to a characters thighs, so someone custom-made a pair of thighs that were inked up, which you could incorporate as part of a character's outfit!) But I did as much as possible using just the game's standard tools, so that I could play as those characters in the official campaigns whenever possible.

And just for craps & giggles, here's a character screen shot I took because I just HAD to try to get him in "the pose"... or as close to it as the game would allow. Basically, i had to have him draw and sheath and draw the sword several times, until I was able to pause the game at just the right instant to take the screen shot. And here ya go...

"I... have... THE POWER!"


Just had to at least try to get a shot with the sword held aloft!

[Geek King]

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...

Actually, that's very Cyberpunk. I like it.

The trick to running Cyberpunk is to remember that no matter how cybered-up and powerful the players make themselves, the corps can bring in overwhelming force to squish them. Even the most powerful lion should walk softly among dragons. Chaos is what keeps the players beneath notice, and that should be made clear.

[Barracuda]

Man, did I ever have an epic session this last week. First, I wound up making the mistake of walking into a zombie ambush in some fog and got killed (fortunately, the party had just discovered a scroll of True Resurrection.) After being brought back, I proceeded to smash some zombie butt by casting Turn Undead so the rest of the party could kill them while they tried to run. Then, we got to fight a great wurm (Tolkien universe, basically a very big very nasty dragon.) I figured I had nothing to lose, so I hid in our war wagon and cast Summon Monster V. The dragon we were facing was a water type, and weak to fire. So what do I wind up summoning? An 11 headed Pyro Hydra (basically, a fire breathing hydra with 11 heads, which means 11 attacks.) Yeah, that kind of knocked the dragon on his head. So we win and cut the dragon's head off and mount it on our wagon and proceed on and come to a town. We ask for rooms at the inn, and the man at the stable gives us a note to give to the innkeep. We can't read the note, because it's in an obscure ancient dialect. Just for fun, I cast Comprehend Languages on the note and find out the town worshipped the dragon we just killed and now they want to kill US. So, we leave in a hurry. I fall off the wagon trying to grab a stone so I can cast Darkness on it and throw it at the pursuing mob to shake them off. I try to run, but...I...get...beaten to death by a crazed mob of dragon worshipping villagers angry that my party just killed God. The druid in our party casts Reincarnation on me after my party got some serious vengeance and killed all the adults (Since the only Lawful Good character in the party just received a serious beat down from the peasants *whimper*). I fortunately come back as another Hobbit and then notice all the children in the town are in the street, taking up their parents' weapons. So, being a Lawful Good Cleric, I try to stop them without hurting them by casting Sanctuary so no one can fight in the effect of the spell. All well and good, right? Except that Sanctuary is a Good aligned spell....and the children were all Evil alignment. The DM ruled that the spell wound up doing damage to them, and they all....died. About 120 children. That I was trying to SAVE. So yeah, my Lawful Good (Now Chaotic Good) CLERIC just massacred 120 CHILDREN by ACCIDENT. No good can come of this....

[gremcint]

We were discussing Robin Williams Live on Broadway during a game, specifically his bit on medications.

As a joke I wrote on my friends sheet (wife of the dm) control anal leakage +3, which she laughed about and left it there. Our dm will regularly write up our character sheets to keep them updated.


Three weeks later right before the game:

DM: (barely keeping a straight face) Who wrote control anal leakage+3 on Jen's character sheet?
after we all finished laughing I confessed, and then wrote it again on he new character sheet.



This is one is from tuesday:
My character has been kidnapped and placed in a running man kind of contest run by aliens, he only speaks english. Someone offers to translate for him.
Me: Alright what's alien for Fuck You?

[ArcticChicken]

This is Pun Pun, I apparently misremembered the build, but he's a theoretical optimization that's just ridiculous.

[ArcticChicken]

Quote from tonight's Call of Cthulhu 4: Modern Warfare:

"Private, I've been over here for nine years, there ain't nothing down here I haven't seen before."

[Nurian]

I love my rogue:

Tonight we broke a cardinal rule in D&D. The two rogues (mine and another player's) were sent on a scouting mission ahead of the rest of the party. I use Spider Climb to get up the tower, the other rogue stands look out. As I'm about halfway up, the other rogue gets pegged with a boulder from the giant skeleton standing guard. She runs and hides again. I slip into the keep. As I'm moving around, I unknowing trip an Alarm spell. I get hit by a cone of cold. I drop down the murder holes (damaged in a previous encounter) and run threw the tunnels toward the other tower, scroll casting Expeditious Retreat. A cold mist passes by me a takes from ahead. It's an Ogre Mage squeezing into the tunnel. I tumble past him as he swipes his greatsword at me. "A hair too slow!" I taunt. I continue running and he gets in front of me again. I tumble past him again, this time grabbing a lock of hair as I do so. I make to the end, jump out of the tower, and start to run. I'm hit as Shag Nasty does the same. I step back and cast Haste and bolt. I run so fast, that when Shaggy takes to flight, he can't catch me. I run, laughing and carrying his hair like a flag.

[Jetfire]

Ah here's the Gaming stories thread. Yanking my stories in from the other place.

I'm in some long running DnD games (well technically they're on the Mutants and Masterminds system now but they started as DnD ), and as I mentioned in another thread, my GM has come to expect me to (semi-intentionally) throw curveballs into his nicely made plans, usually by ways that he doesn't know how they're coming, but when they start coming they come on like a freight train... unstoppable, undivertable, and perfectly logical.

Note that our players are scattered all over North America, so we play on IRC.

Sometimes, what I do is simple and just a neat effect (which normally shouldn't work, but he likes the idea/visual of it so he fudges to let it happen. Like the time the party was under attack, and I could see one of the baddies preparing to do a range attack on us. So I held my attack to just before the guy was about to fire, and then cast a summoned shelter between us and the badguy. Realistically, that shelter should have been shredded (especially since my character uses a deck of cards as his casting method, implying the shelter was probably made out of enchanted playing cards), but the GM liked the way it played out so much he let the shelter do the block.

Often times, I seem to have a habit of bringing a battle to a rapid and decisive stop, after implicitly using the rest of the party as a stalling tactic to give me enough time to prepare and cast. Two incidents come to mind for that.

First, I was playing a druid, the party was underground in a tight rocky tunnel, being attacked by a giant spider creature. (This was a long long time ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but it's still one of our favorite memories). The group basically was stalling the spider, while I was looking through my books (IRL) trying to figure out something to do, and I got an idea. First round, I cast Rock to Mud on the rock under the spider to entagle it a little and hold it still. Second round, Mud to Rock on the mud I just formed, basically locking the spider's legs in rock temporarily. I knew it would be able to get out given time and such, but I wasn't going to give it time. Third round I called the party to move back and used control rocks (or move rocks or something like that) to bring the ceiling down. Since the spider was trapped by the rock to mud to rocks, he couldn't evade so SQUISH. As my GM told me earlier this summer when we talked about that event, "I expected taht encounter to last most of the evening, but you did that, and there was nothing I could do to stop you. We were in a TUNNEL, it's not as if I could say there weren't any rocks for you to move."

The second most memorable event with my characters, involves a bard-rogue I had in a quasimodern setting. The party was facing a mechanical fire elemental on a road outside an office complex. Battle is called, Init is rolled, party charges the creature, and my bard runs into the office tower. A few rounds go by, party is getting their butts kicked by this creature. Meanwhile, I'm in the office building and sending messages to the GM asking if I can find certain things that should be in there to be found. Another round goes by, glass in the building breaks and out I come charging, fire hose and fire extinguishers (can't recall which, think it was a hose) in hand, hosing the creature down, putting its fire mostly out and cracking it enough for the rest of the party to recover and complete the beat down. (Our parties have a habit of both beating the unbeatable, and getting our butts handed to us by the trivial; it's funny how it goes sometimes)

About that incident, my GM's said that it was around then when he accepted the fact that if MyChar goes left while the rest of the party is charging, the battle is going to be over in a few rounds. He's not sure HOW it's going to be over (and is usually waiting with great interest to see what I have in mind), but one way or another, it WILL be over, no matter how hard he planned it to be.

The final incident I'll mention, is the time my character basically ended a semi-planned multisession storyline after the first or second incident with what was basically his stand out moment, if not his Crowning Moment of Awesome (though he hasn't died yet. ).

Once again, it involved the Rogue-Bard and his partymates. Previously, one of the BigBaddies (who survived the first encounter with us ), had stolen somehow the Vorpal blade named Edge that belonged to another party member. We met up with this baddy outside a temple, and he was blocking us from entering it for whatever reasons, and the GM mentioned how he had Edge (and its scabbard) on his belt, but he wasn't using it. We started the fight, rolled Init and as usual, I'm looking at the big picture, trying to think of what I can do. I decide that I might find something useful inside the temple, but to get in, I have to get by the Baddy (who's busy with the rest of the party). Sneaking by him wouldn't be too difficult, but it would bring me close to him. So on a lark, I asked the GM if I could pickpocket Edge on the way by. GM says sure, give it a shot and roll D20. I roll, and get high-teens. On top of that, Pickpocket is one of the skills my character has been keeping maxed as he leveled; he rarely uses it in story, but it's his background as one of his raisons d'etre. GM crunches the numbers and goes silent for a long moment. We begin to wonder what's going on.

Finally another player (the only one who lives with the GM) types in, laughing out loud. "*GM* just shouted, "F***! Tony (my character) just pickpocketed Edge from Baddy!"

Needless to say, it took us a few minutes to recover as that sunk in, though I had the presence to have my character, now with Vorpal blade, run as far into the temple as he could, away from the baddy.

But that wasn't quite it. The fight continued on, I couldn't find anything useful in the temple, but for whatever reasons, it started collapsing around us, indicating it was time to bail out. The only problem was, Baddy was still between me and Out. Once again, I was reasonably confident I could slip by him in the confusion, even with Blade, so feeling extra cheeky, I sent a tell asking if I could try to pickpocket Edge's scabbard on the way out. (I'm going by the guy anyway, might as well finish the set). GM lets me, I roll high again, get the scabbard and we skiddaddled, unaware (until just this summer actually) that I had completely ruined the GM's plans for a quest to retrieve Edge from the Baddy.


Oh and don't think my chars were the only ones to throw curves; I'm just the most consistant at it. All of the characters tend ot have shining moments of awsomeness at various points in the campaigns. (Like the time our Zerker got in an ancient dragon's mouth and chopped his way out the dragon's cheek, or our poor warrior who couldn't pass a sneak check to save his life; he'd find a dry twig to step on in the middle of a metal warship at sea ) I tend to have a lot of memorable events mainly because while the rest of the party are obviously dangerous, my characters tend to be the quite background ones you would never realize were dangerous until it's far far too late.