I figured it was time to add another anectode from history. I enjoy most those anectodes that reflect some sort of maxim of the roleplaying world, so I chose this one to share. Since there was talk in another thread about a character's personality growing through their experiences, I figured I'd tell a story or two about that.
My wife and I had moved to Queensland for my work, and we had no-one to roleplay with. We did play Warhammer 40k though, so we would turn up to the local battle bunker regularly to play and hang out with people of similar nerdy ilk. I was still pretty new to 40k, and I kept referring to victory points (VP) as XP, because of my D&D heritage. One of my opponents picked up on it and said, "Why do you keep saying XP?" and I replied, "Oh, it's just D&D talk, I get them confused." And he replied, "D&D? I've always wanted to play, but never had the chance." Then over my shoulder, a guy from another table replied, "Did you say you're running a D&D game? I want in on that."
The guy I was playing against is Matt. Matt was a young guy, just out of high school, who had a list of problems as long as both arms and legs. If you can have an acronym for it, he had it - ADD, OCD, DPD, Asperger's, the works - and his family situation wasn't great either. He didn't have many friends, but he was loyal to gaming and he was dead keen to make a good run of roleplaying. He made an elf called Lithander, who wanted to be a fire mage. We called him Lith for short.
The guy from the other table was Randal. He was an early 30s guy, thin as a rake, and absolutely affable, would do anything for you. He is always animated and expressive. He made a human fighter character called John the Unhinged, who came from a long list of tribal berserkers (Bert the Vexed, Ken the Unstable etc) going back to Reg the Nutter, whose blade had been handed down through the family.
I'll start with Lithander the 'fire mage'. After the party's first encounter with a scout group of draconians (yes, it's Dragonlance - of sorts) in which they did quite well, they continued to follow a trail in the hope of discovering a mage who had sidetracked a caravan and taken it off into the woods. Unfortunately for the party, this mage had teamed up with a group of hobgoblin slavers, and so when they confronted the mage, they were set upon. It was a balanced fight, but with a few disastrous rolls and some bad decisions (the party members got stuck in a web, and decided to burn their way out) they were all down. It was their second encounter, and they were facing a TPK. what does any DM faced with such a situation do? Turns to the age-old fallback of taking all of the character's belongings and putting them into slavery, of course! And so the party found themselves in the back of a slave cart, being taken up over the mountains. All of a sudden, a dragon attacks the slavers, general hell breaks loose, the hobgoblins flee, and the party finds themselves free - in their undergarments, without shoes, on top of a mountain.
At this point, survival is the first port of call for the party. The mage is so physically weak (good old 2E, his strength and constitution were his dump stats) they had to build fires in holes in the ground at night, and then put the mage in the warmed hole and have one of the fighters sleep on top of him. They were following the hobgoblin tracks, because they had no idea where else to go, and Lith in particular was upset at the loss of his spellbook (making a 1st level mage in 2E absolutely useless). Eventually they came across the hobgoblin encampment in a cave, but the party were outnumbered, had no weapons, no armour, so no chance. They decided to do some recon in the hope of possibly overwhelming a single hobgoblin, taking his gear, and putting themselves in a better position. Sure enough, they saw one of the guards go off into the bushes to take a toilet break, and so stalked him. As they watched him do his business, they saw him then produce a book of some sort, rip out a page, and use it as a bog roll. Lith recognised it as his spellbook, and lost the plot. He charged out of the bushes towards the hobgoblin, who was totally surprised to see a half-naked elf rushing him while he was wiping, grabbed his dagger out of the hobgoblin's belt and stabbed him with it, killing him.
This incident crowned the weak and sickly elf mage as "stabbity death", and even when he did get his spells, sometimes he just couldn't help but charge wildly into battle, stabbing at things with his dagger and causing much less harm than if he'd stuck to his spells, but fantastically in character. He actually only ever learned a single fire spell, flaming sphere, failing his rolls to learn affect normal fires, burning hands, and later flame arrow and fireball, before he died, of all things, from falling out of a tree.
John the Unhinged started off as a fairly typical fighter, who was less of a berserker and more of a fighter with an anger management problem. But it seemed that he was fated to have strike after strike of bad luck, which slowly but surely drove him further and further around the twist. It all started when the party was exploring an old crypt (affectionately remembered as the 'morguealeum', since mausoleum was mispronounced) which had in it, among other things, some skeletal bears. When the old leaking magic of the tombs caused one of Lith's spells to backfire and showered the party with magical lice, the party found themselves hindered by itching and scratching, and their fighting style became a little more desperate and dangerous. John found himself inside the ribcage of an angry skeletal bear, having to parry for his life whilst the other fighter of the party (Gruklen the minotaur) rained down blows from his halberd against the skeleton and John together. With one perilous swing, Gruklen broke John's heirloom sword, sending him into a fit of rage and disbelief. Unfortunately, unarmed, there was little he could do, so he broke off a rib from the skeletal bear and proceeded to beat it to death with its own rib.
At a later stage, whilst involved in ship-to-ship combat, John became the subject of wild magic and had his gender changed. At first this was just a strange minor inconvenience, but slowly over time (with statements like "Ask him, she knows" from other members of the party) John came to fall more and more from his branch of sanity. He began to act in a hypermasculine manner, and carve the number 3 above the door of any room he stayed in. He also started talking to his shield (which would talk back), and asking it advice. Later on, when his sword, newly repaired, was teleported away by a magic trap, he well and truly snapped. The sword was in the hands of some frost giants, and he actually went so far as to accept help from tinker gnomes by way of a machine that launched people over crevasses (this is more insane than it sounds if you know of tinker gnomes) in order to get it back.
I still miss this group. Those were good times.
