Anecdote Megathread

[Flawless P]

Hey all its good to be back, I've been extremely sick lately...

Either way I was thinking back on my gaming experiences and I decided to throw my hat in for bearing witness to the worlds shortest campaign.

So it was about 3 am and I was over at my friend Joe's place with our mutual friend Glenn, this was before I had played much D&D and long before I had tried any other systems. We were talking about all the different game systems there were out there and how my buddy glenn owned a copy of Vampire the Masquerade. I had played to the old computer game of VtM Redemption so the PnP interested me. As soon as the conversation turned to VtM my friend Joe got up and ran to his room, he came out flailing a piece of paper that he proudly proclaimed as his character sheet for back when he used to play Vampire. This in and of itself was funny enough to send us into a fit of laughter watching this 350 pound 6 ft man moving so quickly easily had us hysterical, then he described how his character was a ninja assassin babe with a katana who could cut through anything and we laughed harder.

Then he continuously suggested we play, to which my friend glenn said no, I do have an Idea for a story but its damn near 4 am and I don't want to teach Mat(me) to make a character maybe we can play next weekend.

This was not enough to satisfy Joe however who "Had to play like right now" So he pestered Glenn for another 20 minutes until he finally yelled "FINE!"

Joe got real quiet and said alright so whats the scenario.

Glenn looked at him very seriously and said "Your a vampire, you in the middle of the street, it's day what do you do?"

Joe frantically responds with "Um um um..."

"Your Dead" Glenn interrupts.

I laughed so hard I almost passed out and that my friends is....
The Shortest game ever or Why you shouldn't pester a tired GM.

[IDaMan008]

This was not enough to satisfy Joe however who "Had to play like right now" So he pestered Glenn for another 20 minutes until he finally yelled "FINE!"

Joe got real quiet and said alright so whats the scenario.

Glenn looked at him very seriously and said "Your a vampire, you in the middle of the street, it's day what do you do?"

Joe frantically responds with "Um um um..."

"Your Dead" Glenn interrupts.

I laughed so hard I almost passed out and that my friends is....
The Shortest game ever or Why you shouldn't pester a tired GM.

LOL!

We also would have accepted, "Your character wakes up to find himself in a rapidly degrading orbit around the Earth without the protection of a space suit. What do you do?"

[Kroack]

Small anecdote. Tonight I ran a D&D scenario where an evil spider monster has created a cult surrounding him that snatches local villagers for food. Anyways, when one of my players found out how gruesome the deaths of the villagers were, he role-played his paladin so well it almost brought tears to my eyes. Here's this combat centric player who hardly ever role-plays actually getting into the shoes of his character. It was just nice to see him becoming a better gamer.     

[clockworkjoe]

What did he do actually?

[Mckma]

What did he do actually?

He fell to his knees, clenched his fists, looked to the heavens, and at the top of his voice yelled, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

[Setherick]

What did he do actually?

He fell to his knees, clenched his fists, looked to the heavens, and at the top of his voice yelled, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

In game or IRL?

[Kroack]

What did he do actually?

He held a mass burial basically. He spoke out against the insidious spider creature and avenged their deaths. The absolute sincerity of his actions was what moved me. Also, the fact that he's a kick down the door type player and willing to play a role was awesome.   

[Kroack]

Last night I played in a 1st edition d&d game. I had never played 1st ed and none of us were quite sure about some of the rules. However, we all made the best of it and it might have been one of the best games I have ever played in.

My character was a morally ambiguous private investigator type who wanted to uphold law and order. I based his character off a combination of Rorschach and the Pinkerton Detective agency with a medieval plague doctor's outfit.

The most memorable moment from the game was chasing a werewolf to a remote inn, managing to capture him after entering, and basically torturing him to get the whereabouts of an orc army nearby. Silver Fork Torture FTW.             

[Ulf]

I wanted to share one of my favorite terrible-game anecdotes here, but it would have been a ridiculously gigantic wall of text.

So here's a little taste of it. If you want to read the rest, there's a link down below this excerpt.

The Dungeon of Shame, or How I Learned To Stop Trusting My Players To Take Over As DM.

OK, so, many moons ago my good friend AJ decides that he wants a turn at DM'ing for our D&D 3.5 group. Now, let me preface the rant that follows by saying that AJ is a great guy, and I've got nothing bad to say about him. But, letting this good friend of ours behind the DM's screen turned out to be a lot like letting a lovable 6-year old behind the wheel of a semi truck, barreling through a crowded shopping mall at 70 miles an hour. Bad shit happening was the only possible outcome, and it was bound to end in tears.

So, the set-up for the game:   AJ says he wants to run in the Forgotten Realms setting, and he wants us all to play something we've always had our eye on, but other DMs wouldn't let us play. He tells us to cut loose. Anything officially published by WOTC is fair game. This is the first sign of trouble. Savage Species books get pulled off shelves. Players start dusting off Books of Vile Darkness and Races of Faerun.

As a long-time DM, I can see the stormclouds on the horizon already, and there's not a tornado shelter in sight. I decide to try and do something to mitigate the madness. I play a human paladin. I figure if the inevitable freakshow party has a very vanilla moral center, maybe we'll survive long enough to follow the plot, right? I can help steer the party away from decisions that will totally derail the game, right?

Wrong. We end with the following gems:

-A wemic barbarian who was some kind of unstoppable ride-by-attacking combat juggernaut.

-A human paladin with a longsword and a shield. (me)

-Some sort of half-devil, platemail-wearing, tumble-skill-specializing greatsword-wielding fighter chick (this player quit after like two sessions, thus ironically proving she was the wisest of all of us).

-A half water-elemental pacifist cleric who fought with a great-club and who’s combat role was simply to go full defense and provide flanking opportunities, heal us and cast Bless every once in a while.

-A wizard from some race that I’ve never even heard of, that the player found in a poorly-translated D&D errata on a Belgian website or something. This character was kind of human, but also kind of made of shadows or darkness, or something…. I don’t fucking know. All I remember is that he tried to screw us out of any treasure we found, every single time we found any.

-And of course, it goes without saying, the timeless D&D classic; a monkey-man bard from some oriental setting book, who played a lute with his tail and feet and danced around on his hands, singing lyrics from bad 70s and 80s heavy-metal songs. Yes, he was Man-O-War Monkey Man….

So, you know, the classic party template. Tolkien would have been proud.

The Hook…. a Broadway classic, as it turns out.

Apparently we’re all in this desert together, thousands of miles from anywhere. And we’ve never met before. Wait, what? And we have no supplies of any kind.  And no reason for being there. It’s just, you know, fate or coincidence or something…. or maybe it’s…. what’s the word? Oh yeah. “Lazy, incompetent fucking DMing”. That was it.

Then a city appears. Yup. Just sort of materializes around us, right in front of our eyes. Poof! A giant city, stretching for hundreds of miles. And we’re standing in the middle of a big market. The PCs are all like “Hey, what the fuck? First I run into this bizarre menagerie of freakshow characters, and now a city appears out of nowhere?” But never fear, because an absolutely awesome rationale is coming for this series of events!

No there isn’t.

So, long story short, the very first thing that happens is that the party is summarily overpowered and imprisoned (for what crime is never made clear, but my paladin’s Detect Evil ability shows that no one here, not a single person, is evil, so clearly we must have been guilty, right? Guess we shouldn’t have been randomly walking around the interior of a vast fucking world-spanning desert without supplies, huh? We should have known the cops would show up….). This all happens completely off-camera, and we have no chance of avoiding or escaping this fate. And then we’re thrown into an arena, where the DM informs us that we’re expected to fight for our freedom.

Then he lets us know that the city only appears once every 500 years, and stays there for 24 hours, after which it vanishes into the mists of time once more. If we can win our freedom in that time, we can leave. To which my response is something like “You mean we’ve been captured by the cast of Brigadoon? Really? I sneak out during intermission!”.

Next comes the part where our DM introduces us to a dude he describes as “an NPC party member to help you guys out if you need it. You’ll love him. I worked really hard writing him up, and he’s a totally original character.”

Enter the NPC…. I shit you not, it was a dual scimitar-wielding drow with a heart of gold, with levels in sorceror and ranger, accompanied by a shadowy dog-cat-monster-thing that could turn into a little statue. His name was Rz’zitt’n. And oh yeah, he also wielded Spellfire, and was the chosen of Mielikki or some shit like that. He was also like 15th level, where the rest of us were level 4.

Continued in Part 2: The Dungeon…. or, Oh My Fucking God This Is Making My Brain Hurt.

Here's the link to the entire thing, posted on my blog, Dice-Speak:    The Dungeon of Shame

[Tadanori Oyama]

Ha! Good stuff. Well, bad stuff, but funny.

I want to put this pick of the story from later on in a box with the label: 3.5 is kinda like this sometimes:

We approach cautiously, and my paladin Detects Evil on the coffin. Nothing. I give the go-ahead to carefully crack the lid open. We do so, and before we can even complete that action, a Death Knight wielding a greatsword leaps up out of it like some kind of satanic jack-in-the-box and begins one-shot killing characters. Two party members down instantly. We panic, faced with some CR 10 or 11 monster that has DR 10/+2 or something equally ridiculous. We attack it, using up all my lay on hands to damage it, and all the cleric’s turn undead attempts too. Our weapons just bounce off this thing, and we eventually beat it by having the wemic tackle it into a corner and then taking its greatsword away. Without Improved Unarmed Strike, it can’t attack us without drawing attacks of opportunity, so we just dance backwards and hit it with its own sword, which seems to damage it just fine.

[Ulf]

Here's one of my favorites, from a con game I played in back in like '95 or '96 or so.

We were playing Call of Cthulhu, with about 6 players. I'd played the game before, but not very often. Maybe three or four times. However, I'm a giant Lovecraft nerd and had read everything he'd written, more or less.

So the setup for the game was that the person whose character survived the longest, and lasted to the end of the session, would win some little convention prize. But that we'd have to work together to get through the first half of the session or so, before it would make sense to turn on each other.

So the scenario is that we're passengers on a fishing boat that gets washed up on a mysterious island in a storm. We need to survive until help arrives, and the only structure on the island is a spooky old mansion and it's surrounding out-buildings. On this little island, about 1 mile square.

So I hand the Keeper this note, and tell him this says everything about what my character is doing for the entire game. And every time my turn comes up, I just say "Read the note. That's my action."

Then the other characters start dying in gruesome Mythos fashion, one after another. But my character makes it to the end, and lives to see the rescue helicopter. The Keeper laughs, congratulates me on playing a very boring but very effective CoC hero, and I win the little scenario bonus. The other players start giving me the stink-eye and demand to see the note. Here's what it said:

"Dear Keeper,

Unless I say otherwise, my character does the following every round: I find the spot on the island that's the furthest away from the water, but also not in a building. I then curl up on the ground someplace hidden with my eyes closed and my fingers in my ears. Every so often I look around, and if I see any of the other PCs, I ignore them and do my best to remain hidden.

I know why people die in Call of Cthulhu."

[Kroack]

So you decided that you didn't want to have fun and win an imaginary game?

[Ulf]

So you decided that you didn't want to have fun and win an imaginary game?

No, not really. I'd been in like half a dozen games over the previous day and a half or so, and I was a little loopy from lack of sleep. I just thought of that solution and wanted to see if it would work. It was never about winning. I just explained that part of it so there'd be some context about why the other players were were giving me looks at the end.

If something had interacted with me or if the Keeper had had a monster find me, I would have played the situation out. And granted, the Keeper could have done that at any time he liked, but he didn't. The whole idea started out as kind of a joke, but then when it kept on working, I figured what the hell, keep doing it.

I just think it's funny that in a game as deadly as CoC, sometimes the best way to live through an "all you need to do is survive, there's no plot beyond that" style scenario is to make yourself as unobtrusive as possible.

[Tadanori Oyama]

Managed to kill the second character in our Shadowrun game. Same player but this time I wasn't directly responsible.

We're watching a compound filled with like thirty thugs and assorted hostages/servants/family members/etc. Nasty place. So, we want to break in and since I'm more or less in command of the team I say we have to do things quietly since I was tired of being shot at.

So we're outside at night waiting for a chance to present itself. We've got five people in a run down humvee. Just inside the gate one of the guards start beating the crap out of a woman.

I'm watching another part of the building on full optic zoom so I don't see it happening. Our hacker is playing videogames in the back seat so he doesn't see anything. Our street samurai sees it but doesn't care. Our rigger sees it and wants to do something but doesn't want to come out of hiding to do it. And finally, our mystical adept, who is astrally perceving, sees that the woman is recently Awakened and that a spirit of man is guarding the gate while spirit summoning energy is building up around the woman.

Our mage decides something needs to be done so rather than ask the group for help or inform us about the spirits or that the woman is awakened, so he starts to cast a spell. The rigger sees what he's doing and decides to stop him. Initative, rigger wins, the mage, then street samurai. Me and the hacker sit it out because we don't know what's happening.

The rigger floors it and tells the sammy to cause a distraction. Since the rigger locked the doors, the mage leaps out the window of the moving vehicle. He instantly wiffs his reaction test to land and hits an abandoned car at about twenty miles per hour. After armor he's got 8 out of his 10 physical damage boxes filled. Sammy casues a distraction by firing some grenades into a nearby abandoned car (not the one that the mage hit).

The guards come running out of the compound to see what's going on with the explosions. The rigger starts to turn the car around so we can try and grab the mage (we need him for the job so we can't let him get himself killed). The mage limps to his feet and goes "running" towards the compound. The guards clearly see him and shot him. He takes enough bullets to go from hurt to dying to dead in one round but uses Hand of God to survive.

Second character down in the game, same player, same style of character.

[Dogfish]

I've ran games through skype several times now. However have only ever ran one game in person.

I was visiting a friend from High School that has, like me, gone to a university in a different city from the one we attended high school in. We had both in that past year (and for me a bit longer) got into roleplaying games. He had a group with a very odd dynamic where they all play 4th ed. and take turns running it with a massive number of player characters floating around. Having never actually role-played with him and having told him of my skype exploits (also games round a table as a player) he had passed the word on to his buddies. In the three days I had to spend with him we spent one evening running an RPG. To mix it up for them I ran Call of Cthulhu. A rough approximation of Tom's game, with my own personal take on things.

The cast.
A sniper, my bud.
A translator, their best role-player that had to leave early.
A radio/engineer guy, quiet person that failed every single sanity check.
A truck driver, initially wanted to be a sniper and being a staunch catholic had gotten the prayers from Saving Private Ryan (this is important).
A medic, a bit of a non-player.

Well the game went aslong as you'd expect, they got increasingly worried and were really digging the atmosphere. However I realised my buddy clearly couldn't find anything I was saying scary. So sanity points are loss, the game is building slowly to it's climax and I know I have to get to my buddy. He's sitting beside the guy with the prayers. Everyone makes a sanity check, most fail. I pass a piece of paper to the catholic guy to start reciting the prayer out loud (it made sense in game, shit had gotten real, thankfully had remembered he had them). So play resumes as everyone goes a bit nuts...around a minute later the guy breaks into the prayers during a high tension scene and doesn't stop despite everyones reactions to him.

My buddy practically jumped out his skin.

I had won.


I've got some anecdotes from the Eberron game I've been in for the past year or so. I played a paladin of the silver flame (still do) and had a ball routing out evil.