Author Topic: Anecdote Megathread  (Read 389244 times)

clockworkjoe

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #165 on: November 13, 2010, 05:19:58 PM »
hahaha

this is what happens when Rifts GMs try 4E


Z

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #166 on: November 13, 2010, 06:24:48 PM »
I really can't decide if his gaming or his socializing was the worst thing about him.

Flawless P

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #167 on: November 29, 2010, 07:56:10 PM »
This is kind of an Anecdote but I did it in bullet point form as much as possible because well its a damn long story. This is my

Attacked by a Kraken, sucked into a whirlpool

Shipwrecked

Exploration of the countryside

Tons of fruit, no animals strange flowers.

Further examination of flowers, FLOWERS ATTACK IN CARNIVEROUS

SWARMS!

Run and hide in a cave opening behind a waterfall

Cave exploration yields cave paintings of an Enormous Red

Dragon doing battle with what looks like a giant starfish

while humanoid figures battle the plants.

Dragon and Humans are defeated Humans flee into the caves.

Meet indigenous life forms, look vaguely humanoid but their
eyes are useless and they speak broken Draconic.

Make arrangements with the natives to move our shipwrecked
crew into their caves.

Go exploring through the caves to find the dragons hoard
because there could be magical weapons to help us escape.

Meet the Red Dragon named Malyx who is still alive. He is
poisoned and has been unable to sleep for hundreds of years,
his power is nearing its end, he tells us how we might destroy
the scourges power source and is mercy killed by the one of the group.(at his request)

He has many technologically advanced items, computers and
guns, that we cannot identify. One of the group casts identify
on a gun and is permanently drained of 2 wisdom to learn how it
works.

Uses gun till the bullets run out and we must run and escape
because of enemies in the cave.

We share our plan with the natives and the chieftain volunteers
for the kamikaze mission of forcing the volcano to react and
overload the scourges powers source, which is now resting
comfortably on the volcano.

We were able to recover small stones that stored magical
energy each rock would deal damage of the last element that
touched it. I charged them with cold damage and was rewarded
with a club that had 12 of them inserted in it. One attack
would shatter them all simultaneously destroying the weapon and possibly injuring me in the process.

We stage our final stand to distract the hordes of man eating
plants while we send our people back to the beachfront where
the salt and sand keep the monsters back.

We filled hollowed out coconuts with blood because we learned
that they attacked the smell of blood.

We started throwing the coconuts at the bigger enemies so the
swarms would eat them. We held them off for 4 rounds before I
misunderstanding the plan, took off for the beach as well.

Any injury was to be nearly fatal as it would cause you to
bleed and the masses to descend. I made it all the way to the
beach without fear of the plants but my allies weren't so lucky.

One of my allies was bleeding out and running while another
attempted to heal him, they were being over taken and when I
didn't see them exit the forest behind me I grabbed an armful
of seaweed and some charcoal and ran back in, I tossed the
seaweed to one and the charcoal to the other so they could
cover their scents and we ran back out.

The Volcano goes off and there is much rejoicing, we had just
defeated an enemy that had plagued these people for hundreds
of years and we were able to build a new ship, it took months
but we treated it as an island paradise from then on, plenty
of fresh fruits and vegetables and all the carnivorous plants
you could possibly ever want to smoke.
That is Chapter One.


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If you can't fix it with duck tape you haven't used enough.
I intend to live forever -- so far, so good.

Tadanori Oyama

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #168 on: December 06, 2010, 06:48:26 PM »
The return of my suicidal Vampire the Requiem player!

So, I've managed to avoid killing her current (third) character, Hatti, though only just. She's currently something of a social outcast because she's partly responcible for the death of her own covenant, but that's another story. Two sessions ago she was working a case, all the PCs are members of a secret police group serving the city's ruler, and called one of the other PCs, Chuck. They exchanged some information and she offered to help Chuck, which he declined. Hatti pushed that she should help because her abilities would be extremely useful and Chuck pushed back that they would not, that he had it under control.

Finally they go their seperate ways, him to continue his investigation and her to one of the secret police's hide outs. All of the hide outs have what's basically a red Batman phone that goes to the city's ruler for us in emergancys. So, she uses the big red phone to call in and say that Chuck wouldn't take her help so he isn't doing his job. Message is sent in and she doesn't hear a response right away so she continues about her business.

This last session Chuck gets a visit from a vampire higher up in the city's power structure who informs him an official complaint has been lodged against him and he's been summoned to court. Chuck asked who assused him and found out it was Hatti so he goes out and hires a vampire lawyer to defend him. Meanwhile, some of Hatti's other mistakes are catching up to her and she has to fight a pair of magicians before fleeing into the faerie world with some new allies to escape destruction. When she gets back to the real world she has a phone message informing her of the trial date regarding her complant against Chuck and advising her to get a lawyer. She calls the same lawyer as Chuck, who informs her he's already been hired and gives her four other lawyers she can go to.

Now, here's where it goes strange. Hatti insists on contacting a PC turned NPC named Gypsy. Gypsy is not a lawyer and bearly knows Hatti but she insists so she gets to meet with him. After hearing the details, Gypsy decides to use the trial to expose the secret police and weaken the current ruler polically so he can take control. He also demands an insanely high price for his services, which Hatti instantly agrees to.

The trial date comes, both sides show up, and take their places when suddenly the lights go out, the doors are sealed magically, and the three ruling vampires in the city appear out of the gloom, commanding all present be bound to secrecy on pain of death. So the trial starts and Hatti has no evidence of any wrong doing on Chuck's part aside from their conversation. So, she offers to let one of the elders read her mind in place of testimony, which he does. Chuck is asked to defend himself, which he does by showing that in the time between the accusation and the trial, he has solved the case he was working on. Witnesses are called. Hatti calls another member of the secret police to testify and does not get the answers she wants so she keeps talking until the elders tell her to move on. At that point she faces the elder in charge and starts talking about what the elders intended when they formed the secret police. Elder tells her to keep her focus on the guilt of the accused and not wander. She keeps going so the elder backhands her across the room.

Trail ends with all charges dismissed. Because Chuck opted not to counter sue, Hatti faced no legal action against her and everybody went their seperate ways.

So, to choke it all up for Hatti:
She lost her case.
She wasted the time of all three ruling vampire elders.
She got punched in the face.
Everybody in the city is still mad at her for her involvement in the death of her covenant (especially the one other surviving member).
She alienated all of the other members of the secret police and the public police (many of whom her called as witnesses at the trial).
And she literally bargained away her life to Gypsy for basically no gain what so ever.

Flawless P

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #169 on: December 06, 2010, 07:21:48 PM »
Politics doesn't sound like her game. I don't know much about the nWoD but sounds like she should have been a Brujah or Gangrel in oWoD less political BS that way.

Note: The kind of BS I loved because well I played a Ventrue all 3 games I ever played in.
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Tadanori Oyama

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #170 on: December 06, 2010, 07:41:15 PM »
Politics doesn't sound like her game. I don't know much about the nWoD but sounds like she should have been a Brujah or Gangrel in oWoD less political BS that way.

Note: The kind of BS I loved because well I played a Ventrue all 3 games I ever played in.

Ventrue FTW.

A political genius she is not. She keeps getting herself into these situations. This new character was created with a political mentor who was supposed to watch out for her and show her the ropes.

About two minutes after her mentor official delcared Hatti independent she was getting into trouble but her mentor kept her somewhat sheilded. At least until three sessions ago when Hatti outright defied her mentor, took a powerful magical item to another covenant member, and got over 85% of the covenant killed (they went from about thirty members to four).

So, yeah, now she's the outsider who destoryed her own team, owes her life to a guy she got nothing from, and is arguing with her only two remaining allies.

Flawless P

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #171 on: December 06, 2010, 07:55:50 PM »
I'd give her a quick death and have her make a new character, well that is if she is no longer having fun
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Tadanori Oyama

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #172 on: December 06, 2010, 07:59:04 PM »
I'd give her a quick death and have her make a new character, well that is if she is no longer having fun

She seems to enjoy it. Besides, I get to tell these awesomely fucked up stories. The campaign is coming to an end in two weeks. I'll make her do something different in the next one.

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #173 on: December 07, 2010, 06:00:36 PM »
My campaign is quickly spiraling out of control.

It started out as a simple 'A Wizard Brings You To The Future - What Do?' game, and now they've uncovered Pelor's Holy Avenger that was posing as a mountain while speared through the heart of a Colossus.  One of the characters became a Star for a few millenia, another spent an unnamed amount of time in the mind of an Angel.  And every other session they manage to at least attempt genocide.
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Flawless P

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #174 on: December 07, 2010, 07:22:21 PM »
Tad has helped me to remember my own anecdote from Vampire. This one is in the Masquerade not Requiem, It was also my first time playing Vampire. I made a Ventrue and we all spent our points wrong because no one bothered to re-read the books, so I had alot more dots than I should have, we were a group formed by the Camarilla to investigate and curb Sabbat incursions toward Sacramento, CA. We were all together except for one member didn't make it to the game till late so we had to "work" him in.

We were meeting with an informant, when the other player showed up (in character he was looking for information as well). He was a Gangrel with bad blood towards the Ventrue as a general rule and he started to insult one of the group members for dressing all fancy and driving a really expensive car. He was a Tremere who had a lot of wealth and didn't take the insults kindly. He used his telekinesis to hold the Gangrel in the air while we insulted and threatened him. Well he spit at the Tremere and missed, he hit me instead and I was livid. So we took him out side and waited next to some railroad tracks, when the train came by we bounced him off of it a few times till he was about to meet his final death. Then I grabbed him and delete all his memories of the events, replacing them with a gang of Sabbat members jumping him near to death while we saved him with a combination of my Assault Rifle(not only did I not have one, I would have been at a loss for how to hit anything) and the Tremeres Telekinesis we killed them all and fed him blood to save him from nearly starving while he healed himself.

When he woke up he was super helpful to us and even assisted us in our mission.

Worst part of all of this is that the player is the biggest Wolverine fan, like huge! It wasn't until a few nights later that I realized we Weapon X'd the hell out of him. After I brought it up to him he laughed his ass off.
42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
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Flawless P

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #175 on: December 07, 2010, 07:23:14 PM »
My campaign is quickly spiraling out of control.

It started out as a simple 'A Wizard Brings You To The Future - What Do?' game, and now they've uncovered Pelor's Holy Avenger that was posing as a mountain while speared through the heart of a Colossus.  One of the characters became a Star for a few millenia, another spent an unnamed amount of time in the mind of an Angel.  And every other session they manage to at least attempt genocide.

not a single bit of that made sense to me, apparently I need some context
42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
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The_Last_76

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #176 on: December 08, 2010, 01:23:31 AM »

not a single bit of that made sense to me, apparently I need some context

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=442824897901
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=445986842901
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/note.php?note_id=445989287901

Not sure you'll be able to read that, but that's about the first 24hours worth of gameplay written out.  In two sessions.  Going up for the 6th session and 60+ hours soon.  The short story is we've been playing hard and fast with D&D, ignoring the rules where they are inconvenient in favor of better story.  Three central players, with another seven who rotate in and out of the game at their convenience. 

We have an Eladrin Wizard who founded a magic school at the outpost, in a setting where - thanks to time traveling shenanigans - only her and those who came with her knew about magic.  She taught it to a species whose culture was entirely unprepared for it and the result was a massive civil war.  After getting tied up in the plans of a Liche-turned-God she's started to find religion.  Started with misguidedly worshipping the snake god .  After exploring the petrified body of a slain colossus (biological dungeon for the win), they found an Angel of Pelor at the heart of the corpse, guarding the God's Holy Sword.  After conversing with the Angel in a landscape created from it's mind, she chooses to stay there for X amount of time studying the religion of Pelor.  Now she's on her way to becoming an Angel herself.

Next up is the Chaotic Evil Dragonborn Warlord who seems to have taken Magnificent Bastardry to a whole new level never before witnessed by mere mortals. Starting as the judicial champion of the Chief Slave of the outpost, he worked his way up to Captain of the Guard and finally Military commander.  On the path to his lofty position, he organized the resurrection of an ancient Kua-Toa society to attack the town and justify his promotion, secretly murdered witnesses, egged on a war with the Spider people by setting their forest on fire and using his position to influence the outposts economical situation.  He is currently leading a small society aboard a floating Island-Fortress, protected by an air force of Dragon Riders.  Also the Death Knight Champion of the Liche-turned-God mentioned before.

The third of the central players is an Elven Ranger.  The character has actually been a driving force in most of the campaign, but still managed to slip under the radar while doing so.  She started off by orchestrating a raid on Gargantuan Ant Colony in a bit to capture some larvae and breed her own Ant Mount.  Three consecutive crits on her nature check inspired me to allow her to do so.  Ant Mount aside, she set up a business selling Queen Ant Jelly - which was later used to fuel several technological advancements in mining and deep-sea exploration procedures. A great friend to both the Spiders of Leng and the local societies.  In the last game she sacrificed herself to save a team mate, allowing herself to be used in a Star-ritual.  She's come back as a Star Avatar who just spent all of existence watching the world pass by from the sky.

It started out as a one shot, but they insisted on going with it.
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Fizban

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #177 on: December 13, 2010, 03:47:04 AM »



Well, although I have many years of anecdotes I could dredge up, I feel the need today to share a few short stories from the one-shot I ran at MacquarieCon four times over the last weekend.  I also ran it with a test group a month or so before, so I have run it a total of five times.  And although those five games shared the same plot, the same characters, and the same goals, they could not have been more different.

The basic tenet of the game was this - a group of five mages have heeded the call for help from an archmage, whose last living relative on earth is in danger, and he wants her kept safe.  He'd do it himself, but he is over 400 years old, and if he sets foot on earth, reality will slap him into pasty ancient goo.  His relative was a girl working in a vault complex in Sydney, which was under threat of robbers, and she had been taken hostage.  Free the girl, keep her safe.  That was the ostensible goal.

I say ostensible goal, because there was, as in all my con games, a twist - the mage did not in fact care in the slightest about his great great great grand daughter.  But she had a ring, which was a powerful artifact which anchored his horizon realm to the earth.  However, only one of the mages knew this (the monk whose avatar was the ghost of Bruce Lee).  Well, that's not entirely true.  One of the mages in the group was a member of the nephandi - that group of evil mages who wants to end reality - and knew that the ring was a powerful device that could aid in massive destruction, and figured this had something to do with it.

The ring's power further complicated things, by preventing any sort of correspondence teleportation or scrying into where it was held.  And what the hell, to add a further complication, the robbers were all vampires - insane Malkavians who were holding the girl hostage to get the attention of the archmage, because they wanted help dealing with the technocracy, and figured he would come or at least send some mages if they put her in danger.  And one of the mages in the group wasn't actually a mage at all, but was a ghoul of a vampire who was an enemy of these Malkavians, and he used blood to perform magic-like feats to spy on the mages for general occult information.

Okay, so it's complicated.  But here's a summary of how each group who played this game sought to solve their problem.

The first  group, the control group, ran almost like clockwork.  They researched the building and the situation.  They teleported into a subway toilet, and walked to the scene. The police had already turned up to the scene, so they pretended to be police (undercover, since they were dressed so strangely they may as well have been the Village People) and got access to the CCTV in the vault and found out the robbers' demands.  They decided to go in and negotiate with the robbers, found out they were vampires (the ghoul hid himself to make sure they didn't recognise him) and agreed to help deal with the technocracy and help them loot the vault.  The vampires then basically proceeded to break the masquerade, make sure all the CCTV caught it, then tipped their hats to the magi and said, "Well, they'll be here soon.  Have fun!" and walked out the door.  A technocrat came with a HITMark and a few others, a massive magical fight ensued, in which the nephandi was given the ring by a trusting member of the cabal and told, "Keep it safe!" Yoink, she made good her escape and a few months later the world was ended.  Yay.

The first game I ran at the actual convention took a slightly different turn.  The group decided to do absolutely no research on the facility, teleported onto the roof, and took the fire escape down, but found it didn't go to the basement where the vault was, and used spirit magic to make a deal with the fire alarm not to set off when they opened the door, if they promised to set off all the alarms in the building within 1 hour.  They charmed a beat cop with magic, told him to ignore them, then snuck into the vault complex.  The ghoul used dominate on the vampire with explosives forcing it to stay still, before they blew a hole in the wall, incapacitated the other vampires with a swarm of wasps and fire, and then told the hostages to run.  They found the ring, which was safely snatched up by the monk.  The nephandi then proceeded to summon a horde of spirits to attack his companions in an effort to get the ring, but had his top half disintegrated, and so the ring was made safe.

The second game followed a similar beginning to the first - they ignored doing any research, teleported onto the roof, and went down the fire stairs.  But it didn't even bother them that they didn't go to the basement - they used matter magic to redesign the building and put in a fire stair to the basement.  They then installed a secret corridor to the room with the hostages, whilst the nephandi spirit walked into the vault to get behind enemy lines (and stole the ring while in there).  They froze the exploding vampire in time, stormed in with guns blazing, took out the other two vampires, before the nephandi grabbed the girl they were there for and escaped out the front door and into the hands of police.  Thinking they had all done incredibly well, the monk went into the vault only to find the ring gone, and wondered where it was.  The nephandi then won the game by accidently using spirit travel with the ring, thus tearing a hole in the gauntlet from Sydney to Colombia and allowing the denizens of the umbra to flood the earth, killing all humanity.

The third game had only three players, who did their research and decided to try and sneak into the  vault through the airconditioning system.  One player sought to turn themself into a cockroach, and succeeded in getting everything but the size right, and so snuck into the vault as a five foot tall cockroach.  They then decided to enter the vault by dressing up as pizza delivery boys and snatched the hostage they wanted from the scene, trapping the vampires behind bullet-proof glass doors as they ran.  The enraged vampires proceeded to quite horribly annihilate the other hostages, which the magi saw on their PDA which tapped into the CCTV, and felt bad - so they used magic to set off the explosives, destroying the whole building, and causing the two buildings either side to fall over onto the wreckage.  THEN the nephandi decided to turn into a cockroach and sneak into the vault (now buried under three buildings' worth of rubble), while telling the monk through a mind link that she was a nephandi and she was going to get this ring, and he should totally join her.  He responded by reaching into her mind and pulling out all thoughts to do with the ring so that, by the time she had the safe deposit box open, she couldn't remember what she was doing there, and so just took the ring as a trinket, and traded it to the monk in return for his promise to help her end the world.

The final game at the con involved five people who wanted to make sure everything went off without a hitch, and so planned for - I kid you not - two and a half hours.  They researched, they planned, they schemed, they looked at the clock and saw they had 30 minutes to complete this caper, and they managed to kill the head police negotiator, get subsumed and trapped in a safe deposit box by the spirit of the vault, turn the water sprinkler system into holy water to melt the vampires to puddles of goo, and basically forget about the hostages.  The nephandi locked himself in the vault, found the ring, and attempted to call his nephandi brethren through the spirit realm to tell them he had the ring and to ask what to do next - but botched, and accidentally got speaking to a werewolf, who appeared, tore the nephandi to tiny bits, and took the ring somewhere safe.

One thing that always bemuses me about con games is how you can prepare something (like the whole subplot about the vampires wanting help against the technocracy) and the players never even come close to stumbling over it.  I mean, four games, and no-one thought to find out what the vampires wanted?  Two of the groups didn't even do any research on the vault complex, and so missed out on the cool video I had prepared.  Oh well, such is life.

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #178 on: December 13, 2010, 02:35:28 PM »
That is awesome, this story makes me want to know more about the other White Wolf products since i've only played Vampire.
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Ryo

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #179 on: December 13, 2010, 03:05:14 PM »
That is awesome, this story makes me want to know more about the other White Wolf products since i've only played Vampire.

Old World of Darkness Mage is not for the lighthearted. :P