Anecdote Megathread

[Moondog]

Okay I'm a terrible person but here's another winner from Reddit's Rpg subreddit -

http://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/rog1k/whats_the_most_creative_misuse_of_rules_youve_seen/

That paladin with the helmet is a goddamn hero.

[Wooberman]

Another classic from yog-sothoth

http://www.yog-sothoth.com/showthread.php?p=245138

[bidoof]

So the first real RPG I played in was a really clunky internet forum homebrew system.  It was poorly designed and very unbalanced, but since we were all friends most of us tried to make characters that worked well together.

Not Bob, though.  Bob made a long string of terrible, min maxed characters, each less memorable than the last.  When we came up with an advantages/disadvantages system, he decided to get rid of his 8th character and make a new one, since disadvantages gave you a few extra character points.

His new character was Gunbot (that was his actual name), a police robot that specialized in shooting guns.  He hated evil.  This didn’t seem too bad, until you looked at his disadvantages and noticed a trend.

Intolerance: Gunbot is intolerant of evil.
Personal Vow: Kill evil people.
Obsession: Destroy evil.
Duty: Gunbot has a duty to kill evil where ever it is.
Berserk: Gunbot goes berserk in the presence of too much evil.
Bloodlust: Gunbot gets really angry around evil.
OCD: Gunbot is compelled to kill evil.
Code of Conduct: Gunbot cannot let evil exist near him.
Stubborn: Nothing can deter gunbot from his fight against evil.
Fanatic: Gunbot is fanatic in his quest against evil.
Phobia: Cats.
Depression: Gunbot is depressed when evil wins.
Sadist: Gunbot is sadistic in his extermination of evil.

The guy knew what he wanted, at least.

[Wooberman]

So the first real RPG I played in was a really clunky internet forum homebrew system.  It was poorly designed and very unbalanced, but since we were all friends most of us tried to make characters that worked well together.

Not Bob, though.  Bob made a long string of terrible, min maxed characters, each less memorable than the last.  When we came up with an advantages/disadvantages system, he decided to get rid of his 8th character and make a new one, since disadvantages gave you a few extra character points.

His new character was Gunbot (that was his actual name), a police robot that specialized in shooting guns.  He hated evil.  This didn’t seem too bad, until you looked at his disadvantages and noticed a trend.

Intolerance: Gunbot is intolerant of evil.
Personal Vow: Kill evil people.
Obsession: Destroy evil.
Duty: Gunbot has a duty to kill evil where ever it is.
Berserk: Gunbot goes berserk in the presence of too much evil.
Bloodlust: Gunbot gets really angry around evil.
OCD: Gunbot is compelled to kill evil.
Code of Conduct: Gunbot cannot let evil exist near him.
Stubborn: Nothing can deter gunbot from his fight against evil.
Fanatic: Gunbot is fanatic in his quest against evil.
Phobia: Cats.
Depression: Gunbot is depressed when evil wins.
Sadist: Gunbot is sadistic in his extermination of evil.

The guy knew what he wanted, at least.

No shit, Cats can be pretty damned scary.

[IDaMan008]

I promised you guys this story a while back, and I don't think you ever got it, so here goes:

It's a high school game of 2nd Edition Mage: The Ascension. My good friend Erik is Storytelling, and he's got four players: Alex, Ed, Chuck and me. We roll up our characters, as it is supposed to be a one-shot, and Erik takes Alex and Ed aside in a conspiratorial fashion. He's got special plans for them. When the game starts, we find out that their characters are missing, and it's up to Chuck and myself to find them. We go through about 30-40 minutes of investigation before our characters are overcome by something I don't remember--Gas? A magic spell? In any case, we pass out.

All the while, Alex and Ed are patiently waiting for their special moments in the spotlight.

Erik hands me and Chuck new sheets and tells us that we wake up as two completely different characters with all of the memories of our previous ones, including the bit where we fell unconscious. We are, understandably confused. Ed and Alex are there to greet us, but not as their main characters, either. They're playing two sinister NPCs who we don't know. We ask them what happened, why we passed out, what the fuck we're doing in different bodies, etc, but they give us no response. Instead, they handcuff us and shove us into the backseat of their car at gunpoint so that they can drive us off to God knows where. At this point, both of us look down at the sheets Erik handed us.

Chuck: So we're these other characters now?
Erik: You are, but from your perspective, you're still your original PCs.
Me: But these guys have completely different stats and skills. How does that work?
Erik: You don't know. You suddenly realize you have all these new abilities.
Me: Okay...

With a thrill that borders on pure glee, I see that my new character is an Akashic Brother with three dots of Do and a Dex pool of four. I tell Erik that I'd like to karate kick whoever is sitting in the seat in front of mine, because these people obviously don't have our best interests at heart. I succeed and roll enough damage to kill Ed's NPC instantly. My character kicks a hole in the front seat and the poor bastard sitting there. (To this day I have no idea how he had the leverage to do that, but...magical karate!) Chuck, meanwhile, makes a Dex+Athletics check to slip his cuffs under his ass and around his legs so that he's got his hands in front of him. Just as Alex's character (who's driving, I think) turns with his gun drawn to shoot me in the face, Chuck wraps the cuffs around his neck and strangles him to death.

We all turn to Erik expectantly, waiting to see where the game goes from here, but he's got nothing. He throws in the towel.

All told, Chuck and I had fun, but Alex and Ed did nothing but sit around for the better part of an hour waiting, only to be killed off in a few short rounds of combat. I'm sure it could have been a really great game for all of us, but player logic and bad luck on their part cut it short.

[clockworkjoe]

hahaha, it's good for a GM to keep secrets, but sometimes you can play things too close to the chest.

[Henry Hankovitch]

I just ran a reverse-engineered version of "Lover in the Ice" for a Skype game.  I love the scenario and have wanted to run it for a while (though I was too po' broke to buy into the Kickstarter, more's the pity). 

Anyway, after the characters took out Skip and encountered the first monster in the college-students' house, they decided that what they should do was shut down the power grid for the rest of the town to freeze out any other creatures.

Welp.

They call a power-company engineer in the middle of the night and get him to come down to the station for some kind of emergency, then try to force him at gunpoint to help them shut down all the power.  (I didn't think shutting down a city-wide power grid should be a matter of hacking the gibson from the admin-building computers; any power-company employees out there can correct me if I'm wrong.)  I make a couple sanity/willpower type rolls for the engineer guy, and he basically drives the PC past a police station at night, tucks and rolls out of the truck, and runs for the station yelling for help.  PC tackles and shoots the engineer, then calls up the other PC and shoots himself as policemen start coming out of the station.

The other PC goes back to the HOMEPLATE computer, and informs A-cell that uncontrolled vectors are out there and everything is fucked.  He then grabs a truck and tries to get out of town before Lafontaine blows up, presumably to live out his life in an off-the-grid cabin somewhere.

An interesting case of players sticking to player-logic to the bitter end.  I had only two players, though, and both of them were new to Call of Cthulhu.

Edit:  when the PCs came out of Skip's house, I had Roslin step out of the truck and say "what's going on?"   Because they'd gunned him down in the back yard and set the place on fire--which I'm pretty sure is the only way anyone will ever play that encounter.  So the PCs then shot HER.  Those monsters.

 I blame it on the fact that I'm not as good at playing adorably-sassy black women as Caleb.

[Cthuluzord]

Holy shit! Did Aaron split himself in two via some form of mitosis, and did you play with both of him? It sounds like it.

[Tadanori Oyama]

Wow. The things that players get into their heads...

[Jacko]

I didn't think shutting down a city-wide power grid should be a matter of hacking the gibson from the admin-building computers; any power-company employees out there can correct me if I'm wrong.

Hi, I work for a power company!  In fact, I monitor the computer and radio networks used by most of the company.

You're kind of correct.  Turning off the grid from an admin-building that isn't onsite can't actually happen.  The reason I said 'most of the company' is because there are completely separate networks used for actually running each individual plant. 

If the players were actually at the plant, they could feasibly do something but there's personnel on site 24/7 (especially during a natural disaster like a raging blizzard) so you're going to have a lot of witnesses to deal with and circumventing all the redundancies would take quite a bit of time and involve handling some very high-voltage equipment.  'Operate Heavy Machinery' anyone?

[edwardian_adventurer]

Today I finished session two of a game based on Marble Hornets using nWoD/Changeling rules. For this game, I have made the Slender Man an exile of The Shadow Court. He feeds off the souls of children, turning them into Black Eyed Kids, which he then manipulates like puppets so he can find more souls to consume. I decided to make The Operator Symbol a summoning symbol.

The characters (Diana and Alexa) were exploring a wooded area, looking for the masked figure that had chased them out of Alex’s apartment. Diana decided to take a stick and draw The Operator Symbol into the dirt. Alexa, who was a Fetch, immediately sensed Slender Man’s arrival. She began to panic, telling her companion, who sensed nothing, they needed to leave. Diana refused to leave and a brief scuffle ensued. Diana managed to pin Alexa to the ground. Slender Man, sensing that Alexa was a Fetch, instantly killed Alexa by causing her to spontaneously combust. Both players were completely shocked. Diana succeeded in a composure roll, so she didn’t lose consciousness. She immediately erased The Operator Symbol.

In fairness, prior to the game I had discussed the concept of Fetches and Changelings with Alexa’s player, and she knew at some point the real Alexa would be returned (with no memory of the events up to her return). But the opportunity to shock both players with a sudden, unexpected death was too good to pass up. It would also teach Diana to be a little more cautious with arcane symbols.

[Setherick]

The Anecdote that Almost Happened

I haven’t spent the time to write out this anecdote because there is not much to tell, but it does point to something that could have been glorious. In the spring of 2007, shortly before Karee and I left Springfield, Jason decided to run a Forgotten Realms game. We had so many players that Jason decided to break us into two groups – team good and team evil – and bring us together at the end of the campaign for an epic battle royale. I forget who was on team good, but team evil consisted of Karee, Dan, Ross, and myself. For a number of complicated reasons that were not Jason’s fault, the game only lasted one session, but, oh, what a session it was.

A bit of a back story first. Ross and I rarely played PCs at the same time. The only time that we played PCs together in an extended campaign was a Mage game where we ended up separated from the rest of the players, presumed dead, and returned from a surprise trip to the moon on a space airship.

In the Forgotten Realms game, Ross had decided he was going to play an undead sorcerer of course – Ross is fairly predictable with his undead and fantasy games. I was torn on what I wanted to play, and then I stumbled upon the Duskblade. Here was a character that met my particular play style, melee and combat caster, a hybrid I could live with that was not a Paladin or a Fallen Paladin.

Then things got interesting. I proposed to Ross, without Jason’s knowledge, that my character be Ross’ character’s bodyguard. Ponder that for a minute, the most evil RPPR PC maker and the horrible monster AS A TEAM. Team evil just got more evil. How better to justify metagaming when two PCs have been working together for several years before teaming up with another couple of evil doers.

For an example of how evil the undead and his body guard was, in the one session we played, Ross cast flesh-to-stone on a guard. Rather than just leaving the guard as a statue, I decided that we might as well crucify him and drove pitons into his hands and feet. Ross then cast stone-to-flesh, allowing the guard to return to living form, writhing in pain of course.

Occasionally, Ross and I still consider what team evil would have been like. But, the point for you, dear reader, is that every time you think that you have the worst pair of PCs in a game consider an undead sorcerer and his Duskblade body guard running around your game with the intent to be as evil as possible.

[clockworkjoe]

team evil = best team

[Wooberman]

We have a very small gaming community where I live and since we are all friends just rejecting a player/GM isn't often an option. Call us care bears if you will but we don't want to hurt feelings.

One of our GMs is a Shadowrun Nut. He loves Shadowrun. The rest of us are pretty indifferent but the thing is that he only wants to play Shadowrun 3.0. I've got nothing against dice pools but when you have to roll a minimum of 7 on a D6, no matter how many you have in your pool, it sucks. You don't feel awesome in the slightest. That coupled with the acquisition system of waiting in-game weeks to receive your new rifle and having the GM turn to the rest of the party and ask them what they're doing during that time when all everyone wants to do it just do another mission again sucks. Don't get me started on the Decking while everyone else sits and looks bored minigame.
This isn't necessarily the fault of 3rd ed Shadowrun and more the GMs love of minutiae.

The group is adamant that we don't want to play Shadowrun anymore. This isn't as bad as Caleb's experiences with World of Darkness but its starting to go that way.
Its difficult when we mention moving on to a different game and his face lights up "Hey I've got all these things we can do with Shadowrun, I can draw up pregens for you to play and...".
*Collective shuffle of feet and change the subject quickly*

We've decided an intervention is in order, This weekend before we start up our next session we're going to ask him to sit down, tell him clearly and carefully how much we respect him as a friend and pass him a copy of Eclipse Phase with the words "We love you but we don't want to play Shadowrun ever again".

[crash2455]

To be fair, Eclipse Phase can take equally as long if this guy loves minutiae. Having played Shadowrun 4e, I know that it's very possible to deal with a contact and have your stuff pretty much instantly. Maybe discuss the root issue with him and how his play style does not mesh with that of the rest of the group.

Greg Stolze has a name for these kinds of people: meanderers. They are the type of people for whom roleplaying the act of going out and buying a rifle is just as fun as using that rifle. It's not a bad play style by any means (our group is composed almost wholly of them) but if you want to get down to the mission at hand, I can see how it would be frustrating.