Author Topic: Anecdote Megathread  (Read 343863 times)

Murph

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #60 on: October 12, 2009, 09:51:56 PM »
Just read Dunky Winterbean. Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnncccccceeeeeeeeerrrr!!!!

nekomata

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #61 on: October 19, 2009, 07:14:42 AM »
Well, we had our first session sat. It went pretty well, some friction getting people adapted to GURPS. The highlight in my mind was the fight with 3 werewolves. The werewolves have unkillable 1, requiring a total of 84 damage to kill. One took 3 .50AE rounds to the chest for a total of 56 damage after modifiers, and one of the players stabbed one in the balls twice with a silver edged dagger... That was a pissed off werewolf, when it was actually able to move. ;D My rolls sucked though, only one player took damage, and he had super regeneration. The players also managed to take about an hour of material I had, and stretched into a 4 hour game, and didn't even get to the boss fight. It was a good thing, I hadn't slept in like 20 hours and hadn't eaten in 12. Next session I'm going to make sure the guy with the dagger finds a boot in his pelvis.
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VilaWolf

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #62 on: November 03, 2009, 08:49:51 PM »
The best and worst experiances of mine have both been online:

First we have a three year epic failure of the worst game I've every played. What makes it so sad is that they have that rare, beautiful potential you don't see very often. They just can't hold a game together for more than a month, they min-max and worse of all, they use House Rules. It started out three years ago with a Livejournal invite to a by-post RP with the condition my application had a minimum of 1000 word RP sample in the character I was auditioning for. For the first two weeks I was in heaven. These people could play. I mean every post submitted, by all players, was well over that 1000 word min and they posted eight/nine times a night. When all five players were on at the same time, we could crank out an entire threads in less than an hour. Four threads a night sometimes. We worked out entire novels.

Then it stopped. Just like that. I log on and the board is deserted. It's me and the crickets for three weeks. Finally one of them thought to check the board and saw I was still there going WTF. They had moved on to another game and never bothered telling me. A year later I get an email. They heard a sequel to the movie we were rping the first round was out and they couldn't find anyone who could play the character like I did. They wanted me back for the new board. I should have known.

Two years later of on again off again playing I finally snap and yell at them. Three years I put up with their crap and I was done. Every time one of them saw a movie they'd go skipping off into the sunset and leave everyone else hanging. I say they as the two who are most guilty are “cousins”, even though we've never seen them separate and there's a standing joke/theory that it's the same person. A third player was they “yes man” and would follow them blindly from board to board. The fourth and I have become something of friends and continue to chat and bemoan the possibilities.

Then comes what started in an MSN Chat-Room RP in 1993 and turned into the greatest online game I have ever played. It went on for more than five years moving from chat rp to by post rp and it was everything a Gamer could have ever wanted in an online game. Solid descriptive posts, players who actually logged on, just about everyone took their characters seriously...I still make periodical pilgrimages to the remains of the site to mourn the loss to this day.

The New Tombstone.

Take the movie Tombstone, set in Dungeons and Dragons cross it with World of Darkness and any and all TV/Custom character you could write in a decent “how they got to TNT” story and you where in. I played the Invisible Man, Darien Fawkes as well as his nemesis Arnaud de Fhon, later taking on half the goddamned cast of the show. There was no character limit. As long as you could keep in character and posted, you could play.

There where something like 30 "full time" individual players another 40 "occasional" players who'd stick around for a thread or two and over 150 characters. For five years we would put in anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour or three a day every day and would post. Even if it was “sorry guys I cant play tonight.” We still made sure to at least be there daily. I made friends the world over whom I still talk to and trade halloween cards with yearly. We would buy birthday gifts for each others kids and when one of us was broken into one night, live during a chat, we did all but form a mob. The only thing that stopped us was was the distance. One of us was Australia, two in England, A Canadian, and three of us where scattered across the states. (it was a slow night) By the time all of our planes would have arrived, the police would have the guy in protective custody. Then MSN Groups closed the 18+ section of their site about a year or so after 9-11 and we where forcefully disbanded. While the loss of the game itself was sad, I still talk to my fellow players just about daily. I don't remember much of the story line due to the amount of characters and post count we would produce in a day, it was just impossible to keep track of everyone. What I do remember are the friends I made the world over who I continue to be friends with to this day. I have couches the world over I can crash on any time.

Shallazar

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #63 on: November 06, 2009, 08:40:08 PM »
Thats a great tale dood.

The online sphere is where I was first introduced to RPing. AOL chatrooms, oh man.
Then I graduated to the MSN chats for a while but somehow kept ending up in creepy anthro chats. *shudders*
But the creme de le creme was a beseen client chat called The Vampire's Kiss. Or the VK for short.

I was young and confused as to what was really going on in this room. But finally through trial and error, many character deaths, threats and just plain ol' bailing- I struck up a friend ship with this Jade, Nefertiti, Christopher, Kasortar and to some extent Morguline.
The chat was basically founded on V:TM and it inspired me to buy the books. Eventually beseen went belly-up.

But since I had the books, I used them. I ran the best games throughout highschool with my irl friends.
The games were basically angst and katanas + GTA.
But damn, I mean, blowing the entire party out of a 40 story sky-scraper into the night air of tokyo was a pretty great finale at my going away party.
From time to time I try to resurrect the HIGH OCTANE ACTION of those days with my players, to varying degrees of success.

I mean I owe my RPG loving soul to the internet and its assorted badasses.
I wish I was Tom.

Granted, you are now Tom.

Vastin

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #64 on: December 06, 2009, 10:38:51 AM »
 Hi everybody. My name is Vastin, I've been playing RPGs for awhile now, but last night I had something happen thats never happened to me in a game before. Its just too good not too share with everyone here.

 Afew friends and I just started a new campaign acouple weeks ago. we were all level one characters, I'm a fighter, My girlfriend Xarian was a half-elf bard, My friend Neiren is a half-elf cleric and our friend Kaisa was a ranger who would roll percentile dice to see if he cares about anything that the group did. our first couple of sessions went like a typical game. we got to town hand had to investigate the ruins below the city for an evill cult. we were led to a secret cave entrance and killed some skeletons and goblins. well as we were investigating we came across a door with ancient dwarven writing on it. I was able to sound out the phrase which opened the door to an unused section of the temple. When everyone went to rest I continued to search the area. as I was looking around I came to a large circular room where the doors would revolve around the room. I found one with a box on a large stone table. inside the box was a peice of parchment I could not read. I eventually found my way backl to the group, and brought everyone back. Xarian was able to read the instructions which told us it was a deck of many things. we each had to declare how many card we were going to draw and then keep any of the effects we got.

 Kaisa went first and was going to draw two cards. As he was explaining some of the cards effects he drew the king of clubs, trapping his soul in a gem. I went next and drew the queen of clubs, which gave me a negeative one to all my saving throws. I then drew a queen of diamonds which gave me three wishes, I then used them to find kaisa's soul and give myself a plus two to my strength. I then drew the king of diomonds giving me a greater wonderous item and jumped me from a lvl one fighter to a lvl ten warrior. Xarian went next and summoned a dire wraith that killed her instantly. neiren got an outsider as an mortal enemy and 2 greter magical wepons. kaisa and xarian decided to roll new chars and our gm bumped everyone else to lvl 8 to balance things out. all in all it was very interesting.

Boyos

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #65 on: December 06, 2009, 10:23:43 PM »
haha. almost as good as the old school dung crawl pbp ross ran a few months back.

TigerStorm

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #66 on: December 13, 2009, 02:24:47 PM »
The online sphere is where I was first introduced to RPing. AOL chatrooms, oh man.

I remember those days of online RP'ing where everyone just went into a room and sat in a corner and watched. (which seemed to create 42 different corners in a tavern)

Anyhoo... This is my first post on the boards and I suppose it's appropriate that it's an anecdote. (I hope I spelled that correctly)

This is one of my proudest gaming moments. Not because of anything I really did, but because of a fairly inexperienced player finally getting it.

There was a new player introduced to the group who was new to tabletop RP. All she really wanted to do was throw fire around without any clear character direction. This provided two problems: First, we were all fairly high level and learning how to create characters and play 3.5 D&D starting at level 15 is a pain (nevermind the pain in trying to teach her). After several failed attempts and A LOT of complaining (by her and the other players) we decided that something needed to be done before the group just had enough. Truthfully, I think the only reason she even put up with the group and stayed with us was that she ended up dating the GM.

When we all sat down and talked about it, we decided on a good solution. We all needed to take a step back and look at how we had been making characters as of late, anyway. So we decided that we would vote as a group what each player would make and start at lvl 1. We discussed at length which race and class would fit each player best. This way, it would be easier for new players to the group to feel comfortable with their characters and would give veteran players an insight to what people thought of them.

The results were astounding. The game turned into one of the best campaigns we had played in a long time. The best moment happened between my character (a human paladin) and the aforementioned pain in the but's character (a gnome rogue). We were around lvl 6-8 by this point and my character had been drawing a lot of heat from a corrupt official which, consequently, put the other characters in life-threatening situations on a regular basis. He decided to fake his own death for their sake but to do it with them witnessing so that, if they were ever quesioned, they would answer honestly.

The perfect opportunity happened when we were ambushed by a group of arcane archers hired by the corrupt official. After identifying that they were using death arrows, I saw my chance. The only other person who knew what I was doing was our GM's character (a high elf ranger). On the surface the other characters believed that we hated each other (which we had, in the beginning). But the truth of the matter was that they had grown to respect each other in their own right and had become decent friends. Making good use of my bodyguard feat, I took a death arrow which had been aimed at the gnome rogue. I had passed the save, of course, but fell anyway. The rest of the group chased the assassins off and our ranger came back to check on my condition. (for story purposes, it was fortunate that the one who had been playing a cleric wasn't there that day) I was barely hanging on (or so the other players thought) and proceeded to take each player into another room for his "final words" to each of them. The player whose character I had saved literally came out crying. I had given her the classic "I can't protect you anymore, but you're strong enough to take care of yourself now." speech. She was into her character so much that she actually broke down into tears a little over this. It was all I could do to hold back the smile. Not so much that it made her sad, but that she stopped thinking of the character as just a collection of numbers on paper. They proceeded to bury me and travel elsewhere. The ranger's wolf came back and dug me up. After that, her gnome's general demeanor changed drastically. (as would anyone who had lost such a close companion in that way) I was so proud of her.

My character had then gone off and assumed a completely different identity: that of a costumed vigelante bent on throwing a monkey wrench in the corrupt official's plans (found an awesome prestige class for it and everything). Fast forward to about two months later (real time) when the characters learned of this costumed vigelante and had decided that his cause was a noble one. They (unprompted by my new character or the GM) decided to go help champion his cause. I asked the GM if he would mind if I played this "new character" since it looked like they were going to join him. He, of course, agreed. They never learned of his true identity until many sessions later when he was captured by the official and put on display as an example for all to see. When the GM described his unmasked appearance, the girl who had played the gnome proceeded to throw her dice down, storm over to me, and beat the crap out of me for some time. After she cooled off, we all had a good laugh about the whole thing. Once we explained to her the point of putting her through all that, she realized that she had more fun playing the character than just rolling dice and was a little proud of her progress, too.
« Last Edit: December 13, 2009, 08:54:41 PM by TigerStorm »

Boyos

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #67 on: December 14, 2009, 12:01:46 AM »
now thats some good role playing. brovo.

TigerStorm

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #68 on: December 14, 2009, 12:15:50 AM »
Thank you. I'm going to miss that group. Some real life stuff drove a wedge in an already diminishing group. I'm currently in the process of finding a new group upon which I can build future anecdotes.

Mckma

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #69 on: December 27, 2009, 11:19:36 PM »
So a pretty massive story consisting of two sessions of crazy Call of Cthluhu misadventures, misdeeds, and mishaps.  A note before I begin to help set the stage and explain some of the ridiculousness: this is a group that is fairly new to Call of Cthulhu, being only the second/third times they have all played and the second/third games I've run (I actually owe it to RPPR that we tried the system).  As to be expected with a group that is transitioning from high school to college (there is one member left who is a Senior in High School), there was a certain attitude of kick-in the door and kill the monsters that I was hoping people would be able to set aside for the game.  Still being a new Keeper/GM, I chose to run adventures out of Escape from Innsmouth (really liked Shadow Over Innsmouth as well as CoC: Dark Corners of the Earth), and for those familiar, I planned to run a quick intro with one of the adventure seeds then the Escape adventure and eventually the Raid.  Sorry it's a bit long, but it's important to understand some of the details here to get the ridiculous logic and chaos that happens later.  Alright here goes...

Heads Up: Probably contains spoilers for the Escape from Innsmouth adventure/Shadow Over Innsmouth story, so if you care, you've been warned

Brotherly Love
This was the plot hook (set in Arkham) that I decided to run for what I was intending to be a short segment in which the characters got a feel for some of the weird stuff around Innsmouth (i.e. fishmen) before they played the two main adventures, the Escape and Raid.  The idea is that a 8 year old was killed by a Deep One that was sent by another 8 year old classmate.  It turns out that the classmate is a hybrid whose brothers has changed into a Deep One.  This should have been a pretty simple investigation where they briefly stop in Innsmouth to find some weird stuff going down.  The characters were, Boba Dog Fett the Bounty Hunter, a Private Investigator who was originally going to be a Russian Peasant and was never named, and a Turkish Spy whose name escapes me at the moment.

The characters took a bit of directing and leading, but eventually started on their way investigating.  After talking to a few people and practically accusing everyone he met, Boba eventually found his way to the 8 year old hybrid's residence and began talking to him while a woman relative stood behind him.  Well, my first clue that things were going to take a turn for the "interesting" (not counting the names as we usually choose pretty nonsense names and general lack of serious play) was when Boba asked "How much does this kid weigh?  About?"  I thought for a minute and responded, estimating 80-90 pounds as that is what his character would be able to guess.  "Okay, I grab him."  I looked at him and he said he was serious, he was going to grab the kid and make a run for it.  I reminded him that this was CoC and not DnD, and there were police and the like and just grabbing a random kid (at the point he only knew that the kid had fought with the dead boy a few days before) may not be the best idea.  He insisted he still wanted to do it, so we looked up the rules for grappling and Boba grabbed the kid.  In response the woman grabbed him and we had opposed strength checks.  I gave her a strength of 10 as it seemed reasonable off the top of my head, giving Boba about a 85% chance to win and take the kid.  He failed.  Naturally she slams the door and calls the police.  I thought this would serve as a pretty good lesson that they can't just do whatever they want and figured it would add some flavor as he would either have to talk his way out, serve some time, or hide from the law.  No, Boba decides to up the ante and asks how long it will take the cops.  Hearing a response time of a few minutes he declares he is going to break into the house and take another shot at it.  Finding the door firmly locked through a short series of questions, decides to shoot the window next to the door and climb through there.  Having a pistol skill of 99, it was hard to argue his ability to do so and he enters the house.  He looks around for the kid, and only finds the woman.  Luckily he decides to knock her out rather than just shoot her and so we look up the knock out rolls and suceeds.  He then searches the house, tearing it apart and finds the kid, grabbles him and knocks him out.

At this point I decide the cops should arrive and Boba quickly runs out the backdoor towards the marsh/bog that is nearby.  Not wanting to lose his prize, but also realizing he can't just walk through town with him, he decides to look for a place to hide the kid in the marsh and uses his belt to hog tie the 8 year old so that he will stay put until Boba could return that night (it was about 5-ish by the way).  At this point I really wasn't sure what to do anymore and figured it would take the police a while to put things together and look for Boba (although he had already given them some help as he and another PC had been harrassing the coroner who didn't know anything about the murder), so he was able to hide out at his office for a while.  In the middle of the night, he returned to the spot to find the kid gone and webbed footprints in the mud, and decided to flee the town and head to Innsmouth, telling the others to follow in the morning.  He ended up sleeping in his car outside of Innsmouth all night and drove to a nearby city in the morning to report that he had abducted the kid, but when he returned that night, he couldn't find him.

The next day they went to investigate the old house of the hybrid's family, and, foolishly, I decided to add some flavor that was suggested in the book, and made Boba and the Turkish Spy make listen checks (the PI was still back in the previous town as he had decided to sleep in for some reason and thus got a late start).  They succeeded and heard some noises from inside a boarded up house (a Deep One was inside).  Boba, used to DnD and not CoC decided that it was time to kick in the door and fight the monster.  He was alone in this thought and began tearing off boards while the Turkish Spy went on to check out the hybrid's house.  Boba had pulled off all the boards on the door by the time that the Spy had returned after gathering information.  The Spy tried to convince Boba to leave well enough alone as they had found some interesting evidence in the old house, and didn't need to chase after strange things (the player was metagaming a bit I think as he had read the story before, but I didn't care as I didn't really want them to fight the Deep One as it wasn't really supposed to be fought at that point).  Long story short after a lot of stubbornness, the Spy agreed to check out the house.  The entered, found webbed footprints and proceeded to look around, eventually opening the door to the basement to be ambushed by the hiding Deep One.  They dispatched it fairly easily and about that time the PI arrived and they (being naive) decided the authorities should be notified and shoved the 7 foot tall creature into the back seat of the PI's Model T.  The Spy (once again probably metagaming a bit) decided, "I'll go check out the library, you can go talk to the police."  So the did.  As those of you familiar with the story would guess, the hybrid fishmen police were none too happy to find that some "outsiders" had killed a Deep One and were now seeking praise.  I dropped the players a hint when I let the roll idea rolls to notice some of the "fishy" characteristics of the Innsmouth residents, albeit a bit late.  This had all completely deviated from my original plan.  Not being particularly familiar with CoC or improvising in general, I pulled from what I already had seen/played in Innsmouth and had the constable convince the PCs to stay in the Gillman House.  This was because Boba had fast-talked his way into pretending to be a biologist that should examine the corpse of the Deep One (really he wanted to take it back to the previous town to show what had killed the kid) and the constable said he could do it in the morning.  Boba and the PI were suspicious, but went with it.  The Spy decided to spend the night in the abandoned house that they had investigated and left a note for the other two PCs with where he would be.

That night the PCs were attacked and forced to flee the city (not before using a stick of dynamite to blow a chunk out of the Gillman House first), and long story short, Boba and the PI were capture and thrown in jail as I figured it would add some incentive to the "Escape" portion in which they would be rescuing another person who had run afoul of the fishmen of Innsmouth...


Escape from Innsmouth
The Spy managed to sneak out of the town and make it back to Arkham were he was able to patch up things with the coroner and accomplish a few plot related things.  Not to bore with the details (they were pretty focused for a while), the important thing to note was the two replacement characters that came in: Jango Fett and his unnamed Chinese Criminal Manservant/Driver.  The eventually discovered that the character they were looking for, Brian Burnham, had been kidnapped by the Innsmouthers and was being held in the jail as well as most of the story of what was going on with Innsmouth, without much trouble we ended the session with the characters thinking about how they would get Brian out of jail.


So yeah, that's that, I'll write the second half of the story so far (my session from earlier today) after I take a bit of a break.

Maze

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #70 on: December 28, 2009, 11:08:20 AM »
That is truly awesome. Sometimes player logic might not create the best of games, but it sure makes for interesting stories to tell afterwards.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2009, 02:01:24 PM by Maze »

Mckma

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #71 on: December 28, 2009, 11:51:02 AM »
That is truly awesome. Sometimes player logic might not create the best of games, but it sure makes for interesting stories to tell afterwards.

Oh, definitely that's what I was thinking the whole time (and the reason why I let it keep going).  The second session was much more disastrous but much more humorous.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2009, 04:12:33 PM by Mckma »

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #72 on: December 28, 2009, 02:02:15 PM »
I've personally had more troubles coming up with anecdotes nowadays. Gone are the days of crystal mountains and psychotic bastards wanting to blow up a gas station "just in case" and deciding the police officer is a power player.

Oh wait, no they're not. I've still got a player like that with whom I need to keep a short leash for fear of him ruining the game for everyone. Speaking of leashes, let me start by telling you he's a D&D player at heart. The first thing he buys when he makes a character in D&D is a rope, because "you'll never know when you need a rope." True, can't argue with that logic. What logic I can argue with is: "I'll go through unspeakable shit to get it, I'd even kill people, because we might need that rope."

Let me put it in context in the most simplest way possible: Apocalyptic wasteland in 2440, they've just lost their jeep and a fellow team member in a huge lake of acidic toxic water by trying to cross it. The lake submerged half of a medium-sized city and only the skyscrapers stood out of the water. They've discovered people living there, peculiar people. This place, called "City of the birds" or "City in the sky", was run by priests worshiping as god, a huge-ass bird called Vulture. Vulture was a mix of hawk, crow and lappet-faced vulture with a 25 meter wingspan. Oh, and it had an offspring. The offspring called "Babbys", was a conglomeration of bird heads, wings and feets that grew 2 1/2 meter high. Unable to pretty much do anything, the priests had to constantly feed it to keep it content or else Vulture might get agitated. So, the 11 priests had bird costumes, harpoon guns and would travel from one skyscraper to another by zip lines and hunt for birds. The rest of the population of the city we're living on the lower levels, forbidden to leave or climb up for which the punishment was being harpooned in the back of the head. They lived about 40 per building (all on the same floor) and their job was to hunt bugs with their hands, they would then travel by ways of rope bridge to a central skyscraper where they would fill buckets, lift them up with any of the four system of pulley in exchange for birds to eat. Those people were mostly all sick and underfed but prisoners.

When the players happened to stumble upon this place with only two barrels of provision, I had no idea what they would do. Their characters were not superheroes, or even do-gooders. Just people trying to survive to a harsh place.

So after talking to the inhabitants, one of the player, whose character name was "A.T." told the others to wait for him and went straight for the system of pulleys. When he tried to climb up the rope, it offended everyone around and they try to pull him down as best as they could with their weak arms. Failing to do that, they entangled him up and pulled him up as a sacrifice. When he arrived up, he came face-to-face with a priest that found their behavior "unacceptable" and told him so. They trespassed and came to their holy land without having been called upon, it's "unacceptable". He tried to bargain the fresh water and fish he had brought in barrels in exchange for rope. "No," the priest responded, "It's unacceptable! You will trade food in exchange for forgiveness and then leave." He threatened them. "It's innaceptable! Vulture-help-you, you shall be sacrificed to Babbys for your impudence!" So he jumped back down the line, started kicking and punching in the crowd. The other players came to help. A.T. decided to cut the rope, and jump in the water with it. The people start throwing rocks at him but with the luck of the dice, they escaped.

I should've killed him.

Since then, the other players didn't let him speak or interact with anyone important ever again. There was a time where they were negotiating over the radio with some barons that were asking for a tax for them to drink water from their lake (hint-hint). The character had to speak on the radio and cut the mike immediately after because A.T. would be like saying unspeakable things. I love how players react to being bullied by some bigger organization. Even though it's just a tax that they're not paying themselves (it was deers hunted by the people of a village they were in)

Mckma

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #73 on: December 28, 2009, 04:13:22 PM »
Part two of my Call of Cthluhu story, this all happened yesterday, which was a week after the original session.  I thought that the previous session would have taught some lessons or at least helped, but as you'll see, it didn't.  At all.


Escape from Innsmouth Part 2
The PCs, Jango, his Manservant, and the Spy had just discovered a diary which had a combination to the safe which Brian, the guy they were trying to find, had tried to open before he was taken by the Innsmouth residents and imprisoned.  They head to the safe and find a fortune hunting Mercenary there trying to open the safe (another PC played by a player who had joined that session).  The Spy shoves the Mercenary out of the way, opens the safe and grabs the Book of Dagon and everyone heads off to the jail to bust out Brian.  The reason I mention it was because how funny I always found the "you look trustworthy" method of recruiting other PCs.  In this case, that was completely skipped over and PC hive mind was employed ("Hey there, you already know everything we know, let's go").  It wasn't worth arguing, so they arrive at the jail.  They pull out their guns and get ready to kick in the doors and start shooting.  I remind them that they can't really justify killing officials to bust someone out of jail.  After talking to them for a while, they decide to go around back and realize, "Hey, we could pop out these grates and get the prisoners out."  They also find the two characters that they had previously lost in Innsmouth in another cell.  They spend about ten minutes arguing on a plan that, knowing the Innsmouth residents, wouldn't really work, but I certainly wasn't going to say anything at this point as I had found it quite amusing.  Here was the plan:

The PCs gathered all of the dynamite they happened to have between them, 8 sticks (I think that only two characters explicitly said they had dynamite before then, and I had to argue everyone down to only carrying two sticks, but whatever), and gave them to Jango who strapped seven to his chest and put one in his pocket.  He was then going to run around and pull the suicide bomber feint in order to distract the police so the others could get Brian out (they decided to leave behind the other two PCs as they weren't important, despite Jango's main character motivation being to save his son, one of the PCs).  That was the plan, and failing to plan more than that lead to the following events:

Jango runs around to the front and says, "Okay I have my gun in one hand and the detonator in the other."  I ask him what detonator he is talking about and then inform him that there would be no way that they would actually have a detonator between them.  He improvises and pulls out a lighter which he holds near, but not near enough to accidentally light, one of the sticks of dynamite.  He runs in and says, "I start yelling a mix of German and English, but enough English so they know what I want," (he was a German bounty hunter).  I tell him to make a language check, to which he responds "I don't have that, but I'm from Germany," and I tell him to roll a language check for English then.  He decides to just yell in English with a German accent.  I ask him what he is yelling and he says just to distract them and stuff.  "Yes, but what exactly are you saying/asking/demanding?" I ask, and eventually, after a puzzled look get a, "I tell them to drop their weapons."  At this point he asks the other players if they are going to pop the grate, to which I tell them to make listen checks.  They all fail.  I tell them that they don't know that Jango has started and therefore can't be sure the constables are distracted.  Jango, meanwhile notices that the two constables (hereafter, Smart and Stupid, as one was a buff fishman who was less than intelligent) exchange a look and then draw guns.  Jango makes a failed shot as he starts running (realizing that nothing was happening that he had expected), but gets shot twice in the back.  This all happened quickly and the player gets mad remembering that there were three more people in the jail who could have told the PCs, demands they get listen checks.  I thought it was legit, and didn't really want to have to kill Jango so they rolled and succeed and we rework the last 20 seconds or so.  They get Brian out and Jango is able to run out and duck into an alley next to the station.

Here's the situation: All of the player's current PCs are in a car with Brian (who immeadiately insists they go get his girlfriend and out of town) and drive to a street north of the police station and about a block away, except for Jango who is hiding in the alley next to the police station.  The two constables (hybrid Deep Ones, if you didn't know) run out of the station and split, going in opposite directions.  The Smart One fails to spot Jango and runs down the street popping onto the street the car is waiting on, two buildings down the street.  Jango claims they had decided where to meet up when they made the plan and says he runs there.  He is running down an alley, and can see the car, when the Stupid One (who had doubled back and run around the other side of the police stations) shoots at him from behind, missing.  This is happening at the same time that the PCs in the car see the Smart One come around the corner ahead.  Jango's Chinese Criminal/Manservant/Driver sees this and decides to run the Smart One down.  There is a lot of arguing as the player playing Jango realizes that he won't be able to get in the car then and all his character would see was the car pulling away, presumably ditching him.  After heated discussion I remind them that it is the Manservant's decision, and to think about what his character would do.  He decides to run the guy down (which myself and the Spy thought was while not the best decision was reasonable), much to the anger and outrage of two of the players.  So Jango sees the car pull off and decides he'll pop around the corner and shoot the Stupid One point blank.  We look up point blank rules and finds it double hit range.  He gets annoyed as he had 99 pistol skill to begin with.  I had already decided, out of personal interest that the Stupid One would pick up a 2x4 since he had a 2x4 skill listed and it statistically did more damage (and had better hit chance) than his gun.  He comes around corner, and gets shot by Jango.  He swings the 2x4 and hits Jango for 7 damage, reducing him to 7 HP.  Jango shoots twice more the next round while the Spy says he is going to get out and go help Jango to which everyone else tells him not to and they'll just turn the car around and pick up Jango.  Figuring that the Model-T would not be too maneuverable, I say it will take two rounds to get back.  The Stupid one swings again, impales and hits Jango for 19 damage.  This gets Jango angry and he gets mad at the Manservant who he insisted he had told to wait for him and that it was all his fault he died.  There's general yelling and various things and eventually they decide to break out the other two PCs since they killed the two constables.  Here's where things get good:

They succeed and Boba goes to retrieve weapons from his father's corpse (which he knows is there for some reason), and the Mercenary walks with him.  Boba's player eventually convinces the Mercenary's player to tell him what happened so he will have justification to kill the Manservant (which he said he was going to do as soon as Jango died).  The Mercenary tells him that the Manservant had been a moron and pulled off before Jango could get in, resulting in his death (which wasn't entirely true as Jango could have run down and gotten in the car).  The PI (the first character from the guy who played the Manservant) got in the car and the Manservant pulled the car out to the street to wait for everyone to get in so they could head off.  Brian, sick of everything and having to wait to get his girlfriend, runs off to get her.  The PCs don't care at this point (even though he was the person they were supposed to be investigating and eventually rescuing), and he leaves, presumably to get killed.  The Spy, who realizes Boba's intent doesn't get in the car and walks up to the street behind.  They are all standing on the street when Boba walks to the passenger side, and shoots the Manservent.  He isn't killed and hits the gas, driving off with the getaway car.  At this point the player playing the Mercenary had to leave and turned his character over to Boba's player, letting him know that his character was pissed enough now to kill the Manservant.  So the Mercenary and Boba start shooting at the fleeing car.  The Manservant's player and the player of Boba/Jango start arguing at the table, talking about who's actions were justified in what situations (talking about leaving Jango, shooting the Manservent, etc.).  It is now the Spy's turn, and sick of the absolute mental breakdown that is happening in the street of the hostile town, tells me, "I'm dropping my last grenade and running."  This was very amusing to me, as with all of the arguing at the table, I was the only one who heard his action.  I move to next person and the Mercenary and Boba take more shots at the car before it goes out of range.  I then tell the players that the grenade goes off and the Spy rolls damage, killing both the Mercenary and Boba.  Boba's player is really annoyed now and demands to know what grenade and claims, "I didn't know about it, I would have done something."  "Exactly," I said, "you were too busy trying to kill the Manservant and shooting at his car you failed to notice the grenade dropped behind you."

There were several points at which I thought about adding some fishmen to try and help them team up again, but then I realized that the players were doing just fine killing themselves...

Boyos

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Re: Anecdote Megathread
« Reply #74 on: January 01, 2010, 01:04:45 AM »
Player Logic FTW!

Great job with the nade!