Memorable Gaming Moments

[Domhnall]

Here's one... The player wrote a note to the GM.  The GM graded it for grammar/spelling (a C-) and handed it back.  Top that!

[Andy Kitkowski]

This happened the other week in a Conan OGL game -

Alan is a great guy. An OK GM/DM. Old school.

Our party has "split up", in one room, and everyone is doing a different thing (examining, looking for stuff).

One by one, Alan (physically) takes about 3 players out of the room, to the kitchen, to tell them the secret stuff they find or whatever. Gold coins. Human bones. Etc.

Only problem is, Alan talks loud enough, and the kitchen is close enough, that we can all clearly hear all the other character's secrets.  Furthermore, we could all give a rat's ass that The Rogue found 2 GP behind the Stone Chair...

[Andrew Morris]

Okay, this was way back many years ago, when no one in my D&D group really understood how the rules worked. The party had encountered some creature or another that had a fear effect.

DM: "So...uhm...yeah...the thing...it's...uhm...really scary."

Player: "Okay, I kill it."

DM: "No, no -- it's really scary!"

Player: "Well, why can't I just kill it? It won't be scary then."

DM: "You can't kill it...uhm...because you shit your pants! Yeah."

Player: "What?"

DM: "Yup. Shit your pants. That's what it says. [taps a notebook]"

Player: "You're kidding, right?"

DM: "No, roll for tonnage."

Of course, since we were a bunch of young boys, we all thought this was hilariously funny, and were "rolling for tonnage" the rest of the session. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and kick my own ass, on general principles.

[Valamir]

Back in the day we had an ongoing AD&D1e campaign where we'd rotate DMs, typically on the basis of who got gacked last.  You could tell a DM was running out of prepared scenario when he started desperately trying to kill somebody.

Well I had just finished up a spot as DM and hadn't made my character yet.  The part of the world we were in was a strong Good Theological based feudal area (lots of knightly paladins and the like).  The only M-Us in the region were a pair of high level rival evil wizards (one lawful, one chaotic---high level back in the day being 9-11 ish) who between them either recruited or killed any low level M-Us around (something the anti magic clergy were happy to allow them to do).

Well the next DM's set up was that the local chaotic wizard had begun assembing the ubiquitous army of orcs and trolls and assorted riff raff (think Saruman in Orthanc) and was threatening the kingdom.  The party (all about 6-8 level at the time) knew that going up against a high level MU without a high level MU of your own was deadly, but there were no MUs in the area.  My new character couldn't be a straight MU because in the background you couldn't have a straight MU start higher than 3rd level, unless they were multiclass).

So the party hit on the idea of recruiting the local Lawful Evil NPC Wizard to help stop his rival from upsetting their balance of power.  The GM let me play the Lawful Evil wizard (something like 11 level I think).

Sooo, after many months of game time and several dungeon/wilderness crawls and trips back to base etc. etc. in full traditional fashion...we had the final battle at the top of the wizard's tower against his nastiest minions...and we were getting our butts handed to us.  So...Mr. Lawful Evil (me) figured that a) his rival's forces had already been largely destroyed so his mission was done; b) the two party leaders were a ranking Cleric and a high level Paladin (9th I think) from a religion that would burn him at the stake as a witch if they could catch him; c) self preservation is his first instinct; and d) hey he's evil right...

So I shot off a couple of ole Fireballs that blanketed the entire room...killing off about half of the party as well as several of the bad guys and teleported out (or dimensioned doored, or whatever that spell was that allowed to you zap to a predetermined location...back to my tower)...Most of the rest of the party got finished off by the baddies that were left, while I sat back in my chair and cackled gleefully.

One of my fondest gaming memories from those days:

"Ok Ralph, what are you doing?"
"Oh...I think I'll drop a fireball right about....here." pointing to the map
"Not there, that will hit us too, put it over there so it will go around the corner" says clueless paladin guy.
"No...I think right about here will do nicely...that way it will take out the ogres charging at me"
"but..."
"yep..."
"oh...shit..."


It still makes me smile.

[Frank T]

This one happened in our very first game of Star Wars d6 (1e) back at school. It is still a running gag after more than a decade, to the poor player's dismay.

So, it's the adventure "Rebel Breakout" from the book, if anyone knows it. The fresh-made characters are chasing through the tunnels of an underground mine, scores of stormtroopers on their heels. Our heroes are dodging blaster bolts and having a hard time.

Said player's character reaches a crossing, and I (the GM) shout at her: "Quick, where do you turn, left, right, or straight ahead?!"

She stares at me, wide eyed. Finally: "Straight ahead?"
_________

Another nice little incident happened some years ago in a game of "Das Schwarze Auge". That's a German fantasy rpg with a long history and a very detailed setting. Infamous for it's totally railroaded campaigns and "needing to make a roll for just about everything".

Now, we hadn't played published adventures for quite a while. At the time, we were very Sim, all exploration of setting and character, suspension of disbelief and so on. Unfortunately, the adventure was an older one that was based on largely on solving riddles, slaying monsters/adversaries and listening to the GM unfodling "the plot".

So we are at a place called Yeti Island, in the eternal ice. We have been fighting wolves and tracking mamooths for weeks. Then we get to a fertile valley with hot springs. My fellow player and me look at each other and go: "Cool, a warm bath at last!"

While the GM is frantically flipping pages, we declare we take off our clothes and wade into the water. Of course there was a monster in there. Caught us with our pants down, literally. Funny thing was, the beast shot dozens of little darts at us, which dealt 1d6-1 damage each. No problem normally cause our fur clothing would have granted two points of armor, to be subtracted. As it was, though, my character was dead in round one.

They brought me back with a healing spell, but you should have seen the GM's face.

[Andrew Norris]

I wouldn't know how to begin writing about the entire situation, but I managed to take my most disruptive player and turn her into a Bang generator.

She had all the classic Queen Bee behaviors. Flirty with all of the otherwise-male group, even with her boyfriend present at the table. Pouty when she was out of the spotlight for more than a half-hour. Couldn't stop talking about sex, in or out of game. (Hey, I invited her to play; fortunately, I've come a long way, baby.)

After one positively icky session, I managed to steer her into the path of the other PCs, throw her character enough special powers to keep her constantly in motion, and basically got her to derail my plot at every opportunity. (Which was great, because at that point I couldn't figure out how to get PCs to stop following the bread crumbs I kept laying down.) Hell, it wouldn't have been half as fun a campaign without her.

For example, enter the usual "two PCs wake up with a hangover, in bed together" situation. The other PC's Girl Friday (who's got a serious crush on him), who isn't even supposed to be in town, knocks at the door of the hotel room. He's frantically trying to get dressed -- and Ms. Bang opens the door buck-naked and graciously waves her in.

Now that I've learned a lot more about how to design a decent scenario, I'd never do something like that again. But it happened to work at the time. I guess I needed a player to show me how much players enjoy seeing their PCs put in bad situations.

[Meguey]

Well, there was the time in High School when the scene was all set, a big round room with ornate staff in the middle.  Most of the party dithers around. The quick little elf/thief type says "I go up to the staff" The rest of us dither. Clearly, the thing NOT to do is grab the staff. Elf says "I touch the staff." GM is listening intently, waiting for anyone to stop her. No one does. We dither. "I grab the staff." GM grins, and says "The ceiling beings to fall slowly, with a heavy grinding. It's already closed off the doors."  Eeep! Ok, note to self: don't dither!

More recently, the most memorable gaming moments were:

In our on-going Ars Magica home-brew:
-The great language misunderstanding around a coddled egg: The mage wanted breakfast, the maid brought a whole raw egg on a little pillow. We laughed till we cried.

-Figuring out that the bone wand from the dragon hoard was for moving dead bodies. Chills all 'round.

-Watching Damvild heal people in the war. Ick.

Lots more.

In our Prime Time Adventures game:
-The waders
-The shoes, hats, drinks motifs
-Um. Everything really. That game really delivers.

[xenopulse]

I GMed KULT. The characters were hunted by an underground organization. They left the city and decided to hang out in this old, abandoned mansion until things calmed down. I decided to pull out all the stops and go for the cliches. Torn curtains swaying in the breeze. Broken windows. Dark corners. Big main hall with dark stairs (not quite Resident Evil, but close). We were playing at night as well, by candle light.

During the night, the characters barricaded the door to the room they were sleeping in. They start hearing scratching sounds outside, from the main hall. Long, dark scratching and scraping. Finally, it stops.

The characters muster their courage and start heading down. They know the sounds came from the front door. They ready their guns. They carefully open the door and look outside. Nothing.

They close the front door again. And freeze.

They see long, deep scratch marks on the inside of the door.

This was the only time my players ever had actual goosebumps and shivers. Wonderful moment.

[Nev the Deranged]

During the night, the characters barricaded the door to the room they were sleeping in. They start hearing scratching sounds outside, from the main hall. Long, dark scratching and scraping. Finally, it stops.

The characters muster their courage and start heading down. They know the sounds came from the front door. They ready their guns. They carefully open the door and look outside. Nothing.

They close the front door again. And freeze.

They see long, deep scratch marks on the inside of the door.

This was the only time my players ever had actual goosebumps and shivers. Wonderful moment.

DUDE. I totally wrote that exact same story as a made up urban legend for one of my high school english classes. In my version it was a guy who stayed in a cabin overnight in woods that were supposed to be home to some creature that left claw marks on trees. He huddles in bed all night, listening to the scratching. In the morning he opens the door and sees nothing... until he turns around and the morning sun shows the interior walls are all covered with claw marks. GMTA I guess, eh?

One of my friends was telling me the other day about a game where the party had just failed to prevent some necromancer from becoming a lich empowered by some insanely powerful artifact. As he rose, he called out "As the new God of Death, I decree that the Sun is NO MORE!" at which point everything goes pitch black. The party hastily teleports to their base a continent and a half away- and it's still pitch black. The entire party freaks out and wails in despair, etc.

Of course, the lich had just cast an advanced Darkness spell on the party, the melodramatic decree was just to mess with their heads. Which goes to show that when it comes to wizards, it's the wily ones that are dangerous more than the powerful ones.

[Halzebier]

Our DM describing a corridor while we mapped out a dungeon:

"The corridor is 20' long and ends with a secret door."

[TonyLB]

GM:  "Harper discovers that Evil-Bad-Guy(tm) has a plan to destroy the noble, kind, aloof, all-powerful race of Faeries!"
Me (Harper):  "Is it a good plan?  Will it work if I don't interfere?"
GM:  "Oh yes, it's fiendishly clever.  You're the only one who could stop it."
Me:  "Oh good.  I don't."
GM:  "But... but the Faerie will all die in agony!  Don't you understand?"
Me:  "Understood.  Harper doesn't like them.  They're obnoxious, and for all their supposed power they just sit around telling other people to do their dirty work, except when they whip out the big magic to boss us around."
GM:  "Okay, let's go out of character for a moment.  I get why Harper would feel that way.  Let's figure out a way to make this work out, okay?"
Me:  "Out of character?  I think the game will be much better as soon as the Faerie are out of it.  We'll be thrown back on our own resources, and the story will be about our characters, just the way you always say you want it to be."
GM:  "So you're quitting the game, is that what you're saying?"
Me:  "I... don't think so."
GM:  "Game's over, everyone!  Tony quit without warning, and his character is integral to too many plots.  Go!  Blame him!  NOW!"

I get a warm smile just thinking about it.  I broke the GM by being too open to the cool possibilities of her story.

[Sydney Freedberg]

I have this thing for playing self-destructive female characters. Don't ask.

(1)
Ars Magica. I'm playing both a short-fused fire wizard from an aristocratic 12th century French family, and her ex-monk/con-man lover (with character flaw "never leave well enough alone"). In their introductory session, travelling to join the other PCs, they try to pull a con where she sets mysterious fires and then he sells sacred fire-protection relics. Nobody's buying. He gets beat up a lot. So she gets, well, tetchy. With fire magic.
Many sessions later, wizardly authorities show up to investigate her for something completely different. She (me) gets a little nervous and blurts out:
"I only burned down two villages, and one of them was an accident!"

(2)
Dungeons & Dragons drifted into cyberpunk -- over the course of the campaign, no less. The GM has set up a High Elf dictatorship that mercilessly lords it over less races; my character is the daughter of the elven High Theocrat, so frustrated with the arrogance of her own race that she ran away to live with humans. Oh, yeah, and cut the points off her own ears.
Many adventures, wildly powerful magic, our characters joining the rebellion and then defecting again because my character convinces everyone else they're just as brutal and dictatorial as her father. One last big blow-out against her father's forces.
She's captured. It's my last session before leaving grad school. The GM narrates a little scene where my character wakes up, back in her formal clothes, back in the palace, with her father smiling, patronizingly.
The GM tells me, "You feel a kind of lump in your stomach, from where the underground doctors operated on you. As if they left something in there."
I say, "Father, come closer."
He does, still smiling that patronizing smile.
KABOOM.
End of campaign.

[Anonymous]

We were playing Shadowrun, first edition. I usually was the decker, the rigger, the decker/rigger, the street mage, the face, the con man or something else with a specific duty. I was known in my group for coming up with insightful ways around obstacles and even making things funny (for the players) when the chips were all down. This time around, other guys wanted to try decking and magic. The group talked about what I should run, and they said they wanted to see what I could bring to the party as a full-out cybered up street samurai. Now, a street samurai can have a good Intelligence rating, so it's not like having a big, dumb mule in the party. The thing that separates a street samurai from everyone else is that he's cybered very heavily for combat effectiveness and that's his main focus. Differentiating a character built to be muscle for the highest bidder seemed like a bit of a challenge at first...

We were running this one scenario, it might have been pre-printed, in which we made it to one of the top floors of a 30 or so story building when a dragon shatters out the windows and starts messing with our party from the outside. All the other characters are pretty much paralyzed with fear, but my street samurai runs toward the window, extends his retractable forearm spurs, and jumps on the dragon's neck to try to ride him and maybe pry off a few scales. If he's going to die, he might as well take the brunt of it and give his team a chance to escape, right? Well, the dragon of course can fly better than my urban techno-centered warrior can ride a dragon. Who thought to take a skill for riding highly intelligent, magical, very powerful and pretty rare creatures? Not me. So, the street sammie, streetname Pony, ironically, gets bucked off the dragon and falls 27 or so stories into the decorative fountain in front of the building. The fountain was really there, the GM showed us the map of the business's campus.  My target number to buy down the damage from deadly to serious was set at 27. It looked bleak, as a target number of 13 or so was very unlikely to be met with 8 dice. For anyone who doesn't know, Shadowrun is played with d6, and you roll as many d6 as you have rating in your skill or attribute that applies. If you get a six on a die, you get to re-roll that die and add the results, for as many times as you roll a six. My guy had a Body rating of 6, had a bonus for impact from dermal implant armor, and he had no dice left in his combat pool. Miraculously, not one but two of my dice came up sixes the first four times they were rolled. I rolled once more and got a 3 and another six.

Not only did my guy survive, but the dragon was so annoyed he flew away and left us all alone. The other members of the party started occasionally calling me "DJ" instead of "Pony". "DJ" of course stood for "Dragon Jockey".


I once had a Shadowrun character with an extra high-level contact I got just for naming my character. The GM had been running a character in someone else's group and had built him up to be pretty powerful -- powerful enough that he went mostly legit and retired from running the shadows. That retired character was supposed to be our main contact in the business world, sending us most of our work. All of this was spelled out for the other players before I arrived. I named my character with the same last name by sheer coincidence, so the GM decided the powerful NPC was my uncle. He helped us quite handily a couple of times during our campaign.


I once had a campaign in a homebrew game in which evil forces were about to take over the Earth. In order to save humankind, I expected my party to organize large armies and use great force to counterattack. I made the mistake, though, of making it clear that all of the invaders had come to Earth in this wave of attack. So what my players chose was to have their characters recruit a bunch of genetically prime women (all the players and their characters were male) to travel with them, then destroyed the planet and left to go repopulate the human race elsewhere. The enemy was gone, but so were most of the humans. My players had put importance on survival of the species above survival of the members thereof. They did well according to their goals, and effectively ended the campaign.

[groundhog]

Sorry, but I guess I was away from my keyboard for too long. The dragon-riding Shadowrun Street samurai is my post, but got submitted as a guest post when I clicked the button.

[jerry]

Our DM describing a corridor while we mapped out a dungeon:

"The corridor is 20' long and ends with a secret door."

I think the greatest advancement in adventure gaming since the first published RPG is the creation of flavor text. Fortunately, before I started pre-writing flavor text, my players never listened to me.

Jerry