Troll Lord Games

Since I don't have any whacky NPC/Familiar/Player stories I was feeling left out of those conversations so I started up my own!

Got any crazy gaming stories, either in-game or out-of-game? I has two!

1. In game - It was the very first attack of the very first combat of a new 2nd ed campaign. We all had 1st level characters and we were using rules from all the optional books at the time... my PC was a girl fighter who used two cesti and via some rules wrangling she got three attacks per turn. So... first battle she won initiative... and I rolled two 1's and a three with the three attacks. Not so bad, but we used these home-brew critical/fumble tables that really made things go from bad to catastrophic. I did the requisite d100 rolls for my two natural 1s. And ended up killing the paladin PC with some kind of crazy fumble. Just like that. Poor sap didn't even get a chance to participate in the first combat. I still get heckled about this incident.

2. I wasn't involved in this story, but it grew to legendary status at my college. These guys I was vaguely familiar with played D&D in the garage of the creaky old house they rented. They had a huge punching bag hanging from the rafters and having a go at the bag during a game was a common occurence. Well, one day the rafter the punching bag was suspended from broke and, somehow, most of the garage fell in on the group. That's really gotta suck! No one was hurt (badly), but still... gotta suck. The house was condemned and they had to move out.

Next!
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::: Shane

::: Rational thought, not superstition

We got sent back in time to stop the rise of this evil nasty vampire.He found out about the plot to go back in time to kill him and tried to "stop " us but we had some amazing luck and won through. We didnt know who he was but knew that his first attack was located at the Inn out in the middle of nowhere.

So this female vampire attacked us there and after a crazy tough battle we put her and her familly of blood suckers down but I got bit.

The rest of the party hunted them down while I was being tenmded to so when I changed I killed our priest and the others at the inn and then tracked the rest of the party down and killed them one by one except for the one mage that got away and went back into the future.

Only afterwards could I tell the players that the DM had planed this from the start and I had been in on it the whole time. It was kinda fun becoming the big bad badguy even if he later terrorized our games for a long time.
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Baron Golden, Knights of the Tin Palace (GameOgre)

Subscriber to Crusader Magazine!
http://www.cncsociety.org

When I was in high school, my parents let me convert our garage into a gaming room. It was awesome.

Anyways, I had been doing some electrical wiring in there and still had a few loose wires hanging. I didn't know, but someone had cut the breaker back on .

So, that night while gaming (we where playing 2nd Edition), I jumped up from my DM seat to let out a dramatic in character curse as they killed the main villain and caught a live wire in my temple. They say I twitched a second then collapsed. I don't remember it at all.

Took them a few moments to realize I wasn't acting. I've never been right since.

Many years ago, one of the GMs I played under worked up a huge sub-campaign that centered around a PC played by his wife, Gail. Her quest was to conquer a certain area of the GM's world for her deity. This sub-campaign went on for months and months, with the main players involved every freaking weekend, or damned near.

Finally, the ultimate moment came, and Gail's PC faced the bad-guy boss monster/critter she needed to destroy in order to satisfy her quest and her deity. Of course, for the PC to absolutely satisfy her deity, she had to defeat the bad-guy in single combat. Hackneyed and trite, but there ya go. So, the rest of us stood by, waiting to see what was going to happen and, if necessary, rush in to fight off the beastie if Gail's PC happened to need resurrection.

Her husband had planned it well, and expected that his beastie would kill Gail's PC within a few rounds--this was a middle-to-upper-level adventure (with characters ranging from 7th to as high as 10th level, if I recall correctly) and Gail's PC was somewhere in the middle of that range. He also expected to get a number of us, as well, hopefully including one or more of the clerics in the party. After all, during the campaign several of the characters had already died facing lesser monsters.

The battle began, and Gail won initiative. With her first strike, she rolled a 20 and, with her Vorpal Sword, her PC lopped off the baddie's noggin. Obviously, she had Divine assistance.
Can you say "stupefaction"? The look on the GM's face was absolutely priceless--utter dismay in his eyes, his mouth dropped open so far that you could have driven a full-sized Cadillac into it, fingers clawed and clutching at empty air. And it lasted only for a moment.

I've never seen a GM lose it so badly. We didn't play in his campaign for another couple of weeks, he was so pissed off!
And, Gail essentially retired that particular character almost immediately afterwards, so her hubby couldn't knock her off. (She knew him very well.)

There are a million stories in the Naked Multiverse...this was one of them. I'll be happy to relate others.
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"You don't understand, Beaufingle", said Lungwort cryptically. "You ARE dinner." -- M.M. Moamrath

I ran an old AD&D campaign for my high-school/college friends (including my wife-to-be) for nigh on 5 years. There were 5 or 6 of us and the total number of PCs in the campaign were about 12, with 3 or 4 deaths along the way. Some people ran 2 characters here and there.

These guys had romped through way all over my campaign world, through module series like the Giants and others, many of my own concoctions, into other planes playing odd games with Orcus and with a dragon who gave them a few quests for a bit of merriment, etc. Needless to say they'd done a lot in those 5 years. The range of levels at the scene of the following crime was about 10th-13th (we played about every two weeks or so with some larger gaps along the way, probably averaged a good session about once a month).

Then they got to do some Spell Jamming. Oh, they had some fun with that, had a crew for their ship and had a few encounters in space, then happened upon a Sphere where they made port and met up with the locals. Turns out the Mayor of the port they ventured into had a serious problem in the Great Library and needed the help of this band of roughshod adventurers to deal with it.

The problem? Something in the Library killed the head librarian and was haunting the section that held the greatest tomes of arcane and holy knowledge. Anyone who entered did not come back out alive and a few corpses could be seen from the large double-doors that opened into this area.

Our noble and confident adventurers made haste to aid the Mayor (after some haggling over port rights and other amenities). After all, they had tested wits with Orcus and dragons, major giants and even a deity once (though they were pretty subservient there, naturally). What was some spook in a library haunting some books?

This spook happened to be a powerful lich who's essence was stored in the disembodied hand of its former body. It's touch was poison and it's magic severe. Some of the most godawful rolls and actions ensued--characters failing poison saves (the cleric being the first, that really hurt them) and getting tangled up in some powerful magicks. The hand would shoot out of "mouse holes" to launch its attacks or touch a party member, then shoot back through another to avoid most retaliation. It wasn't long before a few of the party members were down, with horrible saving throws, and the remaining 5 or 6 looking decidedly pissed off (out of character as well as in).

The biggest and baddest fighter of the party was really upset (his brother being the cleric that got wasted). The mage managed to web the hand before it could run (on 5 digits, of course) and the fighter impaled the hand to the floor with his two-handed sword. He proceeded to use his silver hand (a little gift from Orcus during the aforementioned games, that can reach into the astral and ethereal plane and strike as a +3 magic weapon, plus he had significant strength due to a nice belt he obtained) to bludgeon the lich/hand into submission (death). He continued until the hand was a bloody smear on the hardwood floor, screaming his brother's name (he ran both characters, they were bros) while ooc he was almost literally in tears. He had ran these guys together for 5+ years, he simply couldn't comprehend one of them dying.

Overall the tally was 9 characters who entered the Library with 5 walking out. It was a brutal scene, happened on Thanksgiving about 15 years ago. The one character with Psionics blasted the Mayor, they boarded their ship and left the Sphere, never to return again. In fact, they never returned at all--and that particular group has not played together since. They really took it hard! The campaign ended on that dire and desolate evening.

I felt kinda bad for them, but then again--after 5 years of seeing them kick some serious ass and avoid most of my major scenarios in one fashion or another (they were pretty good players, very creative), I felt a sick sort of DM glee at finally having one-upped them.

Maybe we'll have a reunion someday.
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I am not a hamster and Life is not a wheel.

gideon_thorne wrote:
There are lots of explanations that a clever CK can use to bullshit any roll.

I was in a Fantasy Hero game playing an archer martial artist. I dumped as many points as the GM would allow into Bow skill, range modifiers, etc. One of his flaws that I took was that he was a true martial artist, and that he had a penchant for taking more difficult shots than normal simply for the challenge.

In one fight in the campaign a bunch of bandits jumped us in a clearing. After a few rounds we had killed most of the attackers. One of the players (a brawler type) had a bandit in a headlock, while two others were meleeing another badly wounded one, and the bandit leader who was watching the battle on a hill some distance away started to make a run for it.

My turn comes and I want to take a shot at the bandit leader, which despite the distance was a fairly easy shot with my range modifiers. The GM, who is now grinning from ear to ear, has other plans. He tells me my character sees in the heat of battle a very slight opening for a shot on the one bandit who is in a headlock by one of my allies, and who is also partially covered by a tree, and has 3 other characters in melee between myself and him. This, he says is by far the most difficult shot I have ever seen and I can't bear to pass up the challenge. Not wanting to let the bandit leader get away (who we were supposed to be capturing, by the way), I try to make an EGO roll to avoid the compulsion and fail miserably.

So the GM whips out a calculator to add up all the negatives and gleefully informs me that I'm at a -25 to hit for a called head shot against a target grappling with an ally, partially covered by a tree, and obscured by 3 other characters in melee. An impossible shot, even considering my points in bow skill. I roll my eyes and throw the dice...

In Fantasy Hero at that time, you rolled 3d6 to hit and the lower the roll, the better. The dice came up a natural 3, which in the GM's house rules was an automatic critical hit. No one said anything for a couple of seconds then we all starting yelling and hollering!

As a consequence of that impossible shot, the remaining bandits and the bandit leader just threw down their weapons and surrendered. Also the GM ruled that my character had accomplished his quest for finding the ultimate shot and allowed him to buy off the flaw for free, and soon word spread of a "legendary" archer among the townsfolk. It was the coolest thing that's ever happened to one of my characters.