Tabletop Tales

[Xathan]

As much fun as we all having gaming and seeing each other's settings here, there's something we rarely delve into, aside from brief snipped - what we do at our tabletop games. So, I've created a thread for that. Your awesome moments, your hilarious moments, the TPKs, the times the party drove you insane or you were incredibly inspired - whatever, games past or present, what are you playing in, what are you running, and what's going on in those?

[Magnus Pym]

I haven't gamed since I was in early high school. That means about 10 years, a bit less. I like D&D more than anything else, or at least I did. But my most memorable game was definitely a GURPS game.

We had a sniper that used some kind of seriously insane sniper rifle and had near perfect accuracy. I played my usual agile and stealthy ninja guy with silenced UZIs and a crapload of knives and we had other dudes with funky characters. Matrix, at the time, was news; and I happened to roll crits for [note]I -SERIOUSLY HOPE- this will be the lamest story to grace this thread.[/note]defensive rolls. So we just nicknamed me Matrixman and all I did was dodge bullets like Neo, but at point blank range and beheading evil goons with my super throwing skills and sharp knives. It was all chance, but when for a few sessions all you do is roll crits and carry your group further into the story, it just kinda sticks. :P We had a good laugh; the predictions were easy, too.

[Kindling]

That reminds me, years ago I was a player in World of Darkness game. Some demonologists decided to capture all the PCs to use as sacrifices to summon some demon with a thing for vampire and werewolf blood. We were taken one by one as we slept. Finally, they came for my Brujah, resting during the daylight hours under someone's bed. Now, my character had some kind of insane dodge skill, so I was able to not only dodge my way around the shafts of sunlight coming in through the windows, but to literally dodge the demonologist's bullets. For a good few rounds I was completely untouchable until they brought up a dude with a flamethrower... Knowing vampires have serious problems with fire, I thought to myself "I have to take this guy out quick" so aimed the shotgun I had taken from one of the demonologists at his fuel-tank... not thinking until afterwards that while, yes, that would neutralise the flamethrower-man himself pretty quick, it would also unleash a HUGE amount of fire, all over the place... The GM later told me that if I hadn't done that, I had pretty much got them beaten and would have got away. As it was I woke up later tied up with all the others around the points of a pentagram.

[Superfluous Crow]

... and that reminds me of one of my first D&D games where I played an intrepid ranger. It was classical D&D and we were on a quest that took us to a submerged temple. Me and the druid swam down into the lake and emerged in a stone tunnel which we proceeded down. Then we started to notice the poison gas. The druid collapsed and I too was on the verge of unconsciousness when, in a moment of desperation, I grabbed my flint and stone and struck a spark... you can imagine what happened. (yes, not all gas is inflammable, but this one happened to be)
It being D&D I of course survived. The other characters now had no trouble proceeding down the corridor.

[LD]

In a Cthulu game, my players who were using lanterns and torches came across a gas pocket like the one Crow encountered. They hacked into a cave and started smelling something overpowering. Thankfully for their characters (who may have died and who certainly would have been put in a unfavorable situation if it exploded), the players included a real-life engineer... who got the hint and gave a yell to get the flames far, far back.

[CoyoteCamouflage]

I was playing a World of Darkness game at Gencon. I was a Corax. A Corax, I must add, who not only has a cartoon obsession, but who had just been enchanted by a Changeling Selkie, so I was pretty much assumed to be on a combination of every major sensory drug around. SECONDS later, one of the Werewolves comes up, drags me off into a small room (or, you know, a pair of chairs in the middle of the big room), sits me down in front of the Boss, and orders me to "Tell us everything you know".

Hah! Big mistake. I open my mouth, and words pour out.

About 30 seconds in, when the Boss gets a call that demands his attention elsewhere, he looks up, thanks a divine power for saving him from me, then he looks to Andy and says "Write all this down." He then leaves Andy alone with me.

Ten real minutes later, I was still talking, and they were fairly certain I had not stopped to breathe. Nothing I talked about had anything to do with the game's plot. I talked about everything from Saturday morning cartoons, to the pros and cons of comparing eastern and western animation, old Italian recipes, funny moments in the grocery with sweet little old ladies, a little bit of philosophy, some lawyer jokes, that the killer care-bear doll in the middle of the caern (An Irish pub) was actually a Rank 5 Changeling Treasure, that the possessed Care-Bear also kicked the crap out of a pair of high-ranking Giovanni necromancers when they tried to exorcise it. Oh, and the bit about the Hunter wandering around Boston looking for us after we blew up a gas station to cause a distraction. Twice.

Impressively, despite losing a portion of his brain to the endeavor, Andy managed to make a bullet list of most of the things I mentioned. He then swore eternal Ragabash vengeance upon me.

[Magnus Pym]

Coyote, that was funny :)

[LD]

The following year at GenCon, I made it to a WoD game run by the same people that CC is talking about...

And I played a Corax...

The easy story is how I pulled off an obligatory Corax ramble similar to CC's (won a prize for it too!). I was trying to brief the Cairn leader about what was going on and he kept running off, so I explained the situation to a Bastet and one of the Bears in New York-dialogue, fast, snappy quick. "And then ... and then.... and if .... and then... guess what.... and who.... and because... etc." I basically covered all the major plots going on in the game. (Essentially the end of the world was going to happen if we didn't blow up a casino that was filled with distilled evil and we were afraid that the Changelings had some sort of demon running around with them and were trying to betray us).

Then I, flustered, opened my jacket and started handing out relevant fortune cookie sayings (I had about 200 taped on the inside of my jacket [much preparation for this]). E.g. "You are going on a very long journey." (My Scthick was that when I was in human form, I would always just keep talking endlessly (and mostly uselessly) unless I handed out a fortune that said what I intended to say, but I couldn't explain directly how the fortune related--it was just the only way I could mind brevity.) I ended up repeating the whole thing for a GM and the Cairn leader when he returned. (Mind, this was a 10-20 minute summary).

The more amusing story is how when all the werewolf players wandered into the dark realms (forget the term), the werewolves became separated from the ferae and so, when the dark shades attacked, it was werewolves defending on one side and *#&#ing beast force defending on the other.

2 bears in the center... and 1 Corax (raven) (me), 1 Bastet, 1 Rat, and 1 Anansi (!) defending the flank. The werewolves almost all died in that confrontation. Beast Force suffered not a wit.

The game ended with not one, not two, but three factions wiring a casino to explode. The Mages went into the basement to wire its breakers to explode with correspondence magic. I and the Rat raided a military supply depot and returned with explosives, then lay them all to explode in the air ducts and on the roof, to bring down the house, so to say. And the Vampires similarly decided to blow up the place with spells or something (I am not as familiar with Vampire), focusing on the main floor. Of course, NONE OF US knew that the other groups had these plots going on because everyone was being *(@(ing secret as hell. :D

[LoA]

I was playing a World of Darkness game at Gencon. I was a Corax. A Corax, I must add, who not only has a cartoon obsession, but who had just been enchanted by a Changeling Selkie, so I was pretty much assumed to be on a combination of every major sensory drug around. SECONDS later, one of the Werewolves comes up, drags me off into a small room (or, you know, a pair of chairs in the middle of the big room), sits me down in front of the Boss, and orders me to "Tell us everything you know".

Hah! Big mistake. I open my mouth, and words pour out.

About 30 seconds in, when the Boss gets a call that demands his attention elsewhere, he looks up, thanks a divine power for saving him from me, then he looks to Andy and says "Write all this down." He then leaves Andy alone with me.

Ten real minutes later, I was still talking, and they were fairly certain I had not stopped to breathe. Nothing I talked about had anything to do with the game's plot. I talked about everything from Saturday morning cartoons, to the pros and cons of comparing eastern and western animation, old Italian recipes, funny moments in the grocery with sweet little old ladies, a little bit of philosophy, some lawyer jokes, that the killer care-bear doll in the middle of the caern (An Irish pub) was actually a Rank 5 Changeling Treasure, that the possessed Care-Bear also kicked the crap out of a pair of high-ranking Giovanni necromancers when they tried to exorcise it. Oh, and the bit about the Hunter wandering around Boston looking for us after we blew up a gas station to cause a distraction. Twice.

Impressively, despite losing a portion of his brain to the endeavor, Andy managed to make a bullet list of most of the things I mentioned. He then swore eternal Ragabash vengeance upon me.

A fellow cartoon connoisseur I see!

Anyways, i haven't been gaming for very long, made worse by the fact that my gaming buddies are all away somewhere and we don't get online anymore. Still I was a kobold in a party full of drow..... That's all that needs to be said....