LAST EDITED ON Feb-09-25 AT 09:44 AM (EST)
 
Edited for forgetting to finish a thought

The "UF as a game setting" thread reminded me of a happening that came from my own attempt at playing in UF- to make a long story short, adapting the setting was biting off more than I could chew, but we got a pretty decent Star Wars game out of the scraps.

And in this game we had our resident troll*, Dean. Dean specialized in Droid engineering as well as combat skills. Pretty soon, all the party was begging him to build droids for them.

Which he did . . . but with backdoors in their programming so he could take them over if needed. This came in handy when the party's "Gray Jedi" decided that the fame and fortune being offered by the local Sith Lord was worth more than party loyalty. There were two important lessons learned that day:

1) A lightsaber can parry the laser bolt from an X-Wing's wing cannons; but
2) the astromech droid that reverted to Dean's control after it's "master's" treason can fire all 4 laser cannons at once. Relatedly, Gray Jedi explode just like everyone else when hit with multiple starfighter laser cannons.

I have some other anecdotes to share from this group if anyone's interested, but I bet I'm not the only one who accumulated some tabletop shenanigans, so let's hear 'em if you want to share!

*As shown above, Dean could be a troll in the usual sense, but we called him "The Troll" due to his playing a Troll Hunter in World of Warcraft, which is how we first met him. But mostly for the trolling.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

As I mentioned in the "UF as a setting" thread, I took part in a superhero campaign when I was in uni. The way it was set up was rather interesting - rather than having a traditional structure, the campaign was made up of a series of interconnected one-shots with an overarching plot that became more obvious as the weeks went on. In addition, there were three or four GMs and about 15 or 20 players total, though any given session would only feature one GM and four to six players.

The large number of players meant that we had some rather interesting characters. Here are three of my favourites:

1) Vulcanus, a hero who could manipulate magma/lava. He was obsessed with his Vulcanus-brand merchandise, and would always look for ways to include it in each session he was in. He also has no idea how Io somehow got temporarily moved out of its orbit in a way that coincidentally caused it to block a gamma ray pulse that was headed straight for Earth.

2) A hero with electricity-based powers who's name I forget, who had a worrying tendency to go mad with power, meaning the rest of the party had to spend time snapping him out of it. This also tended to happen every session he was in.

3) Captain Communist, a flightless brick who claimed his powers came from the Communism Force, specifically Soviet communism. It should be noted as this point that the Soviet Union hadn't existed in-universe for multiple decades at this point, and the Russians wanted nothing to do with him. The Russian Ambassador in particular was always exasperated that he kept finding his number, and also that none of the KGB hit squads he sent to take care of him were ever successful.

I can only think of three offhand.

1) Back when I was in high school, my gaming group decided to take a session off from our regular campaign and play something else. Our DM pulled out Legends & Lore (that edition's Deities & Demigods) and told us to pick a character from the Arthurian myths. We were going to attack Asgard.

Naturally, the big names (Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot) went first, but I actually owned a copy of that book and picked my favorite. The Green Knight who (among other things) was immune to melee damage.

I ended up going against Thor. It went back and forth for a while, and I barely held my own until our DM rolled a 1.

By house rules, that meant he had to roll again to see if he broke his weapon.

That's right... I was one roll away from BREAKING MJOLNIR!

(We ended up losing when Morgan Le Fay betrayed us and switched sides).

2) At one of my first Arisias several years ago, I signed up for a GURPS game in which the party played the crew of a Klingon Bird of Prey. For reasons I can no longer recall, I ended up the ship's gunner and optimized my character for that.

We went up against a Federation starship. The captain ordered me to fire a warning shot. And somehow, in a million-to-one chance... I hit the reactor core dead center.

So much for THAT encounter

3) At a later Arisia, I played my one and only session of PARANOIA and managed to execute my entire group for treason... during the mission briefing.

>We went up against a Federation starship. The captain ordered me to
>fire a warning shot. And somehow, in a million-to-one chance... I hit
>the reactor core dead center.

To be fair, that sounds very on-brand for a Klingon warning shot.

And now, in drink form:

Klingon Warning Shot
3/4 oz. 151-proof Rum
1/4 oz. Cherry liqueur

(notes for the non-drinkers: this is a "shooter", a mini-drink that comes in a shot glass to be downed in 1 gulp. Between the golden rum and the red liqueur, it will have a color similar to a photon torpedo, and with the rum being 151-proof (75.5% alcohol by volume), it'll kick about like the shot mdg1 described above)

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

>>We went up against a Federation starship. The captain ordered me to
>>fire a warning shot. And somehow, in a million-to-one chance... I hit
>>the reactor core dead center.
>
>To be fair, that sounds very on-brand for a Klingon warning shot.

I was gonna say, that's straight out of Star Trek III.

COMMANDER KRUGE
I wanted prisoners!

GUNNER
A lucky shot, sir...

KRUGE disintegrates the GUNNER.

KRUGE
(contemptuously)
Animal.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

That... never actually occurred to me. :)

>3) At a later Arisia, I played my one and only session of PARANOIA and
>managed to execute my entire group for treason... during the mission
>briefing.

Sounds pretty on brand for Paranoia to me.

>>3) At a later Arisia, I played my one and only session of PARANOIA and
>>managed to execute my entire group for treason... during the mission
>>briefing.
>
>Sounds pretty on brand for Paranoia to me.

Basically, yeah. That is why I listed it last. :)

I played for many, many years in a TTRPG group, with a lot of the same people. My late friend, Mike Satran, was a devotee of Hero System, and for a while was one of the few people writing for it and getting books published in it.

One of my longest-running characters was the madgonzo scientist Dr. EijiEiko Takashima, once called Gomi-no-Sensei, and then after some massive legal shenanigans, the Gadget Queen.

She had some fame in the universe for being quirky (that's when you're rich, weird, and dangerous; eccentric is just rich and weird). She had been known to do things like build devices like the Wedgie-Ray, the Tangle Frisbee, and even more deeply random things. I personally was responsible, in my career playing her, for at least five house rules, for which I am proud.

One of them included a time when she took out an opposing telepath by hitting her in the face with a pie. The pie was lemon merangue. The lemon held a suspension of sodium pentathol in DMSO, as a will deadener so she couldn't use her powers. After doing this, and the telepath falling down, Eiko said,

"Fear my pastry-wielding wrath!"

to her goon/guard squad. This was considered so bad a threat that Professor Mike gave Eiko a minus to her presence attack (kind of a way to represent the way that Batman can stop people just by Being Batman). I was the first person ever to get that. I'm pretty proud of that.

(Years later, at a convention that Mike was at, he was running a con game for people that I sat in on, where he used the team that Eiko was on as his con pregenerated characters. I let everyone else pick first, and the only one left was Eiko. Gods, it was good to slip into her mind again.)

--
Jen Dantes - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lady of Sith Tech Support.
"This may not be a good idea, but it's the only one I have."
...she is another mark on the "how do you not know you're trans" wall.

>One of them included a time when she took out an opposing telepath by
>hitting her in the face with a pie. The pie was lemon merangue.
>The lemon held a suspension of sodium pentathol in DMSO, as a will
>deadener so she couldn't use her powers. After doing this, and the
>telepath falling down, Eiko said,
>
>"Fear my pastry-wielding wrath!"
>
>to her goon/guard squad. This was considered so bad a threat that
>Professor Mike gave Eiko a minus to her presence attack (kind of a way
>to represent the way that Batman can stop people just by Being
>Batman). I was the first person ever to get that. I'm pretty
>proud of that.

Kinda like "I once saw him kill a man... with a fucking pencil!"

-- Slider Da Feral (NYAR!)
Oh, SO many pen-and-paper heroines I had, each one a mark on said wall.
(Then again, there's something to be said for extra-thick eggshells)

I have a couple. The first was back in high school, I played in a D&D campaign where for some reason the DM had allowed one of players (who was a bit of a troll, in modern parlance) to play a chaotic evil pegataur (winged centaur). During the second or third session, we were sneaking through a cavern full of piercers while the other player and I were jawing (I was trolling him back for something, IIRC) and he got annoyed, so he had his character shoot my character with an arrow, which hit. At which point I looked at the GM with cold eyes and deadpanned, "I scream in agony." Now I had finished sneaking across the cavern with the rest of the party and was near the exit, while his character was still in the middle (big winged horse don't sneak so fast). The end result was a very impaled pegataur and the player rolling up a new character. I still to this day relish the look of horror on his face when he realized what I did when my character screamed. Plus, the GM gave me 100 XP on the spot for good roleplaying! :D

The other time was my first trip to GenCon, when I played in a 3-part GURPS Traveller adventure (I was helping the GM, both by assisting other players and by running any additional PCs that were needed to fill out the party). In the one of the first two sessions (don't remember which came first) I played a con artist/thief (IIRC, I can't remember the exact details anymore) who was trying to get away with some priceless artifact (again, IIRC), and in the other I played a couple of soldiers who were either raiding or defending the dig site, including one who was a sniper. In the third session my sniper got to drill my thief character in the head while I was playing both of them at the same time...

(That was also the con where Phantom nearly got crushed by a 6-8 foot D20 :D)

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

Once upon a time, during my freshman year of college, (Spring '92), the college gaming group, all eight of us, were playtesting a homebrew RPG one of the others has written up. Flip & Skip, the other two freshmen, roommates, and chaos magnets were playing trolls. I was running a halfling. I had to leave for a bit, but came back to find these two yahoos had used my halfling as a sportsball and ended up killing him. We had a bit of a dustup about it. I got a little salty. I may have made a few strong oaths of vengeance.

Fast forward to 2005ish. Most of the group moved back to the Cities and we got the band back together, including Flip the chaos magnet. He was playing a halfling sorcerer who mirrored his personality. I had a half-orc cleric of Kord. We were stumbling through the World's Largest Dungeon. We got to a magic trap infested room. I KO's the halfling, tied him up, and threw him into the room on a line. Once he was dead, I dragged him back, healed him up, and repeated the process for until I ran out of healing spells. "WTH was THAT for?!" "I told you I'd get revenge." "That was 15 YEARS AGO." "So. What? I. Told. You. So."

In my defense, I left the little shit with one hit point.

Rest assured, Skippy. Someday, I'll get you, too.

...you know, I'm glad this is the 'funny' kind of grudge you keep for fifteen years, because just this month I've had my life screwed around with in not so good ways by people who still hold fifteen+ year old grudges over my head and not only is it not very fun, it's also really pathetic.

I took part in a D&D 4e campaign about 15 years ago. It was perhaps most notable for the unusual artefacts our party accrued over the course of the campaign, including the Stone of Pink (anyone carrying it on their person would appear to have turned pink, but only to other people), the Infinitely Tessellating Tile (upon activation, it would repeatedly unfold until it covered every surface in the room unless you stopped it early - we mainly used it to create temporary bridges over pits), and Tenser's Floating Tea Tray (exactly what it sounds like, and the mental image of our dragonborn warlord using it to avoid detection by land sharks is one I will always cherish). The story I want to share however doesn't involve any of them.

Some background information first: our campaign's setting consisted of a collection of city-states, all loosely connected by trade deals and other alliances. Each city-state was protected by a totem animal of sorts (essentially a regular real-life creature, except its CR was boosted to the mid 20s - for context, our party was around level 12 at the end of the campaign), and each city-state's ruler possessed a special tablet which granted them control over both their totem animal. Someone who knew what they were doing could even alter its capabilities. Not something you want to end up in the wrong hands, in other words.

So naturally, our party had been hired to recover a stolen tablet. This part of the mission actually went pretty well. We'd tracked the tablet down to a rival city-state's ruler's mansion, so it was simply a matter of sneaking in, subduing the guards without them raising the alarm, stealing the tablet back, and sneaking back out, all of which happened without a hitch. That came on our way back to deliver the tablet to its rightful owner.

We'd decided to rest up in an old fort for the night, but before we could leave the next morning, we had an unpleasant discovery. The ruler who had stolen the tablet had discovered it was gone, worked out we were the ones who took it, tracked us down, and come to take it back. Oh, and she'd brought her city-state's army with her to ensure that happened. The ultimatum was clear: return the tablet or be brutally slaughtered.

Naturally, we started brainstorming ways to take a third option, during which I started looking through my character sheet to see if there was anything I could do. You see, I had taken the Ritual Caster feat,* so I was looking to see if I knew any rituals that might be useful. What follows is more or less the conversation I had with the DM after I spotted something.

Me: I might have an idea. The tablet is magic, right?
DM: Of course.
Me: So could I use the Create Magic Item ritual to make a fake copy of it? Something that would look and act like the real thing, but wouldn't actually do anything?
DM: How exactly does the ritual work?
Me: *Shows DM the ritual's description in the PHB.*
DM: You can certainly try it, though will have a chance to tell it's a fake when you give it to her.
Me: (To the party) What do you guys think? Is this worth trying?
Party: Sure.
Me: Great! This ritual takes an hour to cast, so can you go make sure {Ruler] and her army don't attack us before I'm done?

Amazingly enough, the plan worked flawlessly, with the ruler happily leaving with her army and the fake tablet, allowing us to go deliver the real thing to its rightful owner.

*For those who are unaware, 4e attempted to solve 3.5e's Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards problem with a levelling system that meant two characters at the same level would (mostly) have the same number of at-will, once-per-encounter and once-per-day abilities regardless of what class they were. This meant there was no space for the spellcasting classes to learn all the various non-combat spells with casting times longer than one round by levelling up. So they decided to categorise all those spells as rituals, and made you take the Ritual Caster feat if you wanted to learn any. I believe if you wanted to expand the list of rituals your character knew beyond what this gave you, you had to take further feats.