I had occasion to be reminded this evening of an incident that occurred in the Shadowrun campaign I played in back in high school. This was in about 1990, so we're talking about the first edition of Shadowrun here, the one where you basically needed all the six-sided dice on the planet. Somewhere around here I still have a giant Ziploc bag full of gaming dice, including all the D6es from a Challenge Yahtzee set I found at a yard sale. Challenge Yahtzee came with 20 or 25 D6es that were about half the size of regular ones, which came in really handy for rolling my Decker's whole Hacking Pool in one throw.

The thing I remembered did not actually have anything to do with that, though; it had to do with the moment, late in one marathon Friday-night/Saturday-morning session, when our street samurai mistimed a jump aboard a moving Citymaster. (All dialogue in the anecdote to follow is paraphrased from memory, obviously.) This led to the following exchange between her player (Mike) and our GM (Seann):

SEANN
OK, roll Quickness. [Ed. note I think? That was the stat you used for what would be a DEX check in D&D, right? It's been a long damn time.]

MIKE
(an insufficient result)

SEANN
Nope, you missed the door.

MIKE
Is there anything else I can grab?

SEANN
... the back wheel?

MIKE
So I'm dead, is what you're saying.

SEANN
Pretty much, yeah.

Wherepon Mike prudently spent a point of Karma to do that roll over again and hopefully keep her from being killed. By now it was maybe two, two-thirty in the morning, the session had gone on longer than we thought it would, and we were all pretty punchy, and for whatever reason Seann just sort of lost control at that point. As soon as Mike did that he declared,

SEANN
OK! Just before you would've been crushed under the back wheel of the Citymaster, it stops. In fact, everything stops - the rain, the fire [we had blown up a warehouse and were trying to escape], everything. You're lying on the ground under the Citymaster.

MIKE
(puzzled)
Uh... I get up?

SEANN
Good call.

ME
Can the rest of us see this?

SEANN
Oh sure, you guys are all still moving. It's just the world that stopped. [Mike's character's name, which I've forgotten] is climbing out from under the Citymaster. [My own character's name, which I can't remember either], you can see the driver through the window. He's frozen too. Everybody roll Intelligence.

ME
(highest result - Decker, don't you know)

SEANN
OK! You're the first one to notice the dwarves.

ME
... What.

SEANN
There's about two dozen of them, you're not sure where they came from. They're wearing white jumpsuits and hardhats. The leader has a clipboard. [Mike's character], he comes up to you and asks, [cartoony Brooklyn accent] "Hey lady - are the one that spent the Karma point?"

MIKE
(baffled, in- and out-of-character)
Uh... yes?

SEANN
(in character)
Right, OK, so whaddaya want us to do? Want us to move the Citymaster back so's you can take another shot at it?

MIKE
Uh... sure.

SEANN
(in character)
We can do that. [piercing whistle] AWRIGHT, BOYS! Let's get the lady set up for ten seconds ago!

At which point, Seann gleefully explained, the dwarves brought in a crane and moved the Citymaster, while another team of them hustled the rest of us back to the spots we were in a second ago and so forth, like stagehands redressing a set for another take.

SEANN
(in character)
OK, yer all set! Good luck, lady! C'mon, boys, let's get outta here!

On her second attempt, Mike's character made the jump and was able to commandeer the Citymaster to facilitate the team's escape, at which point we all decided that we had probably better get to bed and reconvene at a later date to examine the mission's aftermath.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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