Your table's "hall of fame"

[Superglucose]

At our table, we have moments that, due to being hilarious, deadly, strange, or just plain awesome have made it into our little "hall of fame." These stories are told over and over again with fond tears of wistful memories of that epic wipe.

Left4Dead with Supers:

Tanks, Boomers, and emo-tears (witches) have also earned their place in our circle's hall-of-fame. See, I was homebrewing some monsters to compete with PCs in a left 4 dead/superpowers campaign. The first iteration caused a TPK... and that lead me to realize they were underpowered. So in the second iteration I tried playing a meatshield character, and took a pickup truck to the face and was almost killed. You haven't seen anything more frantic than a pack of super-heroes running away while the vanilla kills the boomers (boomers were power dampening). This campaign was deliciously overpowered and saw the introduction of a "sniper" PrC, who could use regular bullets to deal non-lethal damage. In fact, I did just that to take out a member of our party who'd been controlled by a telepath... but unfortunately I *still* almost killed him. Other highlights were our refrigerator (literally an ice-house from an ice-powered super), the telephone line (it went from our building to the other building. We used 3 digit area codes and 7 digit phone numbers, also we had TV and internet... with two users and one broadcast station), our power generation system (initially we just had one of our supers biking on an exercise bike with magnets), and a whole host of other little tricks.

Drunk GMing:

I once accidentally wiped with a random encounter of 8 dire apes... a ECL 5 party with a wizard, two druids, and a cleric. I did a rewind and tried again at 4 apes... and still TPKed. I had to dial it down to 2 apes before the party could overcome. Giving me booze = party dies.

Karrot Top:

A techy who once hacked into one of the party members so that they could use his body to repair the ship. Unfortunately another techy on the ship decided he needed to use the serkalth to repair something... at the same time!

Rrrraaaaaaaagequit:

Our GM had us in an encounter against a sniper, and one of our members of the party ran up holding a bomb with a deadman's switch, saying "Put down your weapon or I blow us both up!" Instead of complying, the sniper decided to set off 2 lbs of plastic explosive... which ended up with about 80 lbs of plastic explosive going off. The end result was the sniper died (lol), the suicide bomber died (LOL), and no other casualties except an entire city block of the industrial section of a town. The GM then threw a hissy fit about how we ruined his adventure and ended the campaign.

The Molokai Game:

The same GM had homebrewed a very extensive campaign setting called Molokai, a place that all the players but me had been multiple times before. I wanted to run a game in my own world, but couldn't be bothered to make an overworld map. I knew, for instance, what I wanted to have happen and what races I wanted to exist. So he said, "Use my campaign maps!" I did, but changed a lot of the flavor because, well, everyone but me had played in it, and one of my players had written it. End result? The guy kept saying things like "that doesn't exist in Molokai!" and complaining about it, over and over. I eventually ended the campaign because I thought no one wanted to keep playing from all the complaints... then discovered the complaints were from one guy. Also from this campaign is the epic quest of the guy who provoked an attack of opportunity from a flesh golem so he could get flanking, and the flesh golem critted him and took him to -20 in one hit from full. The guy who was complaining before kept complaining, while the guy who's character died was sad for a bit but then started making a new character.

What are your epic stories?

[DarknessLord]

My Paladin's epic disguise check.
I was wearing that clockwork armor from manual of the planes (what makes this story funnier is that I actually wasn't wearing it at the time, everyone just forgot about that at the time) and we encountered an iron golem that was in the same style. Considering it was probably going to kill me, unless I could escape (which my DM failed to consider how much that armor killed my move speed), I asked if I could roll a disguise check to have the golem think I was one of the golems rather than an intruder, the DM gave it to me as kind of a what the hell kinda thing. The thing was, we were playing with the 20 on a skill check means roll again and add that to it, I rolled a 20, fallowed by another 20, fallowed by a 19, which with my charisma, gave me a 62 to the disguise check.
For the rest of the game, I was able to pass myself as one of those golems without any questions asked.

The ally who was with me, however, was not so lucky, in a "Okay, either we both die or just she dies" thing, I chose to be not stupid in place of stupid good (plus this chick was kinda evil anyways, so it was divine justice in my eyes anyways). She ran out of the room, out side, where 4 mindflayers were waiting for us. The Golem chased after her, and she got mind blasted by every last one of them, made all 4 saves. Then, we convinced the DM to give her a will save to light herself on fire out of shear force of will (because she was gonna die either way, might as well make it badass), she made to stupid high (but barely make able) DC the DM set, and then managed to make 3 more saves against mind blast the next round, failing the forth one, the DM ruled she barely made it to the mind flayers, slid into them (while on fire), and then was stunned and the golem pounded them all flat.

Our actions got us past the golem and killed 4 mindflayers, we were level 6 or 5, we got full xp.

[AslanCross]

^--- Golemdin is made of win.

Lyka, the Shifter Barbarian/Warblade from my current campaign, is awesome and badass.

Her list of accomplishments:
1. Varanthian, the behir in Red Hand of Doom, is notorious for being a PC-shredding machine. Varanthian was perched upside-down on the cavern ceiling. It grabbed Holden, the dwarf crusader, and was about to swallow him. Lyka jumped up, BEAT the behir's +27 Grapple modifier, and pulled her superior out of the beast's grasp.

2. Pounced on a young adult red dragon from the air and shredded it to bits.

3. In an ambush by hobgoblin knights mounted on tigers that killed the psion (who had become her good friend), Lyka went on a frothing rampage that left three hobgoblin knights, one hobgoblin duskblade, two tigers, and one Greater Barghest dead.

4. Destroyed a warforged titan that was laying siege to the city practically on her own.

5. Took 10 Strength damage from a single attack, then subsequently shook off the effect of the poison with Iron Heart Surge, and got back up to shred one of the Wyrmlords in the next encounter.

[Clovis]

Fearsome slinger.
In our 3.5 D&D game a halfling rogue has made a helluva reputation with her sling. On another thread I explained that she has often been the one to finish a monster after others have almost managed to kill the beast. Slings only do 1d3 damage so it's really the final tap to the nose that offs them. On one occasion a slaver tried to escape with a rowing boat: we were attacking a slaver ship at the docks of our nation's capital and one baddie took the lifeboat and rowed away like a man possessed. Our rogue ran to the nearest bridge, slings away, critted, confirmed and took out the guy with one slingshot. And promptly got arrested for 'murder in broad daylight'.

Sinking a sub.
Same game, same heroes. A Gnome-built shark submarine was terrorising the local seas. We came up with an ingenious idea to attack it. We had a side quest to find rust monsters to be used against this steel vessel. Our first idea was to enlist the help of a friendly bronze dragon, having a sort of a gondola hanging from her from which to drop the rust monsters on top of the sub. This was a bit too convoluted so we chose to use a decoy ship and a rowing boat. The decoy ship (provided by a local baron) was promptly sunk but we were able to cause enough damage to the steel submarine by tossing two rust monsters on top of it. Our wizard created some sort of resin with which he coated the poor monsters' feet so they would stick to the hull of the sub.

Half-witted half-brother.
Same game, same heroes. The afore-mentioned slavers had previously managed to capture us and sold us to the Colosseum. My wizard was too skinny to be a gladiator so he was introduced as the 'half-witted half-brother' (with 23 INT...) of the halfling rogue. The wizard was used as a knife-throwing target on the arena, with the halfling trying not to hit him. So the rogue even today, several in-game years after, sometimes introduces the wizard as her 'half-witted half-brother'. Which makes it funnier is that we're both been made nobles.

[TheCountAlucard]

Wonder if stuff from our "hall of infamy" counts.

Both of these are Shadowrun stories, potentially worthy of being in the C.L.U.E. files.

The "Grenades in the Microwave" Incident...The party was doing a low-and-slow run, one with lots of information-gathering. The party's elven weapons smuggler was bored with it, however, so he did things on the side to pass the time... odd things, like buying a box of nails, twenty teddy bears, and a cordless microwave. He keeps asking me if they still use glass to make bottles, a question I really didn't know the answer to. He contacted his fixer, in the hopes of obtaining some grenades. He gets the grenades, and then goes down to a convenience store, carrying his cordless microwave with him. Inside the Stuffer Shack, he loads the microwave full of his grenades, rigs it to start cooking them after a few seconds, and then gets the heck out of there. The building collapses from the explosion, killing a half-dozen people.

He caught some flak from that - first, from the party, though luckily he didn't jeopardize their mission; second, from the fixer, who would never again sell him explosives. He also had to go out of the way to get facial reconstructive surgery, just in case he had been seen (he had), so while he was under the knife, his fixer bribed the street doc to slip a cranial detonater in there.

How Not to Play ShadowrunThis guy's a different guy from the above story, and while he pulled off random stuff to pass the time, he did it in a fashion that was decidedly more annoying...

First instance of this was when a friend was running a module for us, in which we're supposed to recover a stolen optical disk. Two of the three PCs had a reasonable excuse for being hired for the mission (links to the entertainment industry); Problem PC (who also had a fairly-questionable backstory, but I'll not get into that) didn't, so we decided to try and involve him anyway.

We give him a call... and he lets it go to voicemail. We try and leave him a message, and the player declares that his character's inbox is full. ("In 2070? Nonononono, not happening.")

Y'know what? Fine. We do part of the adventure without him. And then he starts complaining that we're not including him... so we relucantly come to his character's place in person and ask him to come along... after a few minutes of heated discussion, he agrees. Great.

There's also a point at which we could see the GM's forehead vein throbbing, when he asked Problem Player to hand him the Core book; Problem Player thought it would be amusing to offer it to him, then tug it back out of reach at the last second.

I'll save "The Quarter Incident" for another post; it's actually part of our hall of fame. But needless to say, we got a few leads that led deeper into the adventure, and we're about ready to call it a night. We try to wrap up the session by going to drop Problem PC off (the other two PCs live together; one is a bodyguard for the other), but for some reason, he insists on not getting out of the car. We keep arguing for him to get out of the car, but for some reason, he just doesn't want to. (Amusing aside: a friend of the GM's dropped by to hang out, and overheard the tail end of the argument. He asked Problem Player, "Is someone waiting for you at home?" Problem Player said, "No," so the friend said, "Then get out of the car!") It takes a whole twenty minutes to convince him to get out of the car.

I wish that was the end of that, but in a later session, Problem Player topped himself for craziness, easily.

The party's doing a mission that involves travelling out to a lake to make a trade. The road trip is going fairly smoothly, until a little ribbing between players leads to Problem PC (a mage, but that's hardly relevant, considering he never casts any spells) pulling out a grenade. In the van. Party convinces him to put the grenade away, but once that happens, they see fit to dump him out on the side of the road after that.

The party's technomancer, who's having to travel separately by ATV, comes across the scene. The party and their van are long-gone, and Problem PC is just standing on the side of the road. Thanks to an incident with a helicopter, the road is also perforated with bullet holes. The technomancer asks him, "What the heck happened?" He refuses to talk about it. Now, if this comes across as suspicious to you, congratulations, you have more sense than Problem PC. The technomancer's player is pretty much forced to metagame in order to not just leave him on the side of the road.

So, they get to the lake, and they start setting up. Problem PC is sitting invisibly in a tree while a trade is being made on the lake. He decides that now's the time to act like he's being possessed by demons, and try and snipe the party's other mage, who is currently the one making the deal. He fails the roll by a narrow margin, but that definitely got everyone's attention. He gets off another shot, also missing, before the party's physical adept tries to take him out non-lethally. The players are all asking him out-of-character what the hell he's doing, to which he replies, "it's got to do with my backstory." Now, when the GM is clueless as to what's going on, there's a sign that it's a problem. The mage who'd been shot at looks into the Astral plane to make sure he's not really possessed (he's not), and then they knock Problem PC out.

Mission succeeded after that; the mage convinces the adept, who was going the compassionate route, to take him to a street doc. While the street doc is patching Problem PC up, the mage bribes the street doc to put kink bombs in his head (sensing a recurring theme here). He pays for four of them. The adept then admits the troublesome PC to a mental hospital. The mage visits him, tells him about the kink bombs, and uses them as blackmail to get some extra nuyen out of him. When Problem PC outright refuses, he "demonstrates" by detonating a single bomb, killing one of his senses, at which point Problem Player starts complaining about how the mage "ruined his character." We finally retroactively rewind it so as to stop him complaining, and Problem PC agrees to pay. And then he convinces the adept's character to go to Europe with him, using bits of a backstory that no one had heard to entice him into doing so. Problem solved, I guess...

Let that be a warning to you: "It's time for some character development!" is not necessarily a good thing to hear.

[Glimbur]

So we were attempting to recover magical crystals before the big bad could get them. We had word that a group of gnolls had one of them, and they were acting... oddly. They had taken up residence in a legendary tower where something or other had happened in the past.

We show up and there's a gnoll military base outside of the tower. We consider the subtle approach, then kill the guards at the gate. Then we kill a general with a lightning gun. We get in to the tower...

where the gnolls greet us warmly. They want to convince us that their civilization is the best choice, and that we should join them. They give us free run of most of the tower, including the vaults, which were locked. We loot the general's stuff. Then we decide we need more information, and that once of us should seduce a gnoll secretary to get it.

I was playing a catfolk Spellthief, we also had a beguiler, a elven cleric/Seeker of the Misty Isle, a wizard, and a couple of other party members. We decide that seduction is a bluff check, so I steal Glibness from the beguiler because I had the highest Cha and roll for it.

I've never been so disappointed to roll a natural twenty in my life.

We then turned on the gnolls, and my spellthief got pasted by a half-dragon ogre or something like that.