Favorite Gaming Escapades

[Lord]

This is a story that happened when I was playing the West End Games Star Wars RPG. More specifically the Adventure that comes with the book, since I’ve never been any good at making adventures. I was the DM, and the other players were some of my friends from School. The characters were three in number, an Albino Wookie Bounty Hunter named Morwynn focused on stealth and sniping with below average strength for his race, a Sullustian tech engineer who had one point in dodge whose player wanted to play a diabolical mastermind, and had consequently refused to put anything into how to use a gun. Finally there was a Jedi/Sith thing. The Jedi was human, and his backstory made no sense in the star wars universe, but I let it pass because it was our first session and I didn’t want to alienate the players. Ironically enough, although the Jedi was the most colorful of the characters in backstory, he stood out by far the least of the characters. As you will see in a minute.
The mission itself was fairly standard fair. You have a pirate base which has stolen supplies from the Rebel Alliance, and your characters have to steal them back. There are three basic stages to the mission, retrieving the supplies, ground pursuit and space escape. I’ll go into greater detail with them as we come to them.
For now the main characters were right outside a Pirate Base, surrounded by an electric fence that would instantly kill anyone who touched it. The fence is supposed to be the players first major road block, and a challenge they would have to make a few skill checks to overcome. The Sullustian had put a great deal of his points into tech skills, and began coming up with a great many schemes to overcome them, when the Jedi guy uses his lightsaber to hack through it. See, Lightsabers can cut through just about anything, and since their blades do not conduct electricity, the whole first challenge of the adventure was made a bit superfluous really.
So the main characters enter into the Pirate Enclosure with catlike tread, and find a skiff, with the supplies next to it. The Sullustian wants to just load the supplies and go, but Morwyn and the Jedi want to look around. They scout a bit, and find that all the Buildings are made of canvas. They also figure out that the Pirate Leader is inside one of the buildings. Unfortunately its heavily guarded, so they can’t do anything right now.
So they go back, and load the supplies and power up the skiff, and all of a sudden their noticed. So they gun the engine, with the Sullustian driving and race off through the base, hotly pursued by the awakening pirates!
It is at this point in the story that I need to give a bit of background. See, the Pirate Leader was never supposed to be a boss battle, even if he had stats. He is well above in terms of power what starting characters are capable of taking out, even if they got really lucky. He was supposed to have a few lines of dialogue later on in the mission, where he demands the main characters surrender from the Bridge of his Starship, and they have to hold out long enough to escape to hyperspace.
But then something happened. Something which the Adventure had not accounted for, but it happened anyway. The Players went off the rails.
‘Hey, so that Pirate Leader is inside a Canvas Tent, and we’re in a giant motor vehicle.’ Said the Jedi ‘Lets run him over.’
Morwyn thought this was a great plan, however the Sullustian thought it was a terrible plan, possibly because he was cautious, but also because he had not come up with it. The player was the sort of person who wanted to be in control of everything. The players told him they outvoted him, but he said that since he was driving he would make the call.
So then Morwyn’s player says:
‘I punch him out, and take control of the steering wheel for myself.’
The Sullustian appealed to me to stop him, but I thought the plan was a very good one, and even if I didn’t I couldn’t in good conscience disallow player creativity. Consequently I told them to roll it.
On the one hand, Morwyn was frail for a Wookie. On the other, the Sullustian was frail for a Sullustian, and a Wookie remains a Wookie. So I don’t think I need to tell you that the Sullustian was slammed unconscious into the back seat. Morwyn took the controls, and rammed into the tent with the Pirate Leader in it. I couldn’t be bothered to figure out the tables of damage vs durability of getting hit by a car, so I simply followed realities viewpoint of what happens when someone is hit by a speeding vehicle, and said that the Pirate Leader and everyone inside died instantly on contact.
After that the Players escaped the Pirate thing, and I decided that since the Pirate Leader was dead, the Pirates wouldn’t send as strong a pursuit force. The force that did arrive was swiftly defeated, and the main characters got back to their ship and escaped. And as for that big showdown at the end, that whole thing where you get chased by the Pirate Ship? Yeah, that wasn’t happening, because the main characters just butchered the Commander and his second and third in commands in one move. So the whole thing ends in something of an anticlimax. Although now that I think of it the ‘climax’ was the conflict between players. The Pirates, meant to be a definite threat, ended up being an inconvenience at worst.
I gave everyone maximum experience points for that adventure.
Anyway, thats my favorite Tabletop Roleplaying game story. I think I may be remembering some things wrong, as it happened a long time ago.
What about you? Do you have any favorite stories to share of you’re gaming escapades? Feel free to share and comment on them.

[Kid Jake]

Since a good number of my favorite shenanigans are written about in detail in my campaign journals, I'll talk about one I've alluded to but never discussed in detail.

When my laptop got fried and I lost all my Ventnor City prep work, my players and I decided to do a short Pokemon campaign with M&M until I could sort things out.

I told them that they'd be the small time backwoods trainers, the bug catchers and youngsters that populate the highways of the game. They didn't have those fancy Palette Town advantages, like starter Pokemon...or brand name Pokeballs. They were gonna have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to succeed.

I asked them to make a pair of PL3 10 year olds to be their trainers and gave them a spiel about how they bought their PartyBalls from the back of comic book and that the reason 6th Graders are allowed to run unsupervised through the woods all day is a legal loophole that disqualifies any kid stupid enough to purchase such shoddy balls from higher learning.

It was supposed to be a lighthearted and humorous game that my young niece could actually watch us play. Instead, they gave me Walter White and Rambo.

Without even discussing it with each other, they both gave me a background about being the son of a shore and growing up in a brothel. One of them had moderate skill in Chemistry and supplied his mother's pump with 'pick me ups' for his girl's, the other had pumped all of his meager points into living off the land and 'stabbing a bitch.'

Neither of them had any leadership of social style abilities to actually help their Pokemon or interact with the world around them without actively making it a worse place.

They caught their first Pokemon by dogpiling it and then beating it with a stick. Their next few Pokemon were also caught via the stick method.

When a fellow trainer beat them in battle they shanked his Mankee and robbed him at knife point. The survivalist naturally skinned it for a cloak.

They then cut out the middleman and just started stabbing other trainers they encountered, skinning their Pokemon for his increasingly marvelous cloak and selling everything else to finance their crime wave.

Things ended around the 3rd session when a SWAT Arcanine showed them why you should actually rely on Pokemon in a Pokemon game. It was a hilariously violent end to a hilariously violent campaign that had started out with the most innocent of intentions.