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Dairun Cates
2007-09-18, 02:21 AM
We've had a thread on moments of PC stupid luck and PC genius moments. This isn't a topic about either of those.

Between stupidity and genius, there's another lovely set of moments that can best be referred to as Rock Star moments (technically, moments of badassery work too, but that's not a word). Almost every group has had at least a few of them. They often can be related to a PC being incredibly resourceful or outstandingly stupid, but they're their own separate category. These are the moments when a PC, for some reason or another, is inspired to throw caution to the wind and risk themselves in order to achieve some victory of means. The character steps it up a notch so to speak. These risks are not usually dumb luck, but usually a willingness to play against the 33 some odd percent odds of dying as a result. When a player does this, they usually have a nice moment in the spotlight and drop the jaws of the other players.

A couple of examples:
One of my players, gets ambushed from behind by a ninja. The ninja makes the hit on the gun mercenary, Ms. Priori, and rolls high sneak attack damage. Despite having a sizable HP for her level (about 50 at level 6), she eats a HUGE chunk of her total (about 35 in one hit). The ninja literally skewers her with the Katana. What does she do? She grabs onto the blade as its sticking through her, pulls it in, and holds it with a strength check. She takes some damage from the ninja moving the sword around, but the other players close in on the ninja. The ninja, horrible at taking on groups without a weapon, is forced to teleport into the shadows and switch to a back up weapon. Ms. Priori, pulls the Katana out and straps it on her back. Despite having like 8 HP left against a well-conditioned opponent, she continues fighting, and no only survives, but does some heavy damage to him. She keeps the Katana as her back-up melee weapon and then eventually kills the ninja later in the campaign with the same Katana on a crit.

On a side session of another campaign where the players played as the idiot rival Pet Monster snatching team, Team Astro, the players were tricked into blowing up their own HQ. Thinking they were the only ones left of Team Astro, they had no choice but to try and stop the Dark God/Accountant who had sealed away the PCs. When they threatened to attack, the Dark God exclaims that any attempts to defeat him are plain useless. The player of Astrocat then screams, "EVERYTHING WE DO IS USELESS!", evolves, charges, and beats the ever living hell out of him.

A more social example. In a D&D one shot, a shapechanger framed us for espionage. The town guard, who is a female that we signed a diplomatic treaty with, exclaims towards our bard, "There's the man that was in my room." Realizing that we couldn't take the town guard head on, and realizing that the treaty needed to get back to the right hand, the bard hands the rogue the scroll and yells, "That's not what she said last night," and then starts booking it. Because of that, we were able to get the treaty back without any fighting.

So, in short, a Rock Star moment is a moment that fulfills most of the following:
1. It involves a heavy, but not entirely stupid risk.
2. It's awe-inspiring and causes the other players to applaud, laugh, or gawk
3. It can be described as "Bad ass"
4. It usually contains a witty line.
5. It is a character defining moment
6. It achieves some extraordinary end that is normally beyond the character's abilities.
7. It's quick and spur of the moment.

So, I'm interested. Share your moments of charging Demi-gods with only half your HP and a flaming sword, or jumping off the side of the boat in roaring rapids to save a comrade. When have you spit in the eye of a King that screwed over your party? When has your character been a rock star?

Note: Just about anything that counts as a 3-dice stunt in Exalted or requires like 3 action/force points is a Rock Star moment and should be used a good measure for what I'm talking about.

Dhavaer
2007-09-18, 02:36 AM
I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but: the PC was in a carpark, fighting a pair of ghoul ninjas. He killed one before the security guards got there. The second ninja critted him and he failed the massive damage save, passing out just as the guards shot down the ninja. It was just the most perfect timing. Would have been very cinematic.

Dairun Cates
2007-09-18, 02:46 AM
I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but: the PC was in a carpark, fighting a pair of ghoul ninjas. He killed one before the security guards got there. The second ninja critted him and he failed the massive damage save, passing out just as the guards shot down the ninja. It was just the most perfect timing. Would have been very cinematic.

Well, that depends, did he do it with a chainsaw while screaming like a mad banshee and suicidally charging in head first? If so, then yes. If not, then maybe.

Although, technically, the guards get some bonus points for showing up in the nick of time too.

The_Werebear
2007-09-18, 02:51 AM
Ok, D20 Modern Setting. Humanity is in ruins from nuclear war, demonic invasion, and general catastrophe. My party(Smart Hero 2, Charismatic Hero 2, Strong Hero 1, Dedicated Hero 1) sets up in Kansas City. We are considering settling there for quite a while, so we set ourselves up in Arrowhead Stadium, (which was miraculously mostly intact) our logic being that it is spacious, has facilities for plumbing, cooking, and power we could repair, as well as having some choke points we can fortify if we are attacked by raiders.

So, we are exploring the place and come across a dessicated husk of a corpse. We start searching it, and it gets up and starts slowly trying to beat us to death. It doesn't move fast, but blunt weapons and puncture wounds do no damage to it. We discover that I, in fact, have the only weapons that can put one down, a Taser and a crossbow modified to fire sharpened can lids or shurikens. After a little struggling, we put it down and retire to the pressbox to rest.

In the morning, the Strong Hero decides he wants some football pads for
armor, because he got mauled fairly badly. We go down to the locker rooms and find another one. We get the jump on it and it dies quickly. We all move in and start searching the room for pads. Just as we find it, the creature gets back up and lunges at the Strong Hero. He is taken to 0 in one round and is forced to retreat slowly out of the room, while the rest of us distract it and run while I fire shurikens into it. We get out of the room with the pads, slam the door, and shove a table in the way. Just as we start to relax and bandage the Strong Hero, we hear a huge Bang! and the door starts to shudder and cave. The Dedicated and Charismatic hero drag Strong away while I ready an action to fire. I graze it as it bashes through, and am forced to retreat into another room, which we barricade again. Again, Bang! as the door starts to cave. The rest of the group takes off through the lockers as I am forced to snipe at it as it shambles closer. We retreat to another room, blocking a third door with a bench. The next door in line was locked, and we were up against the wall. I get a lucky hit though, and it goes down inches from ripping my arms off. Just as we finally start to calm down... Bang! from the locked door behind us.

We all take off at full speed back to the pressbox, where we block the door so well that it took us a half hour to get in or out. That wasn't the worst of it. The strong hero's wounds started to go bad. His skin takes on the texture of the creatures, and he starts to lose memories. I am forced to make a crude land mine (smart hero, after all) and go harvesting brains so that the Dedicated Hero can whip up a cure. I ran a pull cord from a can of gunpowder, nails, and broken sawblade bits around a corner. Then, I got the attention of a zombie by repeatedly shooting it. Running away at top speed, I got to the ripcord just as the monster was limping over the mine. I blew its legs off, and was able to just shoot it while taking five foot steps back each round. I got the intact head though, and we were able to make a cure.

In the end, the fighter survived and got armor, but we decided there were better places to set up camp. Like three states over.

Dairun Cates
2007-09-18, 03:00 AM
We discover that I, in fact, have the only weapons that can put one down, a Taser and a crossbow modified to fire sharpened can lids or shurikens.

That very well may be the coolest Jury rigged weapon I have ever heard of.

Bosh
2007-09-18, 03:36 AM
If you like that sort of gameplay you MUST give Fate a shot for its aspect system. Aspects are basically anything important that describes your character (favorite possessions, catch phrases, personal history, personality quirks) and anytime you do something that relates to your aspect you can use a Fate point to get a bonus on your rolls. This is a great system since it allows your character to do really badass stuff when appropriate without being overpowered all the time.

For example my character is a rather stupid swashbuckler (imagine a cross between Elan and d'Artagnan) with the aspect "I will redeem my family's honor" which means when I try to have a rockstar moment doing something that fits with that I get a bonus, which is cool. Aspects do other stuff too, but they're great for encouraging this sort of thing.

abadguy
2007-09-18, 04:29 AM
Wow, this thread's timing couldn't have been better. Just had quite a "rockstar" moment in my last session.

Me (Cleric 4) and my party's wizard (also Level 4) were separated from the rest of the party as we headed to the city's library for some research. We got accosted by a group of rogues in the streets, who were after our party for some important quest item that was currently carried by our fighter. We got lead into a narrow alleyway and then! A group of religious fanatics lead by a cleric appeared on the other end of the alleyway. Naturally, they were after the same item the rogues were. Caught between the two groups, me and the wizard came up with a plan born out of sheer desperation.

First, I tried to convince the rogues to aid us to defeat the fanatics. They agreed and began leading us to their hideout. At a junction, they said that we (me and wizard) had to seperate. Knowing that separating would most likely lead to our respective dooms, I then attempted to convince the leader to stay and fight, stating that both myself and the wizard were spellcasters with the ability to defeat the enemy cleric. Bluff check. No ranks in Bluff. I rolled a natural 20. They went with our plan and managed to shoot down most of the fanatics before they retreated.

After that, we were told that we had to separate anyway. I looked at the wizard and he looked at me. Then I said "I attack the rogue leader." The DM was aghast as I rolled for initiative. We gained a surprise round and managed to take down the leader with a nice crit from my longsword. I continued to roll very well and the narrow alleyway helped to prevent us from being flanked. As we cut them down, the surviving last rogue tried to run away but was taken down by the wizard's last Magic Missile.

That was truly a gem of an experience, turning things around like that. I think the DM will definitely be preparing more nasty surprises for "Team Spellcaster" soon! :smallbiggrin:

Ashtar
2007-09-18, 05:25 AM
Spoilered for length. This is what happened to my human rogue in our Eberron game, I stole the spotlight for a while and saved the group, but nearly killed myself in the process.

We are in Sharn's underground, coming out of a Cannith workshop after a fight with some (warforged?) mechanical guard dogs. Already in the fight, my rogue saved the group by brandishing the Cannith insigna to stop the guardians' attack. We had found the template which we had been sent to collect and were weighed down by our filthy loot (gold bars, coins, magical armour and weapons).

Just as we leave, a enormous flaming crossbow bolt embeds itself in the door and our "favorite" recurring villainous warforged servant of the Lord of Blades, Sabre, arrives. As he advances on us, he declares he only want the Cannith template and that if we do not hand it over, he will skin us and rend our flesh upon his bladed armor. We decide to resist. Sabre draws his oil drenched weapon, sets it aflame and advances upon us.

Our cleric bravely advances to protect us, but is cut down in one swift blow. As she lies, bleeding on the floor, we realize that our last hour has arrived.

I drop my backpack filled with loot (for I was overloaded) and take a pouch, raise it high and say to Sabre: "Come and take the template, if you can" (Bluff (roll 18 + 7 = 25 ^^). He ignores the others and comes after me as I lead him away, my swaying lantern lighting the way as I scramble through the rubble of the ruined undercity. Launching a tanglefoot bag at him, I gain precious moments to get ahead and out of sight where I am able to duck behind a ruined wall. Leaving my lantern there (the only source of lighting), I run further and duck into the shadows (Hide in Shadows). Sabre arrives and discovers the abandoned lantern, and destroys it in a fit of fury. He extinguishes his weapon, leaving us alone, in a deadly game of cat and mouse, in total darkness.

Meanwhile, the Mage and Psion had stabilized the cleric and dragged her to the exit shaft where we had secreted a cache with a healing potion. Using the rope they had left, they climbed back up, after marking the shaft with a light spell and leaving me to my fate as they rushed to deliver the Template (carried by the Psion) to our employer.

As I start creeping towards the exit shaft, completely blind, I suddenly hear Sabre’s booming voice very close. “I can hear you! I am coming to rend your flesh, human!” (DM rolls Intimidate, I manage my resistance roll to avoid whimpering in fear and making noise). Sabre passes very close to my position on his way to the exit shaft, knowing that he can block me off there. He reaches the shaft before me, blocking my exit.

I start hearing some dull crashes, as if he was demolishing stones. Advancing under cover of the noise, I see him at the bottom of the shaft, breaking through the wall and suddenly, he releases a torrent of water!

With the water rising fast and the warforged blocking my only exit, I am trapped in! I can hear Sabre cachinnating in evil glee as the tunnel and shaft to the surface are flooded. Realizing that I will need to swim out, I get rid of all my equipment and heavy clothes to avoid the swim penalties. I stay in the ruined area as the water slowly pushes me up to the ceiling, periodically diving to check if he is still blocking the tunnel.

Finally, as the water fills the chamber, with my last gasps of air in my lungs, I dive to the tunnel and discover the warforged gone. I swim against the current in the tunnel (1 swim check per round + holding my breath) and arrive at the bottom of the flooded shaft. I start rising along the shaft and my breath runs out. My CON 12 rogue starts making constitution checks, and finally, I surface out of the shaft. Freezing, half naked and scared that the warforged is waiting for me, I sprint to the ground level of Sharn, where I take refuge among the goblins I know.

jademonkey
2007-09-18, 05:54 AM
My favourite rockstar moment:

We're Imperial Space Marines on a derelict ship that obviously has a horrible huge reality warping soul-eating alien (imagine the Alien from the first film but its bite destroys your 'soul' and looking at it makes you go crazy) on it. It's all very tense and my character, who is the squad Sergeant, is currently unpopular with his boys after an unfortunate "itchy trigger-finger" plasma grenade incident.

We search the ship and find the hideously mutilated remains of dozens of soldiers, techs and civilians. Most of the other PCs start saying that we should bug out but I tell them that we have to move on. More muttering.

Finally, the moment comes. We open the doors to the bridge and the DM describes the monstrosity with relish, (we expect to TPK at this point) lingering on the details such as its enormous size, the reality warping effects of its very existence and so on.

Realising we're over our heads, I act first and tell the rest of the squad to run like hell back to the ship and that I'll cover their asses. They all run. :(

The abomination charges me and bites me. I luckily make the save and don't drop dead immediately, but still take most of my HP. I then throw a plasma grenade in its mouth (lucky) and 'duck and cover'. The beast's head explodes, spattering me with gore. I then stagger back to the rest of the squad, to their absolute shock.

Darrin
2007-09-18, 09:15 AM
Valdres and Mauldra vs. the 50-foot Gnoll

Back in my college days, 2nd Edition, I was one of the two tanks in the group, playing Valdres, a fighter who specialized in every possible combat style that involved bastard swords. Or second tank was Mike's elven pit fighter, Mauldra, who specialized in mauls (arena weapon similar to spiked gauntlets). We were playing in DM Ryan's homebrew campaign, sorta a Dark Sun meets Warhammer FRP thing.

Ryan had this thing for gnolls, and in particular, mutant gnolls. One of his favorite BBEG's was Krom, who had some Tarrasque-like regeneration abilities, and he caught up with us in the desert with a bunch of mutant gnoll flunkies, one of which was 50 feet tall. Everybody was around 5th or 6th level, and not really up to fighting 50-foot anything. We weren't all full strength and we'd lost our healer, so the rest of the party took the hint from the DM that he wanted us to parley or negotiate, and proceeded to argue with Krom about why, exactly, our thief had tried to backstabbed him last time we met. The negotiations hadn't started off well, so I looked over at Mike, and I could tell we were both struggling with whether our characters would decide to back down or do something incredibly, insanely violent and suicidal (but somewhat in-character).

I picked up my 20-sider and asked him, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Mike in a quiet, slow voice, said, "Yes, I think I am."

We tossed the dice onto the table. I rolled an 18. Mike rolled a 20. The DM turned to us, surprised that we were rolling attack rolls, and gave us his shocked "Oh crap they're doing something incredibly stupid that will get them killed", and asked us, "Do you really want to do that?" We told him yes, we knew it was stupid but we wanted to do it anyway. He said "Ho-kay!" and reluctantly shifted gears as it began to sink in around the table that we were now all headed for what looked like a TPK.

Next turn, Mike rolled an 18 and a 20. I rolled a 19, and after a few rounds, both of us quickly and thoroughly made mince-meat of that 50-foot gnoll's ankles. I never rolled anything lower than a 16. Mauldra finally landed the fatal blow, and the 50-foot gnoll toppled to the ground...

...on top of Valdres, who blew is roll to get out of the way, driving him waste-deep into the sand. The crushing damage dropped him below 0 HP, and I spent the next six days waiting for natural healing to bring me back up to conciousness.

Leicontis
2007-09-18, 09:25 AM
This game was set in a sort of post-apocalyptic Forgotten Realms (Monstrous races had overthrown all civilization and taken over the world). My character was a grizzled old Marshal with better mental stats than physical stats. Prior to game start, he had witnessed his beloved mentor brutally killed and torn apart by goblins, who had then run off with the various pieces of heirloom regalia my character should have inherited. Needless to say, he hated goblins.

We're clearing a small Dwarven village of the goblins that now occupy it. Upon opening/looking into the door of one of the houses, we see three goblins inside. My character immediately charges in, while the other party members stay outside, one or two providing some ranged support. My character's actions from here are as follows:
Round 1: Attack first goblin with longsword. He drops.
Round 2: Attempt to shield bash second goblin with (non-spiked) shield (also, no shield bash feats whatsoever). Critical. Drops.
Round 3: Turn to only remaining goblin and bull-rush him, attempting to crush him against the wall. A good roll combined with broken weapon racks on that wall...

At this point, the quiet, dignified, intelligent older man arches his back, tips back his head, and lets out a bestial roar of victory. The rest of the party just kinda stood there with "Do we know this guy?" looks on their faces.

Thanks to a good set of rolls, this combat went in a very RP-good fashion.

Hunter Noventa
2007-09-18, 11:27 AM
Probably the most badass thing I ever did with a character involves the Swordsage in my avatar.

The campaign was in a semi Vampire hunter D-ish world, where vampries more or less lord over the general populace. But it's not Ravenloft.

Anyway, the party had just infiltrated the castle of a powerful Vampire Lord intent on taking over the last free human city. We made our way to his throne room where he was meeting with some cronies. They scattered whent he fight broke out, as the statues around the room came alive, becoming Retrievers.

Our party consisted of my Swordsage, a Cleric with a Warforged Cohort, an Artificer with Blast Rod wielding Homunculus, and a non-optimized Psion. THer emay have been one or two more, but I don't recall.

Now, I had been lucky enough to acquie a Sun Blade. So as combat started and my super dexy, Shadow Hand focused Swordsage charges the Vampire and "tanks" him while everyone ele fights off the Retrievers. I spent severl rounds exchanging blows witht he Vampire, backing him up onto his throne as he tries to stay aay to cast spells.

Eventually the retrievers are dead, and the party is focusing on the Vampire. And then, I use a manuver, pull off a critical hit with the Sunblade, and do enough damage with it to destroy the vampire. My DM ruled that I took off his head with that blow and basically incinerated the body, because I was using a Desert Wind manuver. Not only that, but the weapon became a Legacy Weapon right then and there.

It was beautiful.

Heineken
2007-09-18, 11:55 AM
I had one of these Rockstar-Moments on friday:
Our party (12th lvl Rogue, 12th lvl Bard and 12th lvl TWF Ranger <-that´s me) was fighting in quite a big battle inside a dwarven city. Duergar had attacked the city from the underground, while an evil Wizard tried to steal an artifact from the throne room. We were defending the gate to the throne room, when the Duergar´s main force arrived. There was absolutely no chance of defeating them, so the Dwarven chief sent us to find the powerful temple-guard to reinforce our troops. We fought our way through the burning city and finally saw them, fighting a big bunch of Duergar. Unfortunately we were quite high above them because we were standing on a bridge that connected two plateaus of a higher level of the city. So I asked the Bard to enlarge me and jumped off the bridge and aimed for the leader of the Duergar. Thanks to power attack and Leap Attack I killed him with one hit. That was one hell of a cool moment...

On another occasion the same character charged a treant while he was down to 1 hp. What can I say? I critted him :smallbiggrin:

Man, I love this character.

Seatbelt
2007-09-18, 12:44 PM
We saved Greenday from Polar Bears. Rockstar moment? Yes please.

Jerthanis
2007-09-18, 01:03 PM
There was one time my level 5 Fighter practically soloed the level 9 fighter who had a brilliant energy weapon, the campaign end-boss... but that was less "I did something crazy and dangerous and it worked" and more "My party was useless, and I had the right potions for the job"

Other two spoilered for length

There was another time where there was a powerful Djinn warlord who was attempting to take over the world. We found that the only way to defeat him was to seal him away in a sunken castle, so we found out how to raise the castle, and then lured him there. My character, a level 6ish Druid, was waiting for him at the gates. The Djinn left his armies behind and accepted my one on one challenge. I cast Flame Blade, he formed a sword out of wind, flashing green. We dueled for a bit and I realized I wasn't going to win, so I ran away into the throne room, and hit myself with a couple healing spells. The Djinn caught up and we resumed the duel, fighting over the throne itself. I again withdrew up some flights of staircases until we were fighting on the battlements. He kept "pushing me back" as I retreated round after round with a five foot step each time. Finally he had me against the battlements and open air... He told me to yield, and he'd make my death quick. As a response I threw myself over the edge and Wild Shaped into an eagle just as my wizard friend activated the doohickey to seal the Djinn there. It was at the least, a satisfyingly climactic end to a campaign.


This other time, in Ebberron, I was playing a rogue who was hired as a mercenary to act as a policeperson for sharn while their law enforcement brigade was lost in a living spell of Maze. She was going to confront the person in charge of house Cannith about some of their factories and an unlawful upsurge in production, and blackmail her about that for information on the house of shadows, so I could bring in the people who were trying to assassinate the minotaur who was hired to go into the Maze spell and bring people out of it. I wasn't listening to one of the DM's asides for another one of the players, as the game had allowed a lot of freedom to separate from the party to pursue individual agendas... but apparently he had made contact with the house of shadows and had apparently been hired to destroy House Cannith, because while waiting for the CEO (what we started calling the head of House Cannith) to get out of her meeting, I saw my fellow PC out a window, riding a Flying carriage packed with explosives right toward the tower. Cursing violently, and thankful I had a ring of featherfall, I ran into the meeting, grabbed the CEO, and jumped out a window a moment before the explosion rocked the building. I made my reflex save to avoid the shrapnel raining around, but I saw my fellow PC above me, also falling with featherfall, and him being a Spiked Chain Fighter, I knew my bow-rogue couldn't win in an aerial duel with my hands full of CEO. I realized it was only a matter of time before we landed and he killed both of us, so I "Kicked" one of the pieces of falling tower around us and used my slippers of spider-climb to attach myself to it. It overloaded the Featherfall spell and we plummeted from the skies of Sharn. Unfortunately, that gave him the same idea... and he used his spiked chain to wrap around his OWN piece of falling debris to follow us. Fortunately for me, there was a sky-platform we were falling past, and I was able to leap to safety, rolling with it and taking only significant falling damage, instead of dying. Fullplate man was not quite able to make the jump, and was clinging on to the edge for dear life. We looked at each other, him not quite able to make an easy climb check to pull himself up repeatedly, me not quite certain I want to push him the rest of the way off for fear of him pulling me with him... Eventually I retreat with the CEO and lose him in the city.

Winterking
2007-09-18, 01:05 PM
Ahh, the memories...

Two autumns ago, I was studying abroad, and had found a group that played a variant of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Being a High Elves player myself, I went with High Elven WHFRP characters, only for them to keep dying, after generally less than a session of adventuring. Finally, I'd made a new character, a two-sword-wielding swashbucklery type who so far had been unable to do much more than stay alive. The party was investigating some hideous murders and evil-stuff-activity, when a giant snake-daemon (made out of garbage, I believe) attacked us.
The fight was going somewhat poorly, until my elven swordsman leapt onto the daemon-snake's back, ran up its neck, and plunged my swords into each side of the beast.* The worm turned, and as it fled back to its lair, my elf kept his balance, riding atop the snake-daemon like a Fremen on a sandworm, singing a bold elven song, bright red cape flapping in the breeze. Being carried away from the party, straight into the lair of a bunch of cultists. But it was quite the "rock star" moment.


*The fact that the fireballs of our group's permanently drunken wizard finally managed to strike the daemon may have had more impact on the course of the battle, however...


Another campaign I played in was a strange amalgamation of old WoD settings, and while the rest of the party consisted of a Vampire, a Werewolf, and a Sorceror, I was playing a Daredevil (from Adventure!), a crack shot with a heavily modified shotgun. The greatest rock star moment there involved a called shot to the left nostril of a half-demon neo-Nazi, and over twenty dice being rolled for damage. The result? An exploding head, and severely damaged architecture behind the demon.

Argent
2007-09-18, 01:09 PM
Party is up against a bunch of bandits who're looting a caravan. We're mopping up the mooks when the bandit leader decides to hightail it -- he grabs the loot and jumps on his horse in preparation to flee. My cleric (of Kelemvor) just happened to have cast True Strike and it was still active; on my turn, the cleric chucked his heavy mace at the bandit leader, who was about fifty feet away... and rolled an insta-kill. Twenty, twenty, hit. Dropped the guy like a bad habit, right off his horse. Probably the most cinematic moment I've seen in a game in a long time.

Telonius
2007-09-18, 01:10 PM
Our warforged barbarian had been swallowed whole by some sort of awful unpronounceable aberration, and was in danger of being utterly consumed by the stomach acid. My Wizard/Rogue/Master of Masks charges the thing, dives into its jaws, grabs hold of the barbarian, and teleports out to safety. It was one of his more badass moments.

Shatenjager
2007-09-18, 02:24 PM
Well there was this one campaign where I was running a D20 Appocalypse campaign with all the PCs as members of a rock band. I made a wierd magic system that had to do with perform checks.

They had to fight some tribals with arrows when the lead guitarist struck a bad ass chord on his axe, drew his sword and charged. The chord lingered in the air deflecting arrows as per the wind wall spell as he covered the entire distance between the archers and himself.

Is that rock star enough?

I miss that campaign.

Indon
2007-09-18, 02:41 PM
So, in short, a Rock Star moment is a moment that fulfills most of the following:
1. It involves a heavy, but not entirely stupid risk.
2. It's awe-inspiring and causes the other players to applaud, laugh, or gawk
3. It can be described as "Bad ass"
4. It usually contains a witty line.
5. It is a character defining moment
6. It achieves some extraordinary end that is normally beyond the character's abilities.
7. It's quick and spur of the moment.


The Exalted campaign I'm currently running is filled with these. A relatively recent moment:

The players are on a river barge being fired upon by a nearby river fortress with a functioning first age weapon mounted on it; it is essentially a powerful piece of artillery, and very capable of destroying a ship.

After deflecting a few blows off the ship by parrying them, three party members get the bright idea to strike the next shell hard enough that it flies _back_ to the fortress, striking it. I let them do this by all making attack rolls, and they achieved 31 combined successes.

So they not only deflect the attack, but they knock it back into the fortress, inflicting significant damage and giving them some hella impressive reputation.

tainsouvra
2007-09-18, 02:43 PM
The Exalted campaign I'm currently running is filled with these. Yeah, Exalted is made for this stuff. If you're not having moments like that, your storyteller is watering it down :smallbiggrin:

Indon
2007-09-18, 02:50 PM
Yeah, Exalted is made for this stuff. If you're not having moments like that, your storyteller is watering it down :smallbiggrin:

Ooh, another one. The resident Lunar once turned into a Tyrant Lizard and repeatedly rolled over a 1'st Circle demon to beat it up (I ran it like a clinch in-game, if I recall).

tainsouvra
2007-09-18, 02:55 PM
Ooh, another one. The resident Lunar once turned into a Tyrant Lizard and repeatedly rolled over a 1'st Circle demon to beat it up (I ran it like a clinch in-game, if I recall). Ok, that's just funny.

For the D&D inclined, this is somewhat similar to wildshaping into a huge dinosaur then sitting on your opponent until he is crushed beyond recognition. I find that too funny to not abuse at some point in the future.

Zim
2007-09-18, 02:56 PM
The rogue in our STAP campaign did what was probably the most awesome bit of spy work I've ever witnessed. We had just defeated one of the BBEG's and taken his disguise (a magical rubber suit that made him look human rather than a horrible monster). We had found out that the leaders of the BIG conspiracy were meeting at a certain time and place and this BBEG was in tight with the leader (a kissy kissy way, that is).

What we did was dressed the rogue up in the magic suit, gave him a potion of glibness, hat of disguise, the BBEG's clothes (incl jewellery and cologne), and a cape of the montebank (escape route) and sent him into the secret conspiracy meeting, making the excuse that he was crashing the party.

Several ungodly Bluff and Disguise checks later (we're talking low 50's), he had the entire group of shadowy figures eating out of his hand. He even flirted with the head conspirator and the elven vampire, and none of them knew the difference!

Needless to say, when they found the body of the BBEG we killed lying face-down and naked in his sanctum the next morning, they were pissed! It was very cool! :smallcool:

Indon
2007-09-18, 03:04 PM
Another one from my Exalted game:

The party encountered a giant (horse-sized) roach near a Wyld zone. The Dragon-blood of the party, ever heroic, leaps onto the roach and stabs it in one eye. The roach deployed its' wings and took off, the Dragon-blood hanging on, Shadow of the Collossus style, attacking it all the while.

In fact, that character's general approach to combat against large things is 'climb up it and stab it', which is fun.

Machete
2007-09-18, 03:05 PM
I was playing in a game of Evolution as a race of sentient mushroom people. Among other interesting abilities they had was the fact that their bodies were very poisonous. Another dragon-like race had developed a godkilling ability that sapped gods of their powers and looked to eventually kill the gods. This also gave them a taste for sentient flesh.

Therefore, the mushroom people, being the race of mostly pacifistic herbivores with more points in stuff like brewing and cooking than fighting they were decided to offer a great number of themselves up as slaves to the dragon race.

Decades later in game, the true reason for their enslavement arose during what the mushroom people called a celebration of their masters they killed each other and served most of themselves up. The dragon creatures ate up and almost the entire race of dragon creatures was killed in a single night during the full moon as they died horrible deaths comperable to chugging cyanide.

Sure, the mushroom people hadn't sent enough slaves to poison everybody, but it was still a rockstar moment.

BRC
2007-09-18, 03:56 PM
I was absent at the time, but apparently my group once convinced a city of mind flayers to turn against their leader and fight for us.

Fruan
2007-09-18, 05:34 PM
Well, if we're telling Exalted stories...


My Solar Twilight Sorcerer - Mnemon Yen - had a pretty impressive rock star moment when we were clearing the ancient and malfunctioning first age defenses out of his first age incarnation's manse.

On either side of a large sweeping stairway leading up from the back of the great hall to the mezzanine level that surrounded it were 8 big statues. We'd polished off some 3rd circle demons that had been bound to guarding the place, and had basicly all split up to explore. The circle's Dawn does something he shouldn't have (sadly, I forget what) and the statues animate and start attacking.

The were pretty damn tough - Enough soak so that the Grand Diaklave weilding Dawn combat monkey was only doing ping damage. (In D&D terms, I guess this is roughly similar to a creature having massive DR that you just cannot bypass). Coming out of a lab off the mezzanine level, Yen realizes that it's time to break out the big guns, and spends a round casting 'Invunerable Skin of Bronze' - A spell that literally turns you to living bronze, making you hella tough, as well as becoming as heavy as a large solid bronze statue, etc.

The Statues just aren't taking noticable damage from the rest of the party, so Yen charges at the nearest one, tripping it over on the staircase. He then jumps up on it, and stands on it as it starts to slide down, applying all his now massively increased weight to grinding the statues head against the stairs. Riding the statue down the stairs, he starts to cast "Death of Obsidian Butterflies" - A spell that sends out a swarm of razor sharp butterflies carved from obsidian in a rather large cone area of effect. Just as Yen reaches the bottom of the stairs, the spell goes off, effectively sand blasting the statue he rode down into rubble.

Of course, Sorcery being what it is in Exalted, he had to go sit down after that, having expended 80% of his essence. But damn it was cool. Getting a 3 die stunt bonus on a grapple attack, and then using a stunt to be allowed to cast sorcery in a grapple is where things are at.

EndgamerAzari
2007-09-18, 05:50 PM
Ooh, ooh! I have one!


My fighter/barbarian was witness to an out-of-control parade float careening towards a patron-filled inn. Acting on instinct (both her and I), she charges the float. I roll a nat 20 on my strength check, and she tears a wheel clean off, causing the float's speed to drop to non-life-threatening. If I'd screwed that up I probably woulda been flattened.

DraPrime
2007-09-18, 06:00 PM
I was playing a were-tiger. Our party was in a castle that was under attack, and the gates were almost down. I transformed into hybrid mode, and gave one command. Open the gates. I managed to single-handedly hold back half the enemy army.

Beleriphon
2007-09-18, 06:34 PM
We saved Greenday from Polar Bears. Rockstar moment? Yes please.

That deserves a better explanation.

I have a rockstar moment, or rather my players did. Were playing Saga Edition Star Wars and in the first adventure (in a big alternate history thing) they wake up to find their luxury liner under attack. The quick thinking scoundrel downs some pirates in the mess hall and dons their clothes. He manages to lead another group of pirates into a pretty devious trap where our melee build wookiee solider (heaven help those poor pirates) attacks them from behind after netting them. The only comment from the scoundrel: "That'll be a mess to clean up later".

In a different ambush our heavy blaster rifle wielding mercenary psychopath (every group has one) decides he's going to autofire into a group of pirates. He botches his roll something awful, I think he ended up with a 6 total after the modifiers. He respose: "That was a warning shot, surrender now!" One intimidation check later and the pirates surrender. To this day he claims it was intentional.

skywalker
2007-09-18, 07:08 PM
Ooh, ooh, I have a rockstar moment, and we were level one:

The campaign was a sort of Warriors type of game, you know, gangs of street youth battle it out in the streets for territory. We shaved one of their pretty boys so they crashed our bar. We were on an expedition to burn their bar down when we were spotted by 4 of their footsoldiers. They walk towards the party and tell us we better beat feet. My barbarian spits at their feet and curses their mothers. They attack, and we realize that being pressed up against a corner in such a way that they can surround us is probably not the best tactical decision. Upon attacking, their leader immediately receives an arrow from our leader, who was actually on the opposite rooftop. The second drops due to a sudden strike by the gnome ninja(who was hiding in my barb's shadow). The third and fourth both give way to a swinging greataxe(mine). The next round, it becomes apparent(from our rooftop guy) that there are 6 more coming, 3 with bows. The next conversation was priceless.
Me: I want to charge them.
DM: You can't, there's bodies surrounding you, difficult terrain.
Me:*stews for a few minutes*... Wait a minute, I have ranks in jump.
DM: We've never rolled a jump check...

My barbarian leaps the bodies, charges the three melee enemies, cleaves through the first and drops the second, which the DM ruled made an automatic intimidate against the living one(we were teenagers fighting teenagers, after all). He failed and ran screaming to his mommy.

Then more reinforcements showed up. The gnome and barbarian look up from looting the bodies to see about 20 more coming. The DM gives the gnome an evil look.
DM: Looks like you're in trouble... *evil laugh*
Me: I pick him up...

This was the most rockstar moment of all, I think.

Ravyn
2007-09-18, 07:21 PM
Where to start?

One of my best Exalted characters, logically enough, is a walking rockstar moment, but there are three exploits of hers that just cry out for retelling. She was a frail little Air Aspect named Tuyet, Iselsi by birth and master spy by training, and quite possibly the most subtle and manipulative character I'd ever played. Until, that is, the first time she discovered her other gifts.

So there she is. Assigned along with her squad to provide protection for the Roseblack and her legions as she returned to the Isle. (How the heck four relatively inexperienced DBs were supposed to pull that off I wasn't sure.... until it happened.) Gets ambushed by no less than three different groups at once, the most troublesome of which were two Abyssals, ten nemissaries, and a small army of mortal death cultists. Lost my targets, had a perfectly good stunt prop, needed to do something. So out of pure desperation, she jumps up onto said prop--a lump of ice made of four foes that she'd frozen with a side effect of her weapon the previous round--and begins reminding the death cultists of just how uncomfortable it is to die by ice and threatening them with a similar fate. It really shouldn't've worked....

.....but it did. For one brief moment, all of them stopped. Got the deathknight's attention, held it for a while, then used his soldiers as a distraction by feigning death, went invisible, and took him out.

It gave her ideas.

So the next time such a thing came up, she was actually prepared. We were defending a bridge, and our ST had seriously planned for us to lose--sorely outnumbered, with a full legion bearing down on us, it seemed pretty probable that it'd end badly. Practically midnight, nice moonlit night, very good for atmosphere--so she leaps up onto the smoke of some of the firebreaks we set and basically tries to guilt-trip the incoming legion into realizing the sheer stupidity of what everyone's getting into and remembering their greater loyalty should be the Realm as a whole. The looks on our commanders' faces when the group came trotting up with a hefty contingent of enemy soldiers following and saved their bacon, explaining it away with "They followed me home. Can I keep them?" was pretty priceless.

Last but not least was a full-group rockstar moment of epic proportions that quite literally broke the stunt barrier.

Imagine, if you will, enemy encampments a few miles away from each other. Now, imagine two infiltrators sneaking up on one, leaving a thin trail of explosives outside, each set just outside the blast radius of the one before, and an escape attempt from the inside that has already involved invisibility, a pretty good diversion, taking out the enemy's siege engines, and using one on the way out to get to the edge of camp. So the catapult goes off, Tuyet comes falling out of midair, lands on the walls, picks up her friends, leaps off, her partner sets off the first explosion, and they basically Cloud-Tread off the concussive waves of an explosive chain reaction and land safely in front of their reinforcements about a mile or so away.

By that time, our ST had extended the stunt range from one to four because we were so prone to "high twos". ...he gave us five.

appending_doom
2007-09-18, 07:48 PM
So, we're in Eberron, and have spent ages following around our boss, this creepy guy who's the head of Cyre homeland security.

Then Cyre blows up.

Long story short, we eventually find out this guy is a rakshasa and mostly responsible for the destruction, and is planning to use the souls of the recently deceased to become all-powerful.

So we decide to travel into the heart of the rakshasa's city, a literal assault on the stronghold of the Lords of Dust. We might stand a chance, because we've got a powerful transmuter, a freakishly impossible to hit Inspired spy, a warforged artificer who didn't fail UMD checks, ever, and an insane half-undead changeling tainted ranger wielding a double-vicious longsword that usually nearly killed her. We have money, artifacts, and equipment up the wazoo, including the benefits of 4 of the six Tomes, a half-charged staff of power, and hundreds of scrolls on the person of our artificer/barbarian (immune to fatigue, natch).

We were tricked out, but so was the rakshasa.

First couple of rounds, he fired off meteor swarm once a turn, was surrounded by spiritual protection, and I could barely get a shot through his spell turning. Luckily, we were able to nullify some of his special powers by stabbing a cuotl heart through his chest, but we were still in trouble.

And then he cast Disjunction.

The artificer had lost most of his arsenal. The wilder was sort of okay because he was mostly relying on his Inspiredness. The tainted warrior...lost her con-boosting items, the sword that was increasing her Con, and the sword...well, as long as she had the sword, negative energy healed her. Otherwise, she couldn't be healed.

So she's unconscious, about to exit a rage (which will push down her Con and kill her for certain), and no one has any magic weapons. Against a rakshasa.

So. I'm standing like 100 feet away, holding a half-charged staff of power, and with enough levels in Skymage that I could polymorph as a free action.

Our ranger was going to die. That much was certain, short of a miracle we didn't have. The wilder had an ungodly reflex save. And I had a 50% chance of surviving.

So I turned into a gold dragon, launched myself across this crazy throne room, and smashed the Staff of Power against the throne.

So he takes a bajillion damage. The ranger dies, and the rest of the party lives. And I survive, getting blasted to another plane. Two more rounds of beating, and the rakshasa is down.

Of course, I'm sure plenty of other people have exploded Staves of Power to kill enemies, but the Rockstarness comes not only from the surviving, but also the having to turn into a dragon to cross the 100 intervening feet to do so.

Unscrewed
2007-09-18, 08:05 PM
The coolest moment in my gaming experience came when we were fighting a dragon. Party level was ten.

The dragon was huge sized and red, but I don't know exactly what it's age category was.

The fight started badly, with our party being blindsided by the dragon's 10d10 fire damage breath weapon. Ironically, the cleric (me) with a dex of 6 makes the save, while the the barbarian and sorcerer bomb it. By the end of the surprise round, the sorcerer is at 1 hp, and the barbarian isn't doing much better. The Barbarian goes into melee with the dragon while the sorcerer provides the artillery and the cleric tries to keep every one on their feet.

A few rounds into combat, we're in deep trouble. We've been dealing pretty heavy damage, but the dragon is power attacking the barbarian for at least 20+, sometimes 40 damage every round, and he's running on rage HP despite the clerics best efforts. The sorcerer's spells are beating the SR, but only just, and it's only a matter of time till his luck runs out. Worse, this is the last round before the dragon can use it's breath weapon again, wiping us out.

Our barbarian is the last up before it's the dragon's turn again and all is lost. Swinging his falchion, he lands two solid hits. But is it enough? We wait with tensed silence as the DM does the calculations. Smiling, he announces the dragon's hit points.

The dragon is at -1.

That was an awesome session.

Leicontis
2007-09-19, 08:39 AM
The coolest moment in my gaming experience came when we were fighting a dragon. Party level was ten.

The dragon was huge sized and red, but I don't know exactly what it's age category was.

The fight started badly, with our party being blindsided by the dragon's 10d10 fire damage breath weapon. Ironically, the cleric (me) with a dex of 6 makes the save, while the the barbarian and sorcerer bomb it. By the end of the surprise round, the sorcerer is at 1 hp, and the barbarian isn't doing much better. The Barbarian goes into melee with the dragon while the sorcerer provides the artillery and the cleric tries to keep every one on their feet.

A few rounds into combat, we're in deep trouble. We've been dealing pretty heavy damage, but the dragon is power attacking the barbarian for at least 20+, sometimes 40 damage every round, and he's running on rage HP despite the clerics best efforts. The sorcerer's spells are beating the SR, but only just, and it's only a matter of time till his luck runs out. Worse, this is the last round before the dragon can use it's breath weapon again, wiping us out.

Our barbarian is the last up before it's the dragon's turn again and all is lost. Swinging his falchion, he lands two solid hits. But is it enough? We wait with tensed silence as the DM does the calculations. Smiling, he announces the dragon's hit points.

The dragon is at -1.

That was an awesome session.
That is my favorite kind of combat - winning mere moments before a TPK. Hard to pull off, as a GM, but sooo worth it :)

Hzurr
2007-09-19, 03:12 PM
A party I was DMing had a similar experience. The party was level 5 or so and made up of a:
- Human Shadowmage
- Elf Ranger (who was so xenophobic and elitist, she refused to acknowledge that she spoke or understood common)
- Halfling Paladin (who's right hand had gotten bit off by a kobald the adventure before)
- Human Druid
- Half-Elf Cleric
- Human Rogue

The party had been captured by a band of kobalds, who all served as slaves to a red dragon. They were awaiting their time to be fed to the dragon, when a kobald cleric offers them a deal. He'll sneak them into to the dragon's chamber with all their gear, and they can have a fighting chance in exchange for leaving the kobald in charge of the island if they managed to kill the dragon. The party doesn't have much of a choice in the matter, so they agree.

The party makes it to the dragon's lair, and storms in to attack. Unfortunately, they had been extremely loud outside the door, and the dragon was awake and waiting for them. They walk in the door, and everyone gets toasted, and the party is already hurting. They charge in, and actually start doing fairly well against the dragon, and start getting into great flanking positions. Then the dragon gets to use it's breath weapon again. The dragon flies to the other side of the cave, bites the head off of the shadowmage, and then roasts the party as they charge across the cavern after it.

Damage starts getting dealt pretty heavily all around, and soon the cleric is in the negatives and the druid's animal companion is dead. However, the others have managed to more or less pin the dragon in a small part of the cave so that it can't maneuver much, or fly away. The dragon figures that he should get out of there, and decides to bullrush and overrun the poor one-handed halfling. The dragon charges, and the halfling decides to stand his ground. A natural 20 and a natural 1 later, and the small halfling paladin stands his ground against the huge evil charging dragon, and knocks the dragon flat on it's backside with a victory cry of "HUUAAAHHHH!!". I've never seen a halfling (or a player) so proud before.

The party gets in a few good hits before the dragon recovers, at which time the dragon promptly eats the halfling. Now all thats left is a very wounded rogue and druid, and the ranger who is as far away as she can get, and not doing overly well with her arrows. A couple claws and bites later, the druid and rogue are in the negatives, and the dragon breathes fire and takes the ranger down to 2 hp. The dragon charges the ranger, and the many-shot ability that had been screwing her all night finally pays off, and she drops the dragon who was 15' in front of her and closing fast down to -1 hitpoint.

2 PCs killed, 3 in the negatives and one left standing with 2 HP...


Definite rockstar.

kieza
2007-10-01, 01:19 PM
From a campaign I'm DM'ing: a Dwarf Monk, Half-elf Cleric and Half-elf Ranger walk into an abandoned warehouse looking for the occupant, a poison dealer who may have been involved in the assassination attempt on their employer, a foreign diplomat. There are two thugs lounging around on chairs near the door.

Thug 1: Whaddaya want?
Monk: We'd like to see Marhus (The dealer)
Thug 2: He ain't seeing anyone without an appointment.
Monk: We'd like to make an appointment.
Thug: Great! How 'bout you come back when the Nine Hells freeze over?
Monk: We're going to make an appointment.

Thugs attack, using bare hands and one of the chairs they were sitting on. The monk grapples and beats up one, the ranger and cleric take out the other. At one point the cleric tries to overrun the monk and his opponent, rolls nat 20, and makes a spectacular leap off the back of the grappled thug, attacking the other thug in midair. In the end, one thug is unconscious, the other is bruised and bloody.

Monk: We have an appointment. (Walks past with the rest of the party.)

EDIT: My party corrected me on a couple of the details.

Just Alex
2007-10-01, 01:54 PM
In an L5R campaign, the party is hunting down a bunch of maho-tsukai that we suspect are planning to summon a big oni. They manage to summon the big thing, but don't get it to fully manifest yet. We see a bunch of the cultists still chanting, so the guess is that if we disrupt them, the oni will go back to the shadowlands. Unfortunately, the oni was solid enough to fight us. My Hida bushi looks at the oni, draws his Dai Tsuchi, looks to the rest of the party and says "I've got the big one, you guys get the tsukai" With that, I charge after the oni who, as the GM describe it, stepped on me for about 82 wounds. I shrug my shoulders and declare i'd use Mountain Does not Move technique. It allows me to spend a void to roll a raw Earth roll and if I beat the damage dealt, I take no damage. I pick up my 3 dice and roll... 3 tens. I pick them up and roll again (10's explode in this), and rolled 3 more tens. While the last roll was slightly less impressive, with a 6, 8, 9, it still beat the oni's 82 wounds.
With a mighty heave, my Hida threw off the Oni's foot and swung around with his massive hammer dropping the oni down to half health in a single swing.
Of course, with 2 attacks per round, the second swing dropped him.

Leicontis
2007-10-01, 04:28 PM
Monk: We have an appointment. (Walks past with the rest of the party.)
That line makes the moment :)

Of course, with 2 attacks per round, the second swing dropped him.
Which "him"?

Brawls
2007-10-01, 04:35 PM
Not just my character, but a concerted effort by the team:

Level 5 fighter, captured with the Paladin and Sorcerer (but his shocker lizard familiar is free), the Bard had managed to stay free. We were manacled to the wall in an old crumbling tower of the BBEG's stronghold. I have a 20 strength (1/2 Orc), so I simply kept making strength checks until I had severly weakened the chain to which my manacles were attached. 2 human guards at the tower opening, one hobgoblin on a catwalk above us, and an unknown number on the walls making rounds.

The Bard enters the area and attempts to sleep the two guards by the entrance, but only one succumbs. I break my chains and with a 5-foot step can reach him with the chains. DM gives me the -4 for an improvised weapon and an additional -2 circumstance bonus. Roll a natural 20 and the guard goes down. The guard on the catwalk shoots at me with a crossbow, doing minor damage. The shocker lizard discharges at the guard on the catwalk for 2d8, followed by a crossbow bolt from the Bard, he goes down. With darkvision, I can see one guard rushing along the wall to see what is going on. I take one of the human guard's glaives and throw it when he gets close. DM assess a -4 penalty for throwing a polearm and then the 3 range increment minuses. Again, a natural 20. Skewer the other guard through the chest, taking him off the wall to fall to his death.

Bard frees everyone else and move on to our next objective, the BBEG's evil Cleric who has all our stuff. That was where I got a fireball dropped on me (by the Sorcerer, no less), but its all good.

Brawls

OneWinged4ngel
2007-10-01, 04:44 PM
I have so many of them... but I guess I'll choose just one. Hmmm...

I was playing a female paladin of the Silver Flame, Aerlyn Lovoth. We get to the chamber with the evil spellcaster BBEG. Behind me, my ally is desperately holding back the doors as they're being beaten down by a hundred crazed people affected and controlled by the BBEG's experiments even as he himself succumbs to the curse afflicted on him by the BBEG. I face the BBEG on my own, and his spell knocks me to exactly zero hp after I land a few good hits in an intense melee. Just as the doors break down, my character lunges at the BBEG, spends an action point grapples him, and, barely able to stand, she says through clenched teeth "You... haven't... won... yet!" and, ironically, slams the BBEG's head into the stone altar of resurrection God of War style until he collapses in a bloody heap.

His hold on the mob fades at the last second. And I win the day. With zero hp and everyone else on the ground. By killing an evil doctor (the BBEG was a Jorasco, for those of you familiar with Eberron) with an altar of resurrection.

Afterwards, we couldn't resist the joke. "Cause of Death: Altar of Resurrection." :smallbiggrin:

kieza
2007-10-01, 08:48 PM
Oh, and another: the party is fighting...well, it uses ghost mechanics, but flavor-wise, it's an image that can fight and cast spells, projected by a magical device. They're only level 3, so they don't have much magic, so the cleric, sorcerer and fighter are the only ones that can hurt it, but the others are making aid ally checks and flanking. The image keeps demanifesting, sinking into solid objects, and generally being annoying. The rogue feints, putting it off balance (I think that's one of my houserules), just in time for it to spin around to the fighter, who slashes an enchanted weapon straight down through it, cutting it in half.

For the record, here's the group:
Human Fighter
Gnomish Rogue
Half-elf Cleric
Elf Sorcerer
Dwarven Monk
Half-elf Ranger

Enzario
2007-10-01, 10:18 PM
My personal favorite:
Party is all human, psion (me), crappily optimized (read: crappy) fighter/cleric/rogue, artificer, rogue, and a mysterious sorcerer DMPC who was our employer. We're in a dungeon, trying to recover a lost artifact yadda yadda yadda. We get into the final room. The BBEG, a vampire, stands there, looking at us coldly. The sorcerer DMPC then reveals that he's a half-fiend out for revenge on the vampire, and the artifact we're looking for is actually the vampire's coffin. So, clash of titans ensues between the two DMPCs, and the half-fiend dies. The vampire turns on us, and the fight begins. Two rounds later, everyone except me is either in single digits or negatives, and things obviously aren't looking too good. Then, the cleric did something that redeemed every crappy thing he couldn't kill. He looks at me for a second, begins to pray the rosary, and then leaps onto the vampire. He shouts some sort of profanity, and shoves his rosary down the vampires throat. DM just looks at him with one of those faces. He says, "Roll a grapple check." He does, and gets a natural 20. Then comes the best part. Guess what the rosary was?

That's right.
It was a necklace of fireballs.
BOOM.
The cleric died, as did the vampire, but since the cleric got bitten (and the DM ruled that it still worked) he rose a day later as a vampire, as well. That was one of my better campaigns.

ZebulonCrispi
2007-10-08, 12:01 AM
Okay. This isn't from a campaign I was in, but I did witness it first hand.

d20 Modern game, low-level. The good guys are fighting some thugs on a beach. Above the beach is a short dock. One thug was under the dock, the other was several yards past the end of it.

One of the characters (let's call him Dirk McBadass) was a fair distance away from the battle. Fortunately, he had his motorcycle. Unfortunately, he also had a sledgehammer, a grappling hook, and confidence bordering on insanity.

His plan was this: Gun the motorcycle towards the dock at maximum speed. At the last second, jump off slinging the grappling hook to the railing at the end of the dock. Use momentum and centripetal force to swing around under the dock and sledgehammer the thug there in the face at 30 MPH.

That was the plan, at least.

Things start to go wrong when he gets to the end of the dock. The GM rules that in order to jump off of a motorcycle at those speeds requires a Drive check. He fails. Still on the bike, he careens past the end of the dock...

...and directly into the second Thug. This sends him flying away from the crash, and pins the thug underneath the motorcycle.

Next turn, the motorcycle explodes. The thug, being denied his reflex save due to being pinned under a burning motorcycle, dies. Dirk McBadass is left at exactly 1 HP.

Danin
2007-10-08, 11:43 AM
I killed a 4th level Drow Ninja with a 2nd level Elf Commoner and a big arena pit fight. Granted, he had been wounded first, but the Ninja ambushed him, rolls a 1, the commoner goes next, rolls a 20 and an 8 for damage, just enough to send him to - 1. I enjoyed it.

I really need to get some more epic moments from not being a DM. Does getting your finger cut off by an evil half demon elf king / 16th level something after you, a 4th level warlock, flip him off with said finger?

Lycurgus
2007-10-08, 01:32 PM
We were playing Darksun and had gone into the elven bazaar to get some info on the crime boss we were trying to get at. We'd made our way to the tent of an elf named City. My mul gladiator was acting as a muscular set of restraints while our halfling psion was doing some aggressive mindreading on City. We had heard a sound at the front of the tent, so the dwarven cleric, human ranger, and half-elven bard had moved to the front flap when four of City's cronies slashed through the back of the tent to charge us. Everyone kind of froze for a second when I looked at the DM and said quietly, "Throw City at them." Five sets of rather large eyes swiveled toward me. The DM says, "What's your strength?" I reply, "22." After a natural 20 on the attack role, City and his friends became much closer!:smallamused:

Stormcrow
2007-10-08, 06:19 PM
Playing shadowrun I had a street samurai named Ghost by way of his being anemic (because of an essance of six he had 0.008 remaining) suffice it to say that he was very very fast (roughly three times the speed of normal people) so our group burst into a church and found it full of cultists who were trying to raise their leader to godlike power. He was hovering eight feet off the ground. (Ghost was the leader of the group) He turned to his friends and said "You get the priests, I'll take the cultists" and as they ran towards him with their curved knives drawn he drew his twin sawn-off shotguns and proceeded to roll enough successes to drop the sixteen cultists and wing both the supporting priests in the following six seconds.

Indon
2007-10-09, 10:13 AM
I got a D&D campaign moment this time.

Our party has rallied a small army to face a demon and his (larger) army. We know we need to go straight for the demon, so we all charge at him. (FYI, the campaign uses the damage save variant; this is important)

A couple rounds later, one party member is unconscious, another is disabled, the healer (me) is trying to reach the wounded party members, and our rogue is standing toe-to-toe with the (Huge-sized) demon.

The rogue attacks, crits, the demon rolls poorly for damage save (I guess?), and goes down. The rogue immediately finishes the demon and the demon's army breaks and flees.

Our DM then says something to the effect of, "I'd expected this story arc to go on for at least a couple more sessions."

jameswilliamogle
2007-10-09, 11:00 AM
It was in a low-level campaign, we were about 6th level. The BBEG was a Beholder that was also running a Thieve's Guild. Unbeknownst to us, the Hexblade player had been bribed about a week earlier than the final fight by the Beholder (DM) to betray us in the end. I was playing a straight Rogue, focused on Ranged combat. We also had a Dwarf Fighter, a Wizard, a Cleric, and a Ranger of some sort. The DM also had a NPC Wizard character from his previous game that was around 7th level (it was pretty cool: inclusion of past PCs as NPCs always brings continuity to the game, I think).

Beforehand, we had encountered a creature (I forget what it was), that had poison. The Ranger used Survival to harvest it, and several of us (me included) got the poison (DM nerfed it to d4 Con damage from 2d6).

Anyways, we know the Beholder is in the next room. I buff up w/ a potion of Invisibility, and the Cleric puts a Prayer on, and a few other buffs. The Hexblade had an Elf-bane Spell-storing Longsword that she put Blindness into.

We burst in, and there's the Beholder. The fighter runs up and starts hacking at the thing, with little effect (bad rolls). I appear, suddenly, when the Beholder uses the Anti-magic cone on the two Wizards. I try to position myself for Sneak Attack, but I always seem to be between the beholder and the Wizards (for about 3 rounds, I'm just maneuvering around to get out of the AMcone). The Hexblade runs up to join the melee, and tells the Dwarf "Hey, I have a buff spell in my sword. Will you let me hit you with it to boost you?" Dwarf player: "Sure, just don't use your Str bonus". BLINDED! The second round, the Hexblade attacks the Fighter: rolls a 19. Confirms the crit. He goes down. Also, during round 2, the PC Wizard gets hit w/ a Disintigration beam. He makes the save, but still goes down b/c of low HP. The Cleric is working on some of the Beholder's henchmen, during this time.

It was looking really, really bad. The beholder only took about 18 damage from the fighter's 2 hits, and we essentially went from a 6 man party to a 3 man party in two rounds. The Hexblade's victory seemed complete (and appropriately so: this was the last session of the game).

In round 3, the beholder caught both the NPC Wizard and the Cleric in the AMCone. I blinked out of view. I loaded up, and fired two arrows (+1 Flaming Short Bow): I rolled a 20. I confirmed. The beholder failed his fort save. I rolled a 3 for Con damage. The Beholder fell, taking 55 HP of damage (less than that from the arrow, but the Con damage did the rest) with one shot. The second shot hit, too, but it didn't matter.

Everyone at the table was shouting and "OMG" and such. The same round, I was paralyzed by a Hold Person from the caster, but the NPC Wizard blasted the heck out of the remaining henchmen, and the Hexblade lasted a few more rounds, but couldn't keep up with the self-healing Cleric.

If you had been in the game, you would've known that my Rogue was about as ineffectual as you can imagine throughout. He didn't hit anything, failed listen and spot checks regularly, and was pretty worthless. It was my first 3.5 character. To have the fight end like that made me stick around for more.

It was glorious... More of a dumb-luck thing than anything, but still glorious...

Swordguy
2007-10-09, 12:12 PM
Shadowrun

Timothy "Tink" Christiansen was a former stuntman man of no small amount of talent, though unfortunately obsessed with his image. Through severe expenditure of karma, he had progressed to the point where he not only was pretty, but had the real-world skills to back up how cool he thought he looked. He was also very bitter that the "real world" of Shadowrunning was not nearly as glamorous as it was on-screen.

So the runners had just clued in to the fact that a major, open-city corprate shooting war was about to go down, and were desperately trying to protect their home turf over in the decaying ruins of Redmond. Unfortunately, Ares had purchased a large plot of land over that-a-way for weapons development, and were forcing people to clear out by using the old "take a family member hostage and give them back once you've moved out and we've levelled your house" ploy.

As it happened, Ares grabbed the daughter of the leader of a Troll Biker Gang the PCs had worked with a year previous. The Trolls and PCs teamed up to make a full-scale assault on the Ares Peaceful Center of Education (read: holding camp) to get her back, and free the rest of the kids.

The battle starts, and people are running, shooting, and screaming all over the place (the GM was using the cardstock Necromunda and Mordheim buildings with minis, so we had a 6' square table with 4 seperate elevation levels to play in). The Trolls are rampaging around on their bikes, and the heavily-armed Ares security has called in reinforcements and a pair of rotorcraft, which are tearing up the streets pretty badly. We've penetrated a long way into the compound, and Tink is running up on the catwalks, using his paired revolvers to lay down completely ineffective suppressing fire (he had a phobia about not using automatic weapons after an unfortunate incident with a runaway gun in a metal room...ricohets man...). He's down to his last round in each gun, and he's looking down at a couple of Ares Special Ops guys manning a heavy machine gun in an emplacement when one of them looks up and notices him. The rest of the team is pinned down by this same gun and is hurting badly from it - they've been unable to return fire and several are at severe wounds or worse. Tink ducks back and they chuck grenades up after him.

Tink: Grenades go off at the end of the pass, right?
GM: Yup
Tink: I'm delaying my action until JUST before the end of the pass, then I'm leaping off the catwalk towards the guards, and splitting my dice pool to fire one shot at each of them.
GM: Dammit [Swordguy]...all right.
(Combat proceeds to the end of the pass)
GM: All right, you leap off the catwalk towards the guards, who trigger their held actions and try to hose you down with gunfire. You're leaping, so no dodging. (miss, miss). Dangint. Bullets snap and whine around you and you hurtle forward. The grenade goes off behind you, and you feel the hot breeze on the back of your neck. (rolls dice). You feel a sharp impact as a bit of shrapnel hits you square in the spine. Take a 4L wound.
Tink: (rolls dice). I stage it away, the armored vest soaks it up.
GM: Dangint. All right, take your shots.
Tink: (Rolls dice). Hit, hit, and I've got 4 successes on each die. That bumps them to a deadly wound each. Oh, and my Athletics check says I land just fine, if 4 successes is good for you.
GM: ...
GM: (rolls dice). Both of them fail to stage the damage at all. You headshot both of them. They fall to the ground in a lifeless heap. (to the table) The rest of you look up when the suppressing fire from the machinegun stops to see Tink leap off the catwalk headfirst, propelled outwards by the explosion of a grenade. While in midair, he rolls lengthwise, pushes his guns out, and fires one shot from each weapon. Both guards have a red mist puff from the backs of their heads, and both drop to the ground behind the sandbags. Tink hits the ground rolling, stands up in the gun emplacement and waves to you.
Tink: C'mon you guys! You wanna live forever? (to himself) It's just like being back in the movies!
GM: I hate you so much.


Part 2
We've fought our way into the compound to where they're keeping the kids, and the Trolls are outside holding off the Ares reinfocrcements. One last guard is holding a kid close to his chest, and is pointing his gun at us.

Guard: Call this off, or the kid dies.
Runners: (Various exclaimations of dismay and anger)
Tink: I'll try and headshot him.
GM: Uhhh...ok. Init between you and the guard. (Dice are rolled, initiative is simultaneous.) Tink go ahead and resolve first.
Tink: (rolls dice). Called shot...hits! Damage is staged up 3 times! Heh! Suck headcap corp lackey!
GM: The guard drops like a stone, and the little girl hits the floor hard but free. However, he got a shot off too, remember? (rolls dice) He hits...stages...ouch. Take a deadly plus a light wound, good luck staging it down.
Tink: (rolls dice) *wince* Umm...no stage. I'm in overdamage and bleeding out.
Other Runners: Medic! Tink's been hit! (Medic runs over, only to discover he's left his first-aid kit in the car.)
Tink: (slaps the medics player upside the head). I'm bleeding out. Try and naturally stabilize on a 12 (note: on exploding d6)...fail. Got one more shot.
GM: The little girl runs over to you.
Girl: C'mon everybody! Clap for Tink! If you clap for him, he won't die!
Other Runners: (boo! hiss! bad joke!) *applauds politely*
Tink: Stabilization roll...

... (rolls dice)


...succeeds.

Just Alex
2007-10-09, 06:19 PM
I just remembered this one.

Mage game. The party is investigating some weird magic mojo that's messing with the umbra. Normally, we wouldn't give a damn, but it was making the werewolves even more aggressive than normal. We were meeting one of our contacts at night at a park. All of a sudden dozens of werewolves start charging through the park towards us. Then, the following happens:

Transmutation mage(I forget the actual name): How many rounds before they get to us?
GM: 4
Me: The van's right there, right? I walk over and get my amp and guitar (arcane tools).
rest of party pulls weapons/arcane tools
GM: Right, might as well roll initiative now.

Next round
me: I set up my amp and use Control to connect it to the electricity from the lamp post (rolls) I succeed. (to Transmuter mage) Make me a dome, like the big thing in Sydney.
Transmuter: You mean an amphitheater?
me: Yeah, one of those.
Transmuter: But that'll take too much time
GM (now curious): I'll let you do a craft roll, essentially. Roll your spell roll each round, and aim for 20 total successes.
Rest of party shoots spells and guns

Round 3
Transnmuter after and awesome roll: Sweet, got 21 successes now
GM: OK, you've got a small amphitheater around you, now what?
Me: Can I get some bonus successes or dice to a Control Sound roll for the amphitheater?
GM: Sure, give yourself 3 free successes.
Me: Sweet (gets obscene number of successes)
Rest of Party, more guns and spells

Round 4, the wolves get there
Me: OK, now, how much more sensitive are werewolves hearing?
GM: Wait, what?
Me: Well, I turn my amp up to 11 and start rocking out

Thanks to Control Sound and a huge number of successes, I managed to make a focused wave of sound that was approximately 2.5x the decibels of a jet engine. If you've ever seen the Guitar Hero II commercial where they fight of a meteor with music, it's a lot like that, except replace the meteor with werewolves, and replace Mother with the infinitely more appropriate Bark at the Moon.

PnP Fan
2007-10-10, 08:30 AM
I think the most "Rock Star" moments I've ever had were when my group was playing in the Wheel of Time setting.
There were many excellent characters in that party, but the two of note for my stories are my noble/commander prc, and a male caster.

The first Moment involved detective work to uncover the plot against my character and his household by an NPC (noble? fighter? no idea). Once we had discovered and stopped his plot (poisoned wine at one of the PC's wedding), I challenged him to a duel. We agreed, to the death, and no outside interferance. Our female caster even put up a barrier to prevent interferance. Okay, now, I'm a horrible die roller. I obey the laws of probability, and then some. So, over the course of the fight, I do some damage, and reasonably well for the most part. Unfortunately, I'm down to 2 hp, and I'm poisoned (hey, he's a bad guy, I shouldn't have trusted him in the first place!). For three, maybe four rounds, the DM keeps rolling poorly, and I keep nailing this guy, who just keeps looking worse and worse. In the final round, I give him the opportunity to admit defeat, he refuses, and I continue the press, follow through with a crit (probably the first I'd rolled in six months), and whisper in his ear something like, "You should have admited it to me, now everyone knows. . ." as I remove his head. I want to say we tarred it, and spit it in front of the castle, as a warning.

The other moment occured when the DM sent about 30 or so. . . Whitecloaks I think, soldiers at any rate, against us. They easily could have ganged up on us and eventually killed at least some of us, if not for our casters. Well, my character's abilities are at least partially dependant upon him "leading the charge" in combat, so I did exactly that, I think with the intent of charging one of their casters. Our casters teamed up and timed their actions. One put some kind of shield around me as I charged through the ranks, the other cast the equivalent of a fireball just outside the shield, resulting in a bunch of dead soldiers, with me in the middle of the inferno, unharmed, continuing the charge at their casters. The few survivors of the battle carried my reputation for being immune to the One Power far and wide, such that periodically someone we'd meet would actually have heard of that battle. It was pretty cool, and lots of fun.

There were lots of fun moments in that game, like when my character married another PC (female PC, male player). Sent our slightly homophobic player into fits. Quite funny, but a brilliant political maneuver.

Columbine
2007-10-11, 07:38 AM
Had a few but one of the best didn't even involve my character.
We were playing DND (3rd ed) and came accross a bunch of kobolds or goblines (I can't remember which) who were in a load of tunnels. We were only about 5th or 6th level and while we were fairly sure we could take the lot on in the open the prospect of crawling through the tunnels to clear them didn't really appeal. While we were discussing options the mage suddenly said
"I know, I'll summon a celestial Dire badger"
"What are they like ?" we asked then looked at the stats...
"Hey if it takes damage it goes into a rage"
"How long does that last ?"
"Until it or the thing that hit it is dead"
"Can you summon another one ?"
"yeah....cool"

Suffice to say the encounter was suddenly much easier with the party standing at the entrances to the tunnels listening to the sound of carnage from within.

I don't think the GM was too happy when he showed us the nice maps of the tunnels he had made afterwards (as we went searching for booty)

Partysan
2007-10-11, 04:59 PM
We were playing a D&D 3.5 campaign in a homebrewed world. Our party consisted of an elven female charisma-diplomacy-perform-monster bard skillmonkey (with levels in seeker of the song and some additional homebrewed songs for it), a female catfolk ranged darkwood-scouting order of the druidic bow initiate (we called it like that because there was any class in that build that could somehow use a bow), a DMPC that was basically a sorcerer with the homebrewed curse/ability that every of his spells was somehow icy (and his body temperature was about -10°C and everything he touched froze) and me, a goliath bar1/ftr4/Battle Scion X with a homebrewed legendary weapon.
It was a quite homebrew-heavy campaign, because every of us recieved some campaign-specific gifts over time that were involved in the story somehow.
Well, we were fighting some eeeevil elemental monsters that were summoned in the midlands one by one and because of an in-character argument the group was split and me and the ice blaster went alone (we were too proud to admit we were too weak alone) against the next elemental monster. It was a giant spider fully made of ice. So the sorcerer was basically useless as he couldn't damage that thing with ice spells and had only blast spells and some utility.
What did I do? Well, I used the old method for big opponents - just climb up. I went in rage, made some insane grapple and jump checks to get on the beast's back, smacked a hole into the ice with my ring of ram I found (actually a part of a legendary set, but I didn't know at that moment) and put a "grenade" into that hole (I got it from a dwarf shortly before that - doubt that my DM had this in mind) and tried to jump back. (cookie for the one that names the movie first)
Well, the explosion did a lot of fire damage to everything and killed the monster and nearly me and the sorcerer, too.
So I stand down there, mock him, because he could'nt contribute to the fight again (by the first time he was knocked unconscious) and at that moment our friends teleported in to help us and forget the argument. We just stood beside the splinters of the monster and grinned^^

streakster
2007-10-11, 09:57 PM
I have two.

One is from my first game ever. It had gone on a while, and after a particularly hard battle against a dragon king/werewolf (my fault, please don't ask) we are all given boons by the defeated king, as the DM's way of rewarding us. I asked for, and got, a dragon for my animal companion.

Now, after a short break, we hear of a HUGE army approaching from the west. Their plan? To take a natural bridge over a huge canyon that ran for hundreds of miles, then pour across it and destroy the city of Byrelon. Me - being a chaotic stupid druid - had a plan -

1. - Fly, on dragon, to army's camp under cover of night.
2. - Locate water source for camp.
3. - Empty all my supplies of poisons, poisonous plants I had found with Knowledge(nature), and potions of spells that I did not need into water supply from above (the potions were supposed to mix and do random stuff, hopefully).
4. - Cross fingers.

I did not inform my party of this, by the way.

Well, the DM rolled - then looked shocked - then rechecked the numbers. Twice. When our party scouted across the bridge, we found a camp of dead men, magically mutated into hideous forms.

The DM, not liking losing all his hard work, said that that had been the advance scouts, and sent an army twice that size. We fell back, built defenses, etc. We were doomed and knew it, but as our leader was a LG paladin, what could we do?

The day of the battle, I was looking over my spells when I saw Earthquake. I looked at the bridge. I looked at the Earthquake description.

I waited until the very first soldier had almost reached our lines, then yelled "I -AM-ARVAK!" and cast earthquake to collapse the bridge. As our DM reels in shock, and the other players laugh at his face, I follow with transmuting the cliffs that the remains of the army are on into mud.

To this day, that DM flinches when he hears "I-AM-ARVAK!"

hylian chozo
2007-10-11, 10:05 PM
We were playing a D&D 3.5 campaign in a homebrewed world. Our party consisted of an elven female charisma-diplomacy-perform-monster bard skillmonkey (with levels in seeker of the song and some additional homebrewed songs for it), a female catfolk ranged darkwood-scouting order of the druidic bow initiate (we called it like that because there was any class in that build that could somehow use a bow), a DMPC that was basically a sorcerer with the homebrewed curse/ability that every of his spells was somehow icy (and his body temperature was about -10°C and everything he touched froze) and me, a goliath bar1/ftr4/Battle Scion X with a homebrewed legendary weapon.
It was a quite homebrew-heavy campaign, because every of us recieved some campaign-specific gifts over time that were involved in the story somehow.
Well, we were fighting some eeeevil elemental monsters that were summoned in the midlands one by one and because of an in-character argument the group was split and me and the ice blaster went alone (we were too proud to admit we were too weak alone) against the next elemental monster. It was a giant spider fully made of ice. So the sorcerer was basically useless as he couldn't damage that thing with ice spells and had only blast spells and some utility.
What did I do? Well, I used the old method for big opponents - just climb up. I went in rage, made some insane grapple and jump checks to get on the beast's back, smacked a hole into the ice with my ring of ram I found (actually a part of a legendary set, but I didn't know at that moment) and put a "grenade" into that hole (I got it from a dwarf shortly before that - doubt that my DM had this in mind) and tried to jump back. (cookie for the one that names the movie first)
Well, the explosion did a lot of fire damage to everything and killed the monster and nearly me and the sorcerer, too.
So I stand down there, mock him, because he could'nt contribute to the fight again (by the first time he was knocked unconscious) and at that moment our friends teleported in to help us and forget the argument. We just stood beside the splinters of the monster and grinned^^

I believe that was from starship troopers. anyway i recently had a moment with my half-orc barbarian/cleric of kord and a rogue/fighter played by my friend, well, we were in a tavern surrounded by kobolds with shotguns and 2 fighters(3.5 with d20 modern influence). Well, after being stuck with a plasma genade by one of the fighters, my half-orc bull-rushes him into the wall as the rogue/fighter stabbed himself in the foot(fumbled). Next turn, my friend pulls up the sword and fails a disarm on one fighter (sword flies from his hand and sticks to the wall) and i hurt the other one pretty badly (the kobolds walk in at this point and can't act because they are surprised). on the turn that the grenade explodes, my friend jumps toward the window (natural 20!), and grabs his sword as he flies out the window. i then rip off off the grenade, toss it to the middle of the group of kobolds (targeted the square, AC 5) and literally smashed through the wall the window was on and outran the explosion in a horribly cliche manner. when the grenade exploded, everything died, all the kobolds, the fighters, even the barkeeper. it was amazing.:smallbiggrin:

Hell Puppi
2007-10-11, 10:13 PM
There was one in a game I was running a while back.
The group was facing an evil witch-like woman (I made up my own setting) with a VERY b.a. familiar. While one npc was taking on the familiar, the group was doing everything they could to kill the witch. The fight was dragging on (she was meant to be a mini-boss, and as such was pretty tough). At one point one of the players gets fed up, runs up to the witch, and slices off her head with a knife.
It was pretty damn cool.

Lavin
2007-10-11, 10:41 PM
One campaign we played, the party barbarian flew into a rage during one of the baddie boss fights. At this point, he was the only one standing. We had the option of surrendering, but he screamed something vicious and reasonably inspiring, and proceeded to beat the boss within an inch of his life. He kept rolling crits. To watch, it was one of those classicaly heroic moments, and we still talk about it. Turns out the baddie was actually one of the player's character's brothers, so now he is even more respected than before.

Mr. Moogle
2007-10-11, 11:04 PM
Well I had just began a campaign using some homebrewed material, it was based around a circus that moved from city to city devouring souls and bleeding those cities dry until they had nothing more to give. The players are commisioned by an insider to take out the ringleader(a crazy knife thrower) and various important cronies (strong man, fire-swallower, palm reader-who was an enchanter/diviner) i made characters for all of them and made sure that they would be challenging for my Hyper optimized party (consisting of 2 mid level swordsages [one who RP'd Xerksys] , who healed by using vital recovery). The (brief) combat went like this. They were watching a show to get a feel of the freaks powers.

Me: *roll spot and listen* you both see a small person, clad in the robes that identified him as an employee of the circus, who is trying to grab your coinpurse.
Player1 [Xerksys]: quick draw, deathmark
Me: your kidding me right? your in a crowded chamber, you'll kill at least 20 commoners!
Player1:and?
Me:*sigh*

Due to luck overwhelming, they were able to defeat ALL the freaks in one combat, with a leap attack kill of the ringleader by Xerk... 2 weeks of planning down the drain.:smallfrown:

Anxe
2007-10-12, 03:04 PM
I've had a few low level Rock Star moments. Two associated with the same character in the same session.

Story #1: My character was a 2nd level Drow Paladin. There is no story behind that, she just was. We were doing one of those Kalamar adventures to stop the evil coin lady. We needed the breath of a Blue Dragon to proceed with our quest, so we went to the biggest one we could find. We ended up striking a deal with it. We would clear its lair of goblins and it would breath on a stick for us. Well my Drow Paladin got separated from the group at one point and was facing off against 4 goblins, a hardy challenge for a level 2. I kept rolling badly with my sword and they had hit me a few times, then a spark came to my mind. I grabbed one of the Goblins with a grapple check and then started beating the other 3 with him. I managed to take out all four in this manner and kept the gruesome corpse with me to take out the rest of the Goblins in the Blue Dragon's cave.

Story #2: This time I was playing a Dwarven Thief with 3 wisdom named Bumble. We had been sent by the sick lady of our town to get a flower that would cure her disease. When we passed a corn field we were attacked by a vicious troll (Quite obviously a downgraded troll as we were a 2nd level party). It thrashed the rest of the party until my Dwarf's tiny legs managed to get into melee combat with the Troll. Bumble decided his dinky sword wasn't gonna do much damage, so he would trip it. After a few good rolls he laid the troll flat on its back. The rest of the party hacked it and then it got up again. He tripped it again, we hacked it again, and it got up again. The party was surrounding it now, so he got sneak attack damage. He decided he would just stab it. Rolled a crit and killed the nasty thing.

Story #3: After delivering the flower to the lady of our hometown it was learned that a large orc force was going to attack the town. The normal citizens could handle the main force, but we would have to deal with the flanking contingent. These orcs were very stupid and had decided to send their brilliant flanking maneuver on 10' wide bridge over a canyon river. The DM, not wanting us to destroy the bridge, described it as being made of an indestructible material, slippery, and having no railings, so we could push orcs off it. As the orcs approached the battle was on.
In the first two rounds we hit the orcs with ranged attacks, but then they started to move across the bridge. Bumble decides he will go out to meet them face to face. He fumbles his balance check for the slippery bridge and slides right into one of the orcs knocking them both off. Both of them were knocked unconscious from the fall into the water. This is where a bunch of die rolls came in.
At first I took full damage, but then I pointed out from page 303 of the DMG, the first die of falling damage in water is subdual. He went along with it and I was no longer bleeding to death. Then the DM decided I had to roll to see if Bumble would land with his face in the water, and drown, or with his face up, and live. He landed face up. Then the DM brought in the current and I would have to roll to see if Bumble would be swept to eastern side where there was a slight bank in the canyon wall, or toward the center of the river where Bumble would be lost downstream. After another good roll, Bumble was swept to the eastern bank. As he was unconscious he didn't participate in the rest of the battle, but he lived through the first 3 rounds of that combat!

I actually do have a fourth story from my current days as a GM where I legitimately kicked my players' butts.

Story #4: The players had engaged in a quest to recover a set of arms and armor that contained a sword, a suit of breastplate, and a shield. These things were kept in their crafters' tombs. They recovered the sword and armor with a little work and then set upon the shield to complete the set. After going through the tomb without having to face a thing they found the shield. As they picked it up all the defenses of the tomb activated and they had to fight their way out. Upon getting out they found that the maker of the shield, Blendegad was still alive as a vampire and he wanted his property back. They refused to give the shield up, so combat started.
The tomb they were in had its entryway inside of a hill with a tunnel one had to belly-crawl through to get in or out. Blendegad didn't want to deal with crawling on his stomach, so he just used his great strength to collapse the cave. The party quickly scrambled out and received some AoO for going past Blendegad. Two party members were stuck inside the tomb. Blendegad then started pounding the other 4 adventurers with his Hexblade and Vampire abilities. After the ferocious battle the statistics read: 2 dead and buried by Blendegad to become vampires later. 2 buried alive in the tomb. 1 lost in the wilderness when she ran away. 1 blinded and running in fear.
The group later regrouped, dug up everybody, and raised those who had died. An 8th level party of 2 fighter-types, 1 rogue, 1 cleric, 1 mageblaster, and 1 batman were taken down by a 10th level fighter-type vampire.

The_Werebear
2007-10-13, 11:30 AM
Ok, new moment from last night. This was really great, because it ended up involving the entire team working together. The party list is as follows

Elf Barbarian 17, TWF
Human Knight 13/Paladin 4
Human Sorcerer 17, Blast Focused
Human Rogue 5/Scout 7/ Thief-Acrobat 5
Human Bard 10/ Seeker of the Song 7
Dwarven Transmuter 3/ Master Specialist 10/ Archmage 4-me

The situation: We had come to the last climactic battle. The lead up to this is long and complicated, but necessary to know. there was a cold war situation between two factions, one goblinoid, and one of the standard good races. Each side had a ++ Epic Archmage as their leader. The goblinoid side broke the truce in an assault, and the good side decided it would be better just to destroy the world and restart rather than be enslaved by the overwhelming force (At least, the Good Archmage decided that.

Well, we ended up destroying the ritual to end the world, but were cast into hell in the process with a Goblin army advancing into Valir (good guy) territory, looting and burning as they went. We decided we need a demon army. The six man party (at this time, level 14) Assaults a Balor in his layer and take him down, despite both bad luck on our part and good tactical playing by the DM. With this army in hand, we repeat it on several others, until we have a handful of demonic legions lined up behind us. We convince a Duke of hell to open up a portal to the Goblins, and march our army through. So, we have a demon army, a Valir army(who still think we are traitors for stopping the ritual), and an Army of Goblinoids on a collision course. We managed to contact the human army, get everyone lined up right, and the battle begins in earnest, with the demons serving as fodder for the humans.

The plan starts to fall apart when the Goblin's Archmage shows up and starts devastating swaths of the army. Things look bleak, and in desperation, I volunteer to use telekinesis in a last ditch effort to distract the evil archmage by flinging the elf at high speed into him. The idea blooms from there. The rogue climbs onto the elf's back and readies a pair of tanglefoot bags to wrap up the Archmage as I buff the elfbarian with about a dozen spells in advance. The blasty sorcerer times up a series of delayed blast Sonic balls in the Elf's pockets, all set to go off as he lands in the BBEG's lap. The elf himself readies a full attack action for being in range of the BBEG. The Knight goes off to draw attention from our preparations, and the bard gives him a few buffs of her own. Finally ready, I tell the elf to fail his will save, burn my Moment of Prescience for the attack roll to hit the enemy, then catapault him and the rogue several hundred feet across and 50 feet up to hit the flying BBEG and his crowd of escort mages.

It was glorious. The elf starts into his full attack. The rogue slams him with both tanglefoot bags, and gets one hand stuck to him as well, so she can't fall off and roll away like she planned. Then, disaster strikes. The barbarian trip's the BBEG's contingency (Teleport back to my tower when I get to 1/4 of my HP) with his full attack. This is before the sonic balls go off. So the BBEG gets sucked back to the safety of his lair, but our poor rogue is literally glued to him and goes too. Then, the sonic balls go off. There were four of them, each at 17d6 damage, plus the 12d6 for telekinetic throw, +3d6 of falling. So, the escort mages get vaporized by the blast, but the barbarian falls to the ground, and simply stands up and dusts himself off. He failed all the saves but one, and still had 60 hp left over. I teleported over with the bard, who got to work healing him in the giant crater from the blast while I kept the crowd from returning in. Not that they wanted to.

Meanwhile, our rogue got pulled with the BBEG back to his sanctuary. We all know where she is due to Rary's Telepathic Bond that I cast on us. She gets one sneak attack for the surprise round, then they roll initiative. The DM rolls low and the Rogue rolls high. She beats him by two, and gets a full attack of sneak attacks, which turns out to be just enough to drop him to double digit negatives.

After that, I just teleport in and pull her back home.

Campaign over,
Victory: The good guys.
Cause: The Raging Elf Bomb, Dwarven Elf Launcher, and Auxiliary Backstabber Attachment.

Anxe
2007-10-13, 11:41 AM
You are truly the Dwarf Tosser.

Charles Phipps
2007-10-13, 11:48 AM
The greatest moment of our games, probably had to be when the player characters were playing the climax of a Shadowrun game against the Boss of Ares Corporation. They successfully managed to defeat him and acquire the Military Satellite network with only two PCs alive.

In typical Shadowrun fashion, the other PC shot the other in the head and then used the device to inform the heads of the other Corporations he was now in command.

The players applauded the team killing in a rare display of acting in-genre.

:-)

Leicontis
2007-10-13, 04:31 PM
A little background is required for this moment:

I'm running a game with NG sorceress, CG bard, and CN cleric of Tempus (FR god of war). They're fighting an Erinyes (Devil version of a succubus), who started things off by Charming the cleric. So he's standing under the Erinyes, trying to stop the fighting, as she flies over his head, fighting with the sorceress and bard. The fight is a reasonably even match, and she's taking a decent amount of damage. Cleric-boy decides to heal her. He casts "Enlarge Person" on himself to get tall enough to touch her. The next round, before his action, the sorceress finally manages to Dispel the Charm...

The cleric grows, and reaches out to heal the Erinyes, then blinks a bit. His outstretched hand turns around, and all fingers but one fold down as he says, "Charm this," and casts Flame Strike with the bottom of the column centered just above him...

Arthur Eld
2007-10-13, 09:54 PM
I would say that the best Rock Star moment of my DnD career was an encounter inside a college of evil wizards. These guys are bad news, and the "boss" of the encounter was a mysterious man called the Summoner.

We entered the college (which was actually ruined because we were in the distant future) and searched its ruins for this stone which would open a portal back to our present time. The Summoner is also looking for it, and he wants to destroy it so that we won't be able to return to the past and stop him.

Anyhow, we finally found the stone, but our only exit of the ruined college was a team of friendly, Griffon-mounted knights that would evacuate us back to the castle where we could use the stone. These knights were waiting for us at the top of a long flight of stone stairs, outdoors. As we begin to walk up, my Barbarian 10/Frenzied Berzerker 10 along with my best buddy, the party rogue, are the only ones who notice a strange blue shimmer at the top of the stairs. We are also the only two in the party with trap sense.

Suddenly, the blue shimmer grows much brighter, and then explodes outwards in a furious dazzle of light. Then as our vision returns, the Summoner is obviously waiting for us at the top.

Before the Griffon Knights can even act, he incinerates them utterly to the last man. Our evac is demolished, and things are just beginning.

I run up the stairs, heedless of danger, while the rest of the party nervously stays back. As soon as I hit the second flight, a trap activates and sends three Huge spears into my side. This activates my (Deathless) Frenzy.

Screaming blood hatred, I sprint up towards the Summoner, who is smugly waiting. Activating trap after trap but not caring, I reach the top, upon which the Summoner immediately activates a circle of power, making us unreachable by any allies. I draw my Vorpal Greatsword.

Round 1: He readies a spell. "Give me the stone."

"NO!" I power attack for massive damage, but he doesn't seem to notice. His eyes begin to glow.

Round 2: His hair begins to stand. His entire body is glowing now. "Give me the STONE."

"NO!!" I power attack, again for massive damage. Again, he does not notice.

Round 3: He raises his hands skywards. There is a red circle around us, and thunder booms in the sky. The college is crumbling to pieces, and the panicked party below is getting REALLY worried. "GIVE...ME...THE...STONE!"

NO! Critical Hit. Roaring a battle cry to his tiger gods, my barbarian's greatsword punches through his neck and shears it off like a hot knife through butter. His mouth remains open in a shocked, final scream. The thunder stops. The circle goes down. I have free drinks at the tavern for a looong time.

Mavian
2007-10-13, 10:07 PM
In a forgotten realms campaign, we were cleaning out this building full of githyankis who had been raiding the material plane through a portal. I was running a Goliath Barbarian 2/Fighter 6, who was optimized as a charger.

When we got to the BBEG, he was in his study with a couple of his bodyguards.
Now, the DM had been talkin up his villain as DMs are want to do, and the couple of glimpses we'd gotten of him told us he was an undead halfdragon of some sorts.

Start of the action. We roll iniative and I wind up going second, with the party cleric going first. So he cracked open the door, and I wenta chargin through it, shock-trooperin my AC down to -4, and swingin like a madman. Didn't have CC at the time, so it was all or nothin. Managed to just hit the guy, beat his armor class by 1, and proceeded to take him out in 1 hit. Turns out that if I had missed, I was gonna get a flurry of level drains, as they guy was a Half-Vamp/Half Dragon monk.

rankrath
2007-10-13, 10:31 PM
This one is the only one my groups had yet, but it fits the criteria quite nicely.

the PC's are lv 4/5, in a world where gunpowder is rare, but existant. they were fighting the BBEG onboard a warship with a small powder magazine. The encounter had been designed as something they had to run from, setting up a couple of plot hooks, but the wizard took matters into his own hand after the fighter and rogue went down. it went like this:

me: the corsair turns to you, his rapier dripping blood of your allies, who lie slowly bleeding to death on the deck.

Wiz: I fireball the powder magazine

me.........:smallannoyed: your kidding right?

Wiz: nope, what happens?

me: the corsair goes wideeyed as the ship explodes in a ball of flame. the dock the ship is moored at is blown apart. bits of burning ship fall on the city, the noise wakes everybody up. the larges bit they recover is your head, impaled on a mast spar.

Wiz: sweet.

Leicontis
2007-12-05, 11:03 AM
I generally try to avoid necromancy, but this one from our latest session is too good not to share:

The setup - The party (cleric, spellthief, swashbuckler, psion (kineticist, my character)) is in the pocket dimension created by an evil soul-trapping artifact, on an expedition to retrieve the mortal souls trapped therein so that they aren't destroyed. There's also a very powerful demon (fragmented into lots of smaller, weaker demons) trapped inside, who we do want to destroy. The only way for any soul currently trapped inside to escape is for them to be in direct or indirect physical contact with someone who's leaving. On our previous expedition, we accomplished this by tying them all to a rope and towing the rope through the exit. We're all level 7.

So, we're going through the pocket dimension, and come upon a vrock, controlling a bunch of dretch to hold a group of souls hostage. He offers us a choice - either he gets out, or the souls are destroyed. We know we can't kill him and all the dretch before they get a chance to react, so we reluctantly agree. We don't want the demon going ahead of anyone he doesn't have to, because we (obviously) don't trust him. He, meanwhile, doesn't trust us enough to go last. We agree that he'll go second-to-last, with the cleric of Illmater (god of martyrdom, among other things) last.

As we're getting ready to leave, a sudden inspiration strikes me. I tell the cleric to go farther ahead in the line, as he can provide more towing power than I can - I'll bring up the rear. Right as the last soul ahead of the demon gets out, I hit the rope ahead of the demon with a fully-augmented Energy Missile: Fire power, burning it away. I'm now a level 7 elven psion with a very angry vrock between me and the exit. However, I had figured this would happen, so I manifest Dimension Twister (a short-range teleport that damages the target, intended for offensive use) on myself, teleporting to between the vrock and the exit, and losing about half my HP in the process. As I go to move out through the exit, the vrock uses his attack of opportunity from my movement to grapple me. Now, if I leave, he'll come with me. Thing is, Dimension Twister can be augmented to work on Large or larger creatures, and I had just reached a high enough level to do so...

I pass the Concentration check to manifest while grappled, and the vrock rolls a natural 5 on his save, failing by one point. He gets painfully teleported about 50 feet away or so, while I calmly float out through the exit.

We broke then, so I don't have the party's reaction yet, but if desired I'll post that when it happens.

Sstoopidtallkid
2007-12-05, 01:56 PM
Warning, tis is a bit graphic, but utterly awesome. Spoilered for that and length.
It's an Adventure Quest game, which you've probably never heard of, but it's a fantasy water-world. Our party has just been captured by an island of amazons when we went ashore looking for parts for our ship. We're low-level, but me and one of the other casters manage to escape our shackles and are working towards freeing the others when the female guards notice and attack. We're unarmed, so I start praying, but it will be a few rounds before anything happens. Meanwhile, he tries to cast magnetism on one of the spears, pulling it into his hand. Crit failure. The DM rules that he glues his hand to her breastplate. We are captured, taken outside, and whipped.
John: I laugh in between strikes.
DM: Make a con check.
He succeeds.
DM: They look at you with a mix of respect and fear. They stop whipping the 2 of you soon, and you are stripped and tied to poles in the middle of the courtyard, under the hot sun.
John: Just wait, ladies, the rest of our crew will be here soon, and when they free me, I will personally kill every single one of you. You are going to die. (oc) I continue like this for a while.
DM: One of the ladies comes up to you and tells you to shut up.
John: (litany of insults against her and all of her people)
DM:She places her knife against your balls. "SHUT UP NOW, PRISONER"
John: I continue ranting. (looks at me) You know he would.
DM: She cuts one off.
John: What's the matter, baby, you can only do a job half-assed?
DM: She cuts off the other one.
John: That's right, you're real tough facing unarmed prisoners, just wait, I'll kill all of you.
DM: She shakes her head, mutters something about crazy northerners, and walks away.
John: Yeah, you better run, all of you should RUN NOW!
Table: ...
John: I LOVE this character.
He is still playing that guy, and has plans to go back and sink that island as soon as he is powerful enough.

Spectre3541
2007-12-05, 11:20 PM
So this is from a campaign I was in a while back. I'm playing a Dragonborn monk 5 who also happened to be blind... long story. But the the final battle with the BBEG happened to occur in the monastery of a huge monk order. Huge as in 40+ level 1-2 monks for us to fight. So we walk in to this large chamber with balconies around the sides and immediately all of these monks come streaming in from above and on the ground floor. (think Matrix lobby scene) The BBEG stands at the back and laughs an leaves. The rest of the party immediately charges after him, leaving me alone with 40 baddies. Needless to say, it was trouble. They all gang up on me, some with slings and arrows. After about 5 rounds of being pummeled I'm down to about 6 HP. It was then that I remembered the Necklace of fireballs that the DM had given the party as loot a while back....

Me: I rip the necklace off my neck and throw it at my feet.
DM: ..........
Me: I have wings, so can i make a jump check to ride the fireball into the air?
DM: ..... yes?

Moral of the story, all 6 beads on the Necklace go off. All of the monks fail the save. (in retrospect, he shouldn't have given us that necklace at that level) Now there are 40 charred corpses and one flying dragonborn. I ended up flying THROUGH the back wall (it was paper) just in time to see the Dwarf cleric/sorceror/mystic theurge, who had made all of 3 successful rolls in his entire career, whip out his wand of flame blade (lightsaber?) and crit the BBEG to death. Campaign done.

Blasterfire
2007-12-05, 11:32 PM
A friend of mine has a dwarf barbarian, this was around level 4. The parties arch nemesis is an advanced wererat, and hes currently breaking up through the collapsing ground trying to grab players. Suddenly, a huge bit of ground falls and the party monk falls into the underground area with the wererat. the rest of the party made reflex saves and got onto a ledge. the barbarian looks back, realizes that the monk is in trouble, shouts "NOWS MY CHANCE", rages and leaps OVER a firepitand performs a knockdown on the wererat. this enabled the monk to get out and the barbarian lived (somehow). It was FANTASTIC. "NOWS MY CHANCE" also became his catch phrase.

Magnor Criol
2007-12-05, 11:55 PM
So we're playing a campaign set about 60 years in the future, although we're using normal DnD rules instead of d20 modern stuff.

Our party's rogue, who's mildly unsettlingly excited by grisly deaths (as per rogue character standards), has managed to procure from a very bemused quartermaster a large number of old, rusty circular sawblades. About 15, 20 years old, big teeth, generally nasty. We couldn't figure out anything much to do with them - our monk used them as throwing stars a couple of times - until he happened to come across a length of...something metal, forget what.

So he uses Craft Weapon to, well, craft the most stupidly badass weapon that he could make with what he was given: He took the metal bar, affixed the sawblades all down both lengths, and voila! A sawblade-sword. The blades didn't turn, of course, but with the very jagged edge the metal length now had (which our DM ruled gave it the Wounding property) he had a very disturbing circumstance bonus to Intimidate. He didn't have proficiency in it and of course Rogues aren't really martial characters anyhow, so he took pretty bad penalties if he tried to wield it - but that wasn't the point.

So a session or two later, the campaign's coming to its capstone; the large enemy army has been marching north. My ranger's been using his geography skills to coordinate the army we'd manage to raise - choose gun placements, figure out where the enemy was likely to head, etc. - the rogue was busy attacking enemy supply lines, the fighter was preparing to snipe them from 50 miles with his rail gun, the works.

Then once the battle starts, our rogue, who used his supply-line positioning to get into the commander's area at the onset of battle, hops out and challenges the enemy commander.

Our DM, of course, wants this guy to be mean - he's our final boss, of sorts. He's easily three levels higher than us, he's a strong fighter with a bit of rogue or something, and he's well-armed and angry. So what does our rogue do?

He pulls out the massive rusty-sawblade-sword and attacks the commander with it.

He didn't do much damage, of course, but for sheer effect of a psychotic man coming at you with a large row of rusty sawblades, the DM ruled that the commander fought as Shaken for the rest of the fight. (Which didn't last long, because as soon as the rest of our characters heard over our communicators that our ally had been nearly killed, we dropped what we were doing and hightailed it to the commander and concentrated all of our firepower on him.)

MisterSaturnine
2007-12-06, 12:55 AM
My first (and so far only) DnD session, I was witness to a Rockstar moment. There were only two characters--Hebi, a Jack Sparrow-like Bard/con-artist, and Deebs, a crazy gnome druid.

We were stereotypically fighting a single orc, and almost had it killed when two more came. Things weren't looking great. So Deebs looks quickly at the spells he had prepared, goes to Summon Nature's Ally I, and says, "I'm summoning a monkey!"

So, he summons a monkey that lasts for one round that deals 1d3-4 damage against 3 orcs. The monkey attacks one of the Orcs, and gets three national 20's in a row on its attack rolls so the DM has the monkey roll an Intimidate check. Natural 20.

The DM ruled that the monkey leapt out of the oblivion it was summoned from, and bit out the Orc's throat as blood flowed like a fountain from it's neck. Then, standing upon the Orc's body, the monkey pounds on its chest and lets out a monstrous shriek.

The 2 remaining Orcs run as fast as they can.

Then the DM realized he hadn't prepared anything else, and did a Rocks-Fall thing, but instead of rocks, it was Bob Saget.

Vael Nir
2007-12-06, 08:39 AM
There was a Dwarf in our Warcraft RPG game... he kept on having these. He was a Fighter with a few levels of something else thrown in (Artificer?).

Scenario: female high elf arcanist, male gnome gunman/rogue (me), male dwarf fighter, male dwarf scout/dead shot/shaman all teleported into a castle in the alterac mountains. We end up on one of the towers, and decide to go down into the courtyard. This castle is occupied by brigands, which we don't see. So, we go downstairs... I search for traps on a door, fail my search check by 1, try opening the door and get cursed (-4 on all rolls)... I can't find traps consistently after this anyway. At this point I try picking the lock on another door (gunman only gets 2+int skillpoints, so I didn't have enough to max these skills)... failed. I shoot the lock, opening the door and creating lots of noise. Over the course of the next few rounds about 15 rogues attack us. We manage to kill a couple, but we're failing fast (excepting the dwarf, racial substitution level for stoneskin is nice). We rush through another door I shoot open, and the dwarf seals us in by using a hero point. The dwarf is now alone... with about 10 rogues who are actively trying to kill him. The dwarf was half-dead. We give up on trying to help him, and go on...

(... at this point, we find out that there are a lot of traps inside the castle, and teleport out, leaving the dwarf for dead... )

Two days later, said dwarf stumbles into the camp after having single handedly killed 10 rogues. Just lowered the drawbridge and left. Rockstar moment.

--

This dwarf, again. We're a part of Prince Arthas expedition to Northrend, and are about to have the final showdown of the campaign, a battle between the heavily outnumbered Alliance expeditionary force and an undead army made up of 40 Nerubeans (huge spiderlike creatures who also get to dual wield polearms... nasty things) and a few hundred Acolytes (low level blasters).

In the face of the nerubean charge, we lose 2 companies... the dwarf leaps out in front of his troops and (using unit combat rules for damage/hp) single handedly takes out two nerubeans in one turn (and eats about 120 hp worth of damage as well). His troops follow his courageous example and proceed to royally rape the remaining nerubeans on that flank.

pendell
2007-12-06, 10:20 AM
Thanks to Control Sound and a huge number of successes, I managed to make a focused wave of sound that was approximately 2.5x the decibels of a jet engine. If you've ever seen the Guitar Hero II commercial where they fight of a meteor with music, it's a lot like that, except replace the meteor with werewolves, and replace Mother with the infinitely more appropriate Bark at the Moon.

Now that really was a rock star moment.

:Grins:

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Sleet
2007-12-06, 10:49 AM
The setting is Westeros, using the Game of Thrones d20 system.

PC knight, level 7 or so, accepts a challenge to single combat laid down by a 13th level Ironborn raider captain. (He did something to really tick the guy off early in the campaign, and was being called out by the captain ever since.)

I'm GM; I warn the player that this is Game of Thrones, that this guy is seriously badass and I won't pull my punches. "You sure you want to do this?" He draws his sword. "Yup." "OK, roll initiative."

PC, a young and uncertain noble/knight, wins initiative. Criticals a called shot to vital spot (which does something really nasty in that system) - a pair of natural 20s right there in front of . Lays out the seven foot tall reaver captain in the black iron armor six levels higher than he is in one swing of his longsword.

I can't believe it.

The two dozen witnesses around start shouting "Ironbane! Ironbane! Ironbane!" THe reaver ship leaves in a hurry, and the PC takes his unconscious captive home to a hero's welcome. The bards start composing songs about the "battle", House Greyjoy is shamed by one of its sons being so easily defeated by a 22 year old greenland knight, etc.

trainer343
2007-12-06, 12:54 PM
In my buddy Mike's campaine, we were in an underwater battle. At one point this freaking huge(not sure of the actual size cat.) eel swims up under me and tries to swallow me. It missed, swam past and turned back around for another pass. I charged up into it's mouth and down it's throat, then followed up with a full attack with a sonic dagger to make a hole big enough for me to get out and killed the eel in the process.

NobleSavage
2007-12-06, 05:25 PM
My favorite RockStar moment actually happened here on the boards (ICy (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36030&page=8&highlight=Ruin) and OoKy (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29948&page=27&highlight=Ruin) if you want to read it out, killer story, Ozzy's a great DM, get in a game if you can).

Background is thusly; We've been contracted to collect this artifact by an Archmage battling for power after the collapse of an empire. We come across "prophecies" predicting the inevitability of this "True" who will defeat us in our quest. Joining up with this other party (of actual PCs, real complex story lines), whos motives we are unsure of but whose help we need to break into this vault, we continue on to this tomb/storehouse. Entering the dungeon/vault/creepy place the leader of the other party gets visibly excited. My character (a ninja/diviner) gets curious and, acting on some arcane influenced intuition, 'bumps' into the leader, cutting through the illusion and revealing him to be a demon-blooded high-noble. He doesn't react. So we reach the specific vault for this artifact and Mr. Demon-blood takes the key and phases through the door, leaving us stuck. Or so it seems.

Deeper-darker Background; my character had been killed early on in the adventure, along with another PC, in what was quite nearly a TPK, but both characters were sent back by the Elder God of Life/Death to collect the amulet-artifact, which is actually a gate to an alternate, gotee-wearing evil, reality, and bring it to his priests. Other character had since died for good, and only my character knew about his mission.

Flashback to at the vault. My character hears the voice of his god commanding him to reach out, thus channeling said god's power and blasting the door open. So we race down the stairs and jump into the vault proper, which is a demi-plane surrounded by pure chaos. Those of us of Medium size and wearing Light armor reach the end as Mr. Demon-blood is picking up the amulet and trigger BBEG evil plan tirade cinematic while the rest of our party catch up. As he goes on, revealing that he will use it to regain control of the Empire, probably through demon-armies, my character uses a measily Pearl of Power I to recall a Lesser Orb of Sonic and cast it, using Sudden Silent and the 'Deceptive Casting' skill trick, and Invisible Spell to make it less obvious, as the Samurai two feet away from him had just re-pledged his loyalty to Mr. Demon-blood's house. Targeting the amulet I managed to blast it to pieces, pissing off the would-be emperor who collapsed the tunnel on us, not to mention the PCs who were trapped there, too, especially the Samurai. I managed to escape specific punishment by readying the invisibility ability of ninja for when BBEG got all hostile, blinking away as he seemed to blast my character. We didn't end up dying, not that my character was concerned as he'd just end up face to face with his boss, for whom he'd just completed his task with style, but ended up jumping 10 yrs in the future instead. Being able to see the OoC posts is amusing, as it chronicles the glimmerings of the plan I'm coming up with, which begins with a real innocuous question, then jumps into the die rolling and player reactions. Fun


Another mini-RS event was at the beginning of a campaign where the party has just graduated from Candlekeep's Adventuring Department. We're 2nd or 3rd level, and had just set out when we are accosted by a Red Wizard of Thay, who offers us the opportunity to bring any artifacts we find to him instead of Candlekeep. We pretty much shrug him off, my character (a Goliath Fighter) being more hostile while the rest of the party pretty much just saying "uh, no thanks." I had readied an action to attack should he do anything hostile, so as he concludes his spiel this is pretty much what happens;

DM: "As he finishes up, the tattooed wizard mutters a few arcane syllables, waves his hands, and-"
Me: "I charge"
DM: *pause* "What?"
Me: "He's casting a spell. I charge him."

PC1:*rolls eyes*
PC2: *snorts*
PC3: *exasperated sigh*

One powerful charge, Countersong, and Light Crossbow bolt later a 9th level caster is bleeding out at our feet.

Now mildly irritated but amused DM: "So you know he was teleporting out, right?"
Me: "Mmm... doesn't matter, my character thought he was attacking us."

Tycho
2007-12-06, 11:58 PM
Alright, our party is exploring the DM's dungeon. Current members:

Air Genasi Ranger 3 (veteran player)
Surfacer Drow (LA+1 no SLA/SR) Ftr 1 / Wiz 2 (my character; disguised, also not revealing he can use spells, yet)
Aasimar Cleric of Oghma 3
Full Drow Rogue 1 / Fighter 1

Having dispatched some mephits (a task that would have been much easier if I'd just used Color Spray), we were searching the library when the cleric wandered off to check out a bookcase. Moments later, the Ranger and I both heard him yell "HELP, I'M BEING ATTACKED BY A BOOKCASE!"

Two decent listen checks later (to find our way among the maze of shelves), we sprinted over to see what was going on (the Drow rogue couldn't be bothered). We arrive on the scene to find the Cleric in a losing grapple check, his HP at 4. Clearly, this is about to get ugly.

That's when the Ranger had a stroke of brilliance.

Producing a firebomb he'd found searching another section of the room, he proceeded to Intimidate the bookcase (Mimic). With only a +1 modifier (no ranks), it looked like a long shot.

Roll result: 19. Mimic: 5 (+6 to its Will).

Yep...he threatened a bookcase into letting go of our Cleric. Upon retrieving him and tending to his wounds (he was at -3), we then proceeded to play good cop (Cleric) / Bad cop (myself and the Ranger), and SHOOK DOWN A BOOKCASE TO GIVE US ITS MAGICAL TEXTS.

If that's not Rockstar, I don't know what is. :smallcool:

Chronicled
2007-12-07, 04:04 AM
I'm a cleric of St. Cuthbert, level 6. The rest of the party is an elf duskblade, a gnome beguiler, an elf ranger, and a half-elf druid. Recently, the duskblade (a carry-over from a previous campaign, she used to be a CE drow before a god changed her to an elf, and she's now CN/CE) has been wandering off during the night, with no recollection of doing so. She also obscenely deadly due to her player not following the rules (metamagic feats always added, and for free... etc), so this a matter of some concern to most of the other players, one of whom correctly guesses that Lolth is trying to get her back into the drow mindset (where she wants to kill us all).

We're attempting to look for the last piece of a relic, and the search has taken us into caverns, where we spot several drow and driders. The duskblade goes a tad crazy, and stabs the elf ranger (her husband). The cleric is buffing himself like mad, thinking this is our main encounter for the day. Then the drow and driders retreat. With the immediate danger gone, several of the players want to discuss what just happened, and perhaps remove the potential threat of beserking duskblade.

Not wanting his buffs to run out, the cleric insists on pursuing the drow, and charges down the tunnel after them. The group takes out a few mook spiders and low level drow, then enter a room with a statue to Lolth on top of a 5 foot raised platform/altar. There's a smug looking drow male sorcerer standing on top, who starts to do a bit of monologuing and some drow sign language with the duskblade. Before he finishes, the cleric takes a magic shortsword that we've recently found (claimed by no-one), activates his Strength Domain feat of strength, and hurls it at the sorcerer. Due to DM fiat, the sorcerer dodges a roll of 27 after mods while I look at said DM dubiously; then the sorcerer activates his drow darkness ability to put a globe of darkness around the statue, and releases some spiders into the room. Meanwhile, the duskblade has to keep making checks for "you know what."

While waiting for my initiative to pop back up, I look over my spell list, and see that for some reason I've prepped the spell Consecrate (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/consecrate.htm) for the day. I take another look at what it does, and notice the last part. So the cleric (under the effects of Enlarge Person) runs at the raised altar, and jumps/clambers up. DM is confused, and thinks he's headed after the sorcerer. Next turn, he runs into the darkness feeling for the statue, finds it, and casts Consecrate on it.

Wham. Lolth's presence is cut off from the room for 12 hours. DM looks pretty stunned when he reads the last part of the spell, then mutters, "well, at least that's a few less rolls we'll have to make."

The group kills the spiders and sorcerer, gleeful that they don't have to worry about Lolth making the duskblade go psycho on them. Even better, the reinforcement drow and driders DM was going to have Lolth send never got their orders.

Our DMPC starts setting up a ritual to teleport us out, but the cleric has one last trick up his sleeve. Burning through some scrolls and spells, he uses Continual Flame to make his usual heavy mace glow, then uses Shape Stone on the statue to change it into a statue of St. Cuthbert, holding the cleric's glowing mace, about to drive it into a cowering statue of Lolth below him.

Taking his new, magic quarterstaff, he and the group left, off to off a demigod.

Tycho
2007-12-14, 12:21 AM
Our party Rogue just made an entrance with his new Barbarian character, in a most stylish manner...

The party, consisting of a Ftr/Wiz, a Cleric of Oghma, and an Air Genasi Ranger, had just ascended a staircase to find themselves in a Half Dragon's sanctum within a tower. Several rounds in, it became clear our melee presence was not going to be able to land blows against this canned lizard.

Combat opened with a Grease spell that disarmed the Half Dragon of his double-bladed sword. The tide quickly turned against us, though, as he waded in and began wreaking havoc with tooth and claw. Two imps emerged from one of the four corner portals, and two Halflings with bows arrived a few rounds later.

The ranger lasso'd the Half Dragon and proceeded to levitate in an attempt to neutralize him. The baddie, none too happy with this, shot a line of acid along the rope--and rolled a 1 on his landing, falling prone.

Then the Barbarian showed up on the scene.

Charging with a furious roar, he proceeded to overrun an imp that hadn't noticed his arrival, flattening it to the ground before laying into the Half Dragon with his Greatsword for near-maximum damage.

It was the first damage done to the thing all fight.

That's how you make an entrance. :smallbiggrin:

Yeril
2008-01-11, 06:30 PM
During one campaign, which was based around these incredibly fast breeding and evolving homebrewed abberations that were "failed experiments" of the mindflayers that some orginisation had started to breed around the world.

Basicly we managed to, via assasination, sending in our cleric to "join the orginisation" and teaming up with an ex member, we managed to roughly build up and control a small force of these abberations ourselves, for what use we don't know.

Well basicly we had all split up, the Monk and Rouge went scouting, The Cleric and Fighter went to visit neighboring villages to get information, the NPC baddie and a few other NPC's went to pick up supplies in a port, and I, the Warmage was left at our "base" with the barbarian on "guard duty"

and basicly we hear this shrill screetching from outside, so I go to investigate (The barbarian stays inside and watches from distance) and find three mindflayer inquisitors killing our abberations.

So, the first thing that pops into my head? "We are Harper Researchers, trying to work out what we can about these creatures and defeat them before they become a serious threat" and the like, and through amazing bluffs (and will saves to hide my real thoughts) I managed to convice Three mind-reading ithillids to leave.

well allmost, on my last bluff, I bluffed them all realy well, and hid my thoughts exept one guy I missed my save by 1.

Mindflayer Leader*: Well it seems that we will be keeping in contact with you and your orginisation surface elf.. we shall meet again.
The turn to leave
Mindflayer 2: I dont trust him, I could sense thoughts I think hes lying.. we must kill him!
Mindflayer Leader: Shut up Squ'idthle, you say that about everyone.
Mindflayer 2: But.. But-
Mindflayer leader: *backhands*
Mindflayer 2: :(

*as in the leader of these 3.

SpiderMew
2008-01-11, 06:50 PM
The game was using the Hero System in a fantasy setting for the GM's custom world.
The party had already set up its own base of operations and gatherd refuges, little did we know the base was protected by a rune stolen from a race of people from another dimension.
Our base was attacked by an Airship of massive proportions (the likes of which had never been seen before in this world)
With mages on the ship, constantly defelcting all of our defences, we had no choice but to do soemthing drastic.
I gather myself and 2 others and ask in injured weredragon who we were healing to help us with something, what we did was had him transform into dragon mode and drop us on the ship as he flys past it enough to avoid the spells of the mages and then drop us. Surrounded with a small army, the 3 of us start plowing though the enemys (we started scoring allot of critical hits)
I notice the head mage and chace after him, he keeps summoning guards and golems to block me, but my allys burst though the walls of the section i ran to and hold them off.
I chase the mage to the controll deck of the ship, were he holds up an artifact, it was bascily a nuke. I paused and he threated to blow up the ship and the area with it to stop others from using the rune. He tells me his sad story of his people's extention, and i tell him my david and golith like story of hope of how we were challanging and buliding up to take on the marquee (basicly he was the guy in controll of the planet) and i managed to convince him not to kill us, but unfortunatly he had already armed the bomb, so he wraps himself in a force field and puts the bomb under his helmet and tells me to run. I scream about how he dosnt need to do this, and he says its too late.
I run to the deck and i jump off the air ship blindly, and as i race tward the ground, sunddly the dragon swoops and i land on his back, hodling on we make enough distance form the ship to avoid the shock wave, but because of the force field he put arround himself, the ship wasnt badly damaged.
We had just aqured an alien airship (the only one on the planet) in a matter of moments.

Jalor
2008-01-11, 07:17 PM
My Thri-Kreen Psychic Warrior has done some incredibly awesome stuff. Between his 20 Strength, 60 ranks in Jump once you add in his magic items and racial bonus, and his Up the Walls feat, he's a truly amazing character.

Defending a town from a Yrthak (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/yrthak.htm), he jumps onto its back, Roy-style, and kills it. He then accidentally-on-purpose crashes it into the Succubus hiding amongst the party. She turned back into her demon form after dying, so nobody accused him of manslaughter.

More to come when I remember them or decide to post them.

DementedFellow
2008-01-11, 08:04 PM
Okay we were playing half-level characters and my character was a bard with a crossbow. He was also the only one with pertinent bonus languages. So our party gets ambushed by goblins. He speaks goblins. He aims his already loaded crossbow and yells, "WE COME IN PEACE! DO NOT ATTACK US!" and fires into a melee that has already started with one of the party members and a goblin. He fires into the melee and incapacitates the goblin right away. The other goblins kept attacking, but the players couldn't help but laugh at that.

EvilElitest
2008-01-11, 08:10 PM
1. Stupid move
The PCs are working for a group of Awakened animals. The animals are sending them on many different task, most involving hunting and destroying enemies of the forest. However they are very arrogant and hate humans with a passion and have the whole condescending manner towards them towards them. After a few missions with the PCs, they tell them that they are rather less pathetic as far as humans go. At this the thief snaps


"Why the hell do you think your better than us just because you live in a forest and don't bath? What makes you so go? We have freaking cities, and metal, and buildings. Hell, look at this, we have thumbs. We can pick things up and hold things. Its is pretty sweet, look at these babies, they can move. Yeah what do you say to that?
2. Smart move
My players pulled of the mary Anthony speech, that was amazing
from
EE

nhbdy
2008-01-11, 08:40 PM
before you read my post, remember a couple of things
1: my DM is generous
2: i had to eliminate a sith lord to become one (DM's interpetation of "rule of two")

I was playing a jedi in star wars d20and i wanted to be a sith (so did my character, but he was smart enough to act good and restrain himself from using the dark side to avoid detection) and he had decided that of the two current sith lords darth vader was the easier target (i was about level 8 with vader lvl 16) so i had a friend (a DMPC, and a jedi around lvl 10) and i go to the wookie home world (not even gonna try to spell it) and create a rebellion of the wookies to get vader's attention. so we do and kill every stormtrooper there and salvage the turbolasers from the docked ships and power everything down as to not be detected by a scanner. when vader arrived i had my jedi friend lie in an ambush that involved shooting vader with 4 turbolasers at once and the wookies to charge and decimate the stormtroopers while i went on a small ship to board the star destroyer. vader was vaporized as soon as he stepped out of the ship and when i got on the star destroyer i fought my way to the bridge and basically intimidated everyone onboard by rolling a natural twenty and killing the commanding officer when he tried to rally the crew.

where is that character now? in captive of the emporer:smallfrown:

oh and don't tell me it was broken or it shouldn't have worked or any other nonsense, it allready happened and wont change so don't bug me about it!:smallfurious:

SpiderMew
2008-01-11, 09:40 PM
before you read my post, remember a couple of things
1: my DM is generous
2: i had to eliminate a sith lord to become one (DM's interpetation of "rule of two")

I was playing a jedi in star wars d20and i wanted to be a sith (so did my character, but he was smart enough to act good and restrain himself from using the dark side to avoid detection) and he had decided that of the two current sith lords darth vader was the easier target (i was about level 8 with vader lvl 16) so i had a friend (a DMPC, and a jedi around lvl 10) and i go to the wookie home world (not even gonna try to spell it) and create a rebellion of the wookies to get vader's attention. so we do and kill every stormtrooper there and salvage the turbolasers from the docked ships and power everything down as to not be detected by a scanner. when vader arrived i had my jedi friend lie in an ambush that involved shooting vader with 4 turbolasers at once and the wookies to charge and decimate the stormtroopers while i went on a small ship to board the star destroyer. vader was vaporized as soon as he stepped out of the ship and when i got on the star destroyer i fought my way to the bridge and basically intimidated everyone onboard by rolling a natural twenty and killing the commanding officer when he tried to rally the crew.

where is that character now? in captive of the emporer:smallfrown:

oh and don't tell me it was broken or it shouldn't have worked or any other nonsense, it allready happened and wont change so don't bug me about it!:smallfurious:

Kashyyyk and the dm forgot about the foce feet that allows you to channel blaster fire and heal yourself (eather that or he got bad rolls when he tryed)
Eather way, congrats on taking DV out in a stratgic manner that your dm couldnt work his way arround :xykon:

GlordFunkelhand
2008-01-12, 12:08 PM
Our rogue is on an "equipment-gathering run" without our knowledge. He thinks that the magic shop might be worth a look. He enters climbs the wall into the garden and searches the back door.
He can't find any traps. But he is sure that ther has to be a trap. Our rogue pauses, his greed and his fear fighting. The greed wins. He tries to open the door and is zapped by a lighting bolt.
And I rolled pretty high damage as well. The rogue is down to one HP and smells like a grilled chicken. He climbs over the wall, manages almost to fall to death, and hobbles to the temple. 2 times he has to avoid the city guards, doing some risky maneuvers (I mentioned that he has only 1 HP left, right?) and finally arrives at the temple of Pelor.

Imagine a large temple made of white marble. Golden holy symbols are visible on the floor and on the columns supporting the crystal dome-roof. Now enters the rouge: Dark, slightly smoking and with a guilty conscience.

He gets asked what happened, doesn't come up with a good story and panics. Leaving the irritated priest behind he flees from the temple as fast as he can, looks for a dark alley and... drinks a healing potion.

BloodyAngel
2008-01-12, 02:14 PM
I might have a few. Though personally I think the most bad-ass moments usually involve someone dying in an incredibly bad ass way.

Tragically Delicious! This one goes out to my bf.

We're playing a D&D game together. The group consists of my Swashbuckler/rogue, his warmage, a barbarian and a ranger, both played by his brother and my cousin respectively.... not that this matters, I suppose. We are heading back to the campaign's main city to bring warning, having finally figured out the plans of the big bad... who had been looming over the game since it started. (We were only level 6 or so, I think) As we haul-@$$ to get there... the Big Bad sent out his hounds to hunt us down and keep us from getting to give the warning. These hounds being howlers...

The howlers come up on us like the warg-riders from LoTR... and we break to fight them. The fighting is nasty... and one of them rips up my rogue something awful before I manage to kill it. That is when we see a second wave of them coming. The ranger takes a shot at one... but barely slows it down... the barbarian is too far off... and I'm the closest person to them... and I'm at 7 hp. But the warmage win's initiative.

Knowing he'll never drop all four of them in one spell... and that they'll be on me in a second... He jumps in the way. He knew he wouldn't make it. Even though he's at full hp, four slavering howlers tear him into tiny chunks in the span one round... Which buys us just enough time for the barbarian to get to them and hold them off, and me to get a healing potion from my things and re-join the fray. We barely manage to kill the howlers... but there's no saving the warmage. And no raise dead. He sacrificed himself to save me.

It might not be "rock-star", but I thought it was bad-ass as hell. The warmage had been an arrogant aristocratic prick when we first met him... and had JUST recently admitted, finally... that he actually considered the rest of the group friends... rather than people he was forced to work with to serve his kingdom. My character was so touched about it... that she carried his family seal for the rest of the campaign as a good luck charm, and when the war was won and we all settled down... she named her oldest son after him. :smallsmile:

Horsemen of the Apocalypse! It's a vampire game... Gehenna has just started and all hell has broken loose! Wraiths of the dead are soaring about the city, killing as many people as they can... They are all coming from Ellis Island, where one really, really Ax-Crazy necromancer has become possessed by an ancient vampire, slaughtered everyone... and bound their spirits to tear the city apart. The dead are rising... it's a hell of a party.

The group knows where the wraiths are coming from... but what with the city falling apart... getting a cab is probably out of the question. Until one of the characters comes upon a brillant idea. He uses his animalism, and a handful of police horses... and... the riders of the apocalypse go forth! If there's anything more bad-ass (or deserving of a music video) than five vampires riding on horses through a burning, rioting New York City full od zombies, wraiths and people just plain going insane... I can't think of it!

Said character was known for his creative uses of animalism... including keeping a ventrue wanted for treason from fleeing the city in a private plane by "asking" several dozen pigeons to fly into the plane's engines. :smalleek:

Sith Killa! In a star wars game played a while back... the party is tying to get to a sith artifact in one of those oh-so-fun "narrow walkway over a seemingly bottomless pit with a generator at the center" places. The characters are one serious, stick-in-the-mud jedi, one cocky, showboating jedi with a double-bladed saber that disconnects into two normal sabers, a 16 year old punker-girl/swoop racer (my scoundrel), a fringer with knack for unarmed combat, and an ex-imperial soldier. We were also accompanied by the cocky jedi's rival, a FEMALE cocky jedi, and his master... a wookie jedi. (yes... lots of jedi.)

As we arrive, four sith dark jedi assassin-types come from behind us to mess us up... and a sith-spirit in the area protecting the artifact possesses the wookie!! We are right boned! The fight breaks out, and Aiden (the cocky jedi) takes on the sith assassins... All four of them. The rest of the group is desperately trying to survive against the now-evil jedi wookie of DOOM! While we face him... Aiden gets into the most needlessly dramatic lightsaber duel I have ever seen. Round one, he wins init and decapitates a sith on a crit. He takes some damage, but hangs in there... second round... he parries a sith's attack, and pushes the siths blade into one of his parter's faces! (A very cinematic use of a force point). He takes more damage... and is now pretty messed up. Third round, he blocks an attack... disconnects his saber... and swings the second half through the sith... cutting him in half. The last sith strikes him hard, and he's into wounds... and not many wounds at that...

It's his turn... and the DM tells him he has an action before the sith goes, and it's probably all over. Aiden smirks at the sith... powers down his lightsaber... and tosses it to him. Then when the Sith raises his arm to catch it, or whatever it was he'd planned to do. (We'll honestly never know) Aiden uses the last of his few remaining wounds and a force-point to force-push the sith over the edge of the bottomless pit of DOOM! He then promptly blacks out from his wounds.

That character (and the guy who played him) was full of awesome moments like that.

Drascin
2008-01-13, 05:46 AM
There have been a few true rockstar moments in my game, that's to be sure.

A good one was by my old evil druid, Nayaire. I'll try to renarrate it:

Backstory: Our group has been fighting an startling variety of mooks for a long, long time, but it's only now that we discover that they've been sent by an evil wizard whom we are supposedly prophetised to defeat, so he has been trying to study us and maybe, with luck, get us out of his way without risking himself. Basically noone in the group puts any faith in prophecies, but we unanimously agree that we should find him and send his sorry butt right to the Abyss for bothering us.

However, apparently the wizard has other plans, as Nayaire is sent a secret message that says said wizard wants to meet with him to talk business. I know it might be a trap, but, having created Nayaire as a brutally overconfident son of a *****, I can't really back down. However, I prepare, and I take Tim's (the party wizard) metamagic rods before I leave, too, just in case.

I reach the building (I think it was the administration of some guild or other) where the meeting is supposed to take place, and am taken to the audience chamber. True enough, in the center of the chamber with walls lined in mercenaries, a wrinkled man in robes is waiting. I approach.

"So, young Nayaire"

"You're that crimson guy, I assume"

"Yes, I am the Crimson Hazer. And you're quite an impressive man"

"Skip the flattering and get to the point. What have you summoned me here for?"

"No need to be so aggressive, Nayaire *the old man chuckles*. I have watched you and your... group. I have seen how you suffer the company of those inferior fools, how you're forced to keep getting them out of messes they themselves get into, all because of that stupid prophecy. I wish to offer you an alternative"

(note: the wizard here is pretty correct - Nayaire has taken the role of leader by force, and protests continuously due to the stupidity they show and what he thinks is their denial to understand the way the world works, so it's not rare that he threatens or smacks them around. The fact that he's shown to be by far the strongest member in the group helps. The only wrong point is that he thinks Nayaire cares about the prophecy)

"Interesting. Keep talking"

*the wizard smirks* "I knew you'd be receptive. Here's my offer: if you kill those fools now, and join me, the prophecy shall be null and void. I'll take you as my ally - no, my equal - and together we'll be able to take Gaelia by force. I'd even be willing to split the spoils of conquest, of course."

"Keep your trinkets. My only interest is in the hunt"

"Then, what about absolute dominion over the Gael Forest? A better hunting ground you won't find anywhere"

*Nayaire laughs* "Typical wizard. You can't have 'absolute dominion' over a forest, over a manifestation of the indomitable will of nature. You can only hope to be at the top of its chain."

The wizard seems unfazed, and even smiles again.

"Alright then, I think I can up my ante. If I reminded you that this alliance would mean you'd be able to raze cities to the ground, remind the ways of the world - tooth and claw defining life and death by decree of the strongest, who is undoubtedly you - to those weakling citydwellers, what would you tell me?"

Okay, that was a critical Diplomacy success right there. Nayaire doubts. The wizard is hitting the druid's weak spots - his ego, his sadism, his predatorial instinct, and his hatred of those city dwellers, the only things that can defeat Nayaire's merciless pragmatism. The DM sure has taken his time to think this.

"I'd have to tell you it's a very interesting offer you have there"

"It is, isn't it? I'd give you the lead of the armies you'd need to accomplish that, and let you do as you please. I only ask for the control of that which remains - and that you leave the Tower of Unhun unharmed, as I wish to make such a place of power into my new home"

Nayaire looks quite convinced, but paces around, thinking.

"So, the plan is, kill those idiots in their sleep, use their deaths - and therefore, that of the prophecy - to break enemy morale, soak the capital in blood with claw and spell in a surprise attack, and then branch out from there crushing every focus of resistance we find until we control Gaelia, then look at other countries?"

"Yes, pretty much" By this time, the other players are booing me and calling me a traitor and planning ways to defeat me, of course. But hey, I'm evil, what did they expect? :smallamused:

Nayaire stops next to the guy, sitting in his throne, and looks him square in the face. "Not a bad plan. But there are three gaping flaws in it that could be really fatal for its execution."

The wizard looks worried. "Oh? Which ones?"

...and he's suddenly impaled against the throne by a silent Quill blast to the chest at point blank range, as Nayaire had been grasping the Silent Metamagic Rod in his pocket the whole time, and had used the pacing for the somatic component. He approaches his face as the guards are too dumbstruck to attack for a few seconds.

"One, you were unobservant enough to assume I would betray my pack to the man who ordered the death of Kit (note: Kit was Nayaire's fleshraker companion, and his most valued friend. The man who killed it was tortured to the point of madness). Second, you were stupid enough to assume I need your help to do exactly what you told me. And third," Nayaire smiles predatorily as he grasps the old man's neck, "you were conceited enough to think that I was willing to associate with prey" and crushes it effortlessly with a single hand as the man lets out a chortling agonic sound, while the other players look at me dumbfounded and then cheer.

Then he turned to the whole chamber, where there were about fifty guards, and as the mob charged, he just grinned evily. A druid with no animal companion and no wildshape against such a mass, the DM told me he thought it was a suicidal battle. But then, since I am the only one who plays divine casters, and I restrain myself a lot, he had never seen a caster druid played at full power - and this time, I was not restraining myself in the least. I had foreseen something like this (only I expected a trap, not an offer), I had prepared a spell list full of cheese, and I was going to use it. I asked to play it out, with a single sentence: "Guys, don't worry. By the time I'm finished, this building will be rubble :smallamused: "

It was a massacre. I didn't count, but I don't think that more than five enemies escaped.

I then got out of the building, crushed the two guards in the entrance, took out a Control Weather scroll, summoned up a big storm, and proceeded to Call Lightning on the support beams until the thing collapsed into a pile of rubble (I like to keep my word). I would have burned it too, but it was raining. I then headed back to the inn, ignoring the terrified and angry looks of the citizens - who didn't, nonetheless, seem willing to mess with the guy who just obliterated a four-story building by himself, even heavily wounded as he was (I had barely 8 HP and no cure spells left).

When he entered, he gave Tim his rods back, and crashed on the bed, tired. Olaf the dwarf, seeing the wounds, asked him what every character was thinking

"Nayaire, just where the **** have you been?"

"Found the Crimson guy. He wanted me to kill you, so I killed him. Also, we might have an angry peasant mob on our door soon. You've got my permission to kill them if you want, Olaf, take it as your late birthday present". And then he fell asleep, exhausted.

And so, in the end of the session, there was much joy and high-fiving and massacring of angry peasants with a +2 humanbane adamantine axe, and the DM was happy to find out that the group was not as unstable as he thought - we might be roving, psychopathic predators, but we're a pack of roving psychopathic predators, and we were going to stay together despite our infighting.

Another day I'll tell the story of Olaf and the Very Very Big Blue Dragon - it's another interesting tale of utter badassness.

Malfunctioned
2008-01-13, 07:22 AM
There have been a few true rockstar moments in my game, that's to be sure.

A good one was by my old evil druid, Nayaire. I'll try to renarrate it:

Backstory: Our group has been fighting an startling variety of mooks for a long, long time, but it's only now that we discover that they've been sent by an evil wizard whom we are supposedly prophetised to defeat, so he has been trying to study us and maybe, with luck, get us out of his way without risking himself. Basically noone in the group puts any faith in prophecies, but we unanimously agree that we should find him and send his sorry butt right to the Abyss for bothering us.

However, apparently the wizard has other plans, as Nayaire is sent a secret message that says said wizard wants to meet with him to talk business. I know it might be a trap, but, having created Nayaire as a brutally overconfident son of a *****, I can't really back down. However, I prepare, and I take Tim's (the party wizard) metamagic rods before I leave, too, just in case.

I reach the building (I think it was the administration of some guild or other) where the meeting is supposed to take place, and am taken to the audience chamber. True enough, in the center of the chamber with walls lined in mercenaries, a wrinkled man in robes is waiting. I approach.

"So, young Nayaire"

"You're that crimson guy, I assume"

"Yes, I am the Crimson Hazer. And you're quite an impressive man"

"Skip the flattering and get to the point. What have you summoned me here for?"

"No need to be so aggressive, Nayaire *the old man chuckles*. I have watched you and your... group. I have seen how you suffer the company of those inferior fools, how you're forced to keep getting them out of messes they themselves get into, all because of that stupid prophecy. I wish to offer you an alternative"

(note: the wizard here is pretty correct - Nayaire has taken the role of leader by force, and protests continuously due to the stupidity they show and what he thinks is their denial to understand the way the world works, so it's not rare that he threatens or smacks them around. The fact that he's shown to be by far the strongest member in the group helps. The only wrong point is that he thinks Nayaire cares about the prophecy)

"Interesting. Keep talking"

*the wizard smirks* "I knew you'd be receptive. Here's my offer: if you kill those fools now, and join me, the prophecy shall be null and void. I'll take you as my ally - no, my equal - and together we'll be able to take Gaelia by force. I'd even be willing to split the spoils of conquest, of course."

"Keep your trinkets. My only interest is in the hunt"

"Then, what about absolute dominion over the Gael Forest? A better hunting ground you won't find anywhere"

*Nayaire laughs* "Typical wizard. You can't have 'absolute dominion' over a forest, over a manifestation of the indomitable will of nature. You can only hope to be at the top of its chain."

The wizard seems unfazed, and even smiles again.

"Alright then, I think I can up my ante. If I reminded you that this alliance would mean you'd be able to raze cities to the ground, remind the ways of the world - tooth and claw defining life and death by decree of the strongest, who is undoubtedly you - to those weakling citydwellers, what would you tell me?"

Okay, that was a critical Diplomacy success right there. Nayaire doubts. The wizard is hitting the druid's weak spots - his ego, his sadism, his predatorial instinct, and his hatred of those city dwellers, the only things that can defeat Nayaire's merciless pragmatism. The DM sure has taken his time to think this.

"I'd have to tell you it's a very interesting offer you have there"

"It is, isn't it? I'd give you the lead of the armies you'd need to accomplish that, and let you do as you please. I only ask for the control of that which remains - and that you leave the Tower of Unhun unharmed, as I wish to make such a place of power into my new home"

Nayaire looks quite convinced, but paces around, thinking.

"So, the plan is, kill those idiots in their sleep, use their deaths - and therefore, that of the prophecy - to break enemy morale, soak the capital in blood with claw and spell in a surprise attack, and then branch out from there crushing every focus of resistance we find until we control Gaelia, then look at other countries?"

"Yes, pretty much" By this time, the other players are booing me and calling me a traitor and planning ways to defeat me, of course. But hey, I'm evil, what did they expect? :smallamused:

Nayaire stops next to the guy, sitting in his throne, and looks him square in the face. "Not a bad plan. But there are three gaping flaws in it that could be really fatal for its execution."

The wizard looks worried. "Oh? Which ones?"

...and he's suddenly impaled against the throne by a silent Quill blast to the chest at point blank range, as Nayaire had been grasping the Silent Metamagic Rod in his pocket the whole time, and had used the pacing for the somatic component. He approaches his face as the guards are too dumbstruck to attack for a few seconds.

"One, you were unobservant enough to assume I would betray my pack to the man who ordered the death of Kit (note: Kit was Nayaire's fleshraker companion, and his most valued friend. The man who killed it was tortured to the point of madness). Second, you were stupid enough to assume I need your help to do exactly what you told me. And third," Nayaire smiles predatorily as he grasps the old man's neck, "you were conceited enough to think that I was willing to associate with prey" and crushes it effortlessly with a single hand as the man lets out a chortling agonic sound, while the other players look at me dumbfounded and then cheer.

Then he turned to the whole chamber, where there were about fifty guards, and as the mob charged, he just grinned evily. A druid with no animal companion and no wildshape against such a mass, the DM told me he thought it was a suicidal battle. But then, since I am the only one who plays divine casters, and I restrain myself a lot, he had never seen a caster druid played at full power - and this time, I was not restraining myself in the least. I had foreseen something like this (only I expected a trap, not an offer), I had prepared a spell list full of cheese, and I was going to use it. I asked to play it out, with a single sentence: "Guys, don't worry. By the time I'm finished, this building will be rubble :smallamused: "

It was a massacre. I didn't count, but I don't think that more than five enemies escaped.

I then got out of the building, crushed the two guards in the entrance, took out a Control Weather scroll, summoned up a big storm, and proceeded to Call Lightning on the support beams until the thing collapsed into a pile of rubble (I like to keep my word). I would have burned it too, but it was raining. I then headed back to the inn, ignoring the terrified and angry looks of the citizens - who didn't, nonetheless, seem willing to mess with the guy who just obliterated a four-story building by himself, even heavily wounded as he was (I had barely 8 HP and no cure spells left).

When he entered, he gave Tim his rods back, and crashed on the bed, tired. Olaf the dwarf, seeing the wounds, asked him what every character was thinking

"Nayaire, just where the **** have you been?"

"Found the Crimson guy. He wanted me to kill you, so I killed him. Also, we might have an angry peasant mob on our door soon. You've got my permission to kill them if you want, Olaf, take it as your late birthday present". And then he fell asleep, exhausted.

And so, in the end of the session, there was much joy and high-fiving and massacring of angry peasants with a +2 humanbane adamantine axe, and the DM was happy to find out that the group was not as unstable as he thought - we might be roving, psychopathic predators, but we're a pack of roving psychopathic predators, and we were going to stay together despite our infighting.

Another day I'll tell the story of Olaf and the Very Very Big Blue Dragon - it's another interesting tale of utter badassness.

........Awesome, just awesome.

NaYoN
2008-01-13, 08:14 AM
There have been a few true rockstar moments in my game, that's to be sure.

A good one was by my old evil druid, Nayaire. I'll try to renarrate it:

Backstory: Our group has been fighting an startling variety of mooks for a long, long time, but it's only now that we discover that they've been sent by an evil wizard whom we are supposedly prophetised to defeat, so he has been trying to study us and maybe, with luck, get us out of his way without risking himself. Basically noone in the group puts any faith in prophecies, but we unanimously agree that we should find him and send his sorry butt right to the Abyss for bothering us.

However, apparently the wizard has other plans, as Nayaire is sent a secret message that says said wizard wants to meet with him to talk business. I know it might be a trap, but, having created Nayaire as a brutally overconfident son of a *****, I can't really back down. However, I prepare, and I take Tim's (the party wizard) metamagic rods before I leave, too, just in case.

I reach the building (I think it was the administration of some guild or other) where the meeting is supposed to take place, and am taken to the audience chamber. True enough, in the center of the chamber with walls lined in mercenaries, a wrinkled man in robes is waiting. I approach.

"So, young Nayaire"

"You're that crimson guy, I assume"

"Yes, I am the Crimson Hazer. And you're quite an impressive man"

"Skip the flattering and get to the point. What have you summoned me here for?"

"No need to be so aggressive, Nayaire *the old man chuckles*. I have watched you and your... group. I have seen how you suffer the company of those inferior fools, how you're forced to keep getting them out of messes they themselves get into, all because of that stupid prophecy. I wish to offer you an alternative"

(note: the wizard here is pretty correct - Nayaire has taken the role of leader by force, and protests continuously due to the stupidity they show and what he thinks is their denial to understand the way the world works, so it's not rare that he threatens or smacks them around. The fact that he's shown to be by far the strongest member in the group helps. The only wrong point is that he thinks Nayaire cares about the prophecy)

"Interesting. Keep talking"

*the wizard smirks* "I knew you'd be receptive. Here's my offer: if you kill those fools now, and join me, the prophecy shall be null and void. I'll take you as my ally - no, my equal - and together we'll be able to take Gaelia by force. I'd even be willing to split the spoils of conquest, of course."

"Keep your trinkets. My only interest is in the hunt"

"Then, what about absolute dominion over the Gael Forest? A better hunting ground you won't find anywhere"

*Nayaire laughs* "Typical wizard. You can't have 'absolute dominion' over a forest, over a manifestation of the indomitable will of nature. You can only hope to be at the top of its chain."

The wizard seems unfazed, and even smiles again.

"Alright then, I think I can up my ante. If I reminded you that this alliance would mean you'd be able to raze cities to the ground, remind the ways of the world - tooth and claw defining life and death by decree of the strongest, who is undoubtedly you - to those weakling citydwellers, what would you tell me?"

Okay, that was a critical Diplomacy success right there. Nayaire doubts. The wizard is hitting the druid's weak spots - his ego, his sadism, his predatorial instinct, and his hatred of those city dwellers, the only things that can defeat Nayaire's merciless pragmatism. The DM sure has taken his time to think this.

"I'd have to tell you it's a very interesting offer you have there"

"It is, isn't it? I'd give you the lead of the armies you'd need to accomplish that, and let you do as you please. I only ask for the control of that which remains - and that you leave the Tower of Unhun unharmed, as I wish to make such a place of power into my new home"

Nayaire looks quite convinced, but paces around, thinking.

"So, the plan is, kill those idiots in their sleep, use their deaths - and therefore, that of the prophecy - to break enemy morale, soak the capital in blood with claw and spell in a surprise attack, and then branch out from there crushing every focus of resistance we find until we control Gaelia, then look at other countries?"

"Yes, pretty much" By this time, the other players are booing me and calling me a traitor and planning ways to defeat me, of course. But hey, I'm evil, what did they expect? :smallamused:

Nayaire stops next to the guy, sitting in his throne, and looks him square in the face. "Not a bad plan. But there are three gaping flaws in it that could be really fatal for its execution."

The wizard looks worried. "Oh? Which ones?"

...and he's suddenly impaled against the throne by a silent Quill blast to the chest at point blank range, as Nayaire had been grasping the Silent Metamagic Rod in his pocket the whole time, and had used the pacing for the somatic component. He approaches his face as the guards are too dumbstruck to attack for a few seconds.

"One, you were unobservant enough to assume I would betray my pack to the man who ordered the death of Kit (note: Kit was Nayaire's fleshraker companion, and his most valued friend. The man who killed it was tortured to the point of madness). Second, you were stupid enough to assume I need your help to do exactly what you told me. And third," Nayaire smiles predatorily as he grasps the old man's neck, "you were conceited enough to think that I was willing to associate with prey" and crushes it effortlessly with a single hand as the man lets out a chortling agonic sound, while the other players look at me dumbfounded and then cheer.

Then he turned to the whole chamber, where there were about fifty guards, and as the mob charged, he just grinned evily. A druid with no animal companion and no wildshape against such a mass, the DM told me he thought it was a suicidal battle. But then, since I am the only one who plays divine casters, and I restrain myself a lot, he had never seen a caster druid played at full power - and this time, I was not restraining myself in the least. I had foreseen something like this (only I expected a trap, not an offer), I had prepared a spell list full of cheese, and I was going to use it. I asked to play it out, with a single sentence: "Guys, don't worry. By the time I'm finished, this building will be rubble :smallamused: "

It was a massacre. I didn't count, but I don't think that more than five enemies escaped.

I then got out of the building, crushed the two guards in the entrance, took out a Control Weather scroll, summoned up a big storm, and proceeded to Call Lightning on the support beams until the thing collapsed into a pile of rubble (I like to keep my word). I would have burned it too, but it was raining. I then headed back to the inn, ignoring the terrified and angry looks of the citizens - who didn't, nonetheless, seem willing to mess with the guy who just obliterated a four-story building by himself, even heavily wounded as he was (I had barely 8 HP and no cure spells left).

When he entered, he gave Tim his rods back, and crashed on the bed, tired. Olaf the dwarf, seeing the wounds, asked him what every character was thinking

"Nayaire, just where the **** have you been?"

"Found the Crimson guy. He wanted me to kill you, so I killed him. Also, we might have an angry peasant mob on our door soon. You've got my permission to kill them if you want, Olaf, take it as your late birthday present". And then he fell asleep, exhausted.

And so, in the end of the session, there was much joy and high-fiving and massacring of angry peasants with a +2 humanbane adamantine axe, and the DM was happy to find out that the group was not as unstable as he thought - we might be roving, psychopathic predators, but we're a pack of roving psychopathic predators, and we were going to stay together despite our infighting.

Another day I'll tell the story of Olaf and the Very Very Big Blue Dragon - it's another interesting tale of utter badassness.


This sounds a lot like 300's ending scene, which was badass :D

rickvoid
2008-01-13, 09:18 AM
Only without the 300 dead spartans. :)

I haven't played much, so the only real badass story I have was the first time I ever played. I was a cleric with the strength domain. We were level 1 and 2 characters, and the DM dropped a minotaur on us. The party barbarian stepped up and started grappling with it. He was wearing spiked gauntlets, so he'd be able to kill it if he could with the grapple check, rather that just dealing some non-lethal damage. The minotaur was a size catagory larger than him, so it was getting a nice fat bonus to it's check.

I already had a bless going, and didn't particulary want to have my first level cleric shedded in melee, so I announced that I was going to use enlarge person on the barb. Minotaur lost his size bonus, barb gained another point on his strength modifier. Several damage rolls later (the barb critted him:smallbiggrin:) the barb had do over 30 damage more than the minotaur had health. DM ruled he'd just twisted his head off. Barb took the head as his trophy and I got serveral pats on the back.

Sir *TIM!!!!!!*
2008-01-13, 10:49 AM
These are great. One off of the top of my head, where our entire party got lucky at the perfect moments:

Our D&D 3.5 group (rogue, druid, barbarian, and wizard, all 10th level at the time) had been captured during a battle (which was a draw) in a fight with one of the enemy officers (around a 15th level monk).

We are being traded as POW's for a few other officers that were captured by our side. We overhear the officer who defeated us planning to kill us after getting their men back.

The barbarian enters rage, bursts his bonds, and nails one of his guards with a punch that actually kills him. The rest of our guards rush him and surround him except for one outlet. He rushes through the outlet and the AoO's miss (the DM described it as him jumping over the low swing) and he proceeds to rip off the bounds and gags of the wizard, freeing him to cast spells again.

The wizard casts Fireball on the mass of guards, and as the smoke clears, the rogue slips from his bonds which he had loosened about a minute before (a jury-rigged Use Rope/escape artist check).

Said rogue then proceeds to rush the officer. Unarmed.

The officer catches him on the shoulder with a spear thrust, and the rogue fights through his injury to steal the daggar from the mans hip.

Next round:

The wizard looses another Fireball, this time in the mass of the enemy lines behind us. The barbarian rips off the bonds around the Druid, who wildshapes into a dire bear (I think that's what it was) and rips off the legs of several spearmen attacking him.

The rogue trips the officer and then attempts a called shot (house rule) to nail the officer to the ground with the daggar. It succeeds. He then pulls a hand crossbow from the mans other hip and fires at the enemy general a ways away.

20. 20. 20.

It all went downhill for our enemies from there. The wizard blew every spell he had (yes, even the Acid Orbs) generally melting faces and blowing stuff up. The barbarian stole an axe from the bodies of the Fireballed guards and laid waste to all comers. The druid proceeded to single-handedly bowl over a small cavalry charge. And the rogue just stood and laughed as the enemy general slipped off of his horse and his bodyguards panicked.

Malachite
2008-01-13, 12:53 PM
I think the ones about Nayaire and Tink have it so far!



The best in our gaming group isn't quite so cool by comparison. It's the end of the campaign and we're level 18, and the BBEG (though not obvious at the time) is Dracus, a great wyrm red dragon. Lots of mythril is being bought up, the mentor-role archmage has gone missing in another plane, and it's down to us to find out why. Dracus is pretty much discounted as a threat due to an unbreakable oath of his not to attack the Northernlands again for the rest of his life. Along the way another lesser BBEG we had previously killed is returned to this plane life-bound to my character, meaning he has to fight with us or die when I do. Unfortunately we fail to comprehend what's going on in time, and Dracus completes his plans of becoming a dracolich, freeing himself of the oath. We head in for the showdown, and quickly realise we're going to have jack-all chance in a fair fight.
Anyway, he's in a flying city, the power core of which was established in a previous adventure as being extremely explosive if detonated. Talking nuke here. We decide to send in the rogue to blow it up and put a Contingency Teleport on her to get her out as it blows.

Then our plan predictably gets screwed up as my Fighter/Dwarven Defender and the rogue/fighter life-bound BBEG get teleported by Dracus into his throne room. He knows something's up, but he's not sure what yet, so we need to distract him. Telepathic message comes to my dwarf telling him to jump out of the window where he could be teleported to safety, but that will givew Dracus a chance to find out what's going on so Mal thinks 'screw it' and charges. Final scene which I thought was pretty badass was my lvl 18dwarf charging towards a CR 28 opponent while doing the obligatory speech about evil undoing itself, Dracus perverting his form with undeath etc., dropping his shield and taking a two-handed grip on his waraxe, then just as he swings it to hit Dracus the place goes up.

Biggest explosion ever to grace the Northernlands, and Dracus is well and truly disintegrated.

Fortunately a Miracle cast seconds earlier by another party member kicks in, saving me and most of the surrounding countryside.

Possibly the coolest accomplishments for all members of the party involved that I've personally witnessed in DnD . :smallbiggrin:

Brauron
2008-01-13, 07:35 PM
OK, so my group (Human Rogue, Human Barbarian, Elf Wizard, Elf Cleric, all 3rd level) has just fought its way through a truly hellish "Funhouse" themed dungeon to find the villain, a 5th level LE Gnome Sorceror who had kidnapped a little girl, intent on selling her into slavery. This especially angered my Barbarian, who had been a slave for a time.

The Gnome summoned a Fiendish Dire Boar directly in front of me. Without batting an eye, I declared my intention to pick up the boar by the tusks, swing it around and hurl it at the gnome.

The GM asked me to make, in succession, a Grapple check, a STR check, and ranged attack roll.

Aced all three.

The boar flew through the air, squealing in terror, before slamming into the gnome at full force, smashing the gnome into the wall behind him. The gnome would have died if he hadn't had a potion of Cure Medium Wounds in his pocket.

holywhippet
2008-01-13, 09:22 PM
This is one my DM told us about, not one I saw personally so I might get some of the details wrong. My DM's cousin is apparently very good at tactical solutions in D&D. During one session (3.0 rules I believe), the party was walking through a forest when a Balor appeared before them. The DM intended it to be an opponent so overwhelming that their low level party could not hope to defeat it and thus talking was the only option. His cousin however had other plans. He blasted the Balor with a spell to get his attention then used haste to begin running away rapidly. The Balor, angered, began chasing after him using a series of dimension doors. The problem is, he couldn't quite catch up to the uppity magic user as he'd just run away again on his turn. Meanwhile, the wizard was preparing scrolls of Evard's Black Tenatacles using the extra actions granted by haste. When he was ready, he unleashed all of them on the Balor.

The GM didn't think it would be a problem at first, but the tentacles kept winning the grapple check and the Balor kept failing his concentration checks to break free/summon help etc. Eventually it went down, soloed by a low level wizard. He also said the CR of the Balor was so high that it was almost too high for the player to be able to get experience points for killing it.

kieza
2008-01-14, 02:51 AM
All of these just happened tonight: the artificer in the campaign I run, a gnome with low hitpoints and strength, is facing off with a warforged fighter . He casts inflict moderate damage, saying as he does so, "This may sting a little." He proceeds to roll a critical, and drops the warforged to 3 hp with one shot; its plating warps and pops off, the stone parts crumble to dust, and the wood warps and bursts into flame. His next words? "Hmm. It didn't do that last time."

Next, he and the group are fighting four shifters, two rogues and two warriors. One of the rogues has the party psychic warrior grappled and has just sneak attacked him for over half his health. The artificer uses Greater Weapon Enhancement to give his crossbow the Displacing ability, and shoots the rogue. Not only does he teleport the rogue, he teleports him to the dangerous side of the wilder's Wall of Cold. The psychic warrior is left standing there with his hands closing on nothing where the rogue's neck was.

Sort of the opposite of a rockstar moment, but funny nonetheless: the psychic warrior is in Sharn, and witnesses a robbery on a balcony two levels below him. He proceeds to jump to it, sword drawn. He rolls a 1. Not only does he take full damage from the fall, he falls prone. Everyone else in the party looks on in astonishment as a half-giant in full plate does a swan dive off of a balcony and lands on his back 20 feet from an ongoing fight.

Fuzzy_Juan
2008-01-14, 04:21 AM
Hmm...Rockstar NPC in a White-wolf game of Werewolf: Apocalypse...normal Human Pentex employee...trained leader of a first team (hit squad for the company)...we have several encounters with him...everyone is rank 2-4 and have lots of goodies...

first encounter...takes on a pack in the woods...using stealth and suprise separtes and tranqs the lot of them capturing 3 pack members...

2nd encounter...the PC's are dispatched to rescue the other pack members along with some others that have been abducted...expecting this, the NPC arrives with his hit team and while the rest of the team is hard pressed, the human on the team causes severe damage to multiple pack members, kills one supporting NPC, escapes with thieir prime target, manages to destroy the computers to avoid us getting any info, and gets away without a scratch...(and this is with the ST rolling everything in front of us...no fudging or ST Fiat here).

3rd encounter...Another strike on a pentex Facility. While this attack brings together 2 packs of werewolves, 3 various fera (cat, bear and snake shifters to be exact), and a couple of Kinfolk, the enemy is just as numerous. in addition to alot of security guards, there are fomori, 2 elder BSD with their pack (evil werewolves), a pair of first teams...and that one guy. Well...massive hit and run battles ensue in the building...we deal with everyone just fine, some close calls, but all in all no real problems...then, we run accross that one normal guy with some executives trying to get the hell out of the building...well...hilarity ensues as he hands us our collective asses. 3 pack members have to be healed from instant death as at this range he is able to headshot and instantly kill with those silver bullets...a flashbang and smokebomb later he is gone while we sort out the wounded. after a quick heal, we split into teams of 3 to hunt down this guy...leading to one geting headshot again (dead this time)...one group of 3 getting a noseful of pepper spray, another group getting multiple shots and then cutoff by firedoors as the sprinklers come on (no more tracking by scent...for the most part). This of course also potentially calls the fire department so the PC's now are on a time crunch to get out. With the knowledge that he is on his way to the basement, the bear shifts to his largest form and ploughs his way down by jumping hard and collapsing through the floors of the building...he smells the Gas...smells the scent of ionized air...looks over and sees the guy setting a shotgun shell in some wires and then watches as he runs off. The bear has no choice but to grab the wires and channel the electricity through himself (he could take the damage)...if he let go, a spark might turn the basement into an inferno trapping everyone in a blaze...but that is only the beginning, the building apparebtly was rigged to blow...it was only a matter of time...by absorbin the electricity, the bear allowed the others time to get out, but the building blew up and collapsed on him (being ungodly tough...he actually survived...bearly...Meanwhile, the rest tried to catch up to the Human ho was getting away...they saw a truck leaving the building and going down the hill so they chased it...when they caught it, the vehicle had crashed since there was no driver...but when someone opened the door to check if they could get a clue from inside...BOOM...rigged short fuse grenade on the door that was wrapped with the last of his silver bullets in duct tape around the grenade...he nearly killed the guys who got to the truck...apparently he ran the other way and used the distraction to make a clean getaway...we never did catch that guy.

kieza
2008-01-14, 12:22 PM
Hmm...Rockstar NPC in a White-wolf game of Werewolf: Apocalypse...normal Human Pentex employee...trained leader of a first team (hit squad for the company)...we have several encounters with him...everyone is rank 2-4 and have lots of goodies...

first encounter...takes on a pack in the woods...using stealth and suprise separtes and tranqs the lot of them capturing 3 pack members...

2nd encounter...the PC's are dispatched to rescue the other pack members along with some others that have been abducted...expecting this, the NPC arrives with his hit team and while the rest of the team is hard pressed, the human on the team causes severe damage to multiple pack members, kills one supporting NPC, escapes with thieir prime target, manages to destroy the computers to avoid us getting any info, and gets away without a scratch...(and this is with the ST rolling everything in front of us...no fudging or ST Fiat here).

3rd encounter...Another strike on a pentex Facility. While this attack brings together 2 packs of werewolves, 3 various fera (cat, bear and snake shifters to be exact), and a couple of Kinfolk, the enemy is just as numerous. in addition to alot of security guards, there are fomori, 2 elder BSD with their pack (evil werewolves), a pair of first teams...and that one guy. Well...massive hit and run battles ensue in the building...we deal with everyone just fine, some close calls, but all in all no real problems...then, we run accross that one normal guy with some executives trying to get the hell out of the building...well...hilarity ensues as he hands us our collective asses. 3 pack members have to be healed from instant death as at this range he is able to headshot and instantly kill with those silver bullets...a flashbang and smokebomb later he is gone while we sort out the wounded. after a quick heal, we split into teams of 3 to hunt down this guy...leading to one geting headshot again (dead this time)...one group of 3 getting a noseful of pepper spray, another group getting multiple shots and then cutoff by firedoors as the sprinklers come on (no more tracking by scent...for the most part). This of course also potentially calls the fire department so the PC's now are on a time crunch to get out. With the knowledge that he is on his way to the basement, the bear shifts to his largest form and ploughs his way down by jumping hard and collapsing through the floors of the building...he smells the Gas...smells the scent of ionized air...looks over and sees the guy setting a shotgun shell in some wires and then watches as he runs off. The bear has no choice but to grab the wires and channel the electricity through himself (he could take the damage)...if he let go, a spark might turn the basement into an inferno trapping everyone in a blaze...but that is only the beginning, the building apparebtly was rigged to blow...it was only a matter of time...by absorbin the electricity, the bear allowed the others time to get out, but the building blew up and collapsed on him (being ungodly tough...he actually survived...bearly...Meanwhile, the rest tried to catch up to the Human ho was getting away...they saw a truck leaving the building and going down the hill so they chased it...when they caught it, the vehicle had crashed since there was no driver...but when someone opened the door to check if they could get a clue from inside...BOOM...rigged short fuse grenade on the door that was wrapped with the last of his silver bullets in duct tape around the grenade...he nearly killed the guys who got to the truck...apparently he ran the other way and used the distraction to make a clean getaway...we never did catch that guy.

And thus, Tucker's Human was born.

Malachite
2008-01-14, 08:09 PM
bear allowed the others time to get out, but the building blew up and collapsed on him (being ungodly tough...he actually survived...bearly...

*Groan* I'll get your coat... :smallbiggrin:

That's a pretty cool baddie though - it'll make victory all the sweeter when it finally comes!

Fuzzy_Juan
2008-01-15, 12:21 AM
heh...tucker's human indeed...

other screwy moments...

A young werewolf proving his worth in a sparring match...does pretty well...but starts to lose and has to test for frenzy (when you do you go nuts and just kill with abandon)...well...he fails and goes berserk and kills his partner...several elders try and restrain him...he burns some rage and gets some phenominal rolls and before anyone can even act, he slays the 3 that came to stop him...well...his bizzare streak of 'luck' continued along with a simultaneous streak of bad rolls for the ST and long story short, the entire sept of 12 werewolves was killed by this cub. Should never have happened..but it did...More happened to this now outcast later on...but needless to say, that was one 'rockstar' moment that eh wished never happened.

A different young werewolf was accompanying the Bastet (werecat) to one of the Bastet gatherings. He had been told it was a great honor and not to offend or he would be killed. The rank 1 Get of Fenris Ahroun (ranks are 1-5, warrior auspice of a warrior tribe) is impressed with a were lion (rank 4 NPC)...somehow they get the idea to start a sparring match to test the might of Fenris against the King of cats...well...can't let a challenge like that go unanswered...A huge DBZ style battle commences with them using the entire courtyard as their battleground. They start the fight in human form, battleing back and forth, tossing each other around...then they shift up one step into a slightly stronger form (glabro is what it is called, but not full blown 'werewolf'). The battle continues with niether willing to give up...of course...someone has to test for frenzy eventually...but it isn't the werewolf...the werecat loses and decides to rage heal (pretty much guarenteeing a frenzy) rather than lose to a garou...he heals but passes his frenzy test and while not berserk, he is now in full war form. The garou then enters his war form and they go at it again...a flurry of tooth and claw later, the garou gets pounded into the ground hard...he also rage heals and passes his frenzy test...uprooting a tree he louisville sluggers the cat into a brick wall and then the cat frenzies after healing again...some frantic struggle by the Get to not be killd by the frenzying cat leads to both of them frenzied and now fully trying to kill each other. By now they have ravaged the entire yard, through a couple of walls, taken out two trees, and been forced to rage heal twice...two other cats try and force them apart...(random rolls determine target for the frenzied occupants when the new combatants approach), on the same init the garou and bastet turn from each other and kill the people interfering with a single swipe of claws...then go back to trying to kill each other...several rounds later, onlookers manage to stop them from fighting by putting them down non-leathally. It was the longest one on one combat in the history of our playing werewolf. A full 30 rounds or more of them going back and forth beating the crap out of each other and never giving up. The werewolf impressed the Lion enough that he was told the secret of a Lion gift.

Dnd...1st ed...elven fighter mage 7/11 (maybe 11-9...can't remember) rides into a burning village alone to stop the head very dark and evil knights leading the army from further killing townsfolk. The character, Swiftwind...my elf, had rode into town ahead of the party by himself after cutting a swath through the surrounding army. The other PC's were given the task of helping the small army of ours break through and help protect the fleeing villagers. I charged in facing off against 9 20th level fighters...I had the equivalent of a vorpal blade, some really good armor, a contingency heal, and a some spells (most aoe and direct damage spells spent breaking through the army)..When I broke the lines, I had 2 knights on my tail a few rounds behind me...I charged one knight with a lance and scored a crit knocking him into a burning building and rolling so well with damage that he suffered death by massive injury when he failed his system shock...I rode by drawing my sword and attacked another knight...blessed by another 20 I took his head with the vorpal strike...The next three were not going to be taken unaware or with a crit likely...and there were still two bearing down with 2 unacounted for...I used acrobatics to leap off the horse and onto a ledge to jump over them in the street...then cast dig to create a huge deep pit where they were standing. The three fell in and couldn't climb out thanks to their armor and the loose soil. As the oters were riding up, I cast grease on the narrow road and giggled as they lost control of their horses and also fell in. From behind one of the enemies came at me and scored a hit. I fought for a bit but son realized that either the others would climb out or the other one would come and I would lose...a quick tumble for positioning and then a gust of wind changed the story as the next knight went into the pit...I sealed it with a wall of force after another grease spell and burning hands made it a fire pit. The final knight...the leader of them was a real pain...I cast what buffs I could but knew it would be a long and grueling fight that i would likely lose without help...my healing triggered after he crit me giving me a 2nd wind...he went berserk and gained even more strength...as the rest of the party was getting close, I realized that I had one round left...2 attacks...and I had init...if I didn't win, they were gonna have to find a way to res an elf (something not allowed in 1st ed for some reason)...he still had more HP than I could possibly deal with normal attacks...I needed a 20...I got one and took his head as well. I had broken through the army alone, drew off the leaders and faced the elite leadership core alone and not just survived...but won. Swiftwind then romptly collapsed in exhaustion since many of his spells expired and he was down to around 4 hp out of 50 or so.

Craig1f
2008-01-15, 03:21 PM
There have been a few true rockstar moments in my game, that's to be sure.

A good one was by my old evil druid, Nayaire. I'll try to renarrate it:


I finally decided to read this one. I thought it would be long-winded at first, but that was pretty awesome.

You should go into more detail about how you were able to take out 50 guys without wildshape. I'd think they'd rush in for a grapple very quickly.

Fuzzy_Juan
2008-01-16, 12:04 AM
I would like to hear the list of cheese as well, I know it's possible, but the how is half the fun. Sounds like a great battle Drascla.

:smallbiggrin: a balor taken down by the tentacles of forced intrusion...i'm not even sure if that is possible...no way any damage would get through his DR...it is pretty funny though.

wadledo
2008-01-16, 12:58 AM
For some reason, the party had pissed a tribe of were-rats, and after being chased halfway across a continent the caught up with us at port.
Already on our way out of the harbor, the were-rats grabbed a boat and swarmed the ship.
After the wizard sent most of the party to safety, it was just me(the bard) and the dwarven cleric/summoner holding them back.
Dwarf after summoning and getting on a griffin: Get on, you w****ing bastard!
Griffin after getting prepared with arrows: *Yea right! * flies away
Me: No worries, I got this!
* grabs bag filled with alks fire *
Me: * I climb as high as I can and chuck the bag into the hold *
DM: Fine.
Me to Dwarf: Say good by to Cathy for me.
And Maggie.
And Sarah.
And Petunia.
And Brittany.
Not Anny though.
Anny was really clingy.
DM: The ship burns to the waterline as you cling to the mast and recite the names of every woman you've slept with.
Me: So, what sons have I had around here?

Some explanation is necessary.
I was playing a relatively high level game(we came in about 8ish), and when deciding the backstories for our characters I had mine be this completely honest bard, who's only major vice(aside from being a bard) was he greatly enjoyed the company of "loose women".
I made it funny though, as these guys had been around for a while.
He'd walk into some random little town and have 4 or 5 kids be related to him.
He payed a lot of child support.:smallbiggrin: