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View Full Version : What's yout favorite self-contained encounter?



Phhase
2021-12-23, 09:59 AM
Personally, my favorite so far is an duel I ran between a player and an NPC. They were traveling together andtThe player wanted to question the NPC about several things. Said NPC however, was very much a Proud Warrior Race Guy with combat literally written in his DNA (He was a Rahkishi, a race I homebrewed). So he proposed a ritual duel. Combat is how you get to truly know one another, so the rule was: land a blow, ask a question. Back and forth, until one could no longer fight. It was a fun time, a perfect blend of character and combat. Both of them fought viciously, and the NPC was fun to play since he used his specialty Vaccum power to manipulate the air and rocket around. He even punked the player once by answering a question inside a vaccum he pulled. For her part, the PC also fought well, got several good questions about purpose and origin in, discovering a special property of one of her weapons, and the duel was extremely close, coming down to a single blow. The NPC won, just by a sliver, and their final question was "What is best in life?", which the PC could not answer...not in the moment.

Either that you've run or played, what's your favorite encounter that rolled together more than one part of the play-triangle (combat, exploration, social) in an interesting way?

HumanFighter
2021-12-23, 06:58 PM
Over the years I have played through a lot of damn encounters, both as player and as GM. It is tough to remember them all, so I'll go with a recent one that I quite enjoyed, not sure it is my favorite though.
So anyways, the players were in a weird city by the coast, populated mostly by fey creatures. Basically a bunch of fairies, tree people, and other strange, not-of-this-world type beings, all huddled together in this town, taking refuge from obligatory fantasy Big Evil Empire that was trying to wipe them all out.

I don't remember how, but the players caught wind of a couple of agents that had infiltrated the town, and immediately had intentions to capture/question or slay them. These agents were not of the Evil Empire, but of another malevolent faction in the world.
So anyways, they come to this house on the edge of town, and the agents are in there, the windows boarded up. No one in the party can pick locks, so the Berserker attempts to knock the door down, but, he's not strong enough. "Why don't you rage then?" I suggest to him but he's roleplaying and says that he will not rage unless he has to. So the wizard gets impatient and starts slapping the Berserker, trying to provoke a rage. She does it and eventually it works (after like 5 slaps). The Berserker gets pissed off and busts down the door, initiating combat. The 2 enemy agents are a Fire-focused Sorcerer and an Assassin woman, both higher level than the party. The fire sorcerer got off a couple of spells, but died pretty quickly, getting his head chopped off by the Berserker. But the assassin was truly more effective and deadly than I expected, dual-wielding poisoned daggers. The party assassin had a really high AC, and the Berserker was really tough, but she managed to down the player assassin and reduce the Berserker to 1 HP. Finally, after some sweat and blood, she got taken down but not all the way dead. The party decided they wanted to question her, not kill her, so they tied her up and healed her. Still she did not wake up. The Berserker asked if there was any cold buckets of water around. I said, "no, but there is a chamber pot full of piss." So the Berserker grabbed the chamber pot and dumped it on her, covering her in piss. HAHA! They then questioned her, now that she was fully conscious, and got the location of the Mountain Base she came from. After all was said and done, the party decided to confiscate her weapons and let her go, which pleasantly surprised me. I guess they're going after that Base eventually, when they get around to it.

Gnoman
2021-12-25, 03:27 AM
Been running an old-school player vs GM dungeon crawl in GURPS lately, and had great fun with a simple encounter recently.


The party's kobold "rogue" checks the door for traps, and finds nothing, but notices that the door smells funny.

The cleric speculates that it might be poison. Kobold assumes that there's acid on the other side of the door and opens it, getting hit by the semi-magical contact poison impregnated into the door. Makes the save to not die, but drops of paralysis.

The mage assumes an airborne poison, purifies the air, and decides they need to run. And to prevent the poison cloud from returning, runs over and slams the door shut. Luckily makes his first save and avoids ill effect.

Since neither has a good HT score, making the saves was not super likely. So I came very close to killing two PCs with one entirely passive and fairly obvious trap. Great fun was had by all.

Milodiah
2021-12-25, 10:39 AM
My first ever campaign started the players as members of the city watch through their lower levels, and by God do I have a poison story too.

One of the laws they were tasked with enforcing was to ensure that no poison lethal to humanoids was brought into the city without being properly marked, inventoried, and approved, with all the accompanying fees. So, while on gate guard duty, a merchant rolls up to the gate with a wagon full of rat poison, which he insists isn't dangerous to humans because it's a special formula and doesn't need to go through all that.

The cleric has already expended all his castings of detect poison, so what's he do? He tastes it.

I should mention he's a fairy. A Tiny creature, not much larger than a rat. He also made the baffling decision to put the eight he rolled into Con, which the racial modifier made a six. So yeah, this poison does very much work on him.

At this point the merchant is getting scared. There's a uniformed member of the city watch frothing at the mouth at his feet, and he's thinking that since there's no way anyone would be so stupid to actually do what this guard just did, it must be some kind of weird shakedown. So he decides he's going to try to bribe his way out of this.

Unfortunately he attempts to bribe the Lawful Good paladin of St. Cuthbert, who predictably flips his lid and starts attempting to take the guy into custody.

Now he's panicking. He draws a dagger, which is covered in illegal poison, and tries to stab the paladin. He fails, since the paladin's not flat footed, in armor, and this dude is an NPC class. He gets tackled and shackled, and they bring him in.

Its only after all this that the guys who end up having to impound the wagon filled with "rat poison" (since its owner is now in the dungeons awaiting trial) discover that hidden amongst all this stuff is actually some really major contraband. The plan I'd given said merchant was to try to distract the players with the obvious but seemingly minor infraction, and once they conclude that all the guy is trying to do is dodge paying the taxes on the poison, they'd presumably have levied said tax and moved him on his way.

But no, they took the most ridiculous course of action possible by letting the weakest, smallest PC consume something that was literally labeled as poison, and somehow that led to busting a major smuggling ring. The captain gave them a commendation but was visibly confused and concerned the entire time he was doing it.