The best game you ever had.

[Pokonic]

Well, there are a large amount of threads that pop up about idiotic DM's or poor players, and there seems to be a strange lack of happy stories to tell about there experiances on this board. This is what this thread is for.

Whether it be a atmosphereic, dark game, like CoC, or perhapes something light like your average setting, this is for the best time you ever had in a Table top role-playing game session.

[Yora]

I think that was probably the last one with my most recent group.

It was when we tried RISUS as a change from 3.5e but kept playing the same campaign. Two of the players never played before the campaign an the third one set the tone for roleplay heavy.
I ran an adaptation of Escape from Meenlock Prision and though I was awfully underprepared it was really great fun for everyone.

[Greenish]

Problem with describing great games/sessions is that… you had to be there.

[Winds]

When my group tried out d20 modern, it ended up being...crazy. Started simply enough. The setting was based somewhat on Borderlands, but then, well, the players happened and the DM went with it. My character was James Morran, who started as a Fast hero. The other notable was Iam Moone. (The other characters kept dying/leaving) You may note that Iam Moone is an anagram.

Anyway, it started with us hitting a town while we were on a mission. Iam bought a chainsaw and re-worked it to be usable in one hand. He then declared himself a commissar and started killing any NPC in our convoy that failed at their job.

Sound a little familiar?

We then went off the rails a bit...took over what amounted to a land-battleship. We had to get past all their guns, but it was decided that feats and abilities that the driver had applied to the vehicle. This led to my fast hero (somehow) coming through every shot a battleship had to offer without taking damage. This led to one of the most amusing moments in the whole affair: my NPC gunner had to make a Fort save and failed. The DM said he fainted. This feat under our belts, we took over the bridge...by running inside, duct-taping the door shut, and wiping out the captain and other staff.


We then wiped out our mission control and set about being warlords of the area. Long story short, we founded Warhammer 40K's Imperium of Man. And yes, you had to be there.

[Kol Korran]

we just finished our Eberron campaign about a week and a half ago. the ending was... spectacular! (IMHO) the entire campaign was the old school High Herocis, High Fantasy kind of thing, and this last meeting topped it. ended up with the Big bad (whcih they still not sure what it is) fighting them a top a great tower, with dragons fighting overhead (long story) where he saps their ability to fight while controling dragons to fight them! (and free itself, another long story)

the party thought they wouldn't make it, and they wereclose to fail when finally they did, but at the sacrifice of the cleric.

i tend to prepare a lot (i improvise best when i have some basis to relate to) and it paid off. sound tracks and all. but the best thing were the players, and their characters- how they interacted, what ideas they came up with and so on. a great finale for a long campaign!

a few small "after the dust settled" things to tidy in the campaign log, and that is finished too...

(sorry for blabbering, still excited about it)

the group is good, really good. we're not heavy players, but we try and give an evening's worth of gaming.

can't wait to see what they'll choose for the next campaign!

[DigoDragon]

I really enjoyed my group's d20 Modern game. It played like a cross between "X-Files" and "24" with our characters having really good chemistry as a team.

The best arc from that game was when our team was sent to New Jersey to investigate the sightings of the "Jersey Devil". This case was full of surprisingly good twists and a real sense that PCs could die (two nearly did).
The case started off as looking like a bad prank played by teenagers until someone went missing. So now we have a Missing Persons case on our hands. Then the missing person turned up dead so we now were dealing with a murder and believing someone is using the Jersey Devil hoax as a cover.

The first twist was when we thought we had this suspect cornered at a storage facility and suddenly we got attacked by the Jersey Devil (which put a member in the hospital). We retraced our steps in our investigation and connected the devils (Yeah, we learned there were multiples!) to a second twist- A small cult was summoning these creatures with the intent to get revenge on certain people who wronged them in the past. The case ended with a really moving PR moment with a couple cult members and a climatic fight scene against the top cultists.

And like X-Files, the arc ended with most of the evidence being destroyed in the fight and the remaining bits being stored away in a basement office at FBI headquarters.

[Mazeburn]

Lions riding gryphons. I shall say no more.

[SamBurke]

I point you all to my sig.

Gruek: The only character I've ever played with or heard of for whom CMoAs are weekly occurrences. IT. IS. EPIC.

[Aotrs Commander]

I think unquestioningly that would a Rolemaster Middle-Earth game we played, which could have been titled "the Adventures of Rushven the Mage" after one the player's characters, who we decided would have been The Protagonist if it had been a movie...

It was brilliant throughout. My character, Barathon the Ranger saved the party twice; there were moments of hilarious incompetance (such as when the roped-together party fell of a 300' cliff one after the other, and from the Dwarf fighter's perspective, he'd seen the entire party fall past him, so who the hell was holding the rope? (It was Our Hero Rushven, having teleported to the top!) There were some spectacular moments, such as when Rushvan tackled the penulitmate Evil Wizard on a tower-top battle and rolled a Waterbolt critical that knocked him 10' backwards... off the parapet! Talk about a Hollywood death...! And Rushven single handedly, with a couple of judicious spells and a fair bit of luck (a charm and a lightning bolt) sorted the final bad guy. Class.



That DM also ran another Rolemaster campaign that ranks nearly as highly, wherein my character, (a rogue this time) single-handedly made her way across and Orc city where she was a wanted criminal to snatch a quest item from the jaws of the enemy, for which the DM gave me an "above and beyond" commendation.

And my mates character was the epitomy of a good Evil character (even though RM has no alignment); none of us liked him (in that love-to-hate fasion), but he made himself indespencible to the party. He also, despite being a mage, managed the remarkable feat of never getting wounded in the ENTIRE CAMPAIGN. In fact, the only time he took any damage at all was once when he fell off his own horse. (There was one occasion where the whole party took a critical that would have done at least a few hit points to everyone - but the DM rolled a kill-crit, so the player had to spend a fate point - and so TOOK NO DAMAGE AT ALL.) The occasion that truly made us believe he was favoured by the dark side was when we had to get through some crossbow traps. We all ran, and took damage. He WALKED, (and bear in mind he's a Rolemaster wizard, where there are virtually no defensive buffs) and was attacked by something like EIGHTEEN crossbows ALL OF WHICH MISSED. Fantastic...

[Warlawk]

It would be tough to pick just one.

AD&D 2E back when that was current. I played a drow fighter/thief with an oriental adventures martial art style. The overarching campaign was roughly based on final fantasy 2 (us) with us racing against the villains to gather a bunch of macguffins with nothing less than complete doomsday on the line. It was a large group of friends playing, we usually had at least 7 people plus the DM and sometimes as many as 11 players at a time. We ran from level 1 to around level 17 for multiclass with 2 classes. Something around 2 years of weekly sessions and I frequently picked up extra sessions of mostly RP outside the weekly game. It was the only character I've ever had that got married in game. The game in general is still referenced to this day almost 20 years later (yes I still play with the same DM) and we still remember the names of NPCs and events from the game.

The other would be a heroes unlimited game, while I hate that system badly the game was fantastic and we all had a real blast with it. I played a character who was angelic in appearance with feathered wings, air elemental control and alter physical structure: ice. My wife played a speedster brawler and we had a special forces light brick brawler with a lot of espionage skills. We had another couple of players who were not full time and kind of rotated through. The game was very strongly based in politics and the emerging subject of crime and legal revision regarding mutants and superhumans in general. It was extremely RP heavy, we would often go 2-3 sessions without combat.

[Pokonic]

Well, here is my personal thingy:

Well, the game itself had very heavy themes of Dark Sun with a splash of Ebberon in the mix. (ect there where old golems around, and people did have floating cities back in the day, but you would be lucky to be in a shantytown with a couple of people for company). The PC's all started in one of said towns, and the first encounter was (GASP!) a bunch of flying rat-pigions (called demigriffons, for the inquireing). After returning to camp, it turns out the leader of the camp was stung by a small beast that he has never seen before. As his condition became worse and worse, the PC's decided to leave the town to find a guy who will work on him in the remains of the ruins of a city a few miles away.

After fighting standerd evil desert and plains fair (including a carnivores sheep herd and a giant boar), they eventualy fight there way into the city ruins and they manage to find the docter....eating his patient. Turns out, a necromantic substance was put into the already-tainted water supply by a unknown party, creating a entire town of feral sorta-undead, all of whom have lost there minds (running on Fallout style ghouls here, actualy). After clearing the area and managing to find a old magical spear and a few health potions, they head back to camp, noticing a few new hornet-like creatures one of the party knows as a Stingling.

The farther they head back to camp, they find there are more than there should ever be in one single place, and for one horrible reason: turns out, these creatures are a bit like oversized Bot Flies, and they have managed to inject every person in there camp with hundreds of there eggs. Everyone. They fight there way into the place that was formerly there home, eventualy finding the remains of there leader in his shack, along with his small weapons stock. Turns out, he offed himself not long after the PC's went away, for he knew exactly what the beast was. Turns out that they hached before his death, however, and that they will incubate in formerly living flesh as well as living. The note states that, if anyone finds the letter, they should head out for the trail to the southwest too alert the people there of the swarm. The PC's later effectivly loot the place, finding some scrapes of metal, and finds a very interesting set of tracks heading to the notheast: the same set that belongs to one of the towns former healer, who also took almost the entire towns supply of magic substances and equiptment with her.. Undecided, they eventualy head out towords the set of tracks, later noting that the swarm was coming from the direction of the town in the note, in hope that they can get some information about why the towns medic was heading towords raider territory with money on hand.


Annnnd that was a week ago. They realy like it so far, and there is much in store for them. Hehehehe...

[Kane0]

We were in the woods for some reason, i cant remember why.
We were a smaller group than expected, but we carried on anyway.
We had a rogue, a healer, and me (a gish), missing our mage, our cavalier and our ninja.
Put simply, our encounter was an owlbear. At level 2. With three out of 6 characters present.
We managed to win through a contant flow of healing from the cleric (who feigned death to avoid getting sliced up) and lucky rolls on my part as the runner-up front-liner that kept me alive. The rogue kept missing but eventually we whittled it down.
Apart from the first full attack on me i hovered between 3 and 7 HP the entire fight. Very exiting. I finished it off with a coup de grace from my heavy pick, very gratifying to land my first crit on the session, if only when it was dying.

Still, we were proud that none of us died or fled and took it back as a trophy, and much comedy ensued. A good night.

[Niek]

A one-shot Fudge game with some people from my school. Our characters witness Mordred nearly kill King Arthur, before Merlin stops time and explains that we need to go back in time to prevent him killing the princess (who's name I forget) as a kid, which set him on the path of villainy and thus led to the present situation.
So Merlin sends us back in time, where we find the 8-year-old Mordred and the princess playing in the woods with wooden swords. The party jumps to the conclusion that an accident must have occurred, so I attempt to defuse the danger by offering to buy Mordred's sword toy sword for some beans I happened to find in my pocket, which I claimed were magical.
Mordred wanted to have their magic confirmed by his mother before he agreed, and so he led us to Morgause's house, where we discovered she was brewing a potion. Somehow we determined that it was a mind-control potion she intended to use on Mordred (I think one of us rolled a herblore check). Before this, however, one of the other party members accepted a drink offered by Morgause.
The beans were quickly declared mundane, and I pretended to be furious with the nonexistent merchant who sold them to me and ran outside, sneaking one of them into the pot in an attempt to sabotage the recipe. However, it occurred to me shortly after that one errant bean was probably not enough to destroy the potion, so I ran back inside under the pretense of finding my lost bean and "accidentally" spilled the potion all over the floor.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the potion was functional through skin contact alone, and I came under its effect, with the mental command to kill the princess. Meanwhile, the significantly-more-subtle-than-I member of the party who had drank Morgause's tea was already on her way into the woods.
The two remaining party members quickly realized what was going on, and decided to split up. One of them chased me down and tied me to a tree, while the other went to protect Mordred and the princess.
He managed to get to them just in time to prevent the assassination and break his ally out of the spell, then hurried to bring them to the safety of Camelot. Morgan le Fay came out and had a magic duel with Morgause, forcing the latter to flee.
Lancelot rode out of the castle to congratulate the party for keeping the kids safe. At that time I, having managed to free myself from the tree but still bound at the hands and feet, came hopping into the scene, still screaming for the princess' blood. Lancelot was prevented from killing me by the rest of the party explaining what had happened, and we returned to the present. Still bound and still mind controlled, I shouted "KILL THE PRINCESS!" at the top of my lungs upon seeing her, now an adult. Mordred was inches away from killing me on the spot before I finally made the willpower roll to break out of the spell and Merlin intervened to explain things.

And that is how I nearly participated in a stable time loop.

[Riverdance]

I recently played in a one shot in which we never actually made it to the adventure. I was positioned as a drunken irish thief under a bridge stealing from carriages. Two of the other players started as a carriage driver and passenger, the passenger being a Satanist who didn't so much talk as he did drool loudly. The DM expected us to get along and mesh as a group right away.
I of course attempted to steal from their carriage. When I muffed my stealth roll I managed to convince/bribe them to carry me into the city where I could get a drink. On the way in I tried to pick the Satanist's pocket to get my money back. After I muffed that roll too they shot me in the butt twice with a crossbow and spent the rest of the session deciding whether to cut off just my fingers, or my whole hands and replace them with long stabby bits of metal. I was finally rescued by spending two "awesome points" to have my old friend Jerry-Thog the Barbarian happen to be in the hallway. Jerry-Thog rescued me and I spent the rest of the game sitting on his shoulders away from the rest of the party listening to him rant about how everything evil originated at the rival pet store to the one he ran.

[kieza]

My really memorable games tend to be my one-shots; with longer campaigns, I feel a need to incorporate side-plots and diverging story arcs, which leads to filler episodes and lackluster content.

In a short, concise one-shot, I can trim out all of the extra stuff, and have every fight be memorable, every NPC unique and remarkable, and the plot pressing and compelling.

My best example...is probably a military one-shot I ran a couple of years ago (D&D 4e with homebrew and houserules). The players were a mercenary outfit hired to carry out an assassination of enemy leadership. I gave them a map of a contested city where one side of the river was friendly and the other was occupied, and the bridges and waterfront were no-mans-land. They started off by doing a skill challenge to gather intel on enemy positions, and then they planned their surgical strike on that. It went fine for the first two encounters, during which they fought their way across a bridge and stormed a fortified position. But then they attracted the attention of an enemy airship, which they had written off as just a courier. It proceeded to airdrop sanctified steam-powered golems on their position. (They'd missed that piece of intel.) Humorously, they tried to take cover inside a building, at which point the airship dropped one through the roof and four floors of the building. They then had to break out of the killzone, through a line of hostile paladins, in the middle of an artillery barrage. They got to the enemy command post, only to find that the commander was gone, and promptly got strafed by angelically-possessed zealots. No sooner had they bunkered down in the command post, than the enemy commander burst through the wall wearing a suit of magitech/steampunk powered armor with a backpack-mounted pipe organ.

Yeah. My games get like that.

[Need_A_Life]

Oh, there's a few...

There was the pseudo-historical "gentlemans club" game, set in the 1900s in "Anglia" (England), where we'd not only solve crime, but there was also the backdrop of the rise of socialism and the worker rebellion being somewhat more... armed than in our own timeline. Sadly, the game died due to scheduling issues.

There was the Eberron pulp game we played in, where over the course of two sessions we'd had the following: 1) fought atop a Lightning Rail, 2) fought on a bridge and (half-way through) half of the party fighting under the effects of feather fall with those trying to escape, 3) Warforged crashing a vampires pet dire bat (who was carrying away a MacGuffin) through the window of a cathedral, 4) Fighting a ~40 commoners who were trying to buy their vampire master time to escape, 5) My drunk of a gnome beating up an ogre and a medusa single-handedly, interrogating them as we fought.

There was the Dark Heresy game, where our investigations were suddenly complicated when unrelated third-parties blew up half of the Hive we were in, the Imperial Guard declared martial law and mind-manipulating alien parasites nearly mandated an Exterminatus.

Then again, the "Banana Republic during the 70s" LARP was hilarious, with assassinations, bids for power and unlikely alliances made for a fast-paced, political intrigue with just the right dose of slapstick. Of course, as the American Ambassador, I'm biased from managing to outdo the Soviets despite fighting an up-hill battle.

As for the ones I Game Mastered:
There was the Vampire the Masquerade game, where the players were fighting to reestablish a Camarilla presence in Los Angeles. Of course, as they dug, it turned out that there were more than just Anarchs. Sabbat, hunters, werewolves and a group calling themselves "Kuei-Jin" all had a presence and were trying to tip the balance. I'm proud to say that loyalties were very divided within the player group

Or the Realms of Cthulhu pulpy run-through of the Masks of Nyarlathotep. Between two of the players who were ruthless and efficient, the side-missions I thought of throughout the game helped make sure that the "f**k!!!" feel still reared its head every once in a while.

Or my current Dresden Files game, where the players are definitely enjoying the loose, narrative system and my introductory plot (AP is in the sig, 2. playsession will be this Saturday).

[Razanir]

These are all from the same game session I DM'd

1) Our mind flayer wizard grabbed an ogre with his tentacle mustache to try to electrocute it. (I ruled he could cast Shocking Grasp through his tentacles)

2) Our Cleric//Monk ran over, punched the wizard, casting Cure Light Wounds through his first, then span around to punch the ogre and kill it. (We aren't playing with facing, I just include the spinning because it sounds even cooler)

3) They fought zombie dwarves at a dinner party. 'nuff said