6/10/2015

d30 Challenge Day 10

d30 Challenge Day 10: Craziest in-game experience
This is my 10th entry in the d30 Challenge, which is a bastardization of an idea I first saw on Mark "CMG" Clover's feed. Now I'm a sucker for these things and I know some folks aren't so while I'm committed to answering one question about my favorite hobby each day, and putting together a d30 table before the end of the month, I know not everyone is so interested. I'll put the question & answer after the break, posting late in the day, and not promoting this on G+ so those who don't like this kind of thing should be exposed only minimally.

I think this is the best I can do....
Day 10's question is "Craziest In-Game Experience".

I've had a couple "crazy" in-game experiences, or at least highly unexpected experiences, but I'll point out three since they all come from different experiences.

The 1st was as a player in a tournament adventure at ConDuit in Salt Lake City. Now at its height, HackMaster Tournaments were highly competitive and potentially nasty affairs. About 5 minutes after sitting down for this adventure I thought I was going to have to recuse myself from the game because the set-up sounded familiar. It seemed I had already played this adventure and wouldn't be able to play in this one due to a unfair advantage. It ended up this was a total re-write and re-theme of an earlier adventure I had played in, but the intro was left largely unchanged. That wasn't the crazy part.....

The whole set-up, basically the conditions for winning, was to protect this NPCs property from an infestation of giant insects. Right off the bat we can tell there is a big, bad, bug in this NPC's barn. He hasn't been inside in a week due to fear and we assume all his animals are dead. My DS Invoker is about to torch the hell out of the barn figuring it is easier to just burn the thing down instead of risking a straight-up fight and the NPC looses his shit because of all his farm animals....which he hasn't fed in a week and has left in the barn with giant predatory insects. This is my PC's 2nd adventure and I have a lot of loot from the 1st so I offer to buy the barn and it's contents on the spot. He accepts and we torch the barn. As the insects start to wail and scream the NPC continues to loose it because we are burning his barn. No, it's MY BARN...and I give him a generous offer for the whole farmstead to shut him the hell up.

The barn is toast and we escort the blubbering NPC to the local sheriff for safekeeping. At that point maybe a whole 10 minutes of our 4 hour time slot have been used up and I tell the Table GM "thanks for the game, but we just won". The entirety of the NPC's property is on his person and he has been transferred to the sheriff so we met the victory conditions. He agreed and then we spent the next almost-four-hours clearing my farm of the insects. That was the day i was happy to have my PC "buy the farm".

The 2nd "crazy" moment for me in-game came during a GM tournament I wrote for Origins. We had a good six tables of GMs playing and on a whim I decided to have everyone get up and I'd brief the assembled group all at once before letting them go back to their tables. Little did I realize that the intro for the adventure referenced the players assembled in a group of "low-life murderhobos" or some such (that adventure seems to have been lost to time). Whatever the statement was it got a HUGE laugh from everyone and got the whole game off to a great start. I doubt I could have done better if I had tried.

Obviously to me the real crazy moments aren't gonzo, but the weird combinations of luck and circumstance.

The last is just an extremely fortunate bit of statistical anomaly. Late last year in my regular HackMaster game my party of three was travelling to the adventure location when we heard somebody being attacked on the road. Like all good heroes we rush in to help only to discover it is an ambush...for us. The cleric is hit hard and is about three seconds from going down. Now in such a small group the loss of one party member in combat, especially the cleric, is likely to cause a cascade effect...most likely a TPK. Even though my PC is almost right there to keep the cleric from being dispatched, there is another bad guy.....a big bad guy, in the way. It is unlikely I will be able to drop him in time to get the one guy trying to slit the cleric's throat (dispatching a ToP'd PC) threatened enough to stop. The BBG attacks...and rolls a "1" while I roll a "20". My perfect defense nets a counter attack and I roll another Nat 20. My regular attack was on the next second and I roll another Nat 20. In two seconds I rolled more than 140 hit points of damage on this one guy, which was more than enough damage to knock the BBG back into next week...and definitely into the cleric's attacker.

A definite crazy "Hoody-Hoo!" moment if there ever was one.

0 comments :

Post a Comment