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[Alec S.]

This is a thread for sharing anecdotes from playing tabletop RPGs.  Share your crazy moments and stories from pen 'n' paper RPGs you've either played or DMed.

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A short one from a game I'm currently involved in:

Torchbearer is a game that tries to recreate the feeling of an aspect of first edition DnD.  Specifically, it focuses on the crunch of the game: keeping track of inventory, hunger, torches, ect...  To that end, time becomes a really important mechanical factor of the game.  Each action that requires a roll takes one "turn".  Torches, candles and lanterns all last a certain amount of turns, and, of course, every 4 turns, your character has to eat or else they get the "hungry" status.

The system hadn't really sunk in for us until we reached a room in our first adventure that contained a bunch of beds, with a locked chest at the foot of each bed.  Well, of course we're going to try to loot the chests.  We successfully unlock the first one, find a bit of treasure, and then are told "in one turn, you'll have to eat."

Each treasure chest is locked, which means that opening each chest will take (at least) one turn.

I quickly do the math and come to the conclusion that, with the amount of food we've got left, if we attempt to open the rest of the treasure chests, we'll begin to starve.  I think, probably, our torches would have gone out as well, leaving us in darkness.

We sadly leave the treasure behind and continue on our journey, learning to be more careful in the future.

[quantumpotato]

That's funny. Emergent surprises in RPGs are amazing - I still think they are the most creative kind of game.

A long time ago I ran a Paraonia XP game.. and one particular player was late to the party. It was everyone's first time playing and they were hyped at the mystery & chaos of secret societies and mutant powers.

Player arrived in a climactic battle scene - one clone dead, one incapacitated, an R&D weapon misfiring and mutant pyrokinesis igniting the Team Leader..

I had a lot to run as a GM including passing note cards back and forth for secret actions. Party's telling Player how crazy the game is and "we all have mutant powers" etc.. I rolled for a secret-society, then for mutant power.. I went blank, wanting to give one that meshed with the rest for hiliarity but didn't have the focus, so I just wrote down "you don't have one." on a note card and passed it to him.

This led to paranoid confusion as Player was thrust into dangerous combat, with Party urging him to activate his mutant power to save his life and him panicking "I don't have one!" and Party believing he's just Role-Playing. If I was a good GM I would have tossed him some Perversity Points, I hope I did.

He died in a molten inferno from a traitorous mutant's pyrokinesis.

(His next clone did get a mutant power )

[Alec S.]

Paranoia is great for anecdotes!  (Although from the sound of it, you've run a very different sort of Paranoia game than my group if the players will ask each other to use their mutant powers without fear of being branded a mutant traitor)

Probably my favorite Paranoia moment was the time my group had a Total Party Kill while crossing a bridge where no encounter occurred.  It's a long time ago, so I forget all the details, but basically our mutant powers started playing into each other.  One character used their emotion control to make everyone nervous, at which point my character used his mutant-power-hijack power to turn that mutant power back on the user and make them recklessly angry.  Anyway, all but two of our party members died in the ensuing fight-over-nothing. 

The two remaining members then had the task of splitting the loot from our corpses.  Our GM likes to use this chart of weird and mostly useless items to randomly give us starting items. 

One of the items we had was a "I <3 the Computer" badge.  One of the survivors asked if they could have it.  The other agreed.

"AHA!  So you admit you don't <3 the Computer!" the first survivor yelled, drawing his gun.

At this point, all those who had died initially were determined to spend our perversity points in such a way that both surviving characters killed each other.  This happened when the experimental gun one of them had exploded, taking out both remaining party members.

Again, there was no encounter on this bridge.  A completely self-inflicted Total Party Kill.

[quantumpotato]

Beautiful

Yeah, we were teenagers at the time so there was a little meta-gamey chat. No one knew who had mutant powers, only that *someone* was capable of lighting things on fire and *someone* could make weapons disappear (matter eater); It is required to use your MP in service to Alpha Complex if you have them.

The note passing was my favorite part of running the game. Such fun.

Have you tried the new-new-newest one? It looks interesting - it's got cards you play for combat.

[Squire Grooktook]

Last sessions events with zero context:

Ventured into a giant industrial butcher city centered around a tower that reaches into a black hole. Met a nice church lady who agreed to help us in our plight.

She was a flaming skeleton made out of fire and brimstone.

After listening to her very strange sermon, it was discovered that - as a human - she was actually a nurse at the hospital where my character died as a child.

After realizing who I was, she became incredibly distraught that I had (for some reason) ended up resurrected into this h.r giger hellhole despite my innocence. She then gave me my parents cross pendant (an enormous sacrifice on her part, as it had become an incredibly meaningful memento to her as well), and we all cried.


Nechronica is a great game if you want to trudge through an abyss of twisted nightmares and then have tender heart to heart bonding sessions with the lovecraftian horrors you meet.