Awesome / Counter Monkey

• The entirety of Vegan Steve's campaign. It must be seen to be believed.
• The Leaping Wizards encounter. In an (unintentional) Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right! against the RPGA's "no risk of death" mentality, Spoony took what was supposed to be a Curbstomp Battle against three first-level wizards and, with some logical tweaks to their spell loadout (with one spell per wizard) and some lucky rolls, managed to kill two members of a significantly stronger party of six.
• Vampire - Spoony's Jyhad. After being subjected to some of the worst railroading ever, Spoony gets glorious revenge.
  • In summary (needs some knowledge of Vampire: The Requiem): after his Carthian character is abducted and tortured into joining the Lancea Sanctum on his first session in the campaign, he decides that this isn't a very noobie-friendly thing to do. So he goes to the GM and complains, but the GM doesn't really address his concerns. So he get the idea to use his massive chemistry score to make a bathtub full of Semtex. He clears it with the GM, and comes back the next week. He observes the guard not patting down the entrants and proceeds to tape 30 cards worth of Semtex onto his person and walks by, sneaking enough homemade explosive to level the city block. He tricks another noobie into occupying the Prince's attention while he sneaks those cards into the Sanctum's bathroom. He places the cards behind the toilet, walks out, giving the guard a small stack of cards that he tells to flip over when he gets to his car. Spoony gets to his car, watches the guard turn the cards over, which have written on them (paraphrased): "4", "3", "2", "1", "I just detonated enough Semtex I made with my chemistry skill to level the building. Everyone inside is probably dead." Just for fun, he also raises a card in his car labeled "detonator" while this is happening. The guard went to the GM, who comes over and confronts Spoony over this, and Spoony points out that he wasn't hit with any magical whammy and only joined under threat of torture and death, so he didn't exactly believe in the Lancea Sanctum's cause on a personal level. The GM tells him he can't do this. The GM doesn't let him but Spoony tells him that even so, he outsmarted everyone in the building and that if they want to play hardball with him, he'll play hardball right back at them. And as this story shows, he hardballs even harder.
    GM: I'm not — I'm not clearing this, this is bullshit.
    Spoony: I know, I know you won't, but... I just want you to know I outsmarted basically everyone in this entire city and I... basically freed the entire city from the tyrannical grip of the Lancea Sanctum and the Invictus in one fell swoop. Victory for the Carthians, bitch!
  • Best part is the set-up to explain everything (what LARP is, what this particular game is, etc) takes up more of the video, but the payoff and Spoony's crazed, gleeful expression is glorious.
  • Alternatively, it was Spoony playing his game far more fair than those who forced him into Lancea Sanctum. He was open to the ST about his bomb, rolls and all. He also used an obvious flaw in the elysium security to get his plan to work. That is true cleverness.
• Invisible Jason: He relates how his LARPing friend Jason managed to stand perfectly still on a car trunk, in a slightly awkward pose, for sixteen hours, and while seriously drunk, all to avoid his character getting killed.
• Tandem's Last Ride. Oh. My. God. This story is about the final adventure of Spoony's signature D&D character: a badass, swashbuckling bard named Tandem the Spoony, in which he and five other characters brave the horrors of Dungeonland (a module of ungodly difficulty where characters literally go to Wonderland, except everything is trying to kill you). Highlights include:
  • Spoony spots that the hookah-smoking caterpillar is trying to dominate his party's minds with his apathetic, droning voice, and manages to save himself and his friends with Countersong, a little-used bard technique that can cancel any sound-based attack.
    • Not to mention that he sang Iron Maiden at the top of his lungs, whilst nobody else around had any idea of what he was doing.
  • The party goes head-to-head with the Mad Hatter and his cronies, the Dormouse and the March Hare, at the tea party. Tandem (18th level at the time), decides to go one-on-one with the March Hare (misidentified as the Dormouse in the video), who turns out to be a 20TH LEVEL MONK (if you're not familiar with monks, they basically become nigh-unstoppable killing machines at the 20th level). Against all odds, Tandem manages to solo kill the March Hare (who is the strongest member of the Mad Hatter's party) in a straight-up fight with only 3 hit points to spare, and the entire party survives the encounter.
  • Realizing after the previous fight that Dungeonland is not a place to screw around in, Tandem and the party blow through the rest of Wonderland in a mad killing spree, pulling no punches and attacking anything as soon as it appeared (which was a good move, since everything was going to attack them anyway).
  • The final battle involves the group fighting the captain of a dimensional ship, along with both his first mate and his jester-wizard. Except it wasn't a wizard, it was a LICH. Two members of the party go down in the very first round, but despite the rocky start and two more party member deaths, Tandem and the group's cleric survive the encounter and finish the adventure by claiming the dimensional ship for themselves and sailing off into the proverbial sunset.
• Everyone who was involved in Spoony's Thieves' World campaign. A game so amazing that he had to talk for over 2 hours to explain just how amazing his group were in working together as a team and going toe-to-toe with Tempus Thales, a nigh-indestructible God vessel with incredible strategic planning. Apparently, the entire campaign took 6 months, and is one of the most amazing stories Spoony has ever told.
  • The players mugging people who were giving out tips to find them, causing the hints to dry up within the day and making money of off it.
  • The final battle was so elaborate and detailed that it took two weeks to play it all out, the players even discussing in-game strategy between sessions.
  • To put a fine point on it, the characters managed to defeat a canon character whom Spoony describes as a God-Mode Sue who resembles Kratos. While he acknowledges that would never happen in the novels, the players worked so hard and performed a masterfully-crafted plan, exhibiting the best teamwork he's ever seen in a D&D game that he didn't just give them the victory, they earned it.
• In "The Importance of Wearing Pants", after telling a story involving a horribly racist woman, Spoony goes on at some length about how he'll come down fast and hard on any attempts to start a fight in the forums over it.
  • Earlier in the video, he expresses frustration at Gary's ^note the man through whom he knew said racist woman, and the one who'd forgotten to put on pants inability to show up on time, and counters the stereotypes surrounding gamers by saying that people have lives outside of it, and that in actuality it's difficult to set up a session that's convenient to everyone's schedules, something that Gary seemed to have trouble understanding.
• After only two sessions of the Pathfinder campaign, Carmello the Warhorse turned out to be the most fearsome member of the party.
• From ConBravo 2012 D20 Live:
  • The recounting of "The Greatest Swordsman in the World". A single boast by Tandem the Spoony pisses off the wrong guy, a dedicated sword specialist, who felt his honour was sullied. He challenges Tandem to a duel to first blood - he botches, losing his sword, as Tandem gets a crit. He concedes, but follows Tandem around, asserting his boast around powerful fighters in hopes to get him killed. However, he wins every battle, even managing through luck and guile to defeat a gigantic, tree-wielding gladiator by crippling his primary arm and finishing him off with Death by a Thousand Cuts. The gobsmacked specialist never bothered him again. Doubles as a Funny Moment.
    • Linkara's critical shot on the ogre like monster and the result are quite awesome, even if the resulting death was not his intention.
  • The party slays a would-be party slayer, a black dragon, with Tandem stabbing it in the spine, Linkara's character hitting it in the same place with an arrow, and the team wizard striking the wound with lightning. On top of that, none of them were injured in the conflict and the DM had intended for them to retreat and come back with reinforcements.
• Halfway through "Hey Fatty! Let's Go To Mordor!", Spoony delivers an awesome Take That! to people who ask why they couldn't just fly the Eagles into Mordor in The Lord of the Rings, pointing out how the Eye of Sauron and the guys on the walls of Mordor would see them coming and kill them.
• Starting with "Beware Women For They Come From Hell", the series has its own epic intro sequence. It's easy to picture the bardic tune being sung by Tandem the Spoony himself.
• In "Thou Shalt Not Fuck With the Lady of Pain", a player tries to anger the titular Lady of Pain, who Spoony has hyped as an unstoppable, statless badass capable of keeping the gods out of Sigil and trapping people in pocket-dimension mazes as punishment (if they're not outright killed in gruesome ways). The player tried to Briar Patch this by roleplaying a minotaur who he thought had the racial ability to never get lost in mazes; Spoony counters by sticking him in a maze that is a straight line one hundred million miles long.
  • Which, for reference, is longer than the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Thou Shalt Not Fuck With the Lady of Pain indeed!
• In "The Jedi Hunter" Spoony decides to make a non-Jedi character who can take on Sith Lords. In his first encounter a Sith taunts him telling him to just fly away on his jetpack. Spoony's response? "Oh this? This isn't a jetpack, it's a fuel tank for this! FWOOOOOOOSH! Block THAT motherfucker!"
  • Later he uses many other weapons he found in the technology sourcebook, which he explains wouldn't have worked, except that none of the Jedi players or Sith NPCs ever take levels in 'boring' things like sensing things with the Force, so they never saw any of it coming. As it is, he easily beats them.
• Spoony wins Dark Tower on his first try, accompanied by a Big "YES!"
• "Shadowrun: The Squirt Gun Wars" shows incredible insanity and adaptation from Spoony's team concerning the titular war.
  • One of the best moments is Spoony's war declaration. Fed up with his players abusing the Game-Breaker DMSO^note For those unfamiliar, it's a chemical that allows other chemicals to be absorbed through the skin, and penetrates virtually any armor in-game; combined with the right toxins, it could deliver unstoppable one-hit kills, Spoony arms all the enemies in the game with the same chemical-filled squirt guns, as well as chemical-proof hazmat suits and normal semiautomatic sidearms (in case their squirt guns were nullified). The players are taken entirely off-guard by this, resulting in an epic moment of Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.
• "Nightstake":
  • The battle between Invisible Jason (an Assamite) and the Justicar of Phoenix (the "BAD space ASS" Gangrel of the city). Spoony likens the battle to Duel of the Fates, and describes in detail the Justicar's raw power and Jason's ninja-like capabilities. The real kicker? Invisible Jason didn't minmax his character... and he was winning!
  • As a desperation move, the Justicar took the nightstick of a dead cop (killed just before the fight), sharpened it into a stake with his claws, and then threw it at Invisible Jason. Staking a vampire in combat is hard. Throwing the stake is even harder. Throwing the stake at an Assamite with Celerity? Astronomically bad odds! Spoony had to roll five tens to succeed... and he rolled SIX tens! It was a "lift the panel to show it wasn't a fudge" moment.
    • Jason also gets props for being just an amazingly good sport about it.
  • The cops arrive on the scene and behold the aftermath. A cop with his head torn off, another man lying flat with a sharpened nightstick embedded in his chest, and numerous cars ripped apart like a wild animal - a probable Masquerade-breaker. Cue Jason's friends showing up, headed by the Ventrue, using his Presence and Awe abilities to divert the majority of cops away from the scene, leaving only two to easily mop up. A really messy situation that was expertly salvaged.
  • During his reading through the Quick-start Rules, he notes how in Promethean: The Created, you can play as a Frankenstein. He realizes someone's gonna correct him on that and puts down the dead horse by stating just why people say Frankenstein instead of Frankenstein's monster for two reasons: 1) ease of use and 2) He is technically Frankenstein's son, and thus inherits his name.
• During his rant on Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, he brings up the rules regarding a Death Saving Throw and brings up a possible reason for it: To make the game go faster. Keep in mind that he also brings up the process of the DST, in which you have to make a Saving Roll three to five times and ensure you don't fail either when you botch your roll or when the enemy hits you. What does Spoony do? Get the core rulebook from the very first edition and reads out its rule towards dropping to 0 hit points. "When a character reaches zero hit points, the character is slain." Afterwards, he instantly slams the book shut, drops it to the ground, and simply says "How's that for fast, motherfucker?" with a smug grin on his face. Even if you liked 5E, you gotta admit that the way he does it is simply badass.
• "Where Have All The Lawful Goods Gone?" is a 25-minute "The Reason You Suck" Speech towards the hatred of Lawful Good characters, pointing out all the ways it makes things easier because people trust and like Lawful Good characters.
• "3d6 in Order" ends with what can only be called an oddly inspiring "The Reason You Suck" Speech for people who refuse to randomly roll their stats:
  Spoony: I'm gonna revise what I said earlier. You're not cowards if you don't try this. You're boring. And that's worse. Cowards at least can be interesting. Who dares wins.