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• There have been a couple of excellent moments for this troper. In Warhammer 40k: my Grey Knigh Justicar (sergeant) beat a Bloodthirser on half wounds (War God) one on one. The opponent acutally accuesed me of usig weighed die on the second combat round. Also in 40k: my Brother-Captain getting surrouned by Khorne Beserkers, only to use Holocaust and wipe out half the squad. Then he died... In Warhammer: High Elf vs Skaven/Chaos. 1st turn skaven took aim at my swordmasters with the warp-lightning cannon, which proceeded to misfire and explode. This unit went on to destroy a Rat Ogre unit, a unit of Chosen, and finally helped my dragon princes an Tyrion attack the Chaos Cavalry with Archaon. This might not be supposed to go here, but i once had a hobbit archer, in warhammer LOTR, which killed a Warg Chieftan. In Combat. After the Chieftan had taken only one wound before killing about 20 hobbit Sherrifs and a hero. Owned with the pointy stick of death!
• This troper once played a game of Warhammer where a lone skaven slave (one of the weakest units in the game, whose main job is to tie up units and die) was charged by five chosen of khorne (bloodthirsty madman with years or even decades of combat experience) and stood his ground. He even managed to hold on for a turn (almost killing one of the warriors) before he was killed by one of my warp-lightning cannons, taking three warriors with it.
• This Troper had fought several battles against Tomb Kings (undead Egyptians) with an Orc and Goblin armies. Several notable events including A) A unit of Common Goblins holding against a raging Tomb Scorpion, both of which were the only remaining units on the battlefield, and winning out of sheer weight of numbers, B) Earlier in the same battle, a single unit of Orc Boyz with a normal Orc Big Boss, Sustaining a simultaneous front and flank charge from two rank deep chariots, one of which had the Tomb King, by my Boss smashing several chariots, causing the loss of the flank bonus and outnumber bonus, winning combat. The next turn, he challenged the King, clove his head in twain, and resisted the curse with an insane bravery. Finally, in a different game, the first half of the first turn, my sole goblin doom diver, hit exactly on target of his hierophant, mounted on the Casket of Souls, the hierophant failing his ward save, and subsequently dying. The game was won before the fist combat phase.

• This Troper is still GM'ing a Warhammer 40K game where so far:
  • A Marine has killed five Imperial Guards with a teacup - then proceeded to finish his cuppa.
  • A Marine squad has fought its way to the top of a mile-high tower, found nothing at the top, then had half its members take the quick way down by jumping out of the nearest window
  • First trooper to do the above bowls into the Chaos-decieved Guards at the bottom, killing ten by simply being a very fast metal object.
  • Those who jumped taking shelter in an office and arming themselves with stationary. Then proceeding to attack Chaos Demons with a staple gun and flying C Ds.
  • Turning demons into pretzels kills them. This has been proven.
  • The squad sergeant single-handedly attacking a Eldar fire prism... and winning.
  • Most Epic Kill Ever. A Wraith Guard, attacking the squad, is attacked by a single marine who jumps up onto one of its black-hole cannon arms. Said trooper then proceeds to cut through the arm he is sitting on as well as most of the Wraith's torso. As both fall to the ground he leaps out of the way, the gun fires, creating a mini black hole that the disabled Wraith Guard then proceeds to fall in to. Such shit is impossible to make up.
• This troper had his Imperial Guard Officer get into combat with Typhus on the second turn of a game. He spent the next four turns being 'killed' by Typhus, getting back up due to bionics and then beating the Chaos marine senseless with his power fist. On the fifth turn of the game he finally ran with two remaining guardsmen from the two squads which had attacked Typus, boarded the Chimera he had arrived in and promptly finished the Typus off by running him over. Let me just repeat that, he repeatly got back up from death then turned the champion of Nurgle into road kill.

• Rare two-way CMOA: in a Warhammer Fantasy game, a unit of Wood Elf Wardancers led by a Lord-level combat general engaged my unit of Savage Orc Big'uns with its own tooled-up combat lord general. Orc general challenges, and the Wardancer champion accepts. Then it kills him - my opponent's C Mo A. Now, for the awesome part, the Savage Orc unit boss duly leans over and decapitates the Elf lord. BOTH army generals were killed by unit champions in one round of combat. (My orcs lost in the end, but it was an epic moment anyway).
• Second Edition Warhammer 40k game. Khornate champion on a bike, got fired on by a squad of entrenched marines. Hits the front axle, gets the result where the rider dies and the bike goes flying in a random direction. It ended up flipping directly onto the squad, dealing 5 S6 hits to each member, and smearing the entire combat squad over the interior of the trench.
  • And more recently, this same troper has been dabbling with Skaven. Two examples in the same game - Skaven Assassin (sneaky type character) starts the game hidden in a wood near some majorly nasty artillery piece (with the potential to wipe out an entire regiment of armoured soldiers in one go). First turn, he moves out, then throws a Brass Orb (basically a one-hit kill black hole grenade, but very random). He rolls a series of perfect attacks to get the shot arcing right on top of the volley gun. And sucks it and the entire crew into essentially psychic hell. First shot of the game. Second example is a regiment of seven knights charging Skaven slaves (ie: total elites attacking expendable meat puppets. Four slaves die, then the spears skewer two knights - due to some incredibly lucky hitting and some incredibly bad armour on the knights. The slaves win due to outnumbering and ranks... and having a rat with a bell. They chase down the knights.

• This troper had a game of Warhammer fantasy where a points-filler unit of 10 goblin wolf-riders with command group and no other upgrades killed the best part of a 1000 point wood elf army. In two turns by a combination of lucky rolling, flank charges and pursuit over-runs. The goblins paid for themselves approximately 10 times over in cost-kills ratio. While the rest of the Orcs and Goblins army had 2 kills between them. To put this in perspective this is a unit of cavalry where the mounts are significantly better than the riders and they run away if someone says "boo" loudly in most cases. The same orc army later had a unit of Arra boyz taken for laughs, who in the course of one turn shot and then defeated in combat a unit of Saurus cavalry including a Scar-Veteran. Unfortunately the rest of this orc army was plagued by horrible animosity rolls and ended most games in draws or minor defeats.
• An Orc rock lobba in WHFB taking out Vilitch the Curseling...with one shot. On turn one. Kind of balancing out, because this troper has also had WHFB games where an Orc unit only moves twice in the entire game and one of them's fleeing, all because of animosity.
• This not-quite troper, but fan of the site, was involved in a three-way Warhammer Fantasy game, playing Blood Dragon Vampire Counts against Skaven and Lizardmen. The Skaven dominated most of the game and by round 4, I was down to ONLY my general, a Vampire Lord on a nightmare. Said Vampire Lord proceeded to destroy 2 full units of Skaven warriors and a unit of Poison Wind Warriors, all the while being shot at by three warp lightning cannon, before voluntarily leaving the field of battle. Sweet. Similarly, a unit of Black Knights were charged by Chosen Knights of Slaanesh with a cheesy 3 (!) hero units in the first row. After missing all their attacks and failing to take down even one of the undead, ALL of the hero units were slaughtered by killing blow. I still lost the game, but after that, I didn't mind too much.
• Warhammer40000: A unit of Sternguard veterans from this troper's homebrewed Chapter, mounted in a Land Raider Redeemer (the variant with the big fuck-off flamethrowers on the sponsons), coming to about 500 points, wasted just over 1300 points by themselves. This troper was very proud.
• This troper has only just taken up playing 40K (after spending several months mocking it on /tg/) by playing two games with another just-starter; Tau vs. Tyranids, then swap. The first game, at 2000pts (of Dn D figures, because we already have hundreds of them), featured the CMOA: Tau were able to beat off genestealers in close combat. The Tau suck at close combat. Granted, it was by piling in, but a narrow loss to a worthy opponent. (Then, when we swapped with 1500pts, this troper's single squad of minimum-cost Broadsides nailed no less than three monstrous creatures).
• Warhammer: Azhag the Slaughterer gets dragged down to one wound by a Black Coach. Since the game is an allies force, the Daemon player Azhag is allied with kindly heals him back up to full power, at which point he rips the Coach into shreds. Orcs are badass.
• This troper once played a WFRP game in which an insane character believed he was a warrior priest of Shalla. His crowning moment of awesome came when he charged a dozen bandits with crossbows while shouting "Shalla protects me!". All crossbows were shot at him but they all missed horribly and the following close combat barely scratched him. Shalla protected him indeed.
• During a (this tropers) Tomb Kings vs Vampire Counts, my King is fighting his Vampire Lord on a Zombie Dragon, my King is down to his last wound while his lord still has all his by the end of his turn at the start of mine my Tomb Scorpion pops up behind the Vampire lord and gets two killing blows on him. After that said Scorpion charges some nearby Blood Knights and whipes them out, this after I forgot about him after two turns.
  • In another match, this time fighting an all night goblin army, half the guys army (including Grom the Paunch of the Misty Mountain) ran off the board in terror, while his gaint was attacking my Casket of Souls for three whole turns I keep lossing by 2, so my liche priest just kept bring back the tomb gaurds over and over, until my tomb scorpion showd up and killed the gaint.
• This not-troper's space marine command squad managed to take down an entire 1500 point genestealer army in combat (over several turns of course), my terminators got brutally murdered (as they usually do) and the shooty squads I have for support missed every shot. The command squad just sat on a gap between 2 walls and made mincmeat of the oncoming 'stealers
• This troper's Tau fought an Ork army is a wide, mostly open desert. Getting shafted with cover, the Orks were shot to pieces before they could even get close, with the exception of his lumbering mega-armored warboss. Figuring he'd go out in a blaze of Orky glory, he waddled straight at my defensive line. 36 pulse rounds later... and he's fine. And another barrage. And another. Three squads of troops blazing away could not drop him, probability be damned. He stomped forward implacably, powerklaw in the air, until finally reaching (and decimating) my entire army.
  • Strangely, this troper has had almost the exact opposite experience: in the third round of the game, his squad of Fire Warriors charged a mega-armoured warboss with all its wounds intact, and rolled well enough to kill it before it could react. You've never seen a gamer so angry.
• This troper managed to kill the general of a Vampire Counts army with a Savage Orc unit boss. In one round of combat. (The game ended up being declared a draw - a slight points victory to my opponent, and a moral victory for me due to aforesaid points victory being due to a horrific uber-Munchkin unit of invulnerable Grave Guard).
• One about modelling, from a fellow 40k player. Said player, who is the Butt Monkey of our group, was basing some Chaos Terminators with sand, when he decided to try a simple 'sealing' technique (50% PVA glue and water, dunk base into it, let it dry overnight) He did so, then after a few minutes, got bored. So he did the most logical thing you can do- put them in the freezer. However, this wasn't enough, since he left them in there for a few hours (we think he got distracted by something shiny) and he made another highly logical jump for how to thaw them... put them in the microwave.
  • Unsuprisingly, the models melted. However, the icing on the cake is that the Termies themselves were fine, only their shins and feet had melted, which gave the effect that they were trying to walk through tar or lava, and looked damn awesome. It was a shining example of how fine a line there is between genius and madness.
• This troper's pride and joy have always been his vehicles and two of them qualified in an Apocalypse game.
  • With nearly the first shot of the game, the Dreadnought Solaria took careful aim with it's twin-linked lascannon at a Hellhammer super-heavy tank. The chances of knocking off one of the structure points were good - the first roll saw it hit. The second saw it punch through the armour. The third roll, a six, knocked off a structure point and let me roll again. The fourth roll, another six, knocked off a structure point and let me roll again. The fifth roll, a five, knocked off the final structure point and made the Hellhammer explode.
    • Maybe it was a bit gloaty, but the line was too good to pass up: "Diana Ross was right. You just experienced...a chain reaction" Complete with the replacing of the glasses. I've rarely been more proud of myself.
  • The second was less awesome, but despite being immobilised the Land Raider Crusader Kara still registered a full thirty-three kills before being wrecked; it didn't hurt that a squad of Daemons scattered far too close to the flamestorm cannons and nine died.
• A game of 3rd Edition Warhammer40000 involved pitting his Eldar with a single unit Harlequin allies up against a Blood Angels force; with the Eldar woefully outgunned. The game ended in a narrow Eldar victory, thanks to the Harlequins, who destroyed a land raider and obliterated a unit of deep-striking assault terminators, before taking out half of a unit of assault marines, effectively tying up the other half for the last couple of turns. Far outperforming any other unit on the board At the same time, a unit of Warp Spiders managed to keep 2 Rhinos and a unit of S Murfs pinned down and ineffective for half the game, immobilizing one Rhino and stunning the other, until the Vypers could come in and clean up.
• This Troper once played a game of bloodbowl with an Ogre team against Norse. The Norse were about to score a touchdown and had the ball well defended. None of the Ogres could move close enough to tackle the Norse and the snotling were too weak to do anything worthwhile. So in a fit of desperation an ogre ran up to a snotling, picked him up and threw him at the enemies holding the ball, the snotling missed and flew into the crowd killing himself. This didn't phase the ogre team however and they proceeded to throw another snotling, this one hits a friendly ogre and kills him instantly. More snotlings are thrown and eventually the anyone around the general area of the ball was either dead, stunned or knocked out. The ogres managed to barely win that game and cause more damage to themselves than the Norse could ever dream of
  • Some of these actions may have caused a turnover but not all rules were being used
• During a 1st level game of Dark Heresy, this troper's team of acolytes were tasked with holding a cathedral against demonically-possessed gang members. What followed was nothing short of a large Crowning Game of Awesome. At one point, we were attacked by a man holding a bomb large enough to destroy a whole building. He sprinted towards our squad, who promptly blew apart his kneecaps with multiple revolver shots. He landed on his bomb, which went off. Our assassin, who was standing little more than 5 meters away from the man, suffered only minor burns on his leg due to amazingly low damage rolls. Our cleric lost a leg, our thief had his entire respiratory system blown out, and I got pieces of our cleric's leg stuck inside me. Our tech-priest went permanently deaf and suffered extreme scarring to his face. We recovered pretty well, thanks to a series of poor quality robotic parts. When we returned to the cathedral, we found the priest was being possessed by a greater daemon. Acting fast, this troper's guardsman dashed within 5 meters, close range, and got the highest critical possible with his shotgun, blowing the priest/daemon's face off. This was a greater daemon, intended to be a long, drawn out boss battle. They were then airlifted inside the team's 18-wheeler truck to their secret base, where they were greeted with...well, no praise, but certainly a lot of money.
• This not-troper recently had an Apocalypse game: Orkz versus Nurgle Chaos. One of the Nurgle characters, Epidemius, gives the entire Nurgle army bonuses depending on how many theyve killed. After a single turn of shooting they had all the bonuses possible and were ripping orkz apart. The only way to survive was the take out Epidemius, thus taking away the bonuses. Uber Ork Warlord Ghazghkull Thraka gives the order "Rok 'em Boyz!" This means that Thraka's spacefleet, high above the battlefield, starts dropping asteroids on things. These scatter in feet, not inches. All three Roks land dead on Epidemius, squashing him flat. It was a draw in the end, but this not-troper took a moral victory for sniping someone with a chunk of space-rock.
• This troper had a game with Imperial Guard versus Chaos Daemons, 750points. Some two platoons of red shirt guardsmen and a Basilisk against a horde of daemons made out squick. Few turns of shooting, smokes clears. All of the daemons lie dead and 7 guardsmen have died. There´s a reason this troper´s army is called Daemonslayers.

• This troper had a personal Crowning Moment of Awesome in a Vampire The Masquerade game. A fifth-generation Tzimisce had his thirteenth-generation Ventrue chained down to be used as a sacrifice to bring about The End Of The World As We Know It. After being told that You Cant Fight Fate, he decided to Screw Destiny with an overlooked portion of the Eat Food merit - that you have to purge the food you've eaten at some point. Nothing stops a game dead in its tracks like the phrase "I projectile vomit on the Methuselah."
• During the year of fire, in the world wide LARP game, this troper (playing a 13 generation Brujah he had made for Laughs) tried to dead gaze (read, pull a scare face) the tzumice antediluvian, a 5 story tall blob of flesh. For my trouble, I got tentacle raped. And I promptly bit in to that tentacle, and ate the antediluvian, killing him, and gain half his powers.
• This troper and his group had one hell of a time during a Vampire: The Masquerade game. We were transporting the last member of a dead clan from Los Angeles to Las Vegas when we were ambushed by a cult of vampires dedicated to serving a Methuselah we had encountered earlier in the campaign. All the members of the group were captured, including our charge, but excluding this troper's character. He followed from a distance in a stolen cargo van, eventually coming upon an elaborate ritual site where the Methuselah planned to kill our charge and steal her power, while the rest of the group looked on, powerless to interfere (yeah, like you'd take on 50 vampires, all the same generation as you or lower, and one being a Methuselah). That's what would have happened, had I not slammed on the gas as hard as I could and plowed straight into the Methuselah. Now, being ancient and powerful, she wasn't hurt — but she was knocked back about 100 feet, which gave me time to rescue the rest of the group and our charge, and get the hell out. Our escape route took us through the Methuselah's new position, however, and this time, she was ready — she lifted the van's front end off the ground. This, of course, put her in the perfect position to get a face full of shotgun, courtesy of my brother. Which knocked her down long enough for me to drive over her and onward to safety (and thus ruining the Storyteller's plans — apparently, we were supposed to fail at that point).
• My friend was in an early (1st ed) Vampire:TM Live Action Game. When the game began, he said "I'm gonna watch you, a while", backed off, and occasionally moved to follow the action. Since LAR Ping was new then, nobody really thought much about it. He followed them around for about 2 hours, until things got really swinging plotwise, and everyone was broken into smaller groups and plotting against eachother. Eventually, it became obvious that he was watching them because he was a vampire-hunter on stakeout. He picked off nearly half the (large!) group before they started playing defense.
• This troper is currently involved in a Mage: The Ascension game playing a Euthanatos death-mage who has had a fair few CMoAs. The first would be fighting an amphibious magic-eating creature underwater armed only with a knife - when said creature reached the surface and revealed that it could *fly*, not letting go and hanging off this huge insectoid/reptilian creature while still stabbing it to death nearly qualifies (although I must admit I was disappointed that it had a chitinous carapace rather than scales - I was looking forward to my new pair of thaumatovore-skin boots). The *real* CMOA, as far as roleplaying is concerned, is when the character was forced to reveal to the rest of the cabal exactly *why* the Euthanatos had come to take him away earlier in the game - he's a genuine psychopath, compulsive killer and believed schizophrenic, although the wolf that tells him what to do is actually his Avatar rather than a construct of his diseased mind. Having to 'come out' to the rest of the group about just what he'd been up to during his 'nights off' is probably the best roleplaying moment this troper has ever experienced.
  • And another one in a crossover game set in a dystopian cyberpunk future. Most of the party are werewolves, and therefore capable of outputting massive quantities of damage. The fight scene in the first(!) session landed a CMoA for just about every character:
    • A Glasswalker werewolf leaping through the window of an office block into a turbine-driven assault craft through a gunnery port, before shifting into 1-tonne combat monstrosity Dire Wolf form.
    • Followed closely by a betentacled Lasombre vampire who terrified the few still-living soldiers to the point where one managed to kill another simply by trigger-locking his laser rifle and screaming in panic. Said Lasombre then proceeded to eat many of the survivors
    • A Shadow Lord werewolf using the flat of his Grand Klaive sword to knock six soldiers down a flight of stairs (hitting hard enough to instantly kill two of them, and two more died from the fall) in ONE ACTION
    • And an as-yet-unidentified shifter following them down and finishing off the two survivors in a single bite
    • A Demon biting the head off one soldier while simultaneously disembowelling a second.
    • And now for this troper's character. A steampunk-styled Son of Ether mage with a flintlock death ray. While the other characters were dealing with the first flier, the mage noticed a second coming around to allow troops to disembark behind the group. A turn's worth of charging up said death ray, and the assault craft plummeted to the ground in two separate pieces, complete with crew and complement of soldiers. The squishiest and most fragile character in the party, who takes the longest to be able to do anything useful (Unlike D&D mages who can cast most combat spells in one turn), currently has the highest kill count in the game. Said kill count obtained by turning a few dials and pulling a trigger.
• In a recent game of Hunter: the Vigil, one member of the group accidentally signed up for a nightly visit by the elemental servants of some river god, who desired him as a sacrifice. After a called shot to the head just got water all over the place, this troper's Lucifuge character, being quite the intellectual, decided to defeat the magic with the power of SCIENCE, and froze the creature's face off with a fire extinguisher.
• In a Changeling: the Lost game I'm in, the most recent session, with the town being overrun by monsters on Winter Solstice, generated C Mo A for all three PCs.
  • Draconic Accountant Drake reached into a fabled monster's wound and unwound him with a pull after pretty much blasting the Hound's face.
  • Goddamn fucking lucky Living Painting Fu ends up fighting a horde in a nightclub, trying to get everyone else out safe, with his girlfriend going "STOP TRYING TO BE A DAMN HERO!" Cue Fu running at a monster, grabbing him and using the momentum to get into the rafters and then elbow drop one, saying, "But I'm not trying!"
  • Cloud Cuckoolander Dryad Mala wiped the floor with the summoned monsters a True Fae summoned. She took a few nicks, but being made of wood and him using a dinky knife... No problem. Finally at the end, she smiled and stated, "I don't have nightmares, nightmares have me."
• The first arc of one Mage: The Ascension game culminated in an epic confrontation on a mountaintop after the newbie orphan-mage was kidnapped by her own Nephandus Missing Mom in order to be sacrificed in a ritual to summon up an Eldritch Abomination. With very little magic yet at her disposal, the orphan-mage resorted to calling out the fourth verse of Saint Patrick's Hymn Before Tara (perhaps better known as "Patrick's Rune" from Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet) - which was immediately picked up by the incoming Big Damn Heroes to focus their own various forms of magic, turning it into an impromptu Spirit Bomb that ended with the defeat and destruction of the Eldritch Abomination's physical avatar.
• This troper managed to kill a werewolf in Crinos form in one turn, playing a young Brujah street racer (Meg, for those who bother clicking the "troper" above). The situation was intense. First, Meg's stranded in the middle of the street, armed only with her trusty pistol (a compact 9mm one). Luckily, the second party member, Mary the Ventrue, hid behind Meg's car, with a trunk full of guns. On with the dice rolling: first, both me and Mary's player top the werewolf's initiative rolls. Then, Mary catches the car keys Meg tossed at her. She manages to open the trunk, whip out the Sawn Off Shotgun and do a Hail Mary pass, throwing the gun to Meg. Meg, already running on Celerity, grabs the gun and hits the werewolf twice - spending all the "special" ammo, but blowing a nice big hole in the furfag. Fun fact: the shotgun is named "The Hellsinger".
  • Sending a vampire into torpor after pumping fifteen .223 rounds into his chest is a bit less awesome - mainly because it consisted only of rolling a lot of Successes For Massive Damage. This troper just takes it as some sort of karmic balance after totaling Meg's '71 Mustang by rolling a lot of 1's For Massive Failage a few sessions earlier.
• This Troper was G Ming for the first time in a New World of Darkness core game, for his friends, who hadn't done World of Darkness before, either. The first session had two CMO As: The first, the P Cs coming across a serial killer (who had been hinted at on news reports). One character, Aen, shot him repeatedly, doing pretty much nothing - when they deduced bullets were doing nothing, The other character, Abel, tore through the guy's chest with his metal claws (Bagh-Nakh), causing him to seem dead. He then torched him using a hairspray + match flamethrower. After that, I had a big thing set up for them to invade a vampire cult's church and have a massive epic battle. Instead, Abel, rolling about 8 10's and most everything else a success, climbs the wall to the church, hides inside the rafters and torches the support beams. This causes the vampires to be trapped inside a burning building. He then runs to the front and holds the door shut - rolling 4 10s, 3 9s and an 8 against several vampires using vigor. The roof collapsed in on the vampires, killing them instantly.
  • Another epic time: during a practice session with Aen, he got into a mexican standoff in an apartment hallway; they both missed from point blank range, then the enemy got shot repeatedly, bum rushed the PC beating the crap out of him, then Aen put his gun to the guy's temple and blew his brains out; he was later attacked in hospital, slashed a guy's throat with a scalpel, missed with every melee attack then escaped to the rooftop, doing a running jump off the roof to a helicopter, rolling a single ten amongst no other successes, while being shot at, while someone in the chopper fired assault rifle rounds at the enemies. Goddamn.
• Figuring that a little bit of Playing Against Type never hurt anybody, I forgo my usual Malkavian oracle and roll up a Ravnos. After a good bit of adventuring, my group is summoned before the local Prince. One of the NPC guards was a little too enthusiastic about "summoning" us which lasted until he put his hands on my character. I pull out Chimerstry's Horrid Reality, creating the illusion of a fire. Mind you, I'd only intended to get the guy to back off. Seven lucky rolls later, he's in torpor, and his friends are beating the ever loving crud out of me. The GM apologized afterwards, still incredulous at the randon near-death of one of the guard.
• This troper once ran a Chronicle of the New World of Darkness's Vampire the Requiem. The plot basically followed a few Kindred who ended up running a few jobs for the local Prince, Laventin Benoit, one of which involved destroying an oil refinery. After investigating the primary building of the area, they came upon an underground tunnel that led to their target, which they were to detonate. After an ambush by a group of local gangbangers employed by the owner because of Benoit's connections in law enforcement, the building had been set afire and the exit had been blocked by a dozen beefy guys. One of the three, a Russian Nosferatu, was the one that had been given the explosives for the mission. He decided that it would be fitting if he were the one to complete the mission, and jumped down the access shaft behind the party while the other two stayed behind to fight a bunch of armed killers while the rest of the building was burning down. After the Nosferatu took too long to return, one of the remaining two —a Gangrel— turned around and jumped down the access shaft to run towards his ally, who was currently in mortal battle with a professional Mekhet assassin employed by a local Prisci-backstabber. The Nosferatu is right next to torpor from battle, and has been narrowly surviving for several turns. The Gangrel sees this and decides that it will take too long to throw the enemy Kindred aside. So, thinking on his feet, he decides to rip a solid steel door off its hinges with Vigor and throw it at the assailant, immobilizing him so that he could be destroyed. The explosives are planted and the characters narrowly escape by prying a burning metal couch from fire and then with their combined strength throwing it at a door, jumping through the fire only moments before the entire complex explodes
• This troper is endlessly amused by imagining the looks on the faces of the small army of Technocrats when the following happened in a Mage: the Ascension game. A newly Awakened Orphan (just a couple of days ago, three sessions ago) has her cover blown in a facility in the middle of the desert, and instead of surrendering, she calls out into the Umbra, catches the attention of a rather angry, rather large earth spirit, and has the facility torn to pieces around her. She then calls out again for its attention, says "Take me home," and disappears.

• This CMOA was partly brought on by an attempt to be more realistic with a Street Samuri charcter in deciding where to place two hidden body compartments in order to hide a pair of Ares Predators. It was common knowladge that this Street Sam was rather... inept, when it came to hand to hand combat. A rival tried to take advantage of this, making sure to have him disarmed of all known weapons, and confronting him where it should have been impossible to find any replacements, resulting in the following exchange.
  GM: What do you do?
  Street Sam: I pull a gun out of my ass.
  GM: What?
  Street Sam: I pull a gun out of my ass.
  GM: Let me see that character sheet.

GM: I'll be damned. He pulls a gun out of his ass.

• Playing a late-night game of Shadowrun, the team was meant to be infiltrating an Ork cult to steal an idol and get out without being seen. Failing a check while crawling through an air duct, my character dropped into the room below... which was the entire Ork cult, about twenty of them, worshipping the target idol. After an amazing few rolls, the DM allowed me to convince the whole assembly that I was the avatar of their god, and they should help my team loot not only their idol, but all the goods in the building. When one of them doubted me, I ordered the others to eat him (another success roll).
• This troper was in one of the playtest demos for the Corporate Punishment adventure pack for Shadowrun. One of the adventures in that is a two-parter: originally you're supposed to break into a corporate facility located out in the wilderness, kidnap one of the personnel and leave behind an impostor in their place, while pretending to be on an ordinary raid. The kicker comes when you find out in part two that one of your employer's people just defected, so the infiltrator/impostor you just inserted has had their cover blown from the beginning, and you have to go right back to the place you just hit and extract them now. Since the stereotypical Shadowrun party tends to blitz remote research facilities with brute force, the entire point of the module is to send players back to a site they had no intention of ever visiting again, which due to their prior attack is now alerted and reinforced heavily. Unfortunately for this adventure's design logic, our party did their first run on the facility, we'd chosen to be fucking ninjas. We'd ghosted the entire first encounter — no alarms, no guards down, no hostile contact at all. We'd caper-movied the whole thing so hard we didn't even leave footprints. (No, literally — bound earth elementals are awesome for getting across the grounds tracelessly.) And even better, my character (the decker) had chosen to leave behind a backdoor in their computer (originally intended for some private loot-skimming later on), so extracting our blown agent was as simple as forging an e-mail to the site security director. Notably, a directive from the home office that such-and-such employee was a spy, to be discreetly rounded up and handed over to "corporate security assets" who would arrive at such-and-such a date with such-and-such passcode. Do I even need to mention whose descriptions these "corporate security assets" matched? *eg*
• This Troper was playing a Shadowrun game where the party was being chased by a rather more experienced team with nuyen to burn and a helicopter at their disposal. One 'runner jumped from said helicopter to bury a katana in the roof of the team's RV, while our mage, our street sam, and our rigger were all making efforts to disable the helicopter in three different ways. In the end, it was the street sam that managed - she fired two frag grenades upwards. The first one rolled just high enough to take out the copter's windshield - and the second one landed inside the cockpit. Thankfully, our GM was kind enough not to provide us with notoriety for that little episode.
• This troper was playing a Shadowrun game in which one party member was a troll street samurai named Manny, who carried an assortment of weapons around in a golf bag slung over his shoulder. In the Universal Brotherhood adventure (during which the party sadly later experienced a 60 percent fatality rate), the party was trapped in the basement of a UB compound. Guards were firing assault rifles down the stairs at the party. Manny took four direct hits in a single turn — and between his armor and his natural toughness, he took no damage from them. His player spent Manny's next action to have him yell up the stairs, "Y'all are gonna have to do better than that."
• This troper has found that Troll variants are basically made of continuous CMO As. A particular Giant's dedicated role in the party was anti-air support, due to the simply excessive nature of his primary firearm. Naturally, using the gun on human targets would generally have been overkill - normally fine in Shadowrun, but overpenetration with high-explosive shells isn't a great idea when you're trying to steal sensitive electronics. The Giant solved this by using the gun to club people to death. The damage code was slightly lower than shooting them. In the same game, an elementalist proved that armor and guns take a backseat to ingenuity. When faced with a large incoming air support group, he had his air elementals swerve the helicopters just slightly - enough to crash into adjacent choppers, resulting in a higher vehicle kill rate than even the aforementioned giant.

• Fred Hick's game Don't Rest Your Head absolutely loves these. Thanks to loose rules, broad narrative power from the Players, and truly over the top madness talents, nothing is impossible. I thought it would be hard to top escaping an interrogation cell by having the Mc Donald's Golden Arches step through the building and crush Officer Tock underneath it, and then the character riding off on the Arches. Then, in the very next game, the same player (different character) had all four horsemen of the Apocalypse following him into battle against a giant extra-dimensional demon. Somehow, I'm sure this is only the beginning.
• This troper DMed a game where a character, a rogue/cleric of a chaotic good homebrew god, was fighting in a floating house one thousand and five hundred feet off the ground, against a nigh-invulnerable construct not unlike an inevitable. The cleric, seeing that this thing was powerful, jumped out of a window, summoned a celestial hippogriff, and flew to safety. Awesome.
• In a game of Cyberpunk, this troper was in a flying vehicle which exploded due to sabotage. Following the Rule Of Cool and the fact that if it could be in a movie, it could happen, one of the large, flat doors on the vehicle was acquired and used as an air-surfboard, slowing and angling the fall, ending with skipping across the surf and landing on the beach, unhurt and dry. Having a maxed Cool stat helps...
• During a game of Cyberpunk with a full body conversion twenty foot Chilean battle robot with the demeanor of Attilla the Hun, skilled in akido and has a choking hand powered by shotgun shells, charged into a raging battle of several hundred boostergangers, upon arrival into the front lines, the gangers attacked me with several kelios of napalm, five grenades, an entire Kalashnikov clip, a chainsaw and an EMP blaster, and only succeeded in blowing me forward and crushing two guys under my sheer mass, when I got up, shashed several more gangers with the corpses, and poped a guys head in my shotgun hand. After i was subdued, nearly twenty men pulled simultaneously to rip my shotgun arm off, but then I took the arm back and beat them to a pulp with it. the GM decided to stop their and called in the cavalry.
• There is a story about a clone that crashed the Computer in Paranoia using nothing but logic.
  • For that matter, THE COMPUTER CRASHING (in the now "UnProduct" Crash Era line.) It just came out of nowhere, in the middle of a published adventure.
• This editor played a cowardly, hucksterish cyberdoc in a Rifts campaign, who had equipped his mobile surgery with a Nitro Boost to escape angry customers. Then the party was attacked by a band of orcs, backed up by a monstrous elephant equipped with a turret gun. "I hit the nitro and aim for the elephant."
• This troper was playing a Caitian Starfleet Chief Medical Officer in the FASA Star Trek RPG in a movie era story where Orions trying to start a Fed/Klingon war by hijacking a new commissioned ship and its young crew. The plot was foiled and the captured Orion held in sickbay bit down on his suicide pill to avoid being questioned and jeopardizing Orion neutrality. This troper could not help but have his character say "Oh no, you are not getting away with this," and tried to stop the poison and rolled a natural 02, a critical success which means the poison was countered and the Federation had its first living Orion prisoner to question to sink that enemy's neutrality.
• This troper remembers taking part in a forum-based science fiction RPG (ruleset unknown) where his RL best friend managed to take down an enemy dropship using a laser rifle. Lucky bastard.
• This troper, playing a game of Twilight 2000, found his character with a truckload of assorted explosives stolen from a Russian base that had to be abandoned as the group would have to make their getaway on foot through the forest. Not wanting to waste it, he described in exacting detail to the GM what kind of ambush/booby-trap he wanted to leave behind to deal with any pursuers (having been in real life a military engineer helped). When the Russkies chasing the group blundered into the trap and set it off, the GM described a scene so apocalyptic in glorious excessive violence (the words "chunky bits of hamburger" were used to describe what remains could be found) that the other characters referred to explosives-happy engineer as "the Mobile Zone of Total Devastation." The GM also ensured that explosives were harder to find after that.
• This troper has a nasty habit of playing the party butt-monkey, resulting in some spectacular upsets when he proves competent. Case in point: Wilhelm Ruger, who came to the Capitol to petition them to drain the swampland he'd been sold. The Army of Evil invaded, and Ruger ended up on the run with the last member of the royal house. They were attacked by !Nazgul, which systematically killed Ruger's horse, disarmed him in single combat, and benumbed his entire right side. It drew its sword, muttered curses at the last royal, and was about to strike when I rolled a natural 20...on a *sling*. Ruger disarmed the thing and, giving an impassioned speech cribbed from Winston Churchill, sent it running. While still unarmed and visibly lamed.
• At the climax of a Star Wars Infinities RPG campaign, most of our characters had suffered severe radiation poisoning between killing Darth Vader and his new master (a tweaked-out combat monster). With Rebel Alliance orbital bombardments coming down from above, one of our characters (a Toydarian Jedi) was trying to get to a hospital. He had failed to account for two things: 1) He was a Toydarian on Coruscant, outside of InviSec (the non-human ghetto), and 2) he was still carrying Vader's helmet. When stormtroopers showed up, ready to unload into the crowd, he realized that they wouldn't adjust their aim to avoid civilian casualties. In a daring display of heroism, he flew above the crowd, raised Vader's helmet, and bellowed, "Coruscant is free!" before getting ventilated.
• This Troper always tells the tale of Garth V'rkalis, the Correllian Smuggler who sucker punched Darth Vader and lived to tell about it. To this day "I run up and push all his buttons" is enough to make us burst out in laughter.
  • ... Huh. This one did that too. Playing a droid (so he couldn't detect via the Force) who was invisible at the time, and decked him right in the face. Then stole his cloak and lightsaber, and fired him out an airlock. (The black cloak apparently made another one of the PCs go evil... yeah, it was a humour campaign)
• Crowning moments of awesome in my group's campaign: Our group is at a fancy diner party and we had to relinquish our weapons at the door. Suddenly the cultists come out and start slaughtering the guests for their ritual. While the sorcerer had spells, the rogue had a hidden dagger and the psi-warrior could summon his weapon, our dervish had nothing with him. So he starts to fight the cultists using silverware and a chair. When the other characters remarked on this he yelled, "If I can hold it, it is a weapon!". He eventually killed the Big Bad by throwing a gnome at him.
  • This other troper's group also tried using a gnome PC as a weapon to get around a "no weapons in the tavern" rule.
    • This THIRD troper's group once encountered, in a Legend of the Five Rings RPG game, an NPC who specialized in wielding peasant weaponry and improvised weapons. Cue the final battle, where a smuggler's camp was on fire, nezumi (ratmen) were attacking it alongside our group, and the NPC improvised weapon specialist had broken his oversized machete and had replaced it with a small ratling. Which, oddly enough, did more damage per swing.
• This Troper would like to point out that the line "my players have gotten away with stuff like setting a Stargate rolling along like a gigantic hula hoop" in In And Out Of Character is one of the best accounts tabletop RPG experience he ever heard.
• A story this editor heard: A group of adventurers are caught in a room with a slowly-descending ceiling that will crush them if they can't pick the door's lock. The party's thief is trying as hard as can be, but to no avail. If only he had more time! So to save his friends, the party's wizard casts Flesh to Stone... on himself. The mage-statue stops the ceiling just long enough for the group to escape, then gets ground to gravel. The play group unanimously agreed to give the player's next character a free extra level simply out of gratitude.
  • That sounds rather familiar...
• This troper plays a necromancer in a custom RPG setting. This character is prone to more Crowning Moments of Awesome than anybody except his player has any interest in hearing about, so I will limit myself to describing only one. One of the more memorable examples (though perhaps not actually the most awesome) was when a demon randomly appeared out of nowhere, surrounded by zombies for some reason. As the demon was monologuing about something, the necromancer silently took control of his zombies and had them pull down their pants and bare their buttocks in the demon's direction. The necromancer then helpfully pointed it out by saying, "Your zombies are mooning you." Other PCs actually killed the thing, but nobody actually remembers how, the only thing anybody remembers is the mooning zombies.
• This editor was playing a Lord of the Rings campaign when he managed to kill an Oliphaunt with one arrow when he rolled a nat 6 and the GM rolled a 1. Said Oliphaunt exploded in a dramatic fashion.
• In the playtesting for an Avatar The Last Airbender D20 system, a Firebender killed a Waterbender on the first turn, and the firebender's soldier partner goes up against the other party's swordsman and also kills him in one turn.
• If, in a single game session of Exalted, every character doesn't have at least one Crowning Moment of Awesome, you're playing the game wrong.
  • Case in point, this troper has had a Venus Exalted that seduced all living humans within glancing distance to the point of having a personal army for 12 hours for no more reason other than it would be useful and a Zenith Caste, after being beaten within an inch of her life by an 'ARMY' of elementals, that ran trench knives first at a Violator Demon. But wait, she also CUT OFF IT'S PENIS, which was at least as big as SHE WAS(5'10'', FYI).
    • How is this a spoiler??
    • Not so much as spoiler, as something some guys don't want to read.
    • You could have told me that before I read that.
  • Too true, even in a Modern setting. This troper played a Zenith singer who turned the diseased zombies infesting streets of Las Vegas into the dance sequence from Thriller.
  • And this troper's Zenith, while faced with about twenty bandits, took a swig of 1000-year old whisky, spat it out on them, and then proceeded to use his flame-tongue repeater (a magical flame-thrower pistol) with a charm that doubled damage. All 20 were killed in one shot.
  • Later on, that same Zenith had to recruit soldiers to defend the city of Chiarascuro from a huge army of fair folk that was invading. And so I marched into a tavern (in game) and improvised a speech so awesome (Promising adventure, excitement, and triple wages—something I hadn't go permission to do), that the GM made me reroll twice so I could get enough sucesses to justify it.
  • The GM also got a CMOA for creating 2 minor NPCs for that part of the campaign— the bodyguards of a fair folk storyteller, named Manana and Preposterone. When asked about his name, Preposterone turned into a giant chicken and began firing fireballs out of his staff.
  • And a personal favorite of mine had the Zenith triple botch, causing him to think that the Big Bad of that particular adventure (a hypnotizing casino-owner) was actually a Lintha (cannibalistic demon-worshipping pirate) in disguise, leading to a brawl against the Big Bad's army of hypnotized women, colloquially referred to in the game as "hooker ninjas". The Zenith then composed an epic poem based on what had just happened.
  • And in another campaign, this troper's character's familiar (a ferret) broke into a Dragonblood stronghold, managed to completely miss detection, and steal a giant gold key that weighed about as much as he did, and sneak it out of the building.
  • So, there is an Eclipse diplomat, helping her Circlemates (party) run a kingdom. She gets sent to defuse a situation involving another kingdom possibly preparing for war against ours, being encouraged by a deathknight. She tries to convince the kingdom using mundane methods at first, but just as the Smug Snake deathknight comes in, she nails the king with a stealth social attack, destroying all of the deathknight's efforts right in front of him without him even realizing it yet.
• There is a story on the Giant in the Playground forums about a bard who imitated Celestia. Using the light spell, a headband and a celestial owl.
• This page. All the stories on that thread pretty much qualify, including the paladin who kills himself along with a dragon, by headbutting it.
• One pretty, fragile, blonde and all dressed in pink wizardess had her own CMOA when she used a Polymorph spell, turned herself into huge dinosaur and ate the main challenge of the module alive.
• The role-playing game Monkey Ninja Pirate Robot: the Role-Playing Game actively encourages players to create these by giving bonuses for justifying the use of everything at the characters' disposal when doing actions. One particularly memorable instance for this troper involved a pirate using a never-ending flask of brandy to surround himself in a ring of flammable liquid, followed by him taking two flintlock pistols, scraping them across the ground to make a spark, and firing the pistols to ignite the whole area and take out two enemy ninja. Who then proceeded to walk out of the inferno to take out the remaining ninja.
• Oh, where to start?... In one campaign I ran, I had a friend playing an eccentric gnome character to the hilt. For example, he decided in the very first session that he was going to take advantage of his bag of holding to carry... roughly 80 pounds of firewood around, for no reason whatsoever. He had the cash; I allowed it. Skip forward a few sessions; the players are in a classic dungeon crawl. The paladin's nearly down, almost everyone's nearly dead; they're standing on an open trap door, watching a fresh group of orcs climb their way up a ladder towards them. Gnome's up. Player: "I take my bag of holding... and I empty the contents into the trap door." Brilliant.
• This Troper once found himself in a campaign involving the living dead and a particular cemetery where they were rising from. It was a usual standard fare until a NPC that the team now ceremoniously refers to as Grave Digger Sensei, made his appearance.
  PC Swordsman: Who are you?
  Grave Digger Sensei: Who am I? Do you see this uniform? Do you see this shovel? You tell me who I am. No, better yet, you tell me what the hell you're doing in my graveyard with THAT thing with you?
  PC Cleric: M-me?
  Grave Digger Sensei: Yes, you! You and your kind are scum! Do you know how much work I've lost because you go around HEALING people? Don't even get me started on that resurrection BS! I should beat your face in right now, but I have a bigger problem!
  PC Swordsman: And that is?
  Grave Digger Sensei: You see these Zombies? They're coming back to life and crawling out of my graves. THOSE WERE GOOD GRAVES! And now I have to go and put them back in the ground!
  PC Cleric: How do you intend to do that?
  Grave Digger Sensei: I plan to smack them with my shovel until they stop moving.
• This guy was part of a one-off quest that had a couple. Like running down a fleeing, invisible beastmaster that was supposed to escape into the shadows and impaling him on a spear. And watching the team's wizard headbutt a Vampire Lord so hard it knocked his teeth out (Critical Headbutt for the win). Arguably, the best one happened just before either of those, in a room full of noose traps. The team fighter failed an acrobatics check and got swept up by one of the nooses. This would have been an issue if it weren't for the fact that he is, in fact, a Warforged. As such, when the DM said "You've been swept up by a noose around your neck!" I simply responded "I'm mildly annoyed by this, but otherwise unbothered." It took him a second or two to realize why.
• Spycraft 2.0 has a rule in which a character who scores over 75 on a skill or attack roll scores a "Triumph" (read: Crowning Moment Of Awesome) which gives an experience bonus, impresses everyone around you and (in combat) scares the shit out of your enemies. In practice this is only possible if you're already Bad Ass enough to get a good result anyway and then burn through several action dice, ensuring that such Crowning Moments of Awesome only turn up when the stakes are suitably high.
• This troper had two different CMOAs in his first and only campaign. The first occurred during an indoor map where his ranger, after a series of unsuccessful attacks, manages to land a critical on a guard with each sword! The second, and even more awesome, was during a section where the party was intended to wipe, but most of them were so experienced in the game that the DM had to bring out a high-level wizard to cast Fireball. The attack managed to knock everyone to 0 HP or lower...except me. This gave me one turn to act, and given few options, I eventually blurt out "play dead". Even though I have no ranks in anything that should give me skill in that. And I pull it off!
  • There was also later a moment where the paladin tried to outdrink a dwarf. It was seven levels of awesomeness.
  • One story this troper also heard was when a friend was a DM and had a dragon attack a level three party. The plan was to have the dragon, who was the main villain, fly away after the second turn. One player, rather than choosing to hide, attempts a desperation arrow shot on the dragon. She rolls a natural 20, and it was an exploding arrow! To the dragon's eye! The DM needed to scramble together a new villain afterwards.
• This troper recently completed a custom RP campaign containing many Crowning Moments of Awesome. Some that come to mind are the campaign's half-demon Magnificent Bastard Heroic Sociopath player character pulling off a massive Xanatos Gambit involving a duel, a failsafe embedded in a magical gem, and a vial of troll blood to kill the main villain's lieutenant; a character using a power out of sheer desperation in the final battle that ended up quite literally turning him into a living mountain; and another character taking on the aformentioned half-demon's curse (which was slowly turning him into the Antichrist, more or less) out of her love for him (which also counts as a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming, and as Fetish Fuel, as said curse then caused her to lactate deadly-poisonous wine).
• This individual once took part in a campaign with home-brewed rules in which a relatively large group of players were pitted against a diamond golem. With most of our attacks and spells more or less useless against it, it quickly defeated almost the entire group, and despite the damage done to it, it seemed ready to destroy the final two party members. The team pixie, fresh out of magical spells, launched himself at the golem's knee with his tiny wooden staff... and scored a critical hit. The golem crumbled to dust.
• This troper has a Scion character (currently in hiatus) that had finally chased down the Big Bad of the campaign up until that point, a Demon named Han Hua. Han had taken the blood of six children of Gods, and a weapon which could slay a god in a single touch, and was using them to open a gateway from the World to the realms without. Han needed one more splatter of blood to open the Gateway; the blood of the last Scion of the Chinese Gods. Jacob attacked, and by sheer luck (an amazing roll with everything that could boost it added in) Jacob managed to rip out the eye of a being which was on the cusp of godhood. Han responded by punching Jacob's heart out of his chest. Now, the Gateway opened. End of campaign, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies, right? Wrong. He just opened a gateway to, among other places, the afterlife. Jacob dusted himself off, had a talk with his long dead brother, and walked out of the doorway that Han Hua had helpfully opened for him. Apparently, death just gives him another level in Badass. Jacob grabbed the weapon that could slay a god, and cut Han Hua in half with it before calmly walking away from the carnage. In the months since (in game) Jacob has become a Memetic Badass.
  • And since the game came back to active status, Jacob has gotten an even bigger C Mo A. While in South Africa, Jacob was protecting a longtime friend and ally who needed to complete a pilgrimage. At Jacob's side were his wife (who, by dint of her soul being a sleeping god, is almost as Bad Ass as he), and Pruor the Valkyrie. The enemy sent waves of Fire and Muspel Giants to kill Jacob's charge, but Jacob could kill even the massive Muspel giants in one strike. So what did they do? They called in backup, in the form of a Son of the Jormungadr. Now, the Jormungadr has skin so thick that even Jacob can't get through it. He's not strong enough. But Jacob's not just strong. Thinking fast, he remembers that there is a river not too far away, with a hydroelectric dam across it. He fights the Son of Jormungadr all the way to the reservoir. He and Pruor drag it flailing across the bottom of the artificial lake and then shove it into the intake for the dam's turbines. The massive beast destroyed the dam, but not before it was reduced into a fine, grey-pink paste and sent down river. I killed the Son of the Jormungadr... using a hydroelectric dam. I'm proud of that one.
  • Considering that this is Scion, if I failed to top myself, I would be a disappointment. A while after running the son of Jormungandr through a dam, the writing on the wall was that Ragnarok was about to begin. Now, in order to begin, by Canon itself, the forces of destruction summon a meteor to smash the world and plunge it into darkness and evil. Now, considering that by this point, my Scion of Shi Wang Mu is pretty much a walking testament to free-will, he would not abide this. Now a part of a Band for the first time, he takes his son, his wife, a recently returned from Helheim Scion of Odin, and that same Scion of Vidar as above, along with a supremely vengeful daughter of Hermes, to an island in the Caribbean. On this island was a rocket which would allow the world to see the supposedly invisible Jotunhammer. Just preparing the rocket to launch nearly costs his wife's life, and causes his son to Legend Up, again. Then, guarding the rocket is another Minister, similar to the first Big Bad, Han Hua, and the primordial soul of fire itself. Despite being horrendously outclassed, his son holds off the Minister, while he himself takes on the unbeatable soul of fire. Well, almost unbeatable, because since the last time, he'd acquired the Golden Bands, which trapped the soul of fire into the mortal coil of Redboy. By tricking Redboy into his body and into putting on the bands, Jacob bitchslapped the most powerful Demon to walk the world in thousands of years, and managed to keep the Minister off his game long enough to launch the rocket, and let the mortals blow the shit out of the Jotunhammer with nukes. In short, this Scion said "Fimbulvinter? Eternal darkness? Ragnarok? Fuck You, Fate!"
• This troper once GM'ed a session of Feng Shui, a game specifically and explicitly designed to produce as many CMOA's as possible per session, in which the party's martial artist, facing off with the evil sorceror in the middle of a burning hotel, proceeds to not only jump-kick the sorceror and knock him down with a critical success, but then bodysurf his corpse down the burning stairwell to the building exit.
• I played in a Feng Shui game as a Big Bruiser, specifically a former pro-wrestler. My preferred melee weapon was a stop sign, but I tended instead to use various wrestling maneuvers. I defeated an Earth Oni using the Stone Cold Stunner.
• This troper, a novice RP'er, joined a group of my friends in the middle of a campaign. The first session was spent with the group helping me to develope a character; the second was my first fight. The party was in a tavern with several enemy soldiers and the GM, before the game even started, informed us that one of the guys was way to powerful for any of us to defeat. After a few minutes of listening to everyone else argue over how to get rid of the guy I loudly declare my intentions to go over and hit on him. Humoring the new girl, the older players decided to let me try it. I proceeded to roll a natural 20 and take the guy upstairs so my team could defeat his mooks. By the time I'd left the Big Bad he was sleeping the sleep of the satisfied and the fight had spilled out into the streets. The GM was so impressed he gave me the Jenny Knack. No one made fun of my Mary Sue-ish character again. Especially after I developed my Fate Powers to the point I could make any two people with even a slight grudge against eachother try to kill eachother.
• Take your pick from any game of Bliss Stage where the Resistance achieves thier Hopes. Often crosses over with Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming or Tear Jerker. For example:
  • A run through of Final Act posted on the Forge. Keenan Caine's reaction to a disastrous ANIMa malfuction, coupled with learning about his Anchor's pregnancy, is to walk into a radioactive control chamber for the ANIMa to fix it, so that there WILL be a resistance to take care of his child. He didn't survive. Thanks to him, the others did. Resolved a Hope in the process: "We can raise another generation - even if I'll never see them grow up."
  • Seth-Ben Erza's "Saved By Childbearing" thread on same has at least two: first, the Final Battle with the aliens to rescue a pilot's lover from falling into the Bliss: second, the response to the Authority Figure's last incompetence: "...I'm releiving you of command."
  • This Troper's game set in Cambridge: Lloyd, the Magnificent Bastard pilot, realizing that he was no longer chasing Amanda simply for a Level Up At Intimacy 5, but because he actually loved her - enough to resolve a long-running Love Triangle with an explicit Tenchi Solution. Not to mention his Anchor and main flame Alice's response to Amanda's protestations about whether it was really alright: "Amanda, Lloyd, you have too many clothes on - there is a bed over there."
  • And just two days ago: Julian: "Hit me. I deserve it." Chris: "...Julian, if you let me hit you, I don't know if I'll be able to stop." Julian: "...I know."
    • Actually, come to that, Lloyd does this on a regular basis: apparently his player Soylent White is Made Of Win.
• Here's one for everyone. This Troper was playing a Fantasy HERO session and his paladin happened to be stuck on a retracting floor with a rogue and a rather agile fencer. Both of them made a rope bridge and climbed down about eighty or so feet. However, my paladin was in heavy armor; climbing was out of the question, so he merely stood there, resolute, until the floor came out from under him. In the meantime, the two below found themselves facing down a very large spider. By "very large," we mean about ten feet or so tall. The GM rolls our luck and unluck dice (basically the karma of the game). Both my and another player's luck dice hit, while the spider's unluck die hits. The paladin falls straight down, through the spider, doing 16d6 of immediate damage, and goes right through the spider, landing perfectly on his feet. His response?
  Caled: Excuse me, gentlemen, but I seem to be covered in something. Would someone throw me a rag?
• Another fantastic one comes from the GM's character. His character's child was captured by the Big Bad and taken out to sea, to be held hostage. The fighter charges out towards the bay, acquires a ship, and pilots it towards the guy. The Big Bad turns around, and once within a hundred feet, fires a Lightning Bolt right into the ship. In FULL PLATE, no less, the fighter jumps into the water, and starts swimming. The sorceror hits him with one Lightning Bolt. He makes a 17 Swim Check and gains ground. The sorcerors hits him again. A 16, gains more ground. A third lightning bolt, another successful swim check, and he gets to the boat. He climbs up, and the sorceror point-blanks him with the last lightning bolt he had that day. It doesn't kill him. The fighter grabs his sword, and full power attacks the Big Bad. Two Natural 20s in a row. In one spectacular move, he ended the campaign by taking the Big Bad's head, and his son, back home.
• We had a campaign that was so amazing that EVERY character in it had at least one of these. At LEAST.
  • The party had been captured, stripped of their gear and was being brutally tortured. This was a very religion-based campaign, and the villains were trying to get our heroes to renounce their faith in their gods. One of the characters (equal parts rogue and sorcerer,) threatened with the specter of his dying beloved, "cracks" and asks to renounce before everyone. This is, of course, an elaborate bluff. The DM informs him that he is surrounded by two dozen guards who have him at swordpoint. He then states "I'm going to cast a fireball." The DM asks him where he's centering it. The player, not normally known for being ostentacious, says, "Let's see... on ME!" He killed half the guards, but failed his save and got knocked unconscious. The game stopped for five minutes as everyone, DM included, gave the man a high five for awesomeness.
  • Early in the campaign, the party's home town is being attacked by a half-dragon, who is standing in front of the church. They can see him from a distance. The party is running toward him full-bore. The druid summons a Hyppogriff, which can fly at 120 feet per round. As the thing is winging overhead, very low to the ground, the BARD reaches up, grabs onto it's talons, hitches a ride, then leaps off and then DROP KICKS THE MOTHERSLAPPING HALF-DRAGON THROUGH THE WALL OF THE CHURCH at twenty feet per second. The broken legs were, reportedly, totally worth it.
    • Then the half-dragon climbs to the roof of the church, the party fights him in a massive boss battle, and the half-dragon leaps onto the Hyppogriff's back, tears its wings off, rides it to the ground and body-slams it.
  • The jungle druid had a snake animal companion. It racked up a higher body count in the first three sessions than most of the rest of the party put together.
  • The party is traveling at sea when they come across a demonic ship hewn together from the bones of the fallen, burning with hellfire. The crew of skeletons draw their scimitars and prepare to board, and coiled about the mainmast is a marilith pirate captain, wrapped in a Jolly Roger cloak and brandishing a sword in all six hands. The party engages in one round of getting shredded by its dread necrotic blades before the ranger deals a long string of critical hits and DESTROYS the thing in ONE ROUND without anyone else even putting a scratch on her. Boss battle scripted to take one hour: over in ten minutes.
  • A cult of demon-worshipers is sacrificing a young maiden to call a dread Rune Demon, one of the Abhorrent kings, through a portal. The party fails to stop the ritual in time and a burning goat's head, topped with horns that appear to be holes in the universe begins to emerge from a smoky portal. As the rest of the party is attempting to stop the ritual, the LEVEL TWO PALADIN rolls a series of awesome checks and SHOULDER-BASHES THE DEMON GOD BACK THROUGH THE PORTAL.
  • Alturo, king of the minotaur. He was so badass he nearly liberated a city by himself, but it was his last battle that was the best. He basically challenged the avatar of a dark god to single combat, intentionally lost so that he could have his soul added to a sacred sword and thereby enable the rest of the party to (eventually) slay the dark god. He made one last decree before his sacrificial death: the minotaur would thereafter be a matriarchal society, so that no other king could be as awesome as he. Therefore, he is the greatest minotaur king of all time.
  • The skald, whose exploits were so legendary I couldn't possibly come up with one example. Let me put it this way: she was a gnome with levels split between bard and barbarian. She had a constitution score so high that she had over 250 hit points by level 21, even though the majority of her hit dice were d6.
  • Our party's straight sorceror, a fifteen year old girl who explained her magical powers as having her wishes come true. Again, there were a lot of great moments for her, but the best was when she grabbed the dark sword of ultimate evil, then plane-shifted with it into the positive energy plane, thus causing it to explode into a million billion pieces. Her last act: she wished to give up her powers and live life as a normal girl. I'm thinking she just knew she could never top that.
• Needless to say, we've all been rather depressed since the end of that campaign. We know we're never, ever going to top it.
• In this troper's octaNe game, the players were faced with fighting through a factory that was turning elderly people into unliving golems. Instead of fighting the final fight, however, the party's bruiser — a former wrestler — turns around, builds up into a run, and clotheslines the entire building's supports instead, one after another...
• Playing through a massive, 4-session combat scenario in Legend of the Five Rings, this troper, playing a purely-melee damage machine character, came face-to-face with a winged demon that was perfectly content to hover a hundred feet in the air, throw fireballs around, and make snarky comments about the party's ancestors. Eventually, Matsu Katsumi (my character) hefts her no-dachi (2-handed sword) like a spear, shouts "From Jigoku's heart, I stab at thee!", and launches her ancestral weapon skyward. With an unlikely series of exploding dice, it hits. GM tells me to grab my wife's dice and use hers. I shrug and grab her dice. Then the damage check happens. An even more unlikely series of exploding dice occurs. So, the big scary demon, mid-speech against a melee-only character stuck on the ground 100' below him, is suddenly struck through the heart by a flying 2-handed sword and plummets, stone dead, to the ground below, ending the battle and the war. My sword even rolled a 10 on the "GM's feeling vindictive" check result (needed a 10 on a d10) to not be broken when it hit the ground.
• This troper has a CMOA on every one of his characters, but two stand out in his mind: First, in the final battle of an Earthdawn game, my elementalist was casting a thunderstorm like spell and rolling step 18 or something (1d20, 1d12, 2d6, 1d4). Final count: 96. Army of Mooks: Dead. Ensuing Big Bad's revenge: Death. Fact that storm persists past death: Priceless.
• This troper once found himself soloing a CR 14 Shadow creature (Nightwing, or some such) with nothing but a level 10 Druids spell list. Thats right, no animal companion, or shape shifting, and I didn't have any time to buff myself up before hand, and this was one of my first games, so my build and spell list was rather sub-obtimal. I started by using a Rock to Mud spell to drop the cieling on him and get him down to the ground. I then shoved a fire spell right down his throat, and cast a Stone Shape to impale him. Over the next two turns I covered him in several giant constrictor snakes to prevent him lifting off again. He then cast a darkness spell on himself (Back in the days when this meant absolute darkness) and I thought I was boned. Then one of my friends pointing something out, that my enemy was covered in three very angry, very loud hissing snakes. I smiled, cast another Stone Shape spike, and the thing went down. This troper now loves snakes as animal companions simply because of this fight.
  • In the same game, one friend literally flattened an entire drow regiment with the help of an incline and liberal use of stone shape. They were killed by a very large rolling pin.
• CMOA in a West End Star Wars game. I was playing a techno-geek character with a blaster skill of 2d +2 (pretty pathetic, by any measure) when the young jedi and I were accosted by some thugs jumping out of an alley.
  Young Jedi: "Stop!"
  Me: *breaking in over the young jedi's player* "I shoot the lead thug!" *die roll comes up 28, thanks to rolling three consecutive sixes on the wild die*
  GM: "The lead thug goes down with a smoking hole in the middle of his forehead." *much laughter ensues*
  'Young Jedi: "... or I'll shoot." *the game pretty much stops for the next five minutes*
• This troper managed a CMOA with a very unlikely character in a game of Marvel Heroes (a very old RPG). Character creation was a random process, and this troper rolled terribly bad, resulting in a character that was essentially confined to a wheelchair due to low stats, with the super powers of excorcism and the ability to produce a rubber body coating (compared to other powers seen in the Marvel-verse). The setting was essentially a super-hero gladiatorial arena, run by aliens that had taken over the planet. Teams of heroes would duke it out, and each had an explosive collar that would go off if they left the confines of the arena. This troper began the fight by turning on his rubber coating, bouncing out of his wheelchair, and having his ally use -his- superpower to turn the rubber coating into a DIAMOND coating, at which point this troper had another ally use his telekinesis to fling his diamond-coated character into an enemy hero, taking off the guy's head, and sending this troper's character through the arena walls, at which point the collar went off, killing him in a spectacular explosion! Proof positive that lame stat rolls/powers can still be turned to bad-ass purposes.
• ... This troper just had his PCs do something frightening in a BESM game.
  • Gutted the Chinese military command centers.
  • With crowbars.
  • Dropped from orbit.
    • Then stole their satellites.
    • Post-session chat, they were discussing taking them home and using them as lawn ornaments and conversation pieces.
• This troper's roleplay group is a mishmash of D&D 3.5E, freeform, and impromanga. All RP responses are done drawn like comic panels, which only serves to make the epic scenes made of even more win. Two bigguns so far:
  • The ranger and dread pirate captain having a swordfight in the crow's nest of the ship, during a thunderstorm. If that wasn't enough, the fight only stopped when they were both struck by lightning and thrown several feet to the deck below. (They got better.)
  • Said ranger, who has been dragged from his home, knocked out, locked up, been embarrassingly drunk, challenged his kidnapper only to have that fight end badly (see above), finally got his moment of win—by viciously backstabbing the sun elf who's been pissing him off the whole campaign. Did I mention that he did this the moment the sun elf and captain realized they were in love? As the sun elf collapses off the dock into the ocean, cue the Unflinching Walk. Flair for drama: We have it.
  • An update: The ranger has managed another Crowning Moment, having started another fight with the captain. Note that Flan, the ranger, is 5'1" and terribly skinny; Drea, the captain, is higher-levelled, four inches taller, and pretty buff.
    Flan: Is my blood so beautiful, Drea?
    Drea: Ask again in a minute?
    Flan: You won't get a minute—! Think fast!
    (Flan blocks an attempted stab, and with a broken mug floors Drea with one punch to the face, tearing his ear off.)
• In one campaign I was in we were facing a Troll that was chained up. My ranger then went behind the Troll, grabbed the chain and pulled. The Troll went down and we were able to finish him off.
• In a game I've seen on some forums called "Roll to Dodge," actions vary widely based on the roll of a D6. 1 is failure to the point of the action (even putting on a shirt) fails horribly, usually resulting in injury. Six is absurdly overachieving, so that putting on said shirt would probably cause you to rip it over your body and collapse the floor as your hands hit the ground. So, in this game, it started off by an elf turning into a thirty foot tall golem made out of the flesh of other elves. Then a player turned into a 90 foot tall flaming adamantine golem (after previously turning into a rusted and bent dagger). Then one character became the Earth and proceeded to become a supernova, one character became a giant ghost containing the souls of every dead being in existence, the adamantine golem became a ship capable of holding three billion people and warping to other dimensions, another character, through sheer force of will, stopped the supernova for five turns and created a new dimension for him to live in out of it's energy, and one character became the embodiement of physics, able to control everything (provided he rolled well). It's just that kind of game.
• Fantasy-themed BESM campaign. An evil sorcerer of nigh-godlike power is going for divine ascension, using a series of rituals that requires the sacrifice of royal blood from each of five royal houses. Having repeatedly failed to stop him due to his being ridiculously more powerful than we are, we're down to our last chance - each other ruling dynasty of the Five Kingdoms has already had one of their children kidnapped and murdered. At campaign start, before knowing anything about the plot, I'd happened to set my character's backstory as 'youngest princess of several' of the High Elven royal house... and the last remaining royal house was not Princess Avrielana's, as one of her older sisters had already been taken for the ritual. It was the royal house of the Dark Elven (surface) kingdom, bitterest enemies of the High Elves. And yet without a moment's hesitation, Avrielana uses a few Color cantrips to disguise herself as the Dark Elven princess, deliberately allows herself to be caught in the evil sorcerer's attack (to the point of surreptitiously using a stunning spell on her own royal bodyguard to prevent him from rescuing her), and willingly goes straight to the altar to die in the stead of the daughter of her house's mortal enemy... which throws the Dark Lord's apotheosis ritual entirely out of balance, as he's only sacrificed the blood of four kingdoms (and one of those twice), not five. The DM ruled that the evil sorcerer's ritual backlashed and temporarily stripped him of all magic rather than divinely ascending him, and the remainder of the party arrived just in time to turn his magic-neutralized ass into paste.
• This Troper was GMing a Deadlands campaign. The posse was unusually arcane for the average Deadlands posse, but I thought, no big deal- most of my players were new and probably wouldn't be capable of pulling off anything too wild. The first battle was a set piece against eight Walkin' Dead (smart, nasty zombies for those who don't know Deadlands).
  The preacher, who is trained mostly in medical and non-combat skills, is the first person to get a turn. He's got two double-action Peacemakers, bought mostly because the player thought he'd look cool carrying them. Double-action Peacemakers get two attacks a round per gun, so that meant he could, theoretically, get four in a turn. This is somewhat overpowered, but still, I believed, he didn't have the training or the skill, really, to use them, so I let him have them.
  So it's his first turn, and he tells me he's going to pull both guns out. Okay, make a quickdraw check- he's got them in their holsters, and it'll take two turns to get them both out and cocked unless he makes a good quickdraw roll. He's not trained in it.
  Makes the roll, easily. In hindsight, this should have been my warning.
  He tells me that he takes aim at two different zombie heads. I tell him that he's going to be taking enormous minuses, in a game where the maximum dice you can roll is a d12. He's taking -6 to hit the head, and an additional -2 on his right hand for fighting two-handed, *plus* his off-hand takes a -4 penalty. He's rolling d8s for shooting.
  In short, he basically has to make an eight with his first roll, then make at least a five with his second, to hit the zombie. And that's with his *good* hand.
  Player rolls.
  The preacher proceeds to stand up and kill three zombies with his very first attack, guns held in both hands and belching fire at two zombies, getting the third with a *miss*. He missed one zombie with his second attack from his *bad hand*, and the missed shot rules ended up meaning that he hit a third zombie in the head! Three down in one move!
  The game devolved very quickly after that. We ended up calling him the Saint of Firepower.
• Another Deadlands campaign: The posse was transporting a lockbox that turned out to contain the Monster Of The Week. When most of them had clearly figured it out, it possessed This Troper's PC (a rather large fellow) and moved him in front of itself. One of the hucksters said "I'm sorry, but you're in the way," and Soul Blasted *through* him to get at it; it survived, but the lead gunman promptly finished it off.
• This troper and friends were playing in a Macross campaign. We were on a stealth ship, basically doing recon, while the game had several moments of awesome, a few of them stand out.
  • During the investigation of a Protoculture ruin, the thing started to wake up, with most of the party on foot, and this troper's character having followed them underground in her valkyrie. The ruin was rising into the air, and she scooped the people left behind in her hand, flew through the narrow tunnels to the surface, dropped them in the shuttle, stayed behind long enough to make sure it took off, then flew back to orbit at full burn yelling the captain to fire the giant reaction weapons, which he did. She outran the fireball, only to see the big bad, who was very big, standing there annoyed before folding out. It was still awesome.
  • A few characters were rushing back to the fleet to deliver samples of our biological enemy (based on the Vajra encountered in Macross Frontier). We got there to find the fleet mostly gone and/or destroyed. One of the hulks, which held a survivor (who was replacing someone who'd been taken out) was a Macross Quarter Prototype. So, rather than rescue the guy and head back with out Fold Pods, we instead hotwire the Quarter to jump back our ship, and proceed to weld the two together to create a kind of spaceship Pyramid Head with a Quantum Reaction Cannon instead of a big knife.
  • The end of the campaign was equally awesome. Essentially fighting a Protodevlin of some kind, this troper fired reaction missiles into the swarms of enemy fighters, and eventually charged the thing, gunpod blazing, pouring hundreds of rounds into it's head. The awesome though, was reserved for our Macross Vendetta (renamed after the old ship) which, after firing the main gun and didn't quite take out the creature, proceeded to charge at it, headbutt it with the original ship covered in a barrier, and fire the heavy beam cannons into it's brain and end it. It was suitably epic.
• This troper has DMed a scene that was fairly awesome. (3.5, level 1 PCs) Well, from the PCs' point of view it might have been called "humorously pathetic." There were only a few players so the party at that comprised then of a human fighter and a halfling rogue. Thew were in, essentially, a hall of doors. About six doors in the rogue is tired of hunting for traps. In the next segment of passage is found a seven foot deep pool of clear water with a chest at the bottom. The human, being the better swimmer for some reason, took a rope and dived in. He rolled a wonderful swim check and stayed under long enough to tie the rope around the lock in the chest. Deciding he had enough air left, he motioned to the halfling to start pulling on the rope as he lifted the chest himself. As soon as the chest was moved the water began draining downward and acid began spouting from the rim filling the 'top' of the pool. Now out of air in his lungs the fighter swam through the acid, lugging an iron chest with nothing but a 28 pound halfling as help. He made it out with major burns, but with the chest. The chest contained two drowned rats and a broken wand.
  Feeling foolish, the pair headed for the next door. The rogue searched for traps again and found nothing with a roll of 17. Feeling secure they opened the door and were struck head on by a flash trap that blinded them both. The halfling stumbled back, 'into' the acid. Now both temporarily blind the fighter had to take the rope, throw it to the halfling and pull him out. With rather good rolls they managed it. Now both having severe acid burns they lay next to the churning vat recovering . A minute or so later, the next session actually, There were more players and their PCs showed up. A wizard and a sorceress came upon two heavily burned men lying next to a vat of acid mildly dazed. It took a lot of explaining...
• During a Sci-Fi Epic Anime d20 Campaign our party recently acheived the best moment I have ever experienced while playing an RPG. I will quote from our session summary:
  "The PCs face off against the second form of the seemingly-invincible Sovereign. However, in a last minute stroke of collective genius, they come up with the most fearsome weapon ever devised:
  WARP-ACCELERATED HELLISH ACIDIC MECH-ASSISTED TEMPORALLY-ACCELERATED SINGULARITY-DRIVEN PHASING IMPROVISED SHIELD-PENETRATING BOMBARDING IONIC HELLSPIKE 2.0 ANTI-DEITY CANNON!
  19-20 Crit range
  Ignores armor and force fields
  3d4 + 60d6 + 24d8 + 6d10 + 5d12 + 10d20 damage"
  • Thanks to judicious use of the Divine Relationship attribute we got a CRIT. We were in the half destroyed enemy flagship in a giant space battle. The RECOIL of the weapon shattered the remnants of the ship, and in addition to destroying the target, destroyed 6 allied and 60 enemy ships.
    • This other troper would like to expand on that. That atttack did on average 496 damage. On a crit, it'd do double damage. The amount of damage needed to destroy the Earth is 360 points; if they did about 1000, the logarithmic scale Anime d20 uses would mean they should have caused a crack in our solar system (or maybe this one and a few neighboring ones, I'm not sure on the math).
• In the final battle of the same campaign, this acheivement was outdone, as we all used our final attacks to take down the Big Bad. One character channeled the souls of the 54 trillion people whose deaths the Big Bad had caused, one used the most powerful spells in the universe on him, one nuked him by splitting his own atoms, and one erased his own soul from existence to power his final attack. This troper's character basically took on the spirit of Large Ham Hot Bloodedness; chanelling Domon Kasshu, Kamina, and Sanger Sonvolt; and made a hole in the Big Bad's chest with his very Humongous Mecha's final attack while playing this song and giving this speech:
  This drill glows with an awesome power!
  It's burning point pierces the heavens, smites evil, and tells me to defeat you!
  Steel is my body, and fire is my blood!
  Take this! My world, my faith, and all of my pain!
  Reduce all creation to ashes!
  SHINING VALLETAN PLASMA DRILL IMPAAAACT!
  Justicebringer, Carmelo Pavletic, MOKUHYO KCHUSEIRYU!
  • This was followed by all the gods of good in the universe simultaneously shooting the Big Bad in the head.
• This troper's managed to GM one of these combined with a Crowning Moment Of Funny in the first session of his Maid: the RPG campaign. One of the player characters was sent out to get the laundry off the line. This was interrupted by a large steam-powered robot ramming its way through the hedge and running through the clothesline, taking that player's spare uniform with it. She gave chase and managed to divert it off course with a book thrown at its head. Managing to stop it a few feet from the stables, another player (who'd just finished rolling up his character) decided to help by throwing a grenade in front of it to make a crater it would roll into. One failed roll later, the grenade caromed off a rock and landed right underneath the now-dormant robot. The first player managed to get off just before it exploded, rolling against her worst stat (Luck). Cue two fighting maids, one dead robot, and one seriously pissed-off gardener.
• This troper once had a private investigator character throughout a Call of Cthulhu campaign. Once adventure, set in Fascist Italy, went a bit tits up and the party were forced to evacuate and get out of the country. We were chased by the police through a hotel and our only escape was through the kitchens. We got there, only to find armed guards on the otherside blocking the exit. I asked the gamesmaster if there were any food trolleys about. The GM got me to roll for luck, which I passed, and said there was. I requested that I jump onto the trolley, using the force of my jump to propel towards the exit whilst firing off shots at the guards. The GM made me do a series of rolls to 1) ensure I jumped on the trolley successfully 2) had enough momentum to propel it 3) didn't get hit by the guards 4) prevent the trolley from crashing. I made every single roll. The GM was so impressed with this he ruled that my character could have restored some much needed sanity points.
• This troper, GMing his third d20 Modern game, gave the PCs the mission of defending a woman in an abandoned service garage. They proceeded to turn the place into a fortress, setting up tripwires, barricading doors with cannibalized scrap metal, placing razor wire, sandbags, floodlights, and all of this in a few days. At nightfall, the bad guys came, a bunch of guys in leather with katanas led by a vampire. 10 minutes later, armored soldiers with advanced weaponry and a mecha came from the other side. The resulting gun and sword battle was full of so many awesome moments, it blew our minds. One of the most noteworthy was the driver PC taking their heavily armored van, running over 8 vamp minions, and when the vampire leader jumped on the windshield and tried to break through, the driver did a quick U-turn, and crashed *through* the wall, and half of the whole place, causing massive destruction before a battle armor mech armed with a minigun that shot plasma-coated rounds into the engine, bringing it to a complete stop. Also, this troper has never imagined so many grenades being thrown.
• While GMing a Rifts campaign, I had a CMOA. A couple of my players had been complaining about my GM style and just generally making a pain of themselves. For one event (a cave collapse due to a bomb exploding on the surface) I pre-rolled a bunch of strikes and damages, trying to roll low to just make the event survivable. I gave the group the rationale for the strike from the falling ceiling, and the percentage of damage they would take if they failed their rolls. I then proceeded to tell them that they needed to beat a 12 with their dodge rolls to beat the damage. Two of the players then pitched a fit and demanded that I reroll all strikes and damages for all of them. I asked them if they were sure, of course they responded "Yes!" I proceeded to reroll all of the dice for each player. The players that didn't complain got 8, 9, 10, and 11 to beat. The two that complained got hit for Natural 20's, double damage. I then rerolled the damage, which went from 400 MDC for the original rolls, to 2400 MDC for the rerolls (Yes, I rolled maximum damage there as well). The irony of the situation had the entire group laughing at those two. The two PC's in question lived, but only after seeing their powered armor totally destroyed, their personal body armor completely smashed, and having to be dug out of several hundred tons of rock and rumble by the rest of the party before their air bubble ran out.
  • Ah, Rifts. I remember that. I remember my True Atlantean standing up to a tactical nuclear weapon, among many other CMoAs. I also remember my group (a mercenary company's leaders) taking out a Cosmic Horror (Vampire Kings in Mexico) of the setting by purchasing a Mammoth hovertank, fitting a bulldozer blade in front, and using a pair of precisely-targeted dimensional rifts to bring the Horror into a nice crater in Arizona....at which point the holy water, blessed laser cannons and magic came out to play. That was so cool.......
• In my old Traveller campaign, the players were trying to infiltrate an unstaffed Imperial research station. The place was maintained by dumb maintenance bots and guarded by security bots. After the engineer player got himself tranquilized trying to hack into the security system and the other players got shot or stuffed into a low berth, the ship doctor decided to rescue everyone. Arming himself with syringes containing a tranquilizer antidote, he walked through the entrance the demolitions expert had made earlier, injected himself with an antidote, and began poking at the "Employees Only" control panel. Soon enough, a security bot came in and shot him with a tranquilizer. He knew from the earlier encounter a maintenance bot would pick him up and put him into a low berth, but that the bot would otherwise ignore humans. He stayed limp until just before the berth hatch was closing, then jumped out. When the maintenance bot left, the doctor revived the engineer, who welded the door shut. They were able to get what they came for, revive the surviving players, and leave without significant mayhem.
• This Troper was running a campaign on a custom, loosely Final Fantasy-inspired combat system he had scripted up himself. The way the system handled equipment didn't allow for equipment to be locked to a specific slot. The natural result? Someone whose helmet, armor, footwear, and accessory were all swords. He promptly got some vital plot information just by walking into an inn while wearing all of these. And nothing else. When someone asked how this was possible, it used a lot of duct tape. He surmised it wouldn't be very comfortable to take one off when a better sword came along.
• This troper played in a d20 future campaign where the PCs had to go to a jungle planet and collect research specimens. We accidentally disturbed a Gargantuan-sized flying reptile. We split and made it to the spaceship, but it had followed us. As we tried to fly away, my Smart Hero made an improptu railgun, filled it with explosives, and fired. We didn't bother rolling for damage and we made it to 3rd level. Much high-fiving ensued.
• This troper, during a convention game (a generic commando mission to infiltrate a Russian base in Grozny for an extraction), played a heavy weapons specialist that was a walking, talking CMOA. The entire game was awe-inspiring, but the kicker was the end: As the whole mission went tits up following the betrayal of the guy we were supposed to rescue, the heavy weapon specialist had to cover his comrades and create a distraction for them while they get into the base from the back. With seven RPG 7 rockets to his name and a heavy machine gun, the character camps out on the roof of the opera house across the road from the base entrance, and lays waste to the five guard towers, the gate house and the sole tank in the base with rolling perfect criticals every round using the RPG launcher. Then he proceeded to spray down anybody that dared to move in the base, again with rolling critical after critical. All in all, he accomplished more than the four man expert combat team that did the infiltration, and without even getting within fifty yards of the base itself.
• In Exalted, the normal use of the Dragon-Blooded Charm Safety Among Enemies is to redirect an attack aimed at you into an opponent immediately adjacent to you. During the final battle of White Wolf's official Exalted online gaming chat, a player demonstrated that this Charm could also be used when fighting a behemoth. Specifically, when calling in an army's worth of Essence-powered artillery fire directly onto their own position, and then redirecting it all straight into the behemoth. Sadly, This Troper was unable to get the player's name, so This Troper hopes they see this.
• In a Traveller convention tournament, this troper equipped his character with cloth/reflec armor, and a laser rifle. The rest of the party, in battle dress and armed with gauss rifles, fared far better - the situation was not the search/rescue the Imperium patrons thought it was, but was rather an all out alien invasion. In the penultimate scene, the characters launched an assault on the invader's Elaborate Underground Base - yes, it was built in a volcano - and after much gunfire set a TDX bomb up to destroy the command and control center. As battle robots filled the area, as the party engaged in a desperate fight for their lives, the referee announced that the bomb timer had failed. There was no way to get close to the bomb; 'can we ignite the explosive with something? - we need heat!' was the players cry. At which point, this troper just grins. Another player turned to this troper right on cue and said, "Laser rifle. *Light it up*." One dead on shot later the bomb goes boom, the central base computer goes to pieces, the battle robots shut down, and the team is fleeing the base. With the command center destroyed the base - which of course has No Ontological Inertia - falls into the volcano and explodes, our heros gliding away on a commandeered air/raft. The referee then says, to a huge ovation and cheers from players and watchers both.. "And as you fly off, the base topples into the lava.... yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's a *Death Star Explosion*."
• This troper had a CMoA in a game of GURPS, in a custom Space setting. He and two of his friends were playing part of a crew of Space Pirates, captained by another friend of ours. Unfortunately, the captain had become rather... Lackluster, and the crew was staging a mutiny. The captain proceeds to stand up on a table in the mess and scream "WHO'S CREW IS THIS!?", and made a critical success, silencing thw whole room. My character then walked up behind the captain, shouted "MINE!", and proceeded to decapitate him with his bare (Robo-clawed) hands. And what's better? He still has the head, in a jar.
• Two paranoia stories:
  • 1) My (computer phreak) character got a mission to make the rest of his teammates' PD Cs play geeky music, I did this succesfully then decided to kick it up a notch and got EVERYONE in alpha complex's PDC to play Anarchy in the UK, which lead to the whole of alpha complex shutting down whilst everyone's PDC was reset. My hacking roll was so good I managed to palm off the blame onto our briefing offcer who got erased.
  • 2) Later character: Managed to get a nuclear reactor up and running on my own: there were 4 non functioning reactors one got hit by an airstrike called by another character, the other 2 went into meltdown from the other characters' actions. My character has nuclear engineering 1!
• In an RP group This Troper is a part of, in The World Of Aarn, there have been several, including one Mundane punching a bear's face off, another one finishing off the leader of a mercenary group modeled after Peter Pan with a super-strength wedgie, and yet another one riding a Hydra like a cowboy while jamming swords into its back, and a whole team of them hacking apart a creature just a step below a god. The mages have their moments too, such as a wizardess dropping out of the sky to jam a sword through a crocodile-man's skull (at the cost of breaking her own arms, no less), the same one in an earlier battle (after buffing herself with speed and strength spells) tackling and punching the crap out of a bounty hunter that had kidnapped her, one dropping an enemy wizard by hitting him with a sleep spell mid-rant, and this troper's personal favorite (totally not related to the fact it was his character), a Bard tossing three assassins off a roof with a confusion spell and a Look Behind You.
  • More recently in a fight against a very powerful vampire in an abandoned warehouse, the least combat oriented of the group got her CMOA by spending the whole battle slowly undermining the stability of the roof, until it finally collapsed, killing the vampire with a flood of sunlight.
• This troper was once a member of a gang of criminals in a LARP fantasy campaign. The group leader, a Captain Jack Frost, pirate with no ship due to being too poor to pay for repairs sustained during a storm, got a tip from an informant on a massive cache of tax money being transported with heavy escort. After stalking the group for a while it became clear that we could not take them on if we tried a hold-up. Instead, when they checked into a roadside inn, this troper's character smoothtalked the accountant meant to take care of the money into going with the group and splitting the money when the whole thing blew over. As the group is making their getaway, the guards realize what is happening and everyone makes a break for it. To avoid capture, the group splits up, leaving the money with the "Captain". He is supposed to lay low with the cash until the next morning (several in-game days) at which point the group will meet up and split the loot. Once my and the other characters show up at the designated spot, it becomes clear that he isn't going to show. Theorizing that he has run off with all the cash, the gang starts making plans to track him down - until he staggers out, drunk of his face, from a nearby bar. He had spent ALL THE COMBINED TAXINGS OF THE REGION on whores, drinks and gambling. The group bruiser loses his temper and tries to kill him, resulting in the whole group being arrested for disorderly conduct and (later) attempted robbery as he, in Jack Sparrow-like drunken brilliance, gets all of us except himself landed in jail.
• This player GMed a solo d20 Star Wars game (using Revised rules) set right after the first Death Star's destruction with Ryu Mori — a 1st-level scoundrel enforcer a low-level crime lord (let's just say he had nothing on Black Sun or its leader Xizor) — sent to contact an Imperial Army officer on Coruscant, regarding just another under-the-table business deal; well, in the wake of the unrest following the rumors/word of the Death Star's destruction, the Army is cracking down, and the scoundrel comes across an ill-disciplined squad that tries to arrest him on the spot. Said scoundrel makes a run for it, whereupon the Imperial Army gives chase... oh, we probably shouldn't have made it a combat encounter, but those Tumble checks — such as the scoundrel jumping off of an innocent bystander's back, flipping in midair, and landing with a roll through another's legs — were succeeding so beautifully that squad's incompetence became apparent to everyone watching, who then started to support him even before the squad's lack of fire discipline led to them starting to spray shots at the crowd... by the time the scoundrel had escaped, he'd inadvertently kicked off the CoCoTown Riot, disrupting Imperial attempts to keep order on Coruscant and (unknowingly) paving the way for quite a few Rebel Alliance and anti-Imperial ploys and agents to get through in the chaos he'd left in his wake.
• This Troper partakes of a Heavy Gear campaign with a party of misfits as part of a deadend unit at a deadend base, as part of the Southern MILICIA. One character, a known psychopath with the worst psyche possible, the highest combat skills in the party and also possible spy for the enemy, is literally a walking embodiment of this trope who's most recent CMOA was, in the middle of a tense hostage standoff situation that the GM had expected to take up an entire session, calmly blew a leg off the hostage with his oversized handcannon, before dropping the hostage taker.
• This troper was involved in a Mekton Zeta campaign of Invasion Terra with custom rules (more on this in a little bit). The situation is not looking good for the Terran military, and our squad (several pilots of differing specialties and myself, the mechanic) are making our way to the very last shuttle. However, one turn before we get there, a stray shot by the invading mecha rips off the top. However, my character specialized in jury rig, and the way it was explained by my GM was as such: Duct tape. There is always duct tape. In this situation, I immediately run into the shuttle and declare, "I reach into the compartment and grab some duct tape..." Several VERY lucky rolls later, the GM has deemed that the shuttle's new duct tape roof meant the shuttle was good to go. At least at the time, this coincided with Rule Of Funny.
• The Maid RPG game that I am currently G Ming had one recently, when one maid took it upon herself to negotiate with death over tea. One of the group members is an illegitimate heir, whom the reaper had come to collect. However, being the nice maid she was, she decided to make the grim reaper tea, and politely asked him not to kill her. When he responded that it wouldn't be possible, she traded him ANOTHER maid and half her life for the heir's safety. It's a bit more awesome when you realise they then took a vacation to the netherworld to bring her back.
• My friend Evan is about the biggest Halo nut around, and so formulated a home-brew RPG with a Halo theme. In one situation, we were in the hold of a cargo ship faced with four Hunters at one end, six Brutes at the other, and a massively powerful Brute Chieftain in between. The plan was to duck tape four grenades together into a cluster and lob it behind the Hunters. They would be blown across the ship to land in the midst of the Brutes, where another player would use a missile pod to blast the lot to Narnia before the Chieftain knew what happened. Chaos then ensued when I botched the grenade roll, bounced it off the ceiling, and stuck it to the head of the Chieftain. It detonated, he shruged it off, and went into invincible bloodlust mode. At this point, he was only vulnerable around his head, so we formed a suicide plan to springboard off of a Hunter onto the Chieftain's back and, using a shotgun, paint the wall with his brains. But then, in his rage, he went and toppled several large crates on top of himself. it was the that our Elite character named Zaphod walked up to point-blank range with a needler and a resolve to empty the clip. He let out a Battle cry and rolled... a natural 20. The look on Evan's face was both priceless and hilarious. Basically, the first few rounds punched through the Chieftain's helmet and split his head open. The remainder of the highly explosive crytals the burrowed into his brain, out through his face, and detonated.
• In a Deadlands game I was in some time ago, one of the other players was playing a mad scientist with a lightning gun. This was a powerful gun that had the drawback of needing a few rounds of charging up via a manual pump-action part on the barrel. Being the kind of players we are, we noticed the potential for Double Entendre immediately, but the crowning moment came about halfway through the game when the scientist declared his first action of a combat would be "I charge at them, pumping my weapon furiously". Cue non-stop double entendres and masturbation jokes from all the players for the duration of the combat, and putting ourselves and the GM out of action due to laughter for about five minutes afterwards. In one case this was almost literal, as we discovered that one of the players had a breathing problem that causes his throat to seal up if he laughs too hard... Whoops. He Got Better.
  • Same group, new game. It was 7thSea, and the player of the above mad scientist was now one of two Knights of the Rose and Cross in the group. We were on a jungle island being hunted by a pirate crew, and had gotten separated. A large group of about ten to fifteen of them found said player on his own, whereupon he launched into an epic speech about how they were surrounded by an entire host of Knights, but if they dropped their weapons and left they could live. He aced his oratory (or in his words, Speak Unbelievable Bullshit) roll with many exploding dice, and they dropped their swords and ran back to their ship. Halfway down they met the other Knight, who was in their path by sheer coincidence. He didn't have time to run away himself before the pirates screamed in terror and fled in a disorganised mess away from him. We met up, stole the pirate ship, and as we were sailing away, he made another huge roll and shot the pirate captain in the face with a cannonball.
• Several in a HERO system super-hero game setting. Homebrew, not Champions
  • The characters are on an alien prison ship and have made a deal with the alien invaders that they'd stop the invisible, incorporeal serial killer with the resurrection-preventing death touch power if the aliens gave them a way back to Earth. They've got the killer cornered by reducing the oxygen flow in the ship and taking to space suits, but now they've found that his invisibility and insubstantial powers don't shut off when he's unconscious. However, his desolidification is vulnerable to being affected by dimensional powers, my character's superstrength is based on dimensional shifting and weight cancelation. To this point she's been seen as a rather naive but useful member of what is essentially a super-powered black ops team. She drags the killer by the leg to the outer wall of the ship and tosses his immaterial body through the wall of the ship. Killer dies in vacuum (at least until he makes planet fall on a viable planet and his resurrection brings him back). Party interrupted in discussions of what to do gawk at her.
  summoner: You don't get to complain about the rest of us killing people anymore.
  My Phase-Brick: What? He'll come back to life...a thousand years from now...or whenever he makes planet fall.
• Rifts seems made for CMO As. This troper remembers several from his brief stint playing Rifts:
  • First with his Summoner/Endbringer who found gainful employment as a bounty hunter in Tolkeen. His first job was to take care of a guy who'd been hastling the patrons of a bar called the Purple Dinosaur. He tracked the guy down, found out he was the right guy for sure, then walked over to the demonic monster that was his main combat weapon saying "bring me his head." The demon walked up to the guy, grabbed the top of his head, and pulled, coming away with a head and full spinal cord. William walked over, grabbed the end of the spinal cord and slung it over his back, heading back to the bar. He presented the head to the owners (who had specifically requested it) saying "sorry I couldn't find a silver platter."
  • Then there was playing T2 Rampage...
    • He entered the game as Tolkeen was being attacked by a demon lord of immense size, entering the city because he knew he'd get to do some killing. I had to occasionally roll to see if he got preoccupied with torturing the lesser demons flying around, and actually failed a couple times, so for a little while he was sitting in the streets of Tolkeen, cutting demons into one inch cubes with an energon dagger.
    • The party psion spotted a miniscule weakspot on the Demon Lord's forehead, and proceded to snipe it, causing his head to blow apart and render him helpless for a turn or so. Rampage, lacking mystic senses, couldn't see it for himself, but was able to pinpoint the exact spot the bullet had hit and started sniping it himself with a plasma missile launcher until the city mages could get the imprisonment ritual off.
    • Once the demon lord got sealed away, the city looked around, and hailed Rampage as their hero. (yes, ''that'' Rampage. We decided the root of Rampage's psychotic hatred of, well, everyone, was ostracization, and so being hailed as a hero allowed him to actually associate with people.
    • He decided he wanted to attend the memoral service of the mages who'd perished in that battle, it was decided between the GM and I that he would do so in a suit and yamulka.
    • Rampage's main weapon was a Missile Launcher, loaded with plasma missiles, and capable of launching 12 missiles before needing to be reloaded, which was done by nanites in a single turn. He was capable of dealing between 240 and 2040 mega damage (figure each point is sufficient to completely vaporize a rabbit) every other turn. He once used this capability as a threat against a civilization of intelligent canines that inhabited a cave structure known to hold valuable arcane crystals. His threat was something along the lines of "Go ahead, resist, I'll turn this valley into glass and make your species extinct."
  • Finally, there was Baphomet, an anthropomorphic goat engineered by the Coalition States. He escaped and had a big chip on his shoulder regarding the dead boys. So, when the villiage he was living in had to pack up and move because the CS was expanding, he wasn't particularly happy. When the caravan got stopped by four or five CS scouts, he was a bit upset. When broadkil created a diversion by opening fire on the meeting of scouts and the heads of the villiage, and a giant gun popped out the big caravan truck, he was thrilled. He ran into the truck and unseated the operator of the gun who was shooting at the broadkil shouting something along the lines of "Fuck the broadkil, there's deadboys!" and turned the gun on the scouts. He managed to take out a couple before the scouts drove off the broadkil and ordered everyone out of the truck. Baphomet refused, so the scouts had to enter the cramped conditions of the truck interior. Baphomet drew the only two MDC weapons he was allowed to start with: a vibro-knife and vibro-sword. He killed the first scout in one hit, critting him. It was ruled he was able to work the blade under the chest piece and bypass the scout's armour. The second scout was more of a fight, but the cramped conditions favoured my melee, and the second scout was dispatched easily. The final scout, sensibly, remained in the doorway and simply leveled a gun at Baphomet. This is when the Harvest Moon farmer showed up. The Harvest Moon farmer's player rolled high enough on physical strength to do mega damage with his unarmed attacks. He kicked the Deadboy in the knee, not only distracting him, but breaking his knee. The distraction allowed Baphomet to finish him quickly. One session into a "No MDC to start" game, and I had four or five sets of MDC armour, along with an equal number of longarms and pistols, each, all MDC.
  • Having learned early that the easiest way to make money in Tolkeen was to become a bounty hunter, Baphomet quickly became one, and his first job was to take care of a problem customer at a bar. When he arrived, the target was in the bar, and Baphomet persuaded him to take the fight outside. Once outside, the target drew firey whips from tattoos on his arms and began to fourish them. Baphomet drew an MDC pistol and shot him in the head.
  • Baphomet then sought employ in the "grimdark evil magic" section, The Black District, and was tasked, as a test, to kill a mechanic. After a botched attempt at poisoning (more not wanting it to be obvious he had just tried to kill the guy at party HQ) landed the target in a hospital, the Client told him "Forget it, you fucked up, I don't give second chances." Baphomet was not deterred. He broke into the hospital. Aided by conviently manifesting psionic powers (he was a latent master psion), he Machine Ghosted past the locks and found the target's room. He got up there and found a guard had been posted, so he focused a moment, and manifested Ectoplasmic Tendrils, snaked them under the door, picked up a crutch, and beat the guard (and receptionist) unconscious with his floating crutch and stashed them under the desk. He then slipped into the hospital room and plunged a vibro-knife into the target's chest. He then stuffed a few sheets and blankets into the wound to stem bleeding, picked up the body and high-tailed it to the Black District, where his client was waiting for him. Baphomet was paid and informed he got the job, and advised to find different clothing. Baphomet now looked down and realized his clothing was soaked in blood, so he broke into a nearby clothing store, setting off an alarm and alerting police. He grabbed some clothes and ran off down the alleys, chased by a couple police the whole time. He came to cross section and the old "lose em by making them think I went another way" actually worked, allowing him to change his clothes and return home.
    • The next day a detective came out, saying that a man outside the hospital ID'd Baphomet at the hospital and wanted to ask him some questions about what he'd seen. I did not lie, I merely used third person narration and carefully chosen pronouns to avoid admitting guilt.
• This troper's ronin from Legend Of The Five Rings, Kurinto, went through Half A Session Of Awesome. During the ritual that was interrupted by a bunch of mahotsukai, he chased a ninja that stole the artifact, jumped off a cliff after her (and the cliff itself was falling apart!), clocked the ninja really hard, killed another one with the retrieved (and Tainted) artifact, succeeded on three saving rolls against the Taint and rode to the castle to get reinforcements. And he did all that wearing only a sumo-style loincloth.
• This Troper was in a fantasy-setting BESM campaign for almost an entire year before it ended. Our GM was using a rule-set that made Dynamic Sorcery a lot more modular and accessible. You could build a character with it, but they wouldn't know that they had it until our GM decided. My character spent the entire campaign dead last in terms of pure damage dealing potential, while another character, Kunai, would frequently deal tens of thousands of damage in one shot. We reached the last session with this setup, with me having to take an extremely powerful Item of Power just to keep up with the second-weakest character. When I finally brought it up in the form of asking him to "throw me a freaking bone," he said "All right, sure. Whatever." During the first fight of the session, I spent my first turn casting enhancements on myself, the most notable of which allowed me to attack six times per turn. I attacked on my second turn. Immediately after, there was an in-chat silence of about thirty seconds. After that, our GM said "I think he just beat Kunai for damage."
• A crowning moment of oratory from an 'Avengers: The Next Generation' play-by-post campaign. The reformed Avengers have just started their first press conference, and Cinnabar (daughter of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch), who doesn't deal well with emotions or speechmaking, just got hit with a particularly harsh question from the smarmiest git of a reporter imaginable. Her teammate Kolbrandr the Brave (son of Balder and Karnilla the Norn Queen) decides to jump in, and unleashed an inspiring speech of such magnitude that the resulting standing ovation not only crushed the reporter into nothing, but ended the press conference.
  Reporter: This is a question for Cinnabar. But I'd also like to throw it open to any and all the other new Avengers to hear their take on the matter. Cinnabar, your father's death was a terrible blow — not just to you personally, but to the other heroes around the country, and to the nation as a whole. But his death brought home an important (and often overlooked) truth about superheroic activities — that sometimes the good guys don't win. Can you share with us your feelings on this dangerous, potentially deadly job you're about to take on? "
  Kolbandr: Unseemly sir. Unseemly. I do not speak of so overly grim and wounding a question on a day of revels, but rather, thy implication on valour. On sacrifice. "sometimes the good guys don't win"? I say thee nay, nay a thousand times! Every moment of the Vision's life and death was triumph, was victory. Hast thou not taken notice that for every hero, there rampages a whole gallery of villains? That in the history of the champions of Midgard, it is often the appearance of such vileness that brings forth warriors to oppose it, despite the treacher words of the virtueless that imply the opposite?
  
  It is the burden all men bear that there is as much baseness in their souls as there is sterling nobility, and all too many are lured in by the easy temptations of their darker selves. And yet the Vision, though made in darkness, with the mind and soul of a man he embraced virtue. And yet the Vision stood with his fellows as exemplar shining, proclaiming to the world that we can be that better part of ourselves. That we can stand against evil, though it seem about us as the endless sea.
  
  And thou dares't.. thou dares't to say that his death had greater power to hurt us, than his life had to teach us? To enoble us? Little wonder that Cinnabar should not respond to thy words, to hear them is to be enraged at the apparent failure on thy part to have let his heroism reach thee.
  
  To judge the measure of a man by tragedy, is easy. Evil, is easy. To rise to the good in us, to be the people we should be, is so hard that it should be seen as the peerless miracle and true wonder of this earth that we so rise. It can be so fragile a grace that without those to show us it can be done, we would be lost.
  
  From his life to his death, the Vision spent nearly every moment so showing. There are heroes now because of it. There are heroes standing before you because of it. The Vision did his part to ensure that good would not pass from this world to let evil stand unchallenged. The blow his death dealt? To the very last, he has given us strength that helps us stand unbowed! Is that not a worthy life? Is that not a worthy death? How can any man dare to rob him of that legacy in how he is remembered? The true dolorous stroke would be to forget that. The true dolorous stroke would be to let his memory stand not for strength, but sorrow.
  
  It is the doom of the valiant to so rarely leave this world peacefully. But it is their greatest gift to leave it inspired to greater bravery and virtue of spirit still. From the most mortal of local constables to the most cosmic of titans, that is the best of what their heroism gives us. In ever continuing that legacy, in ever rising to the challenge of nobility, in the spite of pain, of trauma, of tragedy, or even at times the world itself, the.. good guys.. always win. The fight itself, is victory.
  
  It is that, as Avengers, that is the most worthy of the tasks before us that we swear ourselves to. To be the heroes of today. To inspire the heroes of tomorrow. To show always, in life or death, sadness or glory, that we will e'er battle to keep goodness in this world, that so long as we have ensured that there are souls about us fired to embrace their own virtue, it will not matter if or when we pass from this world. We will have won. Let that be what thou commemorate. Let that pledge be what drives us to celebrate this day. Let us as one roar challenge into the fetid sea of evil and send it blasted back, tremulous and craven. So says the son of Balder!"
• This troper played a campaign that involved going across all sorts of anime and game worlds. During the early-morning assault on the enemy fortress, our party was flying down a corridor at around 90 miles per hour. It was then that we saw the campaign's Dragons.

• This troper was playing Torg and had stumbled upon the Ark of the Covenant at about the same time as the principal bad guy, a 5000-year-old vampire elder, turned up. The character was a bit of a holy Joe although there was no official "cleric" class in the campaign, and he did the "Avaunt, foul spawn of darkness!" routine on the vamp, rolled an insanely high number, and watched as the bad guy stepped back a pace, and put out a hand to steady himself... on the Ark. What happened next was straight out of the final reel of "Raiders" and there wasn't enough vampire dust left at the end of it to fill a teaspoon.
• Mekton Zeta game: Jovian Chronicles setting, Odyssey 2210 Campaign. The P Cs are attempting to retrieve a defecting scientist, and make first contact with him at a costume ball. One of them, being a fan of Gundam Wing, decides to dress his character up as Zechs Merquise. Anyway, things go to hell, and when they get back to their room, there is the scientist, and a couple of Jovian Intelligence Service agents with bullet wounds in their bodies. . . and Station Security shows up, believing that "terrorists" are "kidnapping" a prominent citizen. Given that these were cops doing their jobs, the P Cs decide to take them down nonlethally. The last cop sneers through his teeth at them. "Fucking terrorists!" Said PC calmly raises his stunner, says, "We're not terrorists. . . we're from the Sanc Kingdom," and KO's the guard.
  • Hell, said PC's role in the campaign basically was a running CMOA. Other feats included: leaping into his Mek wearing a Tuxedo (he'd just gotten back from a formal dinner) and fighting space pirates while dressed like James Bond; finding a bomb planted in his cockpit and hurling his entire ejection seat out of the mek when he realized he couldn't disarm it, then fighting the entire Mek battle with a severe penalty for no acceration couch, and (my personal favorite) the supreme overkill award for wiping out half a squad of powered armor troopers with a single blast from his overkill cannon by catching them as they were running to their suits.
  • Another Mekton Zeta game in a space opera setting had another, equally awesome CMOA from a different player: as the Evil Minions of the Evil Overlord stormed the bridge of their starship, one of them hit one of the Bridge Bunnies with the butt of his rifle to "quiet her down," after she tried to struggle with them. In comes the Evil Lieutenant with his long, sweeping cloak and sneering grin, who looks at one of the P Cs and declares, "He's the one the boss wants. . . take him alive and unharmed." Said PC then says, "You need me unharmed, huh?" and walks straight up to the guard who hit the Bridge Bunny and punches him in the face as hard as he can. Evil Lieutenant does a slow clap. "You get that one for free," he says. After that, the PC surrenders with no further resistance.
    
    *This troper played with a few friends in a 'custom game' the GM ws trying to make with other tabletop rules mixed together with his own abilities/classes and some of the normal ones from Dn D thrown in for good measure. as a 'present' we got to make our own classes and 'abilities' so long as we let it through him for balancing. So we had a "Broken Soul-dier" (a tank with Voldemort-like abilities on his own soul and mainly negative buffs to the enemy), A Bow Dasher (Fires arrows marked with magic that allow him to teleport to whatever the arrow hit and strike fast and hard), a rather generic healer with a few changes, and me the Void Mage (mainly an anti-spellcaster who could neutralize spells but with a few other obvious tricks).
  • The crowning moments all came in one battle funnily enough, against some strange necromancer and some sort of flesh monstrosity that he had risen from the grave. The GM refused to tell us their abilities saying he'd rather it be a 'surprise'.
  • The Bow Dasher went first, shooting at the necromancer. But the flesh monstrosity always knew when his master was in danger and moved to intercept, the arrow simply snapped and the magic on the arrow dispelled. The Broken Soul-dier charged forward to do battle while I waited to counter any spell the necromancer threw. So I was rather surprised by the 'spell of opportunity' that came from the flesh creature, which the flesh (as it turns out it was magically enhanced to be far stronger, as shown by the arrow before), burrowed part of himself underground without anyone noticing and engulfed me, giving the necromancer enough time to start casting a spell, the Broken Soul-dier quickly went down, despite the healer's efforts. The flesh creature had godly damage.
  • So we were all forced back, while the creature simply charged forward, first heading for the Bow Dasher, meanwhile the necromancer headed for the corpse of the Soul-dier to raise it to assist him.
  • The broken soul-dier requested from the healer to heal his wounds. A bit confused considering even with wounds healed he would still be dead, the healer complied anyway. Then he reminded people of what had happened at the start. On the first level he had split his soul in two. But since he had nothing to store it in, he had left it to lay 'dormant' in his body. So with the wounds healed, the necromancer didn't stand a chance with the one attack of opportunity of the rising Soul-dier that cut him in half before the flesh creature knew there was a danger. The creature charged at the soul-dier, already godly power higher with rage. The Bow Dasher took aim, and fired... at the Soul-dier.
  • Then he used his ability to teleport in and they teamed up to try and take down the creature, with us two at support. After we won it became interesting that the dormant soul was rather bitter at what had happened with him being forced to la dormant all that time, and we actually had to work together to restrain him after. What a way to end...
• In an [[Exalted]] game my small, rather mismatched bunch of Dragonblooded stormed Melfeas (Hell, basicly) itself and rescued the Scarlett Empress from the Ebon Dragon's tower, managing to kill two Infernals, one Second Circle demon and literally hundreds of First Circle demons in the process. Then left in a giant fying ship. OK, Solars do that kind of cra a lot. We were Dragonblooded.
• WAAAAAAAAAAAY back in 1989, one of my pledge brothers introduced my to the RPG version of Top Gun. Apparently, he was very good at the game... Anyway, as we're playing, we end up in the air in our jets, going head to head, and we both go to guns. I rolled a seven - no damage to my plane. He rolls a twelve - pilot killed. OWNED by a newbie. It was my first time playing that game, and my last, because he never brought it out again, mo matter how many times I asked. Of course, I never let him forget it...