Funny / Knights of the Dinner Table

• The fact that in the KODT-verse, all gaming, especially Hack Master, is Serious Business. VERY Serious Business.
• The entire Garycon D-Day Arc, which overlaps with Crowning Moment of Awesome.
  • The laughter begins when the various gamers arrive for a HackMaster event, only for Nitro to inform them that they've been 'drafted' for a D-Day style LARP. And by drafted, we mean A) duped, since Nitro had planned this for a while, and falsely advertised it as a HackMaster event to ensure a large number of players, and B) conscripted, since all the hall doors have been locked and guards placed to prevent escape.
  • Later, during said D-day LARP, LV-202 (containing Dave, B.A, Brian, Tank, and Sheila) develops 'engine trouble' - a plan by Sheila to try and survive the assault. However, LV-145 (containing Bob, Pete, Stevil, Newt, and Chad) notices, and tries to contact about what's wrong. Bob eventually resorts to using a provided toy flare gun, only for said flare gun to be real... LV-202, after realizing it was LV-145 that just 'shot' at them, think they're roleplaying traitors/Nazis in disguise/Fifth Columnists etc., and attack them. This then leads to the other LVs joining in, many of them believing that the fight is a 'curveball' thrown in by Nitro. The final result is that when Nitro leaves his 'Command Centre' to observe his troops, he is met with this...
  • Finally, just as Nitro seems to have managed to salvage the event, an army of Stormtroopers, led by one 'Ivan', shows up and kicks them out of the convention centre.
• At one point Bob's Dad bans Bob from playing Hack Master. After a few missed games, he finally makes it to the gaming table. How? He tells his Dad he's attending Dave's funeral.
  • After a few weeks of various excuses, Bob turns up at a game in a Grease-Monkey's overalls. It turns out that his Dad spotted Dave at the Mall, making him suspicious. So when Bob makes his next excuse—that he has a job at a Motorbike repair shop—his Dad shadows him from a distance. This forces Bob to go to the repair shop, and when his Dad continues to shadow him, he has to put on some spare overalls and pretend to be working there.
  Dave: Uh... didn't anyone notice you?
  Bob: Hell yes they noticed me! They almost killed me! I had to hide in a grease rag hamper until I could make a break for it!
• One of their first adventures (prior to Sara joining them) sees the Knights attack a Gazebo. They have apparently also attacked a green Davenport. In both cases B.A. 'didn't have the heart to tell them' the truth.
  • Later on, they're replaying (with Sara) an old adventure, and upon remembering the last time they played it, Dave, Bob, and Brian start arguing over who killed a Snow Golem. In reality it was a Lawn Jockey. Once again B.A. didn't have the heart to tell them.
• Wherever You Go - There You Are: a gaming session with a complex dungeon means that someone has to be doing 'Mapping'. In the end Dave does/is made to do it. Unfortunately Dave's mapping skills are so atrocious that the Knights soon find that the dungeon isn't riddled with spiked pit traps, but that they've been going round in circles and repeatedly falling into the same pit.
• The Wonderful Garycon Adventure: B.A. convinces the knights to attend Garycon '94, with part of his argument being that 'it sure as hell beats sitting around this stupid table and playing games'. After a 72 hour drive to get there, guess what they end up doing...
  B.A.: What? What are you guys looking at me like that for? What?
• B.A. testing Weird Pete's Fireball Generator. Poor Dave.
• As a result of the Knights constantly derailing the planned adventure, poor B.A. has ended up wasting dollar after dollar on gaming material. One wonders why he bothers planning sessions at all. And if he complains about his money being wasted?
  Bob: Ninety (replace 'ninety' with number of your choice) Bucks! He got screwed!
  • The previous quote is from one of B.A.'s first attempts to start a long-running campaign, only to have it destroyed by the Untouchable Trio's relentless hack-and-slashing. Before the game even starts, Bob and Dave object that all the emphasis on orc culture and languages in the "Orcs at the Gates" module (on which B.A. spent $89.99) suggest "parley and talk instead of hacking". The scenario is quickly derailed when Bob decides to cop an attitude about bowing to the local king and Dave follows his lead. After the players trash the throne room and attempt to pawn the king's crown and scepter locally, Dave complains "We didn't run into a single damn Orc!"
• A common occurrence in gaming sessions is that whenever B.A. tries to railroad the Knights towards the actual planned adventure, Dave, Bob and Brian assume it to mean that he's trying to keep them away from something valuable and/or worthwhile.
  • A good example of this is 'The Cows Of War'. When B.A. reads some flavour text which mentions a cow, the Knights decide to investigate it, with Dave taking point. B.A. keeps telling them that it is an ordinary cow, but Dave just won't listen, going as far as to cast a Detect Magic spell on the cow. B.A., in a moment of annoyance, sarcastically says that it is a magic cow. Naturally, this results in Dave keeping the cow (which he names Chelsie) for several issues as his steed.
  B.A.: You know, I never see it coming. No matter how many times they do it to me, I never see it coming. *Sigh*.
  • It's not just B.A. that suffers from this. A session run by Sara involving an adventure at 'Lonely Castle' sees the Knights heading off in completely the opposite direction, and never even reach the castle before Sara gives up and quits the game.
• Although warned by Weird Pete that it can be addictive, B.A. introduces the Knights to Spell-Jacked, a collectible card game. After six weeks, it has not only become an addiction, but turned into an all-out war.
  Bob: This is your last chance B.A.! Hand over the balance of the group treasury and there'll be no blood spilled!
• Take any gaming session involving the Knights being themselves, and 9 times out of 10 poor Sara is left watching the madness unfold before her.
• The Great Revolt: complaints about B.A. wearing the title of 'Gamemaster' like 'it was a badge or something' leads to the Knights (and for once, this includes Sara) discussing renaming him as 'Game Trustee' and forming a group to veto any decision by the GM.
  B.A.: My worst fears have come true! My players have Unionized!!
• Johnny Kizinski, a former member of the Knights from the time that Dave joined, leaves HackMaster after an extreme streak of bad luck at Garycon '91. Or at least that is what his official profile says.....
  Sara: Wasn't Johnny the guy who put superglue on all the toilet seats at that convention? I don't think bad luck had anything to do with it...
• At a Hackcon, Nitro makes the mistake of touching Bob's dice. The first time he is warned. The second time? Well, according to Dave it took three members of Hotel Security and pepper spray to get Bob off an unconscious Nitro.
  Dave: You should have seen it. Ol' Bob was like a rabid Pit Bull! It was awesome!
  • Unfortunately for Bob, Nitro later gets his revenge by a fake letter which invites Bob to a HackMaster LARP session, which Brian, Dave, and B.A. also attend. In reality they are sent to Hawg Waller's, a bikers' bar, where their attempts at LARPing see them getting very badly injured....
    • The cherry on the cake? The four of them never suspect that they were tricked. They still believe it was a LARP adventure.
    • In a later strip, we find that, while it's unclear if the Knights even worked out the truth or not, they look back on the 'adventure' as enjoyable. Bob certainly does, much to Nitro's displeasure.
• 'Hell Hath No Fury': After finding out the truth regarding Troy's Boys, Sara returns to the group, only for their next adventure to be the festival-based one Troy's Boys were playing, where women were supposedly banned from the event. Upon finding out that it is actually farm animals that are banned, Sara reacts to the situation like a true Knight would:
  Sara: I WASTE HIM WITH MY LONGBOW!
  • Made extra funny by the fact that up to that point, the Untouchable Trio had actually been acting like role-players. The moment Sara shouts out the above sentence, they quickly return to the bloodthirsty Hack-&-Slashers we know and love.
• The Vampire LARP Arc sees Bob and Dave with weird new hairstyles that look good with their vampire costumes. Without them: not so much...
  Dave: I was at the Quicky Mart today and some jerk called me Squiggy!
  Bob: I don't know what you're complaining about. I look like Bozo the Clown on crack!
• In one of the Dragon Magazine strips, Dave has to create a new character, but ticked off from the death of his previous character refuses to give the new one a name. Brian and Bob try to force him to name the character by calling him "Monkey Boy" until he agrees to name his character — only for Dave to draw an ankh on a piece of paper and declare the following:
  "The first-level fighter formerly known as 'The Man With No Name' and irreverently referred to in certain circles as 'Monkey Boy'... will now be known by this symbol! I'll make a copy for each of you so you can hold it up when you are addressing my character!!"
  • This is followed by B.A. finally having had enough, and making his own declaration:
  "Will the character formerly known as 'The Man With No Name' and now associated with this symbol please be advised that he has inexplicably attracted the unbridled wrath of the gawds and has just turned into a newt!!"
• From the Java Joint spin-off: Eddie has been taking a new course in speed reading, and in one week he's managed to read the entire Gor series, the Crown of Stars series, the books of Dan Simmons... and his sister's teenage diary, which he came across while fetching the Gor novels from his parents' attic. Unfortunately, using the flawed speed-reading technique, Eddie has gotten the series mixed up in his head, to the point where he thinks that the third volume of Crown of Stars is about his sister joining the Gorean slave girls.
• Another Java Joint strip has Sara, rather sick of the current boom of vampire books and paranormal romances, suggest to a much more vampire-positive Eddie that he could take any book at all and change the main character into a vampire. Next week, both Eddie and Patty have tried the experiment and found that they really enjoy doing it. Eddie is planning on doing the same to all the books in his library and Patty even admits that she tried it with Atlas Shrugged and read it in one sitting.
  Eddie: I'm telling you, everything's better with vampires.
  Patty: I think we've hit upon some elemental literary truth here.
  Sara: (head on table in a deafeated postion) What, the American reading public is a mindless beast?
• In what started as an Awesome moment, Bob's character in Brian's Cattle-Punk Campaign has not only pulled off a series of plays that will see his character all but guaranteed to become top dog, but also managed to kill the Knights' nemesis Red Gurdy Perkins. All Bob needs to do is shoot himself as part of his cover story on how Red died... he ends up rolling a 1, and his character accidentally kills himself.
• Sometimes the same rules that let the Knights get away with so many of their antics works against them:
  Dave: Sorry Bob. You're dead!!
  Bob: Dead??!! From a nose bleed?
  B.A.: Well, you were down to one hit-point.
• The sheer level of detail some characters put into a plan make sense when you realise how easily things can go wrong (or the GM can mess with them) without such detail:
  Bob: We were making a charge. Where the hell'd you go?
  Dave: Hey, it's not my fault. You didn't tell me which direction we were charging in.