Your Funniest Tabletop Story

In a Dark Heresy game last year, we were off to rescue an Eldar officer of some kind (It Makes Sense in Context) from some heretic guys. We figured out the room he was in, so my gunslinging assassin burst in Bolt Pistols blazing.

There were ah... a few more heretics than I had anticipated.

To make matters worse after the ensuing violence the party decided to test out some Xenotech healing drugs on my character, rather than finding a medic. As a result my face became scaled and my eyes became lidless and larger than their sockets. I had to wear a variety of ill-fitting helmets and cloths with holes cut in for the next three sessions so that I wouldn't get purged.

During one of these sessions, we were in a sewer, fighting sewer monsters. We had been fighting in close-quarters to avoid setting off the gasses that had collected. So some idiot decided he needed a smoke.
Whilst everyone was diving for cover from the fireball, I had been near the centre and the only thing my character thought to do was put his hands to his eyes. Cue a screaming burning man grasping enormous eyeballs streaking through the sewers.

I was reminded of this incident, from a campaign about a year and a half ago. The party was on a large ship, powered in part by several elementals. On the ship was a forge, with a rather powerful fire elemental, and one member of the party had been pestering the fire elemental and getting slightly singed in the process. A day or two after this, still before we reached port, the ship was suddenly attacked by some aquatic creatures, and the first couple of rounds were going very badly for the party. So, the barbarian who'd been pestering the fire elemental got the brilliant idea to utterly and completely piss it off, by picking up one of the smaller anvils and smacking the elemental in the face with it. This resulted in a massive gout of fire blasting across the surface of half the ship - causing damage to most of the party but also completely wiping out over half our enemies.

Sit for a little while, my children, and I shall tell you the story of Borsk, the worst Jedi ever. Borsk's player was a newcomer to roleplaying and he did not have much knowledge of the Star Wars setting, aside from having watched the movies. He was also a bit of a powergamer, but then again, who wasn't in that campaign? We all did a bit of character optimization, so nobody really minded.

Our first mission as a group took place on Taris during the Old Republic era. This was before the popular Bioware MMO came out and our GM had his own theories about what happened in the aftermath of Knights of the Old Republic II. We needed to gain access to a swoop gang in the Lower City since we had a common enemy - a group of Mandalorian smugglers that had recently taken up residence, and that the Republic wanted eliminated. Their contact in the Upper City was a retired gambler who opened his own casino.

We entered the casino and looked around for our man. He was in the middle of a tense game of Pazaak, and one that was unlikely to end any time soon so, as such, he was not going to speak to us. After several attempts by the party to get his attention, Borsk decides to use the Force to persuade him to quit while he was ahead. Use the Force check. Natural 1. The contact gets very irritated and warns us to leave. Now. Borsk goes for his lightsaber but we warn him that this guy is important and that we need him alive. Since it is the first roleplaying session of his life, the GM allows us to interfere, Out-of-Character.

Borsk opts for a hand-to-hand encounter instead, attempting to grab the blaster the contact is going for. Natural 1. Borsk slips on a spilled drink and is now prone on the floor. He is saved because I step in and attempt to persuade the contact that Borsk is not worth his time, "now let me get you something". Must have been blessed by the dice gods for using a Star Wars quote as the dice comes up as a Natural 20 and combat does not ensue.

But the misadventure does not end. We make our way into the Lower City and face a few more challenges without incident, but we are eventually attacked by a group of hired thugs. We kill them all except for a Twi'lek female and interrogate her to find out who hired her. Our Scout is a bit of a ruthless fellow and interrogates her with exposed power couplings. She cracks and, sufficiently traumatised, explains how the Mandalorians are aware of our presence and want to stop us from making contact with the swoop gang whose territory they encroach upon.

Borsk decides to be compassionate and attempts another use of Mind Trick to convince her that she remembers none of what has just happened. Natural 1. The GM declares Mind Rape has ensued and she instead remembers everything in horrifying detail. I don't know if this is consistent with the way the Force works. I don't much care, as we are all too busy laughing our heads off. From then on, Borsk's skill checks are known as Rape Checks.

edited 20th Jul '12 12:10:56 AM by HouraiRabbit

Are you me?! I also run a Star Wars campaign, located in Taris, and Old Republic Era. While my Jedi friend is a bit of a problem, it is really just my lack of preparation prior to sessions.

My own clone! Not gonna go there. You know my Mr. Welch list in the other thread? Maybe three or four of those things were other members of the group in both this and other games. The rest were all Borsk. This is only the first session and hardly the worst things he did.

edited 20th Jul '12 10:15:15 AM by HouraiRabbit

Another "first time role-player" story.
I'd just managed to convince a friend of mine to check out our D&D game, and he rolled up (with the assistance of the DM) a pretty decent Half-Orc Barbarian. Our characters were going to his tribe for help, and due to his stats the DM decreed he was the tribe's most lethal warrior, and had a pretty big rep in the local area.

Now as we're talking with these Orcs the tribe is attacked by a rival one, being funded and equipped by a local landlord we'd earlier been trying to kill.
As combat's about to break out we gear up and approach the fight.
My friend's Orc lets loose an ear-splitting roar, charges axe raised...
And rolls a natural 1. He trips over a tree-root and lands flat on his face in the mud, the rest of his tribe don't notice and charge right over the top of him.
Which is just as well really as the very next round every creature in the area taller than a dwarf was mowed down by some kind of leathal energy thing the Orcs had. My friend was the last of his tribe thanks only to his ridiculous clumsiness.

So we're playing a session of D&D (Forgotten Realms, specifically). We're snooping around a fort that's been taken over by goblinoids, and are trying to force open a jammed door when a hobgoblin emerges from a nearby room - the kitchen, as it would later turn out - and demands to know what we're doing. The group's barbarian and I (playing a wood elf cleric) both attempt to talk the big lug out of a fight: he goes for Diplomacy, I go for a straight-up bluff. "We're selling these fine leather jackets," I say to him.

And I get a nat 20 on my roll.

My cleric ended up having to play the part of a jacket saleswoman, managing to pawn off some old studded leather armor of hers. The hob and his friends, upon receiving their gear, bid us a polite farewell and piled out of the fort, leaving behind their (infinitely replenishing) supplies of food and drink and a group of very confused adventurers. It must have taken us a full hour to pick our jaws up off the floor.

So our party is talking to an enemy prisoner and questioning him, when it comes up that the Emperor of said enemy faction has a daughter.

Every single male player at the table immediately announces their plans to fuck the princess. After very briefly arguing over who gets her, we agree to a four-way and move on to discussing how to go about this so that "balls are not touching". Meanwhile our lone female party member listens in with a mixture of disgust and horror. Our GM simply listens with horror and no doubt makes a note of putting fewer female NP Cs into the game.

This is the same party that occasionally after battles, with dance with the corpses of our enemies. And then our GM cues up very fitting music as we play out our monster's dance.

Sounds like someone needs to introduce some karma into this campaign!

In the Deathwatch campaign I'm playing with several other tropers, there was one session where our drop-pod crash landed on a statue of an Imperial Saint. We spent the next 30 minutes, in real time, discussing how we were going to exit the drop pod. Choice suggestions include doing a "haters gonna hate walk", "cartwheeling out", "going out guns blazing" (in the middle of a completely random, non-enemy occupied, civilian city).

Also of note is that we may have derailed that particular mission rather hard by going around and investigating everything, to the point where we didn't get into any combat the entire session.

edited 11th Aug '12 9:21:29 AM by Archereon

@Tomu: Any Karma system would be....odd, for our game. Namely that for the Republic we fight for, anyone who's not a member of the Republic has no rights so do whatever the hell you want to them. Somehow, our questionably consensual 4-way with the princess might just give us positive karma.

Consensual?

Well, I guess it's just that kind of a campaign-

No, I just mean that we would have our "charismatic" characters (who roll shit on their charisma attempts) try to seduce her into a fourway first. When that fails, then it becomes questionably consensual. Have I mentioned we fall somewhere between type IV and V for anti-heroes?

More like a villain protagonist it sounds like~

If I were running that game, I'd have taken one of three options: 1) Turn said princess into Puppy-Kicking, baby-eating, Complete Monster of a Big Bad, 2) made said princess ridiculous naive and innocent, and the go into graphic and Squick inducing detail on her tears and trauma at the experience, or 3) made the princess secretly a prince.

Those guys just reinforce the "gamers are sexually frustrated teens" stereotype (and either homophobic or been around homophobes too much). Tell them to "gb2fatal".

edited 11th Aug '12 3:27:24 PM by Medinoc

Hey, we may be villain protagonists, but we are not homophobic. And we're all in our 20's and in relationships. We're just having a bit of fun by way of being evil in all of our RPG groups.

@Lizard: Yeah, absolutely none of that would have stopped us and some of it would have even encouraged us. Mostly its just we all have far too much fun being evil in tabletop RP Gs. If one of us goes into bastard mode, we can usually talk them down. When we all unify in our bastardry then there is nothing that can stop us.

Keep in mind the GM is usually one of our party members in other campaigns, he is used to our evil and takes part in it. If anything he'll just shut us down because he would find it far too creepy. More so us being his three best friends than any highly questionable actions.

To me, any sentence starting with "It's not gay if" means that the speaker either is homophobic or thinks the listener is.

But I understand you about the being evil part. My group is still busy killing an army from the inside, we are becoming increasingly sadistic about our ways to kill them, or break their morale to cause mass desertions.

The latest suggestion was erecting 60' tall watchtowers with mages and archers to deal with threats. Just in time for "Operation: Beaver". Also, one captain forbade his division from speaking of poisoning, because the sheer number of "indigestions" is bad for morale.

Equally bad is my suggestion to our captain to split the food rations unevenly between our soldiers and those of the 5th company who joined us (the two companies were merged because of losses), on account that the latter look malnourished. Not to mention those who keep finding fingers in the stew... Oh, and the King just cut our supply line.

edited 12th Aug '12 1:28:59 AM by Medinoc

According to our other GM (of another campaign we're all in), the first session of said campaign's season 2 for us will be us gathering up orphans, to sacrifice. They need not start off as orphans and we already have plans to have the orphans join our side in return for giving us two orphans in their place. Have I mentioned that the orphans that do get sacrificed are going to most likely be turned into an army of child-zombies?

Yeah, child soldier zombies on our first day back. And yes, someone already made a Kony joke about this. For some reason we all turn into complete monsters during the games, well except for our long complaining token good character/player.

Had an NWOD crossover with all the campaign settings involved, it jumped between funny and awesome every few minutes. One of the most hilarious lines though, IMO, is this little one:

Time Mage: So, that is how that spell will work. So long as I am alive we can get a second chance at this, got it? Grangrel: Yup, save points are your friend. Save early, save often.

So one day a friend and teammate is getting fucked HARD by the Random Number God. No matter what he does that is sensible or smart is turned into a horrible failure by his evil dice.

After quite a bit of this he attempts to scream NO to the skies. We jokingly make him roll for screaming NO.

-Critical Failure-

"YEEEESSSSSSSS!"

edited 15th Aug '12 12:52:21 PM by imojee

^

Well, my D&D 3.5 adventuring party had an interesting night. We’d recently battled a band of raiders attacking some village, managing to leave one of the bandits alive for interrogation. After dropping the bandit off with the authorities and interrogating him for the location of the bandit camp, we were tasked by the mayor to wipe out the camp.

Everything was going well enough. Unfortunately, we had lost track of our Gnome Wizard. As such, once we emerged from the mayor’s office, we discovered that she had set a tree on fire. Our Cleric was able to put it out with some Water Summoning, but it was left damaged enough that our Crusader (Basically a Paladin who doesn’t have to worry about being lawful) decided to take the Gnome Wizard and go pay for the burnt tree.

As the two left, the rest of us realized that we had forgotten the directions that the captured bandit had given us. The GM was unwilling to remind us of something that he’d just told us ten minutes earlier, so we were forced to go find out where the camp was again. As such, our fastest travelling party member, (whose build I can’t quite remember. He has flying powers and I think he said that he was an electric human. For the purpose of the story, I’ll just call him Ray), went off to re-interrogate the captured bandit.

This left only two of us, myself and the Cleric. Perhaps inspired by how we’d just been screwed over for failing to memorize anything that the DM had said, the Cleric decided to go ask the locals for the answer to a question that none of us had bothered to find out. We’d started off the campaign by simply stumbling into some unknown village, so none of us really knew much about where we were. So, the Cleric then disguised himself as the village mayor, knocked on one of the doors, and asked the local what the name of the village was.

That’s right. He decided to try and find out the name of the village by pretending to be its mayor. Admittedly, after the rest of us pointed out how ludicrous this was, he quickly changed his disguise so that he just looked like some random stranger. But, witnessing this travesty prompted my character to just walk away and head for the nearest bar, in hopes of drowning out the stupidity.

As such, the five of us had been split into groups of four. After paying the fine for the Gnome’s arson, the Crusader, carrying the Gnome in his backpack, began wandering town to gather information on the bandits from the locals, all while the Cleric went around asking for the name of the city. At one point, the DM decided to have the three of them roll spot checks. All three failed, so the DM revealed that the Cleric and the Crusader had actually ran into each other, asked their respective questions, and parted ways WITHOUT RECOGNIZING EACHOTHER!!!! The Cleric later tried to justify this by pointing out that he was still in disguise. And the DM allowed the Cleric to recognize the Crusader after the psychotic gnome in his backpack began acting up again. But, the damage to their dignities was done.

Anyways, Ray had gone off alone to interrogate the captured Bandit for information that he’d already given us. He decided to do so by flashing his chest at the prisoner. Ray immediately backpedalled, claiming that he was showing off a scar and threatening to do the same to the bandit, but we were all to distracted by his flashing to care. Eventually, Ray managed to get the information that we needed, again, and he left the prison to try and gather the rest of us together.

Ray decided to do this by ringing the bell at the local temple. This ended up causing another panic as the townsfolk feared that this meant that the bandits had returned to the village. At any rate, this was enough to get my Bard to leave the tavern, which allowed Ray to spot me. Ray then grabbed my character from behind, picked him up, and flew off with him in tow without saying a word to my Bard. With my Bard in hand, Ray spotted the other three and flew over to them.

So, the five of us were finally reunited. It looked like we would finally be able to leave the village and go after those bandits at last. Unfortunately, before we could do so, our Gnome decided to smack Ray with a Stick of Idiocy. It was a magic stick that could inflict a 24 hour long penalty to intelligence. She liked to try and smack us with this stick, but luckily it relied on a wizard managing to make a melee attack, so Ray was the only one whom she had ever managed to hit.

Having already lost some intelligence to this Stick, Ray finally had enough and began trying to take the Stick and break it. This resulted in him getting smacked again. Whilst trying to take the stick, the Crusader intervened in an attempt to protect the Gnome, which led to Ray getting smacked a couple more times. Eventually, Ray managed to break the Stick of Idiocy, saving the rest of us from the Gnome’s continued abuse. Unfortunately, by the time the Stick was destroyed, Ray only had an intelligence score of 4.

This caused another problem. For Ray was the only one who’d managed to uncover the location of the bandit camp and his bout with the Stick of Idiocy had left him unable to remember anything about the bandit camp. We had to take him to the temple in order to restore some of his lost intelligence. Once he was smart enough to tell us where to go, the party set off for this bandit camp, having completely humiliated ourselves and caused a minor panic through sheer stupidity.

Moral of the Story: If the DM gives you directions, dear god, WRITE IT DOWN!!!

So we are a bunch of mages trying to get into a temple where we think a local Eldritch Abomination is caged. Said temple has a door. With a lock on it. Said Eldritch Abomination interferes with our spells, so we spend half an hour of real time trying to figure out how to open it.

Then somebody pushed and it opened. Turns out it was not locked in the first place.

It's always embarrassing when that happens. In my last campaign, I had my barbarian kick down at least one unlocked door by mistake.