"Side-Topic" Post Week of 03/10/2014

I had a 20 sided dice crack and split into two pieces during a roll. We came to the conclusion it was a critical miss.

This token was originally a friend's PC, and the event described there really happened. It wasn't on purpose, though. His captors made him cook for them, and he rolled three natural 1s in a row on his attempts to chase down the pig they wanted slaughtered, turn it into edible food and recognize how hard he had screwed up. (It was a Skull & Shackles campaign, and my character's forced labor for the day required only one roll--which was also a natural 1.) It wasn't really a disaster; all it did was get us whipped. But after that, it was clear that the third and final PC was the game's only real protagonist.

We've had a vampire die while trying to cross the street thanks to some terrible rolls. Okay, it was a multi-lane highway, but "crossing the street" sounds funnier. Tried to leap across... but only made it about halfway. Tried to get up and run before getting hit by cars... suddenly, a semi appears! Tried to duck between the semi's wheels... the semi blows multiple tires at once and begins to flip over Tried to run out of the way... the semi is suddenly filled floor to ceiling with cinder blocks Hoped and prayed for a merciful God... became a sticky puddle of vampire-goo in the middle of the freeway

I was GMing an NWoD game, only mortals. The party was investigating some sort of monster linked to many severed limbs being found along a small town somewhere in Ireland and their owners missing. They hear about one old lady that had a china shop having heard some relevant rumor, so they went to investigate. The lady is unhelpful and as polite as a Ghestapo officer, so one of the players tries to intimidate her. Unfortunately he had nothing invested in either Intimidate or Manipulation. So he rolls a critical die (you get successes only on a result of 10 on a d10 and if you roll 1, bad things happen) and he gets a 1. And that's how bad things start. Phase One: The guy botches his Intimidation completely while I manage to Crit on the old lady's resistance to coercion. Since he threw some lovely insults and threatened to kill her, she gets a shotgun that was under her desk (ironicly enough put there for help on a later encounter.) Initiative is rolled. Phase Two: Everyone manages to get some lukewarm results on initiative. But the grandmother with the artificial hip manages to get first place in Initiative. Phase Three: The old lady shoots the thug that threatened her in the chest and against all odds drops his health to Aggravated (for mortals that means every second that passes the guy gets closer to death.) That also happened to the trained soldier that tried to put her in a headlock, but failed. I started going for called shots so that her dice pool will drop and she will just drop already. Nope. The knife nut that was throwing knives at her for three rounds, failing to connect even a single hit, gets his head pop like a baloon. The last living character, the only one not fit for combat runs away scared to death by murdergranny. As soon as she gets to the door, one last shot hits her in the back and there you have it, TPK. And that is my worst string of rolls! The intricate hunt for a supernatural cryptoid ended because of Marge Dooley, Geriatric Commando and later retconned as a former IRA member. We still joke about it with these guys when we see each other.

Wildest roll in my life was a coincidental reenactment of the end of the Avengers movie... you know, the "sacrifice play"? My horrifically selfish character made a great many surprisingly selfless actions across a session-long (4th edition-ish) fight involving a zero-gravity power core to an evil floating fortress. At the end, with the core rigged to blow, I stayed behind to make sure the rest of the party got out, and when it came time to attempt my escape, the Game Master said, "Honestly, nothing outside of a crit is going to do it." The cheers and cackling when the natural 20 hit were long and loud. NEW post is up...