When things went wrong.

[Winged]

What are some stories of how you overcame adversity in a game in an original, or otherwise cool way?

this is long, so if ya just want the fun part feel fre to skip to the bottem.

A while back a freind and I where doing a small 3.5 D&D game with a third pal DMing. One day our dm (who I susspect was planing to wrap our game up by killing off the party) sent some type of red dragon (I don't remember the exact age) at our party of two level eights, my wizard and my freind's fighter. We should have been way outclassed, and were are dm less lazy and taken the time to give the dragon the spells it deserved, things may have been much worse. We used every item of any real value we had, potions, wands scrolls, the works, includeing a handful of special items we saved up for spicificly to use against the game's BBEG, and used up most of my wizard's spells (not to mention hp) but we eventuly killed the thing. Our DM deemed that our cart and it's contents were destroyed by the dragon's breath during the battle, and what little resources we had built in the game were now pretty much gone. We were mad, obviously our party had just gone poor fighting a dragon in the middle of some plains it did not even belong in, with no hint that it even had a hord to find, so we did the only resonable thing and desided to harvest it's body for materials to make equiptment from. My wizard slept for the night, and after the dm ruled that a dead body was infact an item , I shink itemed half of the dragon's body to a manageable size and we took it with us.
Eventuly after our party asked ever possable sourse for information we found out where the dragon's lair was likly to be found. The dm however was not just going to let us get the goods of course, the whole previous encounter had been practicly tailored to take them away, as such the whole layer was filled with the dragon's previous minions some kind of humanoid dragonpeople (dragon kin?). Once again the party was on its last legs, my good spells were spent and the fighter can only tank so much, particularly with all of our healing potions gone. We droped what we hoped was the last of our daily opponents to only be greeted by another wave of ten or so. The bad guys started chargeing twords us we had a turn to try and stop them (running was not going to be good enough, they had flight speed), as a last ditch effort I told the DM "I look into my backpack one last time in search of somthing we forgot" he tells me "ya got nothing but rations and a bed roll remember" the fighter says "whao what about the shrunken dragon, we still have that".

Inspiration struck, I quickly double checked the rules on shrink item, and asked the dm how high the room's ceiling was, it all fit, after searching the bag I instructed the fighter "throw the dragon at the stones above them!" the fighter did so the dragon expanded to it's full size, we calculateed falling damage and the entire group of enimies where killed in the cramped tunnel. from that point on My wizard shrunk walls, chunks of floor, and whatever he could get to use later as suprise attacks and improvised defences.

[Daemonwelsh]

Well, my favorite story has to do with my squirrel cleric as she (changed into a girl due to some curse or another) died.

We were fighting against a Dinosaur of some kind (don't remember which) and I ended up being forced to grapple with the thing. I rolled a natural one, the DM rolled a 20, and I got eaten. While sitting in the Dinosaurs stomach I cast time-stop, and maximized-delayed blast fireball twice before another timestop, and 3 more maximized-delayed blast fireballs.

I killed myself, and fried the dino from the inside out.
I laughed it off and had to go make a new character later on, which also happened to be a squirrel, but this was a necromancer.
I reanamated my own corpse, and that of the dinosaur.
that part was amazingly fun too.

[Prometheus]

Well, my group once had to defend a town from a purple worm. We took it down (after our ranger got swallowed, cut his way out, then got swallowed again), and as it started to fall down dead, the psion in our party excitedly said "I telekinetically redirect its fall onto a nearby building for dramatic effect".

The DM raised an eyebrow and said "Okay".

Five minutes later, we found out that there had been a family inside that house that was killed by the falling worm.

The rest of the group, fearing that the villagers would turn on all of us, promptly executed the psion by launching him out of a catapult into a prismatic wall.

That was actually the fifth character belonging to that player that we had murdered in that campaign. Of course, he had a tendency to play wizards who fireballed the party (or cast phantasmal killer on our ranger), so it was justified.

[Ferrous]

My favorite moment comes from a different game, "Aberrant," which is a table-top game where you basically make a super-hero and can pretty much use whatever superabilities/spells you want. There are quite a few rules in place though, and the game pre-defines most conceivable abilities. Anyhow...

The setting was me and five of my friends (three of whom are coincidentally named "Dave"), and we had all created new characters. Mine was essentially a shape changer, who died in the first battle. But that's besides the point. The first battle was meant to be tough. We had walked into a village that somehow managed to close itself off from the outside world, and we were sent in to investigate what happened. We were confronted by the three "Acolytes" - a super-speedy one, a super strong one, and one who was incredibly good at manipulating energy. These guys would not be "End Game" battles necessarily, but the next strongest thing. This was a battle we were clearly meant to lose (which we did).

My character became incapacitated early in the fight by the Speedy Acolyte, who then dashed over to my friend's character, "The Prodigy" (you're supposed to have a superhero-like name). Typically, each character gets only 1 action per round. In this case, the speedy acolyte got 3, and using his claws (imagine Wolverine, but moving five times as fast), made for the Prodigy. The Prodigy dodged all three times. Usually, if you can dodge, you can only dodge once, but his character was well put together, and managed to beat the attack, if barely. We later calculated the probability to be something minutely small, like 4%. It was pretty incredible, if undramatic.

-----

Another time, in a different session, one of my team partners rolled to scale a wall to get into a Nazi compound (it was a time traveling mission). He got nearly all of his bonuses, so he managed to scale the wall (30-40 feet tall) using his pinky.

[SteveMB]

My favorite GMing moment came while running a Champions game. Several of the heroes had just hit the main villain with their attacks, and one of them asked, "What effect did that have?"

I rolled the dice, did a few checks, and replied, "It made him angry."

[Lord Kasavin]

I onced played a CIV IV game where I started isolated on a continent with Shaka.

It went down hill from there.

[Strobe]

During a good old 2e D&D game our party was driving our cart through somewhere in Faerun. We had a cleric in the driver seat, crossbow in lap, a wizard in the other up front seat and our fighter and ranger in the back of the cart. In a forest section a net flys over the people in the back entangling them and the cleric is shot with some arrows.

We were level 1. Cleric knocked out. Party disabled. Bandits yell out hander over your gold. Wizard casts shocking grasp and leaps into the forest!

Amazingly we lived through it. I think our DM was being kind (it was the first combat encounter).

-Strobe

[kefkakrazy]

on a MUD where I play, there's a roleplay setup. It's DBZ-themed (Dragonball Infinity, if anyone's interested/doesn't mind me pimpin' it out, since I'm an admin there), mostly freeform roleplay.

Anyway, a while back, my mortal character (the one I played before getting hired as an imm) was up against a boss someone made for him as a side note to one of the major plotlines. Palisade, his name was, and my character's name was Krosan, a guy who specialized in explosively powerful close-combat attacks...

Palisade was a big android with a booby-trapped room. Mines everywhere, way too hard to move around or dodge, and he was able to blast lasers around the place. The fight lasted about a quarter the length the guy running the plot had expected, because Krosan's response to this trap was to slam the floor with an explosion attack, sending the floating minefield ricocheting all around the room. Krosan was tough enough to survive, but Palisade was scrapped.


For another one, not one I played...
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Sameo

[AllPurposeNerd]

Kinda lame but here goes. D&D 3.5. In a town where magic has been illegal for a long time. My monk (having been wearing a ring of sustenance for about a year), is probing a bartender (the DM) for information when he is offered a bite to eat.
"Oh, I don't eat," I roleplayed.
"You don't eat?" Oh boop. The jig is up.
Without really missing a beat, "UUUHH what I meant to say is I, uh, never eat on, um... on an empty stomach. So tell me about this bridge." Clear throat.

Later that same adventure, he learned to surf.

[kriss]

Steve (not his real name, in fact nobody named here is with thier real names, except NPCs) failed pointless intimidate check on the city guards to try and get them to bow down, resulting in them scorning him and baring him from the city we needed to enter. Before we could try to Biplomacy our way back in, he then started a melee with the guards, and I sided against the party. Gasp all you want, but I was lchaotic good and was not about to let my partymembers attack an innocent village. Screw 'party first' policies, I have standards and am not a comunist. Well me and the city guard were outmatched, as they were level 3 warriors, I was a level 1 wu-jin, and the rest of the party was level 1 haxor powergamers. Now there is nothing wrong with powergaming in and of itself, playing to become powerful and wanting cool magic items is fine motivation, but when you hunt down exploits for the sheer purpose of unfair exploitation of the rules, then it's a problem. So after killing 20 guards, having only lost a total of 7 hp in the entire party, my fellow members were about to kill me when a ki lung dragon, a NG dragon, arose from the mansion in the center of town and joined the battle. Turns out this was Ki Lu Fu Kas (say it fast enough and you'll get it...he was in highschool, let it slide. It's still not the worst he's done) whom we were supposed to seek for guidance to find an ancient artifact, and was meant to be an impressive ally who would send us on a quest as a favor to get the privilage of its knowledge. We were basicly on a factfinding mission, there was another group set to actually retrieve it for the Warlord Chin. We were basicly going to be minor servants that as they proved themselves through minor tasks would be trusted later on (higher levels) with more important work. Anyway, Ki Lu Fu Kas wasn't impressed with the random strangers slaughtering his city guard, so he fired his breath weapon no explinations asked. Luckily, turns out he'd been scrying on the situation and saw that I was on the guards side, so he angled is so I was not hit. The end result was 35 acid damage, 18 to the rouge who made reflex, which was enough to kill them all.

The campaigne kind of died there (no pun intended), but it was awesome to finally have a DM who has consequences to the PCs actions. Steve was still a bit psycho for the next two campaignes, but from then on the other players were a lot more hesitant to act all willy nilly and flaunt all rules and atmosphere. Bob had been our previous DM and a PC. Bad idea right from the start. So naturaly everyone else, not being old hands, started thinking the could get away with everything they wanted, no problem. When adam took over, social skills became more important, as did role playing, puzzle solving, and thinking through your actions.