Tabletop Stories

Shiri

Sparked
Original poster
FOLKLORE MEMBER
Invitation Status
It's been awhile since I've seen a tabletop roleplay thread and I do love reading other people's experiences with them. No two stories are the same. So what's your favorite memories? Anything from lucky crits to botched rolls are welcome here.

My favorite on the my-character-did-a-thing scale would have to be a Pathfinder homebrew campaign. I was playing Avis, my fetchling bones oracle(nercomancer). He is a quirky fellow with an enchanted shovel as his weapon of choice. He was a force to be reckoned with on both sides because I kept rolling 1s and thus would end up smacking whoever was next to him at the time, including a crown prince we were escorting. My best moment with him has to be when we were taking on a undead big baddie. He crit on our sorceress, smiting her in one hit. In a fit of grief Avis used a scroll of Inflict Pain and then cast Slay Living the following round. So he basically implanted his own agony into the enemy's brain while it burned to death. Such a demented yet heroic act. *wipes away tear*

My most recent story of fun and adventure is when Crowjo, my tengu samurai, tried to fly a kite. She is a ronin and had decided to put aside her past of war to open a humble kite shop. Her innocent endeavor of kite flying is put to an end by one of the villagers mistaking her kite for a real dragon. Heroically the villager took up his bow and shot down the "dragon" with a fire arrow. The large, burning kite crashes down onto an unsuspecting alpaca, owned by our human fighter, setting it ablaze. The fighter lassos the alpaca, but it merely flips him on it's back and continues to run. Crowjo is fleeing from the field inferno when she becomes entangled in the rope attached to the burning alpaca and is now being dragged behind it. Her war-trained horse, Nini, follows behind because of Crowjo's frantic come commands. Our druid witnesses the panic from his forest nearby and tries to help by casting a water spell on the alpaca. The now drenched party end up in a cave where the alpaca finally stops panicking. We rescued the herd and took them with us through the cave. I don't know how we managed to save them all, but we did. And that tidbit was just the first hour of play. x'D
 
Damn your game sounds fun.

I played with 2 people who were more about plot progression and politics than simply having fun. So, naturally, I turned into "that" guy - you know the one - every campaign usually has one. The one guy who just tries to make everything into a joke. I'm sure most people hate it. But screw it, after one game where they spent three hours (literally, NOT FIGURATIVELY) figuring out trade deals, I can earn my keep as fucking "that guy".

Anyway.

I was playing an unaligned half-orc barbarian and we were in a tavern. I forget how it came up, but some NPC was making my partner (a palladin, iirc) extremely uncomfortable through overtly homosexual come-ons. A fight was about to arise when they and another party member turned toward me for my answer to some open-ended homo-erotic question. I diffuse the entire situation by looking back to everyone and answering, completely deadpanned
"I am unaligned."
It was hilarious if you were there

Another situation.
I was a rogue, or possibly a thief, can't remember which. I had maxed out my stealth and bluff stats though which made me pretty much an unstoppable ninja.
Some wizard is talking to my palladin partner, and is holding some extremely rare magical powder in his hands. In a tavern.
Right in front of both of them I just swipe the shit right out of the dude's hand. And to add insult to injury I got a nat 20 doing it too. Everyone (including the DM) absolutely hated it, but my stats were so high and the roll so good, he had to handwave it away by the NPC suddenly noticing the powder was gone and then somehow not caring that he couldn't find it if he dropped it.
Believe it or not that was only the start of my ruining their games. I didn't get banned from playing with them til later

Same characters, different time. We're in some oldass castle in a special library where the books can only be read if you have some sort of special trait wizards have.
Commence me spending 10 minutes arguing with the DM about how I should be able to bluff a book into thinking I possess said trait.


No, I'm not any fun at parties.

edit: I think I should interject here that they invited me to play with them, and not the other way around. Also we were all flatmates at the time.
If I hadn't literally been living with them I would've stopped going to the games after the whole trade deal thing.
 
Damn your game sounds fun.

I played with 2 people who were more about plot progression and politics than simply having fun. So, naturally, I turned into "that" guy - you know the one - every campaign usually has one. The one guy who just tries to make everything into a joke. I'm sure most people hate it. But screw it, after one game where they spent three hours (literally, NOT FIGURATIVELY) figuring out trade deals, I can earn my keep as fucking "that guy".

Originally our DM wanted us to take campaigns super seriously, but it never worked out so she gave up. So long as we follow plot prompts and are willing to put up with consequences of our actions we can do whatever. We have a player who always gets pushed into diplomacy roles because he's a salesman in real life. He has more than once seduced the mini-bosses. One of which he convinced into coming with us on our adventure. I think the DM died a little that day. xD

Recently we were told by the DM to describe our attacks to get bonuses. The DM realized her mistake too late. We made everything we did sound sexual because we are mature adults, we swear.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Vars
I've got a couple that come to mind.

The first isn't my story, it was one a friend told me years ago, but it stands as my favorite story ever about players trying to do crazy shit with rules loopholes in a tabletop game. They were playing some version of D&D where handing someone else an object didn't require any action in the combat system's action economy, meaning it was technically an instantaneous thing. One cheeky bastard with a desire to try to twist this oddity in the game rules in his favor went and paid a bunch of villagers to stand in a line an told them to hand the stick down the line, then the last person throws it. He argued that, based on the physics that would apply, the stick traveling instantly from one end of the line to the other and then being "handed" to empty space would mean it was traveling so fast at that end point that it would have to shoot off at ridiculous speeds in that direction and effectively work like a rail gun, with the projectile having so much speed that it would hit a target like a pretty hefty explosive. It wasn't allowed, of course, but I'll be damned if the idea of a rail gun make of a line up of peasants and a stick isn't one of my favorite dumb ideas ever.

The other is from the one campaign I've run, D&D 5e with my younger brother and sister as the only players and, with each of them playing two characters at once and me controlling a couple GMPCs to make for a decent party size. It was a pretty crazy high power level campaign with faster than usual levels and better loot than usual to be found in dungeons and such, because we were just looking to have fun and having a glut of magical items is fun. The early parts of the campaign had a few instances of things coming up from the ground due to something being wrong in the Underdark. They ended up going to a place that was having a lot of trouble with monsters coming up from below, and they were hired to go see what was wrong and deal with it. The resolution of that was neat and all, but this story is about what happened when they first headed down to the cave entrance that would be their path downward.

One of the characters was my brother's half-orc paladin named Gump. Now, Gump was a jerk a lot of the time, but he was keeping the extent of that side of his character close to the chest to shock our sister with it at some point. This was that moment. The party headed down to delve into the Underdark, and they were quickly greeted by a stone giant and some smaller things trying to force their way out to the surface. They joined the fight with the defenders, but my sister's Warlock who spoke giant language managed to get the big guy to chill after the smaller enemies were dealt with. She was the group's interpreter and they had a chat with him, learning some stuff about what was awaiting them below and also that the giant just wanted to get out and away from the dangers, totally willing to just go out into the wilderness far away from any civilization. The party agreed to send him to this mountainous region they'd passed by a long time ago, just the sort of wild land where a giant wouldn't be able to find any towns to terrorize.

However, the only one who could manage this feat was Gump, because he had a Helm of Teleportation and nobody else had any such magic available to them. I can't remember how exactly the group had access to a Polymorph spell, maybe a scroll, but they got the giant to agree to a simple plan: Polymorph him into a mouse, Gump takes him to the wild mountain place and sets him loose, and then Gump teleports back into the city they were in to rejoin them. Good Persuasion roll, giant agrees, doesn't resist the spell, all is well. So Gump borrows another character's magic broom, saying it's so he can get back to the group quicker by flying to them after teleporting back to the location he knows well in the city.

Instead of following the plan, he teleports into the middle of the goddamn ocean and chucks the mouse into it, then quickly teleports away. He condemned that stone giant to a horrible death by drowning, just because he didn't like the idea of letting a monster live. In character the others knew nothing of it, but out of character reactions were goddamn priceless.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Shiri
A one shot I was in a few months ago started of with a fight in a tavern. Everyone in the group was level three and a few bad rolls meant that we came out the other end of the fight with only a handful of hit points each.My character (a tiefling warlock) wasn't impressed with how two of the other characters (a pair of tiefling siblings) had done in the fight and so for revenge cast Magical Darkness on them. The GM made the players do a Dex check I believe, and the male tiefling failed, tripped on a chair and lost those last few hit points. Que the rest of the party trying to find the unconscious tiefling in the orb of magical darkness, with his sister shouting lots and my character sitting and watching it all.​
After two failed saving throws I decide I probably shouldn't be responsible for killing another players character half an hour into the game and since my character had the perk to be able to see in magical darkness I had them wade in and stabilize the unconscious tiefling and drag them into the light before going upstairs. Tiefling Sister, follows my character upstairs and tries to attack my character. Their attack misses and my character takes a running leap through a window to escape before casting fly to avoid splattery death and to fly up to the taverns roof and camp out up there for the night.​
All this took about half an hour meaning we were at least a quarter of the way through the planned game time before we even really got going on the GM's plot.​
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Shiri
I'm not gonna to go into detail, but I do recall awhile back mentioning my favorite DnD character's unfortunate marriage: my beloved Paladin, in order to make peace with a dragon causing havoc in a little hamlet our party had stopped at, was forced to marry the dragon. He then proceeded to spend all his time with his new dragon wife while the DM played innocent, like he hadn't made me do it.

She will always be his beautiful dragon wife, though. A+ campaign, I still play that guy in an ongoing campaign except whenever our DM seems like he might start trying to create some kind of dragon harem.

Haven't actually seen the poor paladin in over a year. Hope he's doing okay with his wife.

:cookie:
 
  • Bucket of Rainbows
Reactions: Cyan and Shiri
My best friend told my mini-boss to kill itself and rolled a crit. I proceeded to roll for the damage dealt to it, and rolled another crit. She killed the thing with her "command" stat. >.>

In the same game, she landed the final blow to my boss by throwing her gun at it when she ran out of ammo.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Shiri
I play with a small group. It's just me, my old roommate @William Grim, with a friend who might as well be my brother acting as DM for this large scale, long running homebrew. This is the story of how our group chat earned the name 'The "Hand"y D&D Group Chat' and how Grim's character earned the title "Drow Leeroy Jenkins"

So we're walking through the woods around town and we hear the sounds of bandits and we decide to go check it out. My character, being a Rogue, decides to slip ahead and see how many there are before we decide whether or not to attack them. Grim's character, a Cleric named Taldor, says 'to hell with this plan' and just rushes in, sword drawn and screaming. It went okay for maybe a minute and it looked like maybe this wouldn't end badly.

And then Grim rolled a Nat 1. And it went all down hill from there.

He tripped - and cut off his own hand.

There was also the time Taldor wanted to turn a skull of one of our enemies into a lamp, because he thought it'd be cool. He brought it to our Wizard friend so he could use his magic on it to make his dream possible, despite the DM telling him it wasn't a good idea, both as the Wizard and OOC. He didn't listen and was therefore responsible for the creation of a goddamn flameskull , which proceeded to burn down the wizard's shop as it flew away.
 
Last edited:
  • Haha
Reactions: Shiri
My companion couldn't remember our third party member's name during a phone call, so our DM had him roll for recall, and he crit failed. So, our third party member became "Ramsey Gordon" for the rest of the campaign.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Shiri
My companion couldn't remember our third party member's name during a phone call, so our DM had him roll for recall, and he crit failed. So, our third party member became "Ramsey Gordon" for the rest of the campaign.
I have a related story. Our party had been drafted into an army and our fighter could not get our commander's name right. It was Commander Sebastian, but the fighter kept calling him "Sea Bass" and they would often fight about it. Then it all came to a head when the commander accidentally introduced himself as Commander Sea Bass to the Crowned Prince. xD
 
I really don’t remember what tabletop rpg we were playing exactly, since it was so long ago, but we realized we were missing a character piece. So we ended up using a hot dog as a replacement instead. (It was in a bun, of course. lol)

I just remember thinking it was the funniest thing in the world when we did it, probably because there was no context when seeing this hot dog placed next to the other characters it dwarfed.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Shiri
On-going story. Because 2 people (and the voices of reason) weren't around, me and the remaining players decided to make a pact with a demon. His name is Tainted Daddy (or, as my bard calls him, T. Diddy). The current plan is to try to make the goody two-shoes fighter intoa blood sacrifice. Will continue to update the story as things progress.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: noodle
I recently joined a group participating in a Star Wars RPG and my character fills the stealth role of the group. She gets them in and out of places with sneaky-sneaks and computer skills, and can literally blend in with shadows thanks to the armor I've crafted for her. She's also quite tiny- I made her like that so she could fit in tight spaces, and it worked. So, in no particular order...here are the escapades of Haven Zerr.

-Smuggled her in a storage crate to the storage room, where she proceeded to gather all the confiscated weapons that had been taken from the party (she hacked a terminal from inside the crate by sticking her hands out from under the lid because I rolled a crit)
-Put her in a size-too-big set of Stormtrooper armor and had her bomb a control room
-Pickpocketed a PC Jedi with flying colors
-Used a Destiny Point (a way of saying 'in hindsight' to give us small boosts) to have her pickpocket a lockpick from another character and free everyone from chains
-Investigated the disappearing bathroom man
-Stole another character's sticky notes so she could leave notes during a covert operation
-Hid in a corner for an entire gunfight, handing dropped weapons to teammates so they could use their maneuver to aim
-Grabbed a handful of credits from right under another player's nose when we were looting the belongings of our supposed-dead friend (player had retired from the game)
-Fondly refers to the secret panels on our ship as her 'treasure closets'
-Tried to start a revolution with enslaved factory workers (still might be an option, we'll see how the next round resolves)

On a side note, I am a very tank-oriented player. I don't really know how to do stealth. So me filling the role of a stealth character has been...an adventure. I think I've pulled it off for the most part, despite the many stupid suggestions I made. XD
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Shiri
My group is currently going through The Palace of Tiamat in the first circle/ring of hell to return my previous character's soul to life (blame the deck of many things). We were going through an ice spire and found an Ashanti beating on a Kobold (which haven't been fighting us) so we saved him. The cute little bugger became "Garry the Intern" and was determined to help us and be a hero. In the next fight he gets frozen and dies. My character (who was reminded of his daughter by Garry's eagerness) tried to revive him with a potion once our fire wizard thawed him. But he was gone, slightly upsetting him. Then he hears the damn soul of Garry telling him it's okay and he'll see them later, freaking him out. It was great. I was sad that Garry the Intern died. We never get to keep any npcs alive that want to follow us around like that. I even tried to save him by distracting the closest enemy to him. Still Garry the Intern will be remembered for a little while at least!
 
  • Love
  • Haha
Reactions: noodle and Shiri