Tabletop Gaming: The Most Memorable Characters and Stories

[chinangel]

I LOVE tabletop gaming and RPing. But I also love hearing other people's stories about it. So please, tell me your stories and tell me about your funny or interesting characters. Be it a barbarian who SWEARS he's a mage, or that warrior who's actually five dwarves stacked on top of eachother, or that one time your halfling went to backstab in the snow, and had to tunnel his way through a snowbank in order to do so.

Tell me it all!

 

[DoPo]

Well, there was this one shot adventure I played in (D&D 3.5). I decided to go with a dumb barbarian, because, why not? The DM was running the game for shits and giggles anyway, and we were given a fair amount of goodies to start with, something like, we start at 2nd level and have 1000 gold to spend on whatever we think appropriate for our character.

And here came my barbarian. He was called "Me *thumps on chest*". His backstory was that he was a great warrior...but was too stupid, so the chief of his tribe just sent him away "to find adventure and wisdom" or in other way, to just get him away on a little goose chase so the tribe can live in peace for a while. So he left with his donkey he named "Donkey". While travelling to the big city, he met a troll who demanded payment to cross the bridge. The exchange went something like this

Troll: "Hold. You must pay to cross bridge."
Me: "Where is bridge?"
T: "Erm, it being repaired."
M: "Oh, OK. How much pay?"
T: "How much you got?"
M: "I can give 10 shinies[footnote]silver coins[/footnote]" *bluff roll - he had like 200 gold or something. It succeeded*
T: "The pay 10 shinies."
M: "OK, then - here." *gives the troll 10 silver coins*

He was very proud for outwitting the dumb troll. Later, in the city there were too many people to talk to, so Me decided to write a sign that he was looking for adventure. Being illiterate, he went to the smartest looking shopkeeper in the market and paid him 10 gold coins to write the sign. Later on he was recruited by the thieves guild to carry some stolen goods (he was promised to be given adventure. I should mention now, that Me thought "adventure" and "wisdom" were actual physical things.), captured by the city guard, brought before the ruler, who gave him another task to clear him of the charges, fought some necromancer and so on. All while being clueless. That shopkeeper who wrote the sign, became a frequent NPC for that session, since Me regarded him as some sort of sage. At some point, Me even got found some adventure of the sort he really wasn't looking for. It included the local red light district and him running very fast after that.

 

[Ultress]

First campaign I ever get involved in we had the DM's girlfriend playing with us,she's a dwarf ranger but she gets this horse and decided we'll name it Henry.The longer we go the more this horse just gets goofier and goofier.He had the voice of Frank Sinatra,was a diabetic,ended up being are tank because our fighter left the game, and had diamond hooves.Just to annoy the girl we keep thinking of ways this horse could die horribly.It was so damn stupid but it provided so many great laughs.

 

[Terratina.]

Dude, there are some good stories in the Temple of Elemental Evil LP in the LP Archive, btw.

My first attempt a Pathfinder session, was, just awful. My sis was GMing and we were playing the starter module you get with the books and I rolled a cleric, one of the pre-generated characters. She's in a cave, with goblins. Lot of goblins and my first thought was, "My character's gonna die, tons of goblins and Attack of Opportunity caused by spell-casting and it wasn't gonna be fun." My sis, on the other hand, just thought and the amount of rolling she had to do as GM. We both decided to call it quits.

So yeah, not the best introduction to Pathfinder.

 

[Lord Beautiful]

My character:

Talfain
Male
20 something years old
Eladrin
Ranger
Very, very athletic

He was so pretty that nearly every response from a town-goer (and his own party members, at first) to any statement from him was, "You're a guy?"

Due to lucky rolls at precisely the right times, he pulled some absurdly awesome stuff.

The one act that sticks out the most happened in an underground crypt with ten or so coffins. Upon lifting the stone cover of one of the coffins in the corner to search inside, enemies began to rise from the others.

So he throws this stupidly heavy coffin lid at one of the enemies rising from another coffin. The lid lands on its face, knocks it prone into its coffin, and seals the coffin. He then proceeds to rush to that coffin, jump on top of it to keep the thing from escaping, and crit to slash the shit out of the approaching undead.

Also, he was viciously perverted. And very, very pretty.

In our final encounter (which turned out this way because the DM was tired as hell more than anything else), we faced off against a necromancer. And when I say "faced off," I mean busted down his dildo-lined door (upon which Talfain fucked himself for stat bonuses) to his personal sex dungeon to find him lying shirtless on a lavish, draped heart-shaped bed. This was not before finding a zombie in a different room, chained up with a dildo in its ass.

Anyway, the necromancer. Know how we beat him? We distracted him with the combined sexiness of my boy and our charming vampire warrior. This gave our druid time to summon a spirit bear to hold his ass down so we could chain him up and set his room on fire.

No, I'm not joking. We had a very open DM.

 

[Beautiful Tragedy]

quick one for now, i have another i will tell later.

We were playing Shadowrun, and our "Face" was trying to cut a deal, while we all hid nearby. I was a shaman, and for fun i wanted to give the guy he was dealing with a headache, used too much force, detonated his cortex bomb and killed our face with skull shrapnel.

 

[Dr.Sean]

I was DMing a 3.5e campaign, and the players ended up in a forest circa Waterdeep. They were still trying to grasp the idea of D&D, so they kept rolling to find stuff that was safe to eat, even though they had plenty of food. They ended up finding a flower that was poisonous to eat, but it was very pretty, so the party's rogue went around asking every person in the party if they wanted the flower. They all refused.

Then the paladin said, "Wow, you sound like the world's worst Jehova's witness."

Then the rogue said, "Would you like to have this poisonous flower?"

Then the paladin said, "Would you like a pamphlet of my god?"

Rogue: "Flower?"

Paladin: "Pamphlet?"


Then I started another campaign, where the PCs are evil bastards, and then there was some freaky shit happening to the druid involving a talking dog. The barbarian kept pointing at me and saying, "You're a dog" whenever the dog said something.

 

[Eamar]

I played a sex-mad Hunter named Kitty Cox-Rider ([small]I know, I'm a terrible human being[/small]) in a game of World of Darkness last summer. Over the course of the game I pimped my skills such that I ended up rolling 18 d10s for my daggers, often resulting in massive overkill that put the gun-toting characters to shame. At one point my character was having sex with some NPC (obviously) and decided he needed killing. I rolled so well that he was effectively reduced to a puddle of gore on the sheets... lost a few morality points over that

In a Savage Worlds game I played last year a friend played a Special Ops soldier who, due to a tragic childhood accident, had lost both his trigger fingers and couldn't use any weapons other than throwing knives. The DM was not impressed.

 

[Iwata]

Kaldor Draigo. Memorable in 40K because it marks the exact point where Matt Ward no longer needed any pretense of trolling players.

 

[the abyss gazes also]

My father told me one of his gaming stories and I thought it was the best example of the dice really fucking you over in the most narratively interesting ways in D'n'D.

The party had just stolen some artifact from the temple and the entire town is chasing after them. The boat is pulling away from the docks. DM says, "Everyone roll to jump onto the boat." So everyone rolls... and everyone misses the roll by 1.

DM, "You all run, get to the end of the dock, leap, and slam into the side of the ship before slipping into the water."
Player, "Someone grab the dwarf. They don't float."

 

[WindKnight]

A game of 2nd edition warhammer 40,000, back when you used cards to cast/power your psychic powers.

I was eldar, fighting against space marines, my army led by a farseer, my opponent got the first turn and immediately turned a guardian next to my seer into a calidus assasin, locking him in place for an epic duel. The rest of his turn was fairly uneventful, just maneuvering into place, and my seer held off the assassin, but was still locked in place by it.

and so came the psychic phase! and I was given the ultimate of boons, ultimate force, so I could cast one of my powers as if I had maxed it out, only for my opponent to hit me with daemonic attack in return. I wasn't too worried - all I needed to do was roll a 3 or more on a six sided dice, and he was safe. I rolled a ttwo, immediately killing my seer off.

Now, under 2nd edition, if your general died, every unit within 12" had to pass a moral check, or flee. This was half my army. And despite needing to roll 8 or under on 2D6 (at the very worst, some units needed 9 or even 10 or less) (i)every unit failed the morale check(/i) and had to flee 2D6 towards the nearest table edge, which was a good 10" away from every unit.

Everyone rolled high enough to run off the table, which meant they had fled the battle and were counted as destroyed.

So, half my entire army - my entire left flank - was lost on the first turn of the game.

 

[WindKnight]

eh, nah, I just have really horrendous luck. Thats kind of the worst example of it, but I've also had an RPG character enter a gunfight with an smg and two backup pistols, and jam all three guns in three combat rounds.

 

[woodsWorld]

This is a story I like to call The Special Stairs.

So my friends and I were playing a Pathfinder module called Masks of the Living God, using Pathfinder rules but with an Eberron world setting. As there were three of us, with one of us GMing, I and my other non-GM friend each played two characters: I had a human cleric and a Warforged monk (Warforged is a race of living constructs, basically fantasy robots), and my friend had a gnome sorcerer and dwarf rogue. We were all about 6th level at this time.

Our mission was to infiltrate a local cult branch and find court-permissible evidence of some of their dirty dealings so they could be shut down. We attended one of their recruitment events, feigning interest in joining the cult. They fed us drugged food (except for my Warforged, who doesn't eat and eventually consented to be willingly knocked unconscious by the cultists on duty), confiscated all of our equipment (this will become very important later), and gave us all standard acolyte robes and supplies.

We woke up inside the cult's castle, and given communal living quarters with all the other acolytes at the recruitment event, so we made small talk for awhile. But our dwarf decides he's not comfortable with us going around the castle unarmed and unarmored, and decides to sneak off and retrieve all our equipment. He knocks out a guard near the storage room where our items are kept in locked chests, steals his keyring, and reclaims our stuff. He manages to sneak back and redistribute our items, but decides he's feeling slightly reckless and sneaks off on his own to try and find information we can use to complete our mission. This is when it really starts to hit the fan.

In the courtyard, there was a set of stairs that led up to the living quarters and private rooms of the cult's leaders. Climbing these stairs was absolutely verboten, but since the dwarf had conveniently completely forgotten this, the guards at the top of the stairs were extremely unhappy. After trying to bluff and give some weak excuse about towels (it was funnier at the time), the dwarf is hauled off by the guards to the second-in-command's quarters, who is extremely pissed about the dwarf climbing the Special Stairs (as we have started calling them at this point), and sentences him to be brought down to the communal quarters and whipped in front of the other acolytes.

He is brought down to the acolytes' quarters and the guards are told to strip off his robes. The dwarf immediately knows that this is a serious problem, as his robes would be removed for the whipping and they would all see his weapons - equipment he was not supposed to have. Being discovered pretty much means a death sentence on the spot, so as soon as the robes are removed and the dwarf is naked, the rest of the team decides it's time to spring into action.

The gnome sorcerer opens by casting Entangle, covering the whole room in thick vines that make it very difficult to move, and conveniently hits everyone BUT the dwarf while screaming "He's getting away! Stop him!" Meanwhile my monk and cleric wade through the chaos basically hitting things at random. The gnome then casts Color Spray, which blinds and stuns anyone hit by them... which just happened to include the second-in-command who was overseeing the whipping. On the next turn, while the second-in-command was stunned, my monk decides to grapple and pin him. The GM decides, between being entangled, grappled, stunned and blinded, that the second-in-command counts as being helpless... thus making him a target for a coup de grace. And after saying "I got your stupid stairs right here!", the dwarf delivers.

At this point we decide that trying to infiltrate the cult and gain access covertly is out of the question, so we stage all-out war on the rest of the compound. These shenanigans include setting up a trap to knock the cultists off of a slippery ledge into a pit containing a giant snake, and turning my Warforged into a ten-foot-tall, two-ton robot who proceeds to roll down the stairs and crush anyone running up after us.

And that's how we utterly destroyed a module with a butt naked dwarf.

 

[Plinglebob]

I played a sex-mad Hunter named Kitty Cox-Rider ([small]I know, I'm a terrible human being[/small]) in a game of World of Darkness last summer.

WoD was the bane of my life. I really like the rules, settings and ideas of the game lines, but the fact you play relatively squishy characters compared to D&D meant that my inability to roll well combined with the GM's dice hating me meant I could never get a character to last. No matter the game, my characters would die within 5 sessions either from bad GM roles, bad player roles, or me being an idiot.

My 2 most memorable characters both came from Hunter: The Reckoning. The first is probably my favourite ever as he was a 60 year old Priest with defensive powers and social stats/backgrounds up the wazoo from being with the same inner city church for 35 years. My GM gave extra XP to start if we did a detailed background for our characters before the game started and I ended up with a 3 page essay detailing each of the priests major contacts and allies and how he knew them. Sadly he then got his face bitten off by an attack dog. Really liked that guy.

The second was one that exemplified the fact I just couldn't keep a character alive when he died 43 minutes into his first session after my priest bit the dust through falling off a bridge and being eaten my mutant sewer alligators.

 

[Eamar]

I played a sex-mad Hunter named Kitty Cox-Rider ([small]I know, I'm a terrible human being[/small]) in a game of World of Darkness last summer.

WoD was the bane of my life. I really like the rules, settings and ideas of the game lines, but the fact you play relatively squishy characters compared to D&D meant that my inability to roll well combined with the GM's dice hating me meant I could never get a character to last. No matter the game, my characters would die within 5 sessions either from bad GM roles, bad player roles, or me being an idiot.

My group doesn't seem to have this problem, though I can definitely see how it might arise. I suspect our DM may cut us a lot of slack without mentioning it...

I'll be DMing my first WoD game this summer (Changeling: The Lost), so I guess I'll find out for myself soon enough.

 

[The Diabolical Biz]

There was this one time I was playing Black Crusade. I was an Alpha Legionaire, and me, my irritating Psyker companion, a horrendously fat marine (so fat he could barely walk) and a renegade guardsman had to infiltrate a forge-world and cause havoc or somesuch. Anyway we had just very stealthily assassinated an Inquisitor, and decided that the best way to get in would be to impersonate said Inquisitor.

So I dressed up as the Inquisitor, and we made our way onto the planet. On the way there (we left the obese plague marine and the guardsman with horns behind, because, you know, stealth), the Psyker was annoying me more and more (we had him pretending to be my interrogator), constantly interrupting me, always running ahead so as to try and find loot/get roleplay points etc, and by the time we got to planetside I was pretty peeved.

It was at this moment, however, that I remembered that the Psyker was now my lackey, and, as a subordinate to a mighty Inquisitor, had to do my express bidding. From there it went...downhill.

See, we were sent in to try and summon a Daemon into the comms system of the planet - which cultists planetside had already been disrupting. We went there under the guise of using the comms to track the cult and eliminate them because blah blah heresy. So we had to pretend to the Imperial folk that we were formulating a plan to help them out. So anyway, the Psyker kept on interjecting while I was ad libbing a plan - a poor plan, but let's ignore that for now - when I just gave up and just focused on tearing their character apart. It went something like this:

Spoiler

'Sir, I think it would be wisest if we procee-'

'Pardon me Interrogator?'

'I said I think it would be wisest if we-'

'Did someone say 'Permission to speak, my Lord'?'

-Sigh-

'Permission to speak, My Lord?'

'No, it must have been the wind.'

(slightly louder) 'Permission to speak, My Lord.'

'Permission to speak? You?'

'Yes.'

-silence-

'Yes, sir.'

'Hmm. Hmmmm...very impetuous, aren't you.'

'I'm sorry, sir. May I speak?'

'Permission gra- denied! On with my plan!'

The session continued in this vein, with me heartily enjoying myself and my friend getting more and more frustrated, until through my idiocy (my Inquisitor was about as good in power as General Melchitt (see: Blackadder)) we'd managed to use the comms to alert practically every Imperial within the galaxy to our Chaotic nature. I know, worst Alpha Legionaire ever.

But you know what? It was totally worth it. The way I've told it might make me sound like a dick, but they definitely deserved it. It was definitely the most fun we as a group had playing Black Crusade. Although the DM eventually decided that we'd fucked up so bad they just retconned that session from existence.

 

[Sneezeguard]

Hmm I don't have any really memorable/funny stories of my own but I can recommend The spoony experiment's counter monkey series those were pretty funny Tabletop RPG and larp stories if you like that kinda thing.