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Everyone has or ought to have a game they played through that is the epitome of what a good game should be.
I was introduced to rp through D20Modern, where in the second campaign I ever played in, I ran a Dedicated/Fast Hero with a few levels of Acolyte( divine caster class) on top. I modeled him, very loosely, after Nicholas D Wolfwood from the Trigun anime (a 'priest' with a big gun). His name was Viktor Masters, and he was awesome.
The premise of the campaign was that a misguided priest named Uzziel was trying to open a rift from our world into the 'shadow' world, where all the dnd type monsters and races come from. For whatever reason I no longer remember, we needed to stop him.
I have two personal moments of glory for Viktor in this game, one around 4th or 5th level and the other closer to 10th.
In the first one, we were attempting to sneak into the home of a woman who we believed was working with Uzziel. Turned out she was home, and asked Viktor, seductively, to come upstairs with her. I failed my Will save (she cast something on me, dont remember what), so up the stairs I go alone with the bad guy, while the rest of the party leaves.
Once upstairs, she has Viktor sit on the bed, and 'fires' a 'gun' at him that shoots lightning bolts (its actually a wand of lightning bolt, shaped like a gun.). Dm rolls dmg, whcih kills me, telling me I get no save, cause Im sitting on the bed. I argue that I should get a save (minus my Dex mod). He agrees, and I roll a 20. By this point, id picked up a level of 2 of Fast hero, so I have Evasion, so no damage. I jump out the second story window, make the skill ckeck to reduce the damage taken from the fall, and GTFO. Epic win for me. (I later killed her and took the Lightning Gun lol).
The second story was close to the end of the game, and the party needed to bust into the house of a group of snipers who had been terrorizing the area, or something like that. Im hiding in the bushes or something, and the snipers know we are outside, we a firefight breaks out.
I barely have LOS to one of them, as he is sitting at an odd angle from me and has total cover from it, but I take my shot (using Burst fire, so I actually have to hit with the shot, instead of needing a 10 to spray the area that would allow him a Reflex save to avoid taking dmg). I roll. Crit. Confirm? 19! Roll for dmg (like 4D8 +?? while using burst fire). Rolled pretty high, causing him to make a massive dmg save. He fails it and drops.
DM: Just so you know, I spent more than an hour working on that guy you just one-shotted...
We ended the campaign in a massive fight with Uzziel and his lieutenants, where one of our casters used Phantasmal Killer on Uzziel, who failed the death save...
Caster: Why dont we just pretend that he made the save, and just takes the damage instead...cause that was anticlimactic...
That was the best game Ive ever played in so far. What's yours?
3.5 game set on Shadow World (Rolemaster world)
My Wizard/Priest Human female 'Becki' travelled back around two different continents doing odd jobs for various rulers and churches. Her comrades were a cat person rogue, human male cavalier, human male soldier and elven ranger.
During the campaign on three occaisions Becki was approached by an evil wizard who wanted some other bad guys out of his way. So she negotiated for more reward money from this wizard and edited the mission details to her heroic comrades. The players were shaking their heads at how evil Becki's contact were but their characters knew nothing.
Our heroes did remove many humanoids and local level threats and gained reputations as regional heroes. Becki even bought the PCs a house to stay in. What she hadn't told them was she slew all the previous occupants.
Now Becki worshipped the sea/storm god and during one trip between lands we were followed by sea wolves. Pretty sure it was an adapted Dungeon magazine adventure.
So the sea wolves are following us since Becki was sacrificing chickens every day to appease her deity. Crewmen started going missing and we spotted a seawolf one night so considered our options.
Becki's plan was this - Fill wineskins with air and let the armoured cavalier float on them, tied behind the boat as a decoay. When the sea wolves would attack him we would blast them with lightning bolts while he bashed them. The other players knew that lighting would go off as fireball radius in the water but the Cavalier didn't know that. I was laughing at how stupid the plan was but they went for it and it worked.
It was fun playing the double lives, she never worked against the party and often helped them.
The Best Game I ever played in I was DM... My players just meshed well with each other and me ALOT and we all added to the world we were in.
The four characters I had playing( 3.5 edition) ended at level twelve and we made a pathfinder conversion because we all had every intention of playing them again or using them for other campaigns in the future.
The four characters were these:
Sabir "The Prophet"
Sabir started as a druid sand person in the post apocolyptic Magic world (Some powerful Anti-magic bomb was set off and it was in the eberron campain setting at the time, we eventually modded it to our own world.)
The player around seventh level met a powerful figure named Alabaster (Mindflayer priest on a powerful council of a plethora of races and people)
Alabaster corrupted him to a new form and to the church of lovecraft basically.
The reason his character took such a twist was he awaked a creature to make it his animal companion, and I asked the player if I could roll percentiles just for S and G and he said why not lol. I rolled 00... The bird thought it was the reincarnation of the God Cthulu.. It was funny but also very story aiding, very comic reliefy I suppose.. it eventually got to the point where he wrote a variant prestige class to the Blighter called "the Maddener", just excellent fun.
Eventually he came to telepathically weild a gear from the mechanus plane after he went back to destroy the vast knowledge of the library of mechanus.
This was a terribly smart player, could ruin every thing I had with a few low level spell combos, but it never upset me or outshined anyone that was his schtick.
Currently we are building a world based on this campaign.. oodles of fun.
The other three players formed the crew "The Four Horseman" each were evil like sabir and all related to the abilities of the four horseman of the apocolypse and since we were in a post apocolyptic world it seemed fitting.
It would take forever to describe them all so sabir will do.
I am an admittedly terrible player. I get so wrapped up in role-playing cool (to me, anyway) character ideas, that all my brains desert me when it comes to tactical situations.
So, my DM moved from Boston to Florida. He was down there for a while and I saved up enough money to fly down there and play in his game. I was playing Doodlebug Anklebiter, goblin paladin, and in the very first combat I was bit by a werewolf and ended up a lycanthropic goblin paladin.
Somehow I survived, but later we were chasing some villains down into a dungeon. We knew that the next room contained 3 vampires, but I got tired of waiting for the rest of the party (which contained like six other people) to get their plans together, so I just opened the door and marched right in.
Three initiative counts later I was a dead lycanthropic goblin paladin. But the DM felt bad that I had blown $500 to get killed after less than an hour's play, so he let me come back as, that's right, a VAMPIRIC, LYCANTHROPIC GOBLIN PALADIN!
I got to beat the crap out of the rest of the party before they finally staked my ass, but by the next combat I'd already rolled up a new character...a mute kobolod sorceror!
Actually, I don't know if that was my best game ever, but it was certainly my most expensive.
the most fun i ever had playing was a Legend of the Five Rings game. It was my first experience with the system and the setting. we were a group of minor clan magistrates looking into some wierd ronin stuff.
My character was Toku Akimoto, Monkey Bushi with nerves of steel. I cut dirty ronin in half, made a monk cry, attempted(badly but humorously) to woo a Crane maiden, and eventually died at the point of a dozen of so assassin's blades which bought my group some time to get away and complete the mission.
it was an amazing game run by an amazing gm. it opened me up to the awesomeness that is L5R. i now read the weekly fictions religiously and run a game myself every other week(with my pathfinder game played on the weeks that i'm not running l5r).
A DC Heroes campaign that lasted from 1988 to 2000. Too many characters and memorable moments to list, but it was the most fun I'd ever had being on the player side of the table. The GM actually met one of the game's designers at a con and told him about our game and how it was running after Mayfair had quit publishing DCH, and he was blown away at how long we'd kept the story arcs going. Good times, good times....
(I'll try to keep this as short as I can, because I tend to get carried away anytime I talk about this campaign, that's how much of an impact it made on my gaming life.)
My very first 4e game was in a homebrew campaign setting a friend of mine made. This friend emailed me out of the blue, and invited me to start this campaign with him, and if I had any friends I wanted to bring, I could. So I brought two of my friends, and he brought his girlfriend and (after a few sessions) another friend of his. The campaign setting and the overarching plot was simple, yet, deep, and all of us (as players and as PCs) meshed really really well. The DM set up a wikidot site (which I continue to update even now, two years after the campaign, with character journals every now and then) and while the campaign was going, all of us, players and DM, posted in-character discussion, out-of-character discussion, character journals, session recaps, and everything. It was worked out so well by the DM that if we had realized it, we could have pieced together who the villain was and how the plot was going to play out just by reading NPC descriptions on the website from day one- but the plot was so well tied together than nobody realized any of the connections until it was staring us right in the face. (In other words, none of the plot twists felt like they came out of nowhere- they all felt like they were perfectly foreshadowed.)
The basic plot is as follows (this campaign was a relatively new world, so certain things, like undead, resurrection, and other things either didn't exist, or were unknown by most people): A great king exterminates the orc race to make his kingdom safer. Many years later, rumors of orcs resurface, so he sends out some knights to investigate- in the meantime, his political rival has him assassinated and assumes control. The knights he had sent out, the PCs, are exiled, and branded as heretics and fugitives. They flee the kingdom, and later on discover that some powerful sorcerer has the entire orc race back from the dead, all to set up this new king to take the throne. The party finds the sorcerer (who is the world's first necromancer, and has perfected not only the creation of undead, but resurrection as well), eventually kills him, finds a long-lost heir of the previous king, then returns to the kingdom to slay the traitor-king and reinstate the rightful heir to the throne. It was pretty simple, but, like I said, there was a lot of depth to it as well.
My character was an abused stable boy who dreamed of becoming a noble, who kinda got caught up in the whole thing. When I made the character, I wanted him to be simple, and not have any of the typical PC motivations- he just cared about starting a familiy and becoming a noble someday. But when we first encountered the evil sorcerer (who, involving some work between the DM and one of the players, was disguised as one of the players right up until a critical moment), my character was killed, and the sorcerer got away. I was pretty upset at first, since I had grown to really like my character, and even though we found the ritual to raise dead in the sorcerer's hideout, I was a little unsure of whether I wanted my character to come back from the dead. Then, it occured to me- my character was going to come back from the dead, but something was going to be wrong. Long-story-short, my character came back, but he was sort of part-undead. Eventually, once he got older, and he died for real, he was going to be reborn as a vampire- the world's first vampire. Since the world was so new, that meant any vampires in the world after this point would have been created by him.
Also, one of the other players had a similar event. He didn't die, but when my character did, it really hurt his character (since my character was more or less his squire). After my death, he made a pact with some otherworldly being, and became obsessed with the evil sorcerer's work, eventually becoming a warlock. He became more and more obsessed with it that, after we defeated the evil sorcerer, he (secretly) took over the sorcerer's power and eventually became a lich. His character and my character are both immortals, eventually changing the world (my character by creating all of the vampires, and his character by becoming known as the archlich-god Vecna). Since then, every generic or grehawk-centered campaign that I run actually takes place in this world we played in, with his character taking the place of Vecna and my character taking the place of both Count Strahd and the vampire Kas, whenever applicable.
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Hard to decide, would have to be a toss up between 2 campaigns...
The first: My introduction to 3.5ed, via a Convention Game, homebrew cosmology and tweaks to classes/skills. It was called Heroes of Ribhus and my character was a halfling Sorcerer named Karnot.
Highlights include:
Getting one-shot-dropped in the 1st round of the 1st fight of my 1st 3.5ed DnD game, via a Goblin (maybe hobgoblin) crossbow. Gotta love Sorcerers with 10 Con...
Fireballing the "final plot device" about 3-4 times in a climactic BBEG fight. As a convention game, the prevailing result of that particular module was the "real-life" result for the world. As the only group to actually STOP the world-shattering ritual, we still failed, but with style.
Being asked, in character, by a very shady bartender "So, you're here to buy it, then? 500 gp, cash money" and able to slap down the coin without hesitation. Of course, I didn't know what I was buying, but the bartender was shady, and it seemed like a plot-hook. End result: Karnot gets a Dire Boar named Piggy for his mount from now on.
Played him from level 1 to about level 12, the hard and honest way, with at least 2 lost levels due to death/resurrection costs. This character still shows up in my games from time to time, and is my "go-to" archetype if we throw a PUG together.
The second campaign, I decided I would play as nice an Evil character as possible, with bonus points for CE behavior.
I lit up the Beguiler class, and playing in Eberron, a House Sivis Dragonmarked Scion Beguiler named Dip was born.
He lied his way into and out of trouble across the entire Eberron campaign setting, eventually getting chased away for some simple villager-murdering.
Highlights from his career include:
Bluffing a large number of hostile Outsider types that we belonged in their club, causing just enough of a distraction to allow us to get the drop on them.
locking the "Light Warriors" in an ancient, underground vault, after bluffing and Charming White Mage and Fighter into helping us in our (diametrically opposed to their own goals) nefarious plans.
Betraying a simple Gnome family to the Zilargo Trust (secret police) for no reason other than some vague threats from the Trust's agents. Bonus points: none of the other PC's even had any idea I had done what I did, despite carrying out the plan in broad daylight while they were all there.
With his perception abilities, telepathy, and crazy skills, he was the uber-party-buff caster, party trapfinder/disarmer, and all around "face" of the group. Fantastic game, through and through.