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I'd like to see what some of your greatest success stories are when it comes to telling a story at the gaming table. Those times when the GM moves their players to tears, when a player character says or does something that will be remembered at that table forever.
Doesn't have to be success in terms of melodrama; fear and tension and excitement and humor are all forms of success, depending on what you were going for. Doesn't even have to be something related to acting; what about a time when the GM's plot or the PC's plan just came together perfectly and everyone just sat back for a moment to bask in the awesome glow?
(not that I mind a wall of text, but it might be best to at least try and be concise. I know *I* could write a small novel on pretty much any of my games, but I doubt I'd have an audience)
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Campaign years ago that crossed from 3.5 to Pathfinder 1E. My tragic cleric of Death found her nemesis, the high priest of the god of evil, undeath, and whatnot. She ultimately found he'd had his soul yanked out and put into a gem. The party found the gem and had a long conversation of how to get rid of him forever. Ultimately, she found a solution and got him reincarnated as a fruit bat. The man who had killed her as a young woman, now finally gone forever....
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two spring to mind.
The first was an opening game to a Shadowrun game in which I was bringing three separate (like by continents) characters together. One was a Ganger tusseling with the Ancients (elven motorbike club), another was a Thai spec ops phys ad running down some drug producers in the jungle, and the other was a mild-mannered fire inspector making a tour of a local chemical plant.
I ran each scene interwoven together; so I'd run a little scene for the ganger, pause go over to the fire inspector, pause, jump over to the jungle-fighter, rinse repeat. The tricky part was getting right up until something exciting or interesting was happening and then pausing and going on to the next character, without that trick getting stale or played out. Eventually the ganger is in a running battle for his life with the Ancients who have killed the rest of his gang, the jungle warrior is escaping capture from the drug dealers and the fire inspector is dealing with a wiring crisis in the chemical fire suppressor system that if left unchecked could result in a delay of said system and the possible expansion of a fire if one were to occur.
Very last scene ends with ganger on fire, upside down flying into a dumpster at about 80mph, the phys ad firing a bazooka up the fleeing keister of one of his torturers and the fire marshal finishing the paperwork on the factory after taking a bribe to look the other way on some violations before being busted in a sting operation.
That was only the first session and the game fizzled out not long after, but all the players still talk about it to this day about how well I wove all the scenes together and switched gears from all the various types of stories going on. I'll never capture lighting in a bottle again like that.
Second one, more recently, ran a modern pathfinder game where the players all started out as kids growing up in the same foster house. Babba Yaga comes to town in her winnebago along with her main hench, a older than dirt Ogre and the two begin to steal children. Our intrepid group of children eventually decide enough is enough of their friends disappearing along with the strange nightmares they've been having and sneak out at night with the help of their trusty neighborhood mutt. Before heading out they raid their toy chest for whatever they can find.
I made them all custom character sheets in the style of a kids fridge art and had a bunch of item cards made up like CCG cards, things like; baseball bat, half a goalie's pads, juice box, fire crackers, lighter (don't tell mom you play with fire!), jump rope, etc.
they were each allowed three choices from the toy chest with which to start their adventure and then were let loose on the streets far after the street lights had come on. What followed was a pretty wild Goonie-esque adventure that had them fighting Mites, navigating the sewers, discovering a ancient temple to dark powers and defeating the ogre by giving him a heart attack with a pair of jumper cables they had round and McGuyvering them up to a battery.
Again, that was the opening session, and the game moved into them as adults, when a familiar wildly painted winnebago came rolling back into town along with some other strange happenings.
Played for awhile before one of the players decided to be an idiot and torch the game, but again they all talked wildly about that first game and wanting to go back to playing as kids or starting something similar.
At level 3, my players encountered a "servant of Erastil" - then they noticed small worms crawling out of his armor. A lengthy and desparate battle with a worm that walks began, and they were unable to defeat him. The template comes with DR 15/-, no matter the CR, and he had some healing capabilities.
So they retreated, just to see the "worm man" being rammed by a boar - which lured him into a cave. When the players closed, they found only some ash in "worm man" shape. Within the cave they encountered an ancient vampire king (who finished off the "worm man" so easily) and started doing jobs for him.
At the end, this little sequence accomplished three things: 1) Players remember the "worm man" as being extremly awkward, even years later. 2) The "boar" "Piggy" was introduced, as a shady helper of mysterious identity. 3) The vampire king was established, in such a way that they never dared to battle him, even though some players made plans. Maybe it was simply a metagaming thing (they suspected he was planned as final villain, so they waited), but I prefer the idea that the first impression was a lasting one.
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Really great stuff so far. Thank you all for sharing.
One of my players wanted his rogue to take levels in some goofy prestige class from 3rd. The master of masks, I think? I was like "why would your character do that?" And he was like "'cause it's awesome!" So I was like "hm...okay, gimme one session..."
His character runs afoul of one of the local crime rings and is framed for a terrible crime. His friends come to his defense, but they're sellswords and hedge wizards, not barristers. He is banished and marked for his misdeeds, so all the world can see what sort of man he truly is. He has an iron mask, heated in a forge fire until it glowed, branded to his face.
--I actually don't consider this moment to be a stellar example of storytelling myself, but my audience did. We had some genuine tears at the table from a few people; tears of frustration and rage and grief for their comrade--a man who stood by them as they faced down death out there in the wild--brought low not by a mighty blow or an eldritch curse, but by the petty laws of a corrupt city.
Two of the characters were so moved by their friends plight that they vowed to stay in the city and uncover the truth. And, of course, the rogue in the iron mask got to be all brooding and sullen after that. Changed his name and everything. "That man is dead. Call me..." *cue thunder and lightning flash with cloak billowing in the wind as he looks down on the city from the gargoyle-encrusted rooftops*.
I had several players tell me that this was the moment they realized what this game could really do. Like, their eyes were finally open to its true potential.
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To avoid spoilers for the AP I'm going to be pretty vague.
I had a campaign that ran for about a year. The players went from level 1 to 17, and one of the PCs died after 2-3 months (during book 2). His death had me make obvious changes to the story direction of 2 NPCs (essentially redeeming both of them). At the end of the campaign the BBEG was using things important to the area to power their evil plans. One of the earlier enemies was siphoning souls into crystals for his own evil plans.
When they found the important things, and saw the soul gem sitting there a player that joined the game between books 4 & 5 asked who would be in it and one of the other players was so choked up he couldn't answer and could only point at the player who lost the PC.
From a different campaign, here's another one I'm quite proud of:
One of my players is fairly rules-focused and has played in (and currently plays in) so many different games that he's kind of seen it all. It's hard to get an emotional response out of him, he doesn't connect with NPCs, and you could say he plays a stat-block more than a character. But anyways...
Rise of the Runelords has a haunted house in it. I inserted it into a different campaign and removed the very few fights that were in it, which made it even more atmospheric. The group was in the house for the majority of two 6 hour long sessions and there were a few times where he visibly shivered and commented that it was creeping him out.
It's a small thing, and impossible to accurately describe, but, yeah, I'm incredibly proud that I was able to give him the willies because he's not the kind of player that would normally get affected like that.
At some point during the first couple years or so that I was dating my future wife, I ran a short Cthulhu Mythos campaign using GURPS. We and the other players were living in the greater Boston area, so I set the campaign there, in the modern day, using a number of sites that most of us were familiar with.
In the subway, it's a fairly common sight to see mice or rats foraging along the rails between trains coming through, so I used that for a scene where the two college students PCs (including my g.f.'s) were waiting to catch a train. They noticed a bunch of rats dragging an old book along the rails. Curious, they took a closer look, and were disturbed by the manner that the rats were working together to move the book, apparently at the direction of a larger, deformed rat. [A rat-thing, thought they didn't recognize it as such.] One of the PCs jumped down and snatched the book away to see what it was, and found it to be some weird occult text. They quickly fled the station before finding out if the rats would try to take it back. They never did learn why or how a pack of rats had acquired the book.
That scene was one of the most memorable in the whole campaign, but not because it was any kind of climactic encounter. I just managed to hit the right mix of the banally familiar and the not-quite-right to hook in my players and slowly ramp up the creepiness and suspense.
For years afterward, until we finally moved away from Boston, my wife would periodically complain about not being able to get on or off a train at that station without being creeped out all over again.
I've played in a lot of LRP games where the plot/ characters / events came together for one of those intense moments that you still discuss 20 years later, but that's a slightly different sort of roleplaying. So for one of the tabletop ones...
It was a weirdly awful campaign, set in a near future post not-quite apocalypse / societal breakdown with a side order of mysticism, and the ref couldn't decide what game system he wanted to use, so we worked our way through three or four increasingly bad indie-games of the sort that only give you three stats and cripple a character every time they fail a dice roll.
In game there was a never-ending winter, scoiety had broken down and someone had just nuked London, wiping outthe characters' homes and families. We had rescued a teenaged girl who *might* be the reincarnation of King Arthur and taken her to Cornwall because plot. Think Twilight 2000 without the cheerful bits.
Somehow involving some weird psychic ritual an the grail we stepped into Avalon, and the ref described this land which was warm, and green, and then said "OK, this is faerie, so now draw up a new character sheet with all the things that your character would be able to do in a mystical realm, limited only by the capacity of their imagination and personality". After a year of real time playing an empath who could, on a good day, tell if someone was a bit upset, suddenly I was playing the character I had wanted to be all along, and it was glorious.
Unfortunately the campaign fizzled shortly after due to irreconcilable political differences, so we never did save the world.
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Really great stuff, here. All of it.
I've played in a lot of LRP games where the plot/ characters / events came together for one of those intense moments that you still discuss 20 years later, but that's a slightly different sort of roleplaying.
I'd definitely be up for hearing about some of those moments. A story told is a story told, no matter how.
We had rescued a teenaged girl who *might* be the reincarnation of King Arthur...
That sounds great!
I ran a game a few years back where the party had to find a cure for a supernatural disease that was sweeping across the land, destroying entire settlements in a screaming chorus of agony and rot.
They were in a labyrinth that caused anyone who entered it to go blind. There was a monstrous *thing* prowling amongst the corridors, all creaking sinew and clacking talons. It was fast, had massive reach and could locate them by senses other than sight. They were running low on hit points, spells and tricks, and still they could not find a way out.
One of the heroes, a tough and stalwart gnome soldier, decided to hold the thing off, in order to buy his comrades enough time to escape. The classic "no! We won't leave you!"
"There isn't any other choice! Get out of here, while you still can!"--type exchange ensued.
...except it went on for a little longer than I expected. Finally I had to jump in, "alright everyone. You can hear the foul guardian approaching. The time for talk is done. You must choose: honor your dear friend's sacrifice and fly, or stand, here, now. Emerge victorious together or fall in the dark and leave the world outside to its fate. Choose!"
...and every single one of them, without a moment's hesitation or even a glance at each other to confer, chose to stand and fight.
"We stand together!"
"All or nothing."
"This is it, do or die!"
And...yeah. The player who offered up their character as a sacrifice broke down and wept. They felt so genuinely loved and a *part* of this band of heroes, these closest of friends.
The battle was tough; 3 out of 5 were unconscious and dying and the other two were at less than 25% of their max health before they brought the guardian low. But the day was won, their wounds were staunched and they stepped out into the light.
Really great stuff, here. All of it.
I've played in a lot of LRP games where the plot/ characters / events came together for one of those intense moments that you still discuss 20 years later, but that's a slightly different sort of roleplaying.I'd definitely be up for hearing about some of those moments. A story told is a story told, no matter how.
So... this was a long running LRP campaign in which the dozen or so players were all in one way or another loyal servants of the Empire - which was the main country in that game world. As a quick PF equivalent, we're all playing Taldan nobles / military/ government agents. Basic plot is that we have been sent through a portal to explore a world which was once an Imperial colony.
My character, Lirael, was an elven wizard, and a bit of an air head. Also in the party were two Imperial soldiers, and she liked the look of a man in uniform, so flirted with the two younger ones, especially a handsome officer called Lannick, who was terribly formal and polite in response. She spent pretty much half the campaign gazing dreamily at him, and getting the same "yes ma'am, may I help you?" response.
halfway through the campaign, somewhere around midnight on a wet Welsh hillside Lannick got killed by some hideous monster, and although raise Dead was quite common inthat system he couldn't be brought back to life (which was quite a big thing in game). So the party had a funeral, with a bier, and everyone standing around making speeches, remembering all the brave things he had done.
in the middle of this, the other soldier (and his husband IRL) says "I have Lannick's will here. and I think i ought to read it. Bear in mind art this point it's somewhere in the early hours of the morning, everyone is cold, tired, and the only light is a few garden flares round the body. So the will reading starts:
'To the Empress I commend my soul, to my bronthers in arms I give my sword and shield...' finally ...'and to Lirael who was always the love of my life...'
At that point I think I sort of slid to the ground sobbing hysterically, and had to be helped into the house by the rest of the party.
Ten years later I have almost forgiven Lannick's player for putting me through an emotional meat grinder.