Worst RPG Moments: And the Winners Are…

?Man oh man. I don’t know that I can say this was the best contest ever, but I definitely enjoyed the hell out of it. I think you guys figured out pretty quick that I really just wanted entertaining RPG tales, and man, you guys delivered. Some were stories of incredibly awful (but entertaining) role-playing, some were moments of awesome (and entertaining) role-playing, some were real life crashing into the game world, some about horrible people obsessed with raping imaginary people, and man did I love it. It made me want to get into a silly game of D&D myself, which is pretty amazing, since I swore that stuff off years ago.

There are more than 30 Honorable Mentions and the two winning entries are just ludicrously long, so they’re all on the next two pages. But two announcements first:

? There will be no TR contest this week. Partially because I need to order more shirts, and partially because it took me six full hours to judge and post this contest. Even when there are less entries, the entries are invariably longer and harder to judge. Point is I need a small break.

? Second announcement: There was a small comment thread requesting that I focus on contest that require creativity — like the haiku contests, or name the destroyer — as opposed to these types of contests, where people tell about previous nerdy experiences. Frankly, I love both types, and am trying to run both equally. If you think I’m erring here, lemme know in the comments. And, as always, I welcome more contest ideas of either type in this very article’s comments. And by welcome, I mean “please?” Now, see your winners and mentions after the jump.

Many of the Honorable Mentions did not follow the rules. They’re not all tales of bad role-playing. As mentioned earlier, some of are tales of awesome role-playing. Some are just funny. Since I crack up just at reading shit like “Ok, so we were playing White Wolf’s Dark Ages Vampire. I was playing a geisha Toreador and my friend was an ex crusader Ventrue and we had a bad habit of getting into trouble if ever left alone” this might explain why there are so many of them.

? Jerry: “So I told him I would wait him out until he stops playing his
20 fucking flutes, which he replies he will play them forever.”
? Cerebe: “My party managed the rest of the campaign dressed as the
Village People… in medieval Europe.”
? Mock26, for redefining what it means to be hit with the plot wagon
? Krystal, for “The Chupacabra Incident”
? random person: “Except for the one girl who played a LG-aligned green
dragon who was obese and could only fly by means of magic and kept her
cache of treasure in her fat folds.”
? losferwords: “She looks at me with total confidences and says ‘Well, I
take out my mace… and I SPRAY ‘IM WITH IT! RIGHT IN HIS UGLY FACE!!’
and she mimes spraying a tiny aerosol bottle with great determination.”
? LadySheeana, for making magical love connections between unwilling
participants at the age of 9
? DrahcirWolf‘s telling warning against the use of “elvish herbs” at the
RPG table
? Mittens, for “Stealy” and “Stabby”
? Kayla for the truth: “Hell hath no fury like a role playing,
D&D’ing woman scorned.”
? Kebabyuchenko for drinking until he vomited on his own game of Space
Hulk
? Kilroy: “My party had just saved a town of halflings, I then used my
balls as an improvised weapon, and teabagged wounded halflings to
death.”
? GruesomeDuck, for his tale of a friend who used a snake as a flail and
managed to beat a dragon to death with it
? Fanboy, for some nonsense involving killing an interdimensional flying
whale from the inside using a portal
? Sara, for reminding us all why more girls don’t play table-top RPGs
(I.e., many, many boys suck)
? Michael A. Ventrella, for telling a story where comic writer Mark
Waid, as a wizard, managed to electrocute his entire party
? GAJoe: “I played [a game]while in the midst of a nasty break-up with
my fianc?e, in which I set myself on fire, ran head first into a tree,
and then tried to stab myself repeatedly out of despair. The DM wouldn’t
let me die, so it got fairly ugly. Anyway…”
? Zade, who’s tragically amazing amount of time spent playing The
Eternal Forest is matched only by his tragic begging for a TR shirt
? zybones, for the best vampire name I have ever heard of, Duke Batface
? barthvader, for playing a character who was covered in giant bat
guano, which was set on fire and exploded
? Ghost, whose boyfriend played a half-orc warrior named, fantastically,
International Codpiece
? Lincolnparadox, who killed God with a Rambo-style, jury-rigged magical
exploding arrow because God gave him sass
? Lisa Lake: “C.T. Hulu and Sons meat processing!”
? Galen: “I was an “Afro-wookie” named Boog who only spoke the words
Ooonie Goo Goo, which translated to ‘I am Boog. I am Boog. I am Boog.'”
? The Other Ken for killing Wolverine on five separate occasions
? Wulfiebaby: “Chaotic Evil? Feels more like Chaotic Rich, muthafucka!”
? astrokender: “I played a kender in one campaign. Apparently that is
enough to warrant an elaborate death from the DM.” [As is right and
proper]
? “Starman” Matt Morrison for playing Joker in a superhero RPG where the
Joker saved more lives than the heroes… just to be an asshole
? Div: “…and that’s the story of the Electric Circumcision of Grumble
Buggerall, Gnome Druid Extraordinaire.”
? Lacroix, who witnessed a player ignore his dead in-game wife (played
by his current, real-life girlfriend) to go through the loot
? AllHailThoon for turning a chance Cyberpunk encounter into a lucrative
venture by having the foresight to have an organ-storing mini-fridge in
her leg
? Glitchy Goblin for… you just have to read it
? Gyran Gymble for UNIONIZING AN ORC TRIBE

And I’d like to give a extra special but not strictly honorable mention to 5318008, who disqualified himself by entering three times, but each one was a fantastic story worth reading. Had he picked one, he might have won. But instead, the two gents on the next page did.

—-

You’ll notice that both these winning entries are long. Insanely long. Now  I don’t want you to think that I approve of this in any way. However, I yet again forget to tell people to be brief, so it’s partially my fault. More importantly, these stories were so good, so “full of win” as the kids like to say in their hippity-hop records, that they won despite their length. So don’t follow their example. Unless your entry is that fucking good. Now here they are:

Nick said:

A friend of mine created a custom campaign using 2nd edition rules. Basically it was Waterworld without urine recycling. We didn’t get a chance to play much since we were all working about sixty hours a week at a restaurant so whatever time we got we wanted to get as much pillaging/killing done as possible. He was making us muddle through hour after hour of NPC conversation and equipment gathering so I talked my team into bringing teh action and robbing a weapons store in town.

When our thief started pocketing amulets, the DM had the shop owner bust us red-handed. I immediately had my mage attack. We spent the next two hours in a running battle. The DM had the shopowner decked out with enchanted weapons and powerful defensive amulets. Our cleric was able to knock him out with a +2 mace he swiped from a shelf (20). The DM said there was a security system in place tied to the storekeep’s health and had steel plates fall from the ceiling to block all doors and windows and lock us in the store. My mage was able to find the switch to open the doors (20). When we got outside, there were five guards waiting for us. I cast a sleep spell that put all but one of them to sleep (20). The last one fumbled his sword and impaled himself trying to attack our thief (1).

The DM said the last guard managed to call for help before killing himself (retroactively, I might add) and we had at least two dozen guards within a block of our position. My mage was able to locate a sewer grate (20) and laid a fire trap on the entrance to the sewer to guard our backs. The DM said the sewer was filled with methane and when the first guard followed us in, he set off the fire trap, which ignited the methane gas and sent a huge fireball down the tunnel we were escaping through. The cleric and my mage were able to jump into the sewage before the fireball hit us (two 20s; at this point the DM went and got another set of dice because he thought we were cheating) but the thief was hit and blown apart.

We made the DM tell us about the thief’s damage. He said we had the torso but were missing a leg and an arm. The cleric and I searched the sewer for the body parts and found our thief’s leg (20). My mage grabbed a random arm and we exited the sewer to find a temple. The DM said our fire trap had set off an explosion that had destroyed the entire city and the temple was gone. The cleric sewed the body parts together and we prayed to the gods for intervention. The cleric’s prayer was heard (97) and our thief was brought back to life. Our party ran to the boat that was waiting for us and we sat down to look at our loot. It was an impressive haul. As we were distributing it amongst ourselves, our DM was furiously rolling dice.

Suddenly, he smiled and said the thief’s reattached arm grabbed his knife and stabbed him in the stomach. We were able to cut the thief’s arm off in the ensuing fight. When we asked what happened, the DM said we attached a guard’s lawful good arm to our neutral evil thief and the arm revolted. Turns out our ship captain was neutral evil so we murdered him, cut his arm off, attached it to our thief and prayed to the gods for help. This time my mage rolled a 98 or 99 and the DM was so pissed that he had the god be offended at my arrogance, set the boat on fire and listen to us scream our insolent last breathes as we died in the fire. Then the god brought us back to life and killed us again.

I have never seen so many perfect rolls in a single game. It was awesome. Our DM told us we were fucking dicks and to get out of his apartment. He wouldn’t even talk to any of us at work for at least a week. It was the last time I ever played pencil and paper DnD.

Dag said:

Back in the early 1980s, I learned a valuable lesson about not having recently-split couples engage in any form social activity. I have to use fake names because I think one of the involved parties reads TR.
Sean and Tracy broke up two days before our weekly D&D game (second edition). They both agreed to participate and behave themselves for the sake of the game and the other players.

One of them was lying.

The game picked up where we had last played. An elf with a unicorn (Tracy) was being escorted by a human paladin (Scott), a halfling (Sean), and a half-troll (Larry). The current situation was that the elf woman was being hunted for the magic pearls she carried (yes, Tracy was the star as the only female playing). The group decided to stop in a town to gather supplies and information. The half-troll had to be watched carefully since he liked to eat children and had a long, nasty history of that. Tracy tried to explain what she expected of the troll.

It was at this point the first crack in the game.
Sean, in character, asked if it was necessary that Tracy’s character coddle everyone and place unrealistic behavioral expectations on people. Apparently, this was too close to a personal issue between them. Tracy responded that even the most dense creature could understand common civility and that it wasn’t an unrealistic expectation. Sean took the jab, but he was mad.
The group got their supplies and information, and got out of town.

While advancing through the forest, staying off the roads after having learned they were indeed being followed, the argument about coddling erupted again when Tracy asked Larry (the half-troll) to stop knocking over trees. Sean asked Tracy to mind her own business and leave the troll alone.
This began the all-out verbal fight. Sean could not leave well enough alone. In character, he took a swing at Tracy’s character, got initiative, hit a natural 20, applied the modifier, and knocked out Tracy’s character.

This part is not safe for children…..
Sean then proceeded to rape Tracy’s unicorn. Any time she, Tracy, showed any sign of coming around, he would knock her out again and returned to abusing the unicorn. He did this repeatedly until he asked, and I will never forget this “[I]s the damn thing dead? Did I fuck it to death?”
I, as the GM, had to make the various rolls to determine the state of the unicorn. It was not death, although severely wounded both bodily and in spirit. Sean then right back to raping the unicorn and asked to a health/spirit check about every five minutes.

Tracy sat there seething and unable to respond in kind.
After about a half an hour of this, the unicorn finally died in spirit, and then physically died. At this point, Sean had his character stand over the foully abused animal corpse and shouted “Fuck you!”, and then cut off it’s head.
Tracy stood up, said “Fuck you!” and departed the house. The game ended… as well as that campaign.
Sean glared at the table and simply said “I hate fucking unicorns.”
I don’t think he understood the double entendre of his statement given that he was angry with his ex-girlfriend. The rest of us started to laugh. He got mad at our laughter and then left the house as well.
Worst ending of any campaign I ever played or GMed.

The first story is a tale of minor PC rebellion that turns into a full-scale coup of insanity, assisted in every way by the dice gods. It is phenomenal and hilarious and perfectly indicative of bad role-playing and usurping the DM’s story. The second story is certainly the worst role-playing depicted in the entire contest, but the idea of a guy raping his ex-girlfriend’s character’s unicorn to death make me laugh so heard I almost vomit every time I think about it. Neither Nick nor Dag should be proud — Nick for what he did, nor Dag for what he allowed as DM. But they’re both getting TR shirts, so I imagine they’ll get over it. Thanks for entering, everybody!