My best experience involved a 37 hour session(yes this was without sleep. We jsut couldn't stop playing ) in an Earthdawn Crossover that had all of us on an astral quest to put down a Horror. I was using my rigger truck to act as a body blocker to the beast while the others worked to pull it from from it's reality, where it was invulernable to weapons(our Adept got a little nasty with it by going hand to hand But then, Killing Hands D was always nasty) and drag itnto our astral realm. Once we got the gateway open, we set our plan into motion. the Adept kept the Horror busy while I broke off from the group and planted explosives on an old rope bridge in it's world which overhung a chasm that our Shaman had used as the bridge between both worlds. I slipped back to the group and got inside my truck again as our Hermetic used a Phantasm Trid spell and the shaman pulled off a Vehicle Mask so it looked like my truck blew up and we all died in the explosion save for our Combat decker dwarf on his motorcycle. He tore of for the bridge with the horror in hot pursuit and detonated the explosives on the bridge once it was in the middle. Once it was over the chasm, it was subject to our reality, so it was vulnerable. That's when I pulled out my vehicle mounted modiefied panthers(Much easier to modify Panthers for rapid fire rather than buying autocannons BTW ) and started rocking it wth autocannon fire till it died. I'm pretty sure the GM fudged some rules along the way, but it was fun, it was long, and we were all dying of laughter when it all worked(never ever watch 13 1's come up on a 20 dice resistance roll )

It involved the IE Dick Clark, and a cyber dong data jack.... leave it at that.

Lindt, was that your worst, or best?

Sounds like best for the data jack and worst for Dick Clark to me.


My best gaming moment wasn't in Shadowrun, but I'll share it anyway.

We were playing Rolemaster and were mid-level (around 10th). While out exploring the world we stumbled across an ice dragon's lair. This thing was huge, but we'd never fought a dragon before, so figured what the hell. We knew the GM was not the type to let us walk away from anything, his campaign was of the sort where the worlkd exists and you do what you want in it. That once had first level characters stumbling into the lair of an ancient oriental dragon. One character didn't act polite enough and got eaten.

So we knew this might be too much for us. It was.

4 rounds into the fight we knew we were doomed, but decided to make as big a show of it as we could. People were going on total defense and still gettting hit. My mage would bladeturn for people (+100DB, which is akin to +20 AC in D&D) and they would still be hit. Blood was flowing left and right.

I was down to my last few power points, and casting any more spells was going to knock me out. So I said to hell with it. If I'm going out, I'm gonna at least try to take it with me.

I cast a spell that was higher level than me and went into my base power points. Basically I expereinced mana overflow, ruptured some organs, and then passed out. But I also open-ended high on my spell roll. The GM just said, "so" because dragons are incredibly resistant to magic in Rolemaster. But then he open-ended low on the dragon's resistance roll. It ended up with the dragon being stunned for 10 rounds, plenty of time for us to kill it.

I'll never forget the look on the GM's face.

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My worst time was also in that same campaign. The campaign came to an end because one of our players loved to see what he could do to screw up the world. We'd turned evil at one point, but had to change our ways to escapea huge ward left over from the previous age.

Somehow we managed to stumble across one of the Rings of Power given to the dwarves (Rolemaster is based in the Lord of the Rings universe). We took this ring to return it to the dwarves, but the wildcard player had found it, so he (an elf) carried it.

During his talki with the king of the dwarves, the king offered him great riches for the ring. He asked "how do I know I can trust you." Here he is, in front of the dwarven king, one of the most honorable beings on the planet, and he's doubting the guy's honor. The king orders him seized and the ring taken. But he slips the ring on his finger and disappears. The next day the dwarves declare a holy war on the elves, and the realm drops into chaos.

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Ok, that's enough rambling out of me.

One game that comes to mind was an SR3 run in which two members of my old gamin group had to infiltrate a building. It was a troll Black Ops specialist named "Dink" and a street sam named "Chrome." Chrome was carrying no less than 16 firearms (no spare ammo, just as many guns as he could get for his max weight). They were supposed to infiltrate a building, but half way through the security rigger traps them in an elevator and calls in a combat mage to mess them up. The mage was trying to capture them so he kept forcing them to drop their weapons. Everytime he would have to drop his guns, Chrome would just pull out a new set. After dropping a set of guns and drawing new ones 6 times, the mage finally ran out of juice and chrome shot him.

Another worthy of note was a game in which one of my players decided that his street sam could tightrope walk and fire a panther at the same time. Needless to say the recoil knocked him off the cable he was traversing -- to the tune of a 30 meter fall.

Some of those were funny guys. Thanks for sharing.

I think the worst time I had was when I discovered that the GM and a player were openly discussing how the other player was going to kill me. I say "openly" because they were speaking out loud and acting perfectly normal just a few feet from me. You see I have a very, very rudimentary grasp of Spanish, which is the language they were using...I just happened to catch the word "muerte" and my name. It's just a game, but the sudden realization that these two were calmly discussing the mechanics of killing me off while in my presense was a bit unnerving. It made some other strange stuff that had happened to me all fall into place.

As for the funniest thing, there are so many. Shouts of "take one for the team!" is huge in my old gaming group. It came from the fact that time and time again it seemed like it always came down to the whole team being pinned down and nobody wanting to make the first move. We would actually argue who could better survive being shot, who was faster, who could do this that or the other, who wasn't wounded, etc.. It seems like somebody always had to draw fire, advance under fire, or reach an impossible objective to save the mission, so calling "take one for the team" became a comical, ice breaking thing for us to say, usually when having to convince another player to do something risky to his character that the player was reluctant to do.

I also wanted to share one mildly amusing thing that happened. I was reminded of it as I was reading over some recent postings here on this forum. Someone here is a prison guard. Well, back in my younger, wilder day I was on the opposite end of that equation. This was a medium security camp with a large overcrowded dormitory (illegally overcrowded actually), I was there as a "victim" of the so called drug war on our own citizens. You know "just say no" and all?

None of the convicts I was locked up with had heard of role playing back then in the early 80s and we weren't allowed dice, so we improvised with pieces of paper. It wasn't exactly SR, it was a RPG I designed with the help of some other ex military cons like me. It was very Shadowrun-like except for the lack of magic. More a mercenary game with every possible factor that could affect a sniper's shot detailed into the hit roll and a huge variety of weapons we had all used or encountered and wrote up from memory.

Anyway, you have to picture the setting; it was a noisy, cramped, crowded, dirty, dingy, mold and mildew covered, poorly lit maze of triple high bunk beds with laundry hanging all over the place and tattooed thugs hanging around eyeballing your every move all the while incessently smoking one cigarrette after another. The bunks were packed in so close that you could just barely walk between them without turning sideways, the top racks were about 6' tall, maybe 4' to the middle rack and close to the floor for the bottom rack. Often we just stood there sort of leaning in using the middle bunk as a place to talk and play, if you kind of muscled in it would fit maybe 6 guys pretty neatly, three on each side, and your body would block alot of the view from the rest of the environment plus you would more or less have three pairs of eyeballs looking over your shoulder in each direction in case anything went down, which happened from time to time.

Anyway, I was GM, they were doing an Entebbe style assualt on an airfield in the Congo to rescue the detained Belgian execs, they had done a huge amount of recon, put together an awesome plan, gathered equiptment, everything was ready, tension was building, it was the final moments leading up to what was expected to be a huge firefight with the Republic of Congo army. I was sitting on a plastic bucket facing them, they were sitting on the bottom beds in a neat row of three down both sides of this cramped little space between the bunks. We were in character, everyone was dead serious, hours and hours of preparatory work and planning had been done, the whole thing carried the tone of professionalism, expectation, and hope that their characters would survive and the plan would hold up. We were running down the list and it went something like this:..."got the cutters?"..."check"..."got the map?"..."check"..."synchronised watches?"..."check"..."everyone know what to do?"..."yes!"(in unison) ..."ready to move?"..."yes!"(in unison)..."ok! let's do it!"..."let's do it!"(in unison). This was timed perfectly and spoken so seriously just as the unsuspecting dormitory sweeper was pushing his broom by us in the isle at the foot of the bunks. He stopped, backed off a step and stood there staring at us with a look of amazement I will never forget. He thought we were about to attempt the escape from Alcatraz or something, of course we all cracked to pieces laughing our asses off.

That was a bit of a humorous situation similar to the Dennys. But the funnest thing I ever did was to create a 4 man team, so did all the other 6 players, we then were inserted onto an island in the middle of the night using a bunch of Squad Leader map boards as the island and the GM took us round by round as we hunted each other. It was really interesting to be moving along using stealth and hiding in good terrain playing it round by round, each tuirn you wonder when you will spot smeone, where to go, where to set up an ambush and how to lure the others to your kill zone, it was really cool to come back to your turn and have the GM describe the sounds of automatic weapon fire and grenades going off in the distance, you think "oh man! two teams made contact out there in the darkness and they are going at it", it was cool to ease your way over to the sight and see where the losers had fallen, it wasn't so cool to get one of your team's brains splattered all over the brush you thought you were hiding behind and fail your perception roll to see where the muzzle flash came from. In short it was a fun event playing blind, but it took forever being cloistered. We talked for hours after it was over trying to piece together who was who and why and where we went.

Thanks for sharing Rory. Any other stories out there?

The first run I did, and I think it was the first the GM did as well (It was the adventure DRAGON HUNT). It was about 10 years ago, and our main group of friends were all in it, along with cameos from a few other friends, siblings, cousins,ect. (We wanted to get as many people into the game as possible.)

We are in a small office and there are two main hallways, a few meters apart (maybe 15), parallel to each other. So my Combat Decker takes one side with a Sammy, and our healer (mage) is hiding out near by. The rest of the team advances up the other hallway taking out guards and what not. Oh at this time the mage and I are both wounded. Out pops a drone in our hallway and so I start laying down fire with my sissy gun. The mage moves up to assist because somehow we missed something and are taking fire from two flanks. Street Sams turn and the player says, "What do I do?" Which everyone replied in unison, including the GM, "SHOOT SOMETHING STUPID!" Instead he runs up the hall (toward the now two drones) and dives through a door, well into the door. It opened the other way, so he soaked some damage that turn...then the next turn, he ran out the building, leaving us behind. (That is Jaruen's brother, that did that in case he doesnt remember).

The other is our guy who shoots everything. In the bar Cobalt Marie, they had "female" robots or synths or whatevers as servers. Well this guy knocks them over the head with a stun baton, and throws them over his shoulder and takes them home as sex slaves, locked in his closet. Crazy. He even wrote on his equipment "2 Marys".

I have already taken too much space to tell you all the other craziness from just that mission.

I think my best moment has to be the mind control duel. I'm playing a mage, and I find myself alone against an enemy mage, also alone. The enemy is part of a shadowrunner team we are trying to kill. So, he and I are both off on our own, seperate from our teams. So the two of us both cast control thoughts on each other. With our high willpowers, we both resist. We both keep casting that same spell over and over again for several turns, before I finally throw all my dice into spell defense, throw a dart filled with some chemical that lowers willpower and causes stun damage at him, then succesfully cast control thoughts on him. Then I have him lead me back to his team's safehouse, take me right on in, and tell his team that HE succesfully cast control thoughts on me. So his team decides to have a little fun and make me serve them dinner. I go along and wait on them for a few minutes, fetching all the soycaf, beer, and chinese food they want, then I toss a couple HE grenades at them as one of them is carefully weighing his plastic explosives and putting them into one kilogram wads, yell "Surprise mothafuckas, I am nobody's bitch! duck around a corner, and listen as they all die like rats. Then I grab the mage's foci, loot a few other things that weren't destroyed, get out of their, and call my team. Team leader says "Did you trail the mage back to their safehouse?" I say "Yeah. Oh, and I killed them all. Mission complete." From that time on, whenever that team had a problem, someone would say "How can we solve this with mind control?"

Worst experience:
We are playing a GM brewed run where we have to break into a Tir Noble's Seattle Vacation home. We do some research and discover he is due to arrive in two days, so we have to do it quickly. Which means our normal MO of flooding the place with a nonlethal but debilitating disease is out. So we have to use Stealth and cunning. We get a blueprint of the building and decide our best bet is the back door. So I sneak up to the door and use the maglock passkey and make a brilliant roll. The key does the trick and doesn't even scramble the lock. Suddenly I am flung to the side by the troll who shoots the door, kicks it in and shoots a camera, all with a Suppressed Panther Assault cannon. So now the Paladins and Ghosts know we are coming. I look around as the rest of the group uses reutheium combat suits and fades from view. I'm now standing there with my SMG, pistol, and Ares Alpha as the hoards of doom are coming. Only due to some amazing luck on my part did I live at all.

Best:
Different character and group. I am running a highly charismatic orkish decker named Doc Hack, got his PhD before he goblinized. Now for the life of me I fell in with a group of mostly women so we got two guys and six girls. The other guy is playing an elven prettyboy Face type. On our first run we are infiltrating an Ares installation. Now my Decker is tough guy so several times he puts himself in the way of rounds meant for the girls. I live with a few bullet holes in my favorite clothes. Every time they ask why i do that I say "Orks are just bigger." This group decides they want to play the celebration party. So the six member team is at the bar and playing out the boozing and dancing, and general story telling. Finally the GM syas "Last call, who're going home with?"
Girl 1: "I grab Doc's arm."
Girl 2: "I got the other one."
girl 3&4: "We got the legs"
Me: "Wha-what?"
Elf: "Why are you guys grabbing him? I'm the handsome elf."
Girl 1 "Sorry Elf boy you just aren't our type."
Girl 4 "Besides we want to see if Orks really are bigger."
Nobody could stop laughing for five minutes.

With regards to your worst day Lorthazar, you were totally set up.

no miss a few runs and you fall back in the curve plus the look on the trolls face when I told him that assault cannon shells explode was just too precious.