I keep having the most childish reaction…

“ooOOOoooh Shadowrun, huh?…..PUPPY!!” <3

So disappointed that my last Shadowrun campaign ended. It was supposed to be a one shot (where the DM made the characters), but wound up running for over a year.

I got handed a dimwitted Sammie with a love of old western flatvids (who was unknowingly a cyberzombie). It was a blast to play.

http://www.dog-obedience-training-review.com/how-to-stop-a-puppy-from-biting.html

thought this might help. we use some of these things at the shelter that i work at with the puppies. funny story

I totally disagree with you here. I think you exhibited class A GM technique. I’ve always been of the opinion that a good, fair, creative GM favors reigning the game back from within rather than laying down a new, external rule. It tends to be much more fun for the players when the thing that is thwarting them is a logical element of the world that they are playing in, rather than something that is totally outside of their control or ability to effect. And, really, isn’t a GM’s job first and foremost to make a fun game? 

alright i have a D&D story i’m going to try and keep this short. My first game ever my Dm was great with story but sucked at everything else. I was a male elf ranger named Zolong and my best friend who this was also his first game had a human barbarian name Dravik and we made a great team. This game has a few story so the first one we where blessed by the gods them self so we all got some gift or blessing of some kind(my friend got a book that when it was open turned inot  bar more on that later), Zolong’s god wasn’t one of the gods blessing us so there was this left over god who gave me grassy palms so i had 10 blades of grass growing out of my palms (yes i know the joke your thinking) so pulling one did 2d12 fire damage 15 feet around me and only 1d3 on me but if i pulled all 20 out it glassed everything with in 15 feet so i used that untill the dm knew it was dumb to give knew player a bomb. so he took that a way i was find with that because i thought it was the gayest thing ever having grass growing on my hand. 

so my dm had a love for vampires so we would run into them all the time. ( I was raped by about 3 female and own by another) So My Dm got a great idea of turning Zolong into some living vampire which is just like a super day walker with +1 life. so the made my character over power very quickly not by my hand but by the DM hands.

ok this one is may favorite story even thought i little to do with it. Dravik and his book of the bar he opened it a bar will pop out over time it started to change into bigger and better things and gain more rooms and stuff that bar had a 500% profit do to all the being god made and stuff came out of nowhere. Dravik only wanted it to be a simple bar so Zolong one day grabs the book and start flipping there the pages and reading how to work it. Dravik looks at him dumb stuck and  said. ” Wait, you can read that thing?” Zolong then smiled then told him in a smug way. ”Of course barbarian, I can read it because I’m not illiterate.” 

I have so many more story with just Zolong (deck of many thing, belt of gender change, just to name a few)

Fun times.  Enjoyed the vid Spoony.  The various distractions didn’t bother me.

I had a similar thing happen in a DnD campaign that was run a while back.  We all had characters, but we would take turns being PCs or DM; so for two weeks a friend would run a module, then I’d run a one-shot, etc.

One of my friends is the rules monkey – he knows everything about 3.5 just off the top of his head. It’s crazy.  I didn’t delve that far into all the obscure rules and things and normally just made up rulings for events and tried to make them as logical as possible.  Well this guy power-gamed the shit out of a character named Chopper Coppercockle – a dwarf fighter (along with some other base or prestige class, I’m sure) that duel-wielded axes and had and insane critical chance, confirm bonus, attacks per round, and overall damage output, ON TOP of having a pretty good pool of hit points and fairly good saves all around.  He just tore through whatever we fought against, and normally he would run in and decimate everything before the rest of the characters had a chance to do anything.

So it comes to be my turn to DM, and I create a module for them to explore a newly-unearthed tomb or cathedral or something that was buried in the side of a hill ages ago.  Their first encounter was with humanoids that were looting the place, which Chopper quickly dispatched of.  But after that first encounter, everything they fought was undead, which destroyed his crit chance and bonus damage.  He’s like, “Whatever – I’m still dropping zombies like a champ.”

So what they fight next is a tomb spider and a few broods and web mummies.  He gets pumped because there are animals to crit.  He rushes in, eventually rolls a 19, and is about to confirm before I stop him.  ”No no no – these enemies have Tomb Tainted Soul.  They have all the immunities that undead have.”

He pitched a bitch-fit over that, but the gang still rolled over them.  (I believe his words were “Fuck your 3.0 Libris Mortis bullshit!”)

The big bad of the whole encounter was a high priest who had turned from Pelor and sided with Vecna to learn to create and command undead.  Chopper met him head-on at the beginning, knowing full well that he was undead, but that didn’t deter him for a second.

However, I had two surprises in store for him:

1) The big bad had a wounding weapon and a high BAB, so Chopper started losing health and Constitution fast.
2) The big bad summoned a shadow on the other side of Chopper, which gave flanking AND started sapping his Strength.

While this lovely trap was being laid out, the rest of the gang was content to hang back and fight a few armed skeletons that were also part of this grand final showdown.  Of the four characters that participated in the fight, here was what happened to each:

Wizard – death by skeletons, but technically got the last hit on the big bad via summoned celestial bison (which pissed Chopper the hell off!)
Berserker – after the rage wore off, less than 10 HP
Chopper - conscious only from Bear’s Endurance cast earlier, less than 10 CON, about 12 STR left
Knight – basically full health

It was a fun module, all the players really enjoyed it, and my friend in control of Chopper learned that day that, as a DM, it is my duty and right to smack you on your ass if you start to think you are the hottest shit in the land.  AND I did it legally :P

Great review, Spoony.  It’s really easy to forget that you’re a huge tabletop gamer, too, and it’s nice to hear that other people have stories as insane as some of mine.  For Example…

Back in the day, I’m playing a D&D 3.5 adventure with some friends, and the Deck of Many Things drops into our lap.  Our DM used house rules for it that he thought made more sense, including reshuffling after every drawn card.  I, being the cocky bastid I am, decide I’m gonna draw 8 cards.  I ended up with a castle almost as big as the city of Baldur’s Gate, and hundreds of thousands of gp.  So, what do I put my ill-gotten wealth towards?  Making my castle fly, and outfitting it with dozens of siege-grade weapons, of course.

So, fast forward a bit, and we’re going to check out a tower that a wizard’s in, and I think “Well, we’ll just fire the ballistaes near the top floor.  Cut out some of the climb, cuz wizards hate being on the ground floor.”  So, figuring the tower was enchanted, I fire a broadside, 30 guns en totale.  I blew out a HUGE chunk of the tower before my bud Ryan says “Hey, Matt…didn’t you have them enchanted?”  after some quick calculations, we realized I’d destroyed the tower completely, and thus, we had to dig through the rubble to get the wizard’s ring…which had been broken and bent by the rubble.

And that’s how I broke the campaign, and got my DM to stop talking to me for a month.

Spoony, tell more of these stories! Super entertaining!

The WETTENING!

In our shadowrun game, we have a magical hobo who killed a sniper by throwing a dog at the man, pinning him to a wall through dog impalement. True story.

Gah–frickin’ DMSO, I remember that stuff from running my own SR game in college.  I don’t remember my group going off the rails with it fortunately–no, for that they used the Rigger book…

That was a supremely epic anecdote from start to finish. Lol. You can’t make up this kinda shit.

Kinda like when me and my friends played AD&D. We -called it- AD&D but that’s not what it was. It was a free-style pen and paper game. We didn’t own a d20. We used multiple d6 for everything. Every level up we’d gain higher HP and a new ‘proficiency’, which was an ability we could completely make ourselves and ask the DM for approval, given it was balanced. 

The story was: We were playing the first Super Smash Bros and then suddenly a mechanical spider bursts into the room and steals Alyssa in a potato sack and then crawls through a dimensional portal which we followed. (Alyssa being a girl we knew. She was actually a guest on the Nickelodeon show Figure It Out. Seriously, google “Alyssa Buecker” and you’ll find something on her.) And after following, we were in this “anything happens” dimension where we had to quest to rescue Alyssa. It was the one DM and two player characters. The other player was a bard-like dude. He came in handy because I was the tank. 

I chose random cool abilities without any sense of theme. I’d have completely mismatching abilities like PK Thunder (2d6 damage to all enemies in the field, double damage against machines and water-y monsters, and being able to boost me like it did in the Smash Bros incarnation), Blade Poisoning (normal damage + fixed damage overtime on a d6 roll, another d6 for how long it lasted), Cosmic Jewel (a Link to the Past-like medallion that let me concentrate on any one foe in the rough area and do 3d6 damage–COLORFUL COSMIC ENERGY DAMAGE–to a guy even if I couldn’t see them and/or they was behind a 10 foot thick wall or something; really broken ability lol), a For Sale Sign (another Earthbound referential ability which brought merchants to me no matter where I was that I could sell and buy from, despite it only being a for SALE sign), and the Surf ability (allowing me also to summon an extra-dimensional surfboard at will.) I was also a half-man half-aquatic lizardman (only the tail and limb scales showed) who had the ridiculously helpful ability to just breathe water. Lol. Could not possibly be drowned. And on top of that, I was a 2nd class SOLDIER of a Shinra-like organization. Yes, I was a psychic swordsman surfer half-lizardman. And the bard’s buffs made me a demonic contender.

Here I am listening to you being like “RULES FOR THINGS. EXPLANATIONS FOR THINGS. RESTRICTIONS FOR THINGS BASED ON EXPLANATION.” My 11-year old self would’ve found you to be a TOTAL buzzkill, man. D:

Hahaha, Oreo broke the squeaky toy.

In my household we have the 5 minute rule: that is any squeaky toy lasts 5 minutes as the dog takes out the squeaker.  All dogs seem to do it. XD

Also.. rofl at all the stuff revolving around the super soaker.  I would personally bring out the robots and maybe some copycat criminals and then bust down with a special police hazmat suit division to counter this new drug crime problem.

Awwww…Oreo just wants to nom the world.

I logged in just to tell you:

- discipline the bitch, you’ll have mayor issues in your private life if you don’t do it now.

- the bitch is possessive and sees you as a toy or a toy launcher.

- your space is yours alone, the dog MUST NOT touch or ESPECIALLY mount you (you always must be the first one to touch), this way she is claiming you, touching at will is a sign of dominance. (my dog doesn’t dare to touch me, if only slightly sniff, i’m the one to begin contact )

- she must also respect the space of every guest

- make some rooms in the house OFF-LIMIT, (bed-room is a must), when entering a new space always make sure you’re the one who goes first not the dog

- preferable no dog on the couch (because that’s your place to sit and the dog can use the floor just fine)

- she is obviously intelligent, no such thing as “too much energy” or “hyper” only UNSTABLE or STABLE what she needs is structured play-time (you only reward her with the toy when she concentrates on you and calms down), and disciplined walks (no pulling, head parallel to your legs)
—————

CORRECTING BEHAVIOR:

- a firm voice (you can see the way she responded to “can i help you” but you didn’t FOLLOW THROUGH , she then went for your hand to test your resolution) and a short word (that you will use every time) and a STRONG touch (not push) to the neck or the ribs, it must be short and firm to convey the message in the moment of a transgression (a kind of touch that registers you immediately as a source of power and control)

A good owner is the one who keeps his dog stable and feeling secure and taken cared of in the bottom part of the pack. A dog that doesn’t have to worry about power struggles and feels protected is a happy, stable dog.
—————————–

There , hope i helped,  been watching your show for quite a while, keep up the funny, lovin the sprinkler wars story even tho i never played tabletop RPGs , it almost seems like something that really happened at times.

Ah yes, if I have learned one thing in my time as a GM, it’s that the players will always find ways to completely buttfuck your campaign, most of the time without even trying.
Fortunately, my players are usually not into exploiting obscure rules or loopholes (probably because that would take too much work), they just come up with stuff that ranges from strangely creative to absolutely batshit insane.
One of my former groups did this on such a regular basis that I actually made a houserule I called ‘crazy enough to work’. Whenever they came up with a plan that would leave me speechless for more than five seconds, they got a +2 bonus for every role they had to make to execute it.
Sadly, they died after crashing a Gnomish war-zeppelin full of explosives and flammable gas into
a demon-baron’s flying fortress that I shamelessly stole from the Lufia games. They jumped off before the thing crashed, but instead of just causing some damage and chaos like they had intended, it destroyed the island’s power core and caused the fantasy equivalent of a nuclear meltdown.
However, the plan was still successful, and we agreed that this was definitely one of the most awesome ways for a character to die.

I’ve only ever been able to dabble in the tabletop RPG world but I do
have one hilarious story. A story where the reality of the game really
matched my character. Star Wars. The GM put in an NPC to help out, the
other player (we were sort of in a war zone so nerds were scarce) was
some catlike thing. I was a failed force clone of the Emperor who
managed to escape the garbage chute. I had no real force what so ever
like that alien race in the expanded universe although I did plan on
trying to finagle “anti-force powers” into it. And I say that that
concept although idiotic is somewhat grounded in real science. So my
character is in a space sci0fi scenario and is pretty much
technologically illiterate. Since he is an escapee from a giant test
tube I HAVE to decline the massive pile of credits I am allowed to trick
out my equipment but I have mercifully managed to get my hands on a
small holdout blaster. I only took it to make the GM happy.So the other
player and the GM are around a corner having a shootout with me walking
towards them. Sensibly I turn around and try to walk away (apparently on
Corouscant you can’t cross streets). They round the corner and I’m stuck between them and a small group of gangster reinforcements.
My character decides to do a wall flip over the gangsters and make a
break for it. I get over their heads but rolled a one. I landed flat on
my face. Thus begins the game of ones. We manage to get into a hangar
with the NPC’s new ship and close the doors. We still have a shootout
going but most of the forces are on the other side. Sensibly I try to
cause the door locks to malfunction so they won’t open by shooting the
door controls with my little pea shooter. I succeed but roll a one. The
doors instead shoot open. We get our asses inside and fly away to be
engaged in space. My technological idiot mans his gun screen and
immediately informs the pilot that his “window is cracked.” After a
brief description of the cracks the pilot loudly and angrily informs me
that those are crosshairs. Now my luck begins to spread. The other
player while firing and missing like a stormtrooper breaks off one of
the joysticks so he begins chewing on it like a chew toy. Meanwhile I am
missing as well and roll a one. My screen goes black.

Me: “Uh-oh.”

NPC: “What do you mean ‘uh-oh.’”

Me: “Nothing. Nothing. Everything’s fine. I didn’t break my window… How are you?”

NPC: *profuse swearing*

Comically though as I fire wildly I actually manage to hit something.
Then we crash. Back on the planet we were fleeing. We manage to escape
the fiery wreckage and the GM’s NPC stares at his “brand new ship”
(maybe in the Star TREK universe) and mutters, “Just four more payments
and it’s mine.”

Excellent story, I had much a-laugh (especially when you mentioned the RC cars with the sprinklers on top).

I mainly played 3rd edition Shadowrun which was pretty similar to 2nd edition really and we had lots of these 2nd edition splatbooks with the equipment and all of that and the most awesome thing to Shadowrun was always the guns and cyberware (right after the great background of course).

I remember my favorite book being Arsenal 2060 which came out rather late in 3rd edition but it had basically all the weapons from earlier books as well plus rules for customizing your guns (mainly to reduce recoil). Great stuff but all the more amazing toys were just so hard to get with availablity and such.

Anyways, as for stories – I probably forgot the best ones. The only things I can think of at the moment were rather silly ones actually. Once our team were looking through an apartment of some guy we were supposed to find and who had taken off. Maybe he was expecting us because when my character looked under the matress for evidence, he found a landmine that exploded in his face. Had to stay in hospital for six months or something and looked kind of scary when he left (but he was an Orc so not much of a loss there).

My last proper runner (a rigger, pudgy japanese girl who was reculant to killing people unless she was rigged into a drone where the experience was less real and she could manage to block it out. That’s why when she was outside the car all she wore was a stun rod, a can of grease spray and a can of sticky spray) died in an especially silly manner. She had her super souped-up, heavily armoured and full of expensive equipment for electronic warfare standing outside a structure that was being raided by the rest of the team. She was in the driver’s seat, jacked into and controlling some drones inside of the building. Some angry securitymen showed up, wanted to shoo her away or something, realized that she had something to do with what was going on inside. I felt rather safe in my mobile HQ super-van when suddenly the question arose if vehicle armour included the windows. The DM couldn’t find anything in the rulebook so it was decided that is basically was just regular glass windows, the securitymen bashed it in and shot my character.

Then there was some stories that just showed how Shadowrun’s second greatest asset (all the equipment) was also a big problem, as your story also illustrated: The power level of the players or the level of research they could invest to get powerful or to make up combos or something like that was problematic. At that point we more or less stopped playing or tried to lower the level of things down immensely and to a more street punk level.

4th edition Shadowrun is very problematic to me. The rules have become much more playable (on the downside, you can’t use any of the old books any more which is a major bummer) but I really don’t like the setting any more. The wireless Matrix kind of destroys it for me on various levels. First, I don’t like it aesthetically. To me, there have to be cables, keyboards, chipjacks and cable jacks in heads. I guess it’s just a matter of taste but I prefer to keep it somewhat more 1980s/1990s near future. Apart from that, I find wirelss internet somewhat scary in real life as well. :P Second, it makes characters way more vulnerable. Anything that’s remotely electronic can be hacked, your credits, your mobile, anything. At any time. You can be traced and followed all the time. That’s not only scary (because the real world is going into that direction rapidly) but also makes playing much, much harder for everybody.

Hey, Spoony. Here’s a good way to get your dog to stop biting you. Whenever she bites you, act like as though her bites hurt you a lot. Say things like “Ow!” to her and make her know that her bites hurt. If Oreo gets the message that biting you hurts, then she’ll stop doing it.
My dog, which is around the same size as Oreo is right now, always bit us when she was in puppyhood. And then we learned that if we taught her that biting hurts, then she’ll stop doing it.
Now, she stops biting us as much and when she does bite us it is very very soft and gentle and always stops and licks the place where she bit us whenever we say “ow!”
Really, Oreo is just playing when she bites you. What she doesn’t know is that her bites can hurt. When dogs are puppies they bite all the time to play, and the parents teach their puppies that it isn’t okay to bite.
Try it out. It might take a little bit, but she’ll get the idea sooner or later.

Funny story, by the way! Enjoyed it immensely. =D

My Shadowrun group loved to shop too. We loved having all that gear and lots of options. I would always make it a point to let my group know that if they could get these things that anyone else probably could too. They did use DMSO creatively sometimes but it never got out of control to the point of super soaker wars (aerosol hands at worst). If it had then I probably would have had the security combat mage just melt their plastic guns with fire spells or something like that.

When the idea of cyber-zombies (negative essence characters) were introduced I sometimes used those to help even the playing field a bit. Ever fight a troll with so much cyberware (cannons for hands!) his essence was -11? Sometimes I’d have them work for dragons or something else with inscrutable motives and godlike intelligence. When that happened, no matter how their adventure went, they usually didn’t come out on top. Those kinds of games were meant to take some of their game breaking stuff away and advance our story a bit more.

We loved to break the system and If my players tried to throw me for a loop there was usually something I could pull out of my ass to do something about it. Good times…

Try… Magic!
Two Words: Air Spirit. More Words: A security-shaman that summons an air spirit, that seals off the guards and blow the stuff back at your PCs.

That story reminded me of this one time with my gaming group. Our idiot friend who always wore stupid hats convinced us to go larping in a cave, and we did, and it was kinda boring but we pretended it was intense. But then, this is the really funny part, our buddy goes total batshit crazy on us and drives to New York and killed a couple of guys. We took Pokemon very serious back then.

But seriously, never played Shadowrun, but any game where you can go on a murder spree using something you can concoct in your bathtub and a turkey baster sounds like something I should check out.

32:26 – he briefly turns into shatner

Agent Smith with katana blades, I guess the creators of Generator Rex were big shadow run players.  Check it:

http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/23300000/agent-six-generator-rex-23394336-284-448.jpg

Funniest Story we ever had in a group was actually not an accident, but deliberate, we were playing a forgotten realms campaign in deepwater and were making contacts with different notorious streetgangs and cults and our gm made every one of the bad guys out to be a caricature of a schlagersänger. (german folk singer, they sing really really shitty and cheesy about the woods and mountains and only old people like it, there is no english equivalent i can think of) but that wasn’t the only thing, since they all were singers, he wrote gangster rap songs for every appearance of those guys, so when ever we met one of our contacts/villains we would hear a rap, he was actually pretty good at writing and performing those things and he kept them in the context of d&d so it was quite amazing actually.

Oh and a running gag, which originated in our recent exploits with Mechwarrior:
We were on a planet in the periphery that was ruled by some kind of criminal/mercenary/space pirate guy, whose name was Whitley. My charackter was fast talking it to some guards and I was really playing that quite well and had done a reasonably good roll. So I was going on for like three minutes or something, about why I was were I was and why they shouldn’t shoot me and wanted to say something about my character wanting to do buiseness with their boss and suddenly, in mid sentence I was like: “So you stupid idiot, I’m here because I wann do buiseness with what was the fuckers name again?” and my mates were like: dude, it’s whitley! and I go like: WHITLEY!
Since that day it has been a running gag that someone always asks how a given NPC we are talking about is called.

Sort of a weird story:
I’m a junior at American University. Last year, I really wanted to join up with an RPG, because I had played D&D and a Star Wars RPG back home in Dubai and really had fun. I eventually joined up with a bunch of guys at AU’s Gamer Society who were playing Vampire: The Masquerade. The campaign they had designed took place in colonial America. I had designed my character as a Brujah, but everyone else had chosen the weirdest clans: we had a True Brujah, a Malkavian, and two Tremeres (one of whom, I was told, had in a past campaign “eaten Germany,” and time traveled to the past specifically to kill Ayn Rand). The entire campaign played out like an episode of the Animaniacs, with people turning into chess pieces, and the Malkavian being crushed by an AUTOMOBILE (in colonial America, mind you) driven by Malkav. Scared me off RPGs.

Can I just say… I love how players think. ‘Can’t get drugs? …How about robbing an ambulance!’

Have you played Dark Heresy? It´s a Warhammer 40k RP that have you play as Acolytes for the Inquisition. I highly recommend it.

Also could you make a “Guide too GM” for beginners? 

Ahh yes, the insane plans. Half the fun of playing RPGs. Well part of it, at least. Must say, I do love how this turned into corporate chemical warfare, only with the most silly of delivery methods wrapped around, thus turning “spraying people with arsenic and COCAINE” into something more cartoonish than horrible. Though the real, true counter to this would of course be this: http://theory-of-everything.deviantart.com/art/SNOWFLAME-161895392

Spray him with drugs all you want, it’ll just make him stronger!

Would love to hear those other 3 or 4 good stories you did have, if they’re anything like this!

(Also, is it wrong of me to now want to make a character built entire on the chemist/insanity idea and just run with combat drugs, poison sprayers and needle guns?)

As for stories I wanna share, I apparently have somewhat of a reputation for being the “Crazy ideas/results” guy. Highlights include:

Mage the ascension. Gave every single Englishman in the world endless, explosive diarrhea for about a night thanks to unintentionally massive amounts of continuing 10′s and careless wording of the effect. This was in the 1600′s, and part of the campaign was set in London.

Rogue Trader (40k rpg): Killed the entire campaign’s rather large collection of BBEG and nemesis during a meeting gone bad by sending a psyber familiar raven down the entire meeting table while activating massive psychic deathfire through it, dealing insanely large amounts of no resistance damage to every single one, killing them all within 1 combat turn.

Cyberpunk 2020: Having a Full-body conversion (Brain in a jar in a robot body kinda cyborg) deal with a minigun and rocket equipped AV drone by running up the stairs of a building and jumping off the roof, shoulder-slamming it straight into the ground.

Please just.. take the dog’s collar off next time you do a video with him around, CLINKCLINKCLINK was drowning you out.

Ugh, this is why house rules are awesome. :)

I like this new happy spoony. It’s refreshing.

There was one time my D&D group had finally got to the end of a campaign we had been playing for months, and our DM decided to add riddles to complete the adventure. We basically rage quit because one of the damn riddles was ” what has a thousand heads, one eye, and two arms?”

After dozens of guesses like ” 200 blind and limbless hydras and one cyclops” we gave up on the whole thing. The answer? A one eyed cabbage salesmen…

We haven’t played D&D since.

“Dogs made of robots”

You should do more of these. This was very fun to listen to.

okay, I’ve got one,

This happened in a D&D 3.5 game…

There was an earth temple of a Tharizdun cult that we had to clear out. We thought it would be a good idea to go through the front door. At first it was a good idea. After entering, we went into the first door on the left and cleared out the few gnolls that resided there. We left the room and were once again in the main hall. Some one must have rang the alarm or something, because the entire hall filled up with enemy combatants. It wasn’t just the dozens and dozens of low level henchmen, their bosses and their bosses’ bosses showed up. We had an NPC with us who was a twelve year old girl. We call her Bronson the Beast because she throws axes and crits over half the time. I don’t remember the name of this creature but it was huge size and looked like a mix between a dog and a porcupine. This thing struck Bronson with one of it’s quills which was laced with poison. Bronson failed her fort save and passed out. She is pretty much like the canary in the mine shaft. As soon as she fell every one else started to panic. Every one else started taking heavy damage and figured this was the time to go. We had a centaur with us who threw Bronson on her back and ran for the exit. Luckily for her, she made it out with  a few scratches but alive none the less. Coincidentally, the people who attacked her on the way out were between me and the exit. I had to bull rush my way out. Now would be the time to mention that my character is a bard with a nine for strength. There were three henchmen I had to go through who were a lot stronger than me. I took my last chance at life. I kissed my cohort goodbye and dashed for the three enemies. This is where the miracle happens. I nat-twenty the first guy and then the next two guys nat-one. I am indeed fortunate, but I am not free from this damnation yet. This fortress is on a very high, rocky hill top with a serpentine path that leads up to the entrance. Ayla, our centaur, had made it all the way to the bottom of the hill and started heading back to town. The dorgupine moved out of the entrance with in striking distance. Fortunately, this creature had to double move and could not attack me. If I ran down the path, the creature would surely reach me before I could escape. This is when the DM suggested that I dash off the side of the cliff and attempt to land on Ayla’s back. To do this, I would have to make a jump check, which is a skill I did not have trained and was based on strength. It was my only hope. So I took the plunge. I miraculously rolled high enough to take half damage on the fall, but I took enough damage to knock me unconscious. My last words before I passed out were “Please help me.”

We lost two people that day: My elven cleric cohort and a psychopath named Dar. He really was crazy, so I am glad he is dead.

I love doing these RPGs.  Sometimes the craziest things happen.  My friends and I still make inside jokes about finding a werebear with a detachable penis.  Roar!  *click*

i dont know shadowrun and i wasnt really into rpgs so much – i played DSA some times…  but eventually the group broke apart. but even tho this story was so much fun to listen to and so fucking entertaining :D you should really tell more of those (maybe with a tranquilized oreo ;)
very fun to watch! your enthusiasm really carries on.
oh and laughed my ass off when you said “can i help you?” and oreo was totally quite and i was so hearing myself saying “this dog … is unfucking believable” and you actually said it ^^

LMAO; DMSO, learned about it in Organic Chem.  I had never thought about that application of it.  That is really clever. >:-)  I know what I’m suggesting to one of my friends who plays a modern style rpg.  Shadowrun, I did play the console version a little and really liked it.  But, I keep seeing the books at this used book store and will def. be picking up a copy or two. 

I wanna say I absolutely loved this story. I like most every thing you do (riffs, reviews,vlogs), but this was fun. I think what I liked about it was that you seemed to enjoy reminiscing. It felt candid and you have a great way of storytelling. I hope you do many more of these  (not that I won’t watch whatever you put up) :)

I love ya Spoons, but train Oreo or Oreo will train you.

we should do a meetup where everyone dresses up as their favorite character or something and we do some kind of DnD LARP. Or we could just do a meetup, cause Spoony i’d love to hangout with you

That was a great story, Spoony. I’ve never been that much of a tabletop player, but I did run a D&D 3.5 game for a while (still want to get back into that, but being a grown-up takes so much damn time!), and I definitely had to deal with some player antics during my tenure. I can totally relate to the whole problem of trying to put the genie back into the bottle once something crazy has happened. One of our players played a neutral cleric, and he had this obsession with necromancy. During one session he figured out that he could raise zombies and skeletons, and they kind of helped with fighting the boss creature, and so afterwards any time he came across some exotic new creature, he would try to raise it as a zombie. I had to constantly explain that, no, the dragon they killed would suck if he raised as a zombie, because it couldn’t fly anymore and wouldn’t have its breath weapon, and no, he couldn’t keep his zombies after the battle, because if they went into a village with him, the townspeople would mob the party and burn him at the stake. Eventually he gave up and tried spontaneously summoning things, but the rest of the group got sick of him holding up the game while he calculated the stats for a Celestial Dire Wolf. Meanwhile, the party’s sorceress (played by my fiancee, who usually looked at Facebook while these antics were going on) would just blow everything up with Scorching Rays and Fireballs, rendering his experiments and twinking completely pointless.

Good times.

I know you were young at the time, Spoony, but frankly, I’m surprised you took so long to try and put your foot down on this. I would have allowed them to get away with that DMSO shit ONCE, just because it’s clever and kind of amusing, but the next time they tried it, I would have busted out the guys in bio-hazard suits, armed to the teeth, and only let the repentant players get out alive. Still, at least it made for a good story. I’d like to hear more, if you’ve got some.

You know your players essentially turned into the toxin troopers from C&C G Zero Hour. And then you turned around and fought back with the toxin tractors.

I remember playing Shadowrun with the Ares Squirt and DMSO/drug loads.  Those were fun toys.  I remember several characters that wore a Squirt on one hip and a standard heavy pistol on the other hip.

We played a little Shadowrun, mostly because we heard it was connected to Earthdawn, a game I’ve been running and playing since 1997. The biggest problem I had with the game was combat reflexes and number of actions. It seemed like everyone was getting 2 or 3 actions to my mage’s 1 as a result. It made things unbalanced in terms of time spent per character. Earthdawn also has this problem, with mages not getting as much to do per round as the fighter types, but its not as bad. I made a dwarf rigger for one Shadowrun game who besides having his rigs around, walked around with a huge steel wrench and used that as his main weapon. I brought a wrench to a gunfight, pwned, dead in the first session, woke up in a docwagon. Um yeah for platinum?

I think the first character I made for Shatterzone was a lot like the characters in your adventures spoony. A huge 7 feet tall 300 lb. human walking around with a giant plasma tank for his plasma cannon, a giant ionic sword (aka jedi-esque light saber) for close combat, biologically enhanced armored skin underneath plastic armor for a double armor bonus, had special drug injectors placed into his neck so that he could take basically steroids during battle to improve his dexterity and strength, a special chip placed in his brain with playback features so that he could rewatch combats to further his combat prowess (also used it to watch SIMS tapes like pron and such), plus an all terrain vehicle with a big heavy machine gun on it. So basically arnold on steroids carrying heavy weapons, a biologically and drug enhanced fighter, addicted to drugs and pron (flaws to get bonuses are so useful for systems to have), and cybered out, with a vehicle for when we went on planetside missions (shatterzone is mostly spaceship based). I was an ex-fleet marine (the big bad in the Shatterzone universe when it comes to control of the sectors) who got all this military grade stuff from an enhanced super marine program that succeeded a little too well and I had escaped.  I was an absolute  nightmare for the gamemaster. I once sneaked into a guard’s barracks, unleashed my plasma cannon on 6 asleep guards in burst mode, and incinerated them all in one round. Cutting people in half with my ionic sword, after waking up during an ambush in the middle of the night conan style with maybe a loincloth on due to alertness and enhanced perception rolling out of bed, grabbing my sword and swinging on these guards. Maybe they were supposed to capture us in the story rather than getting chopped into pieces but that is what happened.

Game balance is an important element of the games, I try to maintain it as much as possible. Unfortunately, it tends to get harder as the players begin to munchkin out their characters and learn the ins and outs of the game system, and gain more power over time, and they found a really funny loophole. Poison is definitely something I learned about in Earthdawn that is potentially unbalancing and game breaking. One of my parties got a hold of cockatrice poison and started applying it to bolts and paralyzing people at range with surprise strikes. It got ugly real quick.     

I remember a GURPS: Supers campaign I ran, when I was 19 and after 2 game sessions, 2 of my players decided it was going to be war. They would work up ways to eliminate the party, steal their abilities, and rule the world. The first two adventures were pretty good, because the 2 d-bags weren’t there to “screw” them up. They were also the same guys who, threw my hand out for the game back in my face, and told me they wanted their points be their limits, I was limiting their creativity, I wouldn’t be allowed to run games in the group anymore, unless I got my shit together. I didn’t give them what they wanted, but everyone else was ok with the game and rules on the hand out. Later on when I ran the game for the 3rd time, the two d-bags ran their own ops and stole tech from super villains and evidence from police stations. (The party started out as a I.S.T. group. They were semi-military and police with super powers, on a international scale, run by the UN) The rest of the party were doing their own thing and completing the missions that they were given. The two d-bags at the end of the adventure knocked out two party members cold, stole more tech from the HQ they were given, and went on a bloody rampage through downtown New York, Times Square, and blew up a office building. All as a distraction so they could escape. I had to give them props for that, but the explosion would have been enough. The following weeks they would come to me with these insane character ideas and new powers, and would put these characters together.

One day the asked what I thought of a character write up for a power suit, and I said I don’t know what these powers do. They told me I didn’t need to know anything, I just had to run the game. The next time I ran the game they were giggling like school girls and remarking to the rest of the guys that their characters where in for it. So, to better handle them, I sent the 2 d-bags into the living room while we continued to play the game in the back spare bedroom. Every hour I would check on them, to see that they had drawn up maps and battle plans. They had written everything the personally, not their characters, but themselves, saw on everyone’s character sheets. They were trying to broker info about the party from super villains, that the party hasn’t fought. The were a new team, no recurring super villains yet. The IST works hard at keeping information like that out of the news, and it shows. So, the night climaxed with 2 battles, the one with the main party doing battle with the NPC baddie, and the second was the two d-bags who got their asses handed to them by a single magic user and a Psionic. Both of which warned the party about them tailing from the start of the adventure and had magical defenses in place for when these rogues attacked.

The D-bags lost their characters and told me that I gave away too much and I was a horrible GM/DM, I wasn’t allowed to run campaigns in the group anymore till I learned balance and how to handle not telling secrets. I was fine with it. 6 months later I wiped out one of the D-bags, in a far-fetched future genetic gladiatorial combat game. 360 ST, Invulnerability to any kinetic damage, and immunity to poison. All on 200 points, with standard disadvantages and quirks. He was pissed and kicked us out early before I outright killed his character. (Me: “I will then rip…” D-bag#1: “Sorry to interrupt, but I have to get up early in the morning, so I need you all to leave now.” J: “You don’t work, it’s Saturday tomorrow, and your mom’s out of town, what do you possibly have to do tomorrow, but wait for us to show back up at 5?” D-bag#1: “I have stuff to do for my dad. And D-bag #2 is helping and driving me over there tomorrow. And stuff.” J: “Whatever. He wins, no question. Your character is dead, that’s all that matters. I hoped you like the game, cause this was the last time I’m running it.” D-bag#1: “But…”)and we leave) 4 years later D-bag #1 after much prodding, cause I told everyone in the group how I did my character, got it out and came up to me at random and explained my character to me. You, win. You got me. He never let me live it down for as longed as I gamed with him. I stopped gaming over there about 5, 6 years ago. I am happier for it.

This whole crazy story would make for one kick-ass movie.

Oreos gonna knock over your camera and break it dude.

Lemme see, dog going insane, camera shifts everything into white for no reason, phone goes off, crazy story about cyberpunk chemical warfare, probably your most chaotic video yet Spoony.

It was still very entertaining. 

Did you ever play the Xbox 360 Shadowrun game? I think they should make a sequel. This concept is so cool Im really surprised it didnt blow up into a franchise with more video games and movies and stuff.

Oh the amount of fun the Wish spell was

That’s hilarious, Noah!  Interestingly, I had a somewhat similar (but not remotely as extreme) experience with Cyberpunk 2020.  In my case, it was squirt guns and powerful acid.  At the time, I had all of the “Chrome” books and a player who spent a week building the most tricked-out, full-body conversion killing machine he could possibly make.  As a result, he was virtually immune to bullets, grenades, fire, drugs and even had EMP shielding.  So, I had to resort to loading some corporate goons up with pressurized squirt guns filled with acid.  The players took that and spun it off into squirt guns loaded with contact poisons/drugs but, fortunately, I don’t recall Cyberpunk having the equivalent of DMSO, so it didn’t get too terribly ridiculous.

My problem in Shadowrun centered around a sniper with a flash-suppressor, silencer and the invisibility spell.  Sheesh!

So in high School I DM’d a Gurps game for a while. I think it’s a bit more casual than DnD, but we played it more casual, anyway. I was a REALLY bad DM. I basically had no idea what I was doing and made Desu ex Machina pets for the pcs. They were wayyy too powerful and eventually, we did get rid of them. I had a big plan for what we were going to do, but we only met on wednesday nights (right after school, since Wednesday was a short day at my school) and even then it wasn’t completely set if we would meet at all since we had a soccer player in the game (Wednesday was so short BECAUSE it was game day for sports teams) and very few people who would play otherwise. My main plan basically fell flat because I had to graduate from highschool and couldn’t play any more, so we basically did nothing productive except leave my old character off with the elves or something. We had one castle invasion that was a lot of fun.
Now, the reason I said all of this is because there was one guy who had an awesome character named Exar. Exar was the group’s tank. He had exploding gloves and whenever he attacked anything, he would yell “EXAR POWERS ACTIVATE” which was a little silly and made the group giggle. Exar was a very… sadistic character and he tried to kill pretty much everything the group came across because his whole reason for joining the group was to eventually find and kill his father. Unfortunately when the other senior in the group and I graduated, the game fell apart. There were only two players left and no one else wanted to join, and the rule for clubs was that at least 3 students had to be a part of the club in order for it to continue. So that was a little sad. But now just talking about it makes me really excited to try to join the Dnd club at my college, so thank you, Spoony, for motivating me to get back into rpgs. I really had fun and I can’t wait to start again. ^_^

Always wanted to play Shadowrun. Not a one of my friends ever had the know-how though. : Sucks though, I do miss those gaming nights. Of course, I’d be drawing almost half the time.

i love shadowrun. the old paper rpg was too fun.

you should review the console games on NES and xbox, and such

Awww Orea is soooo cute I think she’s out shined and replaced the robot.  

I’ve never had such a full out war against my players (most likely because I kill their characters with unerring, unintentional, consistency), but I do love all of those small moments you get to have as a dm. One being creating cursed items, then seeing the curse play out. If there’s a cursed item in my games 99% of the time I made it myself. One I made ‘recently’ was a +2 defending short sword. The thing was, whenever the character activated the defending power, he would unknowingly take 2 (the enchantment bonus) nonlethal damage. This eventually resulted in the character collapsing in a battle and almost got killed.

One of my personal favourites though, is the silver spoon. Identifies as a spoon of sustenance ( I think that was it, not important though). Whenever the person who picked it up draws a weapon he must roll a moderate will save, and if he fails the spoon takes the place of his weapon (essentially retconning the events so that he never did draw his weapon, but the spoon). Each failed save also adds a cumulative +1 on the DC for further saves. And of course even if the character leaves the spoon in the deepest mine on the other side of the world, the spoon still “comes back” if he fails his save.

1. What Happened To “Counter Monkey”?
2. Do More Of These

You must know the old actor’s adage: never work with children or animals. I mean, upstaged by a dog! The whole piece reminded me of Ben Stiller’s & Matt Dillon’s scenes with the dog in There’s something about Mary. I kept expecting an enormous bang crash wallop to erupt after you’d thrown the toy out of shot and your dog jumped after it. At least you appear to be on the ground floor and the window in the background was closed. While I mentally compared Dillon’s canine encounter in the movie with your own dog trouble, you reached the part in your tale about the paramedic character raiding pharmacies for the drugs – a strange coincidence given Matt Dillon’s part in Drugstore Cowboy where he and his gang of junkies did just that. And that movie came out during the late 80s heyday of Shadowrun’s original edition (never cared for it myself: I was a Cyberpunk 2020 guy). Of course famed author William S. Burroughs appears in the movie as an old junkie whom Dillon befriends after he tries to go straight & clean. And Burroughs was one of William ‘Neuromancer’ ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ Gibson’s major influences as a writer, and his novels formed the main source for Shadowrun & Cyberpunk 2020. Ain’t free association grand?

I gotta say, I’ve never much been into tabletop games (I’d like to be, though), and yet I completely understood all of this, and it was a blast to listen to. I think this is one of my favorite examples of how to spot an overpowered game mechanic: If the player’s (and dm’s) efforts are completely focused on either abusing said mechanic or countering it, then it’s broken.

Awesome story, I love it.

So I started playing DnD with a group when i went to college, The Dm was really nice but didn’t put up with crap from anyone. I do mean any crap. The first time i when into a village i had to deal with a jerkass weapons dealer (played by my Dm of course) I said one smartass comment to him and he took my best sword and bent it in half. After much complaining on my part he finally unbent my sword, and told me if i every pissed him off again he would take all my equipment and destroy it all (including my clothes). Well i tried my best to not piss him off and he never took my clothes lol. As the game went on I think i cheesed him off after fudging rolls against a big bad and after a nasty run in with the undead in a forrest, he forced my character to lose his way and end up at a swamp (i believe). Out of the mist came a burst of flame. He put me up against a young Red Dragon, I was doing pretty well by myself but i was losing a lot of hp. He had the DM grin (the one that you see right about the time when he knows your completely screwed). At that point one more attack from him and i would die…I asked and he told me the dragon wasn’t looking good. So with my last attack i rolled a double crit and killed it dead…The look on his face was so priceless! 

Never played SR.  I do remember though the most insane thing that has stopped a D&D game…Getting off a Horse.  We have a guy who loves playing mages but doesn’t read/know the rules of casting.  We try to keep him in line but sometimes we fail…this is where we failed.  We were out in the woods and got attacked, we were all on horse back.  Melee got down and so did the casters, except him.  He wanted to cast from horse back.  We told him there was a roll…and thats when everything started to go wrong.  He wanted to know why he needed a roll, he never needed to roll before, so we explained he’s on a horse and the horse moving around could mess-up his casting.  He didn’t buy that and fought to just casted.  About 20 mins of back and forth happened before someone brought out a book and showed him the rule…then he argued he had a warhorse.  10 mins later he stopped when we showed him, with out a dought, he had not.  So he decided to get off the horse….then he said he would cast a spell right away….so…20 MORE mins of explaining and arguing went in to saying that getting off a horse was more then just a move action and would take his whole round LIKE EVERYONE ELSE DID. If he wanted out that fast…a roll was needed. And about 10 more mins had passed before he got that fact. Anyone keeping track we are now an HOUR into real time…and we are still on his turn. So me makes a roll and rolls a 1. Face first to the ground, his next words…I get-up and cast a spell….not kidding…he really said that. All total we lost about an hour and a half on this becouse there was more fighting about falling and how much time that took and there had to be a pently for falling.

Really good story it was very interesting to listen to but seriously… your dog is a real asshole was distracting as shit I kept looking to see what the dog was doing screw that dog

I think one of my best stories from a shadowrun game that was the entire group, was this:

Our team is currently set up shop at a bar, owned by one of the members of our team.  Well, one day, we were attacked.  Durring the combat, one of the security guards got away.  We got the name of the guy from one of the few living members of the group that attacked us, and decided to go and kill him, and his uncle, who had vital info against our current employers.  (there were more reasons involved, but I can’t remember exactly what they were)  So, we get to the house, and at the time, there were four of us in the group.  I was the mage, a troll, (who after this mission was known as “firegiant”, because I was engulfed by a great fire spirit, and took no damage from it, escaped, and manabolted it, taking it to one box away from death).  A halfling named Sire, who was more machine than man, a female hooker who was known as “manhunter”, (because when someone shoots another person without it being a called shot, we roll the dice to see where the person is hit, and this person always rolls a six when shooting guys, which is the crotch, and uses guns called “cot manhunters”…)  And an elf called glasswalker, who was pretty much the best spy/stealth character possible.

So, we get to the house where the two targets are at, I go astral and go in to see how many are there, then come back and relay the info to the team.  Glasswalker goes invisible using his chameleon suit, and just walks through the house, and into the basement, where I had seen two people tied up, (one of which was a new player being introduced to the game, and played out the entire combat that followed without any cloths on, lol), and the rest of us sneak up to the big sliding glass door, to get a better look inside. 

I see two targets, both sitting on the couch.  And my first thought was, “napalm spell”.  But then I realized that would bring that portion of the house down, and kill glasswalker and those in the basement.  So, my next thought is, “levitate”, which the gm quickly reminded me that it is not an area spell.  So, I say, well then I will levitate the couch, strait up to the ceiling, as fast as I can in a single fling, not actually sustaining the spell…  We took about thirty minutes trying to figure out exacly how fast it went strait up, and it came out to about 98mph, which meant that they shot up to the ceiling in less than half a second, went through the ceiling, through the second story of the house, through the attic, and roof, and about two hundred feet in the air above the house.  It then fell back to earth, hitting perfectly center on the privacy fence, breaking the couch in two, and splattering the two targets on either side.  Grant it, they were dead the instant that they hit the first ceiling, but it was still awesome.  One of the most creative ways that I’ve ever used a spell that I can think of.

SPOONY,  come on the answer was obvious.  Their horrific criminal rampage with DMSO and drugs would be noticed by the powers that be who would get really F-ing pissed off after a while and just send a team of powerful robots to deal with them (if robots don’t exist in the Shadow Run universe just add them, you are the DM and its a high tech world with cyborgs and stuff already).  Then great amusement ensues (for you) as your players realize they are now being perused to the ends of the earth while futilely fighting powerful robots who care not about their sissy little poison filled squirt guns.  Thus your players are made to understand the error of their ways.