I will always treasure the memory of the first time I played Pathfinder 1e. I rolled a half-orc witch, egregiously min-maxed for a ridiculous +16 bonus to intimidate at level 1.
in the very first encounter, my friend alyssa's dwarf barbarian brutally one-shot a goblin. I was next up on the initiative, with the scene well set for an intimidate check.
as the goblins were a size category smaller than my character, I got an extra +4 to intimidate, up to a truly absurd +20. I made my first roll of the game. I got a nat 20, for a total of 40.
the GM lost their shit, along with the rest of the table. the surviving goblins gtfo'd, and that ended up being impeccable foreshadowing for the utter munchkin chaos that was the rest of that campaign. that group was <3
One time in college, I was subbing in for a friend who was out of town in a cyberpunk D20 Modern game. The goal of this particular mission was to steal a Space Shuttle-style orbiter being transported between two locations on a big truck.
So, we silently boarded the truck. Being a party mostly consisting of college kids, we didn't exactly have the patience to remain silent, so we attracted some attention and they called in reinforcements. This took the form of two helicopters that slowly approached the truck. No worries, we thought, we have shoulder-mounted RPGs, this should be a piece of cake. Except, we kept failing our shots as they approached. Eventually, one of the players nailed a natural 20 right as the two copters were overhead.
We celebrated! Until the DM reminded us that they were directly overhead.
Because of the perfect shot, one copter rolled over as it was hit, taking out the second one with it. They were coming down right on us, the orbiter, and the truck. One character is asked to roll a reflex save, which he succeeds in, and chooses to roll directly under the orbiter. He's immediately crushed and killed, along with the rest of us, as the copters land on the orbiter, taking out the entire party save for one of us in a massive fireball.
The one who managed to escape this parade of bad decisions was running our getaway car. Given almost the entire party had died here, this campaign was over. So, to close it out, he snapped a photo of the wreckage, sent it to the crime lord who hired us for the mission with the caption "here's your space shuttle," and fled the country.
That was the first time I ever played a tabletop RPG.
My party and I ran into some sentient giant crabs executing a blockade of a village we were visiting on a mission.
After finding a way to communicate with them through basically semaphore, we learned that there was a disease 100% fatal to this type of sentient crab being spread from that village.
After going to the village, we found a number of humanoids recovering from a minor illness (which we determined to be the same one as in the crabs, shockingly). Through interview, we identified a possible source of the infection, a troll traveler who had arrived ill, subsequently left, and had been visiting many villages in the region occupied by these sentient crabs.
Through oracular insight, we knew that he had likely been deliberately infected with a magical disease. The possibility that he might be deliberately rather than unwittingly taking part in genocide crossed our mind, but we figured this was more likely just some unlucky person we could convince to seek treatment at our university. So we reached out to him via a dream message spell, explaining what we had seen and that we'd like to chat. He replied proposing a meeting, but our travel plans were incompatible, so we tried to get clever.
Through some ritual chicanery, we worked out how to have a sort of magical group chat between our parties, with an added layer of compulsion on both parties that would compel a certain number of questions be answered truthfully and comprehensively, the latter bit proposed by the troll.
Asking our very first question revealed something of our true purpose in this world but got really useful information from the troll about our immediate goals. When his turn to ask questions came up, his first few questions made it abundantly clear we had just revealed our entire plan to stop the campaign villain, directly to the villain, in act one. He then proceeded to get us to document our identities, whereabouts, capabilities, and weaknesses.
We came out of the ritual surrounded by an enormous cloud of disease-bearing creatures that ultimately destroyed our ability to use magic - sent by him in advance.
Definitely my favorite tabletop villain to date.
