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
Playing the biggest orc I could manage in Shadowrun, kitted to the max with strength cybernetics. We met a Mr. Johnson at a bar, and afterwards we needed a distraction to avoid the corpos waiting outside. We needed a distraction, so I told the GM that I was going to find the closest person on a chair, and hurl them outside. The GM assumed I meant the chair, and started with 'you dump them out...' before I corrected him, that no, Mr. Cyberarms was shotputting the poor chummer and his chair out the window, and I rolled enough d6s to get him across the street.
Poor guy.
I was running a Star Wars game, the players were infiltrating a Separatist base when they bumped into some recurring antagonists that were also infiltrating the base for a different reason.
I thought it'd be a fun detail to include before moving on with their actual mission. I neglected to think about the grudge one of the PCs had against them. So they follow the antagonists to the hanger, where they've already boarded their ship. The PC shuts all the hangar doors so that the party is locked in a hangar with an armed and angry starship.
If you're not familiar with FFG Star Wars, vehicle weapons can take out human sized targets with a single hit and human sized weapons don't do much damage to vehicles. I made sure they knew this before hand.
The grudge PC and another managed to force their on to the ship before it fired off a shot, leaving the PC who was actually trying to do what they went there for and his NPC sister as the only targets. He lost an arm (starting a bizarre pattern of arm loss in my campaigns through random chance) while everyone else was bruised, but fine.
Arm damage just brings to mind another pair of smaller moments when we were trying out the Mechwarrior TTRPG. Players were playing a spec ops team raiding a Kurita noble compound. HALO dropped in, still wearing full helmeted suits, etc.
Character moment: The sniper's player was going full on redneck in his roleplay, getting heavily into character. Mid-character discussion, he mock-spat, which led to another player in a bit of perfect response, asking "Curly...did you just spit inside your helmet?"
"Well...I reckon I did sarge." windshield wiper noises
System moment: Mechwarrior had location based hits, roll 2d6 to determine location, with head, torso, left arm, right arm, left leg, and right leg being options. Halfway through playing we realized people kept getting shot in the left arm, both PC and NPC. We put it down to chance, until near the end where we actually looked at the chart and thought about it for five seconds longer than the game designers had. The designers had just went down the chart, 2 for head, 3-6 for torso, 7-8 for left arm, 9-10 for right arm, 11 for left leg, 12 for right leg.
If you didn't already get it, the most common result when rolling 2d6 is seven, so the most common place to shoot anyone in Mechwarrior is the left arm.
(Make sure you check actual probability statistics when designing games, folks!)
We were young, dumb and with our heads full of the Matrix and John Woo films, so we played accordingly. I was the GM and had designed a totally rad, cybered-up mafia assassin to go after the players when their snooping had gotten too intense. It was, in my mind, intended to be a setpiece fight with the PCs running for cover and taking potshots at this nigh-invulnerable terminator while the place explodes to bits around them. I was prepared for it to be epic, and awesome, and a third thing teenagers would say.
Cue the PCs having raided a drug lab and interrogating the lieutenant running the operation. The assassin has tracked them down from location to location, and chooses this time to strike. I narrate him striding in through the door, looking to the world like Armageddon has arrived. We roll initiative. He goes first. He draws, he shoots. He crit fails.
The table tells me he hits himself with the shot. I roll for hit, targeting the leg. He rolls max damage with his roided-out hand cannon, piercing his own armor and obliterating the leg's HP. He fails a death save. He's unconscious, down on the floor, bleeding to death while the group of PCs try to figure out just what the hell happened in the past five seconds of simulated bullet-time slo-mo action where they didn't even get to draw their weapons. I have to take a break from the game because I am laughing too hard.
I will always remember you, Vlad, you were my greatest NPC.
