I, Brian

So I mentioned about wish fulfillment in another thread...

I remember once rolling up for a campaign, and the DM insisted that all of us must keep rolling the dice until all our attributes were effectively no less than 95% of maximum values. Boring - the campaign died after the first zombie.

Then there was the great fun I had with a couple of other characters, where the DM wouldn't let me re-roll a couple of slightly below average scores - which lead to some great fun role-playing with limitations, and actually adding to the role-playing experience.

For example - one great mage character I had was truly off his rocker. Nothing malicious - just wrong at the wrong moments. He suffered a slightly lower than average WISdom score, which translated into having less common sense than he should have. His epitome came when he discovered a wand that would produce a random spell whenever the wand was used.

So the mage is faced with a bunch of angry fighters, and in panic he waves his wand - poof! - he is now 6 inches tall and floating 6' off the ground. Imagine that happening to Gandalf at Moria.

A truly great moment was when a group of very experienced adventurers were exploring some passages beneath a castle - suddenly they were surprised by guards, and the frightened mage quickly waved his wand - lightening bolt streaks through the passage, hits the end and bounces back. All characters are electrified but standing - and so is one of the guards, about to whack the weakling age with a sword. So the mage desperately waves his wand again - a fireball whooshes out and fills the entire passageway with roaring magical fire and fries everyone in the passage: kills the last guard, but also seriously injures all the adventurers enough that they have to suddenly retreat from what should have been a very easy mission, while they go find an experienced enough cleric to perform a resurrection spell on the unfortunate robe-blackened mage.

Very nerdy stuff - but in role-playing, my own experience was that it was character that counted. People could try and be as heroic and dashing as they wanted, but it was always those characters with some real sense of personality, difference, and just plain quirkiness, that really made role-playing the fun story-telling tool that it was.

Foxbat

I never did a lot of pen and paper Role Playing. I did try Traveller and enjoyed it immensely. The biggest problem I had was that the folk that were interested all drifted to different corners of the Earth.

Because of this, most of my amusing anecdotes concern slaughtering home dwellers in Baldurs Gate on the PC. Not very PC I know but it kept me grinning for a few moments

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Vini Vidi Evasi

Ashen Shugar

I played AD&D for years as a kid. Can relate to what you say about limited characters. My best mate was DM and only allowed us 1 roll & what you got was who you were. I think these are more challenging characters to play, and thus, more fulfilling.
Sad thing for me, my oldest 2 kids have NO imagination. I tried to get them into AD&D & they had no idea...they don't even READ...where did they come from? Must have been a mix up at the hospital. Fortunantly there are 2 more younger ones who may one day look at a book with reverence and awe and play AD&D &...

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Nothing is good or bad except thinking makes it so. Reality is merely perception, life is a dream and the sun will rise tomorrow - unless is doesn't.

Leto

I played Masquerade with such a bunch of chatters (that's law students for you) we soon dropped the dice just to tell us what our characters do and don't (with respecting limits of each clans). Finally we used a regular dice before starting to choose the tone of the story : 1 - parody, 2 - action, 3 - gore orgy, 4 - detective like, and so on...

Winters_Sorrow

Well, I did a lot of role-play type stuff when I was a kid, so here goes!

Favourite game - Paranoia - absolutely brilliant game! Mental concept is as follows. It is a future society. All people are graded by colour for rank e.g. Infared = worker, Ultraviolet = top banana. All players start off as Red's and 1 Orange as a leader. Mutants are illegal and killed on sight, Secret Societys are illegal and killed on sight. All players have 1 secret mutation and are members of secret societies!
The game basically consists of trying to accomplish your mission whilst trying to bring down everyone else! My favourite moment playing this game was when we were exploring a sector where all the computers had gone haywire and one of our gang (not me, I'm sad to say) re-programmed a paint-bot to paint the corridor we were in a different colour (Blue) and we were all shot for being in a restricted area!

I used to also love Middle Earth as a RPG, single favourite moment: facing 3 orcs on a bridge, killing 2 with my last throwing daggers and, realising that my ranged skill was WAY better than my melee skill, threw my short sword at the last orc, got lucky and skewered him

My favourite ever RPG moment was actually when playing FF7 on the playstation.
I had been putting some serious hours into this game and I was getting really hooked on the story. At about 3am on a Sunday morning I found the major twist in the story and was blown away! Didn't see that one coming!

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"I'm always happy. Which is kind of worrying when you really think about it."

Isolde

I've only played writing RPGs. I've been on four Trek-related RPGs, and one Vampire: The Masquerade RPG.

Leto

What clan did you belong to in Masquerade ?

Isolde

Ventrue.

Leto

Ah, I see. Started as a Brujah, then my favorite character was a Giovanni.

I, Brian

Pah! Malkavians = best.

Tsujigiri

I came to RPG's late, only discovered them at 21, and so of course went ott and became a designer

I really couldn't care what players decided to play and I freely allow them to bring their '1005th level Barbarian Destroyer of Worlds' into my games, it just gives me more opportunity to molest them and humiliate their characters with a kobold or something similarly unimpressive.

My latest exploit was with my usual gaming group who were merrily traipsing through some tomb or other and forgot for a mere moment who was running the game.
They're not talking to me at the moment....something about being beaten up by a sofa, a bowl of flowers and an imp.....

The point being that a subtle games master can make the most powerful character wish they'd stayed home on the farm.



Of course more reasonable characters encounter far less personally trying events

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Honrai mu Ichibutsu

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