In this evening’s GURPS session we beat the GM.
1) We confronted one of his regional baddies, and proceeded to slice said baddy’s werewolf minions to chutney.
2) the big “reveal” for this baddy was supposed to be that he’s actually a vampire. But instead of delivering it as a big reveal, poor Robby (our GM) accidentally announced the next set of actions by saying “the Vampire draws his… ooops.”
3) Timothy and I slew said vampire handily. Sure, this required a few critical successes and a few critical failures, but in the end we walked off with a vampire skull, all the vampire’s personal effects (evidence to be returned to our Fell Masters), and our trussed-but-still-alive compatriot who had been captured earlier.
4) three hours before the usual wind-down of the session Robby said “And… um… that’s going to have to be it for tonight.” We’d run clear to the edge of his contingency plans, and then past them. I guess we were supposed to follow the vampire to his lair rather than slaughtering him and his pets and then hiking off with a portion of his remains.
My character knows exactly jack-be-diddled about vampires, and the player (me) knows even less about how Robby is treating vampires in this game. Still, taking the skull seemed prudent.
–Howard
Those are some of the best moments in an RPG. Any time you can act in such a way that you make your GM go “Uh… huh. Well, that’s it for the night, you got me,” is truely rewarding.
Sometimes it can also be irksome when you’ve been looking forward to a longer gaming night, but a lot of the time it’s just amusing.
An expression that has been in common use by myself and others is “They’re not dead unless you mutilate the body.” Meaning that unless you really make sure (like taking the skull), they’re going to come back.
Bravo.
The best laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy.
I think I’ve done to that every GM I’ve played under.
Star Wars (d6 system): At the end (as it turned out) of a multi-year (real time) campaign, I, as a player, got pissed off at the game and simply wanted it to end. So I, having the weakest player of the group, armed myself with some grenades, stormed the bridge of a Star Destroyer and took out the Sith Lord, while the Jedi Knights (two other players) were having their rears handed to them by some low-level Sith apprentices. I was totally expecting to have my character die, but he survived without a scratch.
Needless to say, everyone, including the GM was totally surprised at the outcome.
Champions (different GM): the GM had the scenario planned whereby we end up in a jet fighter chase with the Bad Guy™. Only it transpired that prior to getting to the jet hanger, I had gained control of an entire robotic army.
Why chase the bad guy, I thought, when I can have the robots do it for me? The GM did not take that into account when he created the scenario.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me we had this?” I asked, and proceeded to not only save one of our party members that had just been kidnapped, but skipped the rest of module one, skip module two entirely, and hit the very end of module three where, when the Grand Finalé happened (we didn’t even realize it was the Grand Finalé), it took the DM about half an hour to figure out what the heck happened (yes, we were (and still are) a high level group and had, entirely unbeknownst to us, killed an evil god, which was the goal of the three module set to being with).
I have this talent for finding the most unorthodox way of ending adventures it seems.
Re: The best laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy.
This is one of the reasons that I try to keep most of my ideas and thoughts up in my head, where they’re easy to permute, instead of writing them down as a guide to the quest, where they risk my treating them as the unchangeable storyline that we must follow.
Makes it easier to change courses when the players start pulling out monkey wrenches. Just sometimes requires some extra page flipping in the monster books to come up with a new bad guy at a key moment.
Re: The best laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy.
you mean you wing it.
I do too. I… uh, I write down the campaign idea and a basic sketch of the political/(whatever will affect the players most about the world) situation and wing it from there.
It’s really kinda fun.
Re: The best laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy.
Nah, wing it generally means that you’ve done only a small amount of work and you’re making stuff up as you go along.
I’ve thought of what’s going to happen, I just haven’t committed it to paper.
Re: The best laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy.
oh, if by work you mean ‘strenuous thinking up of plots’ then no, i don’t do much work.
If you mean sitting in class half-daydreaming of what I’m gonna do to the poor suckers… then sure, I work on my campaigns. I just can’t be bothered putting it down in such a way that I feel I can’t change it whenever I feel like it. I think of an adventure as playing the npcs against the players, not… this happens, then this, then this… but more… hey, what would this badguy do?
except not quite because I purposefully make mistakes sometimes. I’m not playing to win after all.
Ooops indeed. As nice as it is “beating” the GM, it must really suck for him to have his big reveal spoiled like that.
And good call on the skull. Vampires get different treatments in different campaigns, but I haven’t seen one yet that could arise again having its head severed. (I’ve always favored the stake-in-the-heart, stuff-garlic-in-the-mouth, then-chop-off-the-head method, myself, but that’s largely because it feels… complete, somehow.)
(Quick utterly off-topic question: what pens do you use when you’re inking line art that’s going to be colored with your Copics? Cause I just got a set, and I tried a coloring test with my Staedtler Pigment Liners (which I’ve seen you use before), but there was some light smudging on some of the lines (even when I let it dry for a day), so I don’t think it’s a viable solution.)
I use the pigment liners, but I stage the line art.
1) light outlines.
2) Color with copics
3) Darken outlines
4) Add cross-hatching.
That way the smudging is minimal. Trying to color over cross-hatches is usually disastrous, unless the ink has been setting and drying on that page for weeks, or even months.
Nifty. What sort of pen do you use for the light outlines? Is it just a thinner Pigment Liner, or something else entirely?
Of course now that you’ve run off the end of the planned material and taken the skull, the DM is probably rewriting the vampire mythos of the campaign to include something about their skulls turning back into a newly resurrected vampire while the skull thieves sleep…
How do you do that?
We spent three hours of a four hour gaming session last week fighting one battle in Deadlands. One single combat experience. And we have to go on, next session, but all of our characters are nearly dead.
If he weren’t my best friend, I’d think our GM was just an a**hole. Or maybe our dice hate us.
Is my character dead?