More Bob stories from Happyelf!
Bobowrun
Bob ran shadowrun on two seperate occasions.
The first time had a silver lining, because it was played with new people, and while most of them were pretty goofy, one of them was a pretty cool guy and ended up being a friend of ours- he was the one who ended up sodomising a leprechaun, stealing rob's jester boots, and doing a bunch of cool stuff in other, less shithouse games.
But anyway, bobowrun 1, we're at this guy's house, me and harry, going there to play shadowrun with bob who knows why, we meet these new people and some of them are kinda goofy and obsessed with anime but w/e game on. Harry and I are playing mercs who co-own an extremly fast car, ridiculously fast in fact, due to some upgrade table or something we'd found, we'd managed to make the fastest loving car ever, and then put a minigun on the back. IIRC harry was a rigger who's first tier value was money, all of which he put into the car, and the upgrades he bought turned it into an near-supersonic death machine.
So the group raids a warehouse where pornos are being done. We steal some plot data or rob the place or something, as is our mission. I'm pretyt sure we just sabotaged the script. Then we escape, drop it off, and then poo poo gets wierd. I can't quite recall the order of events, because i'm sure I remember meeting this new friend of ours after the raid, but anyway, that's the lowdown. But I can distinctly remember seeing this guy play for the first time as his PC's appartment is being broken into and he's being shot by the porno company's revenge squad.
That's right, the porno company sent out a hit on us, as revenge. I must stress at this point that this porno company didn't seem to be a front of any kind, and if they were, you'd assume they would not want to give that away by getting all spec ops, but they sure as hell sent some heavy poo poo out at us for wrecking their porno stage.
So apparently the scenario was that we hit this porno place, and the porno place has a ghost or wizard or something, that follows us all home in the astral(even though we split up), and then the porno place (which still is looking nothing like a front) then proceeds to unleash the motherfuckering sword of vengance upon us. I don't know if there was any way for us to survive all this, I doubt it.
So yeah, this new guy we met there who we became friends with wakes up the next night to have his door blow off it's hinges and a hit team shoot him dead on his air matress. The other guys like the guy who's house it was met similarly messy fates, to the point where they pretty much quit the game due to the absurdity of it- their houses were bombed, their data streams were hacked with black ice, nothing clever or entertaining, just boom, near instant death.
Finally it came to me and harry, with our super fast fusion powered car, with built in ultra-advanced security systems, which we'd protected along with ourself with meticulous security protocols (I had run cyberpunk in the past, after all). There we were, rocketing down a highway, in one of our randomly generated travel patterns, hanging on the phone trying to figure out what had happened to the rest of the team.
And we get a ping on the radar. Which is wierd, since it doesn't really work too well against targets on the ground. But that's ok, because the object we've picked up isn't on the ground. It's six miles up in the air.
It's a state of the art, next-gen military attack helecopter, which the people who owned some back-lot porno studio have apparently aquired for the sole purpose of taking us out.
I mean this thing was worth big loving money. It wasn't even like, an old model some well-to-do runners or a merc team had bought. It was was fresh off the production line.
Harry and I peel off the highway like a bat out of hell as half the off-ramp explodes under a rain of depleted uranium. We tear-rear end across the city as it hunts us through the concrete canyons. Of course, bob isn't describing any of this in a cool way, but we tried to correct for him at times like this. Moments later, it fires off an air to ground missile, and as it whips down towards us we pull a sharp turn and duck into the undergound car-park of a major mall.
The rocket zooms down from on high, and turns on a dime with a foot of ground to spare, following us into the car park. I'm not really sure what happened next. I remember we had flares and chaff, and that soon after this a huge team of heavily armed runners turn up, who had just happened to be in that exact mall, waiting for us. We certainly drove through the mall at some point, that was fun I guess. At this stage the game pretty much dissolved, us being the only players who were still bothering to play. The usual story- one bad game, and the campaign is Over. Probably for the best.
We ended up playing with those guys a fair bit (of course I usually ran the game), some of them were kinda shithouse, and we met this other guy (who didn't know them either) who we became friends with. I ended up hanging out with him more than I did with harry. Bob never really got my criticisms of that game, he never really got any of it, but for our part, we resolved not to let him GM ever again. A few months later, we played in the D&D game I described earlier. About a year after that, Harry convinced us to let bob run shadowrun again.
Bobowrun 2
Bob ran Shadowrun again, years later. Harry was in this love/hate thing with him, and was also earer to play the game, and to play with us as the players. So me, harry and a couple other people agree to let bob run shadowrun at my house. He even brought notes.
If anyone read the first bobowrun story, and are famliar with shadowrun, you'll realise bob had caught on centerain elements of the setting and cranked them up to 11 in a really retarded way- team did a shadowrun, and then there was blowback from it. Retarded, game-ending blowback. The same went for this game, but with a different issue.
In this case it was the Johnson. In shadowrun that's slang for the guy who hires you, normally a corporate go-between. Rarely if ever anyone important, much more often an expendable fixer backed up by a corperation or other interest. Meant to be subtle, deniable, discreet, and difficult to trace or even identify. That said, Johnson's are protected to a degree, and one of the unwritten rules many people have for the setting is that you don't gently caress with mister johnson.
So our group of shadowrunners meets with Mister Johnson. In a park, on a bench, pretty conventional setup. Maybe a bit unsafe? Anyway, harry's troll street samurai is haggling with the guy, and the Johnson starts making lots of half-threats, and Harry's pc just laughs it off. Apparently bob didn't like this because suddenly a small spec ops squad just comes out of nowhere and covers us with their weapons.
So much for a discreet meeting! So anyway, after showing off a squad of wet-works epxerts that bob assures us are much better than us, the Johnson then hires us to do some job. Apparntly it's not important enough for their normal people to do, but still important enough that if we screw it up, they'll kill us instantly.
Cue lovely bob adventure. It was rare to get anywhere in a bobgame, but it did happen this once. The mission was rather short. We kidnapped somebody, a musician who had been kidnapped already. Then we hid under a brige when the inevitable retaliation spanwed a fleet of featureless drones that hovered high up in the air and sniped at us, and eventually made it back to mistern johnson, having dropped off the cargo, which thanked us (with lots of prompting for roleplay from us) and gave us two (only two) free tickets to this gig that night.
Now, through this time, harry has been getting more and more frustrated, as have we all, at the typical bob bullshit. On top of this he was just the kind to get frustrated some time. So he's threatened the Johnson, although only OOC. After all, the johnson may as well be bob, and bob is wasting out afternoon with this garbage. So anyway, we arrange the payment drop-off, in that most of us decide to not turn up. My PC is in a cafe six city blocks away from the drop point. Other pcs were even further away.
Harry's troll makes the drop off. The johnson is waiting there for him, apparently alone. Harry comments on it OOC, a kind of 'not so tough now, heh' comment, and suddenly. . . SPEC OPS DUDES COME OUT OF NOWHERE, EVERYWHERE.
Two armored troop carriers burst out of a hegerow at the other end of the park and roar towards the meet. A small army rapels down from nearby buildings. Huge swarms of troops sprint down streets and, several city blocks away, i've looked up from a crossword puzzle to find that every person in the cafe is drawing a bead on me with military-grade assault weapons. I am not exagerating. Now, we might in a less shithouse game, consider this to be a double cross, or the cops busting the meet, or something? Maybe the elves have invaded and war just broke out? But oh no, not in bobgame.
In bobgame, a Johnson arranging a discreet and subtle shadowrun, off the record, off the books, with limited assets and clear deniability, has a small army backing him up just in case the players so much as look at him funny. Where was this army on the mission? How can this possibly not tip off people, including the police, to something going on? Why did we try and play with bob again? I cannot answer these questions.
So harry's troll puts his hands up, and approaches slowly. He does actually have to walk over to get the credsticks. I've told the Johnson via phone he has 'a gift for him'. The troll approaches the johnson, the small army tenses, waits. . . and then, making his approach the troll steps juuuuust within the range of the longest range weapon he has.
The whole army opens fire.
The troll is blown to pieces, although there's enough left of the body that Bob's npc goon army is able to salvage one of the two tickets I sent the troll out with to give to the Johnson as a gift. While harry is tearing up bob's notes and ranting about wasting an afternoon on this garbage, bob mentions to me as an aside that the johnson is really sorry about shooting the troll, and offers a cash bonus to make up for it.
One percent. Minus the cost of the ammo they used.
I don't even think bob expected us to play again after that.
Somethingawful user Tempest_56's tale:
I remember an old tale from many years ago. I was at a gaming con when I was younger - maybe sixteen - and got into a D&D 2e game. It was Dark Sun, I remember, and I was looking forward to my first time with that game world.
The party gets the usual introductions and a task before setting off, fairly generic. We all set down for the night with the usual rotating watch. The DM glances at his book, then tells everyone to roll a save vs. spells. Half of us make it, the other half don't. The DM points in sequence to each of the players who didn't make it (myself included) and says, "The rock under you turns to mud. You are sucked down into it before it reforms into stone again. You each suffocate and die. Because it's silent and everyone else is sleeping, they have no knowledge that you're dead. They wake up the next morning and you're all simply gone."
And that was it. Less than 15 minutes into a con game (a con we'd paid for to get in, and set aside four hours for this game during), and the DM instant kills half the party. No encounters, not even any interaction. 15 minutes of DM exposition then 'you three can leave the room now'.
I never played Dark Sun again.
wtftastic's tale of the traitorous PC:
I'm a fairly new gm, and I started my first "main campaign" (think a headline game for our crappy gaming club), a Star Wars d20 game on a Friday. I recruited really heavily and had 11 or 12 players. In hindsight, this was way too much, but panned out well in the end.
One of the girls, Rose, was not well liked by several others in the group for being a flake, annoying, and just generally grating. I, being me, decided to give her a chance since I didn't want to be rude.
I gave the players copies of the rule book that allowed them to play from a wide variety of races (think like from Chiss to Zeltron). She picked a Blood Carver, an unconventional choice, and I moved on to check on the rest of the players.
When we started playing, most of the players elected to be jedi in hiding sometime after Order 66 went into effect and when the Empire was founded. No problem right?
We went around, introduced our characters. Rose proudly announced that her character was a Smuggler(Rouge like)called Nori Roll. She sniggered while the rest of us stared at her. It wasn't even funny.
But, that's not the real issue. She rolled to hide away from the rest of the party, stalked them, tagged them with a tracer, and then ran to the nearest Imperial Garrison while the rest of the group ditched her. She expressed no interest in tagging along or trying to follow them.
I have no idea what she expected me to do for her, but I wasn't going to make a campaign for one weeaboo player who decided to piss off everyone else. I tried to explain to her that she'd need to make a new character. She huffed, and never returned. Good riddance.
Now,every week is kind of my worst experience. My game is small, my players are enjoying hanging out, and they kind of don't get Call of Cthulhu, no matter how I try to freak them out. Most of the time we end up laughing at each other. Its not bad, but I wish they'd at least let me be serious.
