Great moments in TTRPG

Ghost

Anyone have any cool "great moments" to share from their TTRPGs? Nothing negative, but moments where it was magical, or as a GM you felt like you did something amazing for your group?

I'll start. This is actually a story from this past weekend.

I'm running V5 Vampire for an in-person TTRPG group of 5 players. It's set in Chicago using the "Chicago By Night" module, and I'm taking FULL advantage of all of the canon characters (Portia, Annabelle, Gengis, DuSable, etc). Now, 4 out of the 5 players are old-school VtM players so they know a lot of the lore, and the 5th is brand new to Vampire so I am LOVING being able to introduce them to dark, scary, evil lorepieces for the first time and see their reaction.

However, in V5, there are some new things, and one of them are "Thin-Blood" vampires, whose vampiric blood is so thinned out that they can survive the sunlight better, often have warm breath and flushed skin, and could often pass as a mortal. My "OG" players had never encountered one. They don't have typical vampire powers, and instead dabble in a kind of "Thin-Blood Alchemy" that the other non-thinbloods don't have access to.

So my vampires are following a drug dealer suspected of peddling a new drug called "Ash", which appears to be made of blood and ashes. They track him to his apartment, see him leaving. He's got pink skin, warm breath, and so they approach him like he's a human. Now, "mortals" don't really get a resistance to the vampiric "Dominate" powers, but other supernatural creatures do. So assuming he's mortal they decide to roll on up, get eye-contact, and "dominate" the drug dealer into being quiet and walking with them.

It went like this:

Player: Okay I look into his eyes and say "Be quiet and follow me".
Me: "Roll a rouse check and then roll your dice pool to dominate."
Player: "But mortals don't get a defense."
Me: "That is correct. Roll the dice."
The whole table: "Holy fuck please don't let this be a werewolf."

I had them all eating out of the PALM OF MY HAND as they had no idea what the fuck they'd just rolled up on. They eventually were able to wrestle the thin-blood down after he used some sort of strange power they'd never seen before on one of the PCs. They basically beat him up and dragged him back into his apartment.

They search the apartment and find a secret basement where occult circles, chemistry equipment, and books in a cramped, filthy space. At the end of the basement is a shower stall with an old "Spongebob" shower curtain concealing something shadowy.

The looks on the players' faces was PRICELESS as they peeled the shower curtain back to find a missing Toreador from court, suspended upside down, staked, and with tubes in all of their major arteries and an empty bucket underneath with dried blood residue lining it.

They'd just stumbled into an alchemical drug lab where the blood of their peers is being used to make a street drug that works on vampires.

They're eating this chronicle up and loving it, and it feels really good.

Devrex

This one was from years, years, and YEARS ago, but it pops to mind. It was on a MUSH, though I believe it was an invite-only space.

We're in a fantasy world. And I'd spent, oh, six months building up this villain. She was unstoppable, very powerful, etc., etc., etc.

Well, one of the players had done some subplot work to earn himself an airship. The flagship, in fact, of an airship fleet. So when he poses into the scene where the villain is now up against the players in person, he poses that he brings basically every player who signed up in on his flagship except maybe the one or two who had already posed being toe-to-toe with her.

And declares: "We shoot her with the flagship."

I had to pause momentarily, tilt my head to the side, and admit: "Well, there's no save vs. flagship."

I didn't let the flagship steal the whole show; I let it significantly weaken her to the point so that the ground crew could contribute as well, but shooting her with a flagship certainly made the fight easier on everyone involved.

I am friends with many of those players RL still, and "No save vs. flagship" has remained a fun tagline in-joke that you can sometimes hear one of us saying decades later.

reimesu

In the tabletop vein...I was 19, and playing a superhero character that had a VERY small level of fame as a rising singer.

GM brings in this Juggernaut ripoff character and I think, what the hell. My char flies up, and I have the GM roll to see if he recognizes me. There's like a 6% chance that he does.

He does. Not only does he, but he's a fan. (It was a very good roll...for me.)

I kinda derailed the entire evening's combat in one roll, it's the only time in my life I ever did. And it was fun watching the GM's brain absolutely shut down in shock.

My other fun story was a different GM: it was GURPS and I claimed my char had area knowledge. He was like, "How does she know the area?" I thought about it and said, "She knows where all the malls are." (This was back in 1991. Malls were still a thing.) He disbelieved.

I told him to start naming landmarks in the area. He would. I'd tell him how to get there because of what mall it was near and how to get to that mall and then, by extension, to said landmark. I'd only been driving for about six months or so, but my mom had loooooved to go to shop, so it was a thing I could do: navigate that entire area via mall. Before I even learned how to drive.

Thanks, Mom!

Macha

It was one of my very, very first TTs. I was like.. 12? 13?

And my poor, very underpowered in comparison character only had a gun, three bullets, and an alleyway. So she ran into the alleyway, but got followed by the big bad. the boys are all snickering, now

Not much else to do, right? She pulled out the gun she did NOT have much in the way of points in... and BEST ROLL OF MY TT LIFE. It shut the game down, for the night. Ooops.

Derp

So one of the very first tabletops I ever ran was just for me and a handful of friends, and my at-the-time boyfriend. Well, kid sister to one of the friends was like 12, and wanted to get involved in some of what we were doing. Kid sister was pretty cool, so I agreed to let her play.

This kid, man. She soaked up pretty much the entire rulebook inside of a day, was asking me advanced questions about gameplay by the end of the week. Hadn't even played yet, but I was starting to get a feel for where her mind was going.

Well, I knew that the others at the table were either going to take it easy on her for being new, or try to do the whole newbie initiation hazing thing that they do, and I was starting to get a feel for how her mind worked. So I set her up as one of the villains of the story, infiltrating the group and actively working to undermine them from the inside.

And man, this kid sold it. Every time they would encounter a setback that she had cleverly engineered, she would be the first up in arms, calling for them to mount up and ride off, no time to wait or rest or prepare, we have to go get that son of a gun!. And the rest of the people at the table are just like "Yeah, we can do it, rar!"

And I'm trying so hard not to just lose it because this kid's acting is worthy of Hollywood, right? And she's coming up with just the most devious stuff -- we had agreed that if she had a question she could write it on an index card and I would write the answer back, since she was new and playing shy (this was well before texting was anything like easy or affordable, SMASH THAT BUTTON 4 TIMES FOR S, 25 CENTS A MESSAGE), so nobody else was catching on.

So by the end of it she's managed to sabotage half their efforts and prevented them from resting in their haste to race to the bad guy, and when they show up, she just casually adopts this big, chipper smile like 'Alright, they're all yours now, I'll be in my room!' Grabs a blow-pop from the big bowl, and just straight up walks out of the room with a little skip in her step before the big boss battle.

They still managed to win, but man, it was a tough fight, and they never underestimated this kid again. She was a regular in our group for like four years, and is easily one of the best players I'd ever met. I'm thrilled that I was able to introduce her to the hobby, and I hope that she's carried that torch forward.

Devrex

This one is from TTRPG; now that I've read the whole acronym and caught up with the rest of the class, you know.

Content warning: Drug Use.

***The Story***

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