Badassery
Weird. I thought we were playing Night’s Edge or Hypercorps 2099 or Vampunks or something. Turns out I was wrong. Judging by the sparks between Street Samurai and Artificer, we’ve somehow wandered into Thirsty Sword Lesbians. 😳
Of course, we aren’t here to talk about chemistry. We’re here to talk about the far subtler and more esoteric science of badassery, along with its attendant risks. Try too hard to and you run the risk of… well… trying to hard. There’s nothing worse than achieving cringe when you’re shooting for cool.
But then again, there are those moments when everything goes right. When you earn your epic one liner. When the rest of the table is right there with you, fists balled and eyes blazing, ready to punch through character sheets and into the fiction, where some malevolent thing is in dire need of smiting. We’re talking, “I do not stand by in the presence of evil.” We’re talking Master of Puppets. We’re talking, “DEEEATH!”
If you manage to get just one of those moments in your gaming career, you should consider yourself lucky. And at my table, one moment rises above all others. Is it time for another tale from the table? Does an Alchemical Exalt piss oil?
So no shit there we were, down in the guts of Autochthon and getting our assess kicked. The 40-foot tall avatar of a living city had let us into his inner sanctum, and we were not prepared. Dude had so many health levels that they looked like hit points, and enough armor to render all but our best combos useless. Laurel was ST in that one, and more than one of our Lords of Creation lay unconscious and dying.
If you want to know how the fight ended, go re-read “The Nuke.” It doesn’t matter though, because the actual deathblow was anticlimax. The real heart of badassery isn’t action or violence. It’s resolve. The hero staggers. The hero falters. The hero stands one last time.
Our dawn caste solar was still clinging to consciousness, if only by a hair. She was a little girl with a big hammer, and an even bigger heart. All campaign long she’d been this inexhaustible font of optimism and hope. We knew we could never lose while she breathed. But there we were, in the industrial bowels of a rotting machine god, and with only a handful of health levels between us. It was looking like a very real TPK — Campaign over. Bad ending. Throw your charm lists onto the burn pile.
But she does what heroes do. She stands up instead, using her hammer as a crutch. She looks back at the rest of us. The player says, “I’d like to try a Prayer roll.” And in a small voice (so unlike her merry battle cry) our champion of Sol Invictus says, “I don’t want to die where I can’t see the sun.”
IRL tears were shed. The full three-die stunt was granted. We got to ignore our wound penalties for the rest of that combat.
My group now owns a matching set of “I Don’t Want To Die Where I Can’t See The Sun” t-shirts. And that’s only because we can’t afford a monument in the town square.
But what about you? If your group had to decide on a moment to memorialize as legitimately badass, what would it be? Is there an associated one-liner? Hit us with all your finest commemorative statue plaques and group t-shirts down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Thrice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
My ToA Dwarf Devotion Paladin was full of them. (Read all of these in a Dwarven accent, which is to say a cartoonishly thick New York one. Reject Scotland, return to New York)
“We’ll make them see reason, or we’ll make them see stars.”
“Your first mistake was thinking I’d let you live long enough to make your second.”
My favorite two came at the end of the tomb itself:
We had found a Night Hag coven’s eye and were confronted by them. I pulled it out, shouted “YOU WILL DREAM OF TEETH AND NOTHING ELSE!” and bit into it, complete with biting the air very loudly at the table.
During the final battle with Acererak he thought it was a good idea to have the final battle in a room full of lava. My Paladin knew that killing a Lich was just delaying the problem, and was constantly on the lookout for ways to trap him forever. Through the course of the adventure we had come across a Dao he trapped, and a guy with a magical artifact that was a ring of cold. As such, the last thing he heard before he was chucked into the lava was “How does it feel Asscrack: To know that you brought all of this upon yourself? How does it feel… To be stupid?!” He never knew that the Dao flew down, extracted his stone tomb with **Stone Shape** and hoisted him away. He never knew that his stone tomb was dipped in adamantine. He never knew that he was taken to Mt. Celestia and dumped at the bottom of the sea of holy water. Entombed in stone he couldn’t move or speak, so all he could do was sit there in a torturous sensory deprivation chamber for centuries until he withered away from not feeding his phylactery.
I hope the DM didn’t feel *too* outmaneuvered. 😀
Was it intentional on Laurel’s part to frame and light the shot with maximum “Now kiss” energy?
She assures me that it was not.
I swear, every time I look at them they’re moving closer and closer…
SHIP IT!!!
It’s funny though… If you follow the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comics on Patreon, the actual ship is with her fellow inorg.
Currently, there’s a few I can think of:
“They called, we answered” from my party’s blood hunter after we’d been charmed in a call-to-challenge style and then kicked the asses of those who’d challenged us
“I can’t say I’ve ever killed a dragon… But a dragon bleeds like everything else, therefore it’ll die like everything else” from our battle master before we fight a dracolich
“GET IN THE WATER” from my enchanter Vortex Warping an enemy into a 10ft deep pool of water, same encounter as the blood hunter’s line (it was essentially a boss battle, and our DM did not realize how creative we were going to get.)
Big Arnold energy on that second one:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/UuwAAOSw18ViBgxX/s-l400.jpg
Would make a pretty good t-shirt too.
I’ll let you be the judge of whether this qualifies but the story is none the less amusing I think. Many many moons ago I was in D&D campaign and we had a character in the party whose actual class I forget but their exploits, I recall too well. Somewhere early on, he picked up a bow and decided to use it. Mind you, he had zero proficiency with bows so penalties applied, and, he had some of the worst luck in the universe when using it. Like ones, galore. Any time he announced he was using the bow, the party learned to duck or dive for cover because nobody knew where that arrow was going. (This was a source of great amusement for our DM though.) So, fast forward a fair bit and the party is brought before some local lord who accuses us of being impostors because he’s supposedly met our party already and hired ‘us’ to do some deed. We protest of course that we are the genuine article and he demands proof. So, of course, out comes the bow, and then a 1. The shot ricochets around the room like a cartoon bullet and our erstwhile ‘archer’ ends up hitting himself with his own arrow. The wide-eyed ruler then concedes that we must be the genuine party as nobody but him could pull off a shot like that.
That’s some good ruler right there. XD
The most famous one-liner among my friends is the one that was never actually said.
I won’t go into details because it’s definitely NSFW. But in short, a couple players failed their IRL listening checks. They completely misheard what another player said.
Both of them swore up and down that they heard the same thing. And what they heard was absolutely crude and hilarious. The frosting on the cake was that the misheard player was not the type who would ever make such a crude remark.
In honor of the estimable George Carlin: “shit”, “piss”, “fuck”, “cunt”, “cocksucker”, “motherfucker”, and “tits”.
If this in any way alleviates your reluctance to share, I’m all ears… And also CRAZY curious.
Seconding Claire’s comment… deets please!
Reminds me of a 40k Deathwatch character I ran who wasjust 100% bravado. When our scout alerted us that a riot had broken out in the city blocks ahead of us, his response was, “Are they in our path?”
“yes”
“Then we shall tread them under our heel!”
Which our squad leader promptly countermanded. But it was the moments that really cemented Dax Nova’s personality.
That that right there is some grim dark. Well done that man!
So, I’ve got nothing to contribute to the topic that was asked, but I have a question of my own.
I’ve been trying to find a system that can be repurposed to play one of my favourite underknown scifi settings, but it’s been proving to be difficult.
I need a system that has the following features, or several systems that cover those features and would be fairly easy to patch together: All human PCs: no alternate races, relatively mundane human power levels, *heavy* vehicle customisation options and travel mechanics.
Also appreciated: wound and disease supports, GM (and possibly player) city creation, post-apocalypse flavour and survival mechanics. No zombies.
Hoping that Claire’s (and others’!) stable of many, many RPGs will find something
My first thought would be Gurps or d20 Modern.
When system shopping, the best place I know is r/rpg:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/
Hmm.
HERO 6E is the cheating answer, since that’s a do-anything system. It does however give you quite a lot of prebuilt vehicles and humans as a good starting point. From there, you can customize your vehicles into quite literally anything; the system is all about getting creative with your advantages and limitations to get the most bang for your buck or to accurately create the concept you’re going for. Also has wounds, diseases… can’t remember if it has survival mechanics, but I feel like they must be in there as an optional rules set.
Toward the end of what was increasingly a high-level campaign, my Whisperknife Halfling Rogue was often seen as the bomb-guy, skip-rock throwing lockpick. If there were mobs of mooks or puzzles or someone to sneak attack, then he’s your man (halfling).
Cue the green dragon.
The DM had intended the biggest part of this mission to be a fight versus a dragon, something the party had never done before. He figured we’d fight it down to about 3/4 health and then it would fly off [insert scripted portion of adventure here]. I had in my inventory a bunch of globe palm fruit from a previous adventure (different DM) were considered canonical to the campaign (I asked). Using a Gnomish Calculus (Arms & Equpment Guide), I delayed action until the dragon was within range, then let fly with the stench grenade. With dexterity bonuses and such, I tagged his face.
Globe palm fruit allow no saving throw and cause debilitating nausea. No exceptions. RAW. (The initial save is to avoid shaking the tree and having them drop on you. These were picked with *mage hand.*)
The DM had preapproved the items at the table in front of everyone. The dragon dropped from the sky and convulsed, vomiting its acid breath weapon uncontrollably, but those NOT in the path of caustic nausea had free shots on a RAW helpless dragon. I didn’t one-shot the BBEG, but dang close. (In the end, the DM had to invent a *second* dragon on the spot to carry out the rest of the plot.)
My only legitimate badassery actually happened in my very first AD&D game back in 1978. I had just generated my first character, a 1st level 1e ranger. I was joining an established, long running game and most of the characters were 10th – 12th.
Our very first encounter, out in the forest, was a group of giant rats. I didn’t know any better at the time, but the entire group frantically scrambling up whatever tree was closest totally confused me. All the players were urging me to climb, but all my ranger saw was some big rodents, nothing to get bent out of shape over.
Now a bit about my ranger Ea. She doesn’t miss often and when she does it’s usually a fumble. Been that way since I first rolled her up. I’ve had various DMs, who let me run her in their worlds as an NPC, not believe me, but they always believed by the end of the session :). So first battle with first character at first level. She wiped out all the rats before they even reached her (there were 10 I think, it was awhile ago).
The group comes down from the trees and I find out that the last time they had run into rats they just barely avoided a TPK. No one could hit, they didn’t have a mage (that would be my second character) or anyone who could do AOE damage and there were fumbles taking out characters right and left.
So Ea got to be the hero of her very first fight. I will always remember that as the best possible introduction to the game.
My wizard got to feel like a real badass a few times, all without ever lifting a weapon- which is the most fun part!
Once, we were attempting to stop a bank robbery- and I got permission from the owner to hide my familiar in the vault. Since I had Familiar Conduit, I could cast through him! So, when the thieves leader broke past our line and made a break for the vault, the party jumped to go after him- until I just smiled and shook my head. ‘he’s taken care of. No worries.’ My familiar pops out of a corner, shouts ‘hey asshole, look over here!’ then I cast sleep through the conduit, and the leader’s snoring on the floor.
A few weeks later, a bomb defusal was going south- it was far too late to defuse the bomb, it was about to go off with the whole party standing right there and with a crowd full of civilians still trying to evacuate- so, naturally, I did the only thing I *could* do- ran past our rogue, grabbed the bomb, and dimension doored straight up, to its maximum range of 1 mile. Tossing the bomb as far as my (admittedly pathetic) strength score could, I realized the *downside* of this plan- I was now immune to the 5th level variant of dimension door for an hour. Luckily, I still had a 4th level one prepared, so I could still save my own hide- it just had to be MUCH closer to the ground than I would have been willing to go otherwise. (And I did not have featherfall)
Much later in that same campaign, we came across a giant dragon-like plant creature, which had been stranded in a park when the city around us was built around its ancient den. Unable to leave the city without causing havoc in its wake, the creature had been content (though not truly happy) to simply wait for the opportunity to leave to arise. Being the one carrying the party’s emergency Dimensional Knots, a magic item that lets me carry other people with me when I teleport, I offered one to take the creature outside the city. In return for the gesture, he offered to come to my aid should it ever be necessary- granting me a branch from his wing to break to call him. It ended up never being needed, so once the campaign was over, I returned the branch and thanked him for his kind offer.
I did kinda fumble the line, but I still feel it counts. It was a convention game, Powered By the Apocalypse system taking place in a gothic horror world with us playing good guy monsters. I was playing a Frankenstein’s Monster. So we broke into the villains lair (literally, smashing through a bunch of walls with a magically silenced sledgehammer) who was some kind of ghost monster thing experimenting on innocent people. So he sets his lab to self-destruct, but I had a special ability that allowed me to grapple his ectoplasmic form, not letting him escape. Now I had another ability that allowed me to ignore all damage from a single blow, so I had no worries of holding him and letting the exploding lab take him out, but an unfortunate roll made it so I couldn’t hold him and use the ignore damage ability, it was one or the other. I had to choose. I chose to hold on. And as the lab was exploding around me, it screamed and cursed at me calling me a thing, a pathetic patchwork monster. I replied “No. You are the monster. I am a man!” I did kinda fumble the line out (i’m not used to being badass) but its still one of my few favourite roleplaying moments.
My personal choice would be the time my elderly retired soldier turned diplomat lion-alien fought a psychic-lazer lobster in claw to claw combat that ended with the two of them in an acid lake. Which I think I have shared in another comment somewhere.
But if I were to chose another one, it would be a fairly recent one. Our party had infiltrated what we thought to be the lair of a group of slaving bandits, only to discover a grand government conspiracy. One of the ways we discovered this was due to the arrival of one of the kings knights. A practically giant figure, encased in plate and with smoke billowing from him. It was pretty clear our GM expected us to either flee, or surrender to him so that we could be brought before the King. We decided to fight.
What followed was several rounds of desperate struggle. He was a full on boss encounter, coming in at the end of an already intense dungeon. We were out of spells and low on HP. Me being a bard and the main support did the best I could to keep people going, while the Monk tried to stun the guy and the fighter keep him locked down. But he simply waded forward, eating attacks of opportunity and had a far too high con-score for the Stuns. Allowing him to constantly follow us casters whenever we tried to flee. Then the fighter went down, downed by a legendary action. And the guy turned his eyes towards my bard. My character is an amazing support, but I have an incredibly bad AC and HP, and I was already very, very low due to the whole dungeon thing. Everyone knew that if he hit me, there were decent odds he could kill me outright. And he was going to go before it was my turn. The only person with a turn before him was the wizard. Who had only a couple of first level spell slots left.
So the Wizard, our beautiful weak boy, looked at the giant (legally speaking he was just large) Darth Vader Lookalike in-front of him. Looked at the dying fighter on the ground and then he looked at my incredibly hurt bard and made a decision. He walked out from the safe spot he had found and he tried to grapple the guy. Wizards -1 vs whatever much the big guy had. The Wizard won, rolling a 19, vs the guy who ended up on something around 9/10ish IIRC. So when it became the Knight, he was unable to move due to being grappled by an incredibly weak elf wizard. So he changed up his plan and took his attacks on the Wizard. Who promptly cast shield and weathered the storm. At the top of the next round, our Monk runs up to the guy and gives him the good ol one-two and tries to stun him, and finally the guy fails a constitution saving throw and is now stunned until the end of the monks next turn. In my turn I grab the fighter and start to move him back a bit, while trying to stabilize him. Being completely out of spells at this point. I failed on the stabilize, but got him a bit out of the way and used my last use of a feature to buff up the others a bit.
Then came the fighter, who promptly rolled a nat 20 on his death saving throw, awaking at 1 HP. He stood up, grabbed his axe from me, walked up to the guy and crit him in his face twice (Champion Fighter crits on a 19, plus advantage from stun is a nasty combo). Utterly wrecking the guys face. When he finally got free from stun after we wailed on him some more, he promptly made his grand escape and we did the same. It was that moment that cemented our fighter as basically being Rocky Balboa, because no matter how hard you hit him he gets right up again.
Found my the comment I made about the Lazer Lobster, in case anyone was interested. It actually just about had its two year birthday a couple of days ago. Actually a bit surprised I have been reading and commenting for so long. Hopefully it will continue for even longer.
Anyways, here is the Lazer Lobster Story. It seems there were a couple of things I misremembered (Such as my guy not being ex-military).
A homebrewed space game. I was playing Zeyoor, an old lionman diplomat, who was a rather classy fella. Carried a service saber and had his own cyber-monocle. He had decided to spend his retirement going on space adventures. I will admit that the fog is only loosely related to the story, and that I just really want to tell it.
For various reasons we ended up landing on a planet filled with acid mists, which not only made it impossible to see or track anything, but also required us to wear protective suits or get constantly damaged by it. Zeyoor was part of the 3 man team that left the ship to go explore the planet. We walked through the mist, following a weak signal we picked up. Finally we tracked down the signal down to an acid lake. When we gathered around it to see if we could see something, suddenly a giant psychic lazer lobster burst forth from it, knocking out the two other crewmembers with a burst of psychic energy. After which it fired its eyelazers at Zeyoor.
Zeyoor, now burning from the acid getting through his damaged suit, fought it saber to lobster claw, but the were at a stand still. Until the Lobster grabbed his saber and tossed it into the lake. This, as it turned out, was a big mistake on its part. Zeyoor was build for diplomacy, and only really carried his saber due to sentimental value (It was a sign of service and authority among his people). But I had build him to be decent in unarmed combat, due to being a boxer in his youth.
What followed was an epic claw to claw battle, as Zeyoor battled the lazer lobster, and he was not just winning, but utterly dominating the battle. Finally the Lobster grabbed him in its claws and dragged him beneath the surface of the acid lake, where he promptly choked it out, grabbed his saber from the bottom and swam back to the surface, only being alive to some downright miraculously low damage rolls from the lake. He then grabbed his two crewmates, and dragged them back to the ship, burning from the acid rain the entire way. Finally falling to the ground, with only one hit point left, when they entered the ship.
That is when we, and by we I mean Zeyoor, discovered that half the remaining crew (ie, two people) had been taken over by mind slugs. The Doctor had locked herself in the medbay, with the other two survivors who had had the misfortune of running into the slug-controlled pilot, an adventurer of note and a master swordsman, and were thus out of the fight. So Zeyoor, after fighting off a couple of mind slugs and punching out the mechanic, finally got to the medbay, and got some quick first aid, after which he set out to fight off the swashbuckling pilot, before the slugs got to the part of his memories that would allow them to fly the ship.
The two of them, pilot and diplomat ended up in a dramatic saber fight, that quickly resulted in Zeyoor getting impaled. It was looking grim for me, until the pilot made the classic mistake of disarming him, resulting in Zeyoor once again having to resolve to his claws. Suffice to say, the pilot was quickly dealt with. The session ended with Zeyoor dragging the unconscious pilot back to the medbay, after which he shut himself in a medical pod and refused to leave for the next week.
Cyberpunk 2020. Our party went to the local pub to talk about stuff. My solo went ahed to buy the drinks, when a lokal Im-the-local-badass tried to stare me down. Coolness check (or what is it called in English – I only ever read the Hungarian edition), the guy backs down and starts to leave, so I turn back towards the bar, when the GM says I have a baaaad feeling about this. So I say I turn back towards the kid, but immediately pulling my gun out. The guy was aiming at me with an uzi, so I shoot.
My dice decided to be funny and rolled ones in a series, so DM rolls a couple dice amd decides I shoot one of my mates in the ankle. Roll damage, just in case… well of course I had the handgun with highest available damage, and of course my funny dice roll me max damage, severing my mate’s left foot at the ankle. Everyone pauses, and I turn to the DM:
“Well, punk, if I do that to my friend, what do you think I would do to you?”
The guy ran and was never seen in the area ever again.
I think my most badass moment at the table is from my level 20 Echo Knight, when I stabbed a boss 17 times while it was hexed, and crit a number of them. I don’t remember if I mentioned this last time, but this character had a mentor who had disappeared at sea, and it turned out that the boss monster in question was responsible. Out of character the righteous rage didn’t really have an impact, but in character there’s a reason that that turn did the second most damage to the boss in the fight, and the most was done by the sorcerer who had a way to maximise half of his Meteor Swarm.
One of my favourites off the top of my head comes from my Vampire Werewolf Rogue (yes, really. The bit lies in him not being edgy despite having all the edge points). We were getting held up by some bandits and I rolled to vanish(hide) as rogues do, before they spotted me. Sidenote, It has become a running gag in this campaign that I nearly always roll good on stealth despite having no proficiency in it.
Anyway, the wizard casts some spell, I don’t remember what, but the important thing is it didn’t work. Bandit captain speaks up “‘ere, ‘es one of them magic blokes! Your spells ain’t gonna work on us!”
Imagine his face as he found a rapier to his throat as a voice behind him remarks “No, but they make for a very good distraction”
This comic needs a ‘careless whispers’ sound effect.
Oh my. You can italicize emoji?
Oh yeah, also the sword lesbians.
That joke would have landed better if the emoji had survived the blockquote. Or maybe these comment boxes just don’t like emoji? Let me test something.
Okay, definitely the comment box then.
I should see if I can italicize emoji elsewhere.
I had the perfect setup; dwarven cleric, just laid down the killing blow on a succubus that had taken over a town, but it turned out she was working for someone else, a mystical shadowy voice that gave the classic defeated villain pitch; “You’ll PAY for thiiiissss!”
Without missing a beat; “Meh, put it on me tab.”
Cue sunglasses with the base exploding in the background. Not literally, but man it felt like it.
Those moments are “career”(hobby, but you get the idea) defining, because in every other aspect, you’re just pretending to be a badass. You’ve put numbers together to let you do badass things, you can have your character make choices you’d never be willing or even able to make, and you can do badass stuff that you can only dream of.
But when it comes improvising a badass one-liner? That’s not just playing a badass, you ARE the badass.
I don’t know if this truly qualifies, but back in the days of D&D 3.5, our party, including my Devoted Defender/Fighter of 12 levels, had just finished clearing out the dungeon below a monastery and were reporting our success to the abbot, when suddenly a gate opened.
Some kind of insectile demon stepped through. Initiatives were rolled.
My toon happened to go first (Improved Initiative), drew his bastard sword with Quick Draw, made a Step & Full Attack, scored 2 crits and a normal hit thanks to Keen and Improved Critical still stacking back then, and inflicted about 92 or 96 points of damage.
This was enough to insta-kill the demon, which promptly dissolved into foul-smelling slime.
Asked one other PC “What was that thing?”
Shrugged the Fighter “Dunno. Probably nothing dangerous.”
Took us a minute to recover from the laughter.