Miss-Honorable
What was the best game you ever played? Close your eyes and think back on it. Was it somebody’s parents’ basement on a Saturday night, anime posters and discarded Magic cards littering the floor? Was it a common room in undergrad, pizza boxes and beer cans stacked to the ceiling, and finals still (thank gods!) weeks away? Maybe it was a new group in a new city? The night when everything clicked, and the unfamiliar game shop suddenly felt like home?
It’s strange to think back on campaigns past. Some characters and story moments stick out, but it’s the sense of camaraderie that still echoes.
Were you playing your monk or your sorcerer when we fought the T-Rex? Oh yeah, I do remember that your boyfriend sat in for a few sessions. What was his adept’s name again? And remember the time your cat got into pizza? Lol.
Maybe I’m getting nostalgic in my old age. My degree is finally coming to a close, and it’s almost time to move on to the next thing in the next city. But when I think back on the stories that meant the most to me, it’s the people rather than the unfinished tales that I really miss. Sure I’d like to go back and defend lost citadels one last time, but even more I find myself wishing for one more homecooked meal afterwards, or a beer with the buds, or the old gang shouting a raucous greeting when I clamor down the basement stairs.
My point in conjuring the golden light of yesteryear is simply this: Appreciate it while it lasts. Because gaming groups are hard to gather and harder to maintain. People move away. They grow up, have kids, and take on different hobbies. The stories peter out. But friendship is the real treasure, and you can never tell you’re in Camelot until it’s gone.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we pause to appreciate the good groups past? Who were the best bunch you ever rolled dice with? Have you told them you love them lately? Hit us with your own nostalgia moments and “best games ever” down in the comments!
SWORDS: CUT THE DECK: Who dual-wields thumbs and has an affiliate link to share? We do! Swords: Cut the Deck is a tabletop role-playing card game based on the award-winning webcomic, SWORDS. In this game, strange heroes use even stranger weapons in epic skirmishes. Who will prove their skill with the blade? Who will be dead? And who’s hyped for the Handbook of Heroes guest card? Hit our affiliate link and back the project! Get us a cut of that sweet, sweet Kickstarter money!
ARE YOU A ROLL20 ADDICT? Are you tired of googling endlessly for the perfect tokens? Then have we got a Patreon tier for you! As a card-carrying Familiar, you’ll receive a weekly downloadable Roll20 Token to use in your own online games, as well as access to all of our previously posted Tokens. It’s like your own personal NPC codex!
Hands down, the epic Ravenloft campaign I played online. It spanned years and multiple domains, and I looked forward to seeing new posts every day.
I’ve lost contact with all but one member of that group, and that contact is spotty at best. :-/ So it goes, alas.
As for today’s comic: It’s about time that penny dropped! You guys were supposed to be better than the main party! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE BETTER! =_=*
Actually they’re meant to be more foils for the main party. Meaning they can be just as much screw-ups as the mains, just different.
I think of it like South Park. Stan and Kyle were supposed to be the reasonable ones. But really everyone is awful in their own way.
Claire, I’d take your and Laurel’s story over … that show … a thousand times. Twice on weekends.
Tell Comedy Central to call us. 😛
What, so they can rob you of your rightful income and ruin your story? I should think not.
Probably the group I played my 30-PC mega-campaign with at home before going away to uni. We’ve played in the years since, but not nearly as much as I’d like. I hope to run something else just as good for them one day.
How do you organize something on that scale? Did you have multiple GMs?
It’s those scenes where everyone just clicks, everyone having fun. They’re usually pretty chaotic moments — several of them are tavern brawls, others desperate attempts to extract the party from peril — but they’re those moments where all the players are on form, and everything is going right even when things are going wrong. Those “this is why we play these games” moments.
I love digging through a character sheet in a desperate scramble for dilemmas.
“Wait… You still have that bottle of hot sauce!?”
“I kept it this whole time!”
*Table erupts in celebration for some reason.*
It was the year nineteen hundred eighty-five, eleven year old me was sitting under a tree and reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Some older high school boys were playing full contact football in the courtyard, I wasn’t invited as I was new and no one knew me. After the game one came over and asked if I liked playing roleplaying games…
He was my first GM, that was first real group*, and while there have been plenty since, most with me as the GM, that was the best group I ever played with because without them, nothing since would have been the same.
.* There was a group in fourth grade playing AD&D that I joined for a few days, just long enough to make a character, but then something happened and I never saw them again… it could have been they moved where the game was at, or I just had a severe case of A.D.D. and never went over to where they were again. Who knows, I was eight and not yet a fully formed individual.
Hmmm. You seem a bit… preoccupied. :3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K38xNqZvBJI
Right, so I have two stories I particularly remember from tabletop. One was the time my character straight up ran away from the party.
The other and the one that I will share today is that time my character adopted a house full of cats.
So no duh, there I was. This was the first time I seriously got into a D&D game. It starts off innocently enough: we’re coming up with characters and one of my friends decides to play a “rouge”. I naturally decide “okay, I guess we’re all playing colors” and name my bard Viridian. I did manage to get one other player to be named Chartreuse. We were playing a one-shot that I want to say was a module.
So we rode up into a fancy looking house and inside is a building full of fancy looking catfolk. We’re called in to deal with some disagreement. We had to pick between some aristocrat and a nice lady named Luna. Viridian of course was as much of a gentlemen as he could be and starting trying to get to know the people.
And then the fight started. So it turns out some magic jerk had cursed all these cats with the gift of sentience and held them hostage. Jerk goes down and suddenly this house is filled to the brim with very upset housecats. One night later and Viridian gets attached. I still bemoan the fact that I lost the battle to have them all as traveling companions. Such a shame.
Wait… Were they catfolk or sentient housecats?
They were housecats transformed into catfolk. The transformation ended when the boss was killed.
Oof. Flowers for Algernon cats. Sad times.
Still, it sounds like a great premise. 🙂
The three years DMing at the Rec Center on RAF Lakenheath. Lots of fun, french bread pizza from the base shoppette and late nights. Had some of the best players I’ve ever had in those groups.
Also had what I consider my biggest DM “wins”. When you get the whole group laughing so hard that they can’t stop and you have to break to go get munchies or just catch your breath. I did that twice during this time and will always treasure that :).
Well done. I love high adventure and emotional payoffs, but it’s the dumb jokes that keep me coming back night after night.
Do you remember what triggered the laughing fits?
Hehehe, both times were NSFW moments and I’ll just leave it at that 🙂
Same here, probably around 1977, in the first apartment I had after finally moving out of barracks. The buildings were mostly people I worked with or knew. We’d just finished an exercise and were dead tired but with copious quantities of cheap booze and cheaper shots, the cries of ‘GOBLINS MUST DIE !!!’ rang out and the dice rolled, some for the first but not the last time.
It was a homebrewed game, mostly made up on the fly, not the longest campaign and certainly not the best thought out or planned, but it was what we had and it’s still more memorable than some that took months to write.
The laughter flowed faster than the booze normally would have, nobody wanted to just pass out and miss anything, and that laughter was as much fun as the game, maybe more…the Cold War was on hold for the rest of the night.
The perfect end to a well fought pretend battle was another well fought pretend battle and we milked it for all it was worth.
I demand an out-of-context quote from the GOBLINS MUST DIE!!! campaign.
The ‘Goblins Must Die !!!’ cry rang out when someone opened the mandatory purple velvet Crown Royal bag I kept my dice in, the only bottle I ever bought because I preferred rum to rye and Walker’s Special Old to CR 😉
The quotes were mostly off-colour to say the least, imagine two load crews worth of tired and at least partly inebriated 19-21 year old 1970’s vintage airmen who couldn’t pronounce ‘politically correct’ let alone care about it, some had been in high school a couple of years earlier and were now certified to hande nuclear weapons, you can sleep easy tonight knowing you’re being protected by the best 😉
“He hasn’t got the **** guts to attack us”
“**** no, you’re standing in his ****guts”
“I cast fire****ball on the whole **** lot of them.
Wait, WAIT…I cast it on their balls”
The rest are mostly unprintable and deservedly so.
Several hours and at least two potential fistfights later, the game collapsed about the same time half of the players did.
Noice. I particularly enjoy a good old-fashioned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSynJyq2RRo&t=2303s
That sounds perfect!
Oh, I’ve played in basements and dorm rooms and common areas at friends’ houses where you don’t mar the table with jewel or metal dice (cause you’ll catch hell from the mrs.), but one experience holds my memory more than others:
Summer of 1982. Boy Scout camp. A dozen kids sitting huddled at a rickety picnic table beneath the pale amber light of a Coleman lantern, awkwardly bludgeoning our way through White Plume Mountain and Castle Amber with the crummy shared dice from the Basic set, a couple of pencils, and handmade character sheets on pages roughly torn from the spiral notebooks our moms bought us for our merit badge classes.
OMFG that is the most precious image… I can just imagine you guys ripping on each other like the cast of the Goonies. XD
I still play with these guys, through in different groups and with other players now. But we had a campaign where us three players where each a different type of chaos gremling.
A lawful cleric whose first action in every new settlement was integrate himself with the local guard. Mainly so that he could sic them on us if we disagreed with his decisions.
The fighter whose player quite clearly wanted to be a serious and edgy character, but who constantly failed at it due to not verbalizing stuff and some questionable decision making. Which lead to him just coming of as sorta a weirdo.
And then me, drugged up trigger happy idiot. Who somehow ended up being the glue that held the party together, as I served as a go-between for the other two.
And finally a DM who knew exactly how to handle us. It was an amazing vibe of being a totally dysfunctional crew who was constantly at each others throats (With me desperately trying to play peacemaker, while the cleric tried to sic the guard on me for petty reasons). While at the same time being able to turn into a finely tuned killing machine whenever things got serious. It was so much fun to see our group go from trying to ditch another member, to form ranks instantly if a third party entered the equation.
I think the main reason it ended, apart from life getting busy, was that another player joined who just didn´t get the vibe of it. Which just kinda made the whole thing fizzle.
Functional dysfunction is a hard thing to maintain. It’s easy for “pretending to having my feelings hurt” to “my feelings are actually hurt.” But that type of “Suicide Squad vibe” is hilarious if you can get it to work. Kudos on the dynamic!
It’s hard to pick a favorite, but the first one that comes to my mind is Pathfinder 1e’s Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition. My 3rd run at GMimg it.
I won’t post the player names, but the characters were the 6,000 year old gnome changeling witch Lulu, the aasimar paladin/bard Uriel, who helped out everyone they met, the devil-touched, often-naked Atali, whose dual-wielding barbarian/sorcerer build took me forever to help her player turn it from concept into reality (and the Bloodrager class, which would have done it all much better, came out shortly after the campaign ended), the multiclass abomination monkey man Zaru, whose player moved overseas halfway through, and the halfling druid Nelipot Noot, whose player was the first to take my Noot clan of halflings (the Noot clan is my go-to whenever I make a halfling) and made her own addition to the family.
They all just worked so well together, and roleplayed the group dynamic so well! Even when the characters argued, they did it in character, and resolved it themselves.
It’s hard to define chemistry, but when you got the special something… Ain’t no feeling like it. 🙂
now cut to Paladin on the upper planes, where they;ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot
Ooh, bop-bop-bop
I gotta say it’ good to have someone moralistic around. They are great to point fun you may have missing 😀
I only started playing TTRPGS in college and have kept playing with three or so of the people I met through the gaming club that my best friend created while we were there. However there are so many people that were once part of the club that I played with that I haven’t talked to in a decade. We played 4th edition D&D, Shadowrun, some monster of the week, Dread, and innumerable board games. I don’t really miss most of them, but I miss the simpler times of long evenings and weekends spent with friends.
My first D&D group was with Mike the DM, Chris, William, Andy, Stephen, Petra, and Kyle? I forget Kyle’s actual name but I might be right.
Mike was a wonderful storyteller, he ran the Red Hand of Doom for us and brought the characters we played wonderfully seamlessly into a world of his own creation, where he showed us around in confident and masterful ways. He was very much a furry, which was weird for a while as I got to know him, but getting to know him taught me big and good lessons about acceptance.
Chris was the one that brought me into the group, he lived next door to me when we were in the dorms on base. It was him, me, Stephen, and Mike playing Vampire at first before we got into D&D with everyone else. He saw me as a challenge in a lot of ways while we were playing, and I was often eager to meet him in challenge and relish the victory. It was slightly antagonistic, but it was with him that I began to learn how to learn how to distinguish the difference between out of character and in character, and we were ‘friends at odds’ for the entirety of the time I knew him.
William was the small chaos gremlin of the friend group, and that energy was *really* fun to watch. He was really clever too, he liked the rogue and sorcerer types and would just find solutions. I think I got a little lazy as a grew up as a roleplayer, because Will just had a great idea 3 seconds from now that was going to just make it work, or make it lose hard enough that the conditions for ‘winning’ changed. He eventually went TDY to Seoul, and the Korean place we went to all the time brought us all some soju on the house to toast him.
Andy was a proud edgelord, and I could always pick his characters out of a lineup if they had x, y, and z traits. That was one of them in fact, if a name had an x, z, or an excess of y’s in it, it was under suspicion. He liked dual wielding and fire damage, lots of both. In certain situations the foe was conquered the moment he decided to participate, in others he was strictly extra hitpoints. To think of it, that was reassuring in a way. We all knew we had to be strong enough to pick up his slack when we started fighting devils and demons, it definitely forced some research. Now the research is one of my favorite parts.
Stephen loved to be the face. The limelight was his every time he could convince everyone else that it was best to let him talk, and that was pretty often. He was a very good talker. He also usually liked picking up the pizza, split between him and Petra, Andy supplied the house, Mike was the DM, the rest of us brought snacks or beers for the ones who could drink. Stephen always had a story to tell, and the stories that he helped us tell became much more exciting when he had a hand in the outcome.
Petra loved dragons, just adored them. She would be a dragonkin any time she wasn’t allowed to just be a dragon with age category based growth, but Mike was delighted to accommodate this, and she was having fun, so I had fun too. She was very imaginative with her descriptions and honestly portrayed to me a very believable difference in motive. I remember her collecting something like a hundred thousand gold to sit on and do nothing with, which was a lot, she would be a step behind us by having a stat at +2 and not +3, but it didn’t matter to her, she had better things to do than worry about the numbers of it. As long as she got to sit on a bed of gold, she was a winner.
Kyle was the kind of guy to get drunk at a party and show up to a session without eyebrows. He was sort of a frat boy remnant that glanced off of us for a while when we were all getting into the Air Force, but we played for probably about a year and a half, and he mostly did his job in a distracted way. He killed my character once through purposeful negligence? I dunno what more I can say about him. But I have core memories about every one of these people, and yes, I remember, it was Kyle, so ha.
I remember that Sovereign Gluing oneself to the back of a dragon was something that Mike had to come up with active countermeasures for. Me finding cursed objects that glowed pink and wouldn’t come off was somewhat prophetic in its own way, but ‘light like a torch for 30 feet’ is always useful to a melee fighter so it was fine, I didn’t have to see the pink myself. Dragonball references, ‘Hey can I borrow your manga collection’, some guy knocked on Chris’s door while we were playing Vampire and challenged me to a fight (I lost)…precious stories, each. I laugh and remember.
So, did I miss the comic where Barbarian gets her hands cut off, or…
I forgot to to draw them, thank you for catching it! It’s fixed now.
Being fast at illustration is certainly a HANDY skill to possess.
There goes Doma Castle.
Truly, there is nothing better than music composed of hundreds of voices screaming in unison. 😛
As off as it sounds at the moment I think the best campaign I have played in was probably a high level 5e Theros campaign. We only dod ot as a time filler, and since thats what it wasand we had a table of three we did gestalt, woth two full classes a piece. Every battle felt suitably epic and I feel so regretful that my character from that campaign likely cam’t make another appearance. If your familiar with mtg lore She was a Kor from post eldrazi Zendikar, shoved into Theros. Basically she was a bottle of lost angst and impulsive leaping before looking. She was also violently anti religion in the middle of fantasy anceint greece on missions for gods. It was just the perfect storm of characters getting together, we also had a priest of pharika with us, and setting and just pure power fantasy. I still miss that game.