Memorable Fights

[Gigermann]

Mar 10, 2013 20:31:15 GMT -6 Rigil Kent said:

Amusingly, in my notes, I stated "Make this battle memorable.

When Rigil said this, it got me to thinking: what makes a fight memorable?

So, I ask you all: What is the most "memorable" RPG fight you've experienced?

[WxMAN]

Memorable is such a personal definition that there isn't a single right answer...

For me the most memorable fights have been:

1. "Gone Fishing" in Pathfinder - The pit wherein Drognar the Dwarf decided it would be a great idea to allow his 'friends' to lower him down into the blackness. He then becomes the bait to some monster who is going to kill him if not for the bravery/stupidity of a Cleric of Kord named Raegar dives towards the beast only to knock himself and Drognar unconscious, though luckily killing the monster in the impact. Raegar and Drognar are then saved by Malonna as they are drowning at the bottom of the pit...

2. Nualia Fight in Pathfinder - Raegar and Krognar knocked out of the fight almost immediately. Cabbel takes all the damage ever and explodes into red mist. Malonna drinks unidentified potion and turns into a tree. Nualia does death knell on Krognar who saves on the dot. Zim and Kenric go all out to kill Nualia.

3. Star Wars - Tesla airlocks the crew. Everyone is beaten to a near pulp. Ondo saves the day with a dark side point exploding the bad guys grenade...

4. Crimson City - Apprehension of Hookshanks and Solnia. A comedy of errors at the docks that ends in a viking funeral. Good gawd we could do NOTHING right that entire combat.

And honorable mention:

5. Crimson City - Devargo, King of Spiders encounter. Because bluffing the guards, charming Devargo, framing a underling for betrayal, and getting all of the information needed without having to draw a weapon is priceless.

The major problem with all of these is except for one (#2), none of them would have been written as "Make this epic!". They typically involve a comedy of errors or barely surviving, and just eking out victory. Some of these encounters would nearly classify as snatching defeat from the jaws of victory - as sometimes it seemed like something relatively simple quickly turned into a life or death event....

Very rarely do I find 'being a badass' memorable, probably because when someone gets to 'badass' status, the real challenge/danger just isn't there without going to ridiculous proportions... Its the old idea that if you have to work really hard for something you appreciate it much more than if someone just hands it to you...

[Gigermann]

Mar 11, 2013 10:59:41 GMT -6 WxMAN said:

Very rarely do I find 'being a badass' memorable

It's ironic that this seems to be the case, at least, with this current group. No, there isn't a "right answer," and I wasn't looking for one. However, if one's goal is to make a particular engagement "memorable," it might help to know what makes a fight memorable in the first place. If the most memorable fights are the ones where everything goes wrong, then there may be nothing the GM can do to make that happen.

But then, I really ask out of curiosity, as much as an attempt to figure it out.

[Rigil Kent]

Mar 11, 2013 10:59:41 GMT -6 WxMAN said:

Very rarely do I find 'being a badass' memorable, probably because when someone gets to 'badass' status, the real challenge/danger just isn't there without going to ridiculous proportions... Its the old idea that if you have to work really hard for something you appreciate it much more than if someone just hands it to you...

Which could be problematic for you when we play characters who reach higher levels since, by their very nature, high level characters have "badass" built in.

I will have to give this question some thought.

[Gigermann]

Mar 11, 2013 12:14:20 GMT -6 Rigil Kent said:

I will have to give this question some thought.

The memory database for the two of us on this question is quite a bit larger than the others', and will take considerably longer to process

[WxMAN]

Mar 11, 2013 12:17:27 GMT -6 Gigermann said:

The memory database for the two of us on this question is quite a bit larger than the others', and will take considerably longer to process

... and much more fragmented... ;D

[Rigil Kent]

Not only is it really fragmented, but I'm not allowed to download Defraggler so I'm having to rely on the Windows version and it doesn't exactly work like it should...

[Gigermann]

I'm finding it's easier to think of memorable "snapshots" than entire combat scenarios. Some scenarios end up with more snapshots than others, which naturally pushes them to the top of the list. I find myself categorizing those moments as follows:

• Memorable location/conditions
  
• Memorable occurences
  • Creative solutions
  • Badassery in the face of real threat
  • OMFG-factor (lucky or unlucky breaks, etc.)

One that stands out to me at the moment is the fight vs giants in the ravine in McN's D&D game (that Rigil eventually took over); there was much badassery, but very real (OMFG) threat (tanks nearly died); there was interesting location (the ravine); and creativity (the Silence on the crossbow bolt to nullify the ogre-shaman).

Same game, Rigil GMing: The mirror fight. Much OMFG, and badassery.

Same game, much earlier in McN's run: The fight vs the Blackguard, who was much higher level than we were, and was prepared to TPK us but for a lucky break (for us), as he threw his sword away, and hilarity ensued

Tom's ToEE: The Gay Troll fight—purely negative OMFG

[LabRat]

I don't think that a GM can make a fight memorable. He can provide all of the mechanics, challenges, pacing, etc. etc. to make a 'perfect' encounter, but I think that it is the players that make the fight memorable. Not to mess with intangibles but they are the ones who breathe life into the machine. Most of the scenarios that have been given are because of how the players have handled the situations. Chance also plays a big role in memorable fights. It is that extra something that keeps everyone on their toes. I do believe that a GM can make a fight memorable in a bad way. On the other hand, the GM can only provide good mechanics for a good encounter. But really that is the best he can do. It is really up to the players to make it memorable.

Mar 11, 2013 10:59:41 GMT -6 WxMAN said:

3. Star Wars - Tesla airlocks the crew.

To this day, I still maintain the stance that there is a vernacular difference between opening all doors and opening an airlock. Plus Tesla, being an engineer, would have known the difference and only opened up the inner doors, regardless of what the player said

[Gigermann]

Mar 15, 2013 8:24:38 GMT -6 LabRat said:

I don't think that a GM can make a fight memorable.

Out of the elements that I mentioned, there is one (that I can think of) that the GM has mostly-sole control over, and that's the location—which can be memorable or not on its own.

[Gigermann]

Another:

Early McN's D&D run—the one that ended up referred to as Dark Birthright after Rigil's takeover: The taking of the Keep on the Borderlands. Much badassery & good PC fortune. Wu Blitz with the Rod of Withering. Garrett with the rust-monster-tentacle-arrow. Wulfric doing his mook-chopper thing.

[WxMAN]

Part of the problem is at least with me and likely Shelley is we don't have that point of common reference you and Rigil (and maybe ChrisIII) have so all of those fights mean almost nothing to us as we don't know the details of the fight - which is why I gave a bit of a summary of each one after my examples...

Another interesting observation at least between you and me is I am not particularly concerned with being a "badass" whereas that is one of your memorable occurrences... then again it may be my misinterpretation as to what you think is 'badassery'

[Gigermann]

Mar 18, 2013 14:57:37 GMT -6 WxMAN said:

Another interesting observation at least between you and me is I am not particularly concerned with being a "badass" whereas that is one of your memorable occurrences... then again it may be my misinterpretation as to what you think is 'badassery'

I noted that difference, although I would add that, as I had said before, that it isn't mere "badassery," but "badassery against a real threat" (your argument against it, as stated, was due to a general lack of threat)

Obviously, those examples aren't going to do as much for you as Rigil. I'm still thinking about it, so I might come across something that you remember as well.

[WxMAN]

So let's assume Friday Rigil shows up ( ) and throws us against a 20th level BBEG... if we straight up pummel him without taking essentially any damage, does that qualify as "Badassery vs a real threat"?

[Gigermann]

Mar 18, 2013 15:15:14 GMT -6 WxMAN said:

So let's assume Friday Rigil shows up ( ) and throws us against a 20th level BBEG... if we straight up pummel him without taking essentially any damage, does that qualify as "Badassery vs a real threat"?

If we actually won that fight, you'd bloody well remember it later—"OMFG, I can't believe we pulled that off!" Maybe even if we just escaped ("Gay Troll")

[Mike E.]

When Rigil faught the "Battle Cattle" by himself. That was pretty awesome...

[LabRat]

Nov 17, 2013 22:13:51 GMT -6 Mike E. said:

When Rigil faught the "Battle Cattle" by himself. That was pretty awesome...

addendum- when he shot away an incoming grenade out of the air while fighting the Battle Cattle...very awesome!

[Gigermann]

Nov 17, 2013 22:13:51 GMT -6 Mike E. said:

When Rigil faught the "Battle Cattle" by himself. That was pretty awesome...

I don't (ironically) remember what was so memorable about it, other than the fact that he did a solo-round with a Megamoo.

[Mike E.]

The "oh shit" beginning, the going hand to hand with a titan, and the end where he just shushed someone as they snuck away.

Sent from my VS840 4G using proboards

[Mike E.]

The fight up the stairwell in d&d 4e while running from rising boiling water. Mcnurlen didn't make it.

Sent from my VS840 4G using proboards

[Gigermann]

Nov 18, 2013 10:48:04 GMT -6 Mike E. said:

The fight up the stairwell in d&d 4e while running from rising boiling water. Mcnurlen didn't make it.

Always liked that one. Not much in the badassery dept that I recall, but the increasing threat forcing the traveling melee was interesting.

[Rigil Kent]

Nov 18, 2013 10:48:04 GMT -6 Mike E. said:

The fight up the stairwell in d&d 4e while running from rising boiling water. Mcnurlen didn't make it.

That was definitely memorable and you did an excellent job using the terrain as a threat as well as the enemies we were actually fighting. I remember ending that battle and thinking "man, that would have been an awesome scene in a movie..."

[Rigil Kent]

One of the most memorable fights I've been involved in while RPGing was actually a one-off run by my very first DM back in high school. No, that's not entirely correct - the one-off was a session run following Basic Training when I reunited with my old group and someone (I can't remember which of them) wanted to do an adventure that was "one last hurrah" for our first group of characters. Due to fog of age (this was 23 years ago, mind you), I don't remember the specifics anymore but generalities are known to some of the old guard of this group (Giger, MikeE).

Setup was that we were all fairly high level - I think we were around 15th level or so - and were using 2d Edition D&D rules (with some judicious house rules that were always fun.) In the characters' early years, they'd fought a young dragon and had very nearly been killed - the DM always maxed out dragon HPs and generally made them more bad ass than normal - but for the characters, that had been 20 years or so ago and they thus had forgotten just how unbelievably bad ass dragons were. Thus, when an old dragon (ala the one in Dragonslayer) started causing trouble, the high level, mostly retired, too old for this shit PCs thought nothing of gearing up to go kill it. We traced it to its lair, kicked in some doors, attacked ...

And died. Every round, the dragon killed a PC. The wizard (who was on par with MikeE's Nival character in terms of magical awesomeness) was turned to ash by its breath weapon. My fairly awesome fighter (ah, Tristan Soulforge. I remember him fondly) who considered himself something of a scholar was bitch-slapped into the next week, losing an arm in the process. The rogue (straight up Thief in 2E) was eaten. The paladin was reduced to absurdly negative hit points.

But then, the paladin surprised us. There was this Heroic Action house rule the GM had (which I really wish I could remember the mechanics of ... though it probably wouldn't make sense to me now) and the paladin pulled that out of his ass. His holy sword was shattered, his armor was in pieces, his summoned war horse was dead, but he limped toward his steed, hefted the lance (which was his sole remaining weapon) and turned to the dragon which was mocking him (being Evil and quite confident of victory). We all thought he was going to charge the dragon on foot, but the PC decided to throw the lance (since he couldn't reach the dragon before his Heroic Action expired.) The DM assigned the various bonuses/penalties, and the paladin PC rolled his d20.

Natural 20. We cheered. But it wasn't over. The DM had another house rule that if you rolled two consecutive natural 20's in a row, the damage wasn't just doubled, but rather quadrupled (I think. It may have been even greater.) So the paladin player rolled another d20.

Another natural 20! We were all hooting and cheering at that, and the DM mused for a moment, then asked him to roll a third time. None of us had ever heard him do that and we wasted a lot of time trying to get him to reveal why before the paladin player rolled again.

A third natural 20. We were all boggled by that (especially him - I seem to recall he had nearly as much difficulty with attack rolls as Giger does).

So we turned to the DM, waiting for him to tell us what happened, and he grinned ... before telling the paladin player that his character never saw the results because a white light enveloped him and his god summoned him home.

At this point, we all thought that none of us would ever know what happened, but the DM surprised us. Probably to none of your surprise, I was the guy who wrote the "chronicles" of our adventures - and man, I wish I still had those notes, just to see if they match up with my memories! - and the DM turned to me, informing me that my character gradually regained consciousness. His arm was missing but the wound had been mostly cauterized (I don't remember the specifics of that either) but he was effectively at 0 hp. When he looked up, he almost panicked because the dragon was right there! And then, he realized something...

The dragon was pinned to the wall of its lair by a glowing lance. It was quite thoroughly dead.

That remains, to my mind, the most memorable fight I've been in...

(Afterword: My character didn't even bother with the copious treasure in the lair because he was so injured and grieving for his lost brothers. He limped out, used his horn of blasting to seal off the lair, and then somehow managed to make it back to civilization where he retired (again) and was never again to pick up the sword. As a 15th+ level character, he easily had access to enough wealth to obtain a regeneration spell for his arm, but he never had it replaced. It was a glorious ending for the character and the campaign....)

[Rigil Kent]

Another memorable "fight" for me stems from my Top Secret: SI campaign (an old system for espionage games), also in High School. I was the GM for that since, at the time, I was on a serious spy kick - was reading Ludlum's stuff all the time and LeCarre. Since this was the late 80s, a lot of the bad guys were (naturally) evil Russians, but thanks to the influence of Ludlum's books, there were a lot of Nazi references as well.

In true Bond fashion, the group of PCs had a recurring villain who had a tendency to escape from them when they smashed up his diabolical schemes, and, predating the Mission Impossible movies, my characters were forced to go rogue from their super spy organization - it was a special branch of the CIA, of course - because they knew this villain was altogether evil but had no proof. Since said villain was awesomesauce, he had contacts & operatives in their organization, so the PCs were facing charges of treason and generally considered nutters. Hence, their decision to go rogue.

The last session was run right before I left for Basic Training. We'd already lost one of our semi-regular players to the Army as well (he was a year ahead of me in school, so he'd graduated the previous year), so, with his permission, I killed off his character in an especially violent and cruel way on Christmas Eve to motivate the remaining PCs. It involved that character's family and was setup so it would appear that he (the character) went crazy and murdered his wife and kids before eating a bullet himself.

So the PCs are seeking blood-soaked revenge. They were being chased by their own organization and pursuing the Villain. They tracked him down to an illegal arms shipment he was conducting, kicked in the door and started killing everyone. All three (at the time, there were only three players) had an unbelievable streak of luck. It seemed like every time they fired a weapon, a bad guy died.

Naturally, the Bond Villain said fuck this, and fled, leaving behind mooks to protect his retreat. The PCs selected a chase vehicle at random - there were three vans available, each with certain weapons inside them. On 3x5 cards, I wrote what was in van and then placed them facedown so the PCs didn't know what they had until they jumped into the van and gave chase.

One of the players was my cousin and he was playing an ex-Army Special Forces type of dude (he may have been a Navy SEAL instead; I can't recall) and he had nothing to do while the other two PCs were up front, one driving the van, the other navigating to assist with the Chase (there were actual Chase mechanics for Top Secret) so I gave him the appropriate 3x5 card and focused on the chase.

Their run of good luck started to falter as they encountered heavy traffic - this was outside DC, during Christmas Eve - and they couldn't quite catch up to the villain as he darted into Dulles International Airport where his personal plane was about to take off. The PCs skidded to a halt just as he boarded - he gave them a cheery little wave before he ducked in - and all three emptied a bunch of guns at the plane to no effect. There was no way for them to catch him. He was going to get away.

So my cousin announced that he was returning to the van and getting a Stinger. He handed me the 3x5 card and yup. They'd grabbed the one with the Stinger surface to air missiles. As a former super soldier, he had the appropriate skills to use it, so without telling the other PCs, he grabbed the Stinger, loaded it, took aim ... and fired.

In Top Secret, you used percentile dice to determine skill and combat rolls with the objective to roll under your skill. So if you have a 57 in a skill and you roll a 30, that's a success. In combat, if you rolled doubles under your skill, the specific location indicated is destroyed. A 00 would be a headshot in personal combat or an engine hit in vehicular combat.

My cousin rolled an 00. The missile streaked up and BOOM. The small plane exploded. The team were pleased and so was I since this was an excellent way to end the campaign. They'd finally gotten their man. He was toast.

And then, my cousin asked me where the debris landed. He wanted to make sure the bastard was dead. I looked at him and then had him roll another d%.

This time, he rolled a 99. In Top Secret, that was the worst possible roll you could make.

So I declared that the burning wreck of a plane fell ... straight into the passenger concourse. On Christmas Eve. At Dulles International Airport. And then, it exploded again.

End campaign. Ah, good times...

[Gigermann]

Aug 31, 2018 23:03:02 GMT -6 WxMAN said:

It feels to me like people just aren’t enjoying combat, and I don’t know if that is because you’re sick of it, you don’t like the real possibility of dying, or what.

I was thinking lately (based on some recently-watched Youtubage) about how we, as GMs, tend to focus on "challenge," when we should focus on "making it memorable," and I remembered this thread…