Disadvantages that Kill!

[Blue]

Yup, another new post. I love reading the stories on the board about screw ups, lucky hits, and all the other things that happen. I thought I'd start a post about disadvantages that really wound up coming back to haunt you at a vital time.

 

I mean, everyone has a good unluck story, or a "Viper show up in the middle of the firefight and target your character" type of incident.

 

I'll include one:

 

A player in my game long, long ago (I'd been running Champions all of a few weeks) managed to not only survive the adventure but did well. So the cocky character (female and with an outrageous COM of 36... at the time I didn't regulate stats much) is drawing a lot of hooting and hollering from guys on the street. She proceeds to come over and try to tell them off. When one gives her a slight grab, she punches him. The player was not smart enough to pull the punch or anything. Instead the guy gets pulped against the wall and actually does damage to the building! The building begins to crumble in front. For some as never explained reason, the character had a Berserk: When struck by falling debris, at the worst possible levels, and there were 3D6 of unluck, which I believe was the accepted maximum at the time. Two levels of unluck. I ruled that debris hit her. She blew the Berserk roll. The character subsequently proceeded to pulp poor citizens until she recovered and became a sought after criminal.

 

She never did stand trial and wound up changing her name and heroic identity in order to continue play later.

 

I think about that now and wonder if I was too mean. I mean, it's starting player, I'm a starting GM, and I let these silly disadvantages go through without really proofing them well. Live and learn, I guess.

[Bartman]

I once had a character with an "enraged when teammates are harmed." He was a leader type who saw anyone on the team taking body as a personal failure. And of course he was agressive so he would always try to overcompensate.

 

One day we were drawn into a huge running battle with action taking place in several different areas several miles away from each other. Being the leader type Traveler, my character, flew several hundred meters into the air. From there he directed the confilct and sniped where possible. As part of this battle Red Rapier, a sword based character from Enemies III, had drawn our sword based guy, Glavier, into an ambush and ran him through. This kicked off Traveler's enraged and he begain a power dive towards Red Rapier. The GM allowed me to add my flight to the 30" gravity gave me, so I was really booking when I swooped in. It took a short while to cover the several hundred inches. And by the time Traveler reached him Red Rapier had dropped to non-combat. He missed his perception roll and was at 0 DCV. Traveler hit him for 40 odd dice of damage and drove him through several meters of heavy metal machinery. Between the move-through and knockback, Rapier was reduced to a fine red paste and Traveler's battle suit was reduced to a pile of twisted metal. Traveler ended up spending the next several adventures in traction while I ran an alternate character.

[Dynamo]

I once built a powerarmor character who took double Stun from electrical attacks and double knockback (house rules variant of Vulnerability) from magnetic attacks. Little did I realize that the hitech mercenary we were pursuing into a hydroelectric complex had a double knockback magnetic blast setting on his rifle. You just know I got knocked back into the generator. The knockback had a downward vector, and the generator itself absorbed enough inches that I didn't go through the reinforced concrete mounting block and stayed inside the wreckage, which was still in circuit with the other generators. Man, that was a lot of Stun. We calculated that if the Recovery Time table were continued down the Time Chart rather than resorting to GM Option, I'd have gotten one recovery a year.

 

Adding insult to injury, to represent an ill-fitting prototype I'd also taken a 1d6 Susceptibility to knockback.

[Agent Escafarc]

Not a Disavantage but once had a character who created Teleport Gates but only in Earth's magnetic field(-1/4 limitation on all powers). First adventure had the group teleported to a spaceship in deep space. Seeing as the character had never been off planet, didn't know that he was powerless. The first time that the main villian's thugs showed up he jumped in front and tried to deflect/reflect 12x 2d6 RKA w/Autofire. Needless to say I spent the rest of the night playing video games:(

[tiger]

The disadvantage I liked was will not fight/hit a women. Seemed that every Male hero worked up had this in a group I use to play with. They figured that while there would be women in some of the villain groups, there would be male villains they could play with and leave the females to the other heros.

 

Of course enter twisted GM, me, and W.O.M.E.N. Women Organizing Men's Elimination or Nuetralization.

All women..All the time.

 

Man did they complain

[DarkGreen]

Heh... I now require that hunteds can only be on -8 (or -6 with even lower points).

 

The reason? Once I had a group of heros, I think it was 5 of them. 3 had hunteds on -11 or more. So that meant typically at least one hunter showing up per session. Then two of the players reverted to OLDER characters who also had hunteds. Now, I couldn't tell them they couldn't go back to these guys because of the hunted disads since these characters actually predated the newer team.... so I wound up with a statistical expectation of something like 3 hunters per session.

 

First session with this group, ALL the hunted rolls turned up positive. I was goggle-eyed behind the screen then figured: hey, why not! This adventure had the PCs showing up live on TV during a fight in a major metropolitan area at one point so I figured the hunters would happen to have teams handy and watching TV.

 

Just as the fight (which was minor) began winding down, VIPER showed up... and so did DEMON. Then a couple Eurostar members jumped in the fight. Chaos reigned supreme (after all, these groups don't exactly get along)... the players started getting giddy. Then The Illuminati showed up and people finally realized these were their hunteds currently destroying the city while shooting at the PCs and each other. Just as the last player was remarking that at least his hunted hadn't shown up the sky began to bloom with parachutes: the Ugandan Army had arrived!!! (Yes, he was hunted by the Ugandan Army without limited geographic range).

 

The battle raged for hours (and put any thoughts of a plot completely out of mind). Additionally at the time I was using rather strict damage rules and every missed shot had me rolling some dice to estimate buildings damaged. Some of the PCs hid for a while. The group got split up based on mobility. Various hunters began shooting at each other.

 

Most of downtown was destroyed, and we could only gape considering the loss of life and property (those VIPER robots have some nasty missiles!)

 

After that I declared -8 as the maximum on hunted disads and everyone completely agreed.

 

I don't think the PCs every solved the crime they had first been investigating. They just looked out across the miles of destruction and said "I bet we got 'im."

 

-DG

[Karma]

We all know what the worst killer Disadvantage is don't we people. That's right Unluck. With other Disads you at least know where the damage might hit you and can be prepared...

 

Karma and her team were looking around the house for the mad scientist and the Killer Robot he was working on. Being who she is Karma was teleporting invisably all into all the rooms. Suddenly the 4d6 Unluck kicks in and not only does she find the Robot but manages to teleport onto a dropped piece of paper which unbalances her sending her sprawling onto the Killer Robots activation button.

So there's Karma alone, on her ass and facing the Big Bad that was designed to take on the entire team. Thankfully the rewst of the team was able to follow her screams to the site before she lost any of her viatl organs (since it was designed to take her (and the rest of the team) on it surrounded itself with a 'cannot teleport' Force Wall with her inside)

[CrosshairCollie]

Unluck Storytime!

 

I think Unluck will be the beaut of this thread. Anyway, I wasn't in this game, but boy did I hear about it. The team was a government task force. Most of them I can't remember, save for the Mentalist, who was a pyrophobic, and a robotic dog. This Mentalist had 4d6 of Unluck. Well, the game had been going really smoothly, so while the team was doing some shots on a pier, the GM had the player roll it.

 

Four 1s.

 

While I think the GM might have been a *little* overzealous, it was still amusing. A stray shot hit a docked speedboat, which blew up its gas tank and set the dock on fire. The Mentalist was now surrounded by fire.

The Robotic Dog, being somewhat heavy, then fell through the pier and sank like a rock and started taking damage from a 'submerged' Susceptibility.

Somehow, *everybody* got shafted by that. And that player swore, and stuck to that vow, NEVER to take Unluck again.

[Super Squirrel]

Mystery Limitations!

 

In our game, we had a player who had absurd levels of absorption and armor with a Conditional Limitation that was defined by the GM.

 

Well, my DNPC had been kidnapped and we are rescuing her. We were informed that she was being held at an abandoned warehouse outside of town. We move in and the party forms a plan (despite my best input). The two fliers are going to carry the two non-fliers above the warehouse.

 

When I give the signal, I go in the front door and give an impressive speech. At that same time, our character who has a massive ice blast freezes the roof to the warehouse. The player who had the absurd defense would drop through the frozen roof and land on the ground just seconds after my speech.

 

Everything worked perfectly without a hitch except for two minor details. The first was that the mystery limitation was in effect (it had something to do with a field of some sort that we still don't understand what it is). The second was that the warehouse had a second floor. So the player hits the frozen roof and shatter it. He then hits the second floor at full force with no defenses.

 

My angle: [impressive Speech] THUD! Look up and see a metallic outline of my teammate.

[johnflang]

In a Fantasy Hero game my hero had a enraged when innocents hurt. We had been playing the game in RL for several years. Our adventures were normally where there were no innocents.

 

So one day we are walking down the street in a city and the local watch starts beating on someone because they bumped into him. When I announced I was rolling the enraged, there was silence. It seems the entire party had forgotten about that since it had not come up since our first adventure many years ago.

 

By the time the fight was over with I was almost in a coma. Our rogue had a long spear through the vitals and our covert mission was no longer covert.

 

After the mission, in game they worked on getting rid of my enraged. They succeded.

[CrosshairCollie]

Taking the thread title literally ...

 

I was witness to this, not actively involved. Had I been in the game, I would have been laughing too hard to play anyway.

 

A kind of psycho character had the infamous 'Enraged when Takes Body Damage', representing the wounded-animal-going-apeslag response that the typical comic-book psycho has. Well ... one time, this guy ran into someone with a Penetrating Killing Attack Damage Shield (I think the guy was porcupine-y) and didn't realize what it was until he punched the guy.

 

Damage Shield did Body Damage, of course, and the psycho started going nutzoid, punching away at the guy who set off is Enraged, taking more Body, and never getting to recover. The guy literally killed himself on the villain's Damage Shield because he couldn't calm down.

[Vulcan]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

Our resident snotling made this character. And boy, did the GM take advantage of it.

 

The character (whose original name has been forgotten but forever after was known as 'leadboy') was an energy-projector whose SFX was radiation.

 

He had a x2 vulnerability to lead. Both BODY and STUN.

 

A couple goons with .38's shot him to death without even needing to reload their revolvers.

[Psybolt]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

One of my characters took a hunted by one of the campaigns biggest villains and it was a 25 point hunted. So he ran into the character (named Scorn) and she wound up killing him by chokeslamming him repeatedly into the ground and ripping his wings off, and wearing them as a cape.

[Shadowsoul]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

In one Fantasy campaign our party included a good necromancer, (I called him the anti-necromancer), he hated the undead but used necromantic techniques to destroy them.

 

Anyway the character had a morbid fear of badgers. He also had a demented follower, who happened to have a stuffed badger ...

 

We got into a fight with some Unliving skeletons. The necromancer summoned some bone armour to protect himself but botched his roll and ended up encased inside a solid, jointless, suit of bone. He did at least have eye holes.

 

The follower took the opportunity to wave her badger in her master's face. He became so insanely terrified that he lost control of his bladder.

 

Meanwhile the rest of the party were getting hammered so we decided to use the necromancer as a kind of bowling ball to knock down a couple of skeletons and even the odds.

 

We did ask his permission.

 

His answer was. "No! Don't you dare! Don't y-" gurgle, splash.

[matrix3]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

Anyway the character had a morbid fear of badgers. He also had a demented follower, who happened to have a stuffed badger ...

 

I like all of these posts, but this bit really caught my attention. Did the player come up with characters like this often?

 

EDIT: I must spread some rep, blah, blah, blah...

[Vulcan]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

Twisted and evil. My type of players.

[ParagonAlpha]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

I was running a Champions campaign and we had friend show up unexpectedly on gaming day. He was in town on vacation from Law school and wanted to sit in on the game. Another player, known for having dozens of players written up and with him, gave him a character named Blink to use.

 

I should have read the character sheet closer.

 

A strange robotic ship crashes into downtown and an android (Avar-7) emerges scaring everyone. The PC's are on their way and Blink is in the crowd watching.

 

People scream, cops shoot Avar-7, bullets don't hurt it. Avar-7 fires back, cops die.

 

Blink decides to help the cops and opens fire on the android with his BigDamnGun. Blink manages to drop Avar-7 but some of his bullets miss and hit innocents, killing them. Blink is fine after all it says "Casual Killer" as a disad.

 

Witnesses scream as Blink walks away. Then the player notices the "Never leaves a Witness" disad. Blink turns and starts shooting everyone, killing people by the dozen.

 

Heroes arrive and see this man drinking a coke and gunning down street loads of people, cops, new reporters, police helicopters, puppies and hippies.

 

And then Blink started gunning down heroes.

 

Session ended with two dead heroes, one of the biggest massacres in recorded history, a bored Blink and me vowing never to trust the guy with extra characters.

[Vulcan]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

Yeouch!

 

Sounds like some of the guys I used to play with. That wasn't a hero, that was a villian with a good press agent.

[Shadowsoul]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

His last character with us was actually a fairly straightforward 'dodgy merchant' type. But he certainly had his moments.

 

In Pendragon he played a Carl, (warrior, predecessor of the knightly classes), of the Wotanic religion who started an orphanage and then began a tradition of giving the children presents at midwinter in the hope of inventing/subverting Christmas and taking it for the Norse.

 

In a Sci-Fi campaign he was given a Doctor and redesigned him as an insane gas-mask wearing biochemist whose biological warfare lab was so terrifying that it occupied its own section of the ship which could be jettisoned at a moment's notice.

 

That character's finest moment may have been when the party visited a high class brothel which offered just about anything. He asked for various things including a brunette, some wire, a blowtorch and possibly a frying pan ...

 

He then proceeded to cook the woman a nice dinner and spent the rest of the night making a model railway out of the wire.

 

That was one special player.

[Comic]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

Disadvantage Management 101 - properly managed, Disadvantages can create fun complications session after session after session and eventually evolve into a fundamental element of an elegantly developed character; poorly managed, Disadvantages kill your fun... but they provide cute stories years later.

[Markdoc]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

Not lethal, just funny. Players making characters for a Champ.s game. One of them chose a Witch who had used a spell to flee the lynch mob in Salem and ended up in the current era. Among other things, she had a big ass psych. Lim "Afraid of lightning" which she saw as God's vengeance.

 

I'm not wild about the character (mostly because it's hard for players to play PCs who are "unfamiliar with modern culture" very well: either it's farce or it's forgotten), but it looks quite playable, so I OK it.

 

Player #2, completely independently comes up with "Stormlord" a fairly standard flying energy projector with - you guessed it - lightning powers

 

Needless to say, some changes were instituted.

 

cheers, Mark

[薔薇語]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

Ok this isn't about a disavantage that the Rose took rather one that seemed as though it should have been taken. In the campaign he was in we didn't have any super brains in the group and required the assistances of Dr. Silverback. The Rose didn't mind the Dr. but absolutely hated his AI, as it was the reason why he got teleported into a furture where apprently he released the Kings of Edom and caused destruction of most of the world. It wasn't that he had issues with the future events rather that the AI wasn't even capable of teleporting him (yes a teleporter) to a friggin office.

 

But back to the story. The Rose had in his possession some items he wanted examine. He was lead to believe they might be something Dr. Destroyer may have created and thought it best to take it to the good Dr. That was the night that the GM rolled 5 critical failures in a row. All regarding The Rose and All on behalf of Dr. Silverback. The Rose turned into a simi mechanon like character whose sole goal was to, yes you guessed it, detroy all organic life (outside of himself). Had it not been for The Roses arrogence and sense of Self importence overiding some of the system programs (ie a generous GM feeling sorry of the Player Party), He would have easily eliminated the Hero Team (3 others), Silverback, Technique and her partner, and probably most of down town Millinium city before he could have been stoppped. Moral of story, just call it quits when you get to the third crit failure and just assume a city block or two destroyed, heroes barely survived and one very very very pissed off PC beatting up a monkey on top of a building.

 

La Rose

[Lucius]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

His last character with us was actually a fairly straightforward 'dodgy merchant' type. But he certainly had his moments.

 

In Pendragon he played a Carl, (warrior, predecessor of the knightly classes), of the Wotanic religion who started an orphanage and then began a tradition of giving the children presents at midwinter in the hope of inventing/subverting Christmas and taking it for the Norse.

 

.

 

 

I'm afraid he had it backwards then. It actually happened the other way around. December was a "holy month" to the Norse and they already had a gift giving tradition around the winter solstice before they ever heard of that guy what's-'is-name - Jesus Who?

 

The problem wouldn't be how to subvert Yule. The problem would be, how do we PREVENT the Christians from subverting Yule and re-naming it "Christ-Mass?"

 

By the way - what does that have to do with lethal Disadvantages?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Appearing as a DNPC on the palindromedary's character sheet

[Shadowsoul]

Re: Disadvantages that Kill!

 

I'm afraid he had it backwards then. It actually happened the other way around. December was a "holy month" to the Norse and they already had a gift giving tradition around the winter solstice before they ever heard of that guy what's-'is-name - Jesus Who?

 

The problem wouldn't be how to subvert Yule. The problem would be, how do we PREVENT the Christians from subverting Yule and re-naming it "Christ-Mass?"

 

By the way - what does that have to do with lethal Disadvantages?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Appearing as a DNPC on the palindromedary's character sheet

 

More of a player disadvantage than a character one. Psy Lim 'Bouts of Random Yet Mild Insanity'.