Where have you had your most memorable battles?

[Steve]

When playing in a Dark Champions campaign, where have you had your most memorable battles?

 

Shooting it out with a mafia hood in a dingy hotel room?

 

Fighting an enemy military unit in the midst of a bombed out cityscape?

 

Jumping from rooftop to rooftop as you chase a costumed criminal?

 

What made this battle so memorable?

[Wildcat]

Re: Where have you had your most memorable battles?

 

A Deserted Oil Rig off the coast of South America... Just North of the Antarctic circle.

 

Two teams of Corporate Commandos, forced to work together to fend off a 3rd team. The Battle ran all over the rig (a 3d model I made) and involved over 30 combatants, Automatic weapons fire, Grenades, Dueling Snipers, Apache attack choppers, Missile Launchers, and lots of loss of life.

 

This Battle kicked off a Whole new Campaign for my Gaming Group... I've detailed the Beginnings of this game in another thread http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21071&highlight=gatecrasher

It's been going on for just over a year now, and we're all having a blast... There are many memorable battles in this game... but the 'Rig Fight' as we refer to it was one of the best (And probably one of the most true to the DC genre) Read the threat to see what I mean.

 

WC

[Trencher]

Re: Where have you had your most memorable battles?

 

A running gun battle in a dark forest during winter. What made is so memorable was that it was the first time my Gm actually had the villians use tactics against me.

[Kyle A.]

Re: Where have you had your most memorable battles?

 

Fighting our way through a mansion belonging to the main bad guy of the campaign. It was fully mapped out and the battle went through every floor and at least three dozens of grunt type enemies and I think nine major PC level badguys. It was a lot of fun and kicked of the next stage of the campaign.

[David Blue]

Re: Where have you had your most memorable battles?

 

When playing in a Dark Champions campaign, where have you had your most memorable battles?

 

What made this battle so memorable?

The School Fight, in Psi High, no question.

 

We were a school for psionic kids run by the American government and effectively by Special Forces, and though we didn't have to volunteer for anything, we started to, because

a. we were psionic, the world was our oyster, right?

b. Special Forces, talk about ultra-cool!

c. we had enemies who thought of us less as "teen gods on earth" than "valuable property that ought to be kidnapped, brainwashed with high-powered mind control and put to use" - and why not do unto them, first?

d. among the least pleasant of these enemies was a former schoolmate, a Mind Controller. There was bad blood there. Lots of bad blood. And cold, dead bodies.

 

For various reasons including our youthful errors, the military program was ended, and the school became purely civilian, under politically correct State Department control. That meant of course no training, no guards, and absolutely no weapons. We didn't even protest this, as we were at each other's throats over another Mind Controller (Mind Control Boy II) who'd fled the coop, with some of us convinced he was a villain and others that he'd been railroaded.

 

We students started making secret preparations to defend ourselves against the attack that had to be coming. Preparations had to be secret, they had to work on very little pocket money, they had to pass room inspection, and they had to work within the constraints of a poisonous high school cliquey atmosphere. In a way, it was like a prisoner of war escape movie.

 

Month after month went by, painstakingly roleplayed out. Train, smuggle, tinker etc..

 

The state of play just before what we did not suspect was D-day: Peace-love-liberal Mind Scan Girl had become a deadly pistol shot and martial artist, and her boyfriend Regenerating Boy had tested himself against every bully in the school and was psychologically ready to do absolutely whatever he had to do. Too bad they had no pistol. Telepathic Boy, the arch enemy of the no-argument EVIL Mind Controller had become a killer shot with a shotgun, and was ready to defend his beloved girlfriend, also a Telepath. Too bad he had no shotgun. Mind Control Boy III had fought his way through a heavy barrier of suspicion, and was an accepted team member in "The [school] Watch" (a secret society to defend our school). The two other members of The Watch who did not get scooped up immediately when the mass kidnapping operation began were another boyfriend/girlfriend team: Invulnerable Mind Girl, who was obviously going to be first up against the wall when the "useless" ones who couldn't be brainwashed were disposed of, and X-Ray Eyes Boy. Invulnerable Mind Girl was also JROTC Girl and a rifle champion, and had been training her boyfriend for all she was worth, and she had smuggled a gun locker into the school, which was useless as that part of the school was immediately over-run by the attackers. Those two were just back from the World Swimming Championships in Melbourne, where X-Ray Eyes Boy had seen his life plans as a swimming star go away with a single 17 PS Swimmer roll in the final, while on her return to America Invulnerable Mind Girl learned that her father, a Marine, had been killed in Iraq. So soap opera trauma was in full swing. On the other hand, X-Ray Eyes Boy, played by me, had been fanatically thorough in preparing to fight. He'd built his team, he know the secrets of the school inhumanly thoroughly, he had a sword almost built (which turned out to be useless as it wasn't quite built enough when the attack came) and he had his utility kit Bag-O'-Fun, including a big box of door wedges. And he wasn't afraid to use them.

 

The attack came in overwhelming force, with four psionic attackers, acting on complete information* about the school supplied by our former schoolmate, supported by fifty dumb and inept but extremely bloodthirsty jihadis with AK-47s, all rounded up by yet another Mind Controller: Mind Control Boy IV - one of the four psi attackers and the identical evil twin of our Mind Control Boy III.

 

* Well, not really. Evil Mind Control Boy I didn't have X-Ray Eyes, and he didn't know about either the crawlway in the roof X-Ray Eyes Boy discovered, or the secret cellar where Mind Scan Girl was hiding three fellow psionic teen fugitives from the law that she'd found after he left the school and that he'd never met. Nor did he know that another student he had met - the one who regularly volunteered for Special Forces Operations duty - had undergone a power change and was now Invisible Boy.

 

The fight played itself out like contending carrier strikes. First strike: you lose in one sweep lots of stuff you have put agonizing amounts of effort into. That's it: gone, baby, gone. (But if the tide swings in your favor, it can really swing.)

 

Then, on one part of the field, the attack stalled: Regenerating Boy and Mind Scan Girl held the staircase leading to the secret cellar and their friends. Following the program, Those Who Resist Must Be Exterminated, the attackers grenaded Regenerating Boy in a confined space without thinking twice. They should have thought twice. After that, it was just a matter of time before there were five psionics in a secret basement with two AK-47s and a plan. Unfortunately, time was what the other kids didn't have. Or their friends - a powerless kid sister, a pregnant adopting mother, both of whom of course were slated for decapitation if they were lucky.

 

Then, just with bravado and incredible rolling - the guy seemed to critical every roll - Good Mind Control Boy absolutely kicked the tail of his evil twin Bad Mind Control Boy, and the terrorists with him, and wound up with an AK-47 and spare clips. And he was able to get to a secret passage to the roof crawl space, where X-Ray Eyes boy with door wedges and JROTC sniper coach girl - lusting for bloody revenge for her father - received him with open arms.

 

It is a sad fact that if you are on the wrong side of blocked doors and walls opaque to your sight but completely transparent to bullets, and the person on the other side of the wall - whose location and exact activities you are unaware of - sees you as a sitting duck a few feet away, and has a Kalashnikov and a stack of ammunition, what follows is not a fair fight. Especially if he can't afford to let you see him and bring your massive psionic powers to bear.

 

X-Ray Eyes Boy opened with a warning burst into the stomach of the psionic girl holding the teleport gate open, which did not end her career as she was wearing body armor but which did make her an unreliable ticket out of the combat zone. At which point the irrelevant armored column headed to the school's rescue, which was never going to get to the school in time to do any good, became the highly relevant potential revenge column that was going to descend on everyone who hadn't cleared out by any means available while the getting was relatively good. In general (from what Telepathy told us about their views), the brave jihadis seemed to believe that the benefits of a school massacre outweighed any costs. Their mind-controlling and otherwise psionic masters took a different view of the balance of costs and rewards.

 

The upshot was that none of the psi-kids was kidnapped or killed or even injured (other than Regenerating Boy, which didn't count), and though every available DNPC was at the school, only one got shot up, and he was OK. The only dead for the day were some overly zealous jihadis - and in that campaign, Mind Controllers seem to treat guys like that as just so many rounds of ammunition waiting to be scooped up and expended.

 

The story of the fight doesn't make the location sound like much, but it was a big deal. The atmosphere of the fight was different because we'd put months of desperate low-resource effort into preparing to fight in that space or any other part of the school, depending on the attack, and because the High Tech High Dormitory was such a domestic space. There pregnant mommy was dropping off her adopted daughter and boyfriend at school when the AK-47 wielding fanatics pounced on them en masse, there Illusionist Boy (who I'd been counting on as our big Surprise Weapon) was being abducted naked in the shower by another mass of heavily armed kidnappers (but not before he managed to tap the rescue us trigger in the cell phone under his towel), while yards away, where Mind Scan Girl had once snuck Regenerating Boy into the Girl's (side of the) Dorm to go All The Way, his Cute Kid Sister was bawling her eyes out as if she was going to be killed or worse, which she would have been if luck and the brilliant fighting of Mind Control Boy III hadn't saved us all.

[David Blue]

Re: Where have you had your most memorable battles?

 

The other thing that made this battle-space unique for the three "rats in the roof" was the flooring, combined with a problem: the sniper-girl who couldn't see the enemy through walls could hit anything she could see, and the boy who could see anything wasn't skilled enough to hit the enemy if the flooring under him was bad - which it was. At the same time, our tail-licking Mind Controller generally could take over anyone he could see, but only after I'd used an AK-47 to knock open a hole to them so he could see them - or what remained of them, making Mind Control moot.

 

And movement, crawling stealthily on narrow wooden beams under a low roof, trying to set up to use weapons we didn't have the STR for while taking heavy bad footing penalties, was painfully slow compared to the rate at which the bad guys were moving and taking over the school.

[Remjin]

Re: Where have you had your most memorable battles?

 

Ummm... lessee... mid-air.

 

A villain had jumped out a window on the 47th floor of the hotel and could apparently levitate. I jumped out after him. I couldn't levitate, so I had to grab him mid-air, fight with him, and shoot him in the face. Somehow, he still escaped... (GM loved his villain, apparently, since I rolled awesome)... and I actually lived, somehow. Hadn't expected that.

 

Otherwise, a plethora of fun places: at the circus, partially constructed skyscrapers, the subway, while hanging/climbing cliffs... all good fun! Isn't the place half the challenge?

[Shoutybloke]

Re: Where have you had your most memorable battles?

 

In Gerhart Spregans Secret undergound bunker below hudson city, with carnivore on a rampage, a pulp era Death ray Robot running around and spregan trying to mutate one of the PC's