Most Embarassing Champions Moment

[tmutant]

Bump. I love this thread. Along with the Dumbest moments thread.

[Mayday]

Some teams and some characters are just doomed. Dice hate them.

 

So I had this female Magneto heroine. She had souped up flight speed and there was this villainess that we could NOT defeat, or even touch although the GM swears she was nothing special. The whole series of encounters with her were messed up, but my personal 'moment' came when I was being chased by half a dozen military style helicopters armed with missiles and machine guns through a very tight canyon maze.

 

Not enough room to get up to speed and pull out of range while carrying my team mate (an armored brick) so I used him as a body shield (he was unconscious from the last fight with her) and eventually got shot down because it never occurred to me that all I had to do was fly UP.

[BoloOfEarth]

I played in a group for a few years, and had a few weeks where schedule conflicts made me miss a few game sessions. The other players got together with the GM and decided to have some fun...

 

I was running Plastique, who could spray plastic in sheets, individual entangles, and could even mix in an explosive agent that triggered if the entangle was broken out of in one shot. He rolled around on roller skates with these tanks on his back containing the different chemicals for his attacks.

 

My first game session back, I was out on patrol when I run into some gang members. I decide to "wrap them up", but when I fired the plastic, all that comes out is pink paint. I tried to throw up a wall, and purple paint sprays all over everything. Then the GM informs me that the wheels on one skate are falling off, and that the stitching on my costume is coming apart. By this time, the other players can't hold in the laughter any longer. They hired the "gang members" to lure me into a fight so they could laugh at me. Imagine a half-naked superhero holding onto the remains of his costume, trying to beat a hasty retreat on one good skate.

[Karma]

Originally posted by BoloOfEarth

I played in a group for a few years, and had a few weeks where schedule conflicts made me miss a few game sessions. The other players got together with the GM and decided to have some fun...

 

I was running Plastique, who could spray plastic in sheets, individual entangles, and could even mix in an explosive agent that triggered if the entangle was broken out of in one shot. He rolled around on roller skates with these tanks on his back containing the different chemicals for his attacks.

 

My first game session back, I was out on patrol when I run into some gang members. I decide to "wrap them up", but when I fired the plastic, all that comes out is pink paint. I tried to throw up a wall, and purple paint sprays all over everything. Then the GM informs me that the wheels on one skate are falling off, and that the stitching on my costume is coming apart. By this time, the other players can't hold in the laughter any longer. They hired the "gang members" to lure me into a fight so they could laugh at me. Imagine a half-naked superhero holding onto the remains of his costume, trying to beat a hasty retreat on one good skate.

 

Frank:"So my paladin took on the Demilich with one hit point remaining while everyone else ran away???"

DM: "Its what we thought your character would do"

Caption: Frank misses one game session.

 

That kind of thing is just cruel. Yes they got a good laugh but it beggers belief that Plastique would have been stupid enough to let anyone close enough to tamper with his stuff. the Player might have missed a few Game sessiuons but that doesn't mean the character was sitting there in a catatonic state while his 'teammates' set him up.

[Mayday]

One of my early games as a GM the villains took a liking to the heroes. Invited them to all her high society social events knowing that their code of chivalry would not let them attack first.

 

Some of the more high spirited (and young) villains on her roster lured the heroes out on a call and kept them busy all day long, and when the heroes finally got home that night all the lights were on in their two story house and it had been sealed then turned into a giant fishtank.

 

ALMOST broke his code of chivalry, but he ended up staying the night at the villainess's mansion while the intrepid ones responsible put everything back to rights.

[Captain Obvious]

I think my most embarrassing superhero role-playing experience was just about every time we played Marvel Superheroes. You would think a guy with Amazing fighting skill could hurt someone every now and then, even if his strength was just Good. I guess it was my fault, because I was too stubborn to just re-roll a new guy....

 

This other experience didn't embarrass me, but it couldn't have been good for the guy it happened to. I was GMing the group through the adventure To Serve and Protect, wherein a well established hero group suddenly goes rogue, and throwing around harsh punishments for trivial offenses. A few early encounters in the story are scripted so that the Protectors beat the PCs (not too hard, since the Protectors had some pretty good tactics as I recall). We had one guy whose character was some kind of high-tech psycho-killer (he didn't quite 'get' the whole superhero idea...come to think of it, given some of his fantasy exploits, I don't think he really got the idea of a team...). Anyway, as the other PCs start dropping and the Protectors start looking at him as the biggest current threat, he starts thinking about running. He's low on END, though, so he decides to TP a short distance away and hide for a recovery or two. He teleports right into the Mens' room in the mall they're fighting at. When the Protectors found him, a couple of phases later, he was whimpering in a stall, still unable to fight or run....

[BoloOfEarth]

Originally posted by Karma

That kind of thing is just cruel. Yes they got a good laugh but it beggers belief that Plastique would have been stupid enough to let anyone close enough to tamper with his stuff. the Player might have missed a few Game sessiuons but that doesn't mean the character was sitting there in a catatonic state while his 'teammates' set him up.

 

I let that go because it was all in fun. Besides, I got my revenge a year or so later when I was GMing a Fantasy Hero game with the same players. The mastermind behind Plastique's fiasco missed a few games, and I suggested something similar.

 

That player character (we'll call him Chump) used a bow and arrows as well as a specially-made staff with a spear point that extended with the push of a button. The other players took all the arrows out of his quiver while he slept, replacing half of them with arrows whose fletching was messed up to make them fly off target, and the other half with, well, half-arrows (only the fletching and part of the shaft). They also replaced his staff with one made of balsa wood, with a spear tip that flew clean out of the staff if he pushed the button. They then hired a group of toughs to ambush the group (as a "training exercise").

 

When the ambush started, Chump started firing arrows. I rolled randomly, and the first three arrows were all the "fly wrong" variety. When they veered off target, he says, "They have some sort of missile deflection spell!" Holding our laughter in, the other players and I said, "Yeah, sure, that's what it is!"

 

He then closed in to HtH range and pushed the button. When the spear tip popped out and landed at his feet, the look on his face was priceless. It only got better when he whacked the first guy with his balsa staff.

 

Yes, he should have known that the staff and arrows were different, but I decided he didn't notice. Payback is a b****, ain't it?

[TheQuestionMan]

Super Fumbles

 

Imagine your hero leaping recklessly into a bank being robbed by several thugs with high tech weapons . No match for you .

 

Move Through on Armored Glass Bank window fails ... prat splat against the window . Did I mention you Stunned yourself .

 

Next you recover and charge through the bank door and straight into the guns of 3 high tech blaster rifles . Did I mention that the Knocked Back through the Armored Glass Bank window and into the street and that your stunned again .

 

You recover from stun and some of your poise when the getaway Van tries to do a Move Through on you and you fail to Dodge and your Knocked Back into the intersection and on coming traffic .

 

You live and recover conciousness , but your debue as a superhero not going exactlly as planned .

 

The paramedics , Police and Media response is not exactlly good either.

 

A couple of days later in you Mundane ID your doing some banking and the same Thugs try to rob it while your there . Time for some payback right .

 

As the Thugs take up position you see your opportunity and leap to your feet and plant a Offensive Strike on Thug#1's chin . Before they can react you vault the bank counter ( fail your Acrobatics Roll ) fall on the floor and Sweep Thugs#2 and 3 off their feet .

 

You grab one of their high tech blaster rifles and shoot Thug#4 across the room , but the it jams ( Act.14-) . He shoots you and the Knockback blasts you into the safe . Thug#2 pushes it closed . Did I mention your stunned .

 

The thug's escape , but without as much loot and the Bank manager opens the safe when the Police arrive . No costume to hide your ID and the Bank knows who you are .

 

My personal worst

[Alien Knight]

Submitted for your approval

 

My personal best would have to be when the Blue Scarab (and the Sidekick Squad) responded to a report of a super-powered robbery in a penthouse suite atop a tall building overlooking the city. The Scarab burst in through the balcony, suprising the three villains and made a rousing speech.

 

"Surrender villains! You are no match for the righteous might of the Justifiers!"

 

That was about the point I realized I was alone. The Scarab was the only member of the team who could fly. Crossfire and Zoom were still lumping it up the stairs.

[tmutant]

More dredging

 

**Yeah, just doing a little dredging, scraping some stuff up to the surface.**{Heavy machinery noise in background}

[Enforcer84]

Grand Mantis, before the "Grand" part was added once did a leaping side kick at a villain who turned desolid and he flew over the balcony. Was in the hospital for two months revoering from his wounds.

[Trebuchet]

12 years ago when my campaign started, two of our five players had never played Champions before. So Mentor ran a simple scenario as GM while the two superheroes, Catseye (MA) and G-Force (Demi-brick android), got to fight some terrorists in London who have seized the Queen's husband. Simple, right? I was there to lend technical assistance over their shoulders.

 

Anyway, the IRA terrorists are holed up in an abandoned office building while the police and newsmedia vans gather at a perimeter a couple of blocks away. At this time no one has ever seen a creditable superhero; reports of such foolishness were mostly from World Weekly News, etc.

 

Anyway, our two heroes slip past the police perimeter and change into costume (Catseye) and superhero form (G-Force). They come out from the alley where they had changed and charged across the street towards the terrorist positions. Three terrorists on the third floor open fire at each character from the windows. G-Force has sufficient defenses to basically ignore the bullets hitting him, but Catseye has no Resistant defenses at all; just a 33 DEX and 7 SPD (Our team's second fastest martial artist.). So by dodging and weaving he narrowly avoids being hit as he finally reached the building and gets out of the line of fire. He's standing right below the terrorists on the 3rd floor window, thankful he's still in one piece after all that flying lead that whizzed past him. Then G-Force turns to Catseye and says "Pardon me, but you can turn invisible, correct?"

 

D'oh!

 

Tune in next week when G-Force finds out the hard way that RPGs are different from AK-47s, and learns that "Duck!" shouted in combat does not refer to flat-billed waterfowl...

[JmOz]

My most embarising happened in an AD& D game.

 

I'm playing a CG Minotaur Priest of some war deity, and a fortress is being besiged (The fortress was dedicated to my God), well essentialy we were behind the fortress, the besigers were in front, and some geography was keeping us apart. We knew the besigers would break in soon, and I wanted to (Had to) help with the defence...

 

Tinker Gnome came up with a way to get me in...It was called the "Fastball Special", essentialy a catapult with a chair instead of a basket...

 

I did it...

 

Minotaurs have horns, I got mine stuck in a wall, 25' up

 

Became known as the "Battle of the Minotaur flag"

[aylwin13]

Originally posted by Trebuchet

... G-Force turns to Catseye and says "Pardon me, but you can turn invisible, correct?"

 

D'oh!

ROFLMAO

This is the mirror image of an incident that one of my ,then, brand-new players had. He was a shadow/darkness type and 2 of his powers were full invisibility and total silence (on himself). He was trailing a normal whom he was supposed to covertly keep safe. Therefore he followed behind the doctor (invisible and silent). The doctor was walking down a city street, in a seedy part of town, heading to a secret meeting. The villian who was after the doc had set up an ambush. Our hero was too far behind the doc to stop him from walking around the corner and into the killing zone. He tried yelling and waving, but of course the doc couldn't see or hear him. Needless to say the doc was turned into swiss cheese by the agents' blasters. It was a tough lesson, but a humorous one none the less.

[Brandi]

First combat in the first Champs game I ever played. One of our guys, a techie called Flash, gets knocked out; however, the rest of us are busy engaging other VIPER agents and can't get to him right away.

 

Did I mention that Flash had a Damage Shield 0 END Persistent?

 

He'd melted through the concrete floor of our base and was about 5 or 6 feet down below that before we could get to him, mercifully not having hit any underground powerlines or water mains or GAS MAINS along the way....

[gewing]

I hated it when I went to martial throw the bad-assed half Demon type, and the GM (who had made a similar ruling years before) casually informed me that the target had density increase to the point he weighed 10,000 lbs. (something like that) Since I was a low level martial artist with about 25 str, (5 from density increase) this really chaffed my hide.

 

Originally posted by Gary

I once had a midget speedster martial artist named Quickling. In an encounter with Godzilla, I was trying to think of something useful that I could do. In a brilliant flash of inspiration, I decided to martial throw Godzilla! This was before the 4th edition cleared up that you can only throw your pushed strength. Anyway, we couldn't find anything in the rules against it, but my GM decided to use common sense despite my desperate pleas...

[gewing]

We ran a fantasy camaign that turned out almost a Dark Campions/D&D cross. I was running an 8'tall character (think kind of half ogre) that couldn't hang onto money. He tended to buy "toys" at every opportunity. Once we were trapped in a tomb when the iron lid slammed down on us. After MUCH effort, we managed to break out of the trap.

 

About that time I remembered the "melt Metal" wand he had picked up a while ago... iirc 2d6 cumlative transform, metal to molten metal, change back by pouring it into a mold of the right shape. They NEVER FORGAVE THAT.

 

On another night one of the other characters had been SECRETLY playing "lets create a minotaur" using a magic Gene splicing belt. He was keeping his cows in MY barn, and my herder came to me wild-eyed and said I had to get down there... (other character was a con man who on about the 4th night of the campaign tried to recruit some troops. Rolled a 6 on his fast-talk and a 3 on his oratory, iirc- new religion founded!)

 

He tried to convince me that the human headed calf was the fault of one of the other characters "I Don't know, He's Crazy"

but rolled an 18 on fast talk! He was more shocked that he failed against my character... the known gullible one

[SirViss]

Hey guys, I can...

 

This happened not too long ago, to another player. All the players had 2 characters.

 

At one point, VIPER ambushed 2 PCs and both of them needed to be hospitalized. Two weeks of game time and about 6 sessions went by before the second character of one of the unlucky players also got injured. Looking at his character sheet, the player (and thus his character) said:

 

Mongoose (MA): "Hey guys, I can heal people!"

 

We all had a laugh, as he realised that he could have gotten his second character back in action, and also one of the team leaders...

[Tim]

Start mental reveiw of past games....

 

Not thos, not yet.

 

TimS.

[lemming]

Hmm, my character Ice Pirate sure got her share of embarassing moments.

 

She and another super-thief, Cat broke into a neo-nazi outfit to hack their computer. We flawlessly sneaked past the guards and security systems and made it to the computers. We then turned to each other and said,

"Ok, let's get the info"

"Um, i thought you had Computer skills?"

I think we took the computer back with us along with some art. After that we both trained on computers...

[Tom McCarthy]

A sentence you never thought you would utter

 

The players are traveling to Destruga, Dr. Destroyer's mobile island base.

 

Wall-E: So what altitude is the island flying at ?

GM: The island doesn't fly.

Wall-E: I thought it moved ?

GM: Yes, but it doesn't fly, it sails.

Wall-E: It has a big sail ?

GM: (sigh) No. It's a mobile, non-flying island but no sails.

[johnflang]

I have a Champions character who is a wizard called Wiz. I was at an auction in Mass. monitioring who bought some magical artifacts. Of course, agents were used to make the purchases. So I snuck in after hours found the filing cabinent where the infomation was stored. I wanted to open the cabinent in a way that was undetectable. I had to travel back to Washington DC, get a team member with the apprioprate skills and travel back to pick the lock on the file cabinent. It took years to live that one down.

[dbcowboy]

Ooops...

 

So, we were playing a scenario where our team and our main opponents have been pulled into an alternate fantasy reality. To return to our world, we're forced to track down three pieces of an ancient artifact before our opponents can. No problem, basically 3 battles our GM had designed so that we'd win 2 and be forced to make a final assault on the bad-guys base to get the third.

 

For what was suppose to be his "easy" fight, we decided that my electricity based character Voltage (hasn't everyone had a hero named Voltage?) would call out the code word "Blue Spot" just before he did his area-effect flash attack, giving my teammates time to avert their eyes. It was all planned, the battle started off great, the scene was tense, my phase came up and I said:

Flash!

Blue Spot!

ooops

Blinded everyone in the room, teammates and all. The enemy speedster ended up following the wall (still blind but touching it with his hand), ran into me, grabbed me and slammed me 4 hexes into the far wall very, very unconscious. Needless to say we lost this easy fight but did manage to win the final assault and get back home.

[Susano]

Let's see if I can recall all the sordid details...

 

This has to be the worst set of introductions to a bunch of new supers I have ever seen. It goes something like this.

 

(BTW -- I just watched this mess, I wasn't in it... yet.)

 

Okay, here's the set up. The Art Museum is being robbed by a supervillainess named Crystal. This event is witnessed by Player A. He dashes into the restroom and changes into his... uh.. costume (jogging suit and ski-mask). Running out, he tells Crystal to stop. She turns and says "Who are you?" Player's response? "I... don't have a name yet." Silence reigns... Anyway, they fight.

 

This scene is witness by Player B. He trots his character over and decides to help save the day by activating his Instant Change and adopting his Heroic ID. Did I mention his name is "The Amoeba"? Two cops freak and open fire. One hits, maxes on Body and Stun and puts our hero (who has NO resistant PD) down for the count. (He did have Regen BTW).

 

Sooo... across the street, Player C sees what's happening and has his character swing into action. Swinging across the street, the character lands on a car roof and spouts: "Name's Blackout and you better stop messing with the space freak and the superjock or it's lights out!" GM: "Make a Presence Attack" Player: "Uh... a 4" Us: "Way to go, I don't think even the cops notice you!"

 

Eventually Player A (later known as Jackhammer) and Crystal start hitting each other with a police car. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! GM rolls some dice... GM: "The car is burning and is going to explode" Jackhammer: "What! Crystal is in there I have to get her out!" US: "You've been hitting her with a CAR! Do you think a 12d6 gas tank explosion is going to slow her down?" GM: "BOOM!!! Oh, and by the way, Jackhammer? You know that mystery disad? It's x 1 1/2 from fire..."

[DocMan]

Re: Most Embarassing Champions Moment

 

Since the other undead threads did so well, I'll resurrect this one too.

 

Bump.

 

Doc