Your, best WTF moment in gaming.

[ate89]

I just wanted to start a forum allowing DM's; and maybe even players to voice there vary own, most special WTF moments. These are moments that had every one face palming at the table while one player fights with the DM about something so ridiculous, no one even has a clue as to what they should think, say, feel, or do.

Mine is with a player called Simmons; he brought a gurps Fall Out campaign to a halt over a gunsmithing argument. He wanted to create an old fashioned hand cranked Gatling gun out of old pipes from a meat hook machine used in a butcher shop. The gun was to have 6 rotating cylinders (made from the pipes) with a rusty nail used as the firing pin that was to be reset with rubber bands. The gun was to fire 50 cal HMG ammo; and I would of given it to him on a successful role. But he wouldn't budge on one tiny aspect...... He expected his contraption to be on par with an actual TL 6 HMG. I was willing to draw up a custom gun based on the Simmons's margin of success but we insisted that his gun could only do no less the 12 d6 damage per shot; just like the HMG offered in book.

We argued for an hour over weather or not the gun could even exist or not (which in all honesty it couldn't) and every time I tried to say no, and focus on the other players we would draw up different plans for his gun and hold them up to my face over the DM screen. Needless to say it didn't end well for him. Oh he built it all right, just weight until he fires it and it malfunctions hehehe.

P.S. just for argument sake he stated that the bullet does the damage and not the gun, however I believe that the bullet is dependent of the gun's engineering for it's eventual accessory and damage. Any gun nuts out there who may be able to shed light on this argument?

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by ate89

P.S. just for argument sake he stated that the bullet does the damage and not the gun, however I believe that the bullet is dependent of the gun's engineering for it's eventual accessory and damage. Any gun nuts out there who may be able to shed light on this argument?

The damage done to the target is done by the bullet and is a function of the mass of the bullet and the amount of energy imparted to it by its propellant.
However, the amount of energy communicated to the bullet and where the bullet ends up are functions of the design of the weapon. Energy that goes into (say) blowing up the weapon in the users face does not end up in the bullet. Any character with the knowhow to build such a deathtrap would know not to ... rusty pipes and nails aren't safe with a .22short zip gun, let alone a beast like .50BMG.

[aesir23]

Originally Posted by ate89

P.S. just for argument sake he stated that the bullet does the damage and not the gun, however I believe that the bullet is dependent of the gun's engineering for it's eventual accessory and damage. Any gun nuts out there who may be able to shed light on this argument?

Not a gun nut, but I'm pretty sure that the expanding gases have to be efficiently trapped by the barrel to acheive a bullets maximum damage. Otherwise a lot of energy would be lost.

[EDIT] ninja'd. Kinda.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by aesir23

Not a gun nut, but I'm pretty sure that the expanding gases have to be efficiently trapped by the barrel to acheive a bullets maximum damage. Otherwise a lot of energy would be lost.

Barrel rifling is also quite important if you want to be able to hit stuff. And I imagine most of the barrel heating is because of frictin with the rifling, so the barrel also has to be able to cope with the heat without deforming (or have a cooling system).

[Bruno]

There was a great WTF "moment" that ran on for four hours: Princesses

But it definitely started when my players decided "Princesses live in towers so they must be virgins. We will go steal a princess!"

[IrishRover]

One of my favorites: My character--a warrior-mage--had been snagged by the bad guys for a classic virgin sacrifice--and she did qualify. With no components, she couldn't cast much of anything, and was a weak spellcaster anyways. (I was going to work late, so the GM did that to have a mini-adventure that I could get into when I got there.)

The entire rest of the party is storming in, trying a rescue. They are getting whumped on big time. I manage to get loose--knock out the big bad--equipping myself with his gear--and storm into the next room in typical sacrificial virgin clothes, with a big sword, and rescue the rescuers...

Some of the characters had typical midieval male egos (great players, playing in character--not real chauvinism...) and got a real case of fallen egos...but they survived...and never again assumed that a woman wasn't competent...

[darksaba]

One of my most surreal WTF moments happened a few days ago. We're small time gangsters in a casino to do a drug deal when all hell breaks lose as someone else tries to rob the casino. The drugs are hidden in the mouth of a trained Bengal Tiger which is now running amok having been panicked by the fighting and explosions and having its handlers shot. One of the PCs is trying to calm the tiger down while the rest of the party watches from a respectful distance. The guy manages to get the tiger calm, and then attempts to subdue it....

By sticking his fingers in its eyes to blind it so it would no longer be dangerous.

He died almost instantly.

[Ed the Coastie]

re the improvised gatling gun -- Back when I was a Very Young Coastie™, another Gunners Mate and I used to build zip guns. Despite the fact that we knew what we were doing, we were by no means dumb enough to try actually shooting them in person; we would fire them remotely from a safe distance.

re WTF moment -- My wife Julie and I were playing AD&D with my brothers Ted & Tim and Tim's wife Tonya. Tim (the DM) had announced the game as being a low-magic, pseudo-historical setting based loosely upon Arthurian Britain and Carolingian France, with Vikings on the edges. (Julie, Ted and I were rather amused by this, since that was pretty much the same description of the campaign that I myself had been running for a couple of years.) Ted created a dwarf fighter exiled from the Viking lands for kin-slaying; Julie created an archer, the only child of a minor nobleman who had raised her as a son. My own character was footloose thief and con man who pretended to be an alchemist. All of the characters -- including their equipment -- were carefully reviewed by Tim before he approved them. We were told that Tonya would create her character later.

Gametime came, and Tonya had already created her character but she had not yet been equipped. The rest of us were sitting in the obligatory medieval tavern when her character dropped through a magical portal outside of town. We were then told that her character was a human paladin, an alien-created clone of Joan of Arc. The character then proceeded to walk stark-naked into town and into the bar, where she immediately went into the back room and signed up to compete in a series of gladiatorial matches. (Despite having been in the tavern for a couple of hours at that point and asking more than once, this was the first time the rest of us had seen the door to the back room.) Fighting nude and bare-handed, she won the tournaments easily and received the grand prize of a suit of Full Plate Armor +5, a Shield +5, Gauntlets of Ogre Power, a Girdle of Storm Giant Strength, and a Sword +5, Holy Avenger...all for a first-level character who was played by the wife of the DM.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Yesterday's session:

The PCs had captured some bandits and wanted to sell them as slaves.

That wasn't the WTF moment. After all, this was Dark Sun and the bandits had captured some villagers and planned to sell them as slaves.

The WTF moment occurred during the trip to the next lager town. One of the PCs, secretly a preserver mage, beat the prisoners with a club and withheld food and water privileges until they answered every question with "yes, master" or "no, master". During the whole procedure he kept smiling and always had calm and pleasant tone in his voice...

Wasn't really disruptive to the game, but it was unexpected.

[William]

Sounds like somebody got pool-hall hustled.