Your, best WTF moment in gaming.

[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.

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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).

Shotguns are smooth-bore, and you can hit stuff with them even if you use slugs. Ditto for muskets.

[Anthony]

My best WTF moment occurred in a supers game (Hero system). In this game, one character was playing this martial arts/magic 'warrior against supernatural evil' type. Nothing wrong with that, I was perfectly willing to toss in evil cultists.

Anyway, in this one session the PCs came on a group of cultists who were busy summoning a demon, which was contained in a circle. The PCs intervened, of course, and the our hero decided to trip a cultist and flip him into the cultist, which he did, successfully.

Demon caught cultist, bit cultist's head off (oops). So far, dumb but understandable. However, the character then decided to do the same thing a second time.

Demon caught cultist, thanked the PC, and asked if he was interested in making a deal. PC refused, demon took advantage of two blood sacrifices to break out of the circle, chaos ensued.

[moldymaltquaffer]

Best?
Cyberpunk campaign, the characters were cops with more than the usual latitude. The players had never played anything but D&D.

The PCs were investigating a bad guy who worked in a morgue. They'd learned he and a small group of friends called themselves "The Third Horseman". They broke into his house. In the living room, they saw a black velvet painting of a skeletal rat wearing a cloak and carrying a scythe. In the kitchen, they found that the fridge was packed full of tissue samples (and spent some time trying to freak each other out with the jar of eyeballs). Upstairs, the found his bedroom done up in reds and blacks with a skull motif. They saw his bookshelf holding tracts by Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Zero Population Growth, and multiple texts on microbiology. They then found a room full of cages holding hundreds of white rats. In this room, they found a cabinet filled with airtight vials, each of which had a three-letter identifier. Some of the vials appeared empty, some had liquid in them, some of them had a white or greyish powder in them. There were also some file cards associated with each vial that the PCs couldn't make heads or tails of.

The PCs spent most of the time obsessing over trying to kill the bad guy's pink-mohawked poodle. They then grabbed the vials, and torched the house. The took the vials down to the lab at the station. One of the PCs declared "I'm a narcotics detective. I can identify these drugs." He proceeded to start opening vials, sticking his finger in, and tasting the substances therein. I pointedly asked if he was using a fume hood. He got a confused look on his face, and said "Of course not".
He'd tried nearly a dozen vials, unable to identify any of them, when it finally clicked.

That look of absolute horror (and how it spread from player to player) will likely remain my favorite gaming moment.

Worst?
PC1 was talking about leaving the party. PC2 knew several pieces of information of direct importance to PC1 that would have kept him around. The player of PC2 kept his mouth shut while giving me one of the smuggest looks I've ever seen. Then he wished PC1 well in his travels. I gritted my teeth, and gave PC2 the spotlight he seemed to desire. Which he immediately used to cause a scene about my "picking on" his character.
The player of PC2 will never again be welcome in any game I run.

[Captain-Captain]

In a magical cyberpunk game the GM insisted was not Shadowrun, We had a half of a group of PCs and NPCs crossing no man's land in a sealed armored car. The car was supposed to let them out and come back for the rest of us.

Mutant bugs swarm ineffectively about it. A NPC panics at the sight of the bugs and opens the door of the car to run. The open door lets the bugs in and a PC says "If I'm gonna die, I'm taking them with me!" and detonates an explosive he carried.

He'd forgotten the car was loaded with some super chemical explosive that didn' 'Wimp out' like the ones in Space/Ultra Tech. It kabooms and the GM rules that everything within a two mile radius is destroyed.

'The rest of us' were half a mile away...

[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.

[Jonas]

Originally Posted by ate89

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 energy a round possesses upon exiting the muzzle is determined by amont other things:

1.The amount of expansion in confined propellent gasses behind it, ie rate of acceleration.
2. The length of the barrel confining the projectile and gasses, ie length of acceleration.
3. How much propellent gasses and thus energy leaks by the round due to its fit, ie what is not available for acceleration.
4. How much friction occurs between the round and the barrels inner surface, ie how much energy is lost during acceleration from direct surface on surface contact.

Note that while possible, the weapon you described would likely amount to nothing more then a one way ticket to either the hospital or the morgue if ever fired and even failing that fall far short of the damage the player was hoping for. Also he was only loosely correct about 'bullets doing the damage not the gun, while the quantity of propellent determines the theoretical maximum acceleration and thus 'damage' possible its the barrel which determines the actual value*.

*To a point eventually the pressure generated by the propellants combustion products will start to decline after it has been mostly consumed, so there is such a thing as having too long of a barrel. On the reverse side having too short of one means the bullet exits the muzzle before hitting the rounds peak pressure resulting in still burning products spewing out behind it and now lacking confinement dissipating without performing further useful work.

(Also if any of the above is wrong I do apologize due to the late hour (12:30pm CST) when I wrote it.)

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Ed the Coastie

...all for a first-level character who was played by the wife of the DM.

Oh yeah. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt.

[thulben]

Playing in a Rifts game a number of years back (it has to be going on 10 years now), our party had partnered with a local dragon to ambush some Coalition soldiers for some reason or another. The success of the ambush hinged on splitting their party; the dragon was going to put up two force fields once the Coalition passed a certain point on the road, effectively partitioning them into three groups. Our party was tasked with dealing with the tail. So, the head of the Coalition party gets to our position and everything is looking fine until one of their scouts calls a halt. They do and the scout starts getting perilously close to our position. At which point the Fixer character (i.e. mechanic) looks on his sheet and realizes that he has a pocket voice recorder in his equipment. He records a quick noise onto it and proceeds to throw said recorder over the road in an attempt to distract the scout into thinking that what he heard was not only over there, but not a threat. Needless to say, the whole Coalition party sees a voice recorder arcing over the road and the jig is up. I seem to remember the dragon having words with us after heavier-than-expected casualties ensued.

[Sam Cade]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

Shotguns are smooth-bore, and you can hit stuff with them even if you use slugs.

Shotgun slugs are nose heavy so stay point forward.

Without sufficient spin to stabilize them rifle bullets will tumble end over end.

A few years ago Century Arms had a batch of Polish Tantal 5.45mm AKs assembled and their contractor cut the bore diameter to 5.56 specs....
http://i868.photobucket.com/albums/a...DSC01687-1.jpg