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Favorite Quests?
So, I've finally started a role-playing game with a group at home. Yeah, we're playing 2nd Edition D&D, but I figured I would start them on this instead of Burning Wheel, just because I wasn't too sure if they wanted to act or just hack and slash. Either way, I've been daydreaming quests for the past two weeks, and it was a total blast to see my friends enjoy what I had planned (even if it was just a cliched barroom brawl). Right now, I'm trying to plan out new quests for the party. For some ideas, I want to hear what everyone's most memorable quests, be it something they designed, participated in, or just remember from video games, books, or somewhere else. (Oh, and I mean any RPG, not just D&D)
I'm still haunted by my first character's death, immediately after our party explored a haunted ship. One character was acting funny, insisting that we find out who killed the ship's crew. My mage pulled me to the side and told me I needed to cast hold person (I was a priest), because the character may be possessed. I failed the roll, and so it was a low level cleric and mage versus a fighter, and we were killed and tossed off our boat.
Also, the main quest of the game I'm DMing at the moment involves a group who just left their island in order to flee a plague. I'm going to bring the group back to the island after there are reports of undead. Once they reach the island, I'll casually say "Oh, you all have lived here your entire life, so here's a map" and toss out a recreated map of our town (with the high school as a magician's university, the Target as an abandoned outfitter, the Shop Rite as a farmer's market, and my house as the Emperor's mansion). Definitely getting excited for everyone to try using their zombie survival tactics...
I'm still haunted by my first character's death, immediately after our party explored a haunted ship. One character was acting funny, insisting that we find out who killed the ship's crew. My mage pulled me to the side and told me I needed to cast hold person (I was a priest), because the character may be possessed. I failed the roll, and so it was a low level cleric and mage versus a fighter, and we were killed and tossed off our boat.
Also, the main quest of the game I'm DMing at the moment involves a group who just left their island in order to flee a plague. I'm going to bring the group back to the island after there are reports of undead. Once they reach the island, I'll casually say "Oh, you all have lived here your entire life, so here's a map" and toss out a recreated map of our town (with the high school as a magician's university, the Target as an abandoned outfitter, the Shop Rite as a farmer's market, and my house as the Emperor's mansion). Definitely getting excited for everyone to try using their zombie survival tactics...
Comments
I'm an infamous DM among those old D&D players, my crew before I met the FRC. I'm notorious for seat-of-the-pants DM'ing; typically, my group would show up to bother me at work, 10 minutes before I got out, and say, "Pete, you're DM'ing tonight." I'd bitch and moan about not having enough prep time, then go ahead and whip up something fun off the top of my head. I wound up taking a group of characters from 3rd level to...15th? in 2nd edition, doing mostly off-the-cuff stuff. I became notorious for single monster encounters, random treasure tables, random encounter tables, wildly overpowered characters, wildly overpowered monsters and NPC's, power balances that rapidly started swinging out of control, flubbing dice, rolling really really poorly, bad guys who would slump onto their swords, and pulling all manner of various contrived bullshit to pull everything back into balance. Everyone had a lot of fun with that.
The most epic example was that very first campaign I ever ran; after 3 years of gaming once a week (or more), the PC's got into the final epic battle with the BBEG, and during the climax of everything, I threw them back in time (and level) to the beginning of the campaign, using DM fiat via magical artifact.
They almost killed me for that one.
EDIT: As a player, I'm fortunate enough to have a fantastic group of fellow players, and the best goddamn GM on the face of the earth.
EDIT: If you are going to run a D&D game for new gamers, I highly recommend Confessions of a Part-time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the D&D Game. Despite being overly and sometimes offensively girly, it explains the basics well for new gamers of either gender.
The default rules weren't too complicated, but it's entirely possible that your DM used some of the optional rules (weapon speed, weapon vs. armor type, etc.), or used rules from other books (Skills and Powers, anyone?), to make things even more complicated.
Also, for the uninitiated, Dungeons and Dragons is synonymous with role-playing. As soon as I mentioned the game to my friends, they all got excited (inciting a conversation about that Dexter's Lab episode where Dexter DMed). Sure, I could sit everyone down and just explain what role-playing is, or start them off on a simple, beer and pretzels game, but just by saying D&D;, everyone let their imaginations run wild (everyone at our first game confessed to wikiing a little bit).
As for the rules, I've already taken an incredibly liberal style, and the results have been excellent. I told people to be detailed with how they spend a turn (say a specific body part, how you attack, etc.), and there have been some fun results. I only allow the move to work as expected on a really high roll (leading to a successful crack-person-over-head-with-whiskey-bottle-and-have-mage-use-burning-hands), but on a really low roll, the failures are pretty embarrassing (one character tried throwing a dagger at an escaping enemy, he never found that dagger after combat). This is really helping everyone feel like they're contributing to the world. While I was expecting a somber, typical tone, my newbie players have already given the game a feeling straight out of Kung Fu Hustle. Oh, and I've slowly been wedging the more complex rules into the game (although they can all calculate a THAC0 already.
The best D&D campaign I ever played was loosely based on the DM's MUDD experiences, with a couple tweaks to the rules here and there. My absolute favorite moments from that game involved a reoccurring bad guy called the Kobold Archmage.
The Kobold Archmage first showed up at the end on the first mod, killing us all (which was okay, since the DM did it largely to show death was survivable), but not before our warrior managed to survive his initial attack and tag him with a hammer. From that point forward the Kobald Archmage would keep popping up and in the ensuing fight, the warrior would always get in the final hit. These final hits would get more ridiculous as the campaign went on, including the warrior golf swinging his hammer and almost completely flattening him after an enlarge person. The escalation continued up until the climax of this plot.
It turned out the Kobold Archmage was originally a human wizard who attempted to become a lich, but screwed up somehow. So in the final fight, we had to fight him while trying to find and destroy his phylactery (which was hidden inside a giant shoe, for reasons I can't remember at the moment). Since this was the climax though, the DM was was not holding back with the Archmage's spells and as a result, he was kicking our collective asses. Seriously, a couple of our people were down, but he was barely touched. However, the tides were turned when the warrior reached into my bag of many things and pulled out a tiger. Despite the odds against it, the Tiger hit and pinned the Archmage down when he was in full-on super villain mode, giving us enough time to break the phylactery, which of course resulted in a huge explosion.
Like all good villains, the litter bastard survived that somehow, although we ended up stopping the campaign before he could do anything again. The only other major thing he got to do was at a casino when the warrior pulled a three wishes card from a deck of many things. Now, the warrior knew the DM loved to twist wish spells (assuming someone is using a wish spell to do something other then a strictly mechanical effect, the guy was evil but he wasn't an asshole) so he tried to wish for the simplest thing that couldn't possibly be twisted into something horrible. So he wished for the Kobold Archmage to show up, and then he took a swing at the Archmage was he was still confused. However, the hit pinged off harmless because he managed to pull a version of the Kobold Archmage from the future, who was somewhere around level "Sweet Jesus H Tap Dancing Christ!" Before the Archmage could extract his sweet, if highly paradoxical revenge, the warrior tied to wish the him away. I forget what the wording on the wish was, but it also resulted in an explosion that leveled the casino and killed everyone in it.
There were a ton of other great moments from that campaign (the Vish meer, pissing off Baron Hauckstead, Battle Breakfast!, the bear that almost soloed a Night Walker...), but to recount them would probably take a while.
The only other game that was just as good as that campaign (if not slightly better, since it got a definitive conclusion) was a Savage Worlds game run by the same DM, which took place in WW2 and had a lot of fantasy pulp action. There were tons of zombies, Nazi Warmechs, lizard men, and the campaign ended with a us fighting Cthulhu, whom we defeated by having a party member drive a magic nuke down its throat. Believe it or not, but the guy managed to survive the explosion.