What is Your Most Memorable Gaming Experience?
I've gamed long enough that I have several memorable gaming sessions, and I've written about one of the negative ones in The Munchkin Book and on this Substack in the past, but I'm going to write about one of my favorite memorable gaming sessions. Like many of my favorite gaming memories, this one included my friends Sean McPhail, Ron Peck, and Robert Faust (author of Osprey's Scrappers game). Robert Faust was one of the best Game Masters and Players I’ve ever known and he had an extremely broad gaming palette. His interests ranged from A to Z and he was the person who introduced me to wargaming as a hobby when he taught me how to play Warhammer Fantasy.
Robert was also a great guy and I miss this group of friends terribly. After I started college, we began to drift apart and when Ron died that drifting continued. I’m still in contact with Sean from time to time, but time to time is very different from hanging out every weekend. Nostalgia reminds us of the fun we have, but it also reminds us of the mistakes we made and the initial drift away from this group was all me.
Anyway, the game session I have in mind was the first session of a new D&D campaign (2nd Edition) and Robert wasn’t running the game, so we had the opportunity to play on the same side of the screen. With this in mind Robert and I had decided that my half-elf and his elf were brothers who cared deeply for one another.
In case you are wondering, I almost always played half-elves when I played D&D in high school. I think it had a lot to do with Tanis in the Dragonlance books. He may not have looked Goth, but he was Goth to the core. That resonated with me. I was often sad and listened to a ton of Goth music at the time. As a Varsity Soccer player and Wrestler I did not look Goth at all, but I was as internally Goth as Jerry in The Chocolate War.
Setting that aside and getting back to the game session. The game was set in a country that was extremely bigoted against non-human races. Our DM had wanted a primarily human campaign, but Robert, I, and the other players would have none of it. We wanted to play non-human races and take advantage of the options in 2nd edition. It’s a tale as old as time and DMs and players navigate this conflict differently based on the group dynamic. In the case of our DM, it was to make setting hostile to many of our group.
Robert's elf was slight of build and looked very traditionally elven. No Spock stocking cap was going to hide his ancestry. My half-elf, on the other hand, was more human in appearance and was extra-ordinarily strong (with a Strength score somewhere in the 18/60s to 18//70s). For those of you who started with 3rd edition or later, this is like having a 18 or 20 Strength in the modern games, but with even greater impact on the basic math of the game.
Some humans were harassing Rob's character and he eventually told some of them that if they continued to harass them they would have to face the consequences. He then dared them to repeat what they said (or something of that nature, it is many years ago) to his very strong brother, my character.
They asked him with great skepticism just how strong his brother was. This is one of those moments when metagaming can break a potentially great role playing session. Rob could have said that my character had an 18/76 Strength or used some other mechanical reference, instead he did something brilliant that has become a running cliché in every group I run or play in.
"How strong?" Rob's character responded and then paused for effect.
"How strong?! Let me tell you how strong he is! He carries Hemp rope!"
Cut to a shot of my character wearing 2 crossed loops of 100ft of Hemp rope each, Banded Mail, and a two-handed sword. Note that in 2nd edition 50ft of Hemp rope weighed 20lbs. My character was walking around with 80lbs of rope. Why? It wasn't for flexibility, it was purely to show off his strength.
The response of the NPCs was a resigned "Oh" sound that will be familiar to anyone who has seen John Wick.
I may have some of the specific details of the encounter wrong, but I'll never forget "He carries Hemp rope."
What is one of your favorite moments?
I have two great memories. I DM a family DND game. Last year my adult daughter played with us as a guest character and wow, I was blown away with her “acting in character” and how my sister in law riffed off of my daughter’s character. It was one of the few times I was able to sit back and not have to run things. It was so awesome!!! The second good memory, same group, different time, and the teens had been playing for almost a year but still hardly engaged unless I directly talked to them, and even then, when I’d ask, what would your character do, I’d get an “I don’t know”. So I just kept working with them, teaching them by example, and one day it happened. My niece actually told me what her character wanted to do! I almost fell out of my chair! I was so happy and proud. Finally, a few sessions later, the nephew did the same thing!
My friends collected the world jewels that had different powers (before the marvel films were a thing but based on the comic) and the main baddie got the world jewel crown (see, not a gauntlet) and proceeded to make himself immortal 😂.