I’m constantly surprised in games by my player characters’ actions, so this is tough to single out one instance, but there is one time that a player shocked me enough that it stands out among the rest. We were playing Daring Entertainment’s War of the Dead campaign (though I rejigged it a bit) and the players had escaped a cruise ship of undead only to be standed at sea on a modified fishing boat with a dozen other survivors and a handful of private military operatives (long story). Things had calmed down (as much as they can) and everyone was taking stock of themselves and each other. That’s when one of the PCs, a retired firefighter who had rescued his adult son and grandson, was out on deck and noticed one of the other passengers coughing a bit and trying to hide it.
I figured he might tell the rest and try to figure out if the guy was sick. There was already an association between the “dead” and getting sick before, so suspicions would be high. This would prove to be a dramatic session, for them to try to figure out how to deal with him – identifying first if he was sick, sorting out perhaps a timeline of the sickness, dealing with the morality of how to handle him, etc.
So, when the player tells me that he moves over to the guy and hip checks him into the sea as soon as a big wave comes along, I was left speechless. When I recovered, I told him to roll his attack (since in effect he was pushing the guy overboard) and gave him a bonus on the roll reflecting the rocking ship and help from a wave. He made it and suddenly one of the passengers was overboard.
So much for all my plans for the session. In one action, my whole evening’s plans were gone.
It wasn’t so easy though, as the guy started shouting and screaming that he was drowning. The PC managed to “fail” to throw a rope properly and by the time they were able to get a boat in the water to reach the guy, he was dead. Problem solved for them, but I sure hadn’t seen that coming.
Justin Schmid
Justin started tabletop gaming in 1983 with Basic D&D (red box) and never looked back. He runs and plays in a wide variety of games, including Savage Worlds, Dungeon World, Trail of Cthulhu and many, many more.
He also writes professionally for role-playing games, including writing and creating Night's Edge an Alternate Reality Universe for Cyberpunk 2020. He went on to write eight more adventures and sourcebooks in the Night's Edge line, adding vampires and other supernatural perils to the already dangerous world of Cyberpunk.
As a freelance writer, he wrote The Bermuda Triangle for Call of Cthulhu, Shadows of the Mind, and Psi Wars for Conspiracy X and contributed to Last Unicorn's Star Trek RPG, as well as to Cybergeneration sourcebooks, and many other games.
When he's not creating imaginary worlds for his daughter, he's running games for his friends and writing new adventures or designing new game systems. He currently lives in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.