One of my favorite rolls in an RPG to date...even though I was the GM and a player avoided a dastardly trap by its success

BLOT: (18 Jun 2012 - 10:36:49 PM)

One of my favorite rolls in an RPG to date...even though I was the GM and a player avoided a dastardly trap by its success

Ok, look. I know bragging about events that happened in-game during an RPG session is tres geek. Geek++. On the cusp of being one of those guys. We're talking about getting excited over a shared session of pretend modified by cube-shaped random number generators. I get that. But I'm going to do it anyhow...

We were playing the opening session of a horror campaign using GURPS (at this stage, mostly "Lite" rules). Set in 1897. A trio (right now) of proto-paranormal researchers from generally the upper slice of society. And in this adventure, they were down in the sewers, facing off against rats. Giant ones. Mutated ones. When the characters finally find them, there are three in a group, asleep, near the body of one of the victims and recent food sources...

...before I continue, let me introduce the players. Sarah, my wife, is playing a 19-year-old waif of an artist—Esmerelda—turning to photography in her pursuit of proving the unknown. Jason is playing a slightly older over-confident young man from Chicago—Ezra—partially down in the sewers just to protect the lady. Katie is playing the oldest character—Grace—a widow (though widowed young) with some minor psychic abilities, who is not in the sewers because she is going to get policemen to stop whatever horrible fate is about to be visited upon Jason and Sarah's characters...

...and so you got three mutated giant rats and at least one (visible) corpse of one of their victims, and they are asleep and not noticing the humans coming to get a look, except that Esmerelda wants to take a photo (being in her nature to do such) and flubs the first one. I roll some dice to see if the wake up, get a high number [in GURPS, higher numbers tend to be worse] so they do not. She takes another shot and this time two of the rats do wake up.

Ezra and Esmerelda can either run through the water of the sewers or run along the edge, which is slippery due to some recent flooding. Ezra is holding both the only gun and the only light source, and Esmerelda is trying to keep her camera from getting wet (and is using the flash to blind the rats, Rear Window style). This keeps the characters up along the ledge. As they go to run, I call from a single roll...a very exciting and important roll...does Ezra keep his balance? If not, well, then he slips and falls into the water. One of the rats is already in the water, another is on the ledge behind them. The blinding light means they are being startled back from following too closely, but what happens if the oil lantern gets extinguised? That's right, two humans down in a pitch-black sewer, trying to escape by intermittent and overly blinding flashes, while increasingly enraged mutant rats stalk them in the dark.

Jason, though, made the roll, and they were able to take advantage of the flash-powder to get out of the sewers about the time the police come back down and together they were able to dispatch the poor animals. Still, this is one of my favorite rolls I have called for as a GM because I know that in some alternate universe, that situation got a whole lot worse for those two. And knowing that channeling the possibility of things getting worse into a horror game helping to increase tension, helping to unravel even successful players, makes it all the more fun. Especially in a case like this, where they are playing more or less normal characters (75 points, in GURPS lingo) who do not have exceptional stats, and so many of their dice rolls are about evenly perched between doom and happiness. There was actually a good chance that Ezra was going to fall into the water and Esmerelda was going to have to inch along a ledge while a giant rat crawled up beside her. Kind of fun, right?

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: June 2012