More Funny D&D Stories

[Milodiah]

This is actually a Classic Traveler story, which is a sci-fi game. It's been a very long time, so the details like names are fuzzy. Here goes:

The party:

• Me, Lt. Cmdr. Dyson, naval reserve officer, human supremacist and also an informant for my government. I was sort of the group leader, which retroactively was a terrible idea.
• A priestess of an obscure alien race, trying to raise awareness of her people in interstellar politics.
• A retired marine commando, specifically an assassin.
• An asteroid miner, in possession of a third-hand and battered mining vessel.
• DMPC, a tiny reptilian fellow who flew the ship. His name was unpronounceable so I nicknamed him "Space Jim" even though he kicked my shins when I called him that.

We've been hired to assassinate one (1) politician who was trying to negotiate peace with some hostile aliens, the usual "all we know is there's money for us" motivation. We do manage to kill him in the end, along with 719,999 other people through a series of seemingly sound decisions that...went sequentially wrong.

Spoiler: Spoilered for length

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We choose to leave our ship (fitted with experimental stealth technology) in orbit, and take the small ship's boat to the surface (which is basically a domed city). Turns out it's infested with gangs, we witness a drive-by five minutes into walking the streets (and also witness everyone on the sidewalk return fire).

The conference we're supposed to get into is later on in the day, so we kill time in a diner, where my anti-alien comments net me a frying pan to the face and a broken nose. We also hire some 'muscle' to back us up if the plan-A stealth goes awry, but we roll abysmally, and end up with...three dudes with handguns and a Vargr (read: wolf-man) whose name and vocabulary consisted of "ARNGH-ARNGH-ARNGH-ARNGH-AAAARNGH!", and whose armament consisted solely of a "gigantic motorized pizza cutter". I hand them a radio and tell them and the Assassin to wait in an abandoned house nearby "just in case".

So, we walk into the mansion during the grand banquet, and everyone but me manages to talk their way past the guards. So here I am, getting nasty looks from everyone present (because I'm wearing an officer's uniform of both parties' mutual enemy), and my ploy to pull a Bavarian Fire Drill with an envelope stamped "CLASSIFIED, EYES ONLY" had failed. As the Priestess and the Miner (the only one who has gained access to the ambassador we needed to kill) makes idle small talk, the other players and I start to formulate a plan.

I grab our muscle and the other PCs minus the Priestess and Miner, load up in the ship's boat/gunship, and prepare to make a combat deployment on the roof.

Bad idea.

Turns out the watchtowers we only halfway scoped out were actually fitted with anti-aircraft batteries for just such an occasion.

Ordered all fire on the nearest tower, did evasive maneuvers. A little earlier the Miner, who had a comically small concealed handgun, decided to make his move on the ambassador and followed him into the bathroom. As soon as the **** hit the fan, he draws and attempts to fire.

Bad idea.

I had previously requested intel on this guy from my...connections... and it just now comes in. Tested positive for psionic powers, did eight tours of duty in the Imperial Marines, commendations, qualifications, medals...

"Guys, we're dealing with a Class 8 Badass here!"

He of course is wearing body armor, then pulls multiple top of the line laser weapons and fries the Miner nearly to death in one round.

I blast a hole in the wall, still making evasive maneuvers, and send in the muscle. GM rolls for them...and of course ARNGH-ARNGH-ARNGH-ARNGH-AAAARNGH gets roasted in mid-air by Mr. Badass. The other three end up on the roof, trading shots through said roof with security forces inside the building. The Miner tries to flee to the roof, but Mr. Badass chases him up there, and in a shootout between ship-grade weaponry and laser pistols actually nails my gunner. I hand off the controls to one of the NPCs and finally shoot the roof out from under him, recover the Miner who is in D&D terms at negative HP, and try to fly off.

Bad idea.

The military's coming, of course, and we have to rendezvous with the ship. I instruct Space Jim to switch off transponder and engage stealth.

Bad idea.

The air space-traffic control goes APE**** when they see a ship drop off their screens because stealth tech isn't actually public knowledge, and prepare to scramble everything, including a dreadnought. Our ship's boat is 30 tons, the ship itself is 5000 tons. This thing is 500,000 tons of pure death warming up to come after us.

We make it to an exit airlock, and surprise surprise, it's been sealed off. I order the gunner to blow it open.

Bad idea.

Critical failure. He manages to blast the airlock and the failsafe mechanism, so the entire atmosphere of the dome city is getting blown out of this airlock. The pressure differentials wreak havoc on the dreadnought preparing to lift off, and all 500,000 tons of it crash down on the dome, shattering it into millions of pieces.

As soon as we rendezvous with the ship, I do what comes naturally (at this point I'll add that this is the most in-character we've ever been). I recall the books on naval operations, and order the pilot to "initiate crash jump procedures".

Bad idea.

What I didn't count on was that while I was a trained naval officer, the pilot was not...in the navy it's a twelve-step procedure. To this guy it's "GET SOMEWHERE OTHER THAN HERE".

So we jump to the middle of nowhere, with no fuel to get to the middle of somewhere, after wiping out the flagship of an enemy fleet, along with half a planet's worth of people, becoming public enemy #1 for the entire galaxy, and above all not getting paid by our client because we accidentally killed him.

Hooray!