Brain Farts in RPGs

[Lonestar]

Title says it all. Reason why I created this thread was because yesterday in WoW I had a massive one, and derailed a AQ raid as a result.

In the 20 man AQ raid, we got done killing Big Bug Boss #1 (Forget his name....had a whole bunch of X's and n's in it) and raid leader says "Whatever you do, DON'T speak to the NPCs yet.

We proceed to stand around with our thumbs up our ass for 20 minutes. Why? I don't know, but I was surfing the web and shifting back to WoW to move me from "afk". Third time I shifted back to WoW I noticed people running up to the NPCs and walking away from them. I think:

Holy Shit! Did I miss something? Do we need to talk to this guy?

I follow one of our hunters (less than 10 yards behind him) He runs up, stands in front of the NPC, walks off. Making what I thought was a reasonable inference based upon available information I ran up, started talking to the guy, and then the bug-mob came.




Well, that's my brain fart. Any of you guys have Brain fart stories?

[Yogi]

In EVE Online, I once fired upon my own drone. In my defense, I was less than a week into the game.

[White Haven]

Hehe. Poor guys, got sodomized by Rajaxx, did you? On the plus side, the pre-Rajaxx waves can drop some AWESOME healing cloth boots...equivalent to Prophecy. So not a total loss.

[Losonti Tokash]

Back in the days of Earth and Beyond, Jenquai players were proper fucked when it came to combat leveling unless you were already pretty damned powerful. The only solution was powerleveling, which of course was later made impossible. But before this, a friend and I were sitting around letting people murder mobs that were dozens of levels higher than us, watching the EXP pour in. Most stories that end poorly start the same way.

We got bored. I decided to see whether I could fold space while cloaked. I phased out and reppeared in the center of some very, very pissed off mobs who immediately showed me that, no, I could not cloak and teleport at the same time. They then killed my friend and the bastards that had taken us there decided it wasn't worth jumpstarting us so we had to get towed back to a starbase. EXP debt something in the millions. Never got it all back before the game was canceled.

[White Haven]

I think my most (in)famous one was back when my raid was still learning Molten Core. Back then, it was easy to pet-pull bosses, so I had my pet up by Shazzrah, just getting ready. Anyway, we'd never fought him before, so the raid leader starts to explain the fight. Just then, Shazzrah abruptly turns and randomly walks into my pet.

'Guys? Shazzrah's coming. Now.'

[lPeregrine]

Another EVE one...

I'd just finished a nice profitable courier mission into 0.3 space, and noticed a complex gate in the system. So hey, never seen one of those, lets go see what's inside! Of course "what's inside" is about 20-25 pirate cruisers, with me in my destroyer (not exactly fair in 1v1 even!). So ok, bad odds, but I haven't seen a cruiser before... and there's one isolated away from the others, so I'll just trade a few shots and see how my ship compares.

BAD idea. Neither of us do any real damage, at least for a few seconds. But in giving the "orbit at 15km" order to get into gun range, I hadn't been watching my range to the giant mob. The first hint I had of my mistake was my shields instantly disappearing as they all opened fire. Oops. I hit the autopilot and pray I get out before my armor fails too.

I have just about long enough to think "Hey, why isn't my ship warping?!??!" before it explodes and I'm floating in my escape pod. In a moment of complete idiocy, I'd forgotten to set an autopilot destination!

So 15 million ISK worth of destroyer blown away in about 5-10 seconds. And just to add insult to injury, I probably would've escaped (though badly damaged) if I'd had my autopilot set correctly.

[Civil War Man]

The Mage campaign I'm in. The entire campaign. It would be a comedy of errors if it weren't so tragic.

I'll give you a basic rundown looking back at some of the previous sessions.

There is one titled "Bloodbath." I should probably mention that we didn't engage in combat a single time during that session, but still managed to deal massive amounts of damage to 4 of the party (party size at the time: 6), almost added a fifth to the list. Oh, and 3 of the 4 who received damaged were damaged to the point of incapacitation.

Thank god for Life 3...

Let's see...there a session titled "Wait, we doing actual plot?" I think that's pretty self-explanatory. I should note that the character responsible for advancing the plot was my own, who is an Orphan that derives his magical foci from gaming.

I think there's only been one session where a party member initiated combat against another party member...Two if you count the massive Life/Spirit paradox backlash, but that's another story.

Another session title: "The GM Cries." I believe this session lasted for 4 hours, but covered only about 15 minutes in-game. That's actually where the previously mentioned backlash comes into play. Our healer turned into a sphinx, at which point our shaman-ish mage started hitting him until he turned back.

That leads to the next session "The Day of the Broken Junk." That lovely session involved the death of our healer (see "The GM Cries"), the promotion of one of the remaining members to healer (she happens to be a Euthanatos for those familiar with Mage), and our new healer repeatedly kicking a local cop in the 'nads. That's a long story that I really don't like to talk about.

We did okay for a while (for extremely loose definitions of okay), the worst being our Euthanatos healer accidentally aging herself 30 years. Then came the most recent debacle, entitled "So, how much lethal do I soak?" It differed from "Bloodbath" in that nobody lost consciousness and we actually did engage in a fight (though none of the damage anyone sustained was from the fight). Other than that, it was pretty similar, though there was a bit more shrapnel than I would have liked.