Conversations from the gaming frontlines.

[Chardok]

Ricky: Can I play FarCry 2?
Me: I don't know, can you?
Ricky: Well, only one person in this house beat Handsome Jack and that person was ME, so probably. Can I use your file?
Me. No.


Later....

Ricky: Can I play Minecraft?
Me: Probably.
Ricky: Daddy, I know what you're doing, and I won't fall for it.
Me: Good.
Ricky: *may* I play Minecraft?

[TheFeniX]

Me: "Well, after utilizing all my years of IT expertise, my hard work has come to fruition."
Kyle: "What's that?"
Me: "The Music_Bot is back online for Teamspeak 3."
Kyle: "That's awesome. I used to love going in there when you're not around because I'm too lazy to load up my own play-list. What's it playing?"
Me: "Good King Mog."
Kyle: "What else?"
Me: "Nothing, just that. On repeat."
Kyle: "But... why? You hate that song."
Me: "Others must feel my pain. I'm also debating whether or not to move him to the Lobby to annoy people who haven't requested perm." (NOTE: You can't leave the lobby unless I (or another TS3 admin) mark you as permanent.)
Kyle: "Why the Hell would you do.."
Me: "Because I fucking can, bwahahahahaha!"

[TheFeniX]

Kasey's been complaining he's always broke in FFXIV. He's taken up mining to try and make some money. I've been doing maps as a matter of course and dragging people along because some can be pretty tough. Maps are extra loot that spawn monsters. Kill all the monsters, get loot.

Me: "Ok, I need the Silver. You guys can free-roll on the minion."
Kasey: "You don't want it?"
Me: "Nah, I've got my Minfillia. All I'll ever need."
Kasey wins the Bluebird Miniion. Next day, guild lead is online.
Kasey: "This bird is cool, it lands on my shoulder when I'm not moving."
Tan: "What minion?"
Kasey: "Bluebird."
Tan: "You guys got one one those? That's like the rarest minion in the game. They go for 1.5 million on the market."
Kasey: "No way."
Me: "Hold on let me check."
Kasey: "Tell me he's lieing."
Me: "Yea, he's lieing.... they're going for 2 million."
Kasey: "Aw man."
Kyle: "At least now you can sing Zippidy Do-da while you mine."
Kasey: "Shut up Kyle."

[Raw Shark]

EASTER SUNDAY CTHULHU WARS:

CTHULHU'S PLAYER: I'll spend 4 Power to re-summon Cthulhu in R'lyeh.

ME: HE IS RISEN!

[TheFeniX]

Me: "Holy Shit, this guy is glamoured into looking like that pirate kid from One Piece. Pretty good job too."
K: "What the Hell is One Piece?"
Me: "Some pirate Anime..... remember when Goku is like I'M PIRATE GOKU! in Abridged?"
K: "Any good?
Me: "No, it's fucking horrible."
K: "Why did you watch it?
Me: "Some guy back at TG said I'd like it because I liked Berserk."
Tan: "What the.... they're nothing... that's.... that guy was stupid."
Me: "Yea, I figured that after I watched it for 5 seconds."
K: "When people ask me what anime I like, I just tell them Bible Black. Ends the conversation right there."
Me: "I've heard of that: what's it about?"
K: "Something about Witches who grow dicks and fuck people with them."
Me: "Oh, my kind of party. Wait, there's a name for that... what is it......"
Tan: "Futanari"
Me: "HAHA! You know the name, you're a sick pervert."
Tan: "What.. ah man... I knew you'd give me shit for that. But you knew it too."
Me: "Yea, but I don't care."
K: "Does your wife know how fucked up you are?"
Me: "You're talking to the guy who showed her sister what 'tubgirl' is when she tried to claim she'd seen more, quote, fucked up shit on the Interwebs than I had."
Me: "She's all like 'omg, omg. Then started dry heaving over the sink."
K: "She didn't know what tubgirl is? That's pretty rough. You're a horrible person."
Tan: "Oh man, ugh."
Psych: "What the fuck is tubgirl?"
::Teamspeak explodes with laughter::

God damn our conversations bottom-out rather quickly. NOTE: Don't Google any of this stuff. If you have to, damn sure don't do it from work.

[TheFeniX]

Is this gaming? Dunno, still mad:

"Boot up the TV while I finish dishes. GoTs is coming on."
Wife: "Xbox on. XBOX ON. XBOX ON!"
Me: "XBox on! XBOX POWER ON. XBOX YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT. I know you're spying on me, TURN THE FUCK ON!"
I finally just hit the power button.
Hello FeniX's Wife (Default profile)
2 seconds later the kinect picks out my silhouette.
"Hello TheFeniX"
"Fuck you!"

TECHNOLOGY!

[TheFeniX]

Me: "OMG, I feel like that kid in middle-school. Ninjas run SO DUMB IN THIS GAME!"
Jovial: "Oh yea, that Naruto run."
Me: "Oh god, it's painful! Mommy, I don't want to be a Ninja anymore. Please let me Rogue more!"
Psych: "What run?
Me: "The fucking Sanic run. Arms back like a moron. Everyone knew a kid like that in middle-school."
Jovial: "Yea, and if you didn't: you were that kid."
Psych: "I KNEW A KID LIKE THAT!"
::laughter::
Psych: "THAT's why he ran like that? I thought he was special needs."
::more laughter::
Jovial: Probably was."
Tan: "Aw man..."
Me: What?"
Tan: "I was that kid in middle school."
::Teamspeak explodes::

[Imperial528]

While making alien-like KSP ships for visuals in a play-by-post roleplay...
(Note: Red refers to me)
Me: *Posts image* "Latest thing."
Clippy: "Now that looks more ayyyyy"
Me: "It can pitch decently, can't roll for shit, but its turning circle is inside of it."
Clippy: "I like the fish look"
MushroomMan: "I was just about to say. If the humans have penis ships (rockets), the aliens should have vagina ships"
MushroomMan: "But Red already did it. Sorta. Well done."

[TheFeniX]

::Having that stupid issue with Steam trying to load a game over and over. Also getting errors with ClassicShell::
FeniX: "Ugh, after that malware hit and this new board, I really just need to flatten this thing and upgrade to W10 or something."
T: "Flatten?"
FeniX: "Yea, might do it next weekend."
T: "Why would you throw it all away? Didn't you just spend a lot of money?"
FeniX: "What?"
T: "You said you're flattening your computer."
FeniX: "Wha.... what do you think flatten means?"
T: "Never heard it before. Like, take to the junkyard and smash?"
FeniX: "You.... you're in web design.... you had to at SOME point work on a PC? You've never heard the term 'flatten?' Have you even been to a website that isn't about anime?"
T: "No. I mean, yes to the anime part."
Fenix: "Then read the fucking context, shit. I just blew money on parts and need to re-install my OS. Your take is I'm going to toss it all in the trashcan?"
T: Well, it's just not a common term?"
Fenix: "My mom knows what it means and she just plays word jumble."
T: "You're just making shit up now."
K: "I have to back FeniX on this one, I've never met anyone but the most ignorant of rednecks who didn't know what 'flattening a PC' meant."
T: "Whatever."
FeniX: "More and more I'm convinced you're actually some kind of... alien intelligence merely playing at being human, taking pleasure in my pain. That, or you REALLY need to lay off the reefer."

NOTE: This IS the guy who tried to pay his dealer with PayPal. No joke, it's legal where he lives. Fucking PayPal. He didn't mute his mic, but the only part of the conversation I could hear was when someone (not him) yelled "Are you fucking serious?"

[Imperial528]

During a Mongoose Traveller campaign:

Colonel: "So it took us three and a half hour to get eighty fuel units of deuterium by scraping ice off the surface."
GM: "Guys, are you sure eighty is right? I mean I could just make it eight thou-"
Everyone: "No. That's too much."
GM: "Well, it would be faster if..."
Me: "Wait, guys, what if we used the hangar as a shovel?"
GM: *dying inside*

A day in-game later of using an entire hangar as a shovel/bucket/filter, we have a fueled ship.

[Rekkon]

Friend and I playing X-wing Miniatures:

RM (contemplating his next maneuver): "I think I have to do this. It puts me in a bad position next round, but that is a problem for future me to solve."
*next round*
RM: "Remember how I said this was a problem for future me to solve?
Rekkon: "Ya?"
RM: "Past me is a dick."

[Edi]

Playing DragonQuest (the old SPI pen and paper fantasy RPG) with two of my friends, I'm the GM. The party has some dozen members, with the two principal characters, a few primary NPCs and several secondary NPCs. They also have a dragon ally and another NPC who is an insanely powerful sorceress. The dragon and the sorceress are in the party for campaign plot reasons.

ME: So, you have this siege of the enemy fortress on top of a steep hill coming up and you want to take part in the assault on the walls, what's your plan?

Player #2: We figured we'd try an aerial assault with Player #1's character and the sorceress on dragonback to try and help the grunts scaling the walls, then assault the gatehouse after they get a spell or two off

Player #1: And I'll be using Black Flames on them! (Black Flames is an area effect fire spell with a fear effect)

*attack begins*

First, the NPC sorceress casts an area effect windstorm and throws a critical success, having a choice of doubling two aspects of the spell, or tripling one aspect. She goes for triple area of effect, practically knocking half of the defenders right off the wall.

Then Player #2 casts the Black Flames. Critical, incinerates a several enemies on the other side of the wall before they can take potshots at them.

Then they do the attack run on the top of the gatehouse. Dragon does extra critical on breath weapon, triple damage and rolls maximum. Reduces most of the gatehouse to slag and the enemy soldiers on top of it to puddles of molten armor.

Then Player #2's character, who is a pretty strong warrior, gets to the portcullis mechanism and rolls another extra critical on a strength check and single-handedly raises the bloody thing when you normally need five men to do it.

This whole thing doesn't even take more than a few minutes, so their own army basically does not need to fight the outer wall defenders at all. The enemy loses half their army as dead, injured or captured without inflicting so much as a broken fingernail on the players' army and are looking at facing the full army backed by a dragon that has just gotten warmed up. *white flag*

So much for that being the hard fought battle that it was intended to be...

=======

Later, in the same session:

The principal characters and one of the NPCs (a warrior) are on their way to meet the leader of an allied army, riding on the dragon. This ally has dragons of his own, an entire clan of them in fact, with a few of the smaller ones acting as scouts for enemy dragons. Two of them mistake the party for enemies and attack. Both attacking dragons are significantly older, larger, stronger and more powerful than the party's dragon.

Enemy Dragon #1: *casts spell of entanglement to drop party out of the sky* *rolls backfire, gets entangled in his own web and falls out of the sky*

Enemy Dragon #2: *misses diving attack, ends up below party*

Party Dragon: *dive attacks ED2, blinds him with fire breath and scores a critical hit, nearly killing the other dragon*

Enemy Dragon #1: *gets up off the ground to rejoin the fight, bruised and battered*

At this point, both the other dragons are basically one bad exchange of blows away from certain death, one from the bonecrushing crash landing and the other because he nearly had his head ripped off by a dragon slightly more than half his size. Who just happens to be uninjured and hopping mad and coming after them with a berserk gleam in his eyes. They do the smart thing and flee.

Later, in the allied camp:

Allied Great Wyrm: "I see you have shown my offspring the price of overconfidence. I am impressed!"

Party Dragon: *preens*

Player #1: "Well, serves them right, they should not have attacked us! We were coming to bring you important news!"

Allied Dragonlord: "Indeed. I expect that there are lessons here for all of us."

Great Wyrm: *glares sideways at his mauled offspring* "Quite. See to it that you don't bother Player #1 and her dragon again, or I will be displeased." [this is the second time dragons from this group have attacked the party's dragon by mistake]

=======

All in all, that game session was absolutely crazy. It felt like I was doing nothing but rolling critical hits for the party's NPCs and the players had their fair sahre of them too. As far as what happened with the enemies, it was all high 80s and high 90s for rolls with targets at 60 or below on a d100. And opposed rolls tended to be that party rolls 01-08 and the enemy rolls 93-100, which puts them right in the critical failure spectrum.

The funniest thing is that while the party is powerful, they have an even more powerful reputation because this is not the first time something like this has happened. It's made for some really hilarious incidents in-game and even some of the big powers in the game world would actually think twice about tangling with them. Because some of them have, and it has ALWAYS ended somewhere between a bad setback and an epic catastrophe for the villains. Without even fudging things.

[LaCroix]

Healer to a "less than capable tank" : I swear, if you die one more time, I'll start calling you Krillin!

[Kojiro]

In the middle of a hard mode boss fight in SWTOR"
DPS: This is hilarious. (posts link in teamspeak)
A few moments pass in silence.
Healer 1: Haha, that's fucking awesome.
Healer 2 (me): Well at least it's a different 'ya mum' joke'
Tank: Are both the healers Alt-Tabbed out right now?
Healers in unison: Maybe...

And that's how our team got the name Alt-Tabbed Prog Team.

[TheFeniX]

K: "What are you doing?"
Me: "Leveling my Belf in Invasions."
K: "Why? You constantly talk about how much you hate Horde everything."
Me: "Yea, Org is fucking hideous and terrible to navigate. But, I figure if I get to 58-60 and I ever want to level to max, I can do it in dungeons and areas I don't hate. Also, I want to see what happens when I hit 70 and can use Orb of the Sindorei."
(NOTE: The Orb just makes you look like a Blood Elf for 5 minutes. Is only usable at level 70.)
K: "What do you think would happen?"
Me: "I dunno. The game would crash? I mean, turning a Belf into a Belf. Something bad has to happen right? Or maybe something AMAZING!"
K: "Hey man, I heard you like Belfs. So I put a Belf in your Belf, so you can Belf while you Belf."
Me: "That is... that is awful, you should be ashamed..."
We both break into uncontrollable laughter. I don't know, maybe there was something in the air in Teamspeak, because that joke was bad. But we could not stop laughing for a solid minute.

An hour or so later.
K: "Still need to find a good dagger for my rogue."
Me: "What about this one?" {linked one I was laughing at.}
K: "That...... is terrible. Did someone just slap an extra dagger onto an existing one?"
Me: "Hey Man, I heard you like daggers. So I put a dagger in your dagger so you can stab while you stab."
More uncontrolled laughter.

We aren't even trying anymore.

[Edi]

End of a campaign approaches, the party is infiltrating the main bad guy's secret lair.

Stealth checks for party: Critical success
Awareness checks for bad guys: Critical failure

So, they get in. And right into the main place to confront the ancient evil, though they have not been detected.

Me: "So, you see an altar with things on it and there are ten robed figures chanting in front of it"
Player 1: "I cast Black Flames at them!"
Me: "Wait a sec, there is also the [description of main bad guy] there"
Player 1: "Well, too late, done already. Black Flames!"
Player 2: "I cast Fireball!"
NPC Dragonlord ally: *casts Black Flames* (same school of magic with these two)
Me: "Okay, and since you're still undetected, you get the spells off while they are unaware. Roll checks."
Player 1: *rolls 05 on a d100*
Player 2: *rolls 05 on a d100*
NPC Dragonlord: *rolls 04 on a d100*

Me: "Riiiiight. I don't fucking believe this! Player 1, that's an extra crit, which aspect do you want to triple, or which two aspects of the spell do you want to double?"
Player 1: "Triple damage! What else?!"
Me: "Why am I not surprised. Player 2, with your success chances, that's a crit, what do you want to double?"
Player 2: "Damage! Not taking any chances with this bastard!"
Me: "And NPC Dragonlord sure as hell is not taking any chances with him either, so he triples damage too. Roll damage."
Me (silently): *fuckity-fuckity-fuck*
Player 1: *rolls 14, x3 = 42*
Me: "Let's see, Player 1, your spells wipes out all the cultists and hits the main bad guy HARD, but he's not down yet."
Player 2: *rolls 10, x2 = 20*
Me: "Your fireball incinerates what's left of the cultists's bodies and seriously scorches the main bad guy, but he's pretty well warded, so he does not go down. He is in really bad shape, though."
NPC Dragonlord: *rolls 21, x3 = 63*
Me: "And so much for the main bad guy, because NPC Dragonlord's spell finishes him off once and for all AND he has that nice little soul-slaying effect to his magic. Incidentally the spell also destroys his artifact staff and one of the three artifacts on the altar, the one he was using to corrupt the other two."

Let us just say that this was not how it was supposed to go. The party (two parties actually, the players and their support cast, plus a second group of all NPCs) was supposed to fight their way into the lair / stronghold and confront the main bad guy and his ten lesser mages (lesser being a relative term here) and his two dragonlord allies and his summoned demons and undead which would have resulted in an epic fight that would likely have blown up half the city the lair was in. The last time this particular bad guy was defeated, a quarter of the known world was laid waste. Had they lost this time, it would have been likely that within a few years the entire world would have been as good as destroyed.

Instead, it's yet another series of the party throwing under 10 on a d100 and the bad guys throwing 85+ for everything related to the approach, so they get the drop on the main bad guy. And then the above happens. The rest of it was more or less just mop-up, though the bad guy's dragons and the party's dragon allies mixing it up in the skies overhead did result in some severe damage to parts of the city.

And as a cherry on top, in the aftermath of it all, Player 2 manages to wrangle his family into a position that, thanks to yet another series of 01-05 vs a series of 85+, his brother ends up as king of the entire realm whose capital they almost destroyed while he toddles off to become king in a realm he had earlier wrested from the main bad guy's allies.

[Simon_Jester]

Your party is becoming conditioned to fight like a bunch of genuine, true-blue American heroes.

That is to say, with overwhelming up-front firepower and a great deal of reliance on dumb luck.

If you want to make that exploitable, you probably can.

[phred]

Might be time to check their dice

There's a specific tank in our guild that we joke about sacrificing to the EQ gods every raid. Last night the guild leader posted his healing macro for him.

Line 1: /raid Casting complete heal on tank
Line 2: /cast complete heal
Line 3: /raid Die Tank Die!!!
Line 4: /em Cackles maniacally
Line 5: /stopcast

[Zeropoint]

A bad guy with that much power and threat should also have enough foresight to have things like alarm spells and contingency plans.

[TheFeniX]

A bad guy with that much power and threat should also have enough foresight to have things like alarm spells and contingency plans.

That. But also, and one DM I RPed with was really good at these sort of details: even bad guys need servants. Make those servants children or Fair Young Maidens.™ Some well treated servants, some little more than slaves. The best was a "Conan" style sub-plot where some mid-ranking nobles daughter was "kidnapped" by the "big bad" and we were offered a sizeable amount of gold to return her safely. So we waste the bad Necromancer and rescue the fair maiden. Shelly immediately goes in to woo the damsel, and she stabs his Bard 2-3 times before my Paladin could intervene.

Either way, because of that, we couldn't just let lose with the AOE in those situations.

Fighting a Rare for a world Quest. Vengeance DH and a Holy Pally.
Me: "Oh my God, I am tired of pulling punches for these fucking Horde. They are cleaving the shit out of me."
Kyle: "Stop pulling punches then, I'm not healing you until then."
Me: "There's a Bear Tank and I don't want to start a brawl."
Kyle: "That Druid is 106." (There was so much bullshit going on, I couldn't even target said Druid).
: Down to 50% HP:
Me: "Man.. fuck it."
:Soul Cleave, Sigil of Flame, Immolation Aura, FEL DEVASTATION:
:Kyle starts throwing his AOEs:
:HK Scout x4, All eleventy billion of the Horde Hunters pets die and he takes off running:
Me: Hey Kyle, looks like they..... Kyle... looks like they... WEREN'T PREPARED."
Kyle: ::Groan:: "Oh yea, that Druid was 110."
Me: "Ha! You asshole... I recommend we port now before the Royal Rumble starts."

[Edi]

Your party is becoming conditioned to fight like a bunch of genuine, true-blue American heroes.

That is to say, with overwhelming up-front firepower and a great deal of reliance on dumb luck.

If you want to make that exploitable, you probably can.

The problem here being, these guys plan their shit out. They actually had both a good plan and the firepower to take the bad guys on in a stand-up fight with about an even or slightly better chance of coming out on top but with heavy losses. Then the bad guy's minions and guards fuck up like no tomorrow (and they didn't have one because of it) so they get the drop on the biggest heavyweight and then come down like the wrath of the gods.

More often than not they always had a plan and likewise more often than not the dice also rolled their way. Note that I was the one to roll the NPC stuff almost every time except when I asked them, so the players were only responsible for their own successes. Those were epic enough several times.

Every time I tried to exploit anything, it usually blew up in my face. Player 1 getting the dragon being one of the best of those, but not nearly the only one.

A bad guy with that much power and threat should also have enough foresight to have things like alarm spells and contingency plans.

That. But also, and one DM I RPed with was really good at these sort of details: even bad guys need servants. Make those servants children or Fair Young Maidens.™ Some well treated servants, some little more than slaves. The best was a "Conan" style sub-plot where some mid-ranking nobles daughter was "kidnapped" by the "big bad" and we were offered a sizeable amount of gold to return her safely. So we waste the bad Necromancer and rescue the fair maiden. Shelly immediately goes in to woo the damsel, and she stabs his Bard 2-3 times before my Paladin could intervene.

Either way, because of that, we couldn't just let lose with the AOE in those situations.

Oh, there were contingencies, failsafes, fallback options, boltholes, the goddamn works. The problem is that I was not going to cheat on the dice and usually when the chips were down, they pulled yet another rabbit out of the hat. Usually one that was armed with a bazooka and a bad attitude and the results were typically predictable after that.

It made for some great storytelling in the end. I don't regret it turning out the way it did, but the sheer number of critical success vs critical failures on the opponents' part was unreal. It also had the inadvertent effect of turning a party of obscure adventurers into something that ended up determining the fates of several different kingdoms, finally vanquishing the greatest evil the world had seen in thousands of years, helping lift some ancient curses that had the potential to ignite another continent-spanning war and sundry other things. All told they fair and square earned a reputation that made a good number of legendary individuals with demigod-like powers regard them as people who it was not safe to cross. They also had a knack for making allies of these same powerful beings.

The concept of the campaign when I formulated it 20 years ago was one of a confrontation of ancient forces of evil and the various remnants of its enemies igniting again with the reemergence of certain artifacts and the player (it started out as a solo campaign) being a pivotal figure in the story or growing into one. And holy crap did she fulfill those expectations and then some!

The campaign was on hiatus for a bit over 10 years and when it restarted the second player was my friend's husband. His char went from an obscure minor noble who wanted to hire some mercenaries (some of Player 1's NPC companions who he knew from some years back when they had been on a campaign together) to the leader of the party by decision of Player 1's character (eccentric to say the least in some respects) and ended up the ruler of a sizable realm they took by force from the bad guys.

[Simon_Jester]

Eh, my thought was more that when you have a group that is frighteningly, profoundly good at shooting first and asking questions later, it's not hard to create situations where they wind up regretting having pulled the trigger first. Of course, a SMART group asks its questions before it even gets to the battle, and knows when to shoot immediately, so that may be in play here.

[Edi]

Eh, my thought was more that when you have a group that is frighteningly, profoundly good at shooting first and asking questions later, it's not hard to create situations where they wind up regretting having pulled the trigger first. Of course, a SMART group asks its questions before it even gets to the battle, and knows when to shoot immediately, so that may be in play here.

Oh yes. An example of the first type of situation:

AD&D campaign, and a party of six adventurers: A mage, a ranger, two fighters, a cleric and a thief.

The party is investigating some monster raids in an area that is commercially important. They eventually find their way into a large but well hidden cave network and sneak all the way close to a sort of main meeting chamber of the lair complex. There's a couple of hundred orcs, a couple of dozen ogres, a handful of stone giants and some other beings they are unable to identify at a distance. I drop some heavy hints about just how serious this is and then I ask them what they want to do. The idea being that anyone with an ounce of self-preservation hightails it right the fuck out of there so they can come back with a proper army.

Mage: I cast fireball!

It went south from there VERY quickly.

[TheFeniX]

Clever, knowledgeable, or downright lucky players are hard to deal with. When you combine all three, it kind of becomes a nightmare as a DM at times. I'm not knocking your DM style at all because I've dealt with a lot of the same shit. Best laid plans and all that.

And DnD has no system to really save your ass here. Shadowrun and the Threat Rating does. So does Star Wars with the whole "Calling on the Dark Side." Fuck, during this epic battle, the untrained Jedi rolled just.... everything awesome and the Sith he was fighting failed miserably every roll, even burning Force Points. Funny how that "Heroic Escape" got turned on me in a few die-rolls.

This was one of the reasons I quit DnD 2.0: Mages were just so hard to balance when other player classes are involved. It ends up being "The Mage Show" without some serious shenanigans going on. You deal with many other classes by throwing more and better geared mobs at them. The same tactics against a party with a Mage just makes that an easy XP farm without throwing enemy wizards into the mix. Then the players might become the XP farm. God forbid someone is actually an Invoker. Sure, Conjurers and Nercomancers tend to become more powerful in general, but at least those fights tend to be interesting.

Shadowrun Mages are just as bad. But since you're usually running against Megacorps with nearly infinite money and many Mages like money: they tend to hire the best Mages.

One from me: Bad Guy is escaping on a chopper. We've "rescued" our extraction target, so Bad Dood™ is getting away with only his life and our payday (long story). The Sammies bullets bounce off his bullet barrier and the chopper armor absorbs what got through. So, I pop into the Astral and fly into the chopper. Except whoops, Astral Barrier. But I'm an Initiate and burn some Karma (just to be safe, end of the adventure anyways) and make it through with little difficulty. Then I throw a Powerball through the Bullet Barrier focus.

It didn't kill him or the pilot, but it's a physical spell, and helicopter interiors aren't known for being all that "solid." So, it wrecks every piece of electronics, all the controls, and the heli goes plummeting out of the sky, hits the ground, and explodes into a ball of flame.

[Edi]

I ditched D&D systems long ago for several reasons. 2nd Edition AD&D was the last one I used. The system I was using for that campaign was DragonQuest, the old SPI game system in its reworked 2nd Edition that you can find on Yahoo Groups. I have all three editions (the 1st and 2nd Edition SPI and the TSR 3rd Edition) and 2nd Ed is the definitive.

In that system very high power mages are ridiculous in terms of what they can do. The problem is that getting a mage to even an all across the board journeyman is HARD and takes a ton of XP that will have an equivalent warrior character built up to max skill in all the weapons he uses plus a ton of ranks in other skills. Physical stats do not change unless you use substantial XP on upgrading them too and the combat system is involved but critical hits are brutal (bypass armor and fatigue and go straight to Endurance, which is a Bad Thing).

Toward the end of the campaign, there was a good number of Ridiculously Powerful Mages (the dragonlords, both ally and enemy) throwing stuff around, but mostly superior planning was what carried the day and my players had a habit of coming up with plans that foiled the enemy at every turn. Usually they were sneaky enough to plan to put themselves in a good position and lucky and skilled enough to actually get there so that when they sprang something, the enemy took so long to get their bearings they were either dead or had to run by the time they could react. The few times they fought before they ran, they usually got mauled due to the lopsided critical success/failure rolls, so they learned to run early and often.

These days we usually use a simplified D20 system that can fit on two pages of A4 and works like a charm. It's something Player 1 scribbled down some years ago in less than 20 minutes and it's flexible enough to cover damn near anything (may need campaign specific house rules for some aspects such as magic, but those aren't overly complex to put down either). There's something to be said for a rulebook that even in a vastly extended edition fits into 10 pages. It also allows for epic levels of play but at the same time the system is pretty deadly. When an ordinary person gets hit with a sword by a trained warrior (or shot at with firearms or laser weapons or anything else like that), they usually die or are severely maimed. Heroes don't fare much better usually unless they can mitigate things with something (dodge the blow, parry, evade or whatever).

The advantages of this system are that it is simple, fast, flexible and makes for great cinematic roleplaying where you can have both epic successes and epic failures and where you can also due to a quirky luck system sometimes turn epic failures into unexpected boons and critical successes into an unexpected setbacks with far-reaching consequences. I can ask her if she minds me posting it online but I certainly won't do it without permission. I'll have to post a few stories from the couple of campaigns we have running using it (one sci-fi, one fantasy).