Ok so, Guys Night is about a d20 Modern game I played in after changing cities and wanting to get back into TTRPGs. It is told as best as I can recall, since it was over 10 years ago.
Table of Contents
Chapter I: In the Beginning
Chapter II: Genesis
Chapter III: Enter the Mullet
Chapter IV: It's the End of the World as we Know It
Chapter V: You Can Fight City Hall
Chapter VI: From the Ashes
Chapter VII: New World, Old Problems
Chapter VIII: Finally, a Cave
Chapter IX: Wait a Minute...
The Adult. Red. Dragon.
Ok so, last chapter ended with Mullet and the boys in the lair of an Adult Red Dragon. Immediately Derek and Maurice freak out and start running. They have a sense of self-preservation. Does Mullet? No, Mullet is the hero of the story (at least in his own head). So Mullet steps in the hallway and assumes a defensive stance with his sword. "I'll hold it off, get out of here." All that good noble last stand cliché stuff.
Now gamer logic is in play it this point. I know the dragon can't squeeze past me because the hallway is to small. I figure with my AC and DEX saves I can hold it off long enough for the others to get a good lead on the dragon and maybe fight in the open with the Bradley. Dan, and this is speculation from me as a DM and what I would do in this situation, decides to grant the dragons abilities on the fly to prevent me from being a bad-ass hero.
Dragon in a Dungeon
First he casts Hold Person on me. I proceed to fail my Wisdom Saving Throw and now Mullet standing frozen in place for 3 rounds. He then proceeds to Shapeshift the dragon into a medium sized humanoid and squeezes past me. After passing me and entering the Slaughtertorium™, formally the makeshift surgical theater, it proceeds to breathe fire on those that could not get away fast enough.
Now at time I would like to point out that half the party took Mullet's "Get out of here" to heart and used all actions to run away. So the ones that ran got two rounds of running in before the burninating started. The slower (wounded) members took cover and started fighting for there lives. One more round and the Hold Person wears off. AJ the axe man also decides today is good day to die so he runs up and starts hacking away at the dragon. A hail of bullets rains down on the dragon doing a fair amount of damage and with its sizes doesn't put AJ in danger of being hit.
This is when the dragon casts Protection from Arrow/Bullets. This makes it damn near impervious to nonmagical range attacks. So now the most of the gunslingers are in trouble as the ones with the magic guns were the ones that ran the farthest away. Hold person now wears off at the end of its turn, Mullet enters the fight. And I'm behind it.
♫ Hello flanking my old friend, its time to Power Attack again ♫
So AJ and Mullet proceed to start working their way through its hit points. Gunfire is still happening but doing very little damage, but even the ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. The dragon swings around so it both claw and bite me while sweeping its tail at the others. And when it misses me, I get to attack it. Between the initial volley of gunfire and AJ's and Mullet's hackin' and slashin', we had carved off about 125 HP. And at this point the cowards runners decide "Hey! We can win!" and start running back to the fight.
With the reinforcements and their magic guns finally joining the fight we put the hurt on the dragon. The dragon maneuvers to get out of flanking and turns to flee back to its treasure horde room, since the other exit now has the magical gunslingers guarding it. Before it can transform to get into the tunnel, I make a Tumble check to roll between its legs and block it from escaping. Now that it can't escape, it fights to the death.
The dragon turn around again the tries to use its breath weapon again with mixed results. The wounded in cover hunker down and the gunslingers avoid the brunt of the damage. AJ scores another solid hit and Mullet... gets a crit. Rolls near max damage and I hear that most coveted of phases, "How do you want to do this."
Mullet jumps on the dragons back since it was foolish enough to turn back to him, runs up the spine and slams the point his greatsword into the back of the dragons head.
And that children, is how William "Mullet" Tracy VIII became the Legendary Dragonslayer of Phoenix. I know it took me a while to get this out and I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know in the comments if you want me to continue the story, there is a bit left that I can share. But this was one of the highlights of the game for me. Until next time.
I'm glad you were able to be badass in the end XD
Meanwhile even when I'm trying to kill the players because that's just how some npcs roll I find it much more fun to let the players have all their badass and comedic moments x_x
Yeah, sometimes the dice tell the story the way they want it told.
I finished up the arc for my Spelljammer game about 2 weeks ago, so we are currently on a break. Not sure if we will return to D&D anytime soon. Currently looking into different systems, have any recommendations?
But that's the fun of roleplaying games right XD
I've only played Shadowrun 3e (dystopian cyberpunk set in the mid future), World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness 2e (ostensibly gothic horror but I have done cutesy fluffy fun adventures with a group of Changeling the Dreaming childling characters, I am currently in the very long and slow process of modifying CoD Changing Breeds 1e and WoD Changeling the Dreaming to align better with CoD, and it's a long and slow process because it's a much lower priority than some other stuff I have going on x_x).
I really enjoyed Shadowrun, the universe is great and I thought the character creation system was great (I stole it for one of the many roleplaying systems I have written), the 3e book is a little bit jumpy from memory and it is a pretty crunchy system. Recommend purely for the universe and if you don't mind crunch.
I liked WoD a lot better purely because it was much less crunch and after I put in some hacks to streamline and speed things up and ended up ignoring most of the lore because it was somehow simultaneously all over the place and contradictory and seemed overly prescriptive at times, it became our system of choice for ages. Recommennd only if you find you like the lore (which don't get me wrong is not bad for the most part, just...a lot) or if you want to play Changeling the Dreaming in a whimsical child's pov way rather than a gothic horror way (it's doable but canonically harder with the other splats and CoD).
And I like CoD the best because it implemented most of my hacks into the system and the lore is at about the right level of deep enough and vague enough that you can do a lot with it without feeling like you have to ignore massive chunks of it otherwise it would be restrictive. Highly recommend if you like supernatural gothic horror type stuff.
Otherwise the only other thing I have is a system that I developed recently for play by post (it's a generic narrative support system so requires a lot of understanding how your group wants to play and how the universe you want to play in works, and so far seems reasonably quick to generate characters and resolve things that need to be resolved by dice. I've been focusing mostly on stress testing it while at the same time trying not to make the story I'm using seem contrived but my in-person group seem to be having fun at least (I have an in-person group playing in the Shadowrun universe and a Discord group comprised of two of my kids and a meatspace friend that hasn't managed to get off the ground yet playing a West Marches style thing in the Pokemon universe).
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