1971 Critical Failure.

Lol well that’s pretty much what I expected to happen.

Isn’t Table Top RPG normally you know, played at a table?

Some DMs do mental maps, to prevent clutter and better serve immersion through imagination. Works for some, not for others.

It’s out of frame because I don’t want to draw it.

Thank you for leaving it out. The last panel, is, in my well educated and arrogant opinion; Perfect.
That is the least competent, least coheasive, most mismatched, batch of bumbling neo-Tyros …. Sorry, ran out of words….
I was so busy laughing so hard that the dog got up, then left the room.

This sounds about as bad as my first role-play experience. We were playing Star Wars, and I was a smuggler. My roommates played bounty hunters and turned me in to the Hutts the first chance they could. My first character ever died in the first hour of playing.

Ouch, that sucks! Although I have actually done this to other players before, I wouldn’t do it to a newcomer…

Mind you, my first ever character didn’t fare much better. My first game was Call of Cthulhu. I spent an hour creating my character, only to be murdered walking out of my front door as a warning to the other characters. Worst thing is, it didn’t even serve that purpose since I hadn’t actually MET any of them yet!

Avoid Traveler 2000, then… You can literally die in the middle of Character Creation.

Original Traveller as well – it was all part of the fun of random character creation – come on you can reenlist, just one more roll, oops you died in a supernova while on manoeuvres.

It was a handy way of disposing of characters life was not kind to. More than one I head the happy cry of “he’s dead!” from the next room.

That reminds me of my first Origins convention table playing starwars.
Firefight,”Eeveryone get behind the Wookee” [Wookee falls down] “what the heck?” [lots of swearing in sherwook, which the driod vehemently refuses to translate, followed by I’m the engineer you idiots]

This was where cinematic sequences were encouraged as part of the game play and before the rules rewrite handed down by Lucas had killed the system playablity on top of the incompetence of the administration at that time.

Reminds me of my first time on an old text-based online game. Set in the Wing Commander video game universe. I waited for over a week to manage to log on at the same time as the guy who invited me, so I could get off the starting planet which had nothing happening. Finally caught him online just as I was about to head off for the night, and was able to quickly jump on his ship before logging off. Logged on the next morning to find out I was dead, because he’d decided to go try to run a blockade with my character still asleep on his ship. So, that was fun.

It worked out alright in the end, as I decided to try again and my next character was more interesting, never again got on that friend’s ship *cough*, and ended up a minor in-game legend, wealthy trade magnate with a private fleet, and even became Senator and then President of the Confederation at one point.

I’m guessing that they didn’t even leave the inn. They’re in the kitchen, fighting a kitchen ghoul (or just a very angry chef) and getting in each others’ way.

that brought this to mind….. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhCpMbXw9yU

oh just on a side thought I think I found my future wife…. (look up janine melnitz fanart)

Maybe Jess + Edd were sparring with swords, + then Jess- mistakenly cut off Edd’s hand, and then Jess knocked Mike into a nearby, barbecue roasting station, or something.
( Man. that was too much fun to write!) :D

I choose to believe two things about this.

First, that Mike joked that he was going to get fired while standing too close to the fireplace.

Second, that at some point Ed said “unhand me” to Jess ….

Heh, heh!
That gives the term, “hands off”, a whole new meaning. :)

Yeah — and worse yet this may lead to a face off!
????

Hee hee hee!
British drinkers will warn him not to get “legless”.

Speaking of fights in the kitchen, I once was in a game where the party (sans my character, who was asleep) fought a calzone golem.

I, …I dont know if I can make up my mind to find that scary or savory? Is it terrifying or thrilling? If you chop off an arm, do your u burn it? Or eat it, guessing that it won’t reanimate?
I’ve decided it’s scary and I won’t risk the heart burn.

A motto: “U.S. Army mess cooks! DEATH from within!”
;D

Reminds me of Maxim 23

The company mess and friendly fire should be easier to tell apar

:D

Oh that is a new one.
In a long running horror by gaslight campaign my characters have fought off a Cheese Golem in Michigan, a Beer Elemental in Michigan, Dill Pickled Zombies in northern Europe that were created to fight Vampires, Animated Honey by a type of Lich just outside London and a Giant Pudding in London proper.

Undead Gordon Ramsay?

If he’s less annoying than the REAL Gordon Ramsey, then I’m all for him! :)

god dammit Jess XD

you’re right about not going into details about how it happened
we don’t need to know, it’s better left to our imagination, that’s how D&D works ^^

Hmm half elf half dwarf hand cutting on meeting. Sounds like a round of drunken knife juggling on a dare and one errant firebolt reaction roasting the polishing dwarf.

The trauma on Jo”s face xD

so in this version the table didn’t die when it laughed….

Laughed WAAAAAAAAY harder than I should have. I don’t even regret it.
“You cut off my hand!”
“I didn’t MEAN to!”

I seriously hope this webcomic keeps going forever.

“If I had a lot more time I would write out the entire series of events that led to this series of events”

Just for me, it’s a great wham panel.

Readers’ imagination may be more effective than actual detail. Everyone has their own catastrophe nightmares to draw on.

(Bad copyedit. I left out the part where I literally said “You chose right”.)

Lets put this down as another iteration of “The Noodle Incident” and leave it at that XD

Tabletop at its finest

Sometimes the best times come from bizarre character interactions.

My last game, I was a misanthropic, alcoholic, whoremongering blacksmith who developed magical powers as a way to build better weapons to kill bandits. He had stories and he was not afraid to tell them. Usually they involved random events, but the GM took the opportunity to introduce us to a set of harpies, one of whom worked for a brothel my blacksmith frequented. He didn’t TELL me about this, of course, so I just spun off a different story and turned her into “Three Copper, the cheapest and best harpy whore in Riddleport.” She was called that, of course, because that was all the Common she knew at the time, and everyone thought it was her name. I am not too proud to admit that that was modified from a book by John Steakley.

This game, I’m an insane gnome who believes he’s the King Under the Mountain, which right now is part of the area’s sewer system. He’s frantically trying to recruit people to come live there and make it a real kingdom, as right now, the only occupants are a family of moles, himself, and “the Queen Mum,” which is a cloth hand puppet he regularly talks to, and who talks back to him.

I want to believe Jess felt that waving her sword to fan off the flames would be an appropriate way to put out the fire, but Ed’s hand was unfortunately in the way. Fire was obviously due to mutton flambe special.

I’ve always loved “The Spaghetti Incident” as a trope.

And this may very well be my new favorite incarnation of it.

Yup, that sounds like a newbie game. ;)

In my case, in my second game session I started a bar brawl that resulted in half the town burning down.

HA! I love this page AND the stories in the comments. You did GREAT, Jackie! :D

Ah yes. Eventually every party must confront its greatest nemesis… the crippling incompetence of its members.

For what it’s worth, this page works very well. There’s something inherently funny about a direct cut from the cautious start to utter chaos. I’m sure there’s a trope name for this comedic device, but haven’t been able to identify it. At any rate, had me smiling all morning.

Bullet points from Yesterdays session:
-Bard crit failed performance with his god
-Blew up a Ranger’s house
-Druid Beastformed into a 30 foot Turtle
-Seduced a Dryad
-Formed an Alliance to rule two countries

So this comic makes tons of sense

Sad but true confession. This is exactly how my first experience with tabletop rpgs went and it was hilarious, I was in eds position cause our archer kept shooting me in the back when they failed their rolls constantly and I kept accidentally killing guys I was trying to knock out to capture and interrogate by rolling crits every time.

This is pretty much what happens sometimes when troubleshooting a group that’s kinda green. It’s also a reason I have started going over group expectations beforehand, and in medias res starts. So they have a situation to resolve, and the “What do you want to do?” question isn’t paralyzingly open-ended. Priorities exist.

“What CAN I do?”
“Anything you want.”

At this point, we all knew they were doomed.

Twenty minutes? Wow, their group is much faster than anyone I’ve played in. The results are the same, they just get there a lot faster. We’d still be describing ourselves and saying hello.

That must’ve been one hell of a bar fight.

This reminds me of my first game where my Warlock (at time was level 3 now level six) to save his travelling companions from the evil captain whose boat we ended up on (giving his companions time to get off the ship) used eldritch blast (my character’s most powerful attack) on himself (DM allowed this as I was needing to leave game) lit ship on fire as well as the enemies surrounding him (DM was also the DM in the next sessions game so when introducing my character said “popping in out of puff of what smells like wood smoke my warlock”)

Good call jumping straight to Ed’s character losing a hand. I don’t even want to know how they got there, it’s too funny.

It took them 20 minutes to have party casualties…. They’re doing pretty darn good so far considering!

No, no, this comic timing is *perfect*, as is. The sequence is quite likely hilarious, but barring playing it in fast motion with Yakety Sax in the background, then the jump works better. Also, kudos for Jess managing to look guileless even for a moment! Who’d’a thunk it?

This is exactly how almost all campaigns I start in a tavern develop. Somehow they first start drinking, and it all goes downhill from there.

Not only was it a fantastic choice to have a “jump cut” as it were, without explanation, but the kicker is that it was only 20 minutes later. Amazing stuff!