Kaymyth

Cable company issued or home-built?

What, you mean you aren't all three immortal cyborgs who scoff as us mere humans who require such mundane things as sleep?

Because GIR is the best character ever in the history of the universe? (Can I be a mongoose dog?)

You won't be innocent anymore by the time the movie's done.

There's a reason why "it seemed like a good idea at the time" is often referred to as "Famous last words."

Would anyone like to read a true story? And then get the opportunity to reply with other awesome true stories? Go here! http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/53056-true-story/

We all have them - those stories of things that happened to us, or of things that we did, that are just so good that they must be told. Many of them are funny, but some might be creepy or poignant. But they're all true, because truth is often stranger than fiction. A lot of them might feature such phrases as, "No crem, there I was, when..." So here is where to tell those stories. All I ask is that we all tell stuff that's true and (obviously) keep it to the Shard's preferred cleanliness level. I shall start! Hi, my name is Rosemary, and I play Dungeons and Dragons. And other RPGs. This is certainly not unique to the forum. But I have this pair of friends, we'll call them the Fabulous Monster and the Druid (for these are monikers that they would embrace without revealing their identity to random internet people), who like to co-DM games. Their games are typically awesome, and my circle of friends gets excited when they get ideas for a new one. Back a few years ago, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, Gary Gygax, passed away. The FM and the Druid decided that to honor his passing and his contributions to nerdkind, they were going to run an all-day Gygaxian Grinder event. See, there was this gloriously terrible cartoon in the 80's called Dungeons and Dragons that was loosely based on the game, featuring a group of kids who got sucked into a D&D world and saddled with character classes. We all grew up watching it, of course, so we look back on it with +3 Goggles of Nostalgia. And our illustrious DMs took those characters and made character sheets and said, "Hey, you're going to play these characters! As people get tired of playing, they can swap out and someone else can pick up the character. And here are a few extra ones we made up of a few different classes, just to keep things interesting." The Fabulous Monster ran the plot and main bad guys, while the Druid jumped in for various other NPCs, including Uni the baby unicorn. (Playing Uni mostly involves wandering into danger and saying, "Meh!" a lot, so it wasn't a very interesting part for a player.) I wound up playing a character named Presto most of the day. Presto is a nerdy teenaged mage-boy whose spells rarely work correctly. In the show, he'd generally chant a couple of rhyming lines and his magic would go haywire, or sputter out completely, as the plot demanded. As is often the case in RP, it hardly mattered that I don't match his gender; what did matter is that I demonstrated a prodigious talent for coming up with rhyming doggerel on the fly. The DMs had come up with a system to figure out when and how Presto's spells worked or didn't work. I declared what spell I was trying to cast, and spat out a rhyme (the worse the better). The Druid then rolled a die. Roll too low, and the spell fails. Roll in the middle, and it goes off as normal (but what fun is that?). Roll too high - and things get interesting. And by interesting, I mean it in the Wash from Firefly/Serenity sense of the word. We played through a few modules without anything terrible happening. (Unless you count me summoning a human-sized hot dog to make Billy stop whining about being hungry as terrible. Which you might, because who knows what they put in those things.) We also picked up a non-canon sorcerer character who annoyed the crap out of poor Presto because the little jerk's spells worked perfectly. It was very upsetting (for Presto; everyone else was just happy to have someone who could do magic without risking the creation of giant predator-attracting globs of mystery meat). Then we got to an episode where we had to go through a heavily trapped dungeon. We were several rooms in before we realized our first mistake: nobody had thought to play the thief character this episode, so we had nobody capable of disarming traps. Oops. Well, there was nothing for it but to keep going, we figured. There were six of us; I remember myself and the sorcerer specifically, and there were at least a couple full-on fighter types. But nobody who had the slightest idea how to get through the place safely. Eventually, we came to a large room that was filled with a very fine-grain sand. After some testing and measurements, we determined that the sand was 10 feet deep and any of us trying to walk across it would immediately sink down and suffocate. The annoying sorcerer kid was showing off with his actual magic that works by using the Flight spell to try and examine the room when I got an Idea. (Word to the wise, when I get Ideas with a capital 'i', it's probably a good opportunity to just run far, far away. You'll see why soon.) I figured, Presto's a teenaged nerd. It's not inconceivable that he'd know certain scientific and industrial uses for sand. Certainly before we were all dumped into D&D Land he was the kid reading ahead in the science textbook in class. So I declared my intent to the DMs, and spoke: I'm either stupid or have <bleeps> of brass, But I'm gonna melt this sand into glass! The Fabulous Monster proceeded to dissolve into helpless laughter, and the Druid quietly facepalmed. I didn't understand why; it was a perfectly reasonable trick for a disgruntled 14-year-old who thinks he's way smarter than he is to try. I was going for an Aganazzar's Scorcher, a line of fire that would melt a nice, neat little bridge of glass across the room, allowing us all to cross to safety. And if that annoying little sorcerer twit got a bit singed, well, then that was just a bit of righteous vengeance to add to Presto's burning need to prove himself. FM managed to catch her breath while the Druid rolled for the actual magical effect. He rolled high. Instead of the Aganazzar's Scorcher I wanted, I instead got an Empowered Fireball. (For those of you who don't know D&D spells, that's like a giant ball of fire, only with +1/2 the firepower.) This...is most emphatically NOT a spell that anyone wants to cast in an enclosed space. But it gets better. Because at this point, the Fabulous Monster has melted into a puddle of gasping, sobbing laughter, even more intense than before. She just lay there, hanging halfway out of her chair, completely unable to speak or even breathe for a full two minutes. The Druid was laughing, too, though a bit more resignedly, and the rest of us were just caught up in the infectiousness that humor has, not really knowing quite why we're laughing, but figuring we're going to get the joke sooner or later. And indeed we did, for finally the Fabulous Monster pulled herself together long enough to say, "It's not sand! It's... It was several minutes after that before anyone was able to breathe again. The sorcerer was completely incinerated. Another character who'd been too close to the blast radius was also fried. And me - poor little Presto, standing in the doorway to the room - was in the path of the blast. Now, in D&D, when getting hit by a fireball you can roll a reflex save to take half damage. Also in D&D, there is this thing called a "Natural 20" that means when you roll a 20-sided dice, it lands on the 20 itself. This is a critical success, and is usually accompanied by sunshine and rainbows and unicorn farts and wild amazingness. Yes, you see where this is going. I rolled a natural 20 on my fireball reflex save. This, in fact, did not save Presto's life. Rather, instead of being incinerated like my sorcerer nemesis, I was instead picked up by the blast radius and flung 50 feet down the hallway and crushed against a far wall. A rather appropriate cartoony death, I think. Now, it's important to note here that the party actually did have access to Resurrection spells. But while all of the players agreed that it was one of the funniest mass party deaths ever to grace the annals of gaming, the characters were rather upset. So instead of resurrecting Presto they stuck his poor corpse into a Bag of Holding to cart around for a while until they came across a situation where they absolutely needed a mage. So I got to take a nice little episode break before they decided that they needed me again. In the end, we faced the Five-Headed Dragon Tiamat, and several died. But not Presto. He saw a chance to abandon the lost and jump the portal home and took it. And with any luck, he never had the opportunity to touch another magic spell again, because dang that kid is incompetent. And that is the story of the most epic gaming fail that I have ever had the pleasure to witness, let alone create. The moral is: don't try to outsmart your DMs. It will end in tears. And possibly fiery death. Though it does make for a great story.

*snort* I'm not sure how long it's going to be before I can see/hear that name without snickering. Ahh, living up to the new adjective, I see.

The problem there lies in the fact that...(Shadows spoilers)

You win Best Autocorrect for the day.

Actually, I believe that I read a bit where he admitted to doing it by accident and then found it quite amusing that he'd just invented a world in which foil hats were a genuine protection against mental manipulation.

It's just a joke, referring to the fact that JordanCon has an entire Sanderson track in its programming lineup (and Brandon's a guest almost every year). I've heard stories of people in Mistborn cosplay flinging pennies down empty hallways and such. Mostly I'm just surprised that there aren't more Sharders who go to this con, because it sounds like they're more or less Our People. Also, there's this, where I pulled the "Song of our people" joke from, though this may not be the origin. Maybe. I'm sure we'll wreak a little mayhem. It'll be good times. Except raspberry. Natural raspberry tastes like candy, which is kind of disgusting coming from a fruit.

I believe that we have a WoB out there that says aluminum has sort of an area of effect mucking-with-allomancy thing going on. I'm sorry, I'm really good at remembering having read them but really terrible at finding them again. (It doesn't help that I'm at work right now and can't really search too hard.)

For surviving a Highstorm.

Oddly enough, I think that's one of the minority of Discworld books I haven't gotten around to reading yet. I haven't posted a full version of it anywhere else, but I may have gotten into my personal universe headcanon a bit on the Religions thread or my AMA. (I've never posted in any of the Question threads. I've never even read any of the Reckoners RP threads. I find it amusing that people keep forgetting that I'm not a part of that madness. The pony avatar must keep confusing y'all.)

Yes. Yes, you should. Though even I will admit that Discworld is best taken in rationed doses; I'm not sure how much of that stuff someone could binge-read and still maintain their sanity. Even if it isn't, the comments are comedy gold. Well, folks, I've bought my JordanCon membership and my plane ticket to Atlanta. In April, I shall be going to the place where they Sing the Song of our People.

Discworld fae-kind. They're tiny blue Scottish fairies who were kicked out of Fairyland for being too rowdy. They think they're dead and in heaven. Lots of shenanigans are involved. It's from Pratchett's young adult Tiffany Aching books.

Well, these are the more normal gaming friends, the folks I know from college. It's the other group of friends that do stuff like run day-long grinder campaigns featuring such characters as the kids from the old 1980s Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, or Nac Mac Feegles.

You get your very own Wikipedia article! *inserts a pile of crayons and a set of metalminds*

I should get the Reckoners trilogy for my Kindle this week. I have a friend who's going to be running a game in that world next month. Though apparently we'll all be playing Reckoners, and not doing crazy things like deliberately going out and trying to destroy Oregon.

The vending machine makes a horrific gurgling noise and spits her back out at you. *inserts a batch of brownie mix to mollify the poor offended vending machine*

Does...does this really not exist yet? Well, here it is! Talk about Deadpool here! I've seen it twice so far, and...ye gods. This is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen. (This probably speaks highly impolitely of my sense of humor's maturity level.) I loved Ryan Reynolds, I loved Morena Baccarin, I loved the additions of Colossus and Negasonic Teenaged Warhead, and I loved the fourth wall breaks. What I didn't love was hearing about all the people who keep bringing their kids to this thing. I've been fortunate in that both theaters I saw it in were populated by adults, but I found out today that one of my coworkers took her 10-year-old son. No! Just...no! Why would you DO that?

Someone with...super fluffy woo-woo abilities. I probably delved a bit too much into stuff already for this thread. I'm kind of hip-deep in Weird Crap, and I doubt that most of y'all really want to hear the crazy. Said someone deserves accolades.

Good gods, if I had a nickel for every time I've thought that at my mom...or most of the other females on that side of the family. What's funny is that they all recognize it in each other but not in themselves. Me, I recognized the insidious weed of passive-aggression for what it was when I was in my early twenties. I ripped and tore and burned it out. It always tries to grow back, but I know to watch for the signs and get out the flamethrower again. But I live in fear of the day that I lose my self-awareness and it slowly takes me over like some sort of monstrous, creeping, cancer-beast. I get where you're coming from this, I do. But...no. There is no excuse for emotionally and psychologically abusing your children. Yeah, she read it in a book somewhere - but at some point you have to take responsibility for your own actions. She has not. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but this is a very sensitive subject for me. You just can't do the things that woman has done and still be allowed to call yourself a parent.

Hooray!