As the title says, I want to hear some of your stories about your fellow gamers (either as players or teammates) that you thought wouldn’t make the cut, but blew you away in the end. These are people that you may have tolerated joining your game because they were a friend of a friend, but they proved themselves to be an asset you never knew you were living without, heh.
So, to be fair, I will start… and first a little backstory.
Last year I was running a Shadowrun game for a group of my friends at their game shop when one of their daughters started hanging out around the table. The game was a mix of mirror-shades and pink Mohawk in varying degrees (one of my players played a ork street sam that believed a rocket launcher was essential to solving most problems… even social ones). The daughter, I will call her Talia after her character, was about nine years old… and insistent on playing Shadowrun with us. We batted it back in forth, pointing out such things as it being a game with complex rules and dark subject matter (hey, I toned down a lot of the darker stuff for being in a game store, but when your runners insist that their favorite hangout is a BDSM club called the Hellhole… you can only do so much). Nothing could persuade her from her current path, and her parents (also two of my players) agreed that she could give it a try… but they would not hold her hand in any part of the game except to help understand some of the more complex rules. (To Talia’s credit, she is a very bright girl… I always believed that she is as intelligent as she is adorable).
Talia promised that she would study the rules and that by the next weekend she would have a character created for the run. “Ok”, I said, “I will find a way to jump you into the current run.” By the next weekend, she had a 14 year old elf shaman prepared and ready to go. I ran her though a quiz of sorts to make sure she understood the basic rules of the game plus the magic system, and she rattled off answers and probabilities that I had not even considered. I also suggested that she make her character a little older than 14, but she made the argument that “14 is old”… and I couldn’t help but laugh, so she character remained the same except for a few suggested tweaks rounding it out.
@-;------
The crew was in the middle of a two part run, trying to boost a yak shipment from the docks only for the shipment date/location to have been changed unexpectedly. They picked back up in the middle of doing legwork to find someone to put the squeeze on about this hic-up when one of their fixers gave them a call. Says he heard about their recent troubles and wanted to know if they could use anything… favor for a favor, of course. They consented that they could use a little more muscle for the run as they were sure that the changed shipment was due to a leak in their security, and their fixer just so happened to have someone lined up… new to town, but word has it she is very powerful for her age. Everyone agreed to it, standard contracts and fair compensation and all, and Talia entered play.
Skipping ahead… The crew had discovered a mark to squeeze, a male ork in charge of the docks that the shipment was originally going to, and they started digging. Turns out the ork worked for the Yakuza, but the technomancer blotched some rolls and couldn’t find anything else out about him besides a personal blog about his love for his pet cat. A one off joke that would come back to bit me…
Talia followed the perp on foot as he walked home one evening, her argument being that a little girl would draw less attention than a van full of runners, and she sprang her trap as he drew farther into the less populated parts of the city.
“I want to take him into an alleyway,” Talia stated.
“How?” I asked, “He is quite bigger than you, so I don’t think you can force him in there.”
“I… uh… I use con to trick him into coming with me,” she furrowed her brow in thought, “I run up to him and grab on his sleeve and I say: ‘Help me! My mother fell and isn’t getting up! Please, please… you have to help her.’”
Hmm. I mulled it over for a second and grabbed up my dice. “Give me a con check at -4. He is naturally suspicious of new people, and doesn’t quite know what to make of you. He doesn’t seem to like the idea of walking into the alleyway.”
“Ok,” she shot back with a smirk, and dice were rolled. Her 12 dice at -4… scored 6 hits to my measly 2. I started to wonder if she had loaded the dice for a second.
“Alrighty then. He seems hesitant, but some spark of humanity pushes him to follow you into the alleyway. When ya’ll get there, he starts looking around for your ‘mother’, and you can tell that he is starting to wise up. What do you do?”
“I tell him that I know who he is, and that I want to know where the shipment is. I tell him that I will beat him up if doesn’t tell me,” she stated with confidence in her voice.
I took a moment to process this. “Hmm… he doesn’t seem to be scared of you. In fact, he starts laughing. He says: ‘Listen, girly, this aint none of your business. This is stuff for grownups. Don’t you have some little dollies at home to play with?’” I replied as Talia huffed in muted anger.
After she took a moment to cool down from the button that I unknowingly pressed, she looked me dead in the eyes and said, “I want to call up my spirit from before. You said it would last until sunset and I still have two favors from it. I want it to show up behind me, looking at the guy.”
“Ok,” I said, wondering where this was going, “You hear a deep rumbling sound as a creature made of gravel and asphalt seems pull itself up from the alleyway. It takes a moment to flick a piece of litter off of its shoulder and stares at you waiting for your command. The ork stares at the creature, his eyes darting back and force between ya’ll. It is a force 6 earth spirit,” I reminded her. “What do you want to do now?”
“I turn to the guy and say: ‘Listen, tusker…” She glanced towards her mother, our crew’s technomancer, as if to check if she crossed some imaginary line, but was told to go ahead as it was only in character. “… You’re going to tell me everything you know… or else my friend here is going to eat you. Starting with your toes,’” she smiled at her own creativity. Then she smirked as a bit of earlier information entered her mind. “’Oh, and then we are going to your house for your cat… There is more than one way to skin a cat, you know.’”
I blinked. I was honestly stupefied for a minute as I was trying to figure out how I was going to play this. “Um… give me an intimidation check.” I said, knowing that intimidation was one of her characters overlooked skills. I told her to wait a moment as a checked the book. “Let’s call it a straight roll. He doesn’t know what to make of you, and he would be in serious trouble if he talked… but you just summoned a big mean thing out of nowhere… and you threatened poor Mister Fluffy.”
“Ok,” she replied, “and I’m going to use edge.” Diced were rolled, and despite defaulting on intimidation, she steamrolled my npc. A ridiculous 7 hits, rerolling 6s thanks to edge, to my horrible 1 hit. Did she weigh my dice when I wasn’t looking, too?
“’Nooo!’ The man screams as he falls to his knees, begging you not to harm Fluffy. He says he will tell you whatever you want to know.” I replied after a moment. After this point in time, I laid on her and her teammates an info dump of plot points and they continued onto their merry way… after everyone recovered from their fits of hysterical laughter, of course.
@-;------
Unfortunately, Talia only played for a few more runs before she lost interest in the game. She moved onto Pathfinder, in their living world campaign, saying she liked the setting more.
But to this day in my games… there are rumors of a powerful teenage shaman working the shadow scene… reminding the Sixth World just how scary little girls can be.
