Let’s face it: 2016 has been a pretty crappy year. From the celebrity deaths to the presidential election, there weren’t many high points to reflect on. But fear not: we here at Saving Throw have put together some of the best moments from this past year to pick up your spirits! So sit back, relax, and enjoy the best Saving Throw RPG moments of 2016!
Gaurav Gulati (Never Tell Me the Odds, The Lost Brigade, Roll for Shoes)
My favorite RPG moment of 2016 will probably make me sound like complete asshole, but… it was the first time during a game I was playing that someone started crying.
Let me set the stage: we’re playing Fantasy Flight’s Star Wars RPG, and are delving deep into a hellish prison planet known as The Pit. We were all recruited by Merce Leck (played by the wonderful Amy Vorpahl) to rescue his secret wife Tamaya, as well as a long lost Jedi who was kept in the deepest part of the prison.
We finally find Tamaya, and she’s being held hostage by the mad warden of the prison. Merce and our team manage to defeat the Warden and save Tamaya, as well as the missing Jedi named Iron Gan. Everything seems hunky dory until Iron Gan begins monologuing… it seems all that time in the prison has turned him a little bit crazy. Not only that, but he was apparently on a planet that Merce had “purged” with the Empire. Darkness took him over, and first he killed the warden by decapitating him with his lightsaber. And then he turned his attention to Merce… and cut him in half in front of all of us.
This took us ALL by surprise, most of all Amy, who was half in tears and half laughing because she didn’t quite know how to react. I don’t think David quite expected that reaction either, but that’s always how it goes, right? The unexpected moments in RPGs are the ones you never forget, and that one will be in my mind for a long time.
Nick Levy (Shadowrun)
Playing an angel in service to the Word of Purity in a game of In Nomine [ed: not on stream]. My team defeated a powerful demon seneschal serving Addiction and were in the process of destroying its anchor (a giant multi user hookah). My angel, Cluriel, shifted to the celestial realm to watch the demon be destroyed. It summoned the last of its power and attacked me, stripping Cluriel of a Force (roughly equivalent to losing a level). It hurt, but the satisfaction of watching an enemy of Purity be shredded for eternity was worth it.
Meghan Caves-Callarman (Black Bag, Roll for Shoes)
My favorite moment is the “intercepted high five” from the first Roll 4 Shoes game we ever played on the channel. It was one of those times when the dice behaved just as you’d want them to!
David Crennen (Never Tell Me the Odds)
My best moment of 2016 is the rousing, spontaneous Sea Shanty that the players started singing at the end of the our 7th Sea game.
Traycee King (The Lost Brigade)
Dayl Clawthorne (my character on Barky’s Brigade) butt raped a dude with her sword because she thought HE was raping the girl tied to his bed. Apparently, the girl liked being tied up so it was a very confusing situation.
Jordan Caves-Callarman (Black Bag, Roll for Shoes)
Observe: almost 20 entire minutes dedicated to the feasibility of flicking a match at a man covered in strange fruit pulp, in the hopes that he would be immediately immolated. This was one of the first things I watched on Saving Throw, and it remains one of the most entertaining for me.
And it was made all the better when he later revealed his character had retractable claws that ENTIRE TIME.
Michael Holmes (Phoenix Dawn Command, Never Tell Me the Odds)
This is the single best roll I’ve ever had in an RPG. And I mean, like over my entire gaming career.
I was SUPER stoked to be able to join the NTMTO crew for a Friday night game, the same day I was let go from my job of two years. I was in a weird headspace, and an escape to hyperspace was just what the doctor ordered.
So I showed up, Amy V. brought pizza (and let me say, it was an honor and a privilege to be seated next to her), and we were off to the races. Well, kinda. I botched ALL of my piloting rolls trying to get us out of a super-heated plasma storm with plasma dragons chasing us, and we eventually limped to a safe place a few parsecs away.
Suffice to say: I definitely had to redeem myself.
The game went on, the macguffin was found, and the foil to our plans blew a hole in a derelict Star Destroyer, with the danger of getting sucked in to the vacuum of space a VERY real possibility.
My turn came. I knew I had one chance to make this count. Boosts, difficulty, and skills were all tallied. I was rolling a FISTFUL of colored polyhedrons, and this could go colossally badly. After the results were examined, all of the threat and advantage cancelled each other out until only a SINGLE TRIUMPH remained. And that felt god dang good.
But the EXTRA TRIUMPH one of our players bought me? Allowed me to save the day, the lives of the crew, and look damn cool doing it.
HUGE thanks to Gaurav, David, Teline, Amy V., and Dom for letting me come prove my worth in a galaxy far, far way.
Teline Guerra (Never Tell Me the Odds, Miss Adventures, Roll for Shoes)
It is hard to choose just one moment. I have made many memories with Saving Throw that I treasure: worshiping the great god Kroger; A.R. Oomba; every second of Miss Adventures. But there is one particular moment (or series of moments) that I am particularly fond of.
The place: Granga’s Gambles. The bizarre group of adventures, led by General Jan Dodonna in a fake mustache, had just disembarked into this garish, tacky, pleasure palace. Root, the lost Ewok, is never really sure what is happening. The whole universe confuses her, and the way she explains this all to herself is superstitious and barely good enough to help her cope. She is riding her baby Rancor Yerp into this flashing, strange-smelling morass.
Some security guards spot her and hustle her off to an arena where terrible creatures fight to the death to amuse crowds of equally terrible gamblers.
But the moment Root set foot in that arena, she achieved clarity. Here was a place where things were simple. A thing comes in; kill it or be killed. The smell is familiar: the metallic tang of blood. The feeling is familiar: complete confidence.
Root is physically weak, but clever. Yerp is immensely strong but too young to act independently. Root was always mentally tough and ready to face whatever came, but this was the first time she had the brawn to back it up.
The way David set it up, I faced three opponents of increasing difficulty, and I would get one roll for each. I know that you should never tell me the odds, but those dice rolls, the odds were stacked harder and harder against me.
Have you ever had one of those moments when you felt like something was so right, it had to happen that way? There was never a moment in that fight that I ever had any doubt that I would crush those rolls. And I did.
As Root and Yerp ate the heart of their last victim, suddenly the lights went out and people fled, and Root was dropped back into her regular life, where she relied on a chubby space angel and a murder god/droid to get her someplace that she wasn’t sure she’d ever find. But for a while, everything was clear. For a moment, Root was able to be fully Root. It was bloody and violent, but to me, it was beautiful.
Michelle Otis (Black Bag)
Ben’s [ed: fellow Black Bagger Ben Dunn] character Terry is trying to save a bunch of people from three hitmen, who are firing rounds into a Denny’s… but just winds up holding a headless corpse.
Mac Beauvais (Phoenix Dawn Command, Roll for Shoes)
When we were playing Roll for Shoes during the 24-hour stream, I ended up playing a lady with a rather resourceful beard. Unfortunately, I also later managed to accidentally catch my beard on fire and blow off my hand before being bayoneted. However, instead of extinguishing the fire, I pulled myself further on the bayonet and set the bad guy on fire with my beard thus earning the skill Flaming Death Beard. Achievement unlocked.
