My most memorable character was from a RIFTS campaign one of my friends and I used to run. There were just two of us most nights, though this particular night we had two of the out of towners over. Now, what you must remember is that this was rifts. Where you could take all manner of the wank juice called 'martial arts'.
Now, I don't recall what level our characters were at exactly, but the GM was a bit annoyed at us. You see, we'd taken all these martial arts bonuses and stuff, only to find out later that the abilities don't stack. So we researched and researched, and found something in one of the books that made the bonuses stack. So unless we were facing something really really big, we pretty much had auto-dodge, auto-parry, and auto-strike.
So the GM was a bit annoyed at us. Roughly halfway through the current mission, he sighs as we've just cleaved our way through the ravenous zombie hordes, and the fact that I just killed the supposed 'recurring baddy' with one critical from my character (Oh, the joys of the Cyberknight class).
So he sighs, gets up, walks across the room. We're sort of looking at eachother just a bit antsy.
He comes back with the Phaseworld supplement. The one with the dreadnoughts and Space Glitterboys on the front. Opens it up, reads through a bit, then announces to us that we've found one of these in a giant open space half way down the dungeon.
Naturally, one of our lesser members thought we'd hit the jackpot. Then the GM leans over, and hits play on the tape recorder. The
Final Fantasy VI Decisive Battle theme starts playing.
And we have to fight the bloody thing. Fortunately we were rather strong in the wank force. We roll for init. My character has some gigantic bonus to init, and gets to act first.
57 attacks per round for my character, all those martial arts bonuses stacking. Except this is all so sudden. I open up a Time Hole, drag myself and the rest of my party in where we start pulling out all our gear and other ship, and prepping for the battle we just entered. Most of it is free action stuff.
I step out of the timehole armoured in all sorts of looted stuff. Two Psi-Swords blazing bright, I watch as the dreadnought unloads it's main guns.
The beams stop right before they hit me, being deflected by one of those amusing three times per day rings of wall of force (or at least the local equivalent)
Our Mage Mage acts next. Rather then cast some big spell, he leans over at the GM and whispers to him. The GM frowns, then sighs. The GM pulls out the percentile dice, and rolls.
The Mage has gotten the rolls right to summon something off the random summon tree. (Which was one of the house rules)
He gets the Vorpal Bunny. Which, being the mighty vorpal bunny starts attacking this dreadnought thing. Or rather, it will once we finish this first fifteen seconds of combat.
Third to go is our tank. He's a full conversion cyborg using naruni forcefields and crap. The guy is also reading his weapons stats straight out of the Atlantis worldbook. Pulls out some Greatest Rune Weapon that isn't a sword, and starts doing ranged attacks. He was one of the out of towners, but apparently had cred with the GM, so I didn't raise any protest when he started laying on the munch.
Then it's back to me. Rather then attack, I go and cast another spell.
Let me tell you something. In Rifts? especially at higher levels. Carpet of Adhesion is your very best friend.
My character casts Carpet of adhesion on the dreadnought. Rolls, and gets it. Congrats, the guns can't aim, and none of it's other weapons can deploy. The GM glares.
fourty some odd more attacks pass, taking up the next hour or so IRL. Finally, we've finished the first round. The Dreadnought lets off with it's main gun. liquifies the floor into molten magma, but otherwise misses us. We're all like MDC elves or some shit like that, so we just stand around in the lava like nobody's business. Lets loose with it's secondaries and scores some hits on our dudes. Our mage mage manages to defend himself, but I'm not so lucky. I think our GM fudged the rolls, but the dready gets enough crits to kill me.
The GM is quite vocal about this victory. He stands up, pushes his chair back suddenly, points at me and yellls "HA!"
I frown, but I'm dead, what can I-ohh...
I spot a line written down on the lower half of my inventory page, which is occupied by item granted buffs and other things. There's a scribbly line written in the GM's hand writing.
I slide my character sheet over to him and ask him about it. He looks at it, gets right ready to dismiss it, rolls a dice, then sighs again.
About two campaings ago (Using the same character) I had run into one of those Deck of Wonders card deck things that grant you a set of random bonuses (or sole horrible fate)
The dice had been lucky to me that day, and I had earned one free ressurection.
And never, ever used it, until today.
To tell you the truth, we never really did beat the dreadnought thing. We all had to go home after seven hours of fighting it because we'd gotten tired out, and weren't really making much of a dent. I mean the thing had HP in the hundreds of gigadamage range. Even with some of our really high level stuff, there wasn't much to do. Yes, technically if we went at it long enough, we could defeat it (heading into a timehole to sleep, yay time differential) but it would take an mindboggling amount of time to actually accomplish. So we Greater Teleport-ed out of there, and decided to just leave the dungeon alone.
The next time we got together, our GM handed us blank DnD character sheets, sat down, folded his hands like Ikari, and glared at us until we started making characters.
