#RPGaDAY2018 - DAY 9: How has a game surprised you?

Day nine of #RPGaDAY2018 asks "How has a game surprised you?"

I love it when a movie or TV series I'm watching is unpredictable. So much entertainment these days is formulaic and rehashes the same old ideas over and over again. Luckily, tabletop gaming is very unpredictable. Players can go off on a tangent and before they realise it, they've gone down a path that they were not expecting leaving the other players sitting, staring in shock.

A recent game of Tales from the Loop exposed one of our players' darker sides when they captured a teenager who had been trying to join our little gang. When he started behaving weirdly, and violent, with arcs of lightning running over his arms, we knew we were in trouble. Luckily, one character had developed an EMP device to take him out. Captured, one of our players was sure this kid had been replaced by a robot - the only way they could tell was to check for an endoskeleton...

However, the biggest surprise we've had playing was a crafty bit of planning from the GM of our Star Wars game. We'd been told we were playing Jedi during the Clone Wars, and after a few months of playing we'd been researching cool ancient Jedi artefacts, and trying to stop the influence of the Dark Side on fellow Jedi apprentices. The GM had different ideas of course. Middle of a mission to an icy planet to rescue a few Jedi who had gone missing, the twenty clone troopers escorting us received an order from Coruscant. Order 66. Now we had twenty clone trooper turning on us, blocking our way off of the planet, with a further forty descending in ships. We were doomed.

We survived, but it was a close thing, but great proof of a cool plot twist that changed the dynamic of the game. That was cool.

I could probably list some more, or times when a game's actual content surprised me, but I think that'll do for today!

Until tomorrow -