Players and GMs when did you or your party use a skill to its maximum effect and had your GM going: you cheecky boogers

Iron Kingdoms
1

Mine was in the first campaign i ran in the ikrpg(2d6), the set up:
It was close to the a fifth of the way through, they were hired to guard a shipment of warjacks (2 nomads 3-4 talons all stock without weapons), they were promissed a talon warjack as part of the payment when the mission was concluded.
A wrecked steamboat or two later they conclude the mission, and are about to recive a talon warjack(they are at 15-20exp), but they aint happy about it, so the decide to haggle to trade in the talon and the rest of the payment for a nomad, and in my infinite wisdom i allow.
As expected lady luck punishes me by giving them a good result, and i give them the morrow dammed nomad

3 Likes
2

Not quite a use of skills, but there was a notable incident of “how to climb without climbing” in a session a few years ago:

In order to quickly get from the floor of a hall onto a gallery…

  • One character got himself thrown up there by a friendly steamjack.
  • A second character - the warcaster - had the steamjack pick them up and deposit them onto the gallery.
  • A third character cast Foxhole on the steamjack, making it sink into the ground, then simply stepped onto it and dropped Foxhole again, turning the steamjack into an elevator.

As a further aside, instead of going “you cheeky-”, in our games the GM usually applauds creative approaches and goes “Sweet!” instead (often making critical or particularly high successes unnecessary if the idea is clever enough). :grin: Like when a group in an Unleashed game decided to prop up the corpses of a slain group of soldiers as decoys, just in case their camp was raided, while leaving the one survivor, who was in critical condition, lying down and partially concealed. I (as the GM) made rolls for the attackers to see if they spotted the deception, and they didn’t, striking the decoys first and thus allowing the ruse to save the survivor’s life.

3 Likes
3

The thing I remember best was not the use of a skill, but rather clever use of the setting.

The party was a group of lawmen and I had just introduced the main villain of the story, who was making a dramatic escape with his price on a train after a dramatic up-hill fight with the party. The scene was meant to be a cliffhanger where, even though winning the fight, the heroes lost their target and had to pursue it the next session.

However, I previously established, that the train tracks had no junctions and so it was clear where the train was going. So one of my players, the cheeky …, decided to telegraph law enforcement at the next stop…

I applauded them, but had to rewrite the next session :sweat_smile:.

3 Likes
4

A historical precedent is the capture of Hawley Harvey Crippen, who was identified while fleeing on board of a ship, and whose identification and subsequent capture were transmitted and coordinated by wireless telegraph while the fugitive was still en route. :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

In a pirate campaign I was running, there was a dramatic pursuit scene where Skarre’s Widower was chasing the protagonists’ ship. Of course, it was never my intention to end that in battle because Skarre’s crew would’ve wiped out the pirates. But I let the party sweat a little and try to come up with stratagems to escape.

What they did was let their character with Photographic memory and some skill in Navigation memorize the nautical charts in the area, then head for a shoal when it was getting dark. The photographic memory guy then gave instructions to the helmsman who steered the ship through the rocks in pitch darkness, and the Widower was forced to abandon pursuit.

3 Likes
6

Amazing, I did not know that :laughing:. One has to be the first, I guess.