For me, I’ll never forget rolling up my first character in 3rd Edition D&D (I’d played 2nd Edition, but not as often as I would’ve liked) using Central Casting. While my DM at the time didn’t let me keep a great many of the bonuses that I rolled for, I did get to keep the aesthetic stuff, which was worked into the 3-year long campaign.
That character, now very much retired, has given me a lot of fond memories of storming through the Underdark and defeating Lolth.
I was running a 1st Ed AD&D game. The party needed an item that was in the hoard of a white dragon, so they waited until the dragon was out, and went sneaking in. This particular white dragon had an artistic bent, so the lair was filled with beautiful ice sculptures and carvings on the walls.
One of the characters wrote the party’s home town on the wall with a note including their names so the dragon would know who “borrowed” its treasure. That poor, poor town.
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Hahahahaha!
Nothing says, “Come lay ruin to my home!” quite like Adventurer ego
Playing Warhammer Fantasy RPG (1st Edition). My friend was playing an elf assassin who was a real hardass. Another friend was playing a highwayman who was all about style (think Zorro). These two characters butted heads damn near every session. At one point we were traveling through the woods when we came upon a dead man hanging from a tall tree. The elf, who was the de facto party leader tells the highwayman to get him down. Highwayman nocks an arrow and begins to take aim. The elf, obviously expecting the highwayman to climb up the tree and use his sword to cut the guy down, was not having any of this. He said “Not like that, I said get him down.” The higwayman fired the arrow anyway and my friend rolled a critical hit. The arrow sliced through the rope and the body fell to the ground. The highwayman said “he’s down” and walked away. The look on my friend’s face who was playing the elf was priceless.
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Many, many moons ago we were playing a ShadowRun game. It might have been 1st edition, or some bastardised v1.5 we cooked up.
My character was a cybered-to-the-max assassin (but all internal 'ware, nothing obvious on the outside), with a Psychology/Seduction skill of 9. Think of the original (French) La Femme Nikita with the figure of a Playboy bunny or Bond girl, and a very bad attitude problem. (This was way back when you could have obscene skill levels, before they calmed the game down.)
Her main claims to fame were
a) Being bored one day and tossing a grapefruit off a 13th floor balcony, aiming at the open sun-roof of a car driving past. Rolled a stupid number of successes, caused a massive pile-up that blocked the street for a day and killed a bunch of people
b) Seducing the most straight-laced “I am a girl, therefore I am not interested in girls” characters in the party. So much so that the two of them “vacationed” for a girl’s weekend, and the other character never looked at men again.
c) Putting a bullet into the floor next to a wounded character’s head as he lay bleeding and the mage doing his “cast a big healing spell” routine. Broke the spell, pissed off the mage and wounded player. Her reason? “His screaming was getting on my nerves.”
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My very first time playing D&D (3.5 edition) with a new group of people, mostly coworkers, and it became very apparent that one of the other players was super hard core invested in his carefully min/maxed almost-but-not-quite-rule-breaking dual class build. Let’s call this guy “Mike” because that was his name. I couldn’t tell you what the hell Mike’s character classes were anymore because it was at least ten years ago and the evening involved a fair amount of alcohol, but he made it clear that he had spent a huuuuuuuuge amount of time on this character and one of his greatest joys in life was powering through adventures in the most efficient way possible.
I am at best a casual D&D player, and I’m in it for the lulz. If the GM will let me get away with it, I spend more effort playing practical jokes in camp and trying to seduce party NPCs (especially baggage handlers), or trying idiotic shit in dungeons for hilarious effect. It’s way more fun than running some boring campaign by the book.
But Mike…Mike wasn’t there to joke and have fun. Mike was there to win. We had a bit of time while the GM evaluated his build for fairness (Mike, being the consummate rules lawyer, had answers to all of the GM’s questions and objections), and I made a joke about how everybody should check their sleeping gear now for whoopie cushions and fake snakes, he was like, “Yeah, if you do that shit to me, I’ll kill you.” Most of us were rolling up newbie characters that we expected to lose, but Mike’s was level 5 or 6 or something and he was totally invested.
(My recollection is that I was playing a paladin named something like “Punch Slabfist” whose dump stat was INT. But with 18 CHA, he was at least a really handsome idiot.)
I decided that if Mike wasn’t going to lighten up, that the best possible use of my time would be to torment him into quitting the game, and surprisingly enough, this took less than an hour. Mike’s character had an NPC bodyservant and, probably because Mike’s rules-lawyering pissed off the GM, the GM allowed me to repeatedly talk to the bodyservant and convince him that Mike’s character was actually a demon wearing human flesh. Then, I gave the bodyservant a rock (like, a plain rock from the ground) and told the bodyservant that my deity could protect him from Mike with the power of this Magical Anti-Demon Stone, but that the stone’s powers were temporary. The only way to be truly safe was to bludgeon Mike to death in his sleep.
I have no idea if the GM would have actually let that happen, because Mike took his character sheet and left. He said we weren’t serious players and that if we wanted to fuck around and act like kids that he wasn’t going to waste his time with us.
After he left, we all had a great time and ended up torn to shreds in the GM’s dungeon. Fuck Mike. Also, don’t ever be the rules lawyer with the precious special build. It will bite you in the ass, probably because you’ll piss off the GM.
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I laughed my ass off at this - especially the Punch Slabfist and Magical Anti-Demon Stone parts.
Reminded me of a thread I saw on Reddit about how some guy’s Paladin was essentially Michael Scott from The Office (https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/7o2kek/i_rolled_a_6_for_intelligence_my_paladin_is/)
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A certain amount of min-maxing is expected. It shows you’re paying attention during the character creation process. No excuse for being a d!c& about it though.
That said, I can’t blame Mike for leaving either. You made it clear that your goals for the game weren’t the same as his. Two mutually exclusive ideas of ‘fun’ and he didn’t like yours. Nothing to worry about. As a purely casual thing, I can see the humor. But if this had been the start of a ‘serious’ campaign with me as GM, I’d have nailed that paladin to the wall.
(I’ve always found it easier to GM when the PCs are more or less on the same side and not spending most of their mental efforts to poke each other. YMMV.)
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I’ve never actually played D&D. I had several friends in high school who played, but I never had any desire to. The non-cube dice are nifty, though.
Oh yeah, I agree. I wouldn’t have disrupted the game if it wasn’t pretty clear that everyone else was also there primarily to drink, goof off, and have fun. Mike just wanted the XP.
This isn’t exactly a gaming moment, but it happened at game. I had a group of about 8-10 players at the time, and one of the new guys decided that he liked me, I guess. He gave me the absolute, bar none, tackiest (bad, obviously sexual pick-up line) Christmas card ever. Needless to say, his feelings were not returned.
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A slight detour.
Shareware Doom. Late at night.
Was working slowly but steadily onwards, then at some point I heard barking. Wtf? Continued onwards, more barking.
Then all of a sudden pink demon full in my face, I screamed in fright, backpedalled and nearly downloaded some brownware.
Was fun times 
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I’m not gonna lie, I totally would love to know what was said - I’m a big fan of cringeworthy stuff for some reason
The card said, “What’s six inches long that you hold in your hand and makes you smile.” in the outside. On the inside, it said, “This card!” and the guy wrote something like, “I can arrange for you to hold the real thing.”
It still makes me cringe.
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I don’t blame you. That’s awful. Like, it might be humorous in a relationship situation, but as a cold call… not cool.
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I would totally buy that card for Mrs. Force10. But for someone I was crushing on who I didn’t want to get a creeper vibe, not so much. But then the stereotype of the socially awkward gamer exists for a reason.
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I don’t really remember much of the gaming I played as a teen, but it was D&D. So the closest I’ve got of any kind of memorable gaming moment is figuring out the data format of the save file for the first Bard’s Tale game. Maximum armor? Check. Cool weapons. Check. Ton 'o gold? Check.
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One of the earlier hackers then
Some games would store their savegames in unencrypted format, making it easy for enterprising players to “edit” some of the variables, giving them more lifes/gold/armour/etc
Fun times, until they start to encrypt said save files.
Flashback to Speccy games where you would POKE some memory location in order to get infinite lifes. Or to be able to complete the game with no fuss at all. 
Ah, my nostalgia!
Does anyone remember SSI’s Eye of the Beholder series, Pools of Radiance, and crap - what were some of the other ones? Dragonlance and I think there were a handful of other ones. I remember sitting on the old 386 in the living room playing those games for hours and hours on end. VGA graphics, check! Soundblaster audio card, check! 16 bit pixel animations, yiiiiiissssssss
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