I had a character take the leadership feat once. He got a golem buddy. The golem could not talk, but it could make wheezing noises. Thus, the golem was represented at the table by a rubber ducky, which I would speak with at length, in character.
Yes, the ducky squeaked its responses.
(Before anyone asks, it was a rubber golem. The wheezing sound was a bit of flavor text that everyone thought was silly until I held up the squeaky bathtime representation of the golem. Then it became hilarious.)
Not as much as the player's do. After all, every gaming table has that one player, who can never roll well in crunch time. The one who is always shooting his teammates in the back from critical failures and whose character becomes almost a running joke because of the bad dice rolling.
Unfortunately other than consistently bad rolling the only gag I know of from my tabletop experience is my friend's critical failure die. A 20 sided die with just skull and crossbones on every face to represent failure being the only option. He pulls it out at least once every session often at the most inopportune times like when making hide or diplomacy checks.
Now that I think about, I bring this Lego Chima minifigure with me to every Pathfinder game. It was originally what I used to represent my Tengu Sorcerer, but eventually I bought an actual mini for him and now the Lego comes along just to supervise things.
One time, I used an airsoft gun as a conversation prop in Pathfinder. It's interesting when a brigand pulling a gun on someone makes the entire party laugh...
Silver Bolt, when I was in high school history we once had a role-playing session with each student playing a world leader. Some of them turned up with water pistols and "assassinated" the others.
I was once in a game of Paranoia where the GM gave us water guns so that he could tell who initiated combat. Unloaded though, as he didn't want his carpet soaked.
Early in a Kingmaker game of Pathfinder, we discovered a cache of items from another Material Plane. Specifically, Earth. The DM provided the actual items found therein, including the teddy bear of resistance +1. It was a slotless item that gave a +1 bonus to saving throws, but the character's player had to keep the teddy bear on his or her person at all times.
The barbarian snatched it up and never let it go until we (reluctantly) gave it to a planar scholar.
My hobgoblin gestalt Sorcerer/Fighter/Druid/Archmage's niece, mechanically his cohort and functionally his apprentice, had a fondness for conjuration, and as an Ultimate Magus, she had spells to burn, so once she started hitting high levels, she managed to summon a Walkman and some CDs. He was not pleased to have everything from Queen to Linkin Park and beyond blared in his mage tower, but the transmutations she used to get it to work without electricity made the sound carry. Between that and her cats, he decided it was high time for a vacation, so they stole a pirate ship.
Given that I listened to the music while I was writing, I guess it counts as a prop story.
May I ask why you had to surrender the bear? I'd be reluctant to relinquish something both huggable and useful, myself.
Well, it was a Kingmaker game, where you go from scouting out territory to ruling a nation, so we were playing the long game. Basically, being friendly with a society of powerful wizards seemed better than one magical plushie.
Also, he was offering several magical items that were vendor trash to him but invaluable for us. So there was that. :P
Bah! You successful adventurers and your 'logic!'
I concede, those are good reasons, it's just - magical teddy bear! ...hmm. I wonder what the prereqs for making plushie of Resistance with Craft Wondrous Item would be... Mass production solves everything!
Prereqs for a slotless +1 resistance bonus to saving throws?
You need a caster level of 3 and access to a 0-level spell, (Resistance), or willingness to eat a +5DC. Easy enough to get: Anyone who can take the feat has the caster level and the spell is very common, (and given that it's only a DC13 _without_ the spell...[1]).
The real limit is the minimum crafting cost of 1,000GP[2]. Since that is the cost of materials, you don't get any significant economies of scale.
[1] For a simple, if high level, (7th, minimum for a non-caster to make magic items), Expert: 7 ranks in Craft(foo), +3 for Class Skill, and +2 from Master Craftsman gives enough to succeed on a roll of 1[3], never mind a probable +2/+3 from Int, +3 from Skill Focus and +2 from masterwork tools, (if not more from enchanted ones).
[2] To put this in perspective, that's enough for someone to live a basic 'middle-class' life for just over _EIGHT YEARS_. Remember that adventurers are incredibly rich even at rather low levels.
[3] Not that you ever actually roll for something like this: If you can't do it taking 10, you're better off paying someone who can.
In one long running campaign the GM of the moment whimsically let a slightly fumbled animation spell become permanent, giving the party an animated stuffed raccoon with an attention deficit problem. What she didn't know was that one of the players had a raccoon hand puppet, which he promptly brought to the games...
We had a player that showed up so infrequently to our sessions that I made a replacement for him at the table. I built it with throw pillows and cardboard. Looked a bit like Zod from Superman 2, so we wrote "NPZ" on it (for Non-Player Zod).
Ended up being our stand it for players who fail to show up. Now if only we got it to roll dice...
Duct tape a large funnel and chute to the side. Presto; dice roller!
And if you wanna get crazy, you can make it a full blown Rube Goldberg device.
If my group(s) had regular meeting places, I'd steal that idea. It's worth stealing!
Google "dice tower" and you will find all sorts of designs for die rolling devices. Much better than a funnel because they randomize the roll more effectively.
This would sound sane, exspecially with everything else said, but I would carry around a bunch of "representations" of what each player had the lpay style of for when they don't show up. (I may or may not know how to spell most of them.)
Rogue: Jiggly puff (Social rogue)
Paladin: A note book (Keeps telling me to write notes. The pages are blank)
Druid: A little cat toy (animals love her character, excpet house cats for some reason)
Pirate: Jack Sparrow picture (Guess why)
Myself: ... other players
DM: A note book (See "Paladin" for reason, excpet now it has notes (The DM's notes, ha)).
Wasn't a gag item, but while helping my then a girlfriend's family move, I found a cheap plastic shortsword with an awesome (but functionally impractical) design that included eagle-shaped quillions in a box of stuff to be gotten rid of, kept it, and decided my new character, a Raptoran Scout with a minmaxed move speed (but no way to capitalize on it in combat) spent most of her gold on just such an elaborate piece of crap she saw in a shopfront, so she'd have a melee weapon.
We were travelling through an underground cavern, full of general creepiness. In one room were described 'worms that stand on end and just watch you'.
I then ran to my room (game happened at my place) and grapped a hand puppet that I had - blue and yellow wormy alien thing with antenne. I then proceeded to point it in the face of anyone who looked too closely at the worms in character.
Best part? While the GM is trying to turn the mood back to creepy, he describes the worms staring starting to shake and start mumbling in their own strange language. GM is entirely unaware that this hand puppet has a squeaker...
My group has a number of running gags that seem to always pop up during different campaigns. One of us tends to get his characters killed in some way related to statues, whether they kill him or he gets turned into one.
Next, we have our butt monkey/ability score damage wh*re, who has taken an extreme dislike to poisons, the rest of us, and my cat.
Lastly, there's a third member of our group who takes essentially all the negative levels. He has to keep spending his money on restoration spells to remove them, and he's tired of paying that cost. He also tries to have character secrets, but always talks about them before we start playing. Loudly.
During a campaign where I used entirely too many puns, the other players got me a set of aviators to put on every time I made one.
Once we needed to get down from the top of a tower in a hurry, but I was the only one who could climb walls at a reasonable pace. I came up with the brilliant idea of having everyone pile into a bag of holding so I could carry them down.
Well, I already told y'all about the jelly worm kraken thing. Luckily, time has passed and now there's a couple new additions.
From our last glorious campaign (and the only campaign we've ever finished) come the dreaded miniswords! i.e. a collection of League of Legends decorative keychain swords we constantly grabbed and used to reenact duels and stuff. Qualified as gag items since they added nothing to the gameplay per se and making minifights at thumb lenght was pretty much hilarious.
But that pales in comparison to this one: in our last one-shot, the DM brought a laser pointer and made his kitten deliver a precision one-by-one TPK. Nothing to do against a gargantuan Avatar Of The Meowling God (sic).
I got a story, but not in the same way you might think.
See, for a while, I was on one end of the country while my RPG group was on the other. We had some time before we started, and we were messing around on skype. They had some candy, and I asked them to throw me a piece.
They did.
At which point I immediately threw a candy bar from offscreen into my face.
I was running a Dark Heresy game and for our Halloween session (I tend to go all out on Halloween session prep) I purchased a bunch of noise makers. Now these noise makers made sounds like fingers scratching on a wall, a child laughing, a ghostly whisper, etc. You could set them all to make a random sound at a random interval. I hid them throughout the room before the game and said nothing. As the game moved on and the players ventured further into misshapen/haunted corridors of a derelict ship they noticed the sounds. "What the hell was that? Did you here a laugh? It was right bhind me..." I told them everything they heard, their characters were hearing. Amazing atmosphere. They still talk about that game to other people.
Where does one get such noisemakers? My Halloween suppliers have nothing good, so I have to make do with jury-rigging am iPod.
Granted, that worked rather well for a horror module I built & tried... In short, I turned the Vocaloid song Trick & Treat into a quest to save a little girl from a pair of ethereal cloth golems.
Well, I played a Pathfinder module with one of the play-test classes: the Swashbuckler. I had literally created a Pathfinder version of Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat from "Cats" the musical.
For the game, I legit brought a pocket-watch, a signal whistle, and played his song on my smartphone by way of introduction.
Once during a Pathfinder run, I played an enchantment wizard with evocation and illusion as opposition schools. (The point was to try and make a useless wizard. It didn't work.) His weapon was an enchanted crowbar of piercing. Every game I played with him, I brought along a crowbar, and brandished it whenever I melee'd. I had to stop that when I accidentally dented a wall, though.
One PC carried a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife under her miniskirt (she was British), and over time one or two other players made comments on the size of the knife and the shortness of the skirts. It's a 29cm blade, so that's not necessarily unreasonable. Until one evening, well into the game, someone raised the question again; the player stood up, reached under her short skirt, and whipped out a Sykes!
Our GM always brought an ancient black dragon miniature to sessions. He just had it so he could use it if we ever got to upity. Strangly enough he never used it for that reason.
We were playing a rp heavy focused type table top game with characters you kind of defined as you go. It's called fiasco. I described myself as a woman, with a bob cut, an eye patch, and was wearing the maid uniform of the mansion I had broken into. I was in the basement, where the butler was about to 'teach a lesson' to a worker boy. They mentioned that there was a cage in the basement, meant for the boy when he acted up. I told them my character was sitting on the cage. When they got to the basement, they found me there and I said i was sharpening knives. I then told them to hold on, as I picked up a metal ruler and a pair of scissors. For the rest of the scene, I dragged the scissors along the metal ruler to get that horrible metal scratching on metal sound as if I were sharpening knives. It was fun to see the butler cringe every time I 'sharpened my knife'.
Also, my character was supposed to be working with another character (We had decided that the very vague job descriptions we were given meant that I was an assassin and she was the person who let me know who I was supposed to kill). All throughout the game, I frequently butt into scenes by saying that character (the one mine worked with) was getting a phone call. When that character picked up, I'd have my character simply say, "You're getting too close." Then I'd simulate the 'beep beep beep' sound of when you hang up. That way I could discretely let that person know they were doing something I didn't want, without stopping the scene with OOC, or out right telling that person what to do.
By the way, the game had a horror/suspense theme to it, and this other character was being portrayed as a news reporter investigating the incident. So it was clear that I meant she was getting too close to the truth.
Of course, since that player had their own interest, that character often ignored my warning. Which was perfect, because it was more interesting that way. Needless to say, when the shit hit the fan, we were on opposite sides and since we all got bad endings we all agreed we did terrible things to each other.
Anyway.... at the end of the night, they all went home. We said the usual, thanks for coming, we had fun, yada yada. Then about ten minutes after they left (they were probably still on the drive home) I called the player who had played the character of the investigator. When he picked up I waited a few seconds then said, "You got, too close." Then I hung up.
Just before I did, I heard his disbelief/laughter.
I play in a Pathfinder game on Tuesday nights. I'm playing a character the rest of the group calls "The Sasha", because they don't quite know how to describe her. My initial concept was a hybrid of John Wayne Cleaver from 'I am not a serial killer', Sasha Grey, and Rarity. She's been described as a 'Sociopathic Disney Princess'. Her character sheet lists her as a 15 HD Sociopath [Fluid Extraction Specialist]. For those of you who like the mechanics, she's a Rake/Bandit / Gladiator with an absolutely *ridiculous* intimidate score.
The rest of the group kept badgering her to buy a horse. She declined, instead purchasing a carriage, because riding sidesaddle would ruin her dress. When the thing needed to be on the battle map, the other folks put out their to-scale horse figures. I grabbed and plunked down a Tastykake as my carriage, as it had been described as a piece of confectionary. When the others asked where the horse pulling it was, I reached in my pocket...
And plunked down my Rarity fig. Because my *of course* my horse is more stylish than theirs.
Only time I can think of bringing a gag something to the table was when I (being very immature at the time) thought it'd be a fun idea to bring my dad's old, rusty longsword to the table.
I was an idiot.
However, on a note similar to Raxon's at the top there, my character in my current campaign has a Black Blade (Pathfinder Magus Archetype Bladebound). My character, Arcanum, is a nice guy with zero memories of his past. His sword, Elric, is a bloodthirsty bastard who does remember their past, but won't tell him anything. Arcanum converses with Elric out loud, but no one can hear Elric but Arcanum, so almost everyone thinks he's nuts. The reason this is relevant, is I have one-sided in-character conversations with the air over my shoulder (where Elric is on Arcanum most of the time).
The rest of the party (I joined in later) were making a drop into a brushfire war in Central America to investigate reports of metahuman activity on both sides. Their transport came under fire, and in the process one of them was knocked free without his chute.
At this point, I will now mention that the character in question was a Muppet. In a black-ops unit. Just go with it.
The rest of the team follows more conventionally, and finds Boscoe deperately trying to fend off a platoon of curious monkeys, who have already made off with one of his legs. They recover it, but since no one has time or a needle one of the heavies sticks Boscoe into his front pocket.
Couple hours' hike and an ugly firefight later, the heavy needs a distraction, and throws a screaming Muppet into the fray.
The week after this event, I bring in a prop I'd gotten from a McDonald's Happy Meal as a gift for the player: a Pokeball. "Boscoe, I choose you!" was something that would haunt him for the rest of the campaign.
I had a halfling who tended to use "Summon Monster" in a rather distinctive manner, and I would demonstrate this by holding a small stuffed bison above my head and dropping it, whereupon the GM would make the sound of a Celestial Bison suddenly being summoned to this plane and then dropping from a great height onto her opponents.
In an old school Dragonlance game, I was playing my usual kender... :) The group was gathering supplies before taking a long, LONG boat trip (several months, if memory serves me). My kender became fascinated by a rainstick in the market place and bought it. And proceeded to drive the group crazy by playing with it constantly aboard ship. A few weeks later one the players took a trip to visit friends and came back with litle gifts for everyone. For me? A real rainstick. Which quickly became a staple at the table, much to everyone else's chagrin.
During a campaign my boyfriend played a dwarven bard who was jester to the king. At the next session I brought a red, yellow and blue jester's hat- jingly bells included- for him to wear.
Once when i was DMing a game, when the party was in a dungeon and just looted a chest, i pulled out an hour glass, and set it to count down. i then avoided all questions about what it was. The group started panicking after a few minutes of trying to figure why i did this.
Once a member of the part decided to build a ballista. The only token we could that was large enough was for a bear. So we used that, named it "The Dread Bearlista", and still use the same token.
Don't feel too bad. I once pitted my group against Mara. Yes, that Mara.
Props made the encounter much more memorable.Especially when they found out I rigged the prop for Mara to cough 'blood' upon dying. I had it hooked up to a little plastic squeeze thing.
It was a bit more explosive than I intended. I will say no more on the matter.
Not exactly a non-standard prop, but it amused everyone to no end...
I was playing a rogue in 4e at college, and there was a local gaming store. This gaming store happened to have a large bucket just filled with dice of all sorts. Obviously, I picked through the entire thing, and found a few gems such as a d6 with guitars instead of pips, and a d20 with nothing but 20's.
Fast forward to the next session: we get to a combat encounter, and as a halfling rogue I pretty quickly acquire combat advantage. Up to this point I'd had a set of dice that all went together, but I also had in a felt bag my new pride and joy.
"Hold on, I've got some special sneak attack dice in here."
I then pulled out and rolled 3 d6's that were about 3 inches to a side, making a rather hefty clunk as they hit the table. The DM nearly fell over backwards laughing, and I've kept using them since.
Unfortunately the latest group I'm rolling with is over the 'net, and we use Roll20, so there's not much point to a visual dice gag anymore :(
Yes, the ducky squeaked its responses.
(Before anyone asks, it was a rubber golem. The wheezing sound was a bit of flavor text that everyone thought was silly until I held up the squeaky bathtime representation of the golem. Then it became hilarious.)
Unfortunately other than consistently bad rolling the only gag I know of from my tabletop experience is my friend's critical failure die. A 20 sided die with just skull and crossbones on every face to represent failure being the only option. He pulls it out at least once every session often at the most inopportune times like when making hide or diplomacy checks.
The barbarian snatched it up and never let it go until we (reluctantly) gave it to a planar scholar.
Given that I listened to the music while I was writing, I guess it counts as a prop story.
May I ask why you had to surrender the bear? I'd be reluctant to relinquish something both huggable and useful, myself.
Also, he was offering several magical items that were vendor trash to him but invaluable for us. So there was that. :P
I concede, those are good reasons, it's just - magical teddy bear! ...hmm. I wonder what the prereqs for making plushie of Resistance with Craft Wondrous Item would be... Mass production solves everything!
You need a caster level of 3 and access to a 0-level spell, (Resistance), or willingness to eat a +5DC. Easy enough to get: Anyone who can take the feat has the caster level and the spell is very common, (and given that it's only a DC13 _without_ the spell...[1]).
The real limit is the minimum crafting cost of 1,000GP[2]. Since that is the cost of materials, you don't get any significant economies of scale.
[1] For a simple, if high level, (7th, minimum for a non-caster to make magic items), Expert: 7 ranks in Craft(foo), +3 for Class Skill, and +2 from Master Craftsman gives enough to succeed on a roll of 1[3], never mind a probable +2/+3 from Int, +3 from Skill Focus and +2 from masterwork tools, (if not more from enchanted ones).
[2] To put this in perspective, that's enough for someone to live a basic 'middle-class' life for just over _EIGHT YEARS_. Remember that adventurers are incredibly rich even at rather low levels.
[3] Not that you ever actually roll for something like this: If you can't do it taking 10, you're better off paying someone who can.
Ended up being our stand it for players who fail to show up. Now if only we got it to roll dice...
And if you wanna get crazy, you can make it a full blown Rube Goldberg device.
If my group(s) had regular meeting places, I'd steal that idea. It's worth stealing!
Google "dice tower" and you will find all sorts of designs for die rolling devices. Much better than a funnel because they randomize the roll more effectively.
Rogue: Jiggly puff (Social rogue)
Paladin: A note book (Keeps telling me to write notes. The pages are blank)
Druid: A little cat toy (animals love her character, excpet house cats for some reason)
Pirate: Jack Sparrow picture (Guess why)
Myself: ... other players
DM: A note book (See "Paladin" for reason, excpet now it has notes (The DM's notes, ha)).
Hmm... Now I want to stat Jigglypuff as a Bard with a Rogue dip. You've set me on slippery slope; I hope you're happy :P
Edits: another reason I'll be making an account as soon as Finals week is over.
So many jokes., so little time.
For the one playing a minotaur, I picked up a cute little cow. He was seething. XD
For the greatsword-wielding fighter, I got one of those awesome He-Man swords that makes cool sounds when you swing it.
I don't remember what I got for the ranger.
For the cleric, though... ehehehehe. That session involved a surprise attack by giant lizards, so STUFFED LIZARD TO THE FACE
I then ran to my room (game happened at my place) and grapped a hand puppet that I had - blue and yellow wormy alien thing with antenne. I then proceeded to point it in the face of anyone who looked too closely at the worms in character.
Best part? While the GM is trying to turn the mood back to creepy, he describes the worms staring starting to shake and start mumbling in their own strange language. GM is entirely unaware that this hand puppet has a squeaker...
Yeah, we lost the plot for a while.
Next, we have our butt monkey/ability score damage wh*re, who has taken an extreme dislike to poisons, the rest of us, and my cat.
Lastly, there's a third member of our group who takes essentially all the negative levels. He has to keep spending his money on restoration spells to remove them, and he's tired of paying that cost. He also tries to have character secrets, but always talks about them before we start playing. Loudly.
Once we needed to get down from the top of a tower in a hurry, but I was the only one who could climb walls at a reasonable pace. I came up with the brilliant idea of having everyone pile into a bag of holding so I could carry them down.
Barbarian: "Are you sure this is a good idea?"
"Don't worry."
*Glasses on*
"It's in the bag."
Why, yes, I AM proud of myself.
From our last glorious campaign (and the only campaign we've ever finished) come the dreaded miniswords! i.e. a collection of League of Legends decorative keychain swords we constantly grabbed and used to reenact duels and stuff. Qualified as gag items since they added nothing to the gameplay per se and making minifights at thumb lenght was pretty much hilarious.
But that pales in comparison to this one: in our last one-shot, the DM brought a laser pointer and made his kitten deliver a precision one-by-one TPK. Nothing to do against a gargantuan Avatar Of The Meowling God (sic).
See, for a while, I was on one end of the country while my RPG group was on the other. We had some time before we started, and we were messing around on skype. They had some candy, and I asked them to throw me a piece.
They did.
At which point I immediately threw a candy bar from offscreen into my face.
Many lols were had.
Granted, that worked rather well for a horror module I built & tried... In short, I turned the Vocaloid song Trick & Treat into a quest to save a little girl from a pair of ethereal cloth golems.
I am hoping it was a real life gummy. (But then there is the lack of screaming).
For the game, I legit brought a pocket-watch, a signal whistle, and played his song on my smartphone by way of introduction.
It conceals just fine, thank you.
a can of bear repellent duct-taped to a plunger handle
We were playing a rp heavy focused type table top game with characters you kind of defined as you go. It's called fiasco. I described myself as a woman, with a bob cut, an eye patch, and was wearing the maid uniform of the mansion I had broken into. I was in the basement, where the butler was about to 'teach a lesson' to a worker boy. They mentioned that there was a cage in the basement, meant for the boy when he acted up. I told them my character was sitting on the cage. When they got to the basement, they found me there and I said i was sharpening knives. I then told them to hold on, as I picked up a metal ruler and a pair of scissors. For the rest of the scene, I dragged the scissors along the metal ruler to get that horrible metal scratching on metal sound as if I were sharpening knives. It was fun to see the butler cringe every time I 'sharpened my knife'.
Also, my character was supposed to be working with another character (We had decided that the very vague job descriptions we were given meant that I was an assassin and she was the person who let me know who I was supposed to kill). All throughout the game, I frequently butt into scenes by saying that character (the one mine worked with) was getting a phone call. When that character picked up, I'd have my character simply say, "You're getting too close." Then I'd simulate the 'beep beep beep' sound of when you hang up. That way I could discretely let that person know they were doing something I didn't want, without stopping the scene with OOC, or out right telling that person what to do.
By the way, the game had a horror/suspense theme to it, and this other character was being portrayed as a news reporter investigating the incident. So it was clear that I meant she was getting too close to the truth.
Of course, since that player had their own interest, that character often ignored my warning. Which was perfect, because it was more interesting that way. Needless to say, when the shit hit the fan, we were on opposite sides and since we all got bad endings we all agreed we did terrible things to each other.
Anyway.... at the end of the night, they all went home. We said the usual, thanks for coming, we had fun, yada yada. Then about ten minutes after they left (they were probably still on the drive home) I called the player who had played the character of the investigator. When he picked up I waited a few seconds then said, "You got, too close." Then I hung up.
Just before I did, I heard his disbelief/laughter.
So there you go, now you know.
The rest of the group kept badgering her to buy a horse. She declined, instead purchasing a carriage, because riding sidesaddle would ruin her dress. When the thing needed to be on the battle map, the other folks put out their to-scale horse figures. I grabbed and plunked down a Tastykake as my carriage, as it had been described as a piece of confectionary. When the others asked where the horse pulling it was, I reached in my pocket...
And plunked down my Rarity fig. Because my *of course* my horse is more stylish than theirs.
I was an idiot.
However, on a note similar to Raxon's at the top there, my character in my current campaign has a Black Blade (Pathfinder Magus Archetype Bladebound). My character, Arcanum, is a nice guy with zero memories of his past. His sword, Elric, is a bloodthirsty bastard who does remember their past, but won't tell him anything. Arcanum converses with Elric out loud, but no one can hear Elric but Arcanum, so almost everyone thinks he's nuts. The reason this is relevant, is I have one-sided in-character conversations with the air over my shoulder (where Elric is on Arcanum most of the time).
(Warning: Language, famous people, Chris Perkins, etc.)
(My only thought was (time-stamp) 4:50, favorite part of the episode.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGXctw8IuGA
The rest of the party (I joined in later) were making a drop into a brushfire war in Central America to investigate reports of metahuman activity on both sides. Their transport came under fire, and in the process one of them was knocked free without his chute.
At this point, I will now mention that the character in question was a Muppet. In a black-ops unit. Just go with it.
The rest of the team follows more conventionally, and finds Boscoe deperately trying to fend off a platoon of curious monkeys, who have already made off with one of his legs. They recover it, but since no one has time or a needle one of the heavies sticks Boscoe into his front pocket.
Couple hours' hike and an ugly firefight later, the heavy needs a distraction, and throws a screaming Muppet into the fray.
The week after this event, I bring in a prop I'd gotten from a McDonald's Happy Meal as a gift for the player: a Pokeball. "Boscoe, I choose you!" was something that would haunt him for the rest of the campaign.
"I wonder if it will be friends with me?"
I love mind games.
Still pretty new to this, best I got.
Plus they made me really hate plushy assaults.
Props made the encounter much more memorable.Especially when they found out I rigged the prop for Mara to cough 'blood' upon dying. I had it hooked up to a little plastic squeeze thing.
It was a bit more explosive than I intended. I will say no more on the matter.
I was playing a rogue in 4e at college, and there was a local gaming store. This gaming store happened to have a large bucket just filled with dice of all sorts. Obviously, I picked through the entire thing, and found a few gems such as a d6 with guitars instead of pips, and a d20 with nothing but 20's.
Fast forward to the next session: we get to a combat encounter, and as a halfling rogue I pretty quickly acquire combat advantage. Up to this point I'd had a set of dice that all went together, but I also had in a felt bag my new pride and joy.
"Hold on, I've got some special sneak attack dice in here."
I then pulled out and rolled 3 d6's that were about 3 inches to a side, making a rather hefty clunk as they hit the table. The DM nearly fell over backwards laughing, and I've kept using them since.
Unfortunately the latest group I'm rolling with is over the 'net, and we use Roll20, so there's not much point to a visual dice gag anymore :(