'Let's say I'm on the 11th floor of a 13 story building and it's about to collapse. I have around one minute. Any thoughts on anything I could do to survive?'
My friends all looked at me rather confused.
You see, sometimes I have very silly problems.
Back in the day, when I was still in university and was only a proto-adult (students aren't really adults at all, really) I was playing a tabletop RPG World of Darkness. Normally, you'd all take the roles of vampires and werewolves or some other mystical creatures, but we'd decided to play a game in this universe as the squishy humans. Very, very squishy humans. Normally human's in these campaigns are barely background noise, as powerful as a gnat squaring up to the Incredible Hulk. Sometimes humans could be a problem, but only in great numbers. There were six of us. Only. In a world where certain beasts could kill us with a stray thought, we thought it'd be fun to up to said beasts with a silly little stick and poke it repeatedly.
Very shortly us squishy humans had found a cult on campus, a clone military attempting to take over and fungus zombies crawling up out the woodwork. For any of my reader even partway familiar with World of Darkness this is not exactly usual. We been tasked by the cult to kill a daemon / bug hybrid currently camping out in on of the towers, now surrounded by a giant creeping ivy plant covering the entire building, whilst in turn further surrounded by a ring of nervous clone military covering the plant as it occasional spat out fungus zombies at them.
I would like to take the time to express that at the time, none of this seemed weird.
One of us fluked their way into the clone military force, by means of accidentally stumbling into the officers building and on the way out was given a lieutenant's ID due to a phenomenally bad guard, who made the assumption that anyone leaving the officer's mess had to be an officer... and no one saw fit to correct him. Armed with a fake ID, we waltzed into the armory, picked up... all the guns, and went into the giant creeper zombie-infested daemon / bug hybrid thing lair.
Somehow we ended up on the eleventh floor before being noticed, when all the fungus zombies attacked. All of them. Because each fungus zombie was a originally a student, I made quick few sums in my head, and came up with a estimate that we'd just found ourselves in a fight with approximately one hundred and four zombies, or up to a hundred and fifty if we were unlucky. So, logically, we dropped a thermite grenade behind us.
It was actually a very smart plan. Really! Thermite, as you no doubt know, gets spectacularly fucking hot. So fucking hot there was soon a 10 foot wide floor going down five bloody floors, and counting. But by dropping it up the corridor behind us, it prevented any fungus zombies from that side of the floor getting to us, and funneling every zombies to the stairs, of which there was one entrance point we were currently covering with a SAW.
 |
| Nothing like one of these to give that lil' bit of confidence. |
Until the same guy who bluffed us into the building saw through the hole we made the very daemon / bug hybrid we came to kill a floor below and leapt on it. Where he was promptly eaten. At which point he promptly detonated every grenade he had on him. And then, in a feat of absurd rolling I have never seen before or since, the die decided as the dust settled that the guy was completely sodding unharmed, and the daemon / bug hybrid blown to smithereens.
However, he had specified that he had pulled the pins on all his grenades. And he was, unfortunately, carrying a second thermite grenade. Now, a building might be able to survive one hole ten feet wide and five floors deep... but not two. Yeah. The session ended there, and we were told we had about one minute to get out.
Come to think of it, that was context I probably should of started with in the first place.
This just goes to show that once you get people around a table for a tabletop pen and paper RPG they are going to do silly things, and have silly problems.
(Incidentally, after a week of researching how building collapse and void space, it turns out one of us revealed he could concentrate for about thirty seconds and teleport us all to safety, as long as we were in a 5 metre radius from him. Yes, we may of all been squishy humans, but by that point, some of us were less squishy than others. Also: that still wasn't overtly weird.)
Nowadays, I'm playing Only War, where in the grim dark future of the 41st millennium, we're playing the puny Guardsmen armed with a flashlight guns vs. everything that could kill us with a stray thought.
I may have a thing for impossible odds.
In the middle of an ork invasion, they've landed a Rok on our planet. And by Rok I mean they put engines on a small moon and called in a spaceship. And by landed I mean... well, they rammed our planet. So we have a shit tonne of dust in the air, so no wireless communication or powered aircraft is happening. And our group of Guardsmen were bored waiting on the front line, waiting for the orks to turn up, when we realized the orks were late because they were advancing with their Stompas and Gargant. And by Stompa I mean two high rise building slapped to together and covered in guns. And by Gargant I mean think of a Stompas, but only if Stompas were child-sized and Gargants was a moridly obese parent. And we have guns that are popularly referred to as 'flashlights' because that's how effective they are at killing things.
And because we were bored, we decided to kill a Stompa. By ourselves. All six of us.
Our plan is... well... I say a 'plan,' but...
We're going to board a plane, glide it through the dust cloud, jump off it using fancy high-tech parachutes, somehow land on top of Stompa, somehow get on board the bridge, somehow kill everything on the bridge, somehow hold the bridge, set a giant-ass bomb, somehow work out how to use the controls, somehow turn it around and walk away from the ork horde that's following, jump off the Stompa with our fancy high-tech parachutes, and walk away all cool like not looking behind us as the Stompa explodes behind us.
Incidentally, have a mentioned that one, single, solitary ork is probably more than enough to kill two of us, and the last time we thought an ork higher up he one-hit KO'd us so fucking casually he may as well have been sipping coffee with he free hand?
Yeah. This plan, in itself, is a silly problem.
Once again, this just goes to show that once you get people around a table for a tabletop pen and paper RPG they are going to do silly things, and have silly problems.
...so, originally, when I asked my friends for help, they couldn't provide me with any. So. Anyone. Anyone at all have any ideas how to make this plan any way more survivable, without suggesting to not do it?
Because I get the feeling, that this silly problem we made for ourselves is gonna blow up in our faces hilariously.
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