The opening fight in Baptism of Fire must have taken about an hour because it was just so funny and we couldn't stop laughing. We were a rather creative group when it came to scenery.

Out of interest, here's the web address for that campaign, I played the two Shermans, and my caffeine-addict Maverick Cop did have the coolest lines...

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Maze/1378/fengcamp.htm

Anyone got any particularly good ones they recall?

Kiero

Ray Parker, Everyman Hero B-Movie actor, had some pretty good lines.

Here's a few.

In a sneak attack at the West End Projects (BoF in Louisville), Ray takes the door off at the hinges. He kicks the door down, jumps in the hallway and screams, "Hiya, muthaf****!"

At a fight on a partially built bridge, Ray jumps off the bridge onto a cyber-winged soldier flying around him. He pulls out a pistol while riding his back, "Take me back to the bridge or one of us is falling. Me."

Good times. Good times.

The cop casually says, "Stop... or I'll shoot."

And when my character found his way to the 60's he was sure to casually say "Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try..." while John Lennon was passing.

They placed themselves strategically around the shack, and on the count of three, they all leaped. Some came through the front door, some through the ceiling panels, one through the floorboards.

The Everyman Hero, though, had wanted to leap off the dozer scoop through the shack's giant plate-glass window right into the midst of the mooks. As the rest of the party exploded into the shack dramatically and heroically, the Hero botched his Dex roll mightily, and everyone inside the hut heard the loud THUD as the Hero slammed face-first into the wall *beside* the window, then did a scooby-doo "slide slowly down the wall to a pile on the ground".

The PCs spied two suspicious characters walking into a pizza shop carrying dry cleaning bags from the laundry next door. [They were suspicious because the yakuza PC had spotted concealed weapons in their laundry bags.] Entering the pizza shop behind the NPCs were three of our intrepid PC heroes, including the Killer.

One of the PCs attempted to gain the NPCs' attention and figure out what they were up to, when the party's Killer simply opened fire from point blank range with both her .50 handguns. As one would expect, all hell broke loose, with five heavily armed characters blazing away in the small lobby of the pizza joint, not more then ten feet from each other, with shotguns, hand cannons, and automatics.

When the smoked cleared (literally) and the chambers ran empty, they discovered in the lull of gunfire that these NPCs were actually there to -help- them, and would have been allies had they not been filled with approximately 20 pounds of hot lead each. The NPC Bruiser was barely alive, teetering on his Death Check, and the girl (who was to fill them in on the plot) was not much better off.

The amusing part was that in their attempts to obliterate their allies, they'd given the entire pizza staff of mad cultists time to arm themselves and lock and load. When the PCs looked up over the counter, they were staring at 12 *actual* enemy barrels, and they'd lost initiative...

The *first* time I ran it as a GM, though, I discovered the same problem you brought up... (which you might think a bit odd, since I'd already been through it as a player... I guess the first GM was just better. We screwed up the scenario a much different way a little bit later on.) Anyway, I learned an extremely valuable GM lesson... if any NPC draws a weapon or attacks for any reason, then they are worm food as far as the PCs are concerned. Ming was eliminated pretty much immediately and I had to fudge like Betty Crocker to keep Big Jim alive.

Anyway, since the first disaster, whenever I run that scenario, you have to tweak the intro scene a bit to make sure the two NPC allies survive long enough to fill the PCs in on the background. Two things you can do to help the PCs establish what's going on:

* Explicitly tell one or more of the PCs who Ming is beforehand, although not necessarily what she is up to. For example, the last time I ran this, I told one of the PCs that he was supposed to meet his neice at this pizza place, but he hadn't seen her in a long time and had heard rumors of her getting mixed up in "something dangerous". Since Ming was related to one of the PCs, the other players didn't immediately waste her.

* In the initial scene, make sure the Cultists fire *first*. Ming and Big Jim can pull out their weapons and start shouting, but if they shoot first, one or both of them will be dead by the time the PCs get through their first sequence. If the Cultists start ranting and fire first, then the PCs have to take a moment to figure out what's going on and choose sides.

Oh, and something else I noticed the last time (which you think I'd have noticed earlier)... Eng Fang Mei's Toughness stat changes. In his stat sidebar, it's listed as 15, but in the description of what happens when he swallows bullets, suddenly he's got a Toughness of 10. My solution was to give him the 15 on external attacks, but use the Toughness 10 for internal explosions (umm... like, maybe the structural integrity isn't as strong from the inside... yeah). Otherwise, there's no way any swallowed bullets can get through Toughness 15.

Great adventure, though.

As for the shoot-out, it was bizarre because while my PCs are generally gun-happy, they were actually making a concerted effort to *not* lay waste to every random NPC they encountered because of the obvious problems this has caused in the past. [This concerted effort lasted about eight minutes of game time.] But I think a valuable lesson has been learned at this point. Heh heh!