This was a one-time game session I ran with one of my friends as the only player. His girlfriend (the current DM for our Kelleck & Aerynn game) was next to us playing video-games though, and she would often sigh or giggle at the silliness of it all.
So me and my friend intended to just do a short game for the heck of it. A ‘soda & pretzels’ type of session, we weren’t going for a great story here. Just rolling some dice and having fun. My friend created Grok, a D&D 3.5 Half-Orc Fighter with amazing Strength and unfortunate Intelligence.
The story was plenty of silly. The mayor of a town hired Grok to fight off the invaders, who happened to be actual sci-fi aliens from outer space with disc-shaped spaceships and all!
Grok managed to infiltrate the ship and started hacking off aliens left and right with his mercurial greatsword. He then grabbed a raygun and the game started looking a lot like a Star Wars RPG session.
After having killed all the aliens inside, Grok stepped out of the ship just in time to deal with a second incoming ship. The mayor had installed a catapult to deal with the flying saucers and asked Grok to be the one to fire it. Problem was, Grok didn’t know how to nor did he have any ranks in the skill used for siege weapons. As the DM, I had to come up with a potion of temporary intelligence and knowledge that the mayor had supposedly acquired at the same time as the catapult. Like I said, this game was being played fast and loose.
Despite the boost to his mental abilities (which still left him well below average!) and the temporary knowledge of how to operate a catapult, Grok needed an extremely high roll on his d20 to hit the ship. As the flying saucer began to destroy the town with its beams, Grok launched the first catapult attack… and missed, the huge rock landing on the mayor’s office and completely destroying it!
“It’s a catastrophe!!!” I had the mayor exclaim as he placed both hands to his head.
“No.” Grok bluntly stated right away. “It’s a catapult.”
After wrecking a few more houses in the process, I forget how many, Grok managed to bring down the alien ship and moved on to other adventures (that were never played) with his newly acquired alien weapons and gold coins.
It was a silly game session and we never did continue Grok’s story, but he is sometimes fondly mentioned in conversation. What made that pun so funny? The fact that Grok was, in his mind, genuinely correcting the mayor. He just didn’t know the word ‘catastrophe’.
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