This is a tricky one, for me. I’ve only gotten to “just play” a few times over the few years, and that was in a short lived, unfinished Wild Talents game (good game, terrible system.) In it, I played a Scottish telepath working for the big, oppressive superhero bureaucracy that ran the world. His ambition and skills led him to eventually work against this group, and it was looking like we might not quite pull off my intended coup when the game just sort of …stopped. A not uncommon thing for many campaigns.

There were a lot of good moments in the play, but nothing that really stood out for me. So looking out over all the gaming I’ve done, there are a few moments that stand out, and most of them were not mine…

The final battle in our high-school Dungeons & Dragons game, oh so many years ago, where my character kicked in the door to the main chamber of the Big Bad’s sanctum, only to be faced with hordes of minion bent on turning him into sausage, and turning tail with a aaaaaaaaah! that led them away so the other characters could get to the bad guy wihtout interruption.

That time my friend’s James Bond character managed to flip a Lamborghini Countach — no easy feat — in the middle of a chase sequence after a “are you sure you want to do that?” moment.

The moment our two main heroes were coopted by the supervillainess in our DC Heroes campaign in the late ’80s, and became the de facto secret police for the new European Empire.

The weird kid that was in my Space: 1889 game charging hordes of Oenotrian soldiers after running out of ammo shouting about how he would bring down the “might of the British Army”, only to get — predictably — slaughtered. (He would then claim to have been “haunted” by his character in a dream because he hadn’t been “given respect” by the other characters… At that point, I thought it best he take a break from gaming.)

Similarly, there was the time the bounty hunter in our Star Wars game was surrounded by stormtroopers and after being disarmed, asked them, “Do you want my hold out blaster?” to the groans of the other players.

Same campaign, that time our old jedi in a Star Wars game first went to the Dark Side and started speaking in a deep Shakespearean accent. He would later atone. Then go bad to the Dark. Then atone. He got to the point he had a lightsaber that would go from a lavender blade to a dark purple when he was having a case of the evils. Oh…and he collected chairs from every place. Those cool imperial chairs from the Death Star. Chairs from Stardestroyers. A stool. He had a warehouse of chairs he never used.

The Babylon 5 game I ran during my time in the army, where the one Starfury pilot got the insanely good roll on his pyrrhic run against an Earth Alliance Omega-class destroyer…and his shot damaged the rotation gears on the living habitat, immediately shredding the ship at the midline.

Or the fight between the 12 year old street urchin and a Chinese assassin in a hotel lobby in Shanghai in our 1936-set Hollow Earth Expedition game, where she used a luggage rollaway to defeat him, Jacky Chan style.

But my proudest moment, this year, would be that moment, temporarily playing one of the other player’s characters (he was away on work travel so I was running him as an NPC): Part of the group was being attacked by Indian communist agents in our Hollow Earth Expedition game. They were stopped by a “broken down” car acorss the road, then boxed in by two motorcycles, with gunmen riding pillion. The players took off in their Alvis Speed 20, knocking down a motorcycle, but Gus Hassenfeldt — the big game hunter I was playing — slid off the back of the car, took the gunman’s pistol, grabbed the bike, and rode it into another bad guy, then ordered the rest at gunpoint to lay down their arms, lie face down, and wait for the police. And rolled well enough they did it.

I thought I really captured the personality of the character as the player had portrayed him.