What I learned from RPGs

This is just to fill time until I have a chance to make a real post (I'm adminstering the provincial English Language Arts exam to my grade 12 this week, so I have no time for fun and frivolity. Other than FINALLY finishing FALLOUT 3. And now wanting to start it again, only this time, be a GOOD guy)

What I Learned from RPGs

1) If you take over a starship in TRAVELLER, don't call the rest of your party from the bridge saying you need help to fly the ship when you don' have complete control of the ship yet.

2) If you're playing TRAVELLER, and you're an Aslan, and a giant suction tube pops out of the ceiling to suck you away to somewhere else, don't say, "I pop my dewclaws and sink them into the tube material so I don't get pulled away."

3) When you're playing a fighter/magic-user/thief in AD&D, don't try to burn through the ropes holding up a rope bridge with a Flame Finger spell, hoping that you will have an opportunity to pick someone's pocket when the bridge suddenly lurches.

4) Advice for dealing with stolen tanks in Twilight 2000: if you're driving ouside an occupied town, and you find a radio band where someone is constantly updating coordinates, and ends with the phrase "Target has stopped" when you stop your tank...... GET OUT OF THE TANK.

5) Never climb in a Winnebago with a crazy ex-hippie in a Call of C'Thulhu game.

6) If you're playing Top Secret, and you come home to find a lightbulb burned out, but when you go to change it, instead you find a rolled-up piece of paper in the socket that says, "BANG! You're dead"? You probably are. Damn Russian double agents.

7) Cyberpunk 2020 tips: in your first session of a new campaign, if one of your fellow players has his character try to pick the pocket of Arasaka riot police who show up at a club.... just start rerolling your character. Also, as a corollary to this tip.... if Arasaka riot police walk up to your party, and flash a picture of an absent party member and ask, "Have you seen this person?"....... don't say, "Yeah! That's my best friend!"

8) Life expectancy of characters named "Bill, Brother of Tim the Elf"? Surprisingly short.

9) It is considered bad form to kill the guards of the local Polish warlord in Twilight 2000 and stash them in the storage compartment of your APC, especially when other members of your group are meeting with him, and eventually ally you with him.

10) If you really hate your Traveller character's rolls, make him a belter. They never survive...... except when they do. And then they become the WORST characters EVER.