I'll post it behind a spoiler tag in here. It's a really long story covering the majority of a multi-session campaign, so I don't want to completely derail the thread with paragraphs upon paragraphs.
All right.
It's a regular Pathfinder game in a custom game world made by the sort of de facto leader of our group. That week, he happened to have Nathaniel over. Nathaniel is one of his cousins.
Nathaniel is at least a little autistic and so morbidly obese that he has difficulty fitting through doors and runs out of breath climbing one flight of stairs. He once told his cousin's underage sister that she should grow up to be something "provocative", like a biker chick. He was in his late 20s at the time, and actually braved the stairs to show up (so exhausted that he looked like he just ran a marathon) at her door just to tell her that. This was the first sign that Nathaniel's sexual preferences were not only quite open, but also made people cringe and back away slowly.
There were also some other quirks about him. Like he liked World War II military technology (especially German tanks), but had a really tenuous grasp on the subject. I don't remember what subject he brought up after a game (I think it was about the Tiger tank), but I ended up pointing out a ton of facts that he got wrong. Shortly after that the rest of us were chatting and found that he had promptly fallen asleep on the couch nearby.
Because we were holding a new Pathfinder campaign that night, Scott (the de fact leader guy) figured we should include his cousin. Nathaniel started off with an elf ranger. I think his name was Bob. Let's call him Bob.
The game began simply enough, with everyone in the local tavern/brothel. The party members all paid their silver for a girl and headed upstairs.
Bob the elf decided to try and pickpocket his particular girl, which resulted in her pulling a knife on him.
I don't know exactly why Nathaniel thought random thievery was a good idea, but based on some of his later behavior I think he tried to play D&D almost like The Elder Scrolls.
The prostitute starts taking swings at him, never connecting. He's running all around the room trying to calm her down, which eventually attracts the ire of the rest of the brothel. Literally almost every prostitute is armed and trying to kill him.
Nathaniel tries to dissuade them by saying something like "But which one of you is the prettiest?" He was apparently hoping that he could instill rivalry and get them fighting amongst themselves.
It didn't work.
So the madame shows up and stops the fight. As punishment, she places a magical amulet on Bob that acts sort of like a restraining bolt, forcing him to do her bidding on pain of death.
She gives the PCs their initial quest hook. The baron of the town is collecting the pieces of a legendary warrior's armor, and she wants them for herself. We need to go offer our services to said baron and then hand over the armor when we accomplish the mission. We get paid for the job anyway, and Bob gets his necklace off. Bob is promptly tossed out into an alley, where he is violently raped by large non-human creatures. The party finds him the next morning in the garbage, wearing nothing but a loincloth and leaking from his anus.
This is how he attends the meeting with the baron.
We visit the baron and offer our services. He gives us the locations of the armor, scattered around the various towns and villages in the province. He also has Bob tossed a robe.
So we start off by heading to a town in the mountains, where the first piece is supposed to be. My knight-ish barbarian is accompanying Bob as we search the town for clues, and we come across the leader of the Thieve's Guild in town. Can't remember exactly how we found out it was him. I think in another campaign Scott held in his world our PCs did a job for him, and that's where I got a lot of rogue practice in.
The leader tells us about what we're searching for and reveals some "facts" about it. He says that the religious guards who protect the temple where the armor piece is magically deactivate and switch off at sundown, allowing us to get in.
My guy rolls and finds that the man is very obviously bullshitting. He tells Bob this. Bob doesn't care. I still don't know if Nathaniel was roleplaying or just dumb.
So while the party plans out their sneaky infiltration into the temple, Bob has other plans.
He runs off to the neighboring village, about 2 hours away, and lights a fire in a barn. He hopes that the fire will distract the folks in town from his thieving. Now, I should point out that Bob left for the village less than an hour before sunset. He was aware of this. Nathaniel did not care about time.
As he runs off from the barn, Bob hears cries for help coming from it. He rather callously ignores them, and narrowly escapes the town guard and getting pierced by arrows.
As expected, all of the stuff about the guards was a load of bullshit and they just do a regular changing of the guard. Bob was late, injured, tired, possibly killed an innocent person, and had accomplished nothing.
Clearly, he was not Good aligned.
We got the armor piece through more mundane means. I don't remember any details. I think we did a Mission: Impossible style rappelling infiltration to grab it.
So as an experiment, Scott decided to try something new. Every session, we would rotate DM duties. The next person in line would build the next village and challenges to acquire the plot coupon.
Nathaniel's turn was next.
Back to a different mountain village. While Bob the elf was away, my barbarian and Scott's character were heading off to look for the next piece. I head to the baron's manor to see if I can look in his library for lore related to the legendary hero, while Scott goes to the tavern to listen for rumors and info.
I visit the baron, who I discover is the "Baron of Many Appetites." A horrifically obese man almost constantly feasting. The baron quickly grants me permission to use his library, and sends me off.
While poring over the tomes of forgotten lore, a servant girl arrives with a drink. I am pretty much immediately suspicious. I refuse to drink, and instead I convince her to take a drink first. She does so, and immediately falls unconscious.
I book it right out of there.
Meanwhile, Scott pays a gold piece to a troubadour at the tavern. His song literally tells us exactly where to go to find the armor piece. Like, even names the place.
As we head off into the mountains to seek out the Crystal Caverns, the baron leaves his palace and announces that a town-wide orgy will now take place.
Nobody has ever left a town on foot as fast as our two PCs.
We make it to the mountains, but find that a series of goblin villages are placed around the mountain paths on the way up
My character is downright racist against goblins, so he takes pleasure in the chance to wreak havoc. The two of us slice our way up the mountain, easily killing scores of goblins. Nathaniel plants obscene amounts of treasure and rare weapons in the villages. Seriously, one village will have more than we could ever carry.
This is one of Nathaniel's other trends. He tries to reward PCs with stupidly vast rewards, literal tons of treasure and magical items and magic scrolls.
Anyways, we easily carve a path uphill. The goblins even roll crystal spike-studded boulders down at us, but only succeed in battering their own villages. Eventually the goblins start torching their own homes before we arrive and running.
We reach the bridge, a simple rope bridge crossing a vast canyon to the Crystal Caverns. And a ridiculously large goblin army is on the other side, including their general. We immediately call bullshit, pointing out the impracticality of not only fighting off hundreds of goblins at once, but also actually playing it out.
Nathaniel simply nods his head and handwaves the encounter away. Two regular adventurers, not even very high level, kill an army off-screen.
So we make it to the caverns. There are suddenly two sets of the armor piece presented on a crystal pedestal for us to choose from. A magical voice speaks from the ether, telling us that we need to choose the right one.
We picked the right one.....and a cave-in starts, forcing us to run down the mountain to avoid getting splattered. Turns out Nathaniel hadn't actually set up a difference between the right and wrong armor piece and just tossed the cave-in into it.
The next game didn't involve Nathaniel at all, as he was gone that day. The player who was missing for the Crystal Caverns session was DMing, and it was a sort of difficult session involving unusually tough zombies that nearly gave us a TPK and fighting up a necromancer's tower.
So then it's my turn to DM. I decide to do things a little bit differently this time by incorporating a bit more depth into the town. I chose the harbor town for my session setting.
Part of this game world's setting is ascension to godhood. It's possible to ascend to immortality if enough people have faith that you must be a saint or god or whatever, which is how said legendary hero managed to ascend.
The harbor town was set up by me as a neglected, poor fishing village. The local baron was desperate for godhood, and had banned local religion and attempted to use his military to force the public to worship him in the hopes of becoming immortal
So the party entered a sort of dystopian village, filled with secret police and elite guards.
The party only knew that the armor piece was out at sea, and they needed to find out where it was. Everyone agreed that the baron, so desperate for godhood, would likely be seeking the relic of a legendary hero who ascended to immortality. So they had to talk to him.
Nathaniel had other plans, of course.
He wanted to steal a boat. Being an asshole, Bob the elf decided to do so by murdering a random fisherman.
This is why I think Nathaniel was trying to imitate Oblivion in his gameplay: he tried to kill his target by simply crouching on the dock (in broad daylight) and sniping him with a bow. He failed his shot miserably, and was forced to dive under the dock to avoid being perforated.
Later, he got another plan. Why not see the baron? But how does one visit an oppressive baron?
Nathaniel's plan: get himself fucking arrested.
Bob marched right into the tavern and shouted "THE BARON IS NOT A GOD!" at the top of his lungs, and waited.
He said it again, just to make sure they heard him.
It turns out that his whole plan was to get the medieval Gestapo to arrest him, thinking they would drag him before the baron personally where he could offer his services.
The town guard did arrive, of course. And they simply kicked the shit out of him on the spot. Scott's intervention was the only thing that convinced me not to have Bob get curbstomped to death.
So Bob got tossed out of town permanently for his transgressions. As a final sign of defiance, he shouted "The baron is not a god!" at the town walls. That was it. The guard on the wall shot him in the eye with an arrow. Bob the elf was no more.
Meanwhile, the PCs (who did not miss him at all) simply asked for permission to see the baron and got in just fine.
The rest of that session was fairly boring. It had to end quickly, so it ended with a very simple puzzle involving not killing your doppelganger to get the armor.
There was one last session to be performed for the final armor piece. And we left it up to Nathaniel. In retrospect, this was a good decision. No campaign can end on such a note as this one without letting the creepy idiot take the helm a second time.
The party is camping out in the woods near the harbor town. Suddenly, an ethereal voice tells them that they are ready to find the final piece of armor.
The voice leads us to a spot in the woods. The ground slides away, revealing a staircase down underground. We head inside and find ourselves in a labyrinth. A map flashes on the wall for a few seconds before disappearing, which is utterly useless.
I don't remember most of the labyrinth. It was a lot of various traps and mild puzzles, but Nathaniel wasn't smart enough to actually make challenges. Which is probably the biggest problem you can have when designing Silent Hill-style puzzles to complete: not being smarter than the players.
I do remember that the last labyrinth challenge was each party member being presented with a temptation, and they would be denied the armor if they gave in. The problem is that the temptations were all pretty bullshit. We were told beforehand that we couldn't give in, but they weren't even really good temptations. Like my guy's was being presented with a child goblin and having to not kill it.
Like, seriously? Of course I can hold off on randomly murdering someone that I'm racist against if it means getting the treasure I need. Imagine a KKK member being told "In order to get $5 million, you must not shoot this black man." You think he's going to just flip out and blast him?.
Anyways, we get to the end of the labyrinth. An old wizard awaits at the end, because of course one does.
He presents us with the armor piece, but tells us a warning: we cannot use it for personal gain.
Well, shit. Literally the only reason we're getting it is because we get paid. We need to get this asshole out of the way.
Well, during the campaign with the necromancer, Scott's PC had acquired an item: a teleportation skull. You smash the skull and it teleports you to whatever destination you're thinking of within a limited range. It was meant as a quick escape item.
So Scott pulls the skull out, imagines the solid rock above the cave ceiling, and whacks the motherfucker in the face with it
The wizard, of course, disappears.
.....and then another one walks out from a hidden door in the wall behind him. It was a clone, meant to test us to see if we would try to kill him.
The wizard offers to let us go free if he's allowed to turn Scott into a frog. We refuse, so he animates two suits of armor as bodyguards and begins a fight.
The fight is really easy, mainly because Nathaniel doesn't really understand D&D at all. The enemies weren't statted very powerful, and the wizard was wearing armor that ruined his spellcasting abilities. We actually told Nathaniel that wizards can't wear that kind of armor without hampering their magic, as he didn't know. Instead of removing the armor, he simply continued fighting with the massive nerfing.
We easily win, especially since I had learned the flanking rules well in the previous Pathfinder game as a Spy and can murder the shit out of anything with them. As usual, we collect an assload of gold and magic scrolls for beating the wizard. Again, this reminds me a lot of games like the newer Elder Scrolls ones; you complete a quest and there's a good hundred or two pounds worth of weapons, gold, jewels, armor, magical items, etc. that you have the chance to get during it.
As we head to the surface with the armor, Scott takes over his campaign for the final part. The baron who hired us shows up with his army, and demands the final piece. We hand it over, and Scott takes us into "cutscene mode" for the ensuing encounter.
Undead swarm over the fields, and our party assists the baron and his army in fighting them off, the baron wearing the magical armor. As he fights, we look at him and suddenly recognize his appearance. He's the legendary hero himself, reincarnated. He had returned to the mortal realm in preparation for a mass undead invasion from the north.
We fight and we win. The baron thanks us profusely and offers us downright whatever we want as a reward. Most of us choose money.
Suddenly, Nathaniel announces that his replacement PC for Bob (who came in during the boat ride from the harbor town) rides in over the hills with his own army in tow. Supposedly he had told the religious organization that was guarding the armor in the first town that this baron was stealing the pieces.
Scott immediately calls bullshit on him, and decides to humor him by roleplaying out the exact encounter.
It takes about 5 minutes for said PC to get himself arrested trying to screech at the guards about the theft.
And thus endeth the campaign that encouraged me to forever take notes.
Funny enough, that wasn't Nathaniel's final appearance in our group. He was actually in the first session of my very first GURPS game. Another one Scott ran, a sci-fi.
He was playing the group medic, armed with a .44 revolver. He actually took out most of the guys in the main combat encounter, but he really got on everyone's nerves.
It was established after Nathaniel left the state for good that his medic was so annoying that off-screen he got ejected out the airlock.