I'm finding reading all these stories quite interesting so feel free to share.
I'm not sure why I don't play more Bards, it'd be useful since I'm generally the know-it-all of the group (when playing DnD 5e which I'm immensley familiar with) but I just tend to go with something else.
Guess it might be because I try and avoid being too much of a party face. I constantly find myself jumping in and trying to move things along so I specifically avoid trying to grab the spotlight in whatever way I can.
Plus I don't get to play much, and knowing all the secrets as the DM/GM is far too much fun to stop for long.
One of the major reasons I have avoided rp heavy, mechanics light RPGs, because I don't play characters that are like me, and I hate when I have to improv a conversation with a stranger. I don't talk to people unless I have an "in" in real life, if I could do it in a game, I'd do it in real life. Just let me tell you what I want to convey and roll dice to see if it works.
As long as you do that much, I'm totally cool with it. I've had to pry a few more sentences out of some people who thought "I persuade him" and rolling the dice were enough. That annoys me
I admit a lot of why my own group was comedic is that we frequently had the opposite happen: We'd spend a lot of time roleplaying out in detail something that should have plausibly worked... and then roll a 1 or some other failure. So then the GM has to come up with a reason it didn't work after all.
(Except for one guy who had a weird knack for always pulling out a 20 either exactly when we needed one OR when it was some really mundane thing where it'd be funny for the GM to have to describe critting it.)
Then there's the times my group would just do something plain old weird. Like along the lines of stories with bards, I once played a field secretary for an adventuring company who was mechanically a bardic sage. Unbeknowest to her (or to me, before that point...), our lady brawler had a crush on my character. So in the middle of a big fight that was going badly, the brawler decided she was going to book it while saving the thing she cared about most... by bodily picking up my character and taking her with her. My PC's reaction was basically "Hey, WTH? Put me down!" and basically arguing indignantly with her the entire time.
Then there was the time in the same campaign I had my PC make up a fake cover identity for one of the other members and just pulled a last name out of my rear end for it... only to find out I had somehow managed to accidentally come up with the same last name as who was supposed to be the Big Bad (when we as players didn't know that yet either). So I basically accidentally came up with having one of the other PCs pretend be related to the Big Bad when that was totally a really awkward spot for us.
I was like half-gripingly, "You changed that around to what I said just to make life difficult," and she was like, "No, it was seriously in my notes the whole time!" and one of the other players who was helping her GM was like "Yeah it was, I saw it," and the other player was like "Thanks a lot, Jeysie," and I was like "Oh come on, what were the odds that I would somehow guess that!"
Most of my stories end up about terrible players or cringy moments (I can go for days), but I've got a few ridiculous and funny things.
For example, this picture in the link (I can never get these images to show up from my Google Drive) https://drive.google.com/open?id=1MdM1_EUhJRDjIjwljJP80RwX5OR7LCjg
Everything from the box with the cleric to the Savage Worlds book in the back is the head of a massive Alligator that my players had to fight. The players are represented by the little colored gems. Why did I make such a massive creature? Well, techinically, I didn't. I made a massive mutant alligator for them to fight as kind of a ridiculous super hero fight (I mean, it was an equivalent to the sewers and an alligator the size of a bus, it was kind of campy), but then before the creature revealed itself they played a special card which quadrupled the size of one enemy on the board. When they played it they only knew about the robot nemesis of one of the players, and they had missed that I got to choose which creature was made multiple times larger (the card allowed them to draw more cards as compensation, and they felt good about making the robot a bigger target in the exchange.
They were worried when I grinned and said the robot didn't get any bigger.
They lost it when I revealed the Alligator a few turns later and told them that all they were seeing on the board was the things heads and a bit of it's chest because it couldn't actually get out of the lake anymore.
I laughed maniaclly, but unfortuantely it wasn't as much of a challenge as I had hoped.
This same game included them driving their captain and the chief of police (here's some advice, never actually make your players super-powered cops who have to answer to all the rules of being police officers, that didn't end well) to become alcolholics, a single card leading to multiple increasingly ridiculous romantic entanglements, and plenty of bad dice leading to things like attacking a laundromat, rebreaking your own arm, and incredibly poor disguises.
Well, if we're going to share gaming stories in general, my old RP group has a wiki with various logs and whatnot. The logs are of various stages of completeness; IIRC probably Trinsic Modern: Relief Squad, Space Quest: Exodus, Chaotic Crew, and Trinsic Past: State of the Union are the most readable out of the ones I RPed in. (Also Valiant Ventures and Finals at the Academy are technically log-complete but the campaigns themselves never were finished play-wise.)
Fun fact: I have played a Gnome Beguiler once. Even better, it was deliberately an overly-cheerful, optimistic, hyperenergetic inventor Gnome Beguiler because generally telling me a character idea is too stupid and/or annoying to play makes me determined to figure out how to make one work out successfully.
Also she was still arguably less weird than many of the other PCs. (Among them: A technically undead cleric of Pelor, a knight with color-changing hair, and a pixie wagon driver.)
My last pathfinder Character was Male Orc bard RockStar who wore Chain Male Bikini. That included am an open shirt, low riding tight leather pants, and the best Rocker hair. He usually cast Invisible Servant to do all the simple stuff like picking up stuff and drinking water. If fantasy ladies can wear next to nothing armor so could my rockstar.
In the end, he held the world best Rock concert the lead to a 3-day drug and fun time experiences before the group left him in that town and continued on. (They play one more session before we stopped playing the game, I miss that last day).
