# RPG a Day 2023 - Day 29: Most Memorable Encounter? tags: #thoughts/RPGaDay/2023 ![[RPGaDay2023.png]] Does the time Clive Barker ogled my ass count? How about shaking hands with Harlan Ellison? No? You know, I'm coming up dry on this one. Not because I haven't had enough encounters but because I've had too many and so many have been so good. "Most memorable" is just dozens, maybe hundreds, most of which had different names, different goals, and different reasons to be remembered. I've already written about several of them in previous posts. I think this might just be a particularly unfair question for people who have a long history of gaming. Okay, maybe one. It was during the [[All Things Zombie]] nine hour session at a convention that [[rpgaday2023-15|I've mentioned before]]. I had this 14-year-old kid who was incredibly enthusiastic, as kids always are. The first thing he asked me was "can I hotwire a car?" I'm not sure he was ready for my enthusiastic reaction, "Hell yeah you can!" Now in ATZ, you have to remember, cars operate on the horror movie implicit mechanics. Starting a car is easy – unless there are zombies around. Then odds are good it's going to take three or four tries and if you're particularly unlucky you'll fumble the keys and they'll slide under the seat. First try, the kid turns it over. It doesn't start. Zombies, however, do notice the sound and start moving toward the car. Second try – rev vroom. That bitch is running. Zombies are starting to crowd. His buddy, in the car with him, is starting to get a little nervous. He's popping shots out the window, taking zeds out with relative ease – but every shot is attracting more zombies from the noise. And then the kid stomps it. Again, in ATZ, just driving down the road is easy. Driving down the road which is clogged with zombies that you are squishing left and right and whooping like a crazy person – that requires a dice roll. Kid rules for his first turn driving down the road, splattering zombies left and right, making a run for the other side of town… And he succeeds! He and his buddy are thrilled, the table is cheering, everybody is invested. My character, because ATZ is a co-op game and I am facilitating, is looking out the front plate glass window of the shop where I'm looting, being more than a little thrilled that somebody else is making a huge amount of noise and dragging the zombies off the front. This was, perhaps, premature and optimistic. Because the kid has to make another roll to keep control of the car this turn. He does not make it. Which way does the car lose control? Forward and to the right. Definitely optimistic. Into the plate glass window directly in front of me. Kinetic energy carries it through and I'm staring at the grill of a screaming Plymouth with two crazed teenagers inside and a horde of zombies attracted by more noise than has been on the board the whole session. Where, you might ask, is my character? Well, after a series of interesting dice rolls, lying in the smashed remains of a magazine rack, sprawled on the ground, looking at a wheel well and spinning tire about six inches from my face as the car rocks back and forth, high sided on the inside of the window. There was additional cheering from the table. What followed was a mad scramble, the kids jumping out of the car into the shop, one of them sticking out a hand as he ran by to help me to my feet, and all of us hauling ass to the back door as zombies slowly crawled into the store through the shattered window around the wrecked car. As we moved through the back room, one of the kids made a lucky roll and found a shotgun with ammo in it. The first zombie that crossed his line of fire took both barrels. Badly. We managed to get out the back door and shut it just in time, and felt lucky that the shotgun had not attracted more dead attention from the potential undead behind the store. That was the happiest kid I've ever seen at a game table. Well, maybe not the happiest – that one would be a nine-year-old girl but that's a different story.