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View Full Version : "Well That Wasn't Supposed to Happen" or how PCs screw up good plots



werik
2011-01-19, 07:02 PM
I thought it might be fun to share some of the more outrageous, outlandish, and just plain confusing ways that your PCs or you as a PC have "messed up" the plot of a campaign. This can be either big, essential details or minor inconveniences that snowball out of control.

I'll share two such instances from my own D&D experience.

As part of a long-running campaign that my friend was DMing our party confronted the BBEG in what promised to be another challenging fight (though assuredly not our last) with this fearsome opponent. A very powerful cleric, she flew up to the top of a castle on a wyvern alongside a rather powerful halfling rogue lackey of hers and landed. She said something menacing to us and we rolled initiative. I won the order and so I had my dwarf fighter charge the cleric with my vorpal greataxe (we were new to playing and I most certainly should not have had this weapon at the level we were at). I rolled a 20 for my attack roll. I confirmed the critical with a 20. The cleric's head fell off of her shoulders. My DM stared at me for a second and then looked at all of the other players and said, "Well, what would you like to do instead of D&D today? I really wasn't expecting anything like this to happen so I'll have to think about this." She displayed a surprising amount of sangfroid considering I had just derailed the campaign and later on she ended up salvaging it.

Another thing that happened during one of my campaigns was much more minor and a thousand times more ridiculous. It was the first mission of the campaign that I was DMing for them and all of their characters were assembled and given the task of investigating rumors that there might be an attack against a nearby magic school across a near isthmus on an island continent. After they made some gather information checks the party came up with a list of people who might be of interest to speak with regarding the rumors including a nobleman who was a known political critic of the mayor. Rather than speak with the nobleman, however, two of the party members were convinced that he must be behind the plot and so they broke into his house while he was out in search of clues. Although I had intended the nobleman to be an extremely minor character who would have passed on some revealing information about the mayor's suspicious activities, I transformed him into a powerful wizard who was irritated to find intruders in his home after leaving for ten minutes to speak with a friend. He polymorphed one of the characters into a frog and nearly captured her before she was rescued by her animal companion and shuttled to safety. The caster skipped town after that, but was given a much larger role in future campaign adventures down the line.

frasmage
2011-01-19, 09:15 PM
I've been running an Eberron game for nearly a year now and I must say my players are usually pretty predictable, which makes planning elaborate stories and epic combat sequences fairly easy for me. They usually tend to plow through things, i.e. run straight into the trap for the entertainment value of seeing what I had thought up and then having to get themselves out of the mess.

However, there was one particular encounter where things did not go as planned. The PCs have just been framed for the attempted murder of Boranel and have to get out of Sharn. I had planned a massive battle on the rooftops and causeways of Sharn's upper city of the PCs dodging the entire city guard, the dark lanterns and ultimately one of their nemeses who had set them up. I planned the battle (or series of) to last for an entire session.

So as the PCs fled the building where the murder happened, I spent about 20 minutes drawing a fairly elaborate map of the first section of the combat outside. The players roll initiative. The bard wins and then promptly says two words which completely derail everything I'd planned: feather fall

touche, done in by a first level spell. :smallannoyed:

Probably my fault for not thinking of such an obvious alternative escape method, but my improv skills were up to snuff enough to pull of a series of in-air combat sequences that were probably more epic than what I had had planned in the first place. Must say, my usually-railroad-ahead players impressed me.

RandomNPC
2011-01-19, 09:35 PM
I only plan about a game and a half ahead for encounters and areas. BBEG tends to do things regardless, building power and rescources untill they become unavoidable. Sometimes my group picks up a plot hook and go on it for a while, other times they take a few steps with it, drop it there, and go to the nearest tavern looking to be hired as mercenaries.

SilverClawShift
2011-01-19, 10:05 PM
In the early days of my groups gaming, I decided to set up an Egyptian feeling story with a dab of Lovecraft stirred in. Spent the entire week designing the "Inverted Pyramid", a city-sized network of stone tunnels built in a perfect pyramid shape pointed straight down into the very heart of the earth. I populated this incredibly ancient and distressingly cryptic location with what you would expect. The dry, dessicated and REANIMATED remains of the entire population of an eons dead civilization so far removed from ours that their day to day lives would be an enigma itself, let alone the purpose of the massive wound they had carved into the face of their continent.

Without being prompted, three of the five players had chosen 'pyromaniac' as their character archetype. Either firebreath, or fire spells, or a rucksuck stuffed to the gills with flammable oils and magical heat sources.
They scorched their way through my careful preparation like... well like a hot knife.

They never even reached the mummified dragon that was the 'Pharaoh' that civilization had followed into undeath as servant to. There was nothing I could think to do to save the game aside from straight up offing characters arbitrarily and asking them to pick different character themes. I didn't have the heart to do that, so the game just kind of petered out.

Not long after that, I decided our normal DMs "Details bad, loose ideas good" approach to running a game was the only way to handle a group of players.

Vladislav
2011-01-19, 10:11 PM
I had an NPC ask my party to do a quest in exchange for an important document they needed. Rather than doing the quest, the party's Arcane Trickster stole the document from him with one lucky roll (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/prestigeClasses/arcaneTrickster.htm#rangedLegerdemain). That's it.

pinwiz
2011-01-19, 10:25 PM
I have never DM'd before, but i've managed to blow an entire session's plot with one action.

So the party is investigating a giant magic underground sphere and we've gathered intelligence that leads to the local light house. We walk into the light house and there's a receptionist. We attempt to talk to her to avoid getting the guards at the place called on us. I get bored with talking and my CE (read: chaotic stupid) homicidal Dread Necromancer Halfling attempts to kill the probably commoner receptionist with his scythe. He fails, hilariously. Immediately the party druid's Tiger pins me to the ground and the party psion immobilizes me or something. They decide they can't stay around me anymore (IC, we were fine OOC) so we part ways, and leave the light house. bye bye to the DM's well laid plans. Luckily I have a good DM, and he allowed me and the warforged warblade to rob a bank, which was pretty epic.

So yeah, all it takes is a standard action and a DM will be pulling their hair out. Also, no more Chaotic Stupid for me. :smallfrown:

PairO'Dice Lost
2011-01-19, 11:31 PM
My players do this a lot. :smallsigh: The most egregious example:

I ran one campaign where the premise was that a secret brotherhood within an elven empire had conspired with the devils to help the elves conquer the world in exchange for free access to the Prime. There were two parties of five PCs each in the same world (one goblin party and one human party), and both had about the same basic, simple plans to start with. The first session went about as expected, with the PCs escaping elven troops, meeting up with some dwarven resistance fighters, etc.

By the end of the fourth session, the goblin PCs had united all of the major non-elven races in the area in a massive trade agreement under their newly-established Platinum Scales Merchanting Company, created a base of operations in a dormant volcano, and begun construction of a gigantic flying Blastoise-esque turtle-shaped stone fortress. The human PCs had infiltrated a major elven city, started turning a bunch of elven troops into spawns of Kyuss to cause chaos in the ranks, and headed to the Plane of Shadow to meet up with the Votaries of Vecna.

By the end of the ninth session, the goblin party had started destroying ancient devilish artifacts on the Inner Planes that were aiding the invasion effort, run into a Husk of Infinite Worlds from Eberron and turned it sentient to help them, and had two of their number join a yugoloth law firm in Sigil. Not to be outdone, the human party had captured a githyanki scout ship, "upgraded" it, enslaved a few hundred krinth (a race on the Plane of Shadow), and started making pirate raids on the elven empire.

By the end of the fourteenth session, the parties met up for massive battle between the turtle fortress and githyanki scout ship on the one side and a Star-Destroyer-esque flying adamantine devil fortress and a Ship of Chaos on the other, after which they led a raid into the Abyss to rescue one of their party members, then fought the leaders of the evil elves to the death in one of the BBEG's demiplanes, at which point one of them rose to demigodhood and had to be defeated by the combined might of the PCs and all of their allies thus far.

Thankfully, I had literally nothing planned ahead past the first session except a one-paragraph plot summary and the BBEG's name and stats, so I was able to compensate for all of their shenanigans. Yay improvisation.

Waker
2011-01-19, 11:32 PM
I do recall when a friend of mine was playing as a Warforged fighter. Can't remember our levels, but we were fairly low level. In any event, it's our job to help protect a keep from an invading force. We talk to the commanding officer of the invading army and my friend Bluff/Intimidates him (as a Fighter) and tricks the guy into believing we have a regiment (or some sizeable division) of Warforged soldiers inside. Suffice to say the guy turns his troops around and heads home.

Masaioh
2011-01-19, 11:49 PM
This actually happened in the last campaign I played a few weeks back. It was a solo campaign in FR, and I was a godless CG DMM cleric with the fire and sun domains. I was recruited along with a band of NPCs, including a hilariously overzealous paladin, to escort a member of the Cormyr royal line. This paladin's antics, combined with our epic failure in a battle against a githyanki barb, caused my character to go insane. Cyric contacted me telepathically and the rest is self-explanatory.

NichG
2011-01-20, 12:01 AM
My PCs were in a multiverse where all possible courses of action were represented somewhere, and the various different multiverses hung together like a giant fractal foam. Each version had a set of guardians whose jobs varied from maintaining time and space to stealing souls from that universe to be integrated into a single 'perfect' universe, as decided by the multiverse's overdeity.

The party had defeated one set of guardians that they had unintentionally summoned by rewriting large portions of the universe's history (believe it or not, that WAS supposed to happen). As a result they had a bit of the divine blood, which essentially is the only thing capable of enabling inter-universe travel.

They met with a representative of the overdeity in their dreams to negotiate over what had just happened. The dream realm was a place where metaphors worked as physics, and you could only exist if you were part of the active scene of the dream. So far so good; strange place, mysterious envoy, weird dynamics of combat broke out.

As part of the negotiations, one of the party members got pissed off about something and declared that he was going to punch a hole in 'the wall', which was a representation of the barrier between universes that someone had summoned up in the dream to make a point. I sort of sat there and blinked for a moment, and said 'so, you've got this divine blood... it seems to be reacting to your impulse - do you use it?'. To which of course he said 'sure! I punch the wall and use the divine blood!'.

Result: He pre-emptively breached wall between the PC's current universe and one of its neighbors. I had to think awhile on that one. The result was about a 25% increase in the population of souls in the universe without providing physical bodies for them (the other 25% merged with their living duplicates). Fertility rates were 100% for the next few years, and people with strange powers belonging to the other universe began to crop up. Basically half of the beings in the universe suddenly gained a memory of an entire alternate history along with random super-powers.

Yukitsu
2011-01-20, 12:14 AM
Well, during a raid, I was the captain of the largest haul bearing ship, the planner of the raid, and one of two primary combatants, so I was able to funnel all of teh loots onto my ship. Which at the end of it went mercenary, and retired from the campaign, taking all spelljamming phlogisten capability from the party. Which we apparantly needed.

The money stung too.

Elvenoutrider
2011-01-20, 12:36 AM
Dm planned for en elder evils campaign, long story short my party raided a dungeon full of yui tan cultists and slaughtered all of them before the wall behind the alter collapsed, revealing Sertreuse himself, aka a 100 yard long snake god. My 8th level artificer and the party barbarian decide that discretion was not the better part of valor and decided to fight.

I activated a bag full of blast disks to go off in 10 rounds and proceded to leap right into the snakes mouth firing off 2 wands of skprching ray and embed myself in his mouth using my armor spikes after casting heat metal on my armor and weapons, summoning a fiendish giant wasp, with sertreuse bane active on all of my weapons. When i died it was also revealed that apparently i was posessed by a balor which explodes for 100 damage when it dies.

We both died but easily did enough damage to kill off the elder evil, as 8th level characters.

The dm managed to salvage the campaign and brought in pandorum as the new elder evil, an elder evil we most certainly could not beat with the same tactic.