Players will find/do that sole 1 out of a 1000 things you did not plan for......

[Pika...]

So...after weeks of planning. After homebrewing numerous races and asking you all for help. After spending two days and nights straight plotting out inter-woven Spelljammer systems and a race of conquering Shark Humanoids that would eventually (or as I intended anyway...) follow the PCs out of their isolated section of the Material Plane to conquer other Spelljammer spheres. The PCs end up reviving an aspect of a deceased Demon Lord of war and rebellion and then help him and his new mass of worshipers flank the main spelljammer fleet of my Sharkentine Empire (aka the shark humanoid's empire), giving the Demon Lord and his new small fleet of octopus humanoids the edge they need to tear the fleet to shreds and capture enough ships to overthrow the empire. There was not even supposed to be a Demon Lord in this plot, and I had no idea they would join that battle which was supposed to be thematic...:smallsigh:

But I am proud of them to be honest. I do state I run old-fashioned Players Vs. DM, and boy did they win. Brings a tear to my eye. LoL.

So my Sharkentines will not expand like a plague to other clusters of Spelljammer spheres, and my hard work goes only partly used and not close to it's extent. At least I keep to my word and praise my players for my defeat, and for once again finding the sole 1 out of a 1000 thing I had not planned for.



So, other DMs or even players have their own 1 out of a 1000 things planned for stories? Something so out of the ballpark that you, or your DM, had not prepared for or in a life time expected your PCs to do? Especially if it proved success for them? If so, please share. I really hope I am not alone in this. :smallbiggrin:

[Laura Eternata]

Something like this (though not quite as game changing as your example) happened to my group a few weeks ago. My DM had planned for us to be captured by pirates only for us to escape and be lost on some tropical island, fighting wild animals and native savages every step of the way back to civilization. Sounded fun, only...

...I rolled a natural 20 on my bluff check against the pirates. Not only were we able to continue our journey unimpeded, but we are now the proud owners of a pirate ship who's original owners' tragically drowned while searching for the scroll of wish I "dropped."

[Pika...]

Something like this (though not quite as game changing as your example) happened to my group a few weeks ago. My DM had planned for us to be captured by pirates only for us to escape and be lost on some tropical island, fighting wild animals and native savages every step of the way back to civilization. Sounded fun, only...

...I rolled a natural 20 on my bluff check against the pirates. Not only were we able to continue our journey unimpeded, but we are now the proud owners of a pirate ship who's original owners' tragically drowned while searching for the scroll of wish I "dropped."

Hahahahahaha....

Boy, wish you were in my game. :smallbiggrin:

[OracleofSilence]

hrm. my favorite would be the time the party managed to get its face, who was supposed to be reasonable and slightly cowardly, to become suicidally brave through a blood contract, and then used his bravery to skip into the campaigns end game (which was supposed to be 17 levels later) by the end of the first session, destroying days of complicated work, all by punching out a single mage how didn't like their forgeries.

[Hunter Killer]

I indeed had one of these not too long ago.

Basically I started the campaign by rolling initiative and having them fight their first a adventure hook: A toned down (but still quite scary for 1st level PC's) Displacer Beast.

They killed it, as expected, and I proceeded to explain to the Ranger that this particular animal being in this particular part of the forest was no just strange; It was damned odd.

So... They do what I want and go looking around and discover that this thing has a lair close by. Inside they find another displacer beast, which they kill.

After that, they find a litter of... Uh... Displacer kittens (Yes... I went there). Here's where it goes wrong: Rather than kill the kittens, like I wanted them to do, they come up with a (surprisingly) convincing reasoning for keeping them and raising for their very own.

What's worse is that they immediately stop exploring this lair and decide to go back to town instead; Completely missing the actual reason for the appearance of the displacer beasts and main hook of the campaign: A gate to another plane.

Yeah... No awesome planes-walking adventure hooks for me, and now I have to figure out how I'm going to make up rules for how these displacer beasts age + rules for training them as companions and/or familiars without making them too overpowered (provided the Ranger makes the Handle Animal checks)!

[Coidzor]

So...How did they revive a Demon Lord that didn't exist? :smallconfused:

[Pika...]

So...How did they revive a Demon Lord that didn't exist? :smallconfused:

Fun story.

1. The party rogue slight of hands an ancient little figurine from a makshift temple/alter room of an evil lycanthrope clan who had been isolated for millennium to prevent the Cleric and Adept PCs from destroying them as they were trashing the place.
2. I figured there had to be consequences for this, so I rolled randomly on the complete wikipedia list of Demon Lords to see what Demon Lord that depicted. Originally I did not think this statue would come into play, so I had not settled on a Demon Lord.
3. Turns out it was of a Demon Lord which had died since these beings became isolated. Azael, the Demon Lord of War and Rebellion. (I should have been worried at this point....)
4. I roll percentage to see if there was still a shred of this Demon Lord kept alive by the worship he had been receiving from these evil lycanthropes. It was a small chance, but yes.
5. A session later the PCs play with a Dogbold (a subrace of Kobolds in my games based on KAMB!) slave/crew member using a Deck of Many Things. He got the one where his soul was sucked out of his body, and his body remains comatose.
6. The alter statue was left in the same room with the empty, soulless. comatose body...:smalleek:

[Undercroft]

My characters were after information, so went to morgrave university (an eberron game) to check their library. Rather than pay a small fee for a guest pass, they decided to bluff their way through by pretending to be students...

one sidequest involving a student expedition to Xen'drik later they're still "students"

[darksolitaire]

Me and other players managed to totally screw our DM's plot hook. He intended us to be charmed by Frostwind Virago, and serve her by Slaying White Dragons. Virago had Frost Giant bodyguards, making it clear that our party would have been killed if we intended to fight them. But our bard manages to save against Virago, and later uses counter song to get the rest of the party to their senses (with the exception of our mad sorcerer, no-one could make him snap out of it).

Later when we are getting our if Virago's lair, she appears alone and tries to extort us to stay. My character, a Chaotic Good Wizard/Swiftblade decides to leave as response to extortion, and is in turn attacked by Virago's Icy Vortex. I use celerity and cast Lightning Leap to move next to Virago, who shakes to spell of with spell resistance and then uses touch attack to cause ~40 points damage, killing my character (the party was at level 11, and others didn't have time to act).

Our cleric raises my character, and party is then allowed to leave by Virago.

Few minute later GM simply says that he's out of material. This happened in Friday evening, and we were still supposed to play for two days.

The lesson of this story is that Chaotic Good characters don't react well by being extorted by Neutral Evil fey, especially when they don't know that the said fey has 30 HD and can kill them easily.:smallbiggrin:

[Doktor Per]

So, I was DMing a level 3 party of Frontline Fighters. They needed to get some major divine spellcasting done, so they of course go to the local Temple of Hextor, speak to the High Priest (in a Metropolis where the main religion is Hextor). And one of them slaps him, because he didn't like the priest's attitude.

Well, people mistake Hextor and St. Cuthbert for each other all the time for a reason. Indiscriminate destruction isn't really legal. But sending him a message is. The sends a guy disguised as the man they've been framing for all of their mischief, to their house where he burns a man in the middle of the street (which didn't really happen.) At this point, I'm guessing that they're gonna go into "we gotta get Tommy out of the picture" or "let's bail out of town" mode. No. They went into fullblown paranoia.

After hiding for close to half an hour, they peek out the window, see a woman who after detecting her magic, is clearly exuding a magical aura. Mr. Slappy tosses on a disguise, harasses the woman until he no longer fears she's really some secret agent, steals her purse, only to return triumphant again, after pocketing his hat of disguise, a hero. Long story short, they go back to his place where he seduces her. She takes a sip from a flask (she's well off enough to afford magical contraceptives) and again paranoia takes hold. What if that woman, is really a man!?

While she's in the bathroom, he pushes a wardrobe in front of the door and then burns his own house down to the ground.

[Girshtop]

In our very first campaign, we were supposed to get off some island, while protecting a magical artifact. Unfortunately, it was stolen from us by a vampire, who flew off. Our ranger had tracked him to his shack in the forest. We confronted him, and he sent us away, but not before we got a glimpse of the artifact. We figured we'd come back with a solid plan to get it back, but then he sent some zombies at us. We snapped, 3 of us climbed (and fell through) his thatch roof, while I (our druid) broke down his front door in bear form, with a barbarian and a sorceror behind me.

In short, he one shotted our sorc in round 1. We eventually got away with the artifact, but not before he turned another of us into a vampire spawn.

A lich who the vampire was in a feud with raised our sorc as an intelligent zombie under her power, and charged our group with destroying the vampire, and in exchange she would get us off the island. As we got back to town, our newly formed vampire spawn group member returned to us, and told us that the lich was just going to kill us and take the artifact instead.

We eventually decided on telling the lich and the vampire that we would help them to destroy the other one, and just figured we'd join the side that was winning (most likely the more powerful lich). All that took was to tie up our zombie friend and stake the vampire spawn so they couldn't tell their respective bosses. Attacking our friends? No biggie!

Unfortunately our rogue figured that he would make a deal with the vampire to betray our party for gems, and unstaked the spawn to tip the battle in the vampires favour.

We ended up destroying the lich with rediculous grapple checks, and the vampire was so happy that he now was the most powerful thing on the island, he sent us off free to go.

Our DM then told us the original plan was to let the vampire steal the artifact, then the lich would help us get it back in exchange for us doing a bunch of side quests. He was so shocked that we derailed his plot and lived (by killing his super powerful lich) that right there he just said "....you guys level up. Twice."

Best first campaign ever.

[Quick Tone]

I am currently DMing a pirate campaign. For the players very first encounter they were fighting another group of pirates. After killing who they believed to be the captain of the pirate crew, they all board the pirate's ship to loot it, leaving their ship unguarded. As they come back from being below deck they notice that their ship has sailed away quite a distance. Now, my intention was to have them lose their ship and have to sail the broken ship they were on back to shore; where they would go through a series of quests to reclaim their ship. What ended up happening was the Wizard decided to send his albatross towards the ship. The halfling rogue then states that the albatross is also carrying him. With a huge sigh we look over the albatross' stats to see if this is possible...it was. So the rogue gets dropped off on their ship and finds it being driven by the real captain of the pirates they were fighting. He then convinces the captain that he was a member of his crew who was hiding on the ship. He then sneak attacks the captain. The rest of his crew was able to catch up in their boat, with some really good profession (sailor) checks. After a short little tussle, the players regained their ship, and I am out a recurring villain and a few encounters.

[Flame of Anor]

After that, they find a litter of... Uh... Displacer kittens (Yes... I went there). Here's where it goes wrong: Rather than kill the kittens, like I wanted them to do, they come up with a (surprisingly) convincing reasoning for keeping them and raising for their very own.

Now, really. Surely you must know that there has never existed a PC who could resist the opportunity of taming a baby monster.

[Saintheart]

My players, in the Rhest portion of The Red Hand of Doom, take the Rainbow Six approach: Water Breathing + Silence to first take out a bell tower full of hobgoblins, and then move on to the main town hall where (since the resident black dragon is away hunting with his ranger buddy) they similarly unload a can of whoop@$$ on the remaining mooks.

So. They're in possession of the place, how do they best prepare for the return of the black dragon?

Answer: in a completely inspired move, the party decides to impersonate the goons they just filetted to get the dragon in strike range. (Helps, of course, that pretty well all of them had Hats of Disguise and the party 'face' for the encounter is a Changeling Beguiler with Bluff points in the stratosphere.)

It works. The dragon lands, sets his buddy down while he goes to inspect his hoard. Half the party clowns the buddy in one room ... while the remaining half of the party first hits the dragon with two tanglefoot bags, one pass from the Rogue/Swashbuckler who CRITS ON EVERY HIT, and one successful Suggestion that convinces the dragon not to run for its life.

[That_guy_there]

We do this to our DMs all the time (and since i Dm too, they do it to me)...

One of the most memorable times was when a group of four of us were bulldozing our way from one town to another, all the while trying to figure out the Big Bad's next move. After several sessions of letting us hamfist our way through the DM started dropping hints that we could find a defector in a nearby cave system.

After a long, drawn out exploration of the caves we find several low level peons cowering with a mid level expert. As the expert started thanking us for delivering them from the Big Bad, our power-mad evoke drops a maxed Fireball on him.
For about fifteen seconds our DM stared at us in horror. The evoker just shrugged turned to the peons and said, "So who can tell us about the villian's plans?"

I wish i could say that was the last time that wizard scewred us over. (Spoiler: It wasn't.)

[Coidzor]

My players, in the Rhest portion of The Red Hand of Doom, take the Rainbow Six approach: Water Breathing + Silence to first take out a bell tower full of hobgoblins, and then move on to the main town hall where (since the resident black dragon is away hunting with his ranger buddy) they similarly unload a can of whoop@$$ on the remaining mooks.

So. They're in possession of the place, how do they best prepare for the return of the black dragon?

Answer: in a completely inspired move, the party decides to impersonate the goons they just filetted to get the dragon in strike range. (Helps, of course, that pretty well all of them had Hats of Disguise and the party 'face' for the encounter is a Changeling Beguiler with Bluff points in the stratosphere.)

It works. The dragon lands, sets his buddy down while he goes to inspect his hoard. Half the party clowns the buddy in one room ... while the remaining half of the party first hits the dragon with two tanglefoot bags, one pass from the Rogue/Swashbuckler who CRITS ON EVERY HIT, and one successful Suggestion that convinces the dragon not to run for its life.

...I stand in awe of this move.