Never doubt a PC

[MidgetMarine]

I know that i've seen tons of examples in my current campaign but i thought that a thread to discuss it and give examples of situations like this might be fun. You know what I'm talking about DMs, when you sit the PCs in front of some challenge, monster, BBEG or other sort of obstacle and they solve it in a completely different and often absurd manner. And whether they dropped a boat on the wizard terrorizing the town or petrified the medusa's companions with a mirror, we've all got some good stories. So, let's hear em.

[Grail]

Playing in a near future, post apocalyptic (virus), conspiracy game. We were beset by some unknown force. We knew it existed, had seen it, but didn't know what it was - turned out it was an alien sentient gray goo.

Myself and another player decided the only way to destroy this entity was to detonate a massive nuclear device in the middle of a city of 20 million people. "It's the only way to be sure"

We came up with all the plans, got the intel required, and began the process.

The GM (a great GM), went along with it and wanted to see how far we would go. We even planned the murder of one of our other party members if they got in the way.

In the end, my co-conspirator player convinced me to try an alternate method, because he didn't want to have 20million innocent lives on his conscience.

So, whilst we didn't foil the plot that way, we did take the game off on one hell of a tangent.

Another one....

Playing in a Star Wars campaign. We were low level mercenary types, I was playing a high charisma scoundrel with Bluff, Diplomacy and the like maxxed out the wazzoo.

The DM is trying to hoodwink us to work for the rebellion. But we've met the Rebels, and their scum. Seriously, they were jerks. I didn't want any part of them, I'd even said right from the beginning that I had no particular gripe against the Empire, hell they were good for business.

Anyway, we are rail-roaded into hooking up with the Rebels, and are given control of a capital ship (can't remember what type), and are asked to take it to the rendezvous location with the other rebels.

We board the ship in orbit and the other characters start running all over the place checking it out. I called order and sat them all down.

"Right, we've been given this ship by people we don't like to get involved in a fight we don't want to be in. So I see a couple possibilities out of this:


We take the ship to the rendezvous location and meet up with the rebellion, we fight the empire for a cause we don't believe in and possibly die.
We set the ship to autopilot to the rendezvous location, and take the freighter in the cargo hold before hitting the hyperspace button.
We let the Empire know of the rendezvous location, but this gets us caught up again in the whole war, just on the empire's side.
We just leave and pretend it never happened.
We take this ship to the Outer Rim, where I know this guy. We sell it, split the profits and then go our separate ways to retire and live like kings.


The Game Master just sat there with his mouth agape. The player unanimously voted for option 5.

We sold the ship, retired and the campaign ended whilst we were still only 2nd and 3rd level.

I don't normally try to kill campaigns, but the Game Master was cool with it, thought it was very funny, and after a chat to him, decided not to railroad us as much, and definitely not give us a capital ship at such a low level. :smalltongue:

[killianh]

the antics my party has pulled has given me grey hair...

Of the big ones I remember there was a situation where they were fighting devils and one of the party members said "Aren't we mercenaries?" they all were and it was followed by "I sell my soul!" and then the whole party did :P

A barbarian oiled himself up, lit himself on fire in rage, and hugged the BBEG wizard. Later on that session as the party was about to walk through a grand door to see the person they went to rescue (it was an illusion and trap) the barb said "I'm taking the other door" before I asked what the other door was he had already declared his attack on the wall, broke the wall, and found the real guy.

I won't explain how (so save me the headache of remembering), but a wizard dual-wielded the melee fighters in a battle on the sixth layer of hell, and won.

The party needed to bring back a rare statue that had been stolen from the kingdom, with quite the hansom fee as a reward. The plan on my side of things was they would find it awakened (Incarnate construct) and would have to fight and kill it. Instead spent all of their money on a scroll of gate and scroll of petrify and simply summoned the monster, turned it to stone, and walked away with 500x the amount of gold they had before.

There are a stupid amount more thats happened to me over the years.

Also read this for more fun on the topic

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CFkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Ftheglen.livejournal.com%2F16735.h tml&ei=Z629T8zMMbTl6gHS3NxI&usg=AFQjCNGB_sC-vQLd9UesrJoBzrpwAbIiYg

[Grail]

Oh, another one I remember -this time as a DM.

The group came across a Laenarean Hydra in 2e and couldn't harm it. It was taking quite a toll. Then the Wizard cast Reduce, Permanent, and the group jumped the hydra, now the size of a puppy and stuffed it into a hessian sack.

Oh, and another one, also as a DM.

3.5e, the characters are on Acheron, they are 10th level. They come across a bunch of Horned Devils, clearly a total mismatch encounter. The fighter in the party steps forth boldly and claims that if they don't get out of the character's way, he will turn their scrotum's into coin purses and sell them at the next market he finds.

The Devils all begin laughing and wander off, absolutely delighted at the humour.

[jaybird]

Dark Heresy, my party was hunting down the Lady Governor of an agri-world who traded her family's lives for daemonic powers. They fight their way to the palace vehicle park, where she's getting ready to make a getaway. The Guardsman notices a Chimera IFV nearby that belongs to the Planetary Defense Force and is meant as an escort for the family if they need to bug out for some reason. He hops in the turret, fires up the multi-laser, and goes to town on the Lady...she lasts a grand total of four combat rounds.

[Salanmander]

One time I was running a challenge where the PCs knew they needed to get a series of orbs. One was behind a magic room that was only 5x5, but would shrink them as they walked in, and send them through a tiny labyrinth before they could be full-sized again on the far side.

So, the PCs open the door to The Next Challenge, and see a 5x10 room with a tiny labyrinth on the floor, and the orb on a pedestal at the far end.

They pause. Go "...okay, something tells me I don't want to go in there...".

One player: "I use my hand of the mage on the orb."

me: "Uh......it yeah, that works."

Player: "Okay, I bring it towards me."

me: "Alright, you have it."

Players: "Alright....next room?"

[kharmakazy]

I had one of those awful DM's that decided to arbitrarily increase drama by doing unrealistic things.. "The door locks behind you" was the most uttered phrase from her campaigns...

Anyhow, my character had DR/adamantine and it was pissing her off, so suddenly we were in a dungeon on a floating island... and everything was made of adamantine... the doors, the floors, the traps... everything.

"The door locks behind you" There is a spike wall trap. It get's disabled. Then I start ... the harvesting

:smallcool:"Does the door have hinges?"
:smallfurious:"Yes... why?"
:smallcool: "I take the door."
:smallfurious:"You what?"
:smallcool: "I take the door off it's hinges and I take the door."
:smallfurious:"I... ok sure"
:smallcool: "How many spikes are on that wall?"
:smallfurious:"A lot, why?"
:smallcool:"I start hacking all the spikes off the wall and stacking them up on the door. I tie my rope around the door and drag it behind me like a sled."
:smallfurious:"Whatever..."

Next room ...

:smallfurious:"The do-
:smallcool:"I hammer one of my spikes into the door frame"
:smallfurious:"I.. for what?"
:smallcool: "Now the door won't shut"
:smallfurious: Throws tantrum and leaves

Paraphrased a bit, but that's essentially what happened. I now have the habit of taking large portions of dungeons with me when I leave...

[CTrees]

What good adventurer limits himself to taking everything that's not nailed down? I thought it was common knowledge by now that you should also take everything that IS nailed down, and ideally the nails themselves.

_______________________________

After my group's experiences, I'm thinking dragons shouldn't be allowed. We've encountered three.

-First time, after a fierce battle we killed it (think it was very young), and my cavalier immediately skinned it and wore it as cloak, complete with it's head as a hat. Untanned. PROUDLY rode into town, just like that.
-Second time, adult shadow dragon, meant as a boss fight. The party instead starts chatting. I feed it some ponies. We try to befriend it, spending an entire session just shooting the breeze. The DM was so frustrated, trying to figure out how to progess, he retconned the entire thing :smallfurious: next session started "the dragon attacks before you can utter a single word." I end up turning it into a zombie, frustrating the DM even more ("you know that requires a ton of onyx, right?" "Yep! I made sure to buy a bunch before we set out, here's my inventory sheet!")
-my turn DM'ing, party happens across a young dragon, meant as a miniboss, but possible to simply evade. Instead, they start talking, and with fantastic rolls and great incentives, manage to befriend it, adding it as a party member.

[Alleran]

A lich had spent several centuries setting up a city for a necromantic ritual that would kill everybody there and empower him in a kind of Greater Consumptive Field effect thing. Think Fullmetal Alchemist, but it was more or less before that (I think; not quite sure when FMA started). I'd given them a few options to come at the BBEG, including the option of assembling various items and so on that could be used to counter the effect of the ritual, as well as altering the structure of the city with Stone Shape spells and so on to prevent the ritual from even working. Clean, painless, and allows them to confront a lich that, while powerful, would not be beyond their ability to defeat.

Did they take up any of those plot threads? No.

They stole an airship and rammed it into the room where the lich was beginning the casting (hitting the lich in the process), forcing a Concentration check that probably couldn't have been passed even by a deity. The resultant explosion from the backfired spell was suitably impressive.

They were subsequently declared outlaws for extreme vandalism and had a bounty placed on their heads.

[etrpgb]

I was DMing with a party of players which take the game fairly seriously. With characters with motivations and such. Yet, there were newbie to the 3.5 rules.

They defeated the bad guy and asked me:- his he still alive?
and I was confused and I asked:- what?
- the -10 HP rule. I did 6 of damage, he might be still alive.
I thrown the dice... -yes, he is.
-I heal him so we can bring him to justice.

I was shocked... he was of course right, but I really remember the weird feeling.

[JoeYounger]

Our DM explained to us at the beginning of the campaign that this campaign world was playing on a regular basis. He knew what the NPCs were doing and when they were doing it. How it would affect things and he told us that we should get out there. Explore. uncover stuff. follow plot hooks. That kind of stuff. Well, we're trying but our DM is Asian and has an IQ about 80 points higher than any of ours =/ So we're feeling a bit lost towards the end of the campaign and we kill some people and get a LOT of money. Also though, this fight leaves us in a situation when the main city in this world is being attacked by a legion of great wyrm chromatic dragons, led by a real mean prismatic dragon. (iirc?) Well, stuff goes down and we're like.... "This looks bad... Wut do..." Needless to say, we all teleported to Sigil to go shopping with our newly aquired money and we literally shopped while those dragons destroyed the city and subsequently used an artifact that caused a reset of the multiverse. We litterally shopped while the multiverse was destroyed by millions of spheres of anhilation. Our DM was like ":(" Some of us were able to live thru it in a protected pocket dimension that was located outside of the multiverse with Bocob and Wejas. Others didn't make it. That was a good campaign.

[manyslayer]

In a Star Wars campaign I played in, we were fighting against 2 different groups of Imperial remnants. We knew where the one group was (orbiting a certain world) but they had several capitol ships and we had 0. The other group, (which was a mobile group of slavers) sent an assassin after us.

After we killed the assassin, one player says, "I put the assassin in the bacta tank."

"But, he's dead," says the GM perplexed.

"Yes, but most of his cells aren't yet. I just need him to look fresher." He planned to send the assassin to the group we knew where they were. The rest of the party added several ideas and in the end we ended up with:

An assassin (sent by bad guy group #1) in an one-man ship coming out of hyper space in bad guy group #2's system. He was dead but fresh enough that he appeared to have died from his injuries in transit.
A virus in the navigation system upload when the navigation data was read to see where the ship came from. Written specifically to fail and be fairly easy to find but look like it was designed to cause an engine overload.
Second (the real one) virus that caused ship's weapons to fire when any ship came out of hyperspace nearby.
Homing beacon on the assassin's ship (that we had jammed when he first came for us) active to call his friends in Bad Guy group #1 that were relying on the assassin to find our hiding spot as well as kill the the ex-Imperial (one of the PCs) with us.

So, Bad Guy group #1's assassin comes out in bad guy group #2's system. They plug in to the navicomputer to find where the mysterious dead guy came from. Shortly thereafter, bad guy group #1 appears with a bunch of their ships. One of bad guy group #2's ships opens fire precipitating a massive star ship battle between our two groups of enemies.

This largely knocked out the one group all while we were half galaxy away.

Oh, and we had told the Squib merchant consortium where a bunch of wrecked ships were going to be. After we had bought stock. GM thought about having us charged with insider trading for that one.:smallbiggrin:

[Glimbur]

We ran a campaign one year at college. It's a lot of commitment, so we got three DM's so that at any given week someone would be free to run the game. This worked too well. More of our friends were interested, so we added a second game running simultaneously in the same world with the same DM's. Two groups of six. We split them into a Good party and an Evil party.

Evil party hung around in the city which was (sort of) run by devils. Lots of lawful evil stuff. They got enslaved by a dragon and ran for office and all sorts of fun.

Good party tracked down some mindflayers who had set up camp on the local good city, which was on a flying island. Naturally, killing the mind flayers started dropping the city. They fixed it though.

The climax of the campaign was supposed to be a no-holds-barred fight between the two parties. They were level ~12, each side had a bunch of spellcasters, we gave each side some intel. They had prep time.

Come the climactic show down, half of Team Evil teleports away. Turns out the Good party paid them off to throw the fight. Evilopolis was burned to the ground. Hooray!

[Aeryr]

We ran a campaign one year at college. It's a lot of commitment, so we got three DM's so that at any given week someone would be free to run the game. This worked too well. More of our friends were interested, so we added a second game running simultaneously in the same world with the same DM's. Two groups of six. We split them into a Good party and an Evil party.

Evil party hung around in the city which was (sort of) run by devils. Lots of lawful evil stuff. They got enslaved by a dragon and ran for office and all sorts of fun.

Good party tracked down some mindflayers who had set up camp on the local good city, which was on a flying island. Naturally, killing the mind flayers started dropping the city. They fixed it though.

The climax of the campaign was supposed to be a no-holds-barred fight between the two parties. They were level ~12, each side had a bunch of spellcasters, we gave each side some intel. They had prep time.

Come the climactic show down, half of Team Evil teleports away. Turns out the Good party paid them off to throw the fight. Evilopolis was burned to the ground. Hooray!

It was a great fight though. And an even greater campaign.

Once the whole team evil was 1 person against 6 people (one of them a malconvoker) it became really fun. Mostly because the Team Good ended running away, being unable to kill an animal companion.

[Bahamut Omega]

In a game of Gamma World, our party was raiding a factory that produced robots (or was it chickens?). Anyways, get to the last room with the BBEG and his cronies, and there are a lot of these buggers.

The BBEG is a creature called an Orlan, essentially a two headed giant that gets two turns and hits like a bastard. The cronies are all legitimate threats and require the party's attention, but without the Orlan are an extended nuisance. Seeing them combined together is definitely a cause for worry since the Orlan can just tear through the front line and the cronies will easily get to our ranged attackers fairly easily, once that happens, we're in a lot of trouble.

At the start of combat in Gamma World, though, all players get an Alpha power. Essentially, it's a sudden mutation which gives you a power. Sometimes it's worthless barring a very specific situation (you can pick up, hear, and project radio transmissions; your feet grow to the size of clown shoes giving you a bonus on swim checks), sometimes it augments you (grow an extra arm that you can use to carry an extra weapon in and get one more standard attack), sometimes it's just 'other'.

I got an 'other'. I had the power to create an invisible wall that I could shape which prevents anything from passing through it. No amount of beating would bring this thing down. I also beat the Orlan in initiative. Suffice to say, his menacing position along the wall right by where we came in became a lot less so as he spent the next 10 rounds angrily smacking the wall while we slaughtered his troops wholesale, got to the high ground and nuked him from orbit once the wall collapsed.

[Slipperychicken]

They were subsequently declared outlaws for extreme vandalism and had a bounty placed on their heads.

The label "Extreme Vandalism" is just encouraging by making them feel awesome :smallcool:. And they should feel awesome; they solved the problem in the best way possible: crashing an airship into it.