Phew that dirty laundry

[limejuicepowder]

Along the same vein of Bad DM/Player Stories, this thread is part humor, part confessional: What have YOU done in a game that you regretted? The regret could be dishonesty, stupidity, unfairness, anything. Could come from either side of the screen.

Here's mine: I was playing with a group of long-time 3.5 players, and we'd decided to check out pathfinder. I was playing a fey bloodlined sorc. When I got to level 3, I of course made frequent use of entangle. When asked for a description of the spell, I said that it prevents movement....though it's somewhat ambiguous on that point.

We played for quite a while, and several combats were won due to the no-movement entangle. I don't remember how it came up, but eventually the ambiguity came to light. I didn't get in trouble per say, but hairy eyeballs were pointed in my direction. Made me feel pretty bad actually.

[eggynack]

Actually, entangle does prevent movement if the enemy fails their save. The entangle condition specifies that it, "Impedes movement but does not entirely prevent it unless the bonds are anchored to an immobile object or tethered by an opposing force." Entangle is anchored to the ground, so it prevents movement entirely. It's notable that I experienced the same sequence of events while playing a druid: a belief that entangle stops movement entirely, a later understanding that it might not do so, and a final vindication which you will hopefully now be a party to.

[JoshuaZ]

Things I've regretted while DMing:

The campaign I'm currently DMing (the only one I've ever DMed) is 3.5/PF game with low magic. (Background to keep the magic feeling low, +1 and +2 items can be made purely without magic and some of the more easily fluffable as non-magic bonuses (e.g. keen) can also be made without magic).

One of the players who is probably the most optimized person in the group, and is playing a wizard who really likes battlefield control. Well, for plot reasons, the person in question had inherited an old castle that had belonged to a mage ancestor of the character. I made the mistake of making the castle have a concealed library with a lot of spells. So now the player has almost every low level spell they could want.

Second, I've on at least a few occasions oked homebrew that in retrospect had serious balance issues. In one case, it was really my fault in that I had a list of pre-approved homebrew that people could use. One of the classes I included was the Ebon Initiate (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=163297) that is really flavorful and was written by ErrantX who makes decently balanced to slightly strong homebrew. Turned out that this class was very strong with little optimization. This was made worse by the fact that about half the players were playing substantially less optimization than the others. One had played close to no prior D&D and was basically just playing a straight fighter, and another was playing a the Pathfinder witch as more or less a straight healer. Since the campaign started, the optimization level has balanced out a bit more so things are more ok now, but initially it was a serious issue.