Oh... Pause guys I think I need to re-prep some stuff.

[A_Dinosaur]

So this is a thread about things your players have done that was way more powerful than you thought their characters were capable of.

I will start with something that happened last night with one of the last fights of the campaign. A fight with a big ole' wizard sitting high and mighty at lvl 20 with a ice devil as a bodyguard. The party was level 15 and no wusses. Though we only really have one person who "optimizes". (Though by the standards of this forum its pretty tame)

Anyway our optimizer is a word casting sorcerer who specializes in summoning and debuffs. The wizard opens up the combat with a power word blind and quickens some buff or other with his rod of quickening to top off his battle readiness. (No I do not play wizards to the hilt, it gets too complicated in my opinion) Anyway pretty much everyone saves with some wicked good rolls and the sorcerer gets his turn.

Enter servitor 7. The wordcasting version of summon monster. Unlike the normal magic, servitor is not a full round action cast. Combined with the standard augment summoning, the feat that gives you extra summons when you call multiple things, and that thing that gives your summons the cold type for extra damage and resistances. He casts it and activates a rod of maximize greater to summon 3 celestial Rocs which use their smite abilities and full attack straight out of the gate, power attacking and hitting with about 50% of their attacks.

Yeah suffice to say dead wizard. Though I fiated the fight to continue a bit longer because I just wasn't willing to let a wizard I'd spent an hour and a half making go down in one round through the actions of one character. Still wound up being a fun fight.

What stuff have your players done to surprise you?

[Captnq]

Became Undead at the last minute.

[Xervous]

Usually it is the reverse. My players are occasionally too dense to get past some obstacles without wasting a good portion of their resources.

5 ft gap down to a (might as well be) bottomless pit. Sorcerer has +2 jump mod. Players had just gone over aid another rules not even an hour ago.

Sorc takes a running start and rolls a 2.

[limejuicepowder]

Usually it is the reverse. My players are occasionally too dense to get past some obstacles without wasting a good portion of their resources.

5 ft gap down to a (might as well be) bottomless pit. Sorcerer has +2 jump mod. Players had just gone over aid another rules not even an hour ago.

Sorc takes a running start and rolls a 2.

Hmm, that seems kinda wack. A 5 ft gap can nearly be stepped across, at least by a person of reasonable height. Not sure if I'd even call for a jump check.

[Xervous]

The dwarf even offered to help toss him across, but that was just laughed down...

In Soviet Russia, dwarf toss you!

[Rubik]

Should've just taken 10 on the Jump check.

[Reinkai]

Or gotten a running start.

[rexx1888]

*stuff*

Yeah suffice to say dead wizard. Though I fiated the fight to continue a bit longer because I just wasn't willing to let a wizard I'd spent an hour and a half making go down in one round through the actions of one character. Still wound up being a fun fight.

What stuff have your players done to surprise you?

if this is happening a bit, or just that you dont want it to happen again, you should look up phased boss fights. The angry dm has a good long discussion about it(though its built around 4th ed its easy enough to use for 3.55 with some number tweaking) though there are others. Basically itll allow you to build boss fights where the boss is.. ya know, boss like. You wont have to fiat extra health on big bads this way either.

as to unexpected stuff, i kind of threw my dm for a loop the other day. Wed been hanging out in an evil society, but hadnt realised it at the time(no wisdom for most of the decision makers in the party). Long story short we get tasked with murdering the boss of the city, and are all reluctant until it becomes evident hes going to murder a bunch of people we like. My party is talking about how to solve the problem, and talking to the big bad, and then i bash him in the face with a giant hammer. I hadnt realised how many other people were around us at the time(15 other npc soldiers plus big bad) so it looked pretty desperate. Yet, we clobbered them all with only one pc death. the dm had spent the whole fight saying "im gonna kill ya muhahaha" after starting it with "are you insane O.o". So yeah, he needed a break to figure out where to go from there :P

[Chronos]

The one and only time I DMed, the third-level paladin managed to single-handedly take down a 9 HD demon. It wasn't even a matter of optimization; the dice were just amazingly kind to him.

I hadn't expected the demon to get loose in the first place, and in the off chance that he did, I expected the players to need help from the powerful NPC they had just rescued. Nope.

[Phelix-Mu]

In a fairly low op campaign that eventually went epic, the level 22 VoP spellscale cleric and his aasimar holy warrior-tank cohort found and engaged a 56HD pit fiend, originally set up as a behind-the-scenes mastermind. I seriously expected this to be the end of the brave cleric; he'd managed to escape the pit fiend's minions, rescue and heal his cohort (who had been brutally tortured), and kill the CR-appropriate boss without much trouble.

This is when I basically left the option open: "Do you want to leave now, or do you want to go deeper into the fortress?"

Player: "What does [cohort name] think?"

DM: "These bastards did everything short of rape her; there is no limit to her desire for payback at this point in time."

Player: "Alright, full speed ahead; we go deeper."

Well, they trounce a few weak guards and come upon the uber-boss, this super-advanced pit fiend. With BAB +56 and a slew of feats, I expected the fiend to curbstomp the brave pair. The arrogant pit fiend lobs a couple quickened fireballs and wades into melee, prepared to teach the insolent mortals the error of their ways.

The pit fiend proceeds to roll a bunch of stuff under 5, not even hitting the tank-cohort at all the first round. The player has his cleric unload a consecrated (or purified, can't keep those two straight) bolt of glory at the pit fiend, which he empowers and maximizes with a mix of racial stuff and other spells. Rolling crazy well, he deals like 65% of the thing's massive health in one spell.

I think the creature healed, but continued to melee, figuring that its luck would change. Bad gamble, and bad choice as a DM, I later realized. Two rounds later, with the cohort on the brink of death and the cleric seriously injured, they took the pit fiend down, having dealt over 700 points of damage, if memory serves (as a low-op, two character team). It was a CR 33 challenge or something stupid like that.

Later, I realized that the dumb creature should have blasphemied them on round one, for the easy auto-kill. *doh* I chalked it up to the thing being terribly arrogant, docked them a little bit of experience because the thing wasn't as hard as its stats reflected, and they leveled up almost twice from that one fight (no mean feat at 22nd level).

[Invader]

Our DM had an elaborate encounter set up where we'd have to work our way through groups of mobs while under fire from balista teams on a tower at the far end of the enemies complex. I had my druid fly around everything and cast stone to mud toppling the tower. Without the threat of the batista everything else was pretty cake.

[mucat]

Usually it is the reverse. My players are occasionally too dense to get past some obstacles without wasting a good portion of their resources.

5 ft gap down to a (might as well be) bottomless pit. Sorcerer has +2 jump mod. Players had just gone over aid another rules not even an hour ago.

Sorc takes a running start and rolls a 2.

That's not the players being dense.

If they're visualizing the scene accurately in their mind, there is no way they would use Aid Another to jump a five-foot gap. If your friends tried to "help" you jump a gap that size, they would be more likely to get in your way than to be of any actual use.

[A_Dinosaur]

Heheh thanks for the advice Rexx. I actually knew he had some pretty powerful summons kicking about but wanted the fight to bemore about the characters abilities rather than the abilities of the sorcs summons so I gave the wizard a custom ability

Know who the True Master is:
If Tetzona Zumi is touched in any way by a summoned or bound extraplanar creature that creature is immediately affected as though Tetzona had cast charm monster on it. This consumes charm monsters Tetzona has prepared and does not function if he has none remaining. The creature gets a save as normal.

This was prepared before the session started, but I did not realize just how much power he could summon in one round. To make up for the fact that the sorc just one rounded one of the big bads I had the two rocs that did get charmed just beat up on the roc that made its save for the rest of the fight. Rather than actively defend the wizard from the players.

Another one that happened was in a different campaign one of the players cohorts (I let the players control have full control of their cohorts, yes I know thats not technically how it works) was a druid/wizard/mystic theurge. He used levitate, then cast tree shape to become a giant floating tree during some light hearted roleplay earlier in the campaign. It probably shouldn't have worked but it was too funny to pass up.

Later in the campaign she used this again during a big fight to hover over an enemy before deactivating the levitation spell. To her credit she had put a lot of thought into this and even had the average weight of a "large size category" tree, not to mention the page numbers with all the falling damage rules written on her sheet. Still it wound up being a large number of d6s for a theurge two levels lower than average party level at the time. Considering that theurges have a reputation for being pretty bad in my experience.

[Mr.Sandman]

My players are extremely good at this. In the first game we ever ran, about 5 sessions in. The Party, all LV 6
Dragonborn Ranger, 2 weapon
Half Elf Rogue/ Homebrew Prc based on falling on foes
Half Minotaur Half Orc Barbarian
Elf Wizard, Evocator specializing in Fire
Human Sorcerer
Human Ranger
Cleric DMPC

The rogue had, in his backstory, stolen a magic kukeri from a Paladin from his home city, just a plain +1 but the pally never forgot it. We had to pass through his home city at one point, headquarters of Paladin Order of the White Lion. They set up a trap for him and his companians, a large group of Clerics, Paladins, and Warriors led by the LV 6 Rival, average encounter level +4 according to an online calculator. I Was planning on them being taken to the jail for a plot important bit, but they wiped out half the first wave in 2 turns, mostly between the Wizards spells, and Dragonborns Breath. I sent more in, better spaced this time, and they still wiped the floor with them. They went through the whole lot of nameless NPC's maybe 5 times before surrendering Barbarian and Dragonborn at around 1/4 health, Wizard out of spells and with maybe 5 hp, and everyone else captured. They leveled up before continuing and wiped the floor with the prison encounter, planned for LV 6, not 7. They have just gotten worse since.

[Vhaidara]

Someone found a line changing half dragon from dragon type to dragonblood subtype. No one found the wild shape errata changing it to alternate form. We had a druid and a half emerald dragon. Free half emerald dragon for the druid. On every wild shape.

Oh, and I thought you could wild shape into a size advanced creature. He had fleshraker. Large half emerald dragon fleshraker. Also, that's a large half dragon. Meaning it can FLY.

Biggest. Headache. Ever.

[Zanos]

Became Undead at the last minute.
I'd like to hear this one, actually.


As for my own, this happened a couple of sessions ago, but:

The DM had the villain set up at the end of a dungeon, next to a portal. He was getting ready to give his big villainous speech, reveal some plot stuff, and give us some clues on to our next objection. A "pull back the veil" moment, if you will.

So we charged him. He lost 90% of his health on the first round and then used word of recall.