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erradin
2015-10-07, 05:31 PM
We all know that, as a DM, accounting for the potential actions of your players can be difficult. Sometimes they just veer a little off-course, or subvert the difficulty of an encounter with some unforeseen trick. Other times, some obscene cleverness ruins everything. In the nicest way, of course. And, as a player these moments are usually pretty awesome to witness, and even more awesome to be the direct cause of.

So, playground, tell us of the times when some piece of imagination or cleverness on behalf of yourself, your players, or one of your comrades has thrown things for loop!

My own contribution:

While playing a 3.5 campaign as a sorcerer, there are certainly a number of ways to do the unexpected. However, I think i seriously threw our DM when I realized I could use the Shrink Item spell to one-shot a careless opponent. There are a few important notes: 1) Shrink item lasts DAYS. 2) The object can be as much as 2 cubic feet per level and is reduced to one 16th its ordinary size. 3) The spell description specifically mentions that the caster can set a word that will automatically dismiss the spell if spoken by the caster.

step one: find a decent sized rock- perhaps about double the size of your average humanoid's head.
Step two: Shrink it and set a command word, preferably a very uncommon, short word.
Step three: wait until the villain begins a monologue, or starts laughing.
Step four: cast True Strike. (optional)
Step five: toss the 'pebble' into their mouth.
Step six: speak the word of dismissal as a free action.

Alternatively:Fly to a great height and then dismiss the spell as you drop the boulder.

Our DM started throwing some dispel magic my way sometimes just to make my pockets explode in a hilarious fashion.

EDIT: Stories from tabletop RPG's other than DnD are welcome. This thread is more about cleverness than specifically dnd

Keltest
2015-10-07, 05:39 PM
Our party at one point stumbled upon a green dragon terrorizing the countryside. Being rather low level yet for such an encounter, we promptly panicked. After some milling about in confusion, we had a brilliant idea.

We flew our party dwarf a very high distance above the dragon, petrified him in the fetal position, and enlarged him (not necessarily in that order). We then released him.

Luckily, he made the saving throw to not shatter into a million pieces when he impacted the dragon, who was not happy with being shot with a giant cannondwarf from the sky.

He quickly became a legend amongst the dwarven dragon slayers.

Braininthejar2
2015-10-07, 07:56 PM
My own contribution:

step one: find a decent sized rock- perhaps about double the size of your average humanoid's head.
Step two: Shrink it and set a command word, preferably a very uncommon, short word.
Step three: wait until the villain begins a monologue, or starts laughing.
Step four: cast True Strike. (optional)
Step five: toss the 'pebble' into their mouth.
Step six: speak the word of dismissal as a free action.



My version of the same was
Step one: shrink a sharp piece of chicken bone
Step two: have the party bard start playing during a meal and use fascinate
Step three: use mage hand to drop the grain-sized bone into food
Step four: dismiss the effect the next time the target swallows

Strigon
2015-10-07, 08:19 PM
Our party at one point stumbled upon a green dragon terrorizing the countryside. Being rather low level yet for such an encounter, we promptly panicked. After some milling about in confusion, we had a brilliant idea.

We flew our party dwarf a very high distance above the dragon, petrified him in the fetal position, and enlarged him (not necessarily in that order). We then released him.

Luckily, he made the saving throw to not shatter into a million pieces when he impacted the dragon, who was not happy with being shot with a giant cannondwarf from the sky.

He quickly became a legend amongst the dwarven dragon slayers.

Ooh; I have a fun Green Dragon story, too!
So, my (3rd level) party (of two people that day; a Paladin and a Ranger) took on a job to steal something from a military caravan. They weren't told what it was, only where to look for it. In truth, it was a statue that once belonged to a vengeful Green Dragon, before it was stolen. The Dragon was now constantly searching for it with magic, and only the magical enchantments put on the trailer it was being carried in prevented its recapture. Their employer provided them with a magical box that would perform the same purpose, and gave them a map of the caravan route.


Skip to the day of the big heist; the party has made camp along the caravan route, a few miles out from where it should stop for the night. They disguise the Paladin and give him the box; they rolled a nat 20 on their disguise check, so he's golden.
The Paladin approaches the caravan, and one of the guards asks him what he was doing so far ahead of the group. Bluff check; natural one - he's taken to the captain as they make camp for the night.

Ranger decides this is the time for a distraction, and sneaks into the camp, using an alchemist's fire to set a wagon ablaze. The paladin gets roped into helping put out the fire, and the ranger decides now is the time to sneak up to their prize.
Side note here; they were told quite specifically that they only had a few moments to get their target into the box after they pull the lid off of the wagon.
So the Ranger pops the lid off, and reaches for the box. Unfortunately, the Paladin has it; he was the one sent to retrieve the prize, after all. The ranger grabs the statue and runs off, signaling the Paladin to break off from the group and join him. They put the statue in the box, and lie underneath a tree, waiting for the caravan to move on. Suddenly, however, a very angry Green Dragon descends from on high and lands near the caravan. After speaking with the captain for a while, it eventually slaughters every living soul there and searches for its statue, but not finding it or the PC's (who at this point are understandably concerned about what's happened thus far...).

The next half hour is just them making an increasingly confusing and improbable escape from the Green Dragon. The lesson here, kids, is that you should always plan what you're going to do when things go downhill, because improvising when you can't communicate with your party members is a dangerous game.

slaydemons
2015-10-07, 11:27 PM
I have one

the party gets invited to a big noble get together, the biggest party of the year, We snuck assassins in, we were the guards, we did alot, we switched the booze around with a much stronger version, we constantly assassinated guards that weren't us we robbed the entire place blind. then we trap all the nobles in a room for 3 days and blamed their death on an entirely different group of people. That is how we eliminated our enemy's faction, by going to a party and having fun. that isn't the whole story but I don't even have the whole story and I was there!

goto124
2015-10-08, 12:25 AM
I ripped off a game for a quest about an investigation involving stolen items. As it turned out, I was a rather railroady DM who want certain events to play out in a specific manner (I thought I could manage after reading these forums a lot... I was wrong). Also, after they found a suspect, they decide to interrogate her. I went through my notes and realised I somehow didn't account for something as simple and obvious as talking to NPCs. Things went downhill and the players eventually left the game.

When I went over the quest I used, I realised it had so many steps and plot holes that made no sense when set in anything other than a computer game (like how everything would've been solved in 5 seconds if people were able to communciate). It's pretty much scrapped now.

I'm starting a new area with a simpler and looser plot (if it even counts as a plot). Hope this one goes well...

I consider it a courtsey to not derail plots. Though so far, I've played only in computer games, underailable for obvious reasons, or under DMs who didn't have much of a plot to begin with.

TeChameleon
2015-10-08, 01:05 AM
I'm sure I've mentioned this one on the playground before, but it's still one of my favourites for just making the DM stop and go '... what.'

Long story short, we were at the climax of a fairly long campaign that had seen Orcus rise, assume corporeal form, and lead an impossibly huge horde of undead to scour the continent. The party, meanwhile, had been struggling to prevent the rise of Orcus, and then hunting to find artifacts that could conceivably bring him down, or at least prevent him from murdering everyone and taking over. We had found what was basically an old, improbably-large, semi-weaponized mana battery left over from an ancient war and that had been storing up magic for several millennia. OOC, it was more or less a true Wish spell, capable of altering reality fairly profoundly.

My wizard was tasked for finding a way to use this monster pile of magic to stop Orcus and his hordes. I thought for a while, and then declared that I was going to use it to rip the surviving lands out of the ground in their entirety and suspend them in the sky as a floating continent.

The DM just kind of sat there and stared for a moment.

Then, after a whole lotta skill checks (and the rest of the party fighting off various airborne undead etc. while my wizard did skill checks... that and the cleric had to convince a variety of irritated gods that all was cool and froody), Orcus and his horde were obliterated by a series of massive tidal waves, and most of the 'known world' was hanging in the sky while the coastline rearranged itself.

MrZJunior
2015-10-08, 01:51 PM
I'm sure I've mentioned this one on the playground before, but it's still one of my favourites for just making the DM stop and go '... what.'

Long story short, we were at the climax of a fairly long campaign that had seen Orcus rise, assume corporeal form, and lead an impossibly huge horde of undead to scour the continent. The party, meanwhile, had been struggling to prevent the rise of Orcus, and then hunting to find artifacts that could conceivably bring him down, or at least prevent him from murdering everyone and taking over. We had found what was basically an old, improbably-large, semi-weaponized mana battery left over from an ancient war and that had been storing up magic for several millennia. OOC, it was more or less a true Wish spell, capable of altering reality fairly profoundly.

My wizard was tasked for finding a way to use this monster pile of magic to stop Orcus and his hordes. I thought for a while, and then declared that I was going to use it to rip the surviving lands out of the ground in their entirety and suspend them in the sky as a floating continent.

The DM just kind of sat there and stared for a moment.

Then, after a whole lotta skill checks (and the rest of the party fighting off various airborne undead etc. while my wizard did skill checks... that and the cleric had to convince a variety of irritated gods that all was cool and froody), Orcus and his horde were obliterated by a series of massive tidal waves, and most of the 'known world' was hanging in the sky while the coastline rearranged itself.

That's awesome! You guys played out the origin story for a pretty cool setting in its own right.



This happened when I was GM.

It was supposed to be a steampunkish espionage game where the party was fighting against a foreign army of occupation. While investigating a freighter which had recently arrived at the city docks one of the members of the party shot a member of the secret police ... in the head ... in broad daylight ... with a full powered rifle ... in front of a crowd. He then went jogging down a side street, found himself an opium den and proceeded to chase the green dragon. When he left he forgot to bring the suitcase containing his rifle with him.

The next day he's grabbed out of his home, bundled into a car, and taken off to the castle which served as the headquarters of the occupation forces. He is deposited in an office with the head of the secret police who proceeds to tell him how badly he screwed up and outline all the evidence arrayed against him.

He was then taken into the basement where a guillotine had been set up. The head of the secret police starts to give a speach about how there will be a trial, he will be found guilty, and they finally get to use this fine machine which has been sitting in a crate for so long. He punctuates this speech by pulling out one of his calling cards and using it to demonstrate how sharp the blade is.

I saw two possible ways forward after this. Either the party member agrees to be a double agent, or he refuses and the game shifts to getting him out of jail.

What actually happened was in the middle of the speech he shouts "I stick my head in the guillotine and pull the cord!" I sat there in absolute stunned silence, gaping like a fish, for a full minute or two before I was capable of forming words. One of the other players who had wandered in early described it as a "f**k you're canoe" moment.

TeChameleon
2015-10-08, 03:59 PM
That's awesome! You guys played out the origin story for a pretty cool setting in its own right.

It was actually already a cool setting- it was a homebrew world of the DM's that he had been sort of puttering at for years. For example, the ancient war I mentioned? It was actually mapped out in some detail- I might be remembering wrong, but I think that the mana-battery doohickey that we used was the weapon that ended it. Accidentally. By wiping out most of civilization.

From what I can recall, the war was between the elves and the dwarves. In the later parts of the war, the elves decided to drop the moon on the dwarves. Without really understanding the consequences. Oh, and they missed and dropped it on the human capital instead >.O

Didn't make a lot of difference, of course. Rocks fall, everyone dies.

And we got to play through the world-that-came, too- the DM had already been planning a timeskip once we finished whatever we were doing to try and stop Orcus, and had said we could play new characters, or continue playing our current ones after a 'king under the hill'/'asleep in Avalon' sort of situation. I'm actually the only one who kept his character, and my irritable pyromancer was rather startled and more than a little annoyed to discover that he had created an Earthly paradise full of enormously tall, healthy (hyperbaric atmosphere, apparently), good, noble, well-intentioned, arrogant twits where he was revered as the greatest mage in history (if you can't see how that would be annoying, well... he's a full two feet shorter than they expect, and nowhere near as powerful as they think, given that the artifact he used is now mostly expended. Also, they are kind of twits).

So now he's travelling incognito through the fringes of the floating continent using the resources of the megacorporation he inadvertently founded, doing good, but mostly trying to continue towards his life's ambition of setting everything that annoys him on fire. It's a fun game.

Speaking of that game, one session I missed seems to have had another '... wait, what.' moment for the DM- long story short, the players (minus me, sadly- real life is so inconvenient sometimes :smalltongue:) encountered a town where the inhabitants turned to ghouls at night. The local wizard invited them to his tower to observe an eclipse in safety, and explain how they could help him end the curse.

Unfortunately for the wizard, the magical interference from the eclipse (which he'd been planning on using to break the curse, I think) combined with a badly-timed (for him) spot check revealed him to be a lich, who was promptly dispatched.

Cue DM facepalm and the curse being solidified, with the entire village became ghouls permanently, day and night, since the wizard was the only thing holding it even partially at bay, and his lichification was an accident. Whoops. (as an aside, thankfully for the players involved, the DM brought the plot point back and allowed for some measure of redemption, with the curse finally being broken centuries later. And also giving us a small army of powerful Deva, who were understandably somewhat unhappy with the people who cursed them).

legomaster00156
2015-10-08, 04:33 PM
Early on, our party gained a Rod of Cancellation, an extremely potent item capable of fully (and irreparably) draining magic power one time. Most of the party saw little use for this, since any magic item it drained would then be useless to us as loot, but my Sorcerer held onto it just in case (as he does with many situational magic items). Of course, we never use it and it pretty much just fills a line in my inventory.

Several months of in-game time later, and about the same time OOC, we find ourselves standing in front of an opening hell gate, where my Sorcerer’s apprentice is being held as (presumably) the sacrifice, and a big-time boss is trying to get through. The hell gate is opening via a massive summoning circle.

Me: “Ember [Sorcerer] pulls out the ****ing Rod of Cancellation and applies it to the circle.”

DM: “… Oh. Did not see that one coming.”

It worked. :smallcool:

Jay R
2015-10-08, 08:41 PM
Shove annoying person up against a wall. Stick an immovable rod into his mouth, button first. The button is pushed when it hits the back of his throat.

He is not moving until the wall comes down.

prufock
2015-10-09, 09:12 AM
Got a few stories of this, three involving the same character of mine from a single campaign, the other involving a friend of mine and my character from a different campaign.

First, my friend was playing a ... bard, I think? Anyway, there was a portal to hell opening up, demons coming through, we encountered one of their officers, a (scaled down to be CR-appropriate) Balor. As part of his equipment, he had bought a bag of holding and a portable hole. Put the latter inside the former ... you know what happens. Ended up on the astral plane, I think the balor killed him, but had no way back (at least for a while). This is how the campaign ended.

In that same campaign, we had previously encountered the same balor. My half-ogre barbarian grappler managed to pin him (no teleportation or freedom spells prepared, what?) and broke open a jar of sovereign glue on him, sticking him to the floor. Easy fight after that, but he got away.

In the other campaign, I was playing a fear sorcerer, something like Sorc 5/Dread Witch 5/Nightmare Spinner 5/Mage of the Arcane Order 3. I managed to shag the DM's encounters 3 times. I had been a pretty tough PC to deal with, seeing as how I could make even mindless things afraid, and had high save DCs and Intimidate checks.

1) A minor boss, attacking the fort we were protecting with his army, was killed by a failed save against my Deadly Nightmare ability. Used intimidation and fear to basically cow the entire force.

2) We encountered a dragon that was serving the enemy army while we were traveling. Reach spell shivering touch brought it to the ground where our barbarian simply CDG'd it.

3) In the last session, the BBEG attacked with his "Godslayer" sword MacGuffin. The party was split up by necessity at the time. My sorcerer goes ethereal, buffs himself with CL boosts, comes back and hits a Telekinesis disarm to take the sword. In the process I became the BBEG, and the party spent the rest of the session trying to stop me.

tgva8889
2015-10-09, 09:49 AM
I was playing a True Neutral Conjurer who had been using a lot of fun noncombat spells. I had annoyed our DM with spells like grease, glitterdust, and black tenticles, but up to that point my character had done no lethal damage to enemies whatsoever. Our party was sneaking through the woods when we heard the sounds of marching. We walked out of the woods and saw a small army of orcs, marching down the road towards a town which supplied our small woodland base with supplies.

Up to this point, I had been keeping a secret from the rest of the party. I was in communication with another, much more powerful wizard, who had offered me ultimate power. As the accumulation of power was my goal, I agreed to be his apprentice. I had also randomly found and held onto a manual for how to become a lich.

So the DM told us to roll initiative and I won. He drew up the map, and it so happened that the Orc army fit pretty neatly into the area of a spell I had recently learned after beginning my tutelage under my new master. That spell was cloudkill.

My Wizard went from having killed the least number of enemies to having killed the most number of enemies in a single round.

Another story: one time one of my party members defeated an illithid with a donkey.

A different story: One time one of my party members succeeded so many will saves against a group of illithids that they assumed he was immune to mind blast and started fighting him with magic missiles instead.

A third story: There was also that time I tripped a mech so Colossal the rules supplement we were using had extra size categories attached to describe it. Dragonmech is an awesome setting, in case any of you are wondering.

My friends and I were playing The Strange; for those of you unfamiliar with the system, we were basically paranormal investigators in modern day United States. I was playing a Tough Vector who Looks for Trouble, a strong fellow who liked to attract attention and fight things with a katana. My party members were a Paradox who Conducts Weird Science, a supernatural expert with supernatural powers and a fondness for explosives; a Spinner who Works the System, our tech specialist and hacker; and a Spinner who Entertains, a convincing young woman who was my character's charge.

We were looking into a particular individual who had been doing some rather illegal and unsavory activity, so we attempted to break our way into the house. Our tech specialist horribly failed her attempts to hack in, so we had to do so manually. One of his windows was open, so my supernatural friend magically floated me up there and I climbed through. Unfortunately, we didn't know that the house had a security system. While we were inside, a few security guards arrived who seemed...particularly overzealous, let's say. I mean, most security systems don't send word to a private security firm with guards who use lethal force, do they? One of our party members, the very persuasive young woman, tried to convince the guards we were there legitimately while me and the Paradox were upstairs searching.

So our persuasive friend convinced the guards that she was the owner's girlfriend, and the owner was asleep upstairs. The guards rightfully asked why we'd set off the security system. So she said the first thing that came to mind: she and the owner had doing some particularly naughty things, and in their...activities, they had bumped the window sensor. My friend and I upstairs face-palmed. The guards were unconvinced, and drew their guns to threaten our hacker and persuasive girl. My supernatural friend and I shared one look, and I did the first thing I could think of to distract them: I shouted from upstairs, "Coming back up, honey?" and began stripping as I ran to the master bedroom.

The guards found a naked man in the bed who totally (unconvincingly) claimed he was the owner of the house. Of course the guards didn't believe me (I'm a brute not a talker!) and asked for the security code to confirm my identity. I believe my exact words were "I look down and to the left a little bit and say 'Uhh...' and then I jab one of them in the face."

I ended up taking down two armed guards while completely naked; my mystic friend ended up missing with all of his attacks and my friends downstairs were distracted by another guard who had stayed with them.

Velaryon
2015-10-10, 03:14 PM
I know this thread is technically for D&D stories, but I have a Star Wars d20 (the edition before Saga) campaign that just fits too nicely here for me not to post it.

The derailing of the campaign began before we ever even played it. I had discussed the game one on one with the various players and we had more or less agreed to set it during the Clone Wars time period. However, one player either didn't get the memo or didn't care, because he built a Wookiee whose entire character hinged upon the fact that she was a former slave, which hadn't happened yet during the time period the game was intended to take place. So with some annoyance but no real complaints, the rest of us talked it over and decided to move the game to the time period between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. Not everyone had created their characters yet anyway and I had done barely any prep work, so nobody was really that inconvenienced. But looking back, this set the tone for the entire campaign.

Liaklanna - a female Wookiee and former slave who was good with mechanics and even better fighting up close with her ryyk blades (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Ryyk_blade)
Karas - a Sarkan (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sarkan) Force Adept whose player interpreted the species' "complicated protocol rituals" as mandate to act confusing and difficult.
Maj-Odo - a Cerean Jedi apprentice who had escaped the Jedi purge only because his father/Jedi master had crash landed on the Nagai homeworld in the Unknown Regions, many years before the planet was known to the galaxy at large
Sin Shai - a Nagai Jedi apprentice and close companion of Maj-Odo, who was extraordinarily skilled in telekinetic manipulation and lightsaber combat, but pretty hopeless at all the other skills most Jedi possess. Also the group's pilot.
Torin Koon - Kel Dor all-purpose criminal, who took various turns at smuggling, assassination, bounty hunting, and any other form of illegal activity he could get his hands on, throughout the course of the game. Started off not too bad but got more evil as the game went on.

Later in the campaign, they were joined by other characters:
Ari Sevan - Alderaanian refugee turned Y-Wing pilot and heavy weapons specialist, whose sanity slowly declined throughout the story as people around him died and various wounds and accidents resulted in lots of cybernetics
Vira Loran - a female Miraluka who became Sin Shai's Jedi apprentice
Kell - human martial artist and infiltration specialist, who took Ari Sevan's place in the group when his player decided the character had become too unhinged to travel with the rest of them any longer.

The group started off as independent allies with some contacts on the galactic fringe - making some money here and there, cramming aboard the tiny transport that Maj-Odo's father had long ago come to the Nagai homeworld with. Eventually they started getting more involved with the Rebellion, though some strife within the group led to some changes. Maj-Odo's player quit after just a few sessions because he really didn't care for Star Wars that much, and he was getting into other things and got a new girlfriend around that time. Liaklanna's player quit the campaign for reasons I can't remember anymore, probably personality problems with other players (he was difficult to get along with, to put it mildly). Karas's player left the game because he wasn't that into it, had frequent difficulty making it to sessions (sometimes missing two or three in a row), and didn't pay much attention or contribute much when he was there anyway. We added two new players as well, one as a Rebel pilot who strengthened the group's ties to the Rebel Alliance, and one as a Jedi apprentice to Sin Shai.

Ari Sevan grew to command his own squadron (I fully detailed a dozen different NPCs of various species, skills, and backgrounds) and fell in love with one of his subordinates, while Sin Shai grew ever more specialized in his skills but ever more deadly in combat, especially once he apprenticed himself to a former PC from another campaign. Torin Koon founded his own criminal operation full of smugglers and petty thugs, which he used to amass a small fortune while also settling some grudges from his character's backstory. Vira Loran, played somewhat Chaotic Stupid because her player had a quick temper and not a lot of thought for consequences, began to drift to the dark side.


Meanwhile, the increasingly fractious group had gotten into a sort of rivalry with a division of Imperial Intelligence that was a thinly disguised ripoff of the Turks from Final Fantasy 7 (with versions of Reno, Rude, Tseng, and Elena, supplemented by two or three subordinates later in the game). During a mission somewhere, Torin Koon decided to betray the team and join the Empire. In the process he sacrificed his own R2 droid, who had been stuffed full of thermal detonators prior to the mission). The resulting explosion wounded all the PCs and killed nearly all of Ari's squadron-mates, except the one flying cover outside. He flew off with the Turks and was made a provisional member of their organization, though he was usually given the worst and most dangerous assignments.


At this point, I had a schism within the group. I could've asked Torin's player to make a new character, but I enjoyed his antics and hoped for a character redemption, so I let it keep going. This meant a permanent split in game time - he would wait and watch while the rest of the party acted (leaving the room now and then if there was something they needed him not to know), then he would play for awhile and they would watch. Nobody seemed to mind this, though it created extra work for me as GM.

Then during another encounter, Vira betrayed her master and joined the bad guys too. She didn't get off scot free though - the Rebels turned their starship's guns on the dark Jedi apprentice, and nearly vaporized her body. She ended up with a mostly cybernetic body, very much like General Grievous. The Turks trusted her even less than Torin, but she was a powerful enough tool that they brought her along and aimed her more or less at her former master and his friends.


So for the rest of the campaign, I had essentially two games running at one table. Sin Shai agonized over his apprentice's betrayal and tried to resign himself to the need to destroy her. Meanwhile, Ari Sevan went nuts because his entire squadron had died, including his girlfriend. He became more detached, more reckless, and more vengeful, until finally his player decided he needed a new character and brought in Kell, a stealthy martial artist type.

This two-way schism became a three-way face-off when an NPC faction I called the Orbalisk Club started to get involved. Disguised as a hedonistic cult, it was actually a front for a renegade Sith named Maeve, a Zeltron and secret apprentice that Count Dooku had taken on during the Clone Wars and kept secret from Darth Sidious. She knew some but not all of her master's secrets, and while she was no true Sith, she had significant mental powers that complemented her high charisma and natural pheromones. In short, the perfect cult leader. She was financed by a traitorous Imperial Moff and gathered a few like-minded people to try and take revenge for her master's death and seize control of the Empire.

This led to a three-way race around the galaxy, as the two parties tried to take each other out while chasing Maeve from one ancient Sith ruin to another and trying to stop her accumulating more power. Eventually she found a lost Separatist battle fleet, equipped the battleship with a cloaking device, and managed to sneak it through the Death Star's shield at Endor, right behind the shuttle that carried Han, Leia, Luke, and company to the planet.

The whole campaign culminated in a three-way battle in the Emperor's throne room, in which Sin and Kell and a few allies they had gathered more or less declared a truce with their former friends Torin and Vira, and their allies the Turks, long enough to face down Maeve, her lieutenants, and a small army of battle droids on the Death Star. She was defeated, at which point the two sides tensely regarded one another... and then Torin Koon took a shot at Kell, and all hell broke loose.

By the time it was done, only Sin Shai and one or two of the Turks were left standing, and none of them were in good shape.

...and then the turbolift doors opened, and Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine stepped out, coming to find out what all the ruckus was about.

At this point, Sin desperately called up all the reserves of Force power he had left, burned his last Force Point, and called upon his massive Move Object skill roll, to rip open the exterior wall of the Death Star, exposing all the PCs, all their close NPC allies, and the two BBEG's of Star Wars to the vacuum of space.

End of campaign.

One player makes a character for a different era of play than agreed upon, convinces everyone else to change. That player becomes one of three to leave the game for various reasons, though two others join here and there.

The party fractures as first one PC, then another, betray the others and join the Empire.

I make a third faction so that the game doesn't devolve into pure PVP, and a chase ensues that ends with a three-way battle on the Death Star.

The game ends with the Jedi player ripping the wall off and exposing everyone, including Vader and Palpatine, to the vacuum of space.

To me this game was a train wreck, but all the players apparently loved it.

erradin
2015-10-11, 10:03 AM
Oh man, these are great! Keep 'em coming!

Once, in a campaign I later joined, a few friends of mine were asked to escort an evil demon ring to a safe location so it could be properly sealed and maybe destroyed. The ring itself contained a demon named Boues- a powerful demon ring-leader who was imprisoned to prevent him from organising demons who were ordinarily spiteful and consumed with in-fighting. The ring was in a sturdy, locked case and the party had been instructed never to touch thr ring or Boues would escape.

So, on the road their caravan was attacked, and it was clear that the attackers were looking for the ring. One of the party, Serena, decided to trick them into running away with an empty box. So she dumped the ring down the front of her shirt, thinking that that didn't count as 'touching it' and was immediately possessed by Boues. Thus, villain #2 for the campaign was born.

Fosco the Swift
2015-10-11, 10:57 AM
About midway through one of our campaigns my party ran into a generic sub-boss enemy. He started on top of a balcony with a bow and was raining arrows down on us, except he rolled a 1, snapping his bowstring. So he pulls out a falchion and charges down the stairs to attack us, and rolls a 2 for keeping his balance. When he finally finishes rolling down and taking damage, the monk walks up and disarms him. He spent the rest of his turn screaming "IT'S NOT FAIR!" until we chopped off his head.

My first character was part of a party searching for the phylactery of a Lich we just killed. Successfully finding it, we discovered we needed to open it to destroy it. So my rogue checks for traps and discovers a Disintegrate spell. The Wizard dispelled it, allowing us to open it. We had all our best attacks ready, when the next 3 Disintegrates that I didn't find went off, tearing a hole in reality and sucking the entire party in. At least we destroyed the phylactery.

CombatBunny
2015-10-12, 02:09 PM
Ha ha ha, very good stories everyone =)

This happened to me when I started to play D&D. After reading the rulebooks I was very confused and I wasn’t sure how this was all supposed to fit; the only game I had played before was VtM, but that one has a very different approach.

Anyway, fearing to screw it, I decided to run a premade adventure called “Sunless Citadel”. That led me to even more confusion as I was expecting a plot, NPC's goals, factions, scenes, etc. And here I am with nothing but a tiny plot and just layouts of caverns, labyrinths and rooms.

Whatever, I started to run the game in a very videogame kind of way, being very strict about the monster’s statistics, the treasure, the rooms and not derailing a bit from what was written in the adventure (after all, that’s how the game is supposed to be played, or so I thought).

So, there was a part of the dungeon that was placed just for cosmetic purposes. It was a complex of caverns that lead to the deeps of the underground, and a text in the book said “This is a complex of caverns in which adventurers could be lost for days. These caverns are out of the scope of this adventure”.

Well, when the PCs got to this part of the dungeon, there were many passages they could choose to keep going and there was the entrance to the caverns. Guess what did they choose?

I started to get nervous so I was like:

GM: Okay, the passage leads to a natural vault made of stone that connects to other six passages, they all look very similar and they seem to get deeper into the unknown.

PC1: Okay, seems we nailed it! We choose passage four.

GM: Ooookay… you keep traveling this passage until you reach another vault with other six entrances that all look the same.

PC1: Good! Are you all mapping?

PC2: Yes! I’m noting everything.

PC3: Now I get to choose, let’s take passage number five.

GM: Alright… (Starting to sweat), you travel this other passage and you arrive to another vault which has twelve entrances connecting to it, none of them is noteworthy.

PC1: I think we are approaching, let’s take passage number ten; don’t forget to write it on the map.

At that point I had lost hope to regain control of the adventure, so after they were traveling the tunnel, I stated that an ogre had just shut close the entrance with a giant boulder (out of nowhere).

This was the first time that the PCs felt that something was wrong, but as they couldn’t retreat, they kept going further.

So I stated that after traveling for a while, they finally encountered the end of the tunnel, which was glowing with light. The PCs rushed to the “exit”, only to find a stone bridge that transversed across a lake of lava. The bridge ended in the entrance of a kind of fortress made of natural stone.

As the PCs approached the fortress, I described all kind of gems, magic items and valuables scattered along the road, as well as the corpses of burned legendary knights and steeds. When they entered through the doors of the fortress, they found an amazing pile of coins and treasures and the almighty dragon Ashardalon who was already waiting for them.

He smiled and welcomed the whole party, and he told them that if they wanted to keep their lives, they would have to clean and polish all and each of his coins, which they eagerly started to clean. End of adventure, campaign and party.

goto124
2015-10-12, 08:17 PM
Anyway, fearing to screw it, I decided to run a premade adventure called “Sunless Citadel”. That led me to even more confusion as I was expecting a plot, NPC's goals, factions, scenes, etc. And here I am with nothing but a tiny plot and just layouts of caverns, labyrinths and rooms.

I learned something new today...

CombatBunny
2015-10-12, 09:13 PM
I learned something new today...

I would be so pleased to read what did you learned if you are so kind =)

erradin
2015-10-12, 10:04 PM
Anyway, fearing to screw it, I decided to run a premade adventure called “Sunless Citadel”. That led me to even more confusion as I was expecting a plot, NPC's goals, factions, scenes, etc. And here I am with nothing but a tiny plot and just layouts of caverns, labyrinths and rooms.

Whatever, I started to run the game in a very videogame kind of way, being very strict about the monster’s statistics, the treasure, the rooms and not derailing a bit from what was written in the adventure (after all, that’s how the game is supposed to be played, or so I thought).


Yeah, first time DMing is hard, especially if you're new to the system. My first time I just made a cluster of illogical puzzles loosely tied together with a silly and nearly incoherent story. I think it's always better to start as a player and let someone show you the ropes if possible. All things considered, I think you did a decent job if that was your first encounter with the system! :)

Another story:
One great DM I played with introduced a strange sort of 'memory realm' into the campaign. It was a plane of thought that people could store items in and communicate across. That said, it took a number of skill checks and wasn't easy to do- sometimes requiring material components. It was a great introduction and a fascinating part of the plot. But let's focus on that 'can store items in it' part.

One of the players decided to figure out how this realm worked. He asked a lot of questions, rolled a boatload of skill checks over a number of quests, and finally figured out how to store small items in a specific memory. The rule, it turned out, was that items did not 'age' in the memory realm. You couldn't store living things there, either. What you could store was food. So over the course of a few days in game, we stored four barrels of wine, a dozen fully cooked steaks, a barrel of lamp oil, six barrels of fresh water and a number of whole meals, including veggies, goat meat, chicken, rice and eggs. Since items don't age in the memory realm, we didn't have to worry abut these spoiling. And we practiced retrieving items, too, just to make sure we understood how things could be returned and if they would disappear after a while. As long as you kept a good, solid hold on the memory you stored the items in, they were fine, it turned out.

So our next quest, we ventured out into a harsh, desolate wasteland with no food or water for hundreds of miles in any direction. Our DM had intended this to be an attrition challenge, where we run out of supplies slowly until we're starving and looking for help from any quarter. What actually happened was we spent nights in the house our wizard conjured for us, enjoying 'home cooked' meals of the gourmet variety. She was not well pleased. When we asked if we could store small houses or a dragon's hoard in the memory realm, we were encouraged not to push it. As we had aready gotten away with murder, we decided this was pretty sound advice. :)

erradin
2015-10-24, 02:53 PM
Another story for ya:

I was DMing a game in which all three of the players decided to play monsterous races. One was a Satyr, one a Centaur and the last a Half-dragon.

I designed our first quest around breaking into a thieves hideout and stopping them from robbing a poor town all the time. The players discussed the problem for a long time and finally decided to snoop around first. They discovered that the thieve's boss was expecting a shipment of poisons and giant spider eggs. With some work, they tracked down the supplier and bullied the information they needed out of him to send a package of their own. They destroyed the spider eggs and stole the poisons, then mailed themselves to the hideout. The leader opened the boxes personally and, of course, they killed her before any of her minions could even open the door to intervene. They then used her head and their own monsterousness to intimidate their way out. It was glorious, but wholely unexpected.