Making First Contact - When Players Do The Unexpected

[Draco_Lord]

So there are lots of threads like this, so I thought I'd add another. So tell us a story of how the players ended up doing something completely opposite of what the DM expected or even planned for.

I have two stories, both are a bit tame, one was done by me, the other done to me.


This first one was done by me and the rest of the group to our DM. He was completely new at the time, he had really only run one other session with a different group, and that group was the more standard Murder Hobo type, going from room to room killing. Now we were making our way from where we met towards the North, the campaign revolves around us tracking down a Dragon that burned our village, and we had heard rumors about a Dragon Cult to the North. On our way we pass by an Abandoned Fort. Now we the players started to talk about the Fort, debating the use of it as a good camping sight for the evening, some expressing fears (in character) of it being haunted. After some knowledge checks the DM said that there was no mention of ghosts or anything even living in it, us being players however continued to keep calling it the haunted fort. Anyways we go to check it out, after some scouting by the druid (me) and our rouge we find that bandits have started to use this as a base. Trying to be Good people we end up agreeing that just storming the place and just murdering the bandits was a little much, they might just be unfortunate souls trying to make a living. Unfortunately that was the entire plan of the DM. As a new DM he wanted to make a challenging first dungeon, so he did the standard thing, loaded the place up with bandits, had them in different rooms, just waiting for us to kill them one at a time. Instead what we decide to do is make this Fort into the Haunted Fort we had been calling it through the use of Obscuring Mist, Prestidigitation, and a couple other spells. We set up our fog and had to start rolling into the central room, had our Bard call out in a booming voice (Our DM let us use Ghost Sound to make her voice echo), that if they did not leave now they would be cursed and die. We had expected the Bandits to be frightened, what with being dumb, ignorant peasants, probably a bit superstitious, to get the message and clear out. Instead we have one of them be slightly upset by the whole thing, and the other insisting that this old, lost abandoned, fort couldn't possibly have ghosts. What followed was our DM desperately trying to make us have a hard time fighting these Bandits, he really wanted to make it challenging, even admitting that he added in more to try and do that. The bandits would come in a small numbers, thanks to the druid ensnaring them with magic and making difficult terrain between us and them, and when they ended the fog bank we created our Rouge could usually kill them in a turn, even decapitating one on a crit, the head we rolled right back towards the bandits, once again telling them to leave or die. Sadly we did have to kill all those bandits, but none of us got hurt, and our DM is still a bit upset about the whole thing, though he understands that he might need to change his way of thinking.


The other happened when I was DMing. A bit of a shorter story, but one that sometimes shows how players can surprise you even when you expect them to play as players. So what happened was I created a Tourist Trap kind of situation. The party was going to meet in a town, all of them travelling through at the same time, only for the town to turn out to be capturing travelers, and selling them to a local necromancer. The players were caught, chained up, and escaped, all going well so far. They had worked together, used some teamwork, and had managed escape from the villagers tracking them down with a clever use of summon monster, and grabbing the one guy who had found them. They even knew exactly where the guy who was going to buy them was. I fully expected them to come together for petty revenge against this guy. Instead they all thought it would be too dangerous and would rather go their separate ways and continue on with their normal lives. I was kind of stunned, and only because I strongly told hinted that they wouldn't have a campaign if they did that did they turn around and actually went to deal with the necromancer that the story continued.

[Uhtred]

Had a DM once who set us in Ravenloft, let us be INSANELY overpowered. Like, relic weapons at level six overpowered. Anyway, he starts us in a burning, ruined town filled with zombies, and we discover our purpose is to assault Strahd's castle. So my Warforged Artificer, who has taken a flaw that removed his ability to feel emotions, suggest that they take a few weeks to cobble the remnants of the town into an Elemental Airship, fill that Airship with trebuchets, and simply bombard the castle with sacks filled with vials of Alchemist's Fire until everything inside stopped screaming. The party was totally on board, the DM was not. Apparently, he had a series of quests he wanted us to undertake, finding relics and somesuch, and simply burning the castle down from a position of safety in the sky was not in the list of things he had planned for. Later, when his DMPC Paladin joined our party, he told my Artificer that his power was worthless, so my Artificer brutally murdered him in a single blow. He was not prepared for that, either.
In turns of games I've run, I set them in an encounter with a large warband of Chaos Goblins and I figured they should speak randomly, as a gibbering mouther would, and greeted the party with a roaring "POTATO!" The party's Alchemist mutters "I got this," then steps forward and proceeds to Diplomance his way using total nonsense. He and I go back and forth, and finally, he's convinced me. I give him the key to the door they're looking for, and let them go on their way. Initially a huge, confusing fracas, defused because one of my players is JUST unhinged enough to pull it off.

[TeeHee]

In a gestalt campaign we just started playing, I was a Warmage 4//Swashbuckler 2/fighter 2 and for my advanced learning I learned Tenser's Floating Disk.

Our party of three were travelling through an underground passage when we came upon an underground river about 30 feet wide with an aquatic dinosaur at the bottom. The Aventi ranger//monk talked to it and found that it was hungry. I think the DM expected us to try and swim and then have to fight it. Instead, I cast Tenser's Floating Disk and sat the third player on it then used my swashbuckler acf (the one that swaps grace for a spell like ability, in this case expeditious retreat) to make my movement speed 60 feet and give myself a ridiculous jump modifier. So with a sprint and a flying leap my elf cleared the river as the changeling beguiler skipped across on my disk (we Calvin and Hobbes'd it). The monk player used waterstep to run across the river and jump to the shore and we were on our merry way.

[Caedes]

Once upon a time I was in a group with a LG Paladin whose sole motivation was the protecting of his little sister (Age 4 at time of beginning of campaign). And everything the party did he would somehow turn into a boon into adding protections to the town where his sister lived. So this group, we played together for 5 years covering about 4 years of game time (Using downtime mechanics and the like).

One of our first adventures was to stop the Paladin's best friend from his childhood from successfully turning himself into a vampire. And we thought we had done that and then as many adventurers do, forgot what we did in that first quest. Four in game years later 4.5 years real time the Paladin receives a letter.

"I have your sister. Sacrifice yourself or she will be mine. Signed "Whatever his name was.""

So we hurry to the Paladins home town. The Paladin completely ready to sacrifice himself. And we find the entire town has been turned into undead of all kinds. We then go about murdering the people we have defended for the past 4 years. We get to the house where his sister lives with a friend of the family and find her room is left perfectly intact and a note on the pillow.

"She still Breathes. But how much longer. Come and sacrifice yourself."

At this point the Paladin is losing his ****. He is ready to slit his wrists right and there. We stop him, convincing him that he has to find his super douchebag undead best friend if he has any chance of making a swap. So, we put together some clues and discover he is in the obligatory haunted mansion with a tall tower in the nearby mountains. And we go. Murdering the undead merrily as we go.

So we are fighting up the tower the Paladin getting more and more desperate as the game progresses (This is 5 games into this and the Player behind the Paladin also seemed a frantic). We reach the final landing and there in a simple white dressing gown glowing in the moonlight is his little sister, arms outstretched.

Paladin drops his shield and sword and falls to his knees weeping tears of joy that his sister is still alive. And the entire party breathes a sigh of relief. The little girl runs over to her brother and embraces him. He embraces her back, still weeping.

Then the She bites him.

The table goes completely silent. The Paladin (and the player behind him) had been so sure that he could sacrifice himself to save her that the rest of us ignored the most obvious conclusion and were dumb founded. It took us easily 15 minutes to get back to the situation at hand. The player of the Paladin was close to crying when we returned to game.

The Paladin rips his lil vampire sister from his neck and holds her away from him. She looks up at him. Licking her licks and giggling. Tension fills the room both real and in the game.

And then he did probably one of the most hilarious things I have ever seen in a D&D game. He drop kicked his little vampire sister out of the closest window.

Then after the laughter ended He declared that his heart could no longer withstand a world that would allow such a travesty. Then he took a running start and leaped out into the void after his sister. Killing himself.

The room was stunned. Both Group and DM.