What's the best trick you've ever pulled on your players?

[Avianmosquito]

As the title says, I want to hear the best trick you've ever pulled on your players, either as a GM or working with one. Here's my personal favourite.

This one was in a heavily house-ruled version of 3.5, about five years ago. The setting was homebrewed and early modern (think 19th century, not 20th), but it borrowed heavily from a couple other settings, including Greyhawk (the setting I and the DM were most familiar with at the time), Eberron (the setting I am most familiar with now), Oriental Adventures (because the early modern era was dominated by intercontinental immigration, trade and war) and I'm told Shadowrun, but I've never actually played Shadowrun so I can't speak to the accuracy of that. The setting had no deities of any form, but it had clerics that worshipped said non-existent gods and were treated like atheistic clerics of their alignment no matter what "god" they worshipped, and that was one of my favourite features. I take the time to lay this out because I loved this old setting to death and most of my best stories come from this setting. If I ever do D&D again, and I probably will in the near future, it'll be in this setting.

The plot was supposedly pretty simple. The party worked for an illegal mercenary agency, the prime minister came in with a contract for them to find his missing daughter, Tiffany. He's been having a lot of political issues lately, and he thinks his political opponents might have kidnapped her. The agency normally has a strict stance against involving itself in politics, but this is only related to his position as a father and not as a politician, so they allow it. He also pays top dollar to be able to personally interview and approve the mercenaries that do the job, so that may have influenced them. He obviously selects our four players, because that's how this whole game thing works.

The party was a chaotic neutral drow bard, a true neutral nezumi ranger, a chaotic neutral human sorceress and my character, a chaotic good rogue named Tia supposedly a home-brewed halfling variant with racial dexterity and charisma bonuses but strength and wisdom penalties. Not the most conventional party, but it's more fun that way. My rogue became the unofficial leader of the group, largely because the party knew I was best friends with the DM and helped him make the setting (brand new at the time), and also because I nailed my rolls and had both high charisma and the highest intelligence in the party.

We went through the game, my character leading the party to do clandestine raids on the suspects' headquarters and pinning it on known terrorist groups, getting information as to where Tiffany might be hidden and some extra information for blackmail in case we had to resort to that to find her. While Tia's high intelligence allowed her to lead the raids, her low wisdom meant she conferred with our ranger on pretty much everything and that applied double to sorting the information recovered, which was pretty much entirely left up to the nezumi. Ultimately we found no evidence any of them were involved.

Tia told the party she was worried we were barking up the wrong tree and convinced the party to take the information we did get back to the prime minister to see if they can't find a lead in there somewhere. Upon meeting the prime minister again, Tia ran up to him, leaped into his arms and handed him all the information the party had stolen to blackmail the other politicians.

The most priceless moment was when she asked him "Is this enough, daddy?". The look on the players' faces was absolutely priceless. See, Tia is sometimes used as a pet name for Tiffany. None of the players caught on to that, or the fact that the "home-brewed halfling variant" was actually a human child whose level was now twice her age. The entire party got tricked by a politician, a staged crime scene, a little girl doing what daddy asks and a padded bra.

And I have to say, DAMN but that reveal felt good.

EDIT:
Don't worry, they still got paid. In fact, they got paid extra because Tia gave up her pay for the others to split, and they got a bri... "stipend" in exchange for keeping their mouths shut about the whole thing. And they negotiated this while Tia was fast asleep in daddy's arms, just to remind them what they got tricked by.

[JoshuaZ]

Two good times in my last 3.PF campaign. The primary bad guys, the Telnathi, were using necrotic cysts from Libris Mortis. If you haven't seen it, this is a line of spells which lets one implant small amounts of undead flesh into someone's body, and then you can use it to do fun things, like take over their body, or make them explode. The Telnathi wanted in the short-term to take over, but their long term goal was that the lich who ran them was going to engage in a ritual which would merge himself with all the world's cysts, transforming himself, he hoped, into a god.


There was a major NPC, Baroness Tes, an elderly human who was somewhat allied with the players. She was heavily involved in the politics of the major human empire, essentially pushing for progressive policies, especially better rights for orcs and less sex discriminatory inheritance laws (the second issue which for plot reasons made one of the major PCs highly happy with her work). I was to some extent metametagaming, since I was hoping the PCs would metagame either deliberately or unconsciously that someone who was a good person from a modern perspective would be a good person in campaign. They were sort of shocked when they found out that Tes was partially allied with the Telnathi. Tes was willing to help try to encyst the monarch if it could be used to help pass a whole package of laws in in front of the Council of High Nobles before she died. Unfortunately, it later turned out that the PCs weren't really paying nearly as close attention to the worldbuilding as I intended, so they weren't as surprised by this as I intended.

The other one that worked really well in that campaign (less of a trick and more of a having a lot of fun with the look the players' faces) was when the PCs rescued a caravan with a major NPC that was being attacked by a red dragon that had been heavily encysted. After a grueling battle, they killed the dragon, which they were aided by in part from the fact that its cyst had grown very large with rotting bits of flesh coming off. They determined from looking at it that it had likely been encysted at a fairly young age and the cyst had grown with the dragon, becoming functionally an undead tumor painfully controlling it. To try to find more information, they used the spell Blood Biography which given a blood sample of a being tells you the name of a being and some other info. The look on their faces when I informed them the dragon's name was "Red Number 12" was absolutely priceless.

[Pauly]

My favorite was when a party had just defeated the boss of the last campaign and they were going an a bit of a trek to a new town to get the next section of the campaign rolling. The PCs were all about 100-200 XP short of levelling up to level 6 because they had taken some shortcuts in the final dungeon.

The party is walking through a track in elephant grass and get ambushed by a band of low level pygmies with blow darts. The party decide to go running off into the elephant grass to kill the pygmies and get their XP.

The pygmies evade and the party gets lost. They have no ranger. They are all poisoned, a slow acting poison that reduces agility until they are Paralyzed. No party member has put any points into wilderness lore because it is a 'useless' skill.

The remove poison spell doesn't work on this poison. it was supposed to be the trigger for the campaign starting at the temple of the next town which they would have been able to reach easily if they had stayed on the road.

Since they are hopelessly lost map movement is done by rolling random directions. End result they don't find the road and TPK.

I can't really say I intentionally tricked them, but they thought I was just giving them a bonus encounter to level up before the next campaign.

[Khedrac]

The one thing I pulled on my players was in a freeform one-off game with some friends. The party was a highlander immortal, a crow and a vampire mage, and the player of the immortal asked (in advance thankfully) what was in the newspapers at the start of the game.
Along with some other things I threw in a "silly season" story about a man finding a gold ring in a fish - I had a fair bit of trepidation about doing so, but I couldn't logically exclude it.
Well the player read his paper, and the party started sorting out the mystery which eventually worked out to be caused by a rogue genie that someone had unleashed.
Not until they came up with a possible ID for the responsible person and looked him up only to discover that he had got into the papers by fishing up a fish with a ring in it did the player connect back to the original news story...

It could have short-cut a lot of the adventure very easily, but that just made it all the more satisfying when they missed it.

[Avianmosquito]

...

I don't think that one really counts.

[runeghost]

It was a generic fantasy game in the D&D vein, but using GURPS. The PCs started as newly captured slaves in the Evil Empire, a decadent and bloodthirsty but frighteningly powerful coalition of many high-level NPCs. They're freed by rebels and are indirectly aided by a few shadowy "good" NPC figures. Their powerful but mysterious benefators won't confront the evil empire Big Bads directly, and are reluctant to engage even against mooks. The PCs help out the rebellion and recover an artifact, a book filled with writing they cannot read even with potent spells. The PCs are sent on an epic quest to reach a distant temple and contact "the Gods" and plea for aid against the Evil empire. After a multi-session quest the PCs finally reach their destination and call for intervention, offering up the previously acquired artifact. There's a brief divine appearance, and then a few terrifying moments of nothing, and the PCs are about to be overwhelmed by pursuing bad guys.

Then divine intervention arrives, in the form of a booming voice, a glowing avatar of an old west sheriff (not that the characters recognize it), and words of blue fire in the sky.
"By the authority of Gaming Overwatch Division Security, this simulation is formally suspended until further notice."

Gaming with real Artificial Sentients without their consent and knowledge is illegal, you see.:smallcool: And so is creating them without approval and oversight in the first place.

So now the PCs get to play fish out of water in a transhuman space setting. They're pulled out of the game and uploaded into generic template bodies so they can serve as witnesses in the trial and investigation into the game's creators, admins, and players. There are forces that want them silenced, others who want their home game world (along with all their family and friends) deleted, and the challenge of coping with this immense and utterly alien world.

[Anonymouswizard]

My favorite was when a party had just defeated the boss of the last campaign and they were going an a bit of a trek to a new town to get the next section of the campaign rolling. The PCs were all about 100-200 XP short of levelling up to level 6 because they had taken some shortcuts in the final dungeon.

The party is walking through a track in elephant grass and get ambushed by a band of low level pygmies with blow darts. The party decide to go running off into the elephant grass to kill the pygmies and get their XP.

The pygmies evade and the party gets lost. They have no ranger. They are all poisoned, a slow acting poison that reduces agility until they are Paralyzed. No party member has put any points into wilderness lore because it is a 'useless' skill.

The remove poison spell doesn't work on this poison. it was supposed to be the trigger for the campaign starting at the temple of the next town which they would have been able to reach easily if they had stayed on the road.

Since they are hopelessly lost map movement is done by rolling random directions. End result they don't find the road and TPK.

I can't really say I intentionally tricked them, but they thought I was just giving them a bonus encounter to level up before the next campaign.

... You could just have given them 200 bonus XP as a quest reward. Or for ingenuity, good roleplay, or whatever excuse you wanted.

This is why I like Fate's Milestones system, where generally once per session you'll get the ability to change your character slightly, at the end of an arc or adventure you get slightly stronger, and at the end of a major adventure you get a major power boost. No real 'leveling up', but you do occasionally get the experience of becoming a lot better at once.

I've never pulled a major trick on my players, but I have some planned. The first is to introduce the players to the 'department' they work for, introduce the setting including uplifted animals, then eventually reveal that their actual boss is the 'pet dog' always hanging around, and their apparent boys is his secretary(/typist). By having the secretary tell them the boss is kidnapped or something. I'm not that great at twists and tricks, mainly because they tend to be obvious when I write them.

[Inevitability]

I once had the players fight a minor NPC they quite liked, who had ended up possessed by the BBEG. After a highly annoying fight they bring him down, and the NPC collapses to the ground with grievous wounds. This apparently ends the possession, and he begins whimpering about he doesn't want to die.

Cue the party cleric jumping forward and casting Cure Wounds... only for the NPC to reveal he was just pretending to be freed and teleport out.


During the same campaign, the players ended up fighting a vampire and his undead army together with a black dragon. In the resulting fight, the dragon dies, roaring a plea to be buried near his old hoard as he does so. The players comply with this request.

Much, much later, the party fights an ancient dracolich who's basically the BBEG. For those who don't know, dracoliches are undead dragons who upon death can possess dragon corpses in contact with their phylactery. With a great blow, they destroy it... only for the dracolich to mockingly remind them of the dead black dragon buried nearby.

Turns out said black dragon had swallowed the phylactery before joining the battle, allowing it to get buried with him. When the players smashed the dracolich, what they actually did was allow him to escape the place he was buried at that moment.

[Alent]

I once had my players chasing a Vampire through the sewers and hidden passages of a near-tippyverse mega metropolis turning necropolis. The basic idea was that a religious sect had opened a portal to a negative energy plane in the middle of what was ostensibly the entire continent's graveyard, where everyone made the religious pilgrimage to this temple to bury their dead there from poorest pauper to richest king, and now the place was turning into a Diablo style megadungeon, but it hadn't completely fallen yet. There were lots of power players, and the place was really abusive of magic in more ways than one, so the players were already disoriented from the fact that some of the passageways extended into coterminous demiplanes, which helped make this particular stunt all the better.

Every time they managed to get a hit off on the vampire or got too close, it'd duck around a corner, then when they went around the corner, he was some impossibly long distance away. They were convinced something railroady was afoot, and kept chasing it, until finally they rounded a corner and he was standing on the opposite side of a 150+ meter chasm, just staring at them.

They had no idea, and I kept insisting that this was not a railroad moment. They were theorizing maybe he was turning into a bat and flying at 6x runspeed via a feat and magic or something. The trick was, they were actually chasing four different vampires. This particular coven of Vampires had a peculiar entry requirement: Use PF's Sculpt Corpse spell to look absolutely identical to all the other vampires in the coven.

So for all their efforts to figure out how this one vampire could run so much faster than them, when in actuality they'd bumbled into a spread out hunting party that had already expended it's daily allotment of resources battling rival undead and didn't want to take on an adventuring party, so they were cleverly using stealth and mistform to string the party on a wild goose chase that made them think they'd lost the "single vampire". Every time the vampire gained a huge amount of distance? They were going right past the one they'd been chasing.

The vampires also had custom magic amulets that let them swap places with each other via souped up benign transposition, so if at any point they landed any good solid wounds, the wounds appeared to just heal instantly.

They never did figure it out, the campaign ended the session after that one, they got off into a rogue's den and half the party died trying to make money, and with all the momentum gone we just ended up... doing something else.

[ellindsey]

In my Pathfinder game, the PCs were tasked with protecting an important NPC from a bounty hunter. They had learned in a previous encounter that the bounty hunter was a Shadowdancer, and had the port to teleport through shadows, summon creatures of shadow, etc. They figured that he would use these powers to get to the NPC they were guarding, and took precautions against them. Lots of extra lights to prevent shadows he could step through, precautions against summoned creatures, and hiring extra guards to watch the target all the time.

They didn't realize that the bounty hunter also had a few levels of Bard, despite having seem him use bards illusion spells at one point. Rather than enter through the shadows, he used Disguise Self and a really good Disguise roll to pretend to be one of the newly hired guards. Walked right in under everyone's noses and grabbed the target without even using his Shadowdancer abilities.

He nearly got away with it, but at the last moment one of the other characters remembered that he had access to illusion magic too and started spamming True Seeing. Spotted him as he was leaving, which led to a thrilling chase through the city as he fled the party. They eventually got the kidnapped NPC back, but the bounty hunter got away.

[CharonsHelper]

Back in 3.5 I ran an Eberron campaign in the city of Sharn. A guard captain they'd met had a case where a half-elf girl (equivalent of 20ish) was being charged with murder of an important bureaucrat when she'd been found with him on one of the high walkways. The guard was sure that she was an innocent bystander, but the higher-ups wanted swift justice seen rather than true justice, so he was hiring the PCs to find the real killer since his hands were tied.

They interviewed the girl (who was in the jail) and then set out to find the real killer.

A multi-session adventure followed where the players uncovered all sorts of hints of a conspiracy. As they got too close they were attacked by hired thugs, one of which talked about the faceless assassin of Shar who had done the killing - famous for always wearing a creepy blank gray mask. However, when they put him in the guard captain's jail as a sort of witness protection.

The players were SURE that the killing had been done by a noble family who was against a law that the murdered bureaucrat was working on, but they didn't get proof in time. The girl was to be hung.

The players were mad, and they actually used nonlethal to try to help her get away at the execution, and she did for a bit (I actually rolled a 20 in the open for her to slip away - which was amazing) but they caught her. The guard captain was crying, but he gave the order anyway, and she was hung.

The players were furious, and swore to track down the faceless assassin & expose the noble house's treachery. They actually spent quite a bit of time telling everyone they could find about how horrible that house was, spreading papers on nearly every inn in the city etc. They eventually tracked down the faceless assassin, finally capturing them in a climactic fight which ended with a chase over rooftops in the warehouse district. (they were still level 5ish) When they took off the faceless assassin's mask? It was the girl they'd been trying to save!!

The twist was that the girl had really been the killer all along. The whole thing had been a set-up of the PCs to make the noble house (who hadn't been behind the murder at all) look horrible to the public and lose all sorts of political clout. The '20' I'd rolled at the execution had actually been an escape artist check (and she only needed to roll a 4 or so) and she ran into the crowd and escaped, but her allies had a disguised look-alike be 're-captured' in the crowd and hung.

My players never trusted another girl again.

[BWR]

I fooled all the other PCs and players into thinking I wasn't a vampire...in a game of Vampire: the Masquerade.
It was slightly helped by the fact not all of us were Embraced when we started the game, but I managed to talk my way out of:
- hiding from sunlight
- panicking in the face of fire
- needed to sleep during the day
- crashing through the windscreen of a car in movement, then nearly tearing off the door to get out
- outrunning a Celerity'd Brujah
- taking damage from sunlight
- being found holding a victim with fang marks in his neck
- the other PCs being told by a Mage that they had two vampires (I and another PC were captured by them)
- ignoring a Dominate effect

The icing on the cake was blood bonding two PCs to me, including the one who thought he was my master, when they literally asked me to give them blood.

[The Glyphstone]

Ages ago, I sent the PCs into a demiplane adventure that was a thinly veiled clone of Super Mario World. Goombas, Bomb-ombs, Hammer Bros., all the classic enemies that disintegrated into gold coins when killed, and universal bonuses to Jump checks. They'd already discovered a few warp pipes leading into underground chambers, one of which was inhabited by monsters that hurt the rogue pretty badly. They resolved to rest and heal in the next pipe room, but the Rogue insisted that the Fighter go down first to check it out. Also being wounded, he refused, and the two resorted to grappling. Fighter wins, bodily picks up the Rogue and throws him into the pipe.

I roll some dice. Stare at the 20 that came up. Announce to the group...'The Pirahna Plant scores a critical hit'.

[Fri]

Sadly, we haven't reached this part, but there's a trick I imagined would've worth this thread if only pbp is not a flaky medium.

I once had a fantasy investigation game, and one part of character creation is that the players are not supposed to have any scrying, mind reading, divination, or any sort of those powers.

The point is, I assumed that the players would just assume that it's so the investigation game would work better, but actually, if only they pass the prologue case, they'll find out the twist that the actual premise of the campaign is that everyone with any sort of those powers had disappeared from the kingdom, and the pcs are supposed to investigate that.

[Akal Saris]

I ran a game once where one of the players (a ftr/mage) had to rescue his apprentice from a powerful illusionist who had captured her. He and the other PC flew to the top of the illusionist's tower to attack from the top down, and I had it trigger an illusion of 6 Battle Horrors! At the PCs' level, even 3 battle horrors was a solid challenge, while 6 was outright ridiculous. But the ftr/mage PC didn't hesitate at all: he immediately charged forward, casting his most powerful spells and engaging in melee. The other PC followed close behind, with the player keeping quiet because he can see I'm trying not to crack up. An intense battle ensues for the next 5 minutes, and for every battle horror that drops, another one "emerges" from the tower.

Finally, the exhausted fighter/mage PC snarls "How the HELL does this ILLUSIONIST have so many battle horrors?!?!" At that point, the other PC and I couldn't hold it in any longer, and we just about collapsed with laughter :P

[daniel_ream]

In an Amber Diceless game, I had a PC who was the daughter of the Admiral of the Amber Royal Navy, who had very traditional views on what princesses were supposed to be doing (not being ship captains, more or less). The PC was determined to become the Best Naval Captain Ever, to prove to her father that she could live up to his expectations.

As part of the events the PCs were mixed up in, there was an incipient naval campaign brewing. Her father summoned her to the Hall of the Admiralty urgently, where he issued her a formal commission in the Amber Royal Navy.

And then ordered her as a captain of a ship of the line to take her new command to the farthest border of the kingdom in the opposite direction and stay there until further orders.

When the players asked what would happen if she refused the order, I said "Well....refusing a direct order from the Admiral? Court-martial, dishonorable discharge and disgrace, and you'll certainly never command a ship larger than a garbage scow ever again."

I barely made it out of the gaming lounge alive.

[Jay R]

I happened to mention this in a different thread just yesterday.

In a very early Silver Age superhero game, the heroes heard a news report about a rocket ship landing out of town, and aliens being seen.

They went to the spot, and their flying flame-based hero investigated first. She saw a small fire in the woods, and when she got near, a large orange monster with craggy skin threw a tree at her.

A fight ensued. It turned out that one of the aliens also had flame-based powers.

One of the heroes with enhanced senses saw a long, thin, sinuous snake-like thing moving. He smelled two humans, but couldn’t see any. He also couldn't distinguish a separate smell for the snake-like object. So he tried to sneak into the ship to rescue the humans he assumed had been captured.

The fight went on for quite awhile. The long, snake-like thing had a very human-looking hand at the end. It went back into the ship and came out with a fire extinguisher it used on the flaming hero.

Eventually, a human voice came out of nowhere and asked, “Why are you attacking us?”

The flame-based PC said, "Huh? You attacked me!"

Then the orange, craggy monster replied, in a clear New York accent, "Aw, I just mistook ya for the kid."

The players eventually figured out that these were not aliens. Their PCs had blundered into the origin of the Fantastic Four.

[TurboGhast]

This trick wasn't intentional, which makes it even more amazing that it's the best one that I've pulled off.

First encounter of a dungeon: Animated Armor, and another suit of armor is holding two Animated Swords.
Second encounter of that dungeon: Mimic, left out in the open. Holds a required key. (Unless door smashing, or similar.)

The PC violently mimic checked the rest of the chests, doors, levers, and similar points of interest in the dungeon.

There was only one mimic.

I have plans on what I can do with priming people to check for mimics now.