Craziest Ways Players Have Derailed Your Game?

[SimonMoon6]

What's the craziest way that players have derailed a game?

Here's my story: I was running a game using the fairly obscure RPG called Gatecrasher. Basically it was partly a science fiction setting and partly a fantasy setting, set completely within Earth's solar system, with each planet and moon having different properties (different levels of magic and/or tech), with a slightly humorous bent.

After the first adventure, the players noticed the equipment list in the book and saw all the things that they could buy. Their eyes fell upon some super-duper battle armor and suddenly they were determined that THEY. MUST. HAVE. IT. The players were not about to go on an adventure until they had this battle armor.

Now, in D&D terms, this is like 1st level characters who start with 50 gp that they're supposed to use on potions suddenly having a rabid obsession with the most expensive items in the DMG, not wanting to go anywhere until they had +5 swords (with another +5 in enhancements) and +5 armor (with another +5 in enhancements) and other 200,000 gp items.

So, what did the PCs do? Well, they just COULDN'T go on an adventure. So, even though I dangled a nice plot thread about investigating an abominable snowman (which, due to the humorous nature of the setting, would've turned out to be Frosty the Snowman), they decided to go out and try to get jobs.

Jobs!

Like most adventurers, they had no real job skills. So, they had to try to get minimum wage jobs. And suddenly, I'm in the position where I'm running a game about mundane reality in a setting which is very far away from reality. They had to struggle to get an apartment, had to balance saving money with needing entertainment to avoid going insane, and so on and so forth. One of the players had a somewhat privileged background and didn't have any idea how difficult certain basic life goals could be, so I sort-of enjoyed showing these difficulties. But this wasn't the game I had planned to run at all.

Eventually, one of the PCs became a professional athlete who suffered from racism and death threats (because he was an ogre). But that was the most interesting thing that happened. And then another player missed a session, so I had his character be kidnapped, which was going to lead to an actual adventure (who kidnapped him and why?), but the PCs missed their chance to get the main clue, so they never found him. And the player then moved away, so he never got rescued and the PCs never encountered my quirky interesting villains (the Chance brothers... one was slender, one was the opposite, so they were known as "Slim" and "Fat", as in Slim Chance and Fat Chance... and then Fat Chance would be killed, leaving Slim to seek revenge on the PCs, bringing in his sister (who was a sister), so there would only be two Chances left: Slim and Nun).

And then, we just moved on to other games. So, basically, nothing interesting ever happened except on the first adventure (which at least was a little fun, like when one PC got a crit miss while standing on a rickety bridge over a chasm, so he dropped his only weapon down the chasm and out of sight, and had to improvise to win the fight).

[TheCountAlucard]

I had a sorta sailing game going, where the PCs took a job from the empire to recover treasure stolen by pirates. It was my intention for the PCs to eventually end up having to fight the empire, but one of the PCs decided he was gonna go ahead and try and swindle the empire right now.

Except, y'know, he didn't tell the other PCs first.

[daniel_ream]

Hmm. I don't think I've run a game that had any rails for a very long time. I tend to run PC driven/sandboxy games.

That said, I have had players agree to a game and then utterly fail to engage with the premise, though. I'm not sure that counts.

[Kid Jake]

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y207/UnLegend/FirstTime_zps739e0a5e.png


Literally a word for word retelling of my first time running a campaign.

[Zazax]

I haven't run any games that have gone off the rails (my games tend to not really have rails to go off in the first place), but I've been a player in two games that did.

The first one, and the one that was my fault, was the time I accidentally caused the DM to completely revamp his entire campaign from a gritty how-do-we-survive-the-apocalypse type game to an unambiguously happy ending merely by succeeding on a skill check he assumed I'd fail. Most well-timed natural 20 I ever rolled.

The second time was absolutely not my fault. There were 6 players, and we were all waging a war against a full-scale demonic invasion of the Prime Material, backed up by all sorts of other baddies (crazed cultists, necromancers and their undead armies, etc). We're all reasonably high level with lots of homebrew, although there's a bit of a level difference since some of the players joined later on and weren't caught up. The party fights it way to the Demon Lord in charge of the invasion, and cue boss encounter. After stabbing/exploding our way through hordes of summoned minions and raised dead, we finally put down the Demon Lord in a single titanic clash. As the Demon Lord's essence begins to return to his home plane, our party leader, and highest level player, asks the DM:

"Hey. So I can do soul magic, right? Can I, like, absorb his power or something?"

The DM thinks and allows it with a skill check he passes, and then our highest level party member goes full Arthas on us. He gives the other five of us the standard "join or die" speech, and two of them accept. Those of us who decline, myself and two others, tell the traitor exactly where he can stick it. There's a brief scuffle, but everyone is so drained from the previous climactic fight that everyone is able to escape with their lives, and our Arthas-wannabe takes his place at the head of the still-strong invasion force. And so the game turned from a cooperative "fight the demons" campaign into a massive 3v3 war simulator. It was surprisingly awesome. Unfortunately the campaign died before it could be resolved, but I was totally about to win :smalltongue:.

[Telok]

I accidentally derailed a game with logic last year.

D&D 5e, Out of the Abyss.

The basis of the campaign is that there are a bunch of demons and demon lords loose in the Forgotten Realms Underdark and your party of captured-stripped-naked-now-you're-slaves-of-the-drow characters is supposed to stop it because reasons.

Only we didn't know that. We only knew that it was a FR adventure. I glanced through some of the FR wiki to choose a home town for my character and wrote about two paragraphs of semi-vague backstory.

We started the game. Soon after our escape from the drow we get hold of a rough map provided by a helpful NPC who had escaped along with us. I immediately noticed that one of the places on the map was the origin of an Underdark attack on my character's home town, specifically an attack that came up through some deep mines/tunnels. So we knew where we were, where an exit was (approximately), and had no compelling reasons to hang around and play patty-cake with drow or demons.

"Are we big heroes? No, there are town guards with more levels and better gear than us. Do any of us have friends, family, or even business interests down here? No? Nobody? Do we care if a bunch of evil cave dwellers kill and rape each other? Who wants to stay here and eat dried mushrooms and half cooked lizard meat? Anyone? Ok DM, we head for the exit."

It turned out that we were supposed to run around the Underdark for some months doing assorted side quests until we were about level 8 before we were supposed to 'find' an exit. We were on track to escape before we got to level 5.

[Yukitsu]

The biggest plot derail I ever experienced as a DM was when my players went up to my BBEG in my first session and asked her for a job. While they still adventured, they were doing mostly unwitting evil and working a mail room the rest of the time, they spent more time than anything trying to not make enemies of the random people they encountered over the course of their adventure.

Actually it might be when they decided they wanted to make a raft out of arms and then row through an ocean of strong acid back home rather than literally anything other than that.

I guess there's also the time where I was running a simple grab job and the team managed not only to not get the thing they were meant to get, but they ended up in Leeds when they were supposed to be in Hong Kong.

The biggest plot derail I ever caused was when I built a character super, super optimized for smiting demons and devils during what was advertised as a dragon slaying game. My DM comments that he can't keep up with my optimization so I just agreed to build something that wasn't particularly strong in the setting. Then the DM sent us to hell and we then had to wrap up the campaign early since I one shot his boss during the introductory speech.

[Fri]

What's the craziest way that players have derailed a game?

Here's my story: I was running a game using the fairly obscure RPG called Gatecrasher. Basically it was partly a science fiction setting and partly a fantasy setting, set completely within Earth's solar system, with each planet and moon having different properties (different levels of magic and/or tech), with a slightly humorous bent.

After the first adventure, the players noticed the equipment list in the book and saw all the things that they could buy. Their eyes fell upon some super-duper battle armor and suddenly they were determined that THEY. MUST. HAVE. IT. The players were not about to go on an adventure until they had this battle armor.

Now, in D&D terms, this is like 1st level characters who start with 50 gp that they're supposed to use on potions suddenly having a rabid obsession with the most expensive items in the DMG, not wanting to go anywhere until they had +5 swords (with another +5 in enhancements) and +5 armor (with another +5 in enhancements) and other 200,000 gp items.

So, what did the PCs do? Well, they just COULDN'T go on an adventure. So, even though I dangled a nice plot thread about investigating an abominable snowman (which, due to the humorous nature of the setting, would've turned out to be Frosty the Snowman), they decided to go out and try to get jobs.

Jobs!

Like most adventurers, they had no real job skills. So, they had to try to get minimum wage jobs. And suddenly, I'm in the position where I'm running a game about mundane reality in a setting which is very far away from reality. They had to struggle to get an apartment, had to balance saving money with needing entertainment to avoid going insane, and so on and so forth. One of the players had a somewhat privileged background and didn't have any idea how difficult certain basic life goals could be, so I sort-of enjoyed showing these difficulties. But this wasn't the game I had planned to run at all.

Eventually, one of the PCs became a professional athlete who suffered from racism and death threats (because he was an ogre). But that was the most interesting thing that happened. And then another player missed a session, so I had his character be kidnapped, which was going to lead to an actual adventure (who kidnapped him and why?), but the PCs missed their chance to get the main clue, so they never found him. And the player then moved away, so he never got rescued and the PCs never encountered my quirky interesting villains (the Chance brothers... one was slender, one was the opposite, so they were known as "Slim" and "Fat", as in Slim Chance and Fat Chance... and then Fat Chance would be killed, leaving Slim to seek revenge on the PCs, bringing in his sister (who was a sister), so there would only be two Chances left: Slim and Nun).

And then, we just moved on to other games. So, basically, nothing interesting ever happened except on the first adventure (which at least was a little fun, like when one PC got a crit miss while standing on a rickety bridge over a chasm, so he dropped his only weapon down the chasm and out of sight, and had to improvise to win the fight).

I must admit, that's actually pretty funny.

Remind me of a story. The players killed a bunch of zombies and found a wedding ring with an engraved name as random loot that one of the zombie is wearing, and the campaign turned into trying to return the wedding ring to its rightful owner.

[AuraTwilight]

Once in a Magical Burst game, a player rolled Fate control magic and, basically, became the Big Bad of my campaign and completely scrapped the plot I had in mind.

It was awesome. I was basically just playing NPCs and rolling dice while she basically crafted the entire storyline.

[Jay R]

I was planning to run a Flashing Blades campaign set in the Caribbean, set in the time when buccaneers were just Frenchmen living on the back side of Hispaniola stealing cows, before they had fled to Tortuga and really gotten into the business of piracy. The PCs were Richelieu’s agents at the court of the Spanish viceroy, there to pursue French interests. They were given the following mission goals.


Attempt to learn as much as possible about these renegades.
Discover as much as possible about Spanish interests, settlements, trade, etc.
Assure the Spanish governor that the French government has no association with or control over these renegades, and indeed, no presence in the Caribbean except for a small colony (shared with the English) on St. Christopher’s.
Find possible locations for additional French settlements, establish a French presence in the Caribbean, and offer (untraceable) aid, form an association, and attempt to exert some measure of control over them.


They had been told that Richelieu's power and influence in the Caribbean were very weak, while the Spaniards were all-powerful, so they needed to be very subtle and quiet, keeping a low profile and not raising any suspicions. I had several political intrigues planned – a slave uprising, the viceroy’s daughter kidnapped, the buccaneers getting bolder and the PCs blamed for it, etc., a Dutch-led sailors' mutiny, all with the slowly growing threat of piracy in the background.

By the end of the first episode, the PCs had slain the viecroy's captain, seized a ship, sunk two Spanish ships, captured a bunch of Spanish silver, and were full-fledged pirates.

[PhantomVector]

I was the player in this instance.

We had been going through the DM's custom campaign and while exploring a dungeon we came across this Tiefling who asked us to help save his realm in a different plane of existence. This was the... Tiamat one I think? Where a group of cultists and dragons were trying to revive the mother of dragons or something. We talked it over and agreed to help him. Some hijinks ensues and the fun part began after we cleared out a black dragon nest, mostly younglings and a few young adults, and the final boss was an adult I think. After we exited we rolled a spot check and our fighter spotted something on a nearby mountain peak.

We went and cased the place, there was an old altar with indecipherable writing with an adult blue dragon and a group of cultists guarding it. It looked important. We knew that we probably couldn't take them head on, we barely managed to take on a single adult. So while the party argued I said screw it.

I had in an incredibly lucky roll, mixed with a somewhat generous DM had found a ring of invisibility previous. Putting it on I managed to sneak past the dragon who had fallen asleep, and the cultists. On a whim I had bottled some of the black dragon acid. I pulled out my filled potion flask filled with acid and being the noob I was chucked it onto the altar not realizing it would break my invisibility. Suffice to say it's nearly impossible to outrun a dragon even as a monk at lower levels.

But the DM informed us that this altar had been unique and required in bringing back Tiamat. He had planned for us to gain a few levels and for years to have passed in our realm(time moved slower in the Tiamat realm) but we ended up only spending a few days there. So only a few years passed. The DM never expected anyone to roll high enough to sneak past the dragon and cultists.

The DM ended up having to improv/ad lib the rest of the session and spend the next week reworking his story since we were supposed to come back after the world had fallen and demons had taken over. Good times.

[Beans]

I was in an Exalted game and... generally you can't really put Exalted on rails, because the PCs are all easily able to wreck said rails.

We were playing Abyssals who wanted to find their Lunar mates, and this was a plot we'd proposed and the ST had liked. We sort of... accidentally derailed our own plot by spending more time on the starting island than expected---namely, we took it over. Our ST basically said "yeah, you guys basically immediately derailed it, but you seemed to be having fun so I let you just do your thing a while." We did the same thing after traveling to the city of Chiaroscuro.

[The Shadowdove]

Made the mistake of adding gunpowder to my low magic game. Starting the party as slaves who had survived a pirate raid and washed up onto the nearby island went well.

Last minute improvised the pirates secret weapon being their discovery of gunpowder. Of course not just any pirates...

No my players kidnapped the one scientist who new the formula, ignored my "revenge on your captors and their mystery shrouded boss" plot, and fully expanded their efforts into developing an arms manufacturing company.

It went so long that by the time they had established so many allies and crushed so many competitors through backalley dealings and conspiracy sewing that I didn't even realize what they had done until I was describing the area they recently chose to buy off and make their new base of operations.

It went something like this.

"We've amassed enough power and inspiration on this side of the world. Let's buy that small kingdom on the east coast there off after killing the old heirless guy who runs it. Then we can expand the other direction."

A small independent nation that once belonged to a Lord who half a decade prior paid for the original shipment of slaves which initiated the whole adventure.

[Knaight]

I wouldn't use the term derailed for most of these, but:

I accidentally ran a game centered in a city. The general idea was that the players started as members of an alchemist's guild that as basically doomed by city politics, then once the guild fell that would leave them in place to become adventurers. The guild fell just fine, largely spurred on by the PCs, one of whom had some murder-hobo tendencies. By then they had made personal enemies of not just the rich noble who took down the guild to corner the market, but also a handful of miscellaneous other people who sought revenge. The city was more dangerous than the wilderness, and they were going to go adventure for sure, right? Nope. So the campaign became city focused, with the PCs working to take down their various enemies, building coalitions with their enemies other enemies (mostly the rich noble's). It fell into a rhythm. So, naturally, at this point they decide to lay low by sailing half way across the world to a different city after one last parting shot to a major antagonist, setting up an entirely new chapter of that campaign in a city that I hadn't even planned on existing but which was implied by the backstory of a character who wanted to go back there to hide. The game stayed city focused in a different city for a while, and eventually they came back to the first. At no point did the conventional adventuring I expected ever so much as show up. It was probably a better game for it too.
On the derailing end, almost a decade ago a friend was trying to run a game based on a novel he was writing (first time GM, low standards of teenage games, etc. got everyone else on board with this). It was a science fiction setting, and we were all playing members of an alien species supposed to be vastly smarter than humans. So I played that up, and ended up derailing the game by accident when a fairly standard tactic (triangulating a signal) bypassed all prepared session content, which was supposed to be finding out about said signal the hard way.
I am currently running a game that is supposed to be about the PCs introducing magic into the world and pioneering its uses - this was a setting designed to accommodate the explicit player requests of running a) a magitech game and b) a game about the discovery of magic, which would otherwise be somewhat at odds with each other. I assumed that when the central point of the game was to be the discoverers of magic, they'd share that discovery. Instead, they mostly hid it, eventually revealed it to someone who had revealed themselves as largely unscrupulous* group of miners who were hoarding what was supposed to be expedition gold in the hopes of getting some gold they could hoard by finding it with their magic and only sharing it with these miners. The game refocused, and is still about them discovering magic and bringing it to the larger world. At least, the half of it that isn't about their personal feud with the newly rich and powerful New Miner's Guild of Aradan.


*Well, half the group did. The other half were calling it a stupid idea as the first half was doing it. When they later metastasized into a significant antagonist as the only people other than the PCs with active magic at that point, where their hyperspecialized magic included detection of gold as miners, the second half really got in on the "we knew it was a bad idea train".

[The Glyphstone]

With one group, they were in the midst of infiltrating a magical academy that Totally Wasn't Hogwarts I Swear, where the BBEG had mind-controlled the eight head faculty members (one for each school of magic). Most of the teachers they cheerfully beat into submission in their themed arenas, but when they got to the Evocation headmaster, a Warmage whose arena was decked out like a WW1 battlefield with trenches and traps everywhere, they were supposed to fight their way across where he was throwing blasting magic at them. Instead, when they realized he had been hypnotized into reliving his days in 'The War', the Rogue instead successfully Bluffed him with a natural 20 into believing they were reinforcements sent from 'High Command' to relieve him.

Sergeant Boom turned into a powerful if unreliable ally of theirs after that. Eventually got a self-promotion to Captain Boom and made a heroic sacrifice holding off the BBEG's minions while the party engaged them directly.

-------------------------------------


Another time, I was running Red Hand of Doom. Everything went on track until the PCs got hold of the Ghostlord's phylactery. Instead of returning to him as the entirety of Chapter 4 assumes they will, they instead vote to destroy it. Resulted in me having to rewrite a giant chunk of the rest of the module, even if it worked out for the best overall.

[LarwisTheElf]

A few (https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson) obligatory (https://1d4chan.org/wiki/That_Guy_Destroys_Psionics) links (https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Elfslayer_Chronicles)

In my personal experience, I've only really had one derail. I was the DM (my first time DMing), and had a grand adventure planned out about how the heroes would defeat a great threat from the Far Realms and save the day. Everyone showed up with evil characters. Being an inexperienced and brand new DM, I didn't really know what to do, and tried to railroad them into the plot. The basically said "nah" and went off and did their own thing. It quickly deteriorated from there.

[Mutazoia]

A few years back, we were running a Star Wars game. At one point, the Empire managed to raid a Rebel stronghold and made off with a lot of encripted computer data. Data that included the identitiies of several hundred Rebel undercover agents. Including the players.

We're contacted by the local Rebel command to get the data back at all costs, so we pile into the smugglers ship and....go shopping. Yup. The guy playing the smuggler decided that this was the optimal time to fly to the other end of the galaxy and try to buy some cheap cargo because he had to make a payment to a crime boss (standard smuggler hook). Even after pointing out that once the Empire decripted the data and found out he was a Rebel agent, he would never be able to go near a civilized system again (making the odds of him paying off the crime boss nearly impossile) he still insisted he was flying HIS ship to planet X to buy cargo.

This is the same player who, in a different SW game, rage quit the game after his character received a single (count 'em...1) Dark Side Point for killing a helpless prisoner, just because he wanted his ship.

And the same player who insisted getting his characters in just about every game....married....actually forcing our (male) GM to role play reather detailed dates for his characters. He had his 40 odd year old Paladin marry his dragon mount. His young adolescent dragon mount (equivalent human age, about 10).

The same guy who threw his big gulp across the room (at a very public venue) during a game of Talisman, when another player stole his talisman card.

The same guy who would try to talk other players into kicking a player out of a group (behind said players back) for any suspected meta-gaming (or any other behavior he didn't approve of), but would meta-game (or what-not) like a champ himself....

[Shinn]

Most of the teachers they cheerfully beat into submission in their themed arenas, but when they got to the Evocation headmaster, a Warmage whose arena was decked out like a WW1 battlefield with trenches and traps everywhere, they were supposed to fight their way across where he was throwing blasting magic at them. Instead, when they realized he had been hypnotized into reliving his days in 'The War', the Rogue instead successfully Bluffed him with a natural 20 into believing they were reinforcements sent from 'High Command' to relieve him.

Sergeant Boom turned into a powerful if unreliable ally of theirs after that. Eventually got a self-promotion to Captain Boom and made a heroic sacrifice holding off the BBEG's minions while the party engaged them directly.That's... Awesome !

The most screwed up campaign I've ever seen was on Warhammer Fantasy.
My PC were from a little city where nothing strange happens, and there was a travelling festival (for explaining how you got a stranger and a wrestler bateleur on the group). Suddenly, a trio of Repurgators came for burning a mutant girl they've seen on the road.
The main idea of this scenario was to show a struggle with the safety of this kind of practice against the cruelty of burning of an innocent.

But... One of the PC fell in love with the mutant. Then everyone killed the Repurgators, so it attracted some infiltrated Khorne and Slaanesh démons, which finally destroyed the city while the PC were fleeing with the girl. Two of the PC, however (a Dwarf and an Human Sergeant), swore to kill these traitors.

They then settled on another village by killing an inn's owner and taking it, ran the business for a while until they accidently got invaded by Skavens, solved the probem by burning their own inn, but forgetting that another PC was still inside ; she prayed Sigmar, then finally the Chaos Gods, so Slaanesh turned her in a demon... And another PC fell in love with her.
Seen as criminals in the whole Empire (thanks to the others PCs), they tried to emigrate to Brettony, but "accidently" pummeled to death a very influent noble, so they voyaged to Norsca for celebrating the two weddings (Human ratier-acolyt-wannabe/Démon and Diestro/Mutant), buuuut... They almost destroyed the church where they were, so they fleed again.

So they decided to immigrate to the New World, to build a new kingdom out of nothing, and to make a places called home for every outcast, wether criminal, heretic, mutant or demon.

Sady, the campaign then died.

[ellindsey]

I haven't had any massive campaign-derailing events happening, but there have been a few plots that haven't gone at all the way I expected.

There was the time that the party Rogue got her hands on an important magic item that was supposed to be significant later on in the plot. She sold it at the first store they passed by without even bothering to figure out what it was actually capable of. I did later on managed to get it back into the game, when a recurring adversary showed up wielding it.

There was the Centaur NPC with a complex backstory who I introduced, intended as a one-shot NPC who was solely there because the players needed to translate an old diary they found and none of them spoke the right language. The party's gnomish Cleric fell in love with her at first site, deciding at that point that her goal in the campaign would be to win the heart of this lady centaur. It's led to a strange, yet sweet, ongoing plot thread.

The biggest plot that got derailed was early on in the campaign when I had the players have a few run-ins with a group of halfling bandits. In their first encounter the leader of the bandits was riding a Dire Corgi (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/animals/dog/corgi-dire). I even printed out a little miniature for it. My players then insisted on trying as hard as possible to defeat the bandits without hurting the dog, and in the end when the bandits had all either fled or, in the case of the bandit leader, been incapacitated and tied to a tree, the players used a combination of charm animal spells and the cleric's speak with animals ability to convince the dog to come with him.

They were considering, for a while, abandoning their current quest to lead a mission to rescue the dire corgies from their halfling owners. They changed their mind when they asked the dog they had rescued (again using Speak with Animals) and discovered that it loved its old master and wanted to be returned to him - though it was also happy to hang out with the party so long as they kept feeding and petting it.

What the party didn't know was that the bandits were being manipulated by a Lurker in Light (a Pathfinder fey, who can be invisible in direct sunlight, teleport around, have poisoned blades, and are very evil and like to sacrifice people to summon evil outsiders). She was getting them to kill people for her summoning ritual. When the party met back up with the bandit leader again, she was there, and she and the bandit leader started a battle with the party. The Corgi, who was still hanging around with the party at this time, of course returned to protect his former master, forcing the party to fight him again too.

My expectation was for the party to kill the bandit leader, at which point the Lurker in Light would use his death to complete her ritual. If one of the party died, that would work just as well. I had also planned for her to teleport away if her HP ever dropped below half, to return in a later session to attack again.

Instead, through a series of very good rolls, the party figured out where she was and attacked her. The party Fighter Power-Attacked her, scored a crit, and rolled max damage, killing her in one blow, completely derailing the ongoing plot I had planned.

I had the Halfling Bandit, on seeing this, throw down his weapons and surrender. The party Rogue looked at him, and told him, "We'd kill you, but this dog clearly loves you, so you can't be completely evil. We're letting you go - but if we ever learn you mistreated your dog, we'll return".

Completely not the result I had expected for that plotline. Now, instead of a recurring supernatural enemy, the party has a NPC contact who is grateful to them for returning his pet, sparing his life, and destroying the supernatural horror that was manipulating him.

[Rysto]

No my players kidnapped the one scientist who new the formula, ignored my "revenge on your captors and their mystery shrouded boss" plot, and fully expanded their efforts into developing an arms manufacturing company.

(snip)

A small independent nation that once belonged to a Lord who half a decade prior paid for the original shipment of slaves which initiated the whole adventure.

So in the end, they re-railed your game. :D

[WbtE]

It wasn't "wild and crazy", but...

Some years ago I ran a superhero game. It wasn't my best work but the players really stopped working with me. Mid-way through the first season I hit them with a bog-standard "someone is messing with your brains" scenario. Various clues are left that all was not as it seemed. One of the characters with no special resilience or healing factor showed no signs of the injuries they were thought to have taken - that was overlooked, and that does happen. A second character who had purposefully thrown away his mobile 'phone was told that he still had it. The player protested that the device had been thrown away, I replied that nevertheless he had it with him, and the player told me that I was simply wrong. Well, what can one do? :smallsmile: I decided at that point that the character had been totally taken in by the illusion.

After the season finale, in which the third character had been thrust forward from "also there" to "big damn hero", the player of that character sent out an e-mail in-character explaining that his country needed him and he was off to Afghanistan. That came across like, "It's been fun but I don't want to play any more," so I didn't chase anyone to organise a new season of the game. Several weeks later, Mr. "My country needs me" complained that I had killed the game... :smallamused:

[Inevitability]

A dungeon I once made had a hidden tunnel leading to a cave near Menzoberranzan, to provide a semi-explicable reason for the presence of some magic items and precious metals. I hadn't expected the PC's to actually go explore it, because, well, giant city full of crazy powerful drow. Turns out two of them thought different.

Cue the changeling rogue (who rather enjoyed pretending to be a high-ranking priestess) and human monk (who slightly less enjoyed having to pretend to be a slave) wrecking havoc in the city for several days, intimidating, murdering and lying their way past any obstacles I threw their way. They also got a giant lizard out of the deal, who eventually learned to breathe fire.

[Cluedrew]

The first one, and the one that was my fault, was the time I accidentally caused the DM to completely revamp his entire campaign from a gritty how-do-we-survive-the-apocalypse type game to an unambiguously happy ending merely by succeeding on a skill check he assumed I'd fail. Most well-timed natural 20 I ever rolled.... OK what was the check?


Remind me of a story. The players killed a bunch of zombies and found a wedding ring with an engraved name as random loot that one of the zombie is wearing, and the campaign turned into trying to return the wedding ring to its rightful owner.I like that for some reason, sometimes it is the little things that count.


I was in an Exalted game and... generally you can't really put Exalted on rails, because the PCs are all easily able to wreck said rails.Or ret-con the existence of rail lines out of existence.


Sergeant Boom turned into a powerful if unreliable ally of theirs after that. Eventually got a self-promotion to Captain Boom and made a heroic sacrifice holding off the BBEG's minions while the party engaged them directly.{Salutes}


"We'd kill you, but this dog clearly loves you, so you can't be completely evil. We're letting you go - but if we ever learn you mistreated your dog, we'll return".That just might be my favourite ultimatum ever.



No my players kidnapped the one scientist who new the formula, ignored my "revenge on your captors and their mystery shrouded boss" plot, and fully expanded their efforts into developing an arms manufacturing company.

(snip)

A small independent nation that once belonged to a Lord who half a decade prior paid for the original shipment of slaves which initiated the whole adventure.So in the end, they re-railed your game. :D[/QUOTE]Its called the scenic route.

As for me; you want to hear about the Bear encounter? The Chicken Battle? The Great Hunt for Waffles? Actually that one propelled the campaign along quite neatly. As did the The Great Hunt for Pork Waffles.

... ... ... The craziest way players have derailed my games? Play.

[Alias Unknown]

I'm a player in a game our DM sort of made us derail.

In the game there are sixteen tower filled with scaling challenges and offer powerful rewards and riches for completing them and we were special people with the one-in-a-hundred ability to enter these towers. We were to complete these towers and become Kings of a city at the base of a tower or found a city to rule. Our party; a fighter, a rogue, my druid and DMPC wizard fairly standard party.

First tower almost a TPK only the DMPC wizard and my druid survived (my animal companion was tragicly consumed by the wizards super meta-magiced fireball, so sad). We barely got through it, then free resurrections for the two players who die and I made a new animal companion.
Second Tower another player joined us as an oracle everyone survived and earned victory
Third Tower due to some tactical errors, e.g. kicking a door with a sleeping hydra behind it, I was killed immediately shortly followed by the fighter and rogue, the oracle player roleplayed their character having a mental breakdown from watching their friends die and the DMPC powered through the rest of the tower.
After that we decided we weren't doing another tower and became mercenaries. During a clear the hostile from the ruins mission we, through no fault of the rest of the party, ended up in a different plane where teleportation magic doesn't work, that's fun.

[Potato_Priest]

D&D 5e, Out of the Abyss.

It turned out that we were supposed to run around the Underdark for some months doing assorted side quests until we were about level 8 before we were supposed to 'find' an exit. We were on track to escape before we got to level 5.

We played it by the rails and made it out at level 4. My greatest regret was that we never got around to redirecting a nearby river into the underdark using the exit we found to solve the Demon problem (and the drow problem, and the troglogyte problem, and the myconid problem, but unfortunately not the Koa-Toa problem).

[Zazax]

... OK what was the check?
It's a story I've told before on this forum, so I was trying to just acknowledge it without spending too much time on it, but since you asked:
We were playing a homebrew mecha game that used d20 Modern as a base, and thematically borrowed from most of the big mecha shows (Gundam, Evangelion, etc). We had the GM and 2 players; myself and one other. Circumstances had conspired to find my character discovering that his recently-murdered love interest had in fact been killed by the other PC at the behest of our commanding officer, ostensibly to prove his loyalty (he was the "Do anything my CO asks" sort of character) but in truth to set in motion the following series of events (including the skill check I passed that the DM assumed I'd fail).

Now, my character's 'mecha' was in fact a lobotomized Eldritch Abomination that he just drove around like one (see: Evangelion influence), and its power was inversely proportional to his mental well-being. Considering he has just discovered that his CO and one of his closest friends had (successfully) conspired to kill his love interest for, as far as he could tell, no reason, his mental state wasn't exactly the best. There was a brief mecha fight between the players, I won convincingly, and then asked the GM if I could try something. He'd anticipated this, and agreed, laying out the rules and mechanics for it.

Now, you see, another Eva influence was that inside each of our mechas there was a soul, or at least a piece of a soul. The aforementioned love interest was herself a pilot, and her mecha had a piece of her soul in it. I had asked the GM if I could use this piece of her soul and my mecha's current 'insanity power' to try and restore her to life (note, this was a world where death was supposed to be final). He agreed. However, as he made clear, I was toying with powers beyond my ken. I was essentially hurling phenomenal cosmic power at the universe and screaming at it to obey. I could make the check, but after some maths it was determined that I would only pass it on a natural 20. If I failed, I would tear the fabric of reality asunder in my foolish attempt to harness powers I didn't understand, and would kick off the apocalypse. This was explained both IC and OoC. I nodded understanding and rolled anyway.

Now, I found out after the fact that the GM had predicted my reaction fairly accurately (and had in fact counted on it) because the rest of his campaign was based around us trying to minimize the damage from the apocalyptic hole I tore in the universe when I failed my attempt. Unfortunately for him, RNGesus was on my side that day, and I rolled the requisite natural 20. He was a good sport about it, but that one roll turned his downer apocalypse game into an unambiguously happy ending. That character and said resurrected love interest were even happily married by the time the campaign ended.
Best roll I ever made.

[braveheart]

I was running paranoia, and my players had been conducting their wacky hijinks, I was literally in physical pain from laughing so hard for so long at this point already, but one character had the mutant power that his stomach contained a black hole, he decided to make himself throw up... alpha complex was destroyed and the session ended, because a black hole ate the planet.

[Cluedrew]

It's a story I've told before on this forum, so I was trying to just acknowledge it without spending too much time on it, but since you asked:
I was essentially hurling phenomenal cosmic power at the universe and screaming at it to obey. [<-Nice line by the way.]But not one I had heard, thank you for telling it.

[Arbane]

It's a story I've told before on this forum, so I was trying to just acknowledge it without spending too much time on it, but since you asked:
We were playing a homebrew mecha game that used d20 Modern as a base, and thematically borrowed from most of the big mecha shows (Gundam, Evangelion, etc). We had the GM and 2 players; myself and one other. Circumstances had conspired to find my character discovering that his recently-murdered love interest had in fact been killed by the other PC at the behest of our commanding officer, ostensibly to prove his loyalty (he was the "Do anything my CO asks" sort of character) but in truth to set in motion the following series of events (including the skill check I passed that the DM assumed I'd fail).

Now, my character's 'mecha' was in fact a lobotomized Eldritch Abomination that he just drove around like one (see: Evangelion influence), and its power was inversely proportional to his mental well-being. Considering he has just discovered that his CO and one of his closest friends had (successfully) conspired to kill his love interest for, as far as he could tell, no reason, his mental state wasn't exactly the best. There was a brief mecha fight between the players, I won convincingly, and then asked the GM if I could try something. He'd anticipated this, and agreed, laying out the rules and mechanics for it.

Now, you see, another Eva influence was that inside each of our mechas there was a soul, or at least a piece of a soul. The aforementioned love interest was herself a pilot, and her mecha had a piece of her soul in it. I had asked the GM if I could use this piece of her soul and my mecha's current 'insanity power' to try and restore her to life (note, this was a world where death was supposed to be final). He agreed. However, as he made clear, I was toying with powers beyond my ken. I was essentially hurling phenomenal cosmic power at the universe and screaming at it to obey. I could make the check, but after some maths it was determined that I would only pass it on a natural 20. If I failed, I would tear the fabric of reality asunder in my foolish attempt to harness powers I didn't understand, and would kick off the apocalypse. This was explained both IC and OoC. I nodded understanding and rolled anyway.

Now, I found out after the fact that the GM had predicted my reaction fairly accurately (and had in fact counted on it) because the rest of his campaign was based around us trying to minimize the damage from the apocalyptic hole I tore in the universe when I failed my attempt. Unfortunately for him, RNGesus was on my side that day, and I rolled the requisite natural 20. He was a good sport about it, but that one roll turned his downer apocalypse game into an unambiguously happy ending. That character and said resurrected love interest were even happily married by the time the campaign ended.
Best roll I ever made.


Awesome! :smallsmile:

[sktarq]

I'm not exactly sure deirailing is the word for it. We never to the rails. But the idea was for us to island hop adventuring in a "safe region" for a while before heading out into the wild mid-to high level continental region. That later part of the game very much had the rails laid out.


Most campaigns start in a tavern. This one started in a field three days from a town. No PC's knew each other, no magical/external assembly, just curtain rises. The rail was for the party to walk the three days south to the town and look at the help wanted board and pick the one that the DM thought sounded cool. I should also mention this was mid/late 2e D&D)(with first time use of psionic for any player or DM, and kits, and proficiency slots etc). Sothe plan for the 3 rogues, jester, fighter, falconer, and two psionisits get of to a massive derail in the first five seconds of the game as the rogue with maxed local knowledge (the player helped design the world) goes first and breaks camp while the next person (the multi personality psionisist) chooses to start building a defensive wall to protect us from overnight predators at 8 am. That first rogue (we'll call him Ty) headed for the coast with that first action (saying it will be easyier to not get lost). By the time whole party gets to the coast a mile or so from starting camp the fighter has been triped by the bard, a rogue was paralyzed by a psionic effect, the falcon had messed with bard, a few punches had been thrown and the whole party was spread out over half a mile.
Then Ty's player was an immature donkey and totally derailed the game. He told the other players that there a city 5 days to the north and there would be better adventuring options there than the small town 3 days south which had been described as nearest civilization. The player knew that north was actually one of the only regions in the island group for 4-6 level characters to be used for jumping them out of the low level island group-and it was tractless jungles without civilization at all. And the group fell for it.

Any attempts to rerail the situation were thwarted when Ty bolted from the party heading south that night with the fighter (who had been the only PC to not start something in walk over) and the rest of the party splits in 4 groups trying to catch up or not. . .

It get sillier (if still amusing) from there and a mass of general incompetence, by both players and DM. But eventually everyone kills each other except for two PC's with no healing and no silver and no magic at 3hp or less being chased by werewolves heading in one direction and the fighter with a ring of protection from evil heading the other (it was also the fighter first game, poor girl didn't play again for years)


And yes I was Ty

You can tell we were 13-15

[SuperYakob]

This was as a player. One of the guys in my main DnD campaign decided to run his own. I knew the guy, I had a feeling it would be a complete disaster, so I said sure I'm in. He then got a few of our school friends to join, none of whom knew or cared what RPGs really were. He said he was using some obscure system, and sent us pdfs of what our character sheets should be. He also said we could do anything for our characters. I was intrigued and asked "anything?" He said to run it by him first. I'm reading this email with a friend who says I should make my character a cleric of the RuneScape god of cabbage. And he was the least ridiculous member of the group. There was one girl who, while she had no idea what she was doing, had at least tried, and made some sort of woman assasin who could burst into flames (idk why, never got that far). Then there was this one guy. He made a bard, who used a guitar. His name was Curt Cocaine. Yeah it was that bad.
First mission, we're all in prison (I think he had just watched Guardians of the Galaxy because that's literally how our characters were introduced).
We get walked into some mansion, where some rich guy gives us a mission, standard find and retrieve. Curt Cocaine decides to attack the guy. We all get slaughtered within 5 minutes of starting the campaign. Yep. That happened. And apparently Curt was unhappy his guitar broke after being used as a blunt weapon. And I ran into the issue where the DM told me I could do any spell I wanted, but it had to use existing cabbages. So nothing for me, since no cabbage, so i just decided to wait and let my teammate die. And the nonviolence of me and assasin girl didn't keep us from being crossbowed. Fun times...

[Mai]

I was planning to run a Flashing Blades campaign set in the Caribbean, set in the time when buccaneers were just Frenchmen living on the back side of Hispaniola stealing cows, before they had fled to Tortuga and really gotten into the business of piracy. The PCs were Richelieu’s agents at the court of the Spanish viceroy, there to pursue French interests. They were given the following mission goals.


Attempt to learn as much as possible about these renegades.
Discover as much as possible about Spanish interests, settlements, trade, etc.
Assure the Spanish governor that the French government has no association with or control over these renegades, and indeed, no presence in the Caribbean except for a small colony (shared with the English) on St. Christopher’s.
Find possible locations for additional French settlements, establish a French presence in the Caribbean, and offer (untraceable) aid, form an association, and attempt to exert some measure of control over them.


They had been told that Richelieu's power and influence in the Caribbean were very weak, while the Spaniards were all-powerful, so they needed to be very subtle and quiet, keeping a low profile and not raising any suspicions. I had several political intrigues planned – a slave uprising, the viceroy’s daughter kidnapped, the buccaneers getting bolder and the PCs blamed for it, etc., a Dutch-led sailors' mutiny, all with the slowly growing threat of piracy in the background.

By the end of the first episode, the PCs had slain the viecroy's captain, seized a ship, sunk two Spanish ships, captured a bunch of Spanish silver, and were full-fledged pirates.


That sounds awesome! When I get back to working on GMing I may have to consider a piracy era setting. It would be amazing and offer players tons of control. If they don't care for questing around or need a break if I set it on a coastline and made that possible... It would give players so many possibilities. I could easily work it into my current plans for my first campaign ideas if I set Drace (The first main town.) on or near the coast or another coastal town.

And when you think about it even d&d fits smoothly into that setting. A wizard or sorc. Is practically a human cannon. (Dear Lord imagine that, PC's blasting apart a ship with spells and ranged weapons.)

D&D+1500's-1700's= "Pirates of the Coast PotC" :P

[Bohandas]

Actually it might be when they decided they wanted to make a raft out of arms and then row through an ocean of strong acid back home rather than literally anything other than that.

When you say "arms" do you mean limbs or weapons?

[Sariel Vailo]

Rod of wish luck blade ring of three wishes and me using actual genie rules the more concise your wish the ESS chance for ****ery. The wizard int 18 spent 8,000gp to find everything about the bbeg and polymorphed him into a codpiece. ****ing **** armor. I had to rewrite a whole chapter for 15 through 18 level

[Yukitsu]

When you say "arms" do you mean limbs or weapons?

Limbs. There's a reason I don't bother using a sanity mechanic in my horror games.

[marycrook]

I did run the game and I haven't found any pitfalls.

[The_Iron_Lord]

BUMP

I want more stories...sorry I don't have anything to contribute, but I've only ever ran one campaign, and it hasn't even really properly started yet.:smallbiggrin:

[Mr Beer]

Not particularly crazy but I was running a one-shot game for a couple of players, had a module I was using. Right at the start of the thing I rolled a random encounter and one of the PCs caught a pickpocket. Who he promptly murdered. On the streets of Greyhawk City, in the middle of the day. So the watch turns up to arrest them and the mage fireballs them and then the high level watch mage the survivors summon disables the party and the watch hauls them off to Adventurer Prison (it's not called that but it's set up to deal with rogue adventurers).

So I figure the module is done, instead I have a trial and they get sentenced to 20 years hard labour in a jungle hell camp in Hepmonaland, probably they should just get executed but then there is no adventure at all. The rest of the session was them escaping months later and making it back to civilisation. There was no final closure as such but they'd just managed to beat up some underclass thugs in order to acquire clothes, enough money to buy food and some weapons (clubs).

Was probably a more interesting game than the module would have been.

[The_Jette]

I've derailed a game before. It was a Star Wars RPG module where the PCs are all "called" to this planet by a Sith holocron. It was me (the force sensitive captain), my first mate/ navigator (rogue), and the Wookie pilot. Well, as soon as we get there we use some information gathering to find out who is the most likely recipient of black market goods such as this, and track him down. We end up killing him, and using his holodisk to figure out exactly where the ship with the holocron will be exiting hyperspace. From there it was a simple job to murder the port official, and meet the ship as it left hyperspace. While we waited, I had the Wookie craft a special virus that could only be uploaded directly into another ship's computer system that would simply override the ship's safety features and open every door at once, including bulkhead doors and airlocks. Once it arrived, we bluffed our way onto the ship, saying that the planet they'd left had sent out a netwide alert of quarantine, and we needed to check their goods, which also explained why we were in zero atmo gear. One final bluff check gave the Wookie direct access to their computer, and everyone on the ship was dead...
Apparently, the adventure was supposed to have some kind of bank robbery in it. And, yes, I had already planned on being a dark side force user.
One other time, I was playing a Ranger, with my then wife who was a Fighter, and the DMPC who was a Warlock. We were fighting a Barbarian who was WAY stronger than we should have been fighting (we were level 11, he was level 25), and we were about to die. The Barbarian knocked out my wife, and the Warlock was knocked unconscious by some demon assassins. I got a brilliant idea, and asked if I could sunder the Barbarian's arm, which held a major artifact level gauntlet. He figured, why would there be rules for regenerating limbs if it wasn't possible to cut them off, and gave me a chance. I got a crit, and cut his arm off, forcing a retreat. This wasn't the derail. What happened next was the leader of the Demon assassin's showed up and demanded the gauntlet from me. The DM figured, no player in their right mind would give a major artifact to a demon. I told the demon to promise he wouldn't cause any harm on the material planes, and gave him the artifact. The demon took the artifact, and went back to hell to fight his demon mother and take over one layer of hell. I got my buddies healed, and headed back home. Apparently, the rest of the campaign was supposed to be us eventually building up power to fight the mother in his place. He wouldn't have been able to fight us, because I had already learned his true name. But, I didn't know that I knew, so I didn't use it to my advantage.

[Velaryon]

I can think of two times, one when I was the GM and one when I was a player. Both were Star Wars campaigns, from the d20 system before Saga Edition came out.

The first was about 10 years and many games ago. The players rotated over time, which caused the game to change direction a couple times. By the time things went truly crazy, the group consisted of Sin (a Nagai Jedi), Ari (human Soldier/Ace Pilot), Torin (Kel Dor Scoundrel/Crime Lord), and Vira (Miraluka, I forget her starting class but she was apprenticing to the Nagai as his padawan). Ari had by this time become commander of a Y-Wing squadron, giving them a bunch of NPC pilots they could bring along on missions when appropriate.

Torin had acquired an R2 droid, and crammed its internal storage full of thermal detonators. During one mission where they were in a fight against some Imperial Intelligence agents, he shot the droid, causing the detonators to explode and kill everyone nearby, including all the Rebel pilots and nearly some of the PC's as well. It's been 10+ years since this game, so I don't remember exactly what led up to it, but Torin was not particularly getting along with the rest of the party while leading up to this, and was definitely displaying some evil tendencies when out of sight of the others. After this though, it was over between them. He actually escaped with the Imperials. Next time they clashed, Vira betrayed her master, turning to the dark side and joining the Imperials at the same time.

For the rest of the campaign, I had two mini-parties working at cross purposes. It was a completely unexpected development which they actually really liked, though it made me have to work twice as hard and probably contributed to my burning out and ending the game earlier than I otherwise would have. I created a third faction that attacked them both, which led to a climactic three-way battle in the throne room of the second Death Star (they had all snuck in while the Rebels were doing their thing down on Endor). They worked together to defeat the third faction, then imploded and started fighting each other. When Vader and the Emperor stumbled into the midst of the battle, Sin (who was extremely specialized in telekinesis at the expense of pretty much all other Force powers) ripped a hole in the outer wall of the Death Star, exposing all of them to the vacuum of space and ending the game in a TPK. And for some reason, they loved it.

This game took place during the time period of the game Knights of the Old Republic, starting during the Mandalorian Wars that served as back story for the game. We had an all-Jedi group consisting of an Iktotchi (Daedar), a Codru-Ji (Gallian), a Gand (just called Gand at first, later earned the name Firith), and shortly joined by a Nagai (Xon). However, we were all still padawans, with NPCs serving as our masters/questgivers/occasional NPC allies.

Though the game was played in person, the GM created an online forum for the game. In addition to posting campaign notes, Star Wars memes, general chatter, and occasional news that our characters would know, the GM also made a private board for each of the PC's. This was used for RPing between adventures, primarily interaction with our masters and other NPC's.

At this point in time, the Jedi had recently gotten involved in the war thanks to a master named Revan (whom you'll recognize if you've played the KOTOR video game). However, he had not yet done anything to let the galaxy at large know he had fallen to the dark side, and indeed may not even have fallen yet. Nonetheless, Daedar had a Force-induced dream in which he saw Gallian's master dueling against Revan. He actually saw the battle twice - once it ended in Revan's death, and once it ended in the death of Gallian's master. When he woke, Daedar shared the dream with the group, and we resolved that we had to find out what it meant and see if we could make sure it didn't come to pass, especially the version in which Gallian's master was killed.

Between sessions, Gallian's player cooks up a plan, which he doesn't let anyone else in on. His loyalty to his master could best be compared to that of a faithful hound to its master, and he was not going to take any chance that his master was going to be killed. During his solo RP on the forum, he put a bomb in Revan's private airspeeder, and detonated it with Revan inside. Being a powerful Jedi master, Revan survived but was badly hurt. This resulted in an on-foot chase through the upper levels of Coruscant, with the wounded Revan being chased down by a pissed off, four-armed, four-lightsaber-wielding Jedi apprentice who was very good at melee combat. Though he fought hard, Revan was defeated and murdered... before any of the major events of the video game came to pass.

So we start the next session with Gallian being arrested and his player bringing in a new character. As you can imagine, it completely changed the direction of the game.

[Reathin]

Technically, it wasn't my players in this story, but I was the one doing the derailing.

During a campaign with a few friends, I was playing a Stormlord of Talos, Audra Boreas. Audra liked electricity, explosions, and became a cleric by holding onto a pair of lightning rods in the middle of a storm, after which point she twisted the red-hot iron into a spear that would become her weapon of choice. She hated druids. HATED. With a passion so intense it leaked into MY opinion of druids, who I now hate just as much as her.

We were tasked by someone I forget about to get to a place and investigate some massive mining operation that was supposedly up to no good (it was). To get there, we needed to pass through a forest with one road. The road was enemy territory, so we couldn't be spotted on it. Instead, we walked parallel to the road while inside the forest proper. We were caught by some druids, who got all sanctimonious. Pretty sure we killed them (or rather, I started the fight that killed them), but either way, an enemy officer came through on the road with a horse-drawn cart (not part of the druids). We stopped him (since there was only one guy) and got into a fight. After killing him, we took two magic items from him: a ring of disguise, and a blunderbuss that shot fireballs. When I saw the ring, I got a mad idea in my head. Putting it on and disguising myself as the enemy officer (wounded), I equipped the blunderbuss and got to the fort he was going to, apparently bleeding out. When the troops questioned what had happened, I muttered "Damned...druids...Broke the truce...." And spent the majority of the game getting their troops ready for combat with the druids, sparking a civil war between two semi-allied sides. When we left and dealt with our main mission (mass production of dragons), we buzzed the fort on red dragons, screaming "Death to those who threaten Nature!".

Might have also set the forest on fire. Seriously, **** druids.

[RazorChain]

I can't say it was derailing on my part but my character accidentally destroyed the multiverse....it ended the campaign prematurely and one player got so pissed off that he wrote half a novel about his character just to retcon what I did.

Else it is the classic

Being fed up by the horrible Time of Troubles adventure module for AD&D, we the players grabbed Elminster and suffocated him to death...pounding him to death didn't help because the DM gave him endles supply of stone skin or sumthing.....luckily for us the combat round in 2nd ed. was a minute so it didn't take long to suffocate him. Then we killed off Midnight, Cyric and Kelemvor because who likes playing second fiddle to a bunch of DMPC's.

Then we managed to off Khelben Blackstaff when he came to set things right. How you might ask? One character had had aquired a tiny gelatious cube and our rouge slipped it into Khelben's water skin. So Khelben got eaten from the inside out while he tried to find the right spell to get "well" Unlucky for him that his arcane magic didn't work out so well...or rather backfired disastrously.

Luckily for us that nobody could resurrect them. The DM wasn't exactly rolling with this so he had the Simbul show up and kill us....and she resurrected Ganda...I mean Elminster and Khelben with a wish....that lead to a heated argument because clerical magic didn't work....so us the players felt that the wish couldn't be used for a true resurrection, the DM of course ruled that an Avatar was close by so clerical magic would work At this point our tiny gelatious cube, which we called Hubert, had grown considerately after we had fed them the corpses of Gandal...erm I mean Elminster and the rest of the DMPC's. We never played in the Forgotten Realms again and I probably never will because to this day I still refuse that Cyric, Kelemvor and Midnight became gods....not in my game at least.

[Pauly]

In a steam punk game set in Victorian England.

The French do a raid on Manchester in order to capture a particula scientist. So the GM sets the scene and specifically tells us that the French military are blcking the major roads and the railways. Our mission is to get into Manchester grab the scientist and get him out before the French find him.

One of our players who had lived in Manchester for 3 years, looks at the map and sees where the GM indicates where the French army has deployed, and says we'll use the Worsley Navigable levels, an underground canal network not marked on the GM's modern map. The GM was a good sport and agreed that if he didn't know about the canals then the French didn't either. So we use the canals to bypass the French army, going down the airshafts and get a barge from the miners and enter inside the French cordon. We go straight to our scientist, and get out the same way. No fuss, no detection by the French. Home in time for crumpets and tea.

The whole chapter which was supposed to involve going to the moon to rescue the scientist and discover links to a planned lunar invasion of Earth? Tossed in the bin.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

PCs are members of a Neutral-to-Good aligned Assassin Order.

Sorcerer PC gets kidnapped during celebration for ending the Human-Elf Mafia-Race War.

Brought to Evil Wizard(tm) the players thought they'd robbed without getting caught (Spoiler: he found out).

Evil Wizard(tm) says he's going to torture the Sorcerer for information.

Sorcerer immediately lists off every other party members' names, current locations, item and spell loadouts she's aware of, weaknesses, and possible allies and safe-houses.

Evil Wizard(tm) is literally so stunned that worked he just...kinda...leaves?

Conclusion: Setting suffered a slight case of EVERYBODY DEAD.

[Dunsparce]

I once had a campaign with a plot that was heavily based on the Gameboy RPG SaGa2/Final Fantasy Legend 2. While the main plot resolved itself, the main motivation of the players was completely out in left field: They wanted to turn the party pet, a Dire Pug, into a God. I said if they got to get it to work I'd make the Pug a deity in all pantheons of future games I ran, regardless of tone or if it was a pre-established setting or not.

They Succeeded. I even let them design his home plane.

[jaybird]

Black Crusade. They rolled for anal circumference.

[LordCdrMilitant]

In this scenario, I'm a player [though I've had my share as a GM].

Our GM this time was usually a player, and decided he wanted to try a hand a GM'ing. He decides that it would be awesome to start at level 20. He proceeds to write a storyline more fitting for characters who aren't the single most powerful individuals in the world, more appropriate for level 10 characters. He completely underestimates our abilities.

As it turns out, small moons have a terrible reflex save and armor class, and rocks placed in a permanent greater demiplane in vacuum, with looping edges, and a constant gravitational acceleration of 20m/s/s do far, far more damage on impact that the amount of hitpoints a small moon has.

My character is an ancient dread vampire sorceress, who lives in a private realm of interconnected permanent greater demiplanes. She also has a castle in space, staffed by her legion of hundreds of undyingly loyal wyrwood necromancer followers and their skeletal minions, and spaceships. This was supposed to be a fantasy game, but Interplanetary Teleport is a thing. Her spell list is primarily mind control, with a little necromancy and conjuration. She has schemes to ensure everyone in the world dances on strings she pulls, but they're also far too complicated than they need to be and are almost guaranteed to trip over each other. She also has schemes to counter other party members' schemes, and schemes to counter their schemes that counter her schemes that counter theirs.

Another character is a druid that is a colossal +2 crystal golem tyrannosaurus rex. He's super scared of dying, so he's got plans over plans and contingencies over those to ensure no attacker can kill him. He owns a magical research laboratory.

Another character is a fighter with too many arms. And by how many arms is too many arms? Well, the druid just kept magically grafting more onto him. He can stab for over 5k damage in a round. He's an alter-ego: Morbad the Limb Rending and Morgood the Cuddly.

Another guy had a character who is the king of a small nation, but spent his entire starting wealth on said nation and having 20 legions of genetically-engineered, magically-empowered, super-soldier Land Marines [my name for them, not his].

There's a few more, including an android businessman who licenses franchises to maximum-efficiency stores for stupidly-high profits, a crazed summoner whose eidolon is a ball of crossbows, an anime magical girl, and a master thief.

So, we start. As I said, the campaign is better suited storywise for characters who can't demolish planets in a single combat action. We are supposed to go and explore some uncharted region. We meet a giant sandworm with 5-digit HP, but it gets deleted before it can act by our sheer potential damage. Then we fight a Tarrasque that can teleport as a reaction to dodge my stone barrage. Morbad subdues it in one round of battle, then flips to being Morgood to tame it into Terry the Teleporting Tarrasque. Then, the party seizes control of the story, and we being to put our plans into motion. Half the party founds Al-Morbad, a terrorist organization destabilizing the local empire, and King Akkad's Land Marines sweep into to restore order and save the day. Orks invade, but rocks from orbit wipe them and the whole region of the world off the map. To his credit, the GM improvises, and a group of Elfdar show up in their Peace Moon [again, my names, not his]. We invite them to parlay, because I can't be beat by them at negotiations with my stupidly high charisma and other bonuses to Diplomacy, Bluff, etc. and I draw up the outline of our diplomatic conference and our month-long agenda together with our robot businessman. Our GM decides that the Elfdar are prescient and all wise, and evaluate us as a threat to multiversal peace [also, it was the second session we spent negotiating the agenda for our diplomatic talks, having banquets and fancy speeches and achieving nothing but filibuster, while Al-Morbad and King Akkad were conquering the world, and he was probably tired of it going nowhere, though we were having great fun]. They decide to blow us up, but I beat them to the punch and blow them up first with my energetic stone barrage on full power. There's nothing left to salvage. We spread more propaganda to celebrate our victory, and the campaign from then on is entirely driven by our conflicting schemes to its imminent conclusion, and with the power of Interplanetary Teleport, Greater Demiplane, and Permanency we conquer the stars and planes in epilogue.

I feel a little bad for him, because he had something planned but we not only wrecked it entirely, but treated his world as a playground for our schemes and almost entirely ignored what he wanted us to do unless it got in our way.

This time, as GM for a Dark Heresy party.

The party has discovered some traitor forces doing something in a ruined hive. They decide, rather than try literally anything else to storm the traitor checkpoint, to launch a frontal assault. They prevail, thanks to Meltagun, and then try to infiltrate the chaos base. It doesn't work so well, and they leave, blow up some more traitors, and come back for another go! They almost die in the ensuing battle with CSMs and 50+ cultists in tanks, and have to burn fate to live. But they get away. I provide them with all sorts of means to bypass the chaos base, like Hades Breaching Drills, sneaking through the ruins, etc., but what's their plan this time? FRONTAL ASSAULT! They charge in, guns blazing, and murder their way through the heretic forces. They shoot up a chaos ritual, then turn around, and go "eh, job's done!" and leave after ensuring that everyone is dead. No looking for clues, no nothing, just charge in, kill everyone, then leave. This in turn means they missed pieces of information I expected them to have by now, and and working on structuring things to make sure they eventually get it.

Earlier in the campaign, there was a DE agent they were supposed to capture and interrogate, but instead, they got a Baneblade to blow him and the building he was in up. They keep blowing things up, and I have to keep re-writing things to make sure they get the information they need to find, but then they blow that up too. It's like we're playing Only War, but with rosettes instead of regiment numbers!

[PhoenixPhyre]

Same universe, separate timelines.

Group 1 faced a nation that was on the verge of civil war/collapse (mostly catalyzed by their actions earlier). Their response: convene a fantasy UN and weld nations together to face a (as yet hazy) external threat.

Group 2 decided (and I quote) "We just really want to have a coup." Not so picky about which nation to run this coup on, not really wanting to be in charge, just wanting a coup.

Both are still in progress, so we'll see how that goes. Good thing I don't usually plan more than a session in advance...

[JBPuffin]

In this scenario, I'm a player [though I've had my share as a GM].

Our GM this time was usually a player, and decided he wanted to try a hand a GM'ing. He decides that it would be awesome to start at level 20. He proceeds to write a storyline more fitting for characters who aren't the single most powerful individuals in the world, more appropriate for level 10 characters. He completely underestimates our abilities.

As it turns out, small moons have a terrible reflex save and armor class, and rocks placed in a permanent greater demiplane in vacuum, with looping edges, and a constant gravitational acceleration of 20m/s/s do far, far more damage on impact that the amount of hitpoints a small moon has.

My character is an ancient dread vampire sorceress, who lives in a private realm of interconnected permanent greater demiplanes. She also has a castle in space, staffed by her legion of hundreds of undyingly loyal wyrwood necromancer followers and their skeletal minions, and spaceships. This was supposed to be a fantasy game, but Interplanetary Teleport is a thing. Her spell list is primarily mind control, with a little necromancy and conjuration. She has schemes to ensure everyone in the world dances on strings she pulls, but they're also far too complicated than they need to be and are almost guaranteed to trip over each other. She also has schemes to counter other party members' schemes, and schemes to counter their schemes that counter her schemes that counter theirs.

Another character is a druid that is a colossal +2 crystal golem tyrannosaurus rex. He's super scared of dying, so he's got plans over plans and contingencies over those to ensure no attacker can kill him. He owns a magical research laboratory.

Another character is a fighter with too many arms. And by how many arms is too many arms? Well, the druid just kept magically grafting more onto him. He can stab for over 5k damage in a round. He's an alter-ego: Morbad the Limb Rending and Morgood the Cuddly.

Another guy had a character who is the king of a small nation, but spent his entire starting wealth on said nation and having 20 legions of genetically-engineered, magically-empowered, super-soldier Land Marines [my name for them, not his].

There's a few more, including an android businessman who licenses franchises to maximum-efficiency stores for stupidly-high profits, a crazed summoner whose eidolon is a ball of crossbows, an anime magical girl, and a master thief.

So, we start. As I said, the campaign is better suited storywise for characters who can't demolish planets in a single combat action. We are supposed to go and explore some uncharted region. We meet a giant sandworm with 5-digit HP, but it gets deleted before it can act by our sheer potential damage. Then we fight a Tarrasque that can teleport as a reaction to dodge my stone barrage. Morbad subdues it in one round of battle, then flips to being Morgood to tame it into Terry the Teleporting Tarrasque. Then, the party seizes control of the story, and we being to put our plans into motion. Half the party founds Al-Morbad, a terrorist organization destabilizing the local empire, and King Akkad's Land Marines sweep into to restore order and save the day. Orks invade, but rocks from orbit wipe them and the whole region of the world off the map. To his credit, the GM improvises, and a group of Elfdar show up in their Peace Moon [again, my names, not his]. We invite them to parlay, because I can't be beat by them at negotiations with my stupidly high charisma and other bonuses to Diplomacy, Bluff, etc. and I draw up the outline of our diplomatic conference and our month-long agenda together with our robot businessman. Our GM decides that the Elfdar are prescient and all wise, and evaluate us as a threat to multiversal peace [also, it was the second session we spent negotiating the agenda for our diplomatic talks, having banquets and fancy speeches and achieving nothing but filibuster, while Al-Morbad and King Akkad were conquering the world, and he was probably tired of it going nowhere, though we were having great fun]. They decide to blow us up, but I beat them to the punch and blow them up first with my energetic stone barrage on full power. There's nothing left to salvage. We spread more propaganda to celebrate our victory, and the campaign from then on is entirely driven by our conflicting schemes to its imminent conclusion, and with the power of Interplanetary Teleport, Greater Demiplane, and Permanency we conquer the stars and planes in epilogue.

I feel a little bad for him, because he had something planned but we not only wrecked it entirely, but treated his world as a playground for our schemes and almost entirely ignored what he wanted us to do unless it got in our way.

This time, as GM for a Dark Heresy party.

The party has discovered some traitor forces doing something in a ruined hive. They decide, rather than try literally anything else to storm the traitor checkpoint, to launch a frontal assault. They prevail, thanks to Meltagun, and then try to infiltrate the chaos base. It doesn't work so well, and they leave, blow up some more traitors, and come back for another go! They almost die in the ensuing battle with CSMs and 50+ cultists in tanks, and have to burn fate to live. But they get away. I provide them with all sorts of means to bypass the chaos base, like Hades Breaching Drills, sneaking through the ruins, etc., but what's their plan this time? FRONTAL ASSAULT! They charge in, guns blazing, and murder their way through the heretic forces. They shoot up a chaos ritual, then turn around, and go "eh, job's done!" and leave after ensuring that everyone is dead. No looking for clues, no nothing, just charge in, kill everyone, then leave. This in turn means they missed pieces of information I expected them to have by now, and and working on structuring things to make sure they eventually get it.

Earlier in the campaign, there was a DE agent they were supposed to capture and interrogate, but instead, they got a Baneblade to blow him and the building he was in up. They keep blowing things up, and I have to keep re-writing things to make sure they get the information they need to find, but then they blow that up too. It's like we're playing Only War, but with rosettes instead of regiment numbers!

For the latter? Just feed them more things to burn. They seem to enjoy it ;).

[LordCdrMilitant]

For the latter? Just feed them more things to burn. They seem to enjoy it ;).

Oh yes, that's what I do.

Admittedly, our best stories are those of the party smashing through armies that could be a respectable 2500-point force with a Leman Russ Vanquisher Command Tank, butchering their way through bloodthristers with psycannons, unleashing the Emperor's fury through the main battery of an Inquisitorial Battle Barge, and screaming through cultist lines in a hijacked goliath truck firing meltagun, flamers, and demolition charges left, right, and ahead.

This is my 3rd DH campaign I've run, and by now I should expect that the players will approach the problem as "obliterate everything", but I still start out planning for sneaky-stealthy operations, and end up throwing it out the window and improving the rest after they burn down a promethium refinery on the first session.

For what it's worth, I think it's the specific 40k-ness of DH that makes the party so inclined to straightforward and violent solutions. When we played Traveller, not a shot was fired, and it was all struggling to pay the bills with legitimate and illegitimate trade.

[Obesesniper93]

I was once in a World of Darkness campaign where we had wore the GM down over months of silly derails and PC civil wars. In our last session he introduced Santa Clause as a deity, and the game ended. Apparently THAT was enough to get us to stop because I remember all of us agreeing that this was a sign that a new campaign needed to be started.