When The Game Got Derailed

[Finback]

Just wanting to share (and encourage others to share) those moments where sanity went out the window.

CoS - we have to take on the druids of Yester Hill. We are level 6s - a vengadin (me!), a tiefling shadow monk, a gnome satire bard, a grung divine soul sorcerer, a dwarven cleric of light, and a drow artificier.
We look at this bloody great hill, and think - there is no way we can do this easily. We discuss stealth, separating out the party, etc. The DM allows a slight change - the scale is now 1:25ft, not 1:50ft, so it won't take us ten rounds just to climb. Thanks to a handy spell, even my vengadin's worst stealth rolls are still hitting over 20, so we manage. And then we decide - let's just charge.
Grung casts enlarge on the vengadin, because we did it once, and it was fun. Grung and gnome take up position on his shoulders, and we start charging up the hill, in a thunderstorm*. Tiefling dashes and teleports up up up and scouts ahead. Um, the whole "arena" is overgrown with vines, making it superdifficult terrain (iir, 1sq is 20ft of movement cost). Six druids, and a huge wooden Strahd doll. The area is surrounded by huge stone walls as well.

For comedy, the tiefling uses thaumaturgy, and makes any containers of water vibrate, a la Jurassic Park, as vengadin begins to approach. DM asks for stealth - make it. Yes, a massive armour clad man is sprinting up a hill - and somehow, the footsteps are timed with the thunderclaps overhead. The first hint something is wrong comes to the druids when my head appears over the walls, and the gnome begins crossbow sniping and the grung casts fireball. I ask the DM if I can, as an attack, shoulder charge the wall. "O...K..."

And that's how I crashed through the wall, scattering stones all through the difficult terrain, allowing the monk to leap from one to the other, to fast approach the monks.

But it turns out, they're calling down lightning literally EVERY. TURN. Each of them - all six. We rapidly go down. The vengadin at one point is down, and I make a death save. Nat 20. I'm up! But do I waste my action to lay on hands, if there's still two druids (at this point) calling down more lightning? Or do I leap forward between them, and use Arms of Hadar?

At that point, the grung got killed by an evil, evil tree** - our first PC loss all campaign (other than a complex tale involving a vampiric gnome rogue, which was more narrative death than dice rolled).

We had to end at that point - grung dead, artificer hiding in terror, cleric barely standing, vengadin on 1hp and VERY angry, gnome trying to save themselves from the tree monster and the monk trying to figure who they can *try* to save.

It was one of the best games ever :D


* yes, a giant paladin, in plate mail, on top of a hill, in a storm. Gerhart Ostermeier is not a smart man, just an angry, fervent one.
** DM asked me to bring some suitable minis (as I have tonnes) - let's just say a Reaper Miniatures Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath looks AMAZING as an evil tree. The other players were mixed with fear and excitement.


So, what's your favourite moment of "we Did The Thing and it was not good"?

[Unoriginal]

Derailed? Sounds like it went normally to me.

Now, if you want a story of what should have been a cakewall going badly:


Our group was investigating a house in a city, trying to find clues on some archnecromancer's plot, as the sun was setting, and it took us a while.

As we're about to leave, it's clearly night outside. Which is bad news because there is a whole gang of smug-smiling vampires outside, waiting for us.

At this point we're wetting our pants a bit... until we realize we're in a house, and vampires can't enter houses uninvited. So we just laugh, mock them and stay inside. Which of course make the vampires grind their teeth in frustration.

At this point, this exchange occurs:

Vampire Leader: "Really, you're going to stay inside? Are you really so scared by us?"

PC: "Oh yeah? And why don't you come here to tell this to our face?"

Cue the entire table turning at the player with the dead expression of those who can't believe what just happened. And facepalming.

[Magzimum]

My 5 players entered a village on the main road they were following. It was supposed to be a simple stop for the night with no encounters or complications.

The group asked a local villager for a place to stay, and rolled reasonably low for persuasion. So the villager thought it's a good idea to charge these travelers 2 gp per person for a night in his stable, which would include dinner.
At that point the rogue pulls out a giant golden plaque to pay, which is part of the loot they carry. It was mostly a joke to show how rich they are. The eyes of the villager widen, and the villager tries to run away quickly on an "urgent errand". Without even making an insight roll, the rogue thinks that the villager wants to rob him of the loot, and shoots him in the back, kills him in one shot.

What was supposed to a simple long rest became a complex roleplay where the group is trying to dispose of a dead body, and still tries to get a long rest in the house of the dead peasant.

To be fair, I believe they did eventually leave some money on the table to pay for their stay.

[ruy343]

Derailed? I have one or two stories like that:

DM has prepared a ton of stuff for his first time DM-ing - he's got paid voice actors and clips of music he's composed for different locales; he's got a sprawling world map, and ideas for every settlement thereon; he's got an epic 20-level campaign all planned out. Every major NPC is a level 20 character, and he's got custom stat blocks for every single one of them.

And then we all sit down for the first session...

It's a railroady start - we're sent to clear out some "commoner" rebel rabble from a nearby town. Immediately, we can see the writing on the wall - we're being set up, and we're not happy about it. The de facto queen is taking out her brother's upstart grassroots movement to get him placed on the throne, and no matter what happens, we're going to end up in the middle of a large, political struggle that we didn't want to deal with. The bulk of our characters are mercenaries for hire or drifters from around the area, and the one guy with a noble background has more loyalty to his parents' shipping company than to royalty...

So what do we do?

We look for our first opportunity, and we make a break for it. We return to the city, we tell our loved ones to steer clear of the city for a while, and we hop a boat to the elven kingdom to get out of dodge. The DM is flabbergasted - he had a planned script for the next 5 sessions, but we were already in his "session six" notes. When we arrived at the elven kingdom, the fane orders us to go back to rescue HIS son, and forces us to include an NPC in the group, who's clearly there to reinforce the theme of "nobility is better than everyone else" on the story. We're told that he'll hunt us down if we deviate from our mission...

So we complete the mission, send the son back to the fane, and get out of dodge again, only to have the same NPC show up, and for the DM to add a personal motivation: the kidnapping of my character's sister. We're finally motivated to go to the final stronghold, where we just run past all the bad guys we can, take the easiest path to the goal, and then... the group just kind of dissolved because no one was excited for it anymore.

TL;DR: Super-overprepared DM tries to railroad party through complicated plot; party beelines it to objective and tries to run away, only to get put back on the rails... and jump off them again. Repeatedly.

[Theodoxus]

snip

My party went similar. Ranger jumps onto stone wall, gets nuked with lightning, knocking him out. I (playing Life Cleric) get within range for Healing Word. Arcane Archer makes one attack, gets swarmed and cries the whole fight that he can't shoot his bow (the player is a legit moron - so many stories about his stupidity). Drunken master monk and I basically carry the day. I even get knocked out at one point and roll the nat 20 death save as above! Channel Divinity at the best possible moment saves us from a TPK.

But the fight that went wrong was the next session. Fully recovered from the druid fight (and where we became unshakenly convinced that Strahd was simply an evil druid), we encounter a statue with weird zombies that pop out snakes when killed. Well, it would have been a cake walk, if the Lightning Ranger hadn't wandered off in search of "magic". So the party is fighting the snake zombies and doing ok, though there's a lot of spell slot and HP attrition going on, and the ranger runs smack dab into the baba's walking hut - pissing off the baba and animating said hut and getting it to come chase us down...

So, a medium difficulty fight becomes deadly, really quick.

The only thing that kept that from a TPK was a liberal use of Esmerelda's spells and a lucky pull from a bag of tricks that summoned a giant elk (that elk is pretty much perfect for fighting an animated house). The ranger nearly died twice to the baba's trickery... Had I been anything other than LG, I would have slaughtered that damn ranger after that... as it was, we never let him wander off alone again.

[Ranger0998]

Playing Lost Mine of Phandelver with a lvl 3 party consisting of arcane trickster rogue, totem barbarian, ranger, life cleric, divination wizard, and myself a battle master fighter with a tower shield. We are attempting to siege Cragmaw castle having managed to trick the main force into leaving. So we were all crowding around the doorways into the rooms where goblins had been watching the entrance attempting to break in to kill the goblins inside. I manage to intimidate one into opening the door only to find that he strapped 7 or 8 flasks of fire to himself. I got a nat one for the dex save with the halfling rogue a foot behind me getting a 4. First time I went down that encounter. Later we were fighting 6 hobgoblins through a doorway with the Ranger's fog cloud keeping them from instakilling us. But the fight with them pretty much consisted of me getting hit twice going down and then instantly being brought back up to 4 or 5 health with cure wounds only to miss an attack or two then go down again. By the time we finally killed the hobgoblins and an ogre I had gone down and been revived 5 or 6 times. My fellow party members have now nicknamed my character Lance the Undying due to that basically being every combat encounter we have.

[Afrodactyl]

My friends homebrew game got derailed recently. Our druid was insistent that he get a pet, so the DM eventually gave him a goat that had blight and was waiting for death.

Then, there was lots of moaning on his part, and thus began our three session long derailment of the druid searching for a cure, and the rest of the party sighing and following unenthusiastically.

Eventually we got back to it and saved the world, but we had to save that darn goat beforehand.

[DeTess]

We killed a really powerful dragon, leaving all his Kobold minions cowering in fear before us 9those we didn't kill on our way to the killing the dragon). I don't think the DM expected our reaction to this to be to recruit the Kobolds, bust out the spreadsheets to calculate what it'd cost us to arm them, and start building our army. At this time we've got about half a Roman legion worth of equipped and trained Kobolds under our command (filling out the rest of the legion being an equipment issue, and not a training issue).

[Finback]

Eventually we got back to it and saved the world, but we had to save that darn goat beforehand.

In the group I run, I would have had the goat get the druid's XP. Goat is GOAT.

[Finback]

Playing Lost Mine of Phandelver

The group I run (versus the CoS I play in) managed to get past the Castle by virtue of having rescued Droop the Goblin, and having PCs who spoke it, and could cast illusions.

This basically lead to the Goblin Uprising, In Which the Chains of Servitude were thrown Off, and the Hatesome Bugbears deposed, and the Free State of Goblonia was Borne.

This will in turn come to fruition if the PCs make it back from Chult, wherein they will find nations all over the place trying to make sense of goblins who have democracy (of a sort), free trade, are welcoming immigrants of all races, and have managed to thwart all attempts to invade/wipe them out.

[Vessyra]

My players were level five in the city of a corrupt noble planning a war. However, there were also a bunch of wizards being forced via specially worded contracts to upgrade an airship that they had already built. The players decided to free the wizards before they stopped the war from starting. However, for some reason, after the wizards were freed, the players went, "Okay, job done. Time to skip town".

So the players ended up leaving while the noble finished her evil plan to start a massive war.

Four levels later the players are regretting not stopping that noble. However, this is where they derail my plot. One player with a forgery kit and a previous friendship with the long-term BBEG writes a death note to the ancient red dragon leading one army in the war, and the player writes it in the BBEG's handwriting. So now, an ancient red dragon wants my BBEG dead.

As any good DM would, I'll have the red dragon succeed... then discover the BBEG's plans and take his place.

[BreaktheStatue]

Derailed? I have one or two stories like that:

DM has prepared a ton of stuff for his first time DM-ing - he's got paid voice actors and clips of music he's composed for different locales; he's got a sprawling world map, and ideas for every settlement thereon; he's got an epic 20-level campaign all planned out. Every major NPC is a level 20 character, and he's got custom stat blocks for every single one of them.

And then we all sit down for the first session...

It's a railroady start - we're sent to clear out some "commoner" rebel rabble from a nearby town. Immediately, we can see the writing on the wall - we're being set up, and we're not happy about it. The de facto queen is taking out her brother's upstart grassroots movement to get him placed on the throne, and no matter what happens, we're going to end up in the middle of a large, political struggle that we didn't want to deal with. The bulk of our characters are mercenaries for hire or drifters from around the area, and the one guy with a noble background has more loyalty to his parents' shipping company than to royalty...

So what do we do?

We look for our first opportunity, and we make a break for it. We return to the city, we tell our loved ones to steer clear of the city for a while, and we hop a boat to the elven kingdom to get out of dodge. The DM is flabbergasted - he had a planned script for the next 5 sessions, but we were already in his "session six" notes. When we arrived at the elven kingdom, the fane orders us to go back to rescue HIS son, and forces us to include an NPC in the group, who's clearly there to reinforce the theme of "nobility is better than everyone else" on the story. We're told that he'll hunt us down if we deviate from our mission...

So we complete the mission, send the son back to the fane, and get out of dodge again, only to have the same NPC show up, and for the DM to add a personal motivation: the kidnapping of my character's sister. We're finally motivated to go to the final stronghold, where we just run past all the bad guys we can, take the easiest path to the goal, and then... the group just kind of dissolved because no one was excited for it anymore.

TL;DR: Super-overprepared DM tries to railroad party through complicated plot; party beelines it to objective and tries to run away, only to get put back on the rails... and jump off them again. Repeatedly.

I get that this is supposed to be a case of "Check out this noob DM, railroaders suck," but this description reads less like a funny story, and more like "Selfish children are unwilling to work with some poor inexperienced guy who is trying to entertain them."

It's a first-time DM who clearly put a lot of thought and effort into his game, it was a game you weren't interested in, and rather than handle it like adults by discussing it OOC, you took him for a ride? Great job.

[NaughtyTiger]

PC: "Oh yeah? And why don't you come here to tell this to our face?"

that is too beautiful.
i love having that player at my table. keeps everyone on their toes.

[Wisefool]

My current group hasn't played since May due in part to poorly timed IRL derailment. In our last session, we had been exploring the basement of an abandoned dwarf fortress that was now occupied by an army of hobgoblins. Except we hadn't seen a single hobgoblin below, just a lot of nasty bugs. As soon as we surface, our druid starts describing the outside of the keep despite being behind the castle walls. He then somehow magically warped to our fallen rogue during the ensuing fight, despite his last reported position being over 80 ft away and not in the rogue's line of sight.

I'm the rules lawyer in the group, but have been letting the druid's loose play go, deferring to our DM. I am also responsible for the recaps and I was behind on them as I add extra details and turn each of our sessions into a novella. I was currently working on the recap for the session we entered the stronghold's basement... except there was one problem, we never actually learned how we entered the keep because we were handwaved in by the DM at the druid's insistence. So I created our entrance out of thin air, but savaged the druid by making him the star of how we entered the keep.

He wasn't pleased by it or my attitude toward him during the sessions and we had a row. For about a month afterwards, our group couldn't all get together to play. We were reaching the conclusion of this keep that we had spent most of the first half of this year exploring and we didn't want anyone to miss out, so we kept postponing instead of playing shorthanded. However, over the summer two of our players had serious real life issues happen that they are still dealing with and the group hasn't played since the druid and I had a OOC argument. I really wish we could have had one more session to at least put that session behind us.

[DMThac0]

A couple stories that pop into mind:

So we are all familiar with those moments when players derail every one of our well laid out plans. Some of us so much so that we plan for the players to not do what is asked of them.

6 players, one giant homebrew world, a 30yr DM, and the table is set.

I set the players off on a simple journey to travel from the little village that they call home to deliver a message from the Arch-Druid to the King. As a long time DM, I decide to sprinkle in all the little sight-seeing spots that players tend to gravitate toward because the main quest is boring.

I placed an abandoned tower, complete with broken down wagon in front of it, and the players decided to send a raven back to town to give aid.

Further on they come across some Gnolls and Bugbears, they are warring and it seems both sides are at their weakest. The party stealthily sneaks around the combat, leaving nature to take it's course.

They cross a large lake, they meet the King's army. Conversation happens where the players learn that the guards are investigating the appearance of a giant tower that sprouted up over night. The party wishes them well and verifies that they're headed the shortest distance to reach the castle.

They reach the city and promptly get lost. They end up in a dead end alley surrounded by thieves and cutthroats. The group grabs on to the two horses they have, charge the bad guys at the alley's mouth and find the town's guard.

What should have brought them to level 4, allowing them to continue on to the next leg of the journey with the skills and abilities necessary, was avoided in the most spectacular RP. I was amazed, almost beyond words, that for the first time ever a group did exactly what was asked of them.

I have a player, bard, who has been trying, with all her might, to create a romantic sub-plot in my current homebrew game. She created an elaborate back story and has RPed interactions throughout the game to the effect of getting a relationship. I finally caved in and tied in the romantic angle into the main character arc that I had crafted for her.

After a year, real life, the party has finally made it to the Dwarven kingdom of Iron Haven, where my bard believes she'll meet her long lost love interest. I spin this tale of why the kingdom is so crowded with people of all race and creed, a tale of the elemental planes tearing rifts into the prime material, and the need for the blood heirs to reclaim the instruments of power that will settle the rifts.

The bard swallows the plot hook before I finish the first sentence, literally bouncing in her chair. She promptly tells the group that they're headed to inspect the instruments. Here I have them walking down a long tunnel, crowded with people, all heading to the same location. I then describe a small group of 3 Dwarves blazing a trail through the crowd, and have her roll a perception. She notices that this is her love interest and shouts out his name, and is drown out by the noise of the crowd.

I've set this whole scene up to give her this 1980's slow motion lovers embrace and it fails, so I'm trying to come up with something quick. Our barbarian saves the day in the most fantastic scene I've had in a long time:

Mhurren (Barbarian): I pick her up and rage yell for the other dwarf.
(OOC player): But you're a H-Orc, that might not go well...
Vistra (Bard): You're going to what?! NO! I want to try to wiggle out of his grip...
Me (DM): roll,*Vistra rolls super low vs Mhurren*
Me: As you try to wiggle free you are lifted up, almost Lion King style, in your dress, above the stream of Dwarves and Mhurren shouts out Dwalin's name.
Mhurren: Dwalin! Look what I have! *Do I get his attention? I'll pop a rage just to make my voice carry.*
Me: To the utter dismay of Vistra, her bardic voice able to entertain crowds, she is outshone by the roar of Mhurrens voice. Much like Fezzig from Princess Bride, you watch as the crowd separates and about two dozen Dwarven guards surround your group, weapons pointed at Mhurren.

What was supposed to be a simple meeting of star crossed lovers ended up being a heated moment where the evil H-Orc Barbarian hoisted up the fair Dwarven damsel before the son of the Royal guards of Iron Haven.

[ruy343]

I get that this is supposed to be a case of "Check out this noob DM, railroaders suck," but this description reads less like a funny story, and more like "Selfish children are unwilling to work with some poor inexperienced guy who is trying to entertain them."

It's a first-time DM who clearly put a lot of thought and effort into his game, it was a game you weren't interested in, and rather than handle it like adults by discussing it OOC, you took him for a ride? Great job.

You make a point - allow me to clarify: I did omit that we did play the story through for a good while, but that the story was clearly more about the NPCs he had crafted than it was about us, the players. We talked about it OOC, but it didn't change... So when I said before that we waited until the first opportunity before, I was exaggerating - it was at least three sessions in.

[Waterdeep Merch]

I'm a permissive DM. This has gotten me into untold levels of trouble. One game in particular.

One player had a fairly large ruby, a gift from his affluent parents before he set out on an adventure to serve as money in an emergency. Another player, something of a troublemaker, decided that he was going to steal said ruby while the player slept. So he crept up on the player, and said he went through his bags. At this point we realized that we'd never clarified where this player had stored said ruby. So he looked the thief dead in the eye and proclaimed "In my ***."

You'd think this would be the end of it, but no. No it wasn't. So the thief decided to go elbow-deep looking for it. Lo and behold, he was discovered. The party turned on itself and chaos ensued, wrecking most of the wagon they were sleeping in, getting a few party members killed in the process, and ultimately wrecking the entire campaign all at once. By the way, the thief didn't die here.

So at one point, I decided screw this. The universe resets to the exact moment before this whole mess of stupid happened. And guess what the thief did then?

Repeated history. And got caught.

Before anyone could do anything more sensible this time, the party barbarian raged, got one of the biggest critical hits I've ever seen in a game (it was 3.5 and those crits kept rolling!), and sent him careening down a mountain into a lake. At this point, the party started running down after him in a chaotic mess- some wanted to save him, some wanted to kill him, some were pretending to want to kill him in order to coerce other party members into making stupid mistakes. It was a nightmare.

So the players were actually playing dual roles. On one end, they were pretty stereotypical characters, though I made them take levels in commoner first to represent the start of the game when they were children, then NPC classes when they were teenagers, and then finally allowed them to take real levels once they were fully grown. I also randomized a few elements of their backstory, including some fears. I'll get back to the other roles they were playing later- we're going to focus on the fears right now.

So the party just barely escaped a bad situation involving angry extradimensional orcs by jumping through one of their own teleportation devices, set to randomly send them somewhere. I had them arrive in the middle of a relatively normal town. One of the players was nearly killed thanks to his fear of fire during those events (it was the thief again, get ready), and decided to look around for some way to beat his fear of fire. Rather than tell him that mental health care wasn't exactly something you'd find in a medieval town, I thought it would be funny if he ran into a little girl running a stand that proclaimed 'The Psychologist is In'.

When he asked for help, she pointed to a donation bottle. He paid two gold, and asked for help with his fear of fire. She thought about it for a moment, poured oil on the thief's hand, and then set it on fire, calling it 'immersion therapy'.

The player decided to go on a rampage. I wasn't about to include 'murdering children' as a gameplay feature, so she left, but that didn't stop the thief from trying it anyway and killing several guards in the process. He ended up getting run out of town, where he camped in the hills to wait for the other players.

MEANWHILE, I just handed out XP for the extradimensional orc cave. Because I offered extra XP to players for certain events, the party wizard found that he was just barely off of gaining a level. He mistakenly believed that this was like a JRPG, and that he could make up the last bit by killing rats. So he went into the sewers, and pulled out his knife.

This was no ordinary knife. It was a homebrew thing, carrying a horrific and deadly disease. They'd lifted it off of an enemy and ended up keeping it, despite how terrifying something like that really was. And then the wizard decided to go kill rats in a sewer with it.

After murdering one rat and watching a bunch of others come and try to eat that one, the wizard finally recognized what an awful, awful thing he just did was. So he decided that the best way to solve this problem was with burning hands.

In a sewer.

In a cramped and unclean sewer, that didn't have flowing water.

He managed to just barely survive the explosion (I believe he cast a defensive spell at the last moment), then ran out of the sewer to find the rest of the party panicking now that the entire town had gone up in flames. They all end up running off to the hill where the thief was cackling madly and they all watched in horror as everything burned to the ground.

Then I said "Some of those townsfolk were decent combatants. Congrats, wizard. You level."

I mentioned in the previous story that the players weren't just ordinary D&D characters. On a different level, they were new gods that had pooled their resources into selecting their characters in the mortal realms as their avatars and champions. They had a very limited ability to influence the mortal world once a day, and it was prone to failure. Stopping a single attack or action was much more likely than, say, causing a spell effect or creating a magic item.

The other players had finally gotten fed up with the thief player from the previous stories, and decided to pool their resources together. They were going to teleport the thief into the middle of the arid desert nearby, known to be inhabited by a large clan of blue dragons.

So, the players all rolled together to cause the spell effect. With so many of them contributing, it easily hit the necessary limit I'd imposed on such effects. But the thief wasn't going to take this lying down. He said "Can't I try and use my god power to stop it?".

Well, yes. Of course. So he rolls his dice, and BAM. Natural 20. He couldn't dispel something of this magnitude, but he could screw with it's intended function. So the target of the spell became random.

A dice roll and some hysterical laughter/crying later, and the main instigator of the teleport in the first place ended up lost in the desert, where he was promptly found by blue dragons that decided that he made a magnificent plaything. It took him a full session to escape his humiliating servitude and rejoin the party.

As mentioned previously, the players were not just characters, but also gods on another level. They had joint custody of a hidden but expansive plane that had enormous power and potential, if only they could grow strong enough to exploit it.

The players (nine of them) had incidentally aligned themselves to all nine classical alignments. Yes, this means I had three evil players and three good players, as well as three chaotic player to three lawful players. And I really should have seen all of this coming. Hindsight, right?

So anyway, the thief player was a bit scared of the player that had been teleported to the blue dragon desert, and wanted to make sure that he had the upper hand in case something like that was ever attempted again. To do this, he figured he needed an army.

So he went to the abyss.

It got around very fast that there was a large, unspoiled and magically potent plane hidden out in the multiverse, practically up for grabs. So demons made plans to invade.

The lawful evil cleric, typically an ally of the thief, caught wind of all this. He really didn't like this idea, and figured they'd be better off if someone could fight the demons to a stalemate to stop them from conquering everything. So he went to hell and struck some bargains.

The chaotic good swordsage heard all of this and got antsy. So did the player that got teleported before (I think he was a lawful good crusader?). Soon everyone did, and basically the entire D&D cosmos ended up invading their little private sanctum, all at the same time.

And so I narrated the death of the multiverse. The ultimate victors, as was practically preordained with a situation like this, was True Neutral. They rebuilt the multiverse in their image, and left the blasted remains of the players' plane to their devices. After a time, the material was recreated, now with several major upheavals and the absolute sovereignty of nature and impositions against any and all extremes, even in thought, forever etched into the fabric of reality.

The players finally agreed to a truce. No more PvP.

[BreaktheStatue]

You make a point - allow me to clarify: I did omit that we did play the story through for a good while, but that the story was clearly more about the NPCs he had crafted than it was about us, the players. We talked about it OOC, but it didn't change... So when I said before that we waited until the first opportunity before, I was exaggerating - it was at least three sessions in.

Okay, that's fair enough.

Sorry if I overreacted, I just get a little fired-up about the whole "railroading" thing. I'm not a DM, so it's not coming from personal experience, but they're only human, and it's a lot of extra work they're taking upon themselves for the benefit of the group so I try to give them the benefit of the doubt.

[Finback]

As any good DM would, I'll have the red dragon succeed... then discover the BBEG's plans and take his place.

Nothing is more fun than setting up a BBEG.. and then supplanting them with something worse.

My PCs in 4e had encountered a black dragon several times, and considered it their nemesis.

And then they found it dead, head torn off, surrounded by draconic runes written about 5ft high, that effectively translated to "THIS IS NOW MY DOMAIN, BEWARE INTRUDERS".

Bricks were produced.

[Finback]

that is too beautiful.
i love having that player at my table. keeps everyone on their toes.

Heh, mine was the PC who wanted to learn Nanny Pupu's magic spell to raise the dead, but in his eagerness, he fell on his own sword. She brought him back, and he asked to add it to his spell sheet.

"But you missed it. You were dead while she cast it, so you didn't see it. But you CAN have the stats for your wasting affilication as an undead!"