Role Playing a bad decision

[Warchon]

Have you ever made a decision in-game that you knew was the wrong call, but you committed to it because your character would not know better? How did it turn out?

Example. At level 3, my party encountered a herd of buffalo in a wasteland that had resorted to cannibalism. Two two that were still alive were emaciated and frothing at the mouth, and the party agreed that killing them was the humane thing to do.
We didn't buff or make any tactical moves at all--not because our characters were stupid, but because we the players were.
After some awful rolls, the buffalo had the upper hand. The Duskblade was on the ground, my Dread Necromancer was at five hit points.
Because of an amnesia effect the DM had given us, my character did not know he had a Tomb Tainted Soul and thus could heal himself any number of ways.
So even though I knew better, I called for the NPC cleric we had along with us to give me a heal.
He rolled well on the heal and consequently dropped my pseudo-undead ass into the negatives.

What's your story?

[Buufreak]

The party was flat out convinced a person was a grade A jerk face, my character included. When I pinned her to a tree, I knew it was a bad call, but he was a rather reckless and verbose guy. Then the will save happened, and I took my big sharp-a-majig and started swinging away at my once allies. And that's the time I got dominated by a succubus.

[DeTess]

I once played a Kobold Sorcerer with incredibly low intelligence and Wisdom, so I'd often come up with idiotic, impulsive ideas. Nothing that would truly be disruptive (no randomly killing NPC's or stealing from PC's, for example), but stuff like wandering into the mysterious magic circle to use 'magic symbol' to write 'minion was here' one one of the Obelisks, or dumping a fireball into a combat situation that was ever so slightly explosive was par for the course. It generally generated comedy moments though (I tried timing it that way).

And then there was the time my party kicked down the door to an ancient dragon's inner sanctum, after very noisily killing his bodyguards. Not sure if that counted though, because neither us nor the PC's had processed why this might be a bad idea until we had to start rolling Dex saves.

[Geddy2112]

The party ranger was the only character to spot a water elemental in a pool in the middle of the room. The character said nothing to the party, even though everyone at the table was glaring at the ranger player. We walked right by the pool of water, only to get vortexed into the pool leading to a near tpk.

Almost everyone at my table has at one point or another:
-Foolishly wandered off to solo an enemy only to die
-Party refusing to buff against an obvious fight leading to a near TPK out of character/player confidence/arrogance/ignorance
-Proceeded to knowingly re-escalate a situation that tactful roleplaying had defused into combat leading to PC death. A couple of great moments were when the same character that defused the situation caused it to go hostile.

Some of these times we look back on and laugh. Others are very bitter memories. The key is that you don't rain on anyone elses fun. Roleplaying bad decisions that screw your character is one thing, but knowingly screwing the party "because it is what my character would do" is a major jerk move.

[Kyrell1978]

In an evilish campaign some of my fellows and I convinced a druid to go along with the burning down of a large section of forest to take out a particularly stubborn enemy. We pulled out the fire as renewal speech as the ash creates fertile ground argument as well as a couple of others. At the end of the day,that was probably the wrong call, but hey I was a CE cleric of the Lord of Demons so........

[ElderDarren]

Time to dredge up a bad memory!

It was my first campaign and I was playing the party Artificer. We started the campaign in a typical DnD world: flame lanterns, wagons, stone castles, etc ad nauseam. Over the course of the campaign it was revealed that the world had once been plagued with alien invaders who happened to enjoy sucking souls out and eating them (this is as politely as I can define the weirdness). We eventually find ourselves in their world which is teaming with advanced technology: multi-hundred floor skyscrapers, the internet, flying motorcycles. We are there to prevent them from relocating our little backwater world before they remember we exist and come finish us off. We enlist the aid of a local (I honestly don't remember how we convinced her to help us) she snuck us down to the map room of their main military compound and was trying to erase our coordinates from the glowing boxes when we heard footsteps.

Now I as a player am aware of the concept of computers and networks and backups, but poor Nicholas didn't even have electric lights. So what did Nick do? He Fabricated the glowing boxes into a delightful pile of neatly organized scrap-metal. Setting off half a dozen alarms and alerting the generals to an unauthorized database search. I was groaning while I did it, but Nick didn't have any cause to believe that the information existed elsewhere.

[erok0809]

I have Suurth, my Illumian Wizard, whose whole goal in life is to learn as much as he can as fast as he can and write it down and pass on the information, especially if that information is something that someone else doesn't want known. In the campaign, we found a McGuffin sentient magic helmet that basically allowed semi-constant detect thoughts, and with some failed saves the wearer could eat someones mind, thus learning everything they knew and increasing the wearers abilities. I claimed it for myself, as it fit me well, and I planned on using it on downed enemies. I say planned because I end up being tempted by this helmet to consume more and more, actually willingly changing alignments a bit in the pursuit of knowledge and power. We end up in an arena match against a number of dragonborn, where I am explicitly warned by a party member who was quick with a fireball and didn't like how Suurth had been acting that if I tried to eat the dragonborn's brains, I'd pay for it. Suurth was fairly confident in his ability to fend off his party member, but didn't take into account the outrage from the other dragonborn. Suurth died that day, a burnt, headless corpse. The helmet was collected by the party, stuffed into a bag of holding, and was never seen again until the very end of the campaign when it mattered as a McGuffin.

I knew Suurth would die, but he put knowledge before all else, and the chance to absorb the knowledge of a long lived creature like that was too good to pass up, even at risk of death.