General DM Screw-Ups

[Cheesegear]

Blue Dragonborn Gladiator (Warden) on 2HPs.

Bard on 4HPs.
Tank on 0, bleeding out.
Other party members around. But Warden has Initiative, bottom of the round for the Bard.

DM: "Okay, the Warden has 2 HPs, left. Any hit that deals 2-dice damage, will kill him, even on snake eyes. However, if you miss, he's probably going to kill two of you."

Bard: Right. I want to cast Shocking Grasp. Even without Advantage, she hits! Party cheers, as even on double-1s, that's still a dead Warden. 2HPs, done and dusted. Two of the party lives.
For shots and goggles though, let's roll damage, just to roleplay what actually happens...3 damage. lol.

Did you spot it? ...My players were cheering too loudly for me to notice and everyone was so excited that I...Forgot.

A few. Hours. Later. I'm in the shower...

Wait a second.
Blue Dragonborn have Resistance to Lightning!
3 damage, halved, rounded down to 1 damage!
...The Warden isn't dead!
Two party members should be dead right now!
...Oh myyy gawwwd!


What are your stories where the DM just screws up, and events accidentally swing wildly in the party's favour?

[Magicspook]

I'm not sure that was a screwup... you just made the fight have a very satisfying ending!

[ScoutTrooper]

I've forgotten about Wild Magic a few times with my WM Sorc player.
The Bard got a Sword of Vengeance and the curse. I sometimes forget to tell him to do Wis saves when he takes damage, or when using his magical dagger (Rakdos Riteknife) at disadvantage cause it's not the sword.
Tracking Concentration on spells is a big one that I forget in the midst of combat.
I've also done the 'gloss over resistances and immunity' a few times in the beginning. It didn't help that I dropped 2 gargoyles on a party of level 2's.

I mean not screw-ups, just a few dropped balls while juggling behind the screen. So far the only player who left, only went on hiatus to take care of IRL things so he could play with more enjoyment. So far no screw-ups.

[EggKookoo]

I don't have a specific example but I'm constantly forgetting about monster damage resistance. Many fights should probably have ended up differently...

[stoutstien]

I don't consider a missed ruling that falls into the category of benefiting the players a screw up. The situation you had sounds perfect by my book even if you unintentionally disregarded resistance. It had tension, provided the players with meaningful choices, and they had a feeling of accomplishment at the end.

[Mikal]

I'm not sure that was a screwup... you just made the fight have a very satisfying ending!

No, it's a screw up. And it's ok. DMs screw up all the time.
And coddling a player (not that this DM did so) by ignoring on purpose a resistance an npc would have against an attack isn't satisfying. It's like eating a pop tart- it's empty calories that provide nothing of sustenance.

My biggest screw up as a DM? Hmm, there have been quite a few. I'd say my worst one was when I followed the 2nd edition paladin's handbook on how the paladin class should be played. Worse experience for my paladin PC in my game ever. Thankfully I figured that out.

[KorvinStarmast]

I forgot that lizard folk renders can use that AoE attack at the beginning of a fight, which left two squishies unharmed when they shoul have taken damage. Party would probably have still won, but unless I think through what the special abilities are, I often don't get the full effect.

And a "Doh" moment after we ended the fight with the evil Druid in Sunless Citadel; the Hucrele child who is a sorceress had barkskin AC 16 from the GUlthias tree, not the druids spell. So, when the druid got hit by an arrow from the ranger, I had him make a concentration check and dropped the barkskin. Wrong me. And she got hit with a 14 (total score) in the next round.

Whoops.

[Torpin]

in an old game, it was like my second time DMing, I gave my players at level 5 the task of transporting an object in a box. it was supposed to be delivered to what would become the BBEG, instead the bard opened the box, and put on the eye of vecna

[ThatoneGuy84]

in an old game, it was like my second time DMing, I gave my players at level 5 the task of transporting an object in a box. it was supposed to be delivered to what would become the BBEG, instead the bard opened the box, and put on the eye of vecna

This is gloriously hilarious.

[D.U.P.A.]

I'm not sure that was a screwup... you just made the fight have a very satisfying ending!

Definitely better to screwup in favor of players than against them. That BBEG can be replaced, but from TPK is harder to recover.

Like I remember when 5e just coming out, DMing a next (beta version) adventure, not figuring out that Orog from Next and full 5e had different stats.

[KOLE]

I don't have a specific example but I'm constantly forgetting about monster damage resistance. Many fights should probably have ended up differently...
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a balanced CR encounter end in three easy rounds with an untouched party and ended up scratching my head at how well they did. Then I wake up in a cold sweat and suddenly remember that half the monsters they knocked down had resistance to most of the attacks... D’oh...

[KorvinStarmast]

and suddenly remember that half the monsters they knocked down had resistance to most of the attacks... D’oh... Last night the level three party fought a Chuul and a Bearded Devil. Both with damage resistance. Fight took six rounds, IIRC. (The casters were out of spells other than cantrips ... )

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

I've incorrectly, incompletely or inaccurately described a situation, leading my players to behave in ways that they wouldn't if I'd correctly described the scene. I encourage my players to build rube goldberg-style plans because they enjoy doing so, and I don't want to be the burr in the gears that stops the whole thing whirring. That's the thing that makes me feel like I've screwed up at the table.

[Telok]

Party does some scouting and talking to towns people before attacking a human bandit camp. Since all the PCs have darkvision it's decided to go for a pre-dawn attack. Going to try for near the end of the night watch before everyone is up and armed.

Taking out a couple of guards in the dark works great. Listening at the cave entrance there is no light and no sound. Party gets in, is creeping around trying to be stealthy in the dark, listening for snoring or talking at every corner, opens a door. DM reads box text from the adventure, four armed and armored human thugs drop their lunches and attack. Lunches, at 4 AM? Two rounds later four more human bandits appear at the ends of the hallway, wearing scale mail or something and carrying polearms & bows. The rogue tries to hide in the darkness but can't because there are lit torches every 15'. Torches? Weren't we sneaking around in the dark? Then the enemy caster shows up. Naturally all this TPKs a 2nd level party.

It turns out the DM was just running the module from the book. Not adjusting it to anything we tried to do because nothing in the module said anything about the PCs attacking at any other time than midday.

[CheddarChampion]

I was running a campaign of my own making. The PCs accepted the hospitality of a noble and his family but after going to bed they found out the noble was a necromancer that was going to use them to make some more undead.

After some fights they confronted the necromancer and his "Masterpiece," an amalgamation of corpses sewn together and animated. They took it down after a hard fight and it split into 4 crawling torsos.
These torsos then took down 4 members of the party because I didn't realize how low on HP everyone was. Had I known, the extra enemies wouldn't have come up.

I was running this in WFRP, not D&D... but it was a big enough mistake that the group didn't want to play WFRP again. I still feel bad about it. At least I'm still in the group, they'll let me run D&D.
I'd rather make the kind of mistake that has the players cheering at the end.

[Nero24200]

This is more of a player screw-up but I think the story still suits.

We were playing an evil party which consisted of myself (Monk), a Necromancer a Barbarian and a Hexblade.

We were infiltrating a drow settlement and, long story short, ended up being exposed and having to fight off several drow, including a Drow Sorcerer. The Sorcerer was the hardest obstacle there, with the minions acting as fodder.

The battle opens up and my monk runs up and smacks the Sorcerer around with his staff (though refluffed as a wooden sword so it did so some slashing), though the Sorcerer then escapes by flying upwards and raining spells down on us.

Now... we decided to pull a bit of an all nighter, and were kinda sleep deprived at this point so some of our ideas starting to show this. The Necromancer tried to reach the sorcerer by animating multiple skeletons and having them trying to form a pyramid of bodies before being knocked over. The Barbarian was picking up random weapons dropped by the minions to throw and the Hexblade, lacking ranged abilities, resorted to trying to climb up the skeletons.

The fight lasted easily an hour and a half to 2 hours. Afterwards when we started picking up loot I facepalmed since I realised... I declared before going into this area that I was coating my staff in drow poison (picked up from an earlier fight). The DM did a quick roll in plain sight... turns out if I remembered the Sorcerer would have been unconscious in one hit.

[Cheesegear]

"I cast Crown of Madness on the Ogre."
Oh? Fair enough.
"Oh wow this encounter was easy."

Wait a minute!
Ogres aren't Humanoids.
Crown of Madness fails.
Encounter should've been slightly harder.

[Chronos]

A couple that happened recently to me:

The party slowed down some fleeing Spined Devils with a well-placed Web, which they tried and failed for several rounds to escape, which resulted in them getting ahold of a McGuffin much earlier than planned. Except that Spined Devils have the ability to deal fire damage, and are immune to fire themselves, so they should have just burnt through the web on the first round.

The party had a just-barely-alive cultist captive at the end of a fight, which they were able (with the help of some magical compulsion) to interrogate for some key information the villains didn't want them to have. But I forgot that there were a couple of invisible imps present that the party didn't know about, and one of them would surely have stung the cultist to prevent it from spilling.

[EggKookoo]

With some of these, you can retcon it so that things happened but the rolls just worked out against it. For example with the invisible imps -- maybe they attempted but kept rolling nat-1s?

Same thing with forgetting to roll saves to break free of ongoing conditions. Maybe the saves were rolled anyway, they just kept failing. In older editions, ongoing effects had specific number-of-round durations, so forgetting them felt worse.

[firelistener]

I've made plenty of these lol. Whenever I realize it, I try to always rule in favor of the players as recompense. One I can recall easily is forgetting about concentration with a druid NPC enemy. The druid ended up dealing a lot of damage to them via concentration spells despite having barkskin up on his melee companion, and then the party decided to skip resting after the fight even though they had all their hit dice. Full party wipe a few minutes later when they faced a hill giant guarding a castle door.

On the bright side, they all wanted to make new characters and do a completely new adventure anyway, so it worked out fine.

[J-H]

I've had trouble remembering to use Legendary Actions. We use folded notecards on top of the DM screen to show who's going when, so I ended up adding 3 LEG cards that I just drop in where I want to remember to use Legendary actions. If I decide that a monster will use it's actions somewhere else, I can just move the cards.

[EggKookoo]

I've had trouble remembering to use Legendary Actions. We use folded notecards on top of the DM screen to show who's going when, so I ended up adding 3 LEG cards that I just drop in where I want to remember to use Legendary actions. If I decide that a monster will use it's actions somewhere else, I can just move the cards.

I DM using my laptop as a DM screen, and I make Excel docs to keep track of fights (init, HP, AC). I just put legendary and lair actions into those as separate rows.

[Chronos]

Oh, another one: A fight against an ochre jelly. I knew that it split on taking slashing damage, but I overlooked that it was also immune to the damage itself.

Later in the adventure, there was a black pudding, and I reminded myself not to make that same mistake again. So of course, the party explores every nook and cranny in that dungeon, except for that one particular spot, and so they never encountered it.

No big deal; oozes in general are more for scenery than to present an actual threat. But still annoying that I forgot it.