Ridiculous GM Improvisations!

[Chaltab]

Ever been playing a game (or GMing one yourself), when the GM suddenly does something utterly spontaneous? Maybe it's comic relief, maybe one of the players is annoying the GM, or maybe there was no reason for it at all. It wasn't planned, but it comes about anyway.

I have two.

The first instances was a BESM d20 mission I was GMing in which one player kept having her character check for traps--every room they entered, every corridor they progressed down. Now, this was a haunted mansion wherein a living man also dwelled, and booby-trapping his own home would be silly. Nevertheless, I eventually got so annoyed by the constant search checks that I decided there was a random bear trap sitting in the middle of one of the halls. When the character tried to set it off with his gun, I had it explode like a land mine. After that, the player got the hint. I also had a balcony giggle upon being stepped onto.

In another scenario, a player kept having his Level 5 HotRod shout Shazam! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam!) at random intervals. At first I played along and had lightning strike the character and dress him in his normal clothing. Eventually, I decided I'd punish him for tempting fate and had a random enemy mook get struck by the lightning when the PC said Shazam and actually turn into Black Adam.

Everyone was supposed to be screwed, until one character rolled a critical success on a called head-shot with a rocket launcher. Which dealt 2d8+3 damage, quadrupled.

[Bassikpoet]

Had a Lich give up his immortal body to live in a giant dragon brain. His thought process...more brain more ability to control undead. He is now in a timeshare with the dragon's conciousness. Yeah, I had a little too much grog that night.

[Xyk]

One time I had the players find a wedding ring on an enemy mook's finger, just for fun and to make them think about who they killed (it would have been easy to leave him unconcious). They felt awful because that means he has a wife and probably kids to support. The party left the quest they were currently on (something about a necromancer threatening the townspeople with zombies) to go find the guy's family and pay them a large sum to make sure they survived without him. The zombies came and killed hundreds because the heroes were distracted.

[SoD]

One with my first DM, who was known to randomly flip through MM's to find a fun looking encounter.

DM: Ooh, this sounds good. OK, *describes a xorn*.
Me: *after the battle* "Wow, what a strange creature to encounter in the middle of a city, I'm certain that it's not of this plane, and I've seen a lot. Maybe it was summoned to attack us by those assassins who attacked us earlier?"
DM: ...could you write that down for me?

OK, so it wasn't really improvisation on his part, just thought I'd put it in anyway. For the record, I was playing a Chitine Paladin of Freedom who quad-weilds whip-daggers. Due to me not really understanding the rules yet, he failed to hit anything. Except once. The party was attacked (well, we attacked) a group of commoners (who had been bashing up a warforged. We had a warforged in the party). One of them registered as evil, so I all out attacked him. *swish, miss, natural 1, throw whip dagger away* *swish miss, nearly drop whip-dagger* *swish miss* *swish crit kill the evil commoner* "...whoa. I actually did something!" Of course, by the time we killed them (well, the rest of the party did), the warforged they were attacking had also died. Then the watch turned up. And there's us, weapons in hands surrounded by dead commoners...

[Ellisthion]

Artificer fiddling with custom bag of tricks. Rolls "DM chooses."

DM: "You get a sperm whale!"

The whale then crushes half a dozen orcs and a ballista.

[NPCMook]

d6 Star Wars:

Party was being led to a place where a dangerous creature was living and would occasionally roam out and attack the near by village. It was night so we were taking turns during watch, I have 2 characters my Ithorian, and his droid bodyguard, we also have a human Jedi, a human Merc, along with a Duros Pilot, and a Wookie who has pledged a lifedebt to the Merc. The Droid was on third watch when the following dialogue takes place:

DM: You hear a low growl...
Me: Holy ****, I think the Wookie is rubbing one out
The entire group is in utter shock after what I said, I nearly gave one of our older players a heart attack because he was laughing to hard.
DM had us roll a perception check to see if we could spot what made the noise, I rolled a 32(on 3 dice, was awesome) I spotted all of them.
DM: The Wookie... I, uh.. wakes up from a very wet dream, and you spot the Enemies(I forget what they were called)

Sadly at the end of the session the Wookie had died, and we were trapped in an old republic bunker with 5 force sensitive possibly roaming around.

[Vizen]

Well, once I DM'ed a low level game, and the party had just killed the leader of these group of kobolds. The players had noticed that the leader was holding some sort of jar in his hand, and thinking that it may be a magical item of some sort, so my players wanted to get it. The jar was really just there for some added cheese, but I thought it should at least have something in it. First thing to pop into mind? Hemorrhoid Cream.

Needless to say the players didn't want the jar after that.

[Alcopop]

I ran a one hit filler sessios when our GM was sick, The main boss was a goblin engineer called Captain Mayhem who used rediculas amounts of improvised explosives. When they finally managed to kill him they found his baby son in his house and the party decided to adopt it! Since it was just a filler session at the end of the quest i had the baby goblin explode wiping out the entire party. :P Captain Mayhem got his revange from the grave!

[Sstoopidtallkid]

I ran a one hit filler sessios when our GM was sick, The main boss was a goblin engineer called Captain Mayhem who used rediculas amounts of improvised explosives. When they finally managed to kill him they found his baby son in his house and the party decided to adopt it! Since it was just a filler session at the end of the quest i had the baby goblin explode wiping out the entire party. :P Captain Mayhem got his revange from the grave!That guy must have been Evil. Who the hell booby-traps their own kid?

[Alcopop]

That guy must have been Evil. Who the hell booby-traps their own kid?

He was fairly insane, I mean, he'd strap explosives onto his cousins and have them run into combat!
...
yeah

[VerdugoExplode]

This was d20 star wars, revised edition and this event of DM improvisation still fills me with confusion to this day.

We were on random planet X and due to our party consisting mostly of good jedi in training we were helping the inhabitants, arbitrating disputes, the whole nine yards. We find a few sith, cue fight music, one PC dies. Now it should be known that the player in question is by no means new to this experience and frequently comes up with characters and plans riddled with faults, looking back I think we was of the "character flaws = roleplaying" school of thought. As a result of the attack our little contingent was reassigned to protect a local diplomat in case something like this were to happen again. Now the previously deceased player rolls up a new character, a scoundrel with a penchant for explosives. The DM in what I can only describe as decision fueled by a complete and utter lack of any sort of forward thinking whose cognitive capacity I can only hope was impacted by lack of sleep decides that the best way to reintroduce the scoundrel is to have him hired by a local crime boss to kill the person we were trying to protect.

The game fell apart shortly after that for reasons I think are obvious. Sigh, it was going so well up until that point too.

[BobVosh]

Hmm. I got 2.

First one is D&D in a Yaun-ti module of some sort, slightly modded. Eventually we were stowaways on a ship, with the crew alerted and doing a search for us. In the cargo hold there is some werid spider thing that is medium sized. We were down to 2 party members. One was a cleric of Loki, and our GM is a big fan of god calls. Most mortals can pray for help with a 3% success rate, 5% if a cleric. Loki is too chaotic to be reliable so he is a 1%. Bam, rolled a 1. Loki gives a quick eye over and drops pure chaos in front of the spider. The spider eats it and starts growing, becomes large, huge, etc. Eventually growing tentacles, crab claws, a furry tail, has an unborn fetus in its eye, etc. Getting crazier and bigger until it breaks the ship apart from its size. Then it puffs out of existance in this plane as it becomes too large and cosmos-ly awesome. It becomes a major diety over in another plane. We swim to shore and are like...ok. Now what?

Second one is in rifts. Some party members couldnt show so we did a 2 shot filler game. I remember these games as quite possibly the most fun I have ever had with RPGs. It shall forever be known as the "bum campaign." Vagabonds from the main book, with one stat at a 22. (standard 18 for most characters as for D&D) So each person had to take a unique stat, I was beautiful bum, we had quick bum, strong bum, dex bum, and of course Charismatic bum.

Going through the skills compendium book there is a skill called shanty building, there is ghetto rigging, and other silly things like this. Eventually we ended up in a CS (coalition states: think Hitler Germany on crack, and againist all nonhumans) propaganda film. Everything that happened was completly random and yet made some sense. Except for the trolls under some bridge that killed us all because the DM refused to do any more bum campaigns. Something about self-respect.

[Jade_Tarem]

I had a campaign which had crept up to middle-to-high levels, and the party set out at one point to hunt down and kill a powerful lich. Due to a bunch of puzzles and other mixups, the party's barbarian (a thoroughly insane, extremely powerful (even by comparison to the party casters - he was optimized and they weren't), terminally and comically stupid, and very well-roleplayed half-orc named Krug) was the first one to stumble upon the actual Lich, and his animated army of undead. Sensing an opportunity for an interesting encounter, I had the Lich dominate the barbarian and give him instructions to find his party and kill them. The barbarian actually managed to do this, and after a short fight, the party wizard also dominated Krug and ordered him to take the party to the Lich. This began an out of character argument about what should happen next. Some insisted that the more recent spell took precedence. The rest, including me initially, figured that the Lich's superior caster level meant that the Lich's spell was the one that would dominate, no pun intended. Eventually I decided to compromise, and declared that the two sets of instructions merged - Krug would take the party to the Lich and then attempt to kill everyone. The players found it both acceptable and humorous, and hilarity ensued.

[Klose_the_Sith]

That guy must have been Evil. Who the hell booby-traps their own kid?

That reminds me of my exploding ogre ...

[BobVosh]

That reminds me of my exploding ogre ...

Everything reminds you of that ogre...

[Klose_the_Sith]

Everything reminds you of that ogre...

Not true!

My amorphic blob which absorbs some substances, doesn't absorb others and makes no sense reminds me of Scooby Doo. The Warlock keeps an infinite amount in a special water bottle.

[banjo1985]

I do find myself improvising stuff on quite a regular basis, no matter how well I think I plan things. In my game groups improvisation is known as 'the blag' and I had to the biggest one I've ever done quite recently in an Exalted campaign.

I used a minor NPC's body as the target of a necromancers spell, so the players ended up having to fight his undead body. After dealing with the necromancer and laying the body to rest one of the PC's decided to investigate how the guy died and apprehend whoever was responsible. Cue a full night of blagging where the players investigated a tavern, a completely made up rebel Thieves Guild faction, and a chase through catacombs under the city. Turned out to be a great night, but hard work at times.

[BobVosh]

if you find yourself in a session where you DON'T improvise in Exalted...what went wrong?

[Totally Guy]

When the party found the BBEG drinking away his sorrows at his evil plan failing one player picked up the guitar and started stumming the music "Always look on the bright side of life", so I re-did the words for when started the bad guy singing.

Then there was the time when I was a bard and I asked if the Dark lord had an Army. The DM said yes, and I had an army drinking song prepared. Then the he said the army was entirely made up of golems I had to redo the lyrics.

[Roderick_BR]

Everyone was supposed to be screwed, until one character rolled a critical success on a called head-shot with a rocket launcher. Which dealt 2d8+3 damage, quadrupled.
You could just be mean and say that Black Adam laughed it of unscratched..... then he gets bored with them and leaves, but only after letting them suffer some tension.

Myself, I had my share of lightning bolts hit a character (even indoors and underground), everytime he said something too silly. From time to time he would look up and cover his head.

Other times were when I had to make a character "disappear", because it's player missed the session. I had one character drank an unknown potion, and disapear. Not go invisible, it winked out of existence. Other one ran after the same kobold for 2 or 3 sessions, until the player was back, and the rest of the team "found" him (the kobold got away, but the character swore he'd find it someday). The third one was abducted by aliens in a flying saucer.

[Satyr]

I regularly improvise most of the events in a campaign and use only a few points as an orientation and lay out the opponent's plans and actions, so naturally, most of the vents are indeed improvised, other are based on strange ideas ('today, the group will deal with a group of law-abiding slavers who are the epitome of legitimate buisinessmen') and events which are thrown in to make the campaign world more plastic (when there is one thing I hate is, when every single evet, person and location in a game is somehow related to the overall plot. That's just a great way to destroy the feeling of versimilitude of a fictional world).
The combination of much improvisation and events which are mostly unrelated to the central plot can sometimes lead to some strange diversions, up to the point where the original idea of the adventure becomes less important than the current events - why should a group follow a personal vendetta when they can become jury members at the continental championship of the Dwarven brewmasters? Why get involved in the feud between to local noble families when you can instead equip a ship and go for an expedition to the mysterious islands in the south (that was only meant as a small diversion to fill the local harbor town with a bit of life. It became a campaign which span one and a half years in the real time, partly inspired by the competition between Amundsen and Scott).

[Saph]

We had one in our recent Red Hand of Doom session. The party barbarian charged a trio of goblin worg riders on his own. After much fighting and long-range support, the barbarian was on negatives, but only one worg rider (minus his worg) was left.

Neither having the goblin coup-de-grace him nor having the goblin move on or run sounded right, so in the end I came up with an alternative action; have the goblin start searching the barbarian's body in the middle of combat. He found one of the barbarian's healing potions and drank it.

The paladin charged in to save his friend and hit the goblin; the goblin grabbed another healing potion off the barbarian and drank that.

The paladin hit the goblin again, and the goblin did the same thing a third time.

The now very-frustrated paladin hit the goblin yet again and the goblin, figuring that this strategy seemed to be working, searched the body yet again. (By this point the game of Loot the Barbarian had been going for five rounds or so, and the rest of the party were laughing their heads off.)

Me: "Got any more potions?"
Barbarian: "Just one."
Me: "Okay, the goblin grabs it and drinks it. What does it do?"
Barbarian: "Gaseous Form."

So the slightly-surprised goblin turned into mist, the paladin tried to hit him and couldn't, and eventually just healed the barbarian up. The gaseous goblin floated away. I'll have to have him show up again some time.

- Saph

[Blackfang108]

That comment is more than a little bit offensive, and I urge you to delete it.

Doesn't change the fact that others will find it funny.

especially now that he's deleted the comment, and we can still read it.

EDIT: also when Goblin is "Arabic sounding gibberish" in my group's campaigns.

It began as a horrible joke and grew into a meme.

So, Yes, they were.

[Texas Jedi]

Myself, I had my share of lightning bolts hit a character (even indoors and underground), everytime he said something too silly. From time to time he would look up and cover his head.


Mine weren't lightning bolts, they were Fridges, and if they continued to give out stupid ideas the items would get bigger, and heavier. I called it the Tex Avery rules of Dm'ing :smallbiggrin:. We were all in a playful mood so when they kept humoring me I finally dropped an Nimitz Class Aircraft carrier, and a Space Shuttle on them.

Most of my games were always tongue and cheek and full of humor.

The one real memorable time I was DM'ing a 13-15 lvl 2nd edition party. One of the characters who was a Kender had to jump over a small river of acid. One of the other characters was playing a large troll (more like Tolkien, than DnD). He stepped across the the gap easily and hung his hands down so the kender could jump and swing over.

Well the Kender being curious decided to look up as he was doing this. The troll was only wearing a buttflap (like tarzan). The Kender failed his improvised saving throw against curiosity and looked up. He was so stunned/horrified that if the troll had not been holding on to him the kender would have ended up in the acid.

I rulled that since he failed the roll so badly and was so horrified that the kender could never again be shocked by anything he ever saw from that point forward.

The second time of improvosations more stemmed from the fact one of the characters rolling horribly twice. We had a group with a wizard with a cat familar, and a tinker ganome. The ganome wanted to make the cat's claws more effective in combat so decided to make some spring action claws like wolverine's. Well all I hear is "ooo crap", because I was behind the screen coming up with damage tables for the kitty claws.

I look up and he had rolled a 1 when building the contraption. I told him since I didn't see it he could re-roll it. He wouldn't budge so rolled another d20 to see what failed on it. Well he rolled another 1 and I had to come up with a death on the fly. The whole party was resting and the tinker ganome was fiddling with his Crazy Cat Claws o' Death muttering to himself when there was silence. The next thing the party knows he falls backwards off the log he was sitting on. I told the rest of the party that as he was locking one of the claws in place it got caught on a spring and snapped back and went thru his head.

That was one of the first times I had ever had to kill a party member because of poorly rolled dice.

[Kyeudo]

if you find yourself in a session where you DON'T improvise in Exalted...what went wrong?

Everything.

[LibraryOgre]

d6 Star Wars:

Party was being led to a place where a dangerous creature was living and would occasionally roam out and attack the near by village. It was night so we were taking turns during watch, I have 2 characters my Ithorian, and his droid bodyguard, we also have a human Jedi, a human Merc, along with a Duros Pilot, and a Wookie who has pledged a lifedebt to the Merc. The Droid was on third watch when the following dialogue takes place:

DM: You hear a low growl...
Me: Holy ****, I think the Wookie is rubbing one out
The entire group is in utter shock after what I said, I nearly gave one of our older players a heart attack because he was laughing to hard.
DM had us roll a perception check to see if we could spot what made the noise, I rolled a 32(on 3 dice, was awesome) I spotted all of them.
DM: The Wookie... I, uh.. wakes up from a very wet dream, and you spot the Enemies(I forget what they were called)

Sadly at the end of the session the Wookie had died, and we were trapped in an old republic bunker with 5 force sensitive possibly roaming around.

What the hell were you dealing with that a Wookie died in D6 Star Wars?

[GrandMasterMe]

I once had an entire campaign revolve around stopping this unstopable infantry of an evil 8 year old girl. We played this campaign for about 6 months with the characters going on several diffrent quests to thwart the plans of said 8 year old, before they finnaly felt they were ready to tackle the infintry of ultimate doom as they called it. They go to the city where the evil girl and her infantry are; just to find the girl cackling and dancing around a tree filled with screaming babies, once they realized what the dramatic conclusion to their "infant tree" quest was they became enraged that I dragged them through those quests for all that time.....I am no longer allowed to DM :smallredface:

[valadil]

Due to a bad interpretation of some intel I gave them, my players decided that the ranger's imaginary friend was being held captive by the mafia and they had to go free him. Not only was I able to roll with that, I worked it into the plot and nobody could tell it was improvised.

[xPANCAKEx]

I once had an entire campaign revolve around stopping this unstopable infantry of an evil 8 year old girl. We played this campaign for about 6 months with the characters going on several diffrent quests to thwart the plans of said 8 year old, before they finnaly felt they were ready to tackle the infintry of ultimate doom as they called it. They go to the city where the evil girl and her infantry are; just to find the girl cackling and dancing around a tree filled with screaming babies, once they realized what the dramatic conclusion to their "infant tree" quest was they became enraged that I dragged them through those quests for all that time.....I am no longer allowed to DM :smallredface:

i would have loved it... such unappreciative b@~!#%*^

[AKA_Bait]

I once tried to run a prefabe adventure from a book I got at RPGnow. I don't remember the name off the top of my head but it was a pretty low level adventure that starts with the PCs being in the wrong place at the wrong time and assumes they are going to duck into this grating to avoid being spotted by the guard.

My PCs decided to be an evil group, which seemed just fine for this.... not so. Instead of hiding from the guard, they half hide and start sniping at the guardsmen, killng a few of them before they get TPCed (total party capture). This is all within the first maybe 10 minutes of play. I basically have to invent a jail break and subsequent meeting up with local underworld baddies who give them a totally different job (since they weren't going to go back to the scene of the crime) and run it for the remaining 3 hours on the spot. That was... interesting.

[shaddy_24]

When my party was exploring a temple of St. Cuthbert (only a small one, and only because it was the source of an undead plague in a city), the party rogue rolled amazingly well to sneak into an empty room. He was hoping that something was there, just because he'd rolled so high. So I had Martha Steward cleaning up in there. He decided to kill her. It was pretty funny.

Then, in the same session, the ranger threw some cheese at a large wall of fungus. I told him that it exploded and rained fire and death down onto the entire party. He actually believed me, which was pretty funny itself.

[TheThan]

Whenever I find that I have a new player that wants to join my gaming group, I introduce them by dropping them from the sky… unexplained.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaah

Splat!

[Magnor Criol]

We had one in our recent Red Hand of Doom session. The party barbarian charged a trio of goblin worg riders on his own. After much fighting and long-range support, the barbarian was on negatives, but only one worg rider (minus his worg) was left.

Neither having the goblin coup-de-grace him nor having the goblin move on or run sounded right, so in the end I came up with an alternative action; have the goblin start searching the barbarian's body in the middle of combat. He found one of the barbarian's healing potions and drank it.

The paladin charged in to save his friend and hit the goblin; the goblin grabbed another healing potion off the barbarian and drank that.

The paladin hit the goblin again, and the goblin did the same thing a third time.

The now very-frustrated paladin hit the goblin yet again and the goblin, figuring that this strategy seemed to be working, searched the body yet again. (By this point the game of Loot the Barbarian had been going for five rounds or so, and the rest of the party were laughing their heads off.)

Me: "Got any more potions?"
Barbarian: "Just one."
Me: "Okay, the goblin grabs it and drinks it. What does it do?"
Barbarian: "Gaseous Form."

So the slightly-surprised goblin turned into mist, the paladin tried to hit him and couldn't, and eventually just healed the barbarian up. The gaseous goblin floated away. I'll have to have him show up again some time.

- Saph

You have some of the best stories, Saph.

[xPANCAKEx]

Me: "Okay, the goblin grabs it and drinks it. What does it do?"
Barbarian: "Gaseous Form."

So the slightly-surprised goblin turned into mist, the paladin tried to hit him and couldn't, and eventually just healed the barbarian up. The gaseous goblin floated away. I'll have to have him show up again some time.


now this i want to hear about

will the goblin be a minor side show (a mad hermit, brewing more and more potions of gaseous form to feed his addiction to the misty state) - or something else?

[Hank Dude]

I remember one time I started my party at 10th level in D&D with a bunch of magic items and 2 good card from the deck of many things. Needless to say the thing was unbalanced. So we all got bored and I decided to put them in a dungeon to face a yoda. The yoda demanded a powerful magic item from each character at regular intervals to open passage further in the dungeon, and then, after the main monster fight, Yoda re-appeared and presented to them their prize: A small toy bahamut. He assured them to climb on, and then the bahamut would grow to bad ace size. One complied, and the toy immediately broke under the fighter's armored bulk. The enraged Yoda transformed into a vampire that had the ability to latch onto magic items and "drain" them into mundane things. My players were pissed! By the time the fight was over, there was one magical sword left, and the decapitated head of yoda (vorpal sword) continued to hurl funny insults. When the warrior set to chop it in half, yoda head rolled a nat. 20 to intercept and drain the sword as a final f you. lol I think that my party had a mutiny.

[Heliomance]

That's the type of thing that result in GMs facing cruel and unusual punishment.

[Tyrael]

DnD was running late one night, and it was 3AM, and my creativity muscles were just about shot. I had run out of prepared material 2 hours ago, and the party was long since off the map. They came upon a big Plot Door that had holes for them to insert the Magical Gemstones they had collected in the dungeon. I didn't want them to open the door until next session, because beyond the door was the BBEG. So, when they put the gems into the altar, the surface of the altar flowed together and formed a female face, which began quoting GLaDOS from Portal at them. "Hello. Welcome to the <garbled> Center. It's funny, actually, when you think about it. Because I don't think you're going where you think you're going. You should have turned left before. Someday we'll remember this and laugh. Goodbye." Then it disappeared.



This, of course, led them to crawl up an NPC trapdoor. I flailed about in my sleep-deprived brain and eventually burst out that they had infiltrated a vast warren of Kobold caverns that honeycombed the entire dungeon. It made sense, I reasoned, for the Kobolds to have tunnels everywhere, otherwise how had they been defending the whole time? The players had snuck into the back of the Kobold tunnels, I decided, and had come upon the "residential district" of the tunnels. Out of the darkness, dozens and dozens of Kobold families and children stared at them. One PC tossed a gold piece onto the floor. A Kobold child leapt at it, but was dragged back by his mom. Luckily, two of the PCs knew Draconic, and began talking to them, saying they came in peace, and they wanted to talk to their leader. One of the Kobolds disappeared. In the silence, the party bard made a Bardic Knowledge check to remember an ancient war between the Dwarves and the Kobolds, and so he began singing in Draconic about the Horrendous Mishaps of Fatbeard the Dwarf. The party Rogue and Monk both joined in, Tumbling around to bolster the performance. The Kobold crowd grew larger, and a few of them fetched drums and other instruments, and they actually got a damn good dance party going on. It was one of the highlights of the night.

[Guinea Anubis]

The night my PCs don't do something that makes me Improvise is the night I get worried.


There are so many great things that has happened because my PCs have done stuff that that I had never dreamed of them doing.

One that sticks out in my mind is the PCs where in the woods just passing through. The one PCs says he wants to roll a spot check and rolls really high. He rolled so high I had to let him see something so I say "you see a white rabbit". He and the rest of the PCs go running after this rabbit and even try to follow it down its rabbit hole. They where so fixated on following this rabbit I let them and had them end up in a D&D Alice in Wonderland.

[Shpadoinkle]

Yeah, if you're not pulling SOMETHING out of your ass, EVERY TIME, you either have incredibly boring players, or you overplan things to the point where I would seek help if I were you.

Anyway, a few months ago I was running a BESM (Tri-stat version) game for my sister and her fiancee. They were playing two high school students from what was essentially the real world, who had gone through a portal and wound up in a sort of miniature solar system, with planetoids, called Regions by the inhabitants, floating around seemingly at random. I did a LOT of improvising when I ran those games- probably about 90% of it was stuff I came up with on the fly.

One incident, though, stands out. They had arrived in a new Region, and asked some random guy for directons. He replied "I don't know, I've never been here before, I'm just passing through!"

[Xsesiv]

2 years ago, I was running a real-life WFRP campaign with two PCs left alive. I had a Black Orc Mutant beating the PCsin a narrow corridor, neither of them had any Wounds left and one had a broken arm. I had the Orc take a swing at the other PC, but rolled 100 on the Weapon Skill check. I thought I'd give the PC's a repreive, saying:

"OK, he smacks the wall, a large stone chip comes off the wall and hits the Orc for Damage 1 in the...*rolls dice* head. *rolls dice* Crap..."

The dice said the chip got Ulric's Fury, managing to knock the Orc out and blind him permanently. The PC's were celebrating until I reminded them the Orc was a Mutant and had two heads. The remaining head proceeded to have their shared body chase the PCs out of a cave and push them over a cliff.

[littlechicory]

Vampire penguins. Just... VAMPIRE PENGUINS.

I am not making this up.

[gnomas]

part 1: my players decide to explore unfinished area of map, area was meant for next session, players go anyway.

part 2: players decide 11 heads is low enough to deal with, hydra grows 20 heads and eats the horses. players get hint (except one but the others dragged him off)

[Ionizer]

I was DMing a game for my siblings. I had them start in a small town. When asked about places of interest, I gave them the usual: Tavern, mayors house, merchant, blacksmith. But I also told them about the resident homeless gnome, Bock. That's right, he was a gnome hobo (a Gnobo). He had a small box (Bock's Box) behind the merchant that he lived in. I think they eventually ended up burning his box down...

[Khatoblepas]

So my group turned up to my house on a day when I didn't know we were going to have a game. They assumed we were, so... I decided to run with it. I didn't have anything planned for that day anyway! Everyone has Level 3 characters rolled up.

I look through my collection of Modules and find... Tomb of Horrors. Recommended 7-10? Pah! The party would be able to run through it. The mad improvisation came when...

After a few doors being opened via Natural 20s on throwing halflings (don't ask - whenever someone threw a halfling, it was a natural 20), the party came across the portal that changes people's genders and reverses their alignment. Of course, my party being my party, threw halflings at it. When that didn't work (the monk changed from lawful neutral to chaotic neutral, and then back again, but no genders were swapped), they threw a stick at it.

The module didn't say what would happen if an inanimate object was passed through (the module was being run with a very, very loose and satirical tone. The Tomb was literally the Only Thing in the World, and everyone knew the metagame. This was just one of the sillier things). So, I rolled a d4 for alignment (the opposite of true neutral is an extreme alignment), and came up with Chaotic Evil. The Stick, being a masculine, phallic object, became... a cup.

The party were stuck with a malevolent cup. Then, I noticed we only had five minutes until the end of the session. Tired, grizzled, and wanting closure, the party threw lit oil bottles through the portal. One dice roll later...

Lawful Evil Dynamite. It explodes.

Rocks Fall.

Everyone Dies.

Pretty fitting end for a Gygaxian module. ^^ Of course, it was left open, since the party had two lives left, and the case of the chaotic evil cup was left unsolved. But for a quick one shot, it was an awesome end.

The Chaotic Evil Cup shows up once in a while in our campaigns, too. x3

[Knaight]

Lets just say that when you have players in a robot game downloading weapon schematics, and a bunch of science geek players, and they ask for details, things get interesting. Although I have been able to avoid any science errors that my players caught.

[StoryKeeper]

In an all monsters campaign I had intended for the PCs to simply fight and kill an NPC for an ancient artifact. The group did something that no DM would ever see coming in a million years: They were extremely patient, polite, and diplomatic with the NPC. I hadn't even been trying to make this guy sound like anything but combat fodder. None-the-less, they are all very polite and cooperative, and I wound up (despite repeated nudging) having the guy who had told them to get the artifact give them the ultimatum of killing the keeper of the artifact or dying themselves.

They made a stand against what was supposed to be an impressive amount of fire power, and absolutely wiped them out with good use of resources and tactics. I was so proud!

So now, they had killed off an NPC I had intended to survive for possibly the entire campaign, and potentially alienated all of his higher ups. I turned the campaign's attention to filling the void and merged that with the storyline I had already planned, and came up with something fairly fun... until I just kept on improving myself into a hole and kind of got stuck...

I'll be retconning some of the more recent events of campaign soon...

P.S. Vampire Penguins= awesome!

[Callos_DeTerran]

Did any of you end up sending your party to the Far Realm because they went so off the beaten path that they had to battle their way to the Citadel of Time, bargain their way inside, where one of them was used to sire a child, get hurtled back through time where they barely were able to get back to THEIR own time just to find out that said child (from the beginning of time) had traveled through the time stream to kill his bastard father? No? I win. :smallbiggrin:

[THAC0]

Party: Okay, we open the door and go into the basement.

DM: ...You find barrels.

Party: Barrels? What kind of barrels?

DM: ...Lots of barrels. Filling the whole room.

Party: Okay, we loot the barrels. What's in them.

DM: Um... really old wine. So old it's gone bad.

Party: ...Um, well... we look behind the barrels. Anything hiding there?

DM: Nope.

Party: ...We search for secret doors!

DM: You find nothing.

Party: ...um... I guess we... leave...


Yeah, the DM opened to his notes on that room and realized that he had none. :)

[Enlong]

My man, did you ask how many magic pluses the wine had? You [I]did check the inside bottom for the stats, right?

[AngelSword]

My group quite often catches me unprepared for their shenanigans, and I'm often improvising things. I'm often scrounging my noggin for names, whether they're places, ships, or NPCs.

My favorite bit of fiat, though, was the guide I created when the party wanted help traversing the desert. Later that (in-game) evening, they're sitting in a local tavern, when I turn to my media player, turn up the volume, and play the first several seconds of "With a Little Help From My Friends (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poUoCggQZd0)," off of the Yellow Submarine Songtrack (linked for reference). Their guide's cloak had an enchantment on it that would dramatically announce his entrance when he comes into a room. So I thought to myself, Who would own such a cloak?

The answer? A self-centered, womanizing, bombastic, elf named Billy Shears, who was so self-absorbed that he was surprised when his advances on the party cleric were met with cold silence.

All of this led to some interesting interactions between her and the NPC mind flayer poet (which is another fantastic tale of improvisation itself!).