...I can't believe they just fell for that.

[Hzurr]

So overall, I DM a pretty bright group of PCs. There's one or two who occasionally do foolish things, but for the most part, it's a smart group of people.

Now, with the exception of one guy (it's his first campaign, but we've been playing about 8 months now), they're all very experienced, and the campaign we're going through are the pre-published 4E campaigns (we're on H3 right now), so the adventures are pretty standard. There are cliches, and tropes, and what-have-you, all in a fairly standard dungeon crawl. We're talking bread-and-butter classic d&d here.

They manage to get the drop on a group of bandits who are hiding out in a few chambers in the pyramid the party is trapped in, and the party proceeds to slaughter the bandits. I mean, the party was fully rested, and this battle is so lop-sided that it's almost laughable.

I won't go into too much detail to avoid spoilers, but in one of these bandit rooms, there's a monster that the bandits have barricaded in. The idea is that if things get too rough, the bandits will go move parts of the barricade so the monster can kill the PCs. However, after a few rounds of a blood-bath, the party is between the 3 remaining bandits and the door, so they have no hope of getting over there and setting this thing free.

In a last-ditch effort I know will never work because it's so cliche (and has even been made fun of in OotS), the bandit leader points to the character standing closest to the monster door, and shouts to the other two bandits who are still alive "Quick, don't let him open the door!"

The b.s. was so obvious it was painful, so much so that the other bandits give their leader a very obvious weird look, before taking a few poorly aimed shots at the character who is standing next to the door.

The PCs have almost an entire round before it gets to that characters turn, plenty of time to point out that this is a bad idea; but when he states that he's going to go and clear the door, because that's obviously what the enemy doesn't want him to do, they all encourage him in this endeavor (the only person who suggested that this might be a bad idea was the newbie who was in his first campaign).

...


The next round, the Player blasts away all the rubble with a thunderwave, and surprise-surprise, a monster starts trying to break through the door. The player (who is by far the most experienced person in our group), suddenly has an epiphany, and realizes the stupid thing he's done, and can only look at the party and sheepishly exclaim "incoming!"


So what about you? What stories do you have where the Players (not the PCs) should have seen it coming a mile away, and for some odd reason all got a natural 1 on their wisdom checks?

[Trodon]

roflmao thats awesome

[Hadrian_Emrys]

That's too rich. haha

[Tsotha-lanti]

RuneQuest. The party are on an exploratory HeroQuest - a journey through unfamiliar God-World territory. In this instance, they're following a route blazed by God-Learners, who mucked everything up as they went.

Right at the start, after entering the God-Realm, they come across a brooding giant of a man in black armor, holding a huge sword before him. He booms, loud and grim, "KNEEL AND ACCEPT DEATH!"

The first member of the party, an ancient Troll-lord and master magician, promptly kneels before the swordsman, who lops off his head in one clean stroke, forever separating soul and body and ending his life irrevokably, beyond any magic or quest to resurrect.

I couldn't believe it.

[Shpadoinkle]

I HAVE to do that. I'm certain one of the guys in my gaming group would fall for it.

Anyway... a few years ago I was playing in a campaign with my dad, my uncle, and a guy my dad worked with, who was DMing. We were investigating some ruins, and in one room, there was a very obvious trap: A loop of rope hanging down so that the loop was actually on the floor. Inside the loop, written in chalk, was simply the phrase "put fut heer." My uncle's character effortlessly stepped over the loop... and naturally he insantly fell into the concealed pit on the other side. I couldn't BELEIVE he fell for it- I saw it coming MILES away. I actually had to ask him "Have you EVER watched a cartoon in your LIFE?"

[Zenos]

That is hilarious and awesome.

Eh, the players weren't really stupid, but they did do stuff you wouldn't want to do in a horror movie, as there is this Dark Heresy campaign I'm DM'ing now on Myth-Weavers, Ordo Xenos.

So the acolytes are in an old hotel, it's night. The acolytes keeping watch over some prisoners notice movement outside the window, where there is a balcony. So they wake the other acolytes and get their weapons. They notice more movement outside, moving up. One of the psykers, and not even the feral world psyker, decides to walk out on the balcony. And then.. claws descend from above trying to grab him.
Had I not rolled badly and been merciful he would have been hoisted up by the alien gribbly.
The fight afterwards was fun though, I startled the players enough that one of them said OOC, "oh boy, this is really going to suck," without actually killing any characters off. They were actually rather close to killing the beast but I had decided beforehand the alien assassins weren't going to let the acolytes have a chance to see their foes clearly if they had a say in proceedings.

[MCerberus]

20x20 room, nothing in it but a door, a lever, and a sign that says, "Pull here for treasure." I was the party rogue and was out taking a natural 20 on a door in the hall adjacent because my rolls weren't cooperating.

They pulled the lever and were dropped onto a gelatinous cube.

[TheThan]

20x20 room, nothing in it but a door, a lever, and a sign that says, "Pull here for treasure." I was the party rogue and was out taking a natural 20 on a door in the hall adjacent because my rolls weren't cooperating.

They pulled the lever and were dropped onto a gelatinous cube.

I would have given them treasure, give them something small but useful. Then do it again at a later date and give them a cursed item.

[Coidzor]

20x20 room, nothing in it but a door, a lever, and a sign that says, "Pull here for treasure." I was the party rogue and was out taking a natural 20 on a door in the hall adjacent because my rolls weren't cooperating.

They pulled the lever and were dropped onto a gelatinous cube.

Sometimes you really wish bluff and sense motive rolls were made automatically... haha.

[JMobius]

Well... I once had a party pounce on an obvious and lucrative opportunity for a triple cross in Shadowrun.

[Haven]

That's great. Technically there probably should have been a Bluff-Insight roll, but that would have given it away. I guess the PCs' total willingness to go along counts as forfeiting it, or maybe they would have had to have asked for an Insight check...

Aw, hell, Rule Of Funny plus an idiot ball carried by the entire party.

I HAVE to do that. I'm certain one of the guys in my gaming group would fall for it.

Anyway... a few years ago I was playing in a campaign with my dad, my uncle, and a guy my dad worked with, who was DMing. We were investigating some ruins, and in one room, there was a very obvious trap: A loop of rope hanging down so that the loop was actually on the floor. Inside the loop, written in chalk, was simply the phrase "put fut heer." My uncle's character effortlessly stepped over the loop... and naturally he insantly fell into the concealed pit on the other side. I couldn't BELEIVE he fell for it- I saw it coming MILES away. I actually had to ask him "Have you EVER watched a cartoon in your LIFE?"

Ha! Wile E Coyote'd!

[chiasaur11]

Well... I once had a party pounce on an obvious and lucrative opportunity for a triple cross in Shadowrun.

In the immortal words of Sgt. Schlock "It looked like 'get paid twice' to me".

[holywhippet]

That's great. Technically there probably should have been a Bluff-Insight roll, but that would have given it away. I guess the PCs' total willingness to go along counts as forfeiting it, or maybe they would have had to have asked for an Insight check...

I don't think you can use skill checks like that. If there was an actual person in the room telling you to do it then you could make a skill check. Technically that works by reading body language, watching facial expressions etc. to decide if the person is telling the truth. A sign has nothing you can use to judge by - discounting handwriting analysis. It's up to the players to decide if it's a bluff or not.

[Saph]

This story is still one of my favourites because it's a case of players managing to trick themselves and get themselves killed with absolutely no influence from the DM at all. It's been a year and I still don't know why they did it.

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

We were restarting our Phantasy Star IV campaign, and I was DMing. Two new players were joining the party.

The setting was Motavia; for those of you who don't know the Phantasy Star universe, think a planet a lot like Dune. Same mixture of low-tech and high-tech, along with sandworms. Big sandworms.

The PCs were 8th-9th level. They'd just finished a difficult and dangerous mission out in space, and had returned for a few days downtime before going back out again. They're not very tech-savvy, but they have an NPC called Rika who pilots their spaceship and operates all the technology. The two new players showed up - one's playing a warlock, the other's a warmage. The warmage player didn't get around to making a character and generated his PC in the 20 minutes before we started playing. With hindsight, this should have been a tip-off.

The two new players joined the party, and after some conversation were shocked to discover that there was nothing that immediately needed to be killed, mutilated, or blown up. Obviously, something had to be done about this.

Warlock: "Let's go out and hunt something."
Me: "Sure. This is a mostly low-level world, though, so the monsters aren't going to be much of a challenge. But you can spend a couple of days doing that and-"
Warlock: "Boring. Hey, I know, let's go out and hunt a sand worm."
Me: " . . . What?"
Warmage: "Yeah, that sounds cool."
Warlock: "Can we find one?"
Me: "Uh, yeah, in the deep desert. Listen, I did explain what the sandworms here are like, right? They're Dune-style sandworms. You know how big those are, right?"
Warlock: "That's why it's cool!"
Druid: "Has anyone tried hunting sandworms before?"
Me: "They've tried, yes."
Druid: "I'm guessing they never come back."
Me: "Yes. In fact, 'going to hunt a sandworm' is actually a proverb on this planet that translates as 'doing something suicidally stupid'."
Warlock: "Great! Let's go!"

(Ten minutes later)

Me: "Okay. The warlock and warmage are heading out into the deep desert. The rest of you are in the spaceship, following at an altitude of five hundred feet or so."
Warlock: "I start shooting eldritch blasts at the ground. Does it attract a sandworm?"
Warmage: "I walk around on the sand and jump up and down to make lots of noise."
Me: "Start making encounter rolls."

(Ten minutes later)

Me: "The distant earthquake seems to be getting louder and stronger. In the distance you can see a disturbance in the sand, getting closer."
Warlock: "I use fell flight and take off!"
Warmage: "I cast fly, take off, then cast fire shield and ring of blades!"
Psion (on the spaceship, five hundred feet up): "Rika, can you find it?"
Rika: "Getting a reading on the gravimetrics. About eighty feet long. It looks like a mature sand worm."
Psion: "Okay, how about you take the ship down, and open the hatch, so that we can-"
Rika: "No."

(Five minutes later. I couldn't be bothered to make up stats for a fully Dune-sized sandworm, so I decide to go with 'only' a D&D Purple Worm.)

Me: "The sandworm breaks the surface of the sand beneath you. You see its jaws, followed by the enormous length of its body."
Warlock: "I fly down and eldritch blast it!"
Warmage: "I fly down and cast orb of electricity on it!"

(Five minutes later, during which the players discover that flying at close range above the ground is not actually all that much protection against a creature that's 80 feet long.)

Me: "The sand worm's teeth sink into the warmage. You take 19 damage and you're grappled."
Warlock: "I eldritch blast it again!"
Me: "You know you're firing into a grapple, right?"
Warlock: "Yup."
Me: "Roll percentile dice."

(Five minutes later)

Me: "Okay, the rest of the party just saw the warlock blast the warmage, who's still in the worm's jaws."
Psion: "Maybe if Rika takes the ship down to close range-"
Rika: "Are you out of your mind? No!"
Warmage: "I've got Sudden Still. I use that to blast the worm with another orb of electricity!"
Me: "*sigh* Roll concentration."

(Five minutes later)

Me: "The worm gulps down the warmage like a cocktail olive . . ."
Warlock: "Great! Now I've got a clear shot!"
Me: " . . . and submerges beneath the surface of the desert."
Warlock: "Damn."
Warmage: "Hah! Now I'm in its stomach, my fire shield and ring of blades are doing it damage each turn!"

(Three minutes later)

Warmage: "Hey, Shout is a verbal-only spell! I can cast that from inside its stomach!"

(One minute later)

Me: "You take 23 crushing damage . . ."
Warmage: "That puts me to -7. But I'm still-!"
Me: " . . . and 8 acid damage."
Warmage: "Crap."
Warlock: "Can I see anything?"
Me: "Just swirls in the sand."
Psychic Warrior: "Can we leave and get back to the mission now?"
Druid: "Rika, can you put me on the speaker?"
Rike: "Sure."
Druid: "I shout out at the warlock, 'I told you, dumbass!' "
Me: "There's nothing to see anymore. You turn around and start flying back to base."
Psychic Warrior (to the warlock): "Does this usually happen to your companions?"
Warlock: "Well, come to think of it, he was always kind of stupid."
Warmage: "I'd just like to point out that my spells are going to keep going even after I'm dead, so I am eventually going to kill that thing. Ha."

The warmage player made a new character, a monk, and died one hour later to a pair of babau demons, putting him into the rare category of players who've managed to die twice in one session.

- Saph

[Hzurr]

That's great. Technically there probably should have been a Bluff-Insight roll, but that would have given it away. I guess the PCs' total willingness to go along counts as forfeiting it, or maybe they would have had to have asked for an Insight check...

Trust me, had even one person come close to questioning it (other than one half-hearted "I don't know if this is a good idea" by the new guy), I would have given them an insight check. With bonuses. But when they all go along hook line and sinker....

[Ovaltine Patrol]

I once tricked my players with a mere goblin, who successfully convinced them that he was a conjured demon, simply waiting for someone to break the spell binding him by crossing the threshold into the room. It only worked because of a bizarre combination of a lack of ranged weapons and a malfunction in their collective BS detectors

[Oracle_Hunter]

One of my very first campaigns, AD&D. Now, I was really young (6th grade, IIRC) as were my players, and they were my "trial and error group." I decide that it would be neat for a local baddy to trick the PC Thief into getting trapped so that the rest of the party would have to find and rescue him. There was no motivation for this - it just seemed like a fun idea at the time.

N.B. Never use this plot.

Anyhow, in order to trick the PC Thief, I send an agent that asks the (LV 2) Rogue to steal an item out of a manor. His reward? A ludicrous amount of gold or a magic item of his choice or advanced training with the agent's master thief. Despite the obvious questions this raises (why is this guy paying so much for a petty thief? And why pay him at all, if he already has a Master Thief?) the PC takes the bait without blinking.

The rest of the party takes an in-game month to finally break the Thief out. It was bad all over.

This particular Thief turned out to be a magnet for bad ideas. Later, after being drained by a Wight, the PCs find themselves in the service of a (clearly) Evil Wizard. Rather than take the proffered reward for their quest, the Thief asks if the Wizard can restore his lost level. The Evil Wizard thinks for a moment and says "why yes, I think there is something I can do about that." Of course, the PC agrees without asking for any details.

So I infused him with demonic essences that slowly warped his body and mind. By that point, I had absolutely no sympathy for this guy

[Swordguy]

Head of Vecna, guys. Head of Vecna.

Used it in 2 campaigns thus far. It's caused 1 TPK, and wiped out half the other party before they caught on. Including 1 guy who was in the TPK'd party!

[holywhippet]

One story my DM told me about a session he was running. The players came across a bridge leading across a gorge. For some reason one of the players decided there must be some kind of illusion involved - the DM said he never said anything that would indicate that. So this guy is disbelieving, tossing stuff into the gorge etc. None of it is having any effect. Finally he decides that the gorge itself must be an illusion and jumps down into it. I think he took something like 100 feet worth of falling damage - easily fatal at his level.

[ocato]

The warmage player made a new character, a monk, and died one hour later to a pair of babau demons, putting him into the rare category of players who've managed to die twice in one session.

I have a friend who used to bring 5+ character sheets to a session because he invariably died several times. He kept them on a clipboard and ripped them off as he went. Now, we played marathon sessions (12+ hours, this was weekends and the summer when we were in high school) with a pretty tough DM and 2 or 3 person parties (with blaster wizards and fighters and so on). The odds were usually stacked against us, but he was the only one who really died that much.

Actually, one time there was a small river of lava (maybe 5' across) that, after our party member fell into and died, something like 7 people randomly ran up and jumped directly into. Cleared the clipboard pretty early that night.

[aboyd]

I'm not sure this falls under the "fell for it" category, as there was no trick. However, it's still amusing to me. Sam, I hope you don't mind me telling this story. You have to admit, it's pretty funny.

My group is 8 4th-level players with hired mercenaries & animal companions & familiars. If everyone gets off a combat round, there are 15 total "allies" in the party that can attack. Because of this, I have them doing modules a couple levels above their average level. So long as they stay together, they swarm & overwhelm just about anything that is a CR 8 or lower.

Well, in the Cage of Delerium module, there is a hidden pit below some loose floorboards. The pit contains the bodies of hundreds of mental patients who died when the head of the mental hospital lit it on fire. Players who fall in take 4d6 damage, and then have the possibility of awakening a 12 hit die corpse-amalgamation that breathes fire. Oh and it has 12 "tentacles" each made of 3 or 4 connected torsos, and these tentacles each hit for 1d8 + 6, and they have +10 to hit.

By reading that, you might guess that even for the levels the module was designed for (levels 6 to 8), that pit monster is supposed to be death. Only 1 or 2 players will fall in. An 8th level character fighting a monster with 12 +10 attacks will likely die in just a few rounds. Add in that the monster has lots of immunities, and it's just silly.

So, knowing that my players were a couple levels too low and would likely die in a single round against it, I halved everything. Only 6 heads, half the hit points, etc. The creature would still be deadly, but maybe if the PC unlucky enough to fall in were to flee he or she could live long enough for reinforcements to show up, so that no one player bore the brunt of all the attacks.

So, the party hits the creaky floorboards and 1 guy falls through. I rule (quietly, to myself) that he does not fall on top of the monster but rather on some inanimate corpses. If he flees, he's OK. Someone lowers another player down, they scoop up the fallen player, and get out alive. All they know at this point is that the fall really hurt the player, and there are corpses piled high.

They heal the fallen player, give him Spider Climb, and have him investigate. He investigates by climbing down the hole and hurling alchemist's fire flasks at the bodies. This of course awakens the monster. I draw it huge on the map, explain what it looks like, and have the monster spew fire that travels so far up the hole that it reaches all the players standing at the opening.

The player investigating runs back up the hole. Everyone is safe. "Whew," I'm thinking, "They're playing smart! They picked up on my hints about the danger!"

Then another player -- the one previously lowered in on a rope -- says, "I still have the rope around me. I jump in to fight it. Everyone else better figure out how to get down there."

So he's down in a pit, standing alone on a pile of blackened corpses, going mano-a-mano with a custom undead horror built from a hundred dead bodies. It is size 15' square with 10' reach. 5 of the 6 "tentacles" hit, all roll high for damage, and the character ends his first round at -29 hit points.

I guess that's more of a "I can't believe they just did that" thing. :)

[chiasaur11]

Head of Vecna, guys. Head of Vecna.

Used it in 2 campaigns thus far. It's caused 1 TPK, and wiped out half the other party before they caught on. Including 1 guy who was in the TPK'd party!

In the immortal words of Bullwinkle J Moose:

This time for sure!

[The_JJ]

Although I'm normally a smart and sane player, I went ahead and... didn't fall for something last session, I just made the mistake of 'giving the GM ideas.' So we're doing some puzzles and we run into a homebrewed Tarot card thing, like a cross between Memory and... that one anime for kids. The one with the hair? (Like that helps...)

The cards came alive is what I'm saying. So anyway, we flip over four of them, and if we got anything that fit into the GM's list of precombinations, stuff would happen. Or not. Anyway...

GM: "Okay, gust of wind, leaves, creepy jack-o'-lantern, pot of black power. Mmmm... nothing happens."
Me: "Cool I was worried that the wind pick up the leaves, blow them through the jack-o'-lantern, light on fire and then get blown into the explosives."
GM: "Hmm... okay. Reflex saves everyone!"

I guess it was okay because we were in a place that was activly trying to kill us...

[Random NPC]

<snip>
- Saph

Spoiler

Show

[DragoonWraith]

It's true, 40% of OpenBSD installs lead to shark attacks.

[holywhippet]

So we're doing some puzzles and we run into a homebrewed Tarot card thing, like a cross between Memory and... that one anime for kids. The one with the hair? (Like that helps...)

??? Dragonball Z maybe (Super Saiyans have their hair sticking up and glowing)

Pokemon?

Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo?

[Rhiannon87]

In a game I'm a player in, we managed to cause a TPK because we failed to properly hide a skull that, when hit by a weapon, shattered and cast wail of the banshee. We knew the enemy we were fighting was shooting at it. We had an NPC holding it that we could have shouted at to hide it. And yet. We did not. The only reason the characters are still around is because three people hadn't used their "mulligan" deaths, and one person had a ring of deathward. Sigh.

I also once charged a guy who did six attacks in a round, and could get more any time he threatened a critical. (F***ing Lightning Maces.) I briefly forgot that my compulsively multi-classed character =/= front-line melee fighter. Sigh. She's still alive, as the party has many many diamonds (we die rather a lot).

[Sstoopidtallkid]

??? Dragonball Z maybe (Super Saiyans have their hair sticking up and glowing)

Pokemon?

Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo?

Yu-gi-oh. You know, the one with the card game?

[archon_huskie]

It was just a simple lever. All it did was re-lock all doors on the dungeon's level. Totally confused the party theif when he had to re-pick all of the locks. The party fighter was certain they were being followed by an invisble demon. But in truth, that level of the dungeon had no enemies at all.

The moral was, if you don't know what it does, don't pull the lever!

[KBF]

??? Dragonball Z maybe (Super Saiyans have their hair sticking up and glowing)

Pokemon?

Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo?

.. What do any of those have to do with cards doing stuff?

It's Yu-Gi-Oh. The hair is Yugi's insane hairdo and color. I mean.. Seriously.