Sucessfull Player Insanity

[Brennan1214]

So I just had an idea. Could the people here share stories of when you were running a game, and the players did something insane, suicidal or just unexpected but succeeded completely. I have one here:

This was a party of 6, D&D 3.5:
They were in a small town, and they got into some pretty big trouble with the police. It was partly because they were insane and partly because the town was run by a weird cult (See signature.), but when 80 or so people came to fight (They had already murdered several smaller attacks.), they stood there and fought them off. Well, they did run away in the end, but only because as DM, I straight-up told them I had no idea how to run a mass encounter, and they were nice about. Lesson learned. It pretty much doesn't matter how much cannon fodder you throw at reasonably optimized level 3 PCs, it's still cannon fodder.

PS: I don't know how to use spoiler tags.

[ArcturusV]

Heh. That's the problem with the typical "No win" scenario. The players will invariably win it. Particularly if you don't use DM fiat and cheat the stats/rolls. It's just one of those things. The players will crit, the enemies will fail, etc.

As a player: I was in the Palladium Superhero RPG (Can't remember what it was called)... and the DM threw out these creatures that were supposed to be impossible for me to beat. Had some sort of energy shield, a lot of armor, a lot of SDC, etc. I was supposed to lose the fight so I could get kidnapped.

So this thing is rampaging through the city. My guy, randomly determined, had basically Hulk Powers/Sasquatch/Wolverine. Big, muscular, athletic, claws, etc.

So first round comes out and my Hero had charged into the fray. Off the cuff, just as Roleplaying "Color" I mention that I go for the target's head. Roll a natural 20.

DM is about to go "Well dip, you hurt it's shield but it's still powerful enough to slap you around" sort of thing when the co-DM for the campaign reminded him "... but it's a called shot to the head which bypasses all that main body SDC and shields..."

Suddenly "... oh... crap... roll damage..." I ended up maxing my damage out, with the crit multiplier it was enough to just destroy the head of this thing. Suddenly the whole campaign is off the rails and the guy is scrambling to figure out how to salvage it just because instead of saying:

"I attack."

I said:

"I charge at the guy and throw my whole body and momentum into slamming into the guy's head."

[The Dark Fiddler]

Could the people here share stories of when you were running a game, and the players did something insane, suicidal or just unexpected but succeeded completely.

Well, my Psyker was recently possessed by a daemon and, while possessed, killed the person who was the only hope for saving his planet. This was maybe half an hour after he interpreted a series of psychic phenomena as a warning from the God-Emperor of Mankind that the previous plan of killing this person was a bad idea and actually listened long enough to hear his goals. So, feeling as though he'd failed the Emperor, he decided to kill himself. The only reason I can still play him is because I burned a Fate Point (one of five!) to keep him alive.

Wait, is that not what you meant?

More on-topic, I have a plan the party's Scum had. We were in the middle of a club in the slums, and needed to sneak into the back in order to "talk to" the owner. The Scum walks onto the dance floor and punches some random dude, and we all proceed to ask him if he's crazy (out of character; in character we kept our distance and had decided that he'd gotten himself killed, sucks for him). He activated a device that subdued sounds inside a rather large radius and managed to use the Blather skill to talk his way out of any trouble, while providing us with exactly the distractions we needed to get into the back.

[Lvl45DM!]

It started off so simple. My halfling wanted to backstab a dragon.

This is 1st ED so the DM ruled that it had to actually be in the back. So i make a climb roll and shank him. Standard stuff really. Or so I thought.
The dragon takes off, flying around the cavern trying to buffet me off with its wings. After a few times of failing it eventually knocks me off 80 feet the air. The other characters scramble to save me, eagles, Bibgy's hands etc. Im looking through my NWP and see "Tightrope walking" and tell the DM
"He hit me with his wing right? Well as I'm falling and the wing i want to talk on it" and show him the proficiency.
I make the roll adjusted for difficulty but its not a lasting strategy. So i jump off the wing, stick a knife in there and slide down like Errol Flynn in a Pirate Movie. I land on the Bigby's hand turn around and pull out my Wand of Wonder, which lucks into a double strength gust of wind blowing the dragon into a wall and breaking its wings. The falling damage together with the backstab and hit into the wall, along with the damage from the knife in the wing killed it before anyone else had hit it.

Two totally lucky rolls let my level 10 Halfling thief solo a dragon.
Bad. Ass.

[Exediron]

More than I could possibly enumerate on - mine is an insane group (although it's mostly the characters, not the players). Here's one that almost worked, and was definitely insane:

Passing through a massive dungeon created by an eccentric wizard as the final test for the heroes he had foreseen a thousand years ago, the characters arrived at a circular room with a complex design in all the colors of the prism decorating the floor. There were grooves spaced on the metal walls and ceiling of the room at about 3 foot intervals. The entire tower featured an unbreakable blanket ward that prevented dimensional movement of any sort (teleport, plane shift, even most incorporeality).

Instead of trying to solve the puzzle in any way, shape or form, the plan they came up with was this: Take 9 sharp weedwhackers that one of the characters was carrying (their world crosses over with the real world, sort of ala Dark Tower only not) and hit them together with incredible force to magnetize them. Then tie a rope to the weedwhackers and hurl this conglomeration at the ceiling, hoping to lodge it in one of the metal grooves. Then swing across the design Indiana Jones style.

The plan worked up until the character tasked with throwing the thing rolled a 1, hit himself in the face with the 9 magnetic and perilously sharp weedwhackers, then lost his grip and fumbled them onto the prismatic design - whereupon they promptly exploded.

As the DM, I hadn't quite decided if I was going to let the weedwhackers hold their weight if they had managed to throw it successfully.

I have more, and I might post some later. Some even worked. Many did not.

[Fighter1000]

I was playing as an Elf Cleric of Desna for my friend's campaign. We (the PCs) started out in Golarion, but got forced into a portal to a world based off of Disgaea.
I didn't much like this Disgaea idea and got really bored with the campaign real fast. So I decided to cause some trouble. Went into a nearby shop, took a sword off a wall, and walked out. The GM sent the shopkeeper after me, viciously attacking me in the street. I almost got K.O.ed, but a huge brawl erupted in the street. The shopkeeper got ganged, and I escaped and hid in a barrel.
Little did I know that a fellow PC was making sweet sweet love to an NPC barmaid upstairs. He decided to dump his "sex sweat" down on me. This pissed me off so I climbed up there and pissed through the window. The naked barmaid punched me right in the crotch with a nat 20 I think and I fell all the way down into the alleyway. Then I threw a thunderstone up there, but I didn't throw it high enough and it bounced off the wall and came back down, deafening me and another PC who had showed up.
I was surprised and actually quite happy that my character survived all that crap

[Yukitsu]

My DM says that he can't call it insanity any more because my plans always work.

But insanity was what he used to call everything when I explained the first half of my plan.

[Chilingsworth]

We were attacking the site of one of Demogorgan's Macguffins. The place was protected by an anti-teleportation ward some large number of miles in radius. So, I suggested we teleport above the ward, then have the bard cast featherfall when we neared the ground.

We fell too fast for the airborn guards to attack us and landed without a hitch. We then unleashed a Demogorgan-hating beast (avatar of Obox-Ob, iirc), destroyed the focus of the anti-teleportation ward (I think that was the macguffin, actually), and teleported out

This was in the Savage Tides adventure path.

[Doorhandle]

I have a fairly minor example.
4e, first level party, everyone is fairly new except me, we're in prison.

Several goblins are talking smack while we wait outsider our cells, and so the cowardly channeling poison, the Cannibal Berserker, and me, the Swordmage with the Grinning Mask, step out to oppose them. Negotiations break down (truth to be told only the changeling was negotiating,) and then CB decides to attack.

So, charge? No. Howling strike? yeahnaw. walking up and slapping the goblin in the face? Still no but I did that.

Nope, C.B just straight-up CRASH-TAKLES into the goblin and then pins him under his crushing weight. The D.m ruled the goblin took decent over-time damage due to having a hundred pounds of angry cannibal standing atop him.

Also, on a related but less successful note, at this point the C.C.P deicide "bugger this," minor-created a smokebomb, and ran off to hide in the toilet pit (to be fair, he had to leave.) Later on we decided that C.B was hiding booze in the toilet, and this imagined the psion staggering about covered in filth and filthy drunk.

[Ozfer]

I have a berserker in my game who consistently finds ways to tackle two people at once, snapping each of their necks in the same instant.

[Kane0]

I once successfully broke my character's mind down into four parts and handed one part each to four spirits that from that point lived in his head.

Now that was one badass character. Utterly mad and more than a little chaotic, though, and we weren't allowed psionics for this game so this is the closest we got.

[Minitroll]

Once upon a time, one of my friends had a pathfinder dwarf summoner. They were fighting a druid that was using fire and had a large amount of fire protection. So, he ran up to the flaming druid with a half-empty barrel of alcohol and smashed the barrel into himself then jumped the druid.

He died.