Favorite/Most Major "Players Annihilating Your Expectations" Experiences

[Vrock_Summoner]

Players have a tendency to go against your expectations in a tabletop game. Many (including myself) argue that this very element of surprising and spontaneous creative input, and the ability of the GM to adapt to it, is the main thing giving tabletop gaming an edge over, say, story-heavy video games, as far as interactive storytelling goes.

Sometimes, your players go to an unexpected NPC for help. Sometimes, instead of going down either path in a dungeon fork in the road, they tunnel through the wall. Sometimes, they resolve a long-term conflict with a major adversary through diplomacy rather than a climactic battle. Sometimes they really build upon the framework you gave them, proving through conviction that their story *will* be grander (in its own way) than that of any other party in similar circumstances.

Other times, one of your mecha-piloting, giant monster-fighting teenage heroes hatches a crack plot to reshape international politics by uniting Africa into a global superpower.

Mind, this was in a Neon Genesis Evangelion game, so a character jerking governments/organizations around is the exact opposite of the usual order of operations.

Spoiler: Context

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The character more or less specializes in snooping, which I expected him to use to get in on the background conspiracies in the game. Instead he made his own, hacking into NERV's database and pulling up schematics and info to send to Saudi Arabia, so that a few months down the line, he could kick off his gambit, having the government fake an Angel attack so NERV would send an Evangelion and pilot (with himself being the natural choice for diplomatic reasons, since he was the only pilot who spoke Arabic), then use an EMP generator (which his AT Field would protect the Eva and its power supply from) to knock out the communications systems of the surrounding conventional forces, shoot them all out of the sky and sea, while ground agents seized the mobile support platform powering the Eva. They beat a hasty retreat to a facility built into an old mine shaft while NERV is scrambling to piece together what happened. By the time the story is clear, he promptly makes a global stunt by submitting himself to a trial by the United Nations entirely over international broadcast, limiting their ability to act based on secretive information, and through sheer persuasive skill regarding the benefits of his actions, leaning on how much the U.N. needs the natural resources Saudi Arabia exports, and some sabotage, more or less gets himself publicly exonerated, leaving himself open to engage in "peacekeeping" to unite the fractious entities of Africa into one coalition where he has... rather a higher status and standard of living than he did as a high school student and NERV pilot.

What about you guys? What's your favorite (or at least most memorable) experience with a player throwing you such massive curveballs that you're left speechless? Generally I don't mean people who are just being dumb and disruptive for no reason ("oh, so you're just gonna spend the session flirting in the bar? Uh. We kinda need you for the dungeon? I don't want to run this please?") but rather players who play seriously and just come up with/pull off things that leave you with little to do but clap proudly and/or pick your jaw up off the floor.

[Mastikator]

Unfortunately all of mine have been "we leave this campaign we're already a part of to go explore this area over there that you haven't prepared because you were too busy making this campaign".

This was years ago with a group that broke up and I'm still salty about it.

[Cluedrew]

As a GM I have never gotten and fantastic "I was not expecting that" moments. Well there was a time my "warning shot" to let the players know stuff was starting to happen got one of the players kidnapped. The most defenceless one of course. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to re-work the campaign after that. I think I did a good job but then it fell apart before we reached much of the new stuff.

As a player, the biggest things I didn't expect seem to happen during character creation. We are charging through the wasteland trying to escape from monsters: we got a death cultist who worships the things. Exploring the forbidden north: suddenly we are taking a TV show host and a camera crew along with us.

[KillianHawkeye]

The setup for this story is a game of Star Wars: Saga Edition. I was running the free "Dawn of Defiance" adventure series that WotC was putting up on their website at the time.

The first handful of chapters went by just fine, but then we got to the one that's centered around a card tournament on Bespin. Basically, it's supposed to be like Casino Royale in space, and the plot of the adventure is that the PCs are supposed to infiltrate the tournament and intercept some command codes for a ship carrying weapons so it can't be sold to the Empire (or something like that, I can't recall the specific details).

So what to my players do? Before the final round of the tournament even begins, the players decide to tail one of the suspicious parties. I forget which individual it was, but it was the one who was going to be receiving the codes during the championship. Naturally, this person had some shady-looking personal security, so naturally, rather than backing off my players jumped at a chance to fight and ended up taking the important NPC prisoner in order to interrogate him/her.

I was a less experienced DM at that time, and this was such a huge departure from the adventure's expectations that it provided no help figuring out how to handle this turn of events. The party had blown their cover (mostly), kidnapped somebody who didn't have the information they needed, and screwed their only chance of finding the weapons shipment. I couldn't think of any way to fix this (I wasn't even sure how much I could alter to get things back on track because the next chapter hadn't been released yet), so the campaign basically imploded and ended right there.



Anyway, that's the story of how I stopped running pre-written adventures because I couldn't trust them to have all the details I needed and didn't have the confidence to start rewriting one mid-adventure. I realized that if I write the entire adventure myself, I could fix both of those problems, so that's what I started doing.

[Quertus]

Well, the players doing the unexpected is the only part of GMing that I enjoy. That said, I'm really not sure what my favorite was.

Perhaps the first major such departure was when I had prepared a little adventure for some co-workers - the first actually set on a world I'd been working on for over a decade, btw. They proceeded to ignore the prepared adventure, and chase down a bit a random background fluff I had thrown in for atmosphere. Three sessions later, they asked, "oh, what was that about at the beginning?" It dawned on them that they'd skipped the adventure entirely, and had a little adventure of their own. They enjoyed it so much, they asked if I could turn it into a campaign.

[Tinkerer]

Well I would have to give some more thought as to what my favourite one was but without a doubt the most major was the complete and utter annihilation of the fantasy world which I had spent years laying out. The players decided to call my bluff when I was describing the world falling to pieces around them by taking their time and lazing about crafting magic items and preparing themselves for the final confrontation figuring things would move at the speed of plot. The only problem was I wasn't bluffing. Not only did all of their characters die but the majority of retired characters from that world died. I wound up using the majority of setting notes as kindling for camping fires.

Note that I did give them fair and multiple warnings.

[Vrock_Summoner]

Yeah, I feel you. One of the best parts of switching to an Evangelion campaign for me is that all the players (being familiar with the source material) came in very aware I wasn't pulling punches and would totally screw them to whatever degree they couldn't prevent, up to and including triggering an immediate end of the world scenario. It's nice to not have clashing expectations in that regard. Encourages a surprising amount of player proactivity, too.

[NRSASD]

I frequently design my adventures so they aren't conventionally solvable, but then I give the party lots of tools and scenery to work with, so my expectations are pretty fluid to start with. That being said, a recent adventure completely took the cake and ate it too.

Deep down in the underdark is a tribe of Kuo-toans, highly superstitious, insane, and extremely xenophobic fishpeople. One of their most holy sites is an ancient sealed temple, guarded by a spirit of elemental earth (a slightly modified helmed horror). No Kuo-toa has ever managed to set foot inside this temple, but every month they bless and anoint their most promising warrior and sending him screaming to his doom by dueling the earth spirit. This has gone on for at least 1400 years by the time the party arrives.

What I expected was a pair of tough boss fights for the party. The band of Kuo-toa and their chosen warrior (who would attack any non-Kuo-toa on sight), and either a nasty fight with the earth spirit or some puzzle solving to get around it.

What I got... was Kuo-toa Jesus.

The party had successfully stealthed their way down to the temple entrance, just in time to see the chosen Kuo-toa charge the earth spirit, battle axe raised high and yodeling triumphantly. There was a chorus of "Oooo"s, "ahhh"s, and "how are we supposed to fight that thing?"s from the PCs when the spirit turned the fish person into sashimi with an exasperated sigh. But, our CE firbolg vengeance paladin was unusually quiet. While the rest of the party plotted how to set all of the Kuo-toans on fire simultaneously, the paladin and the wizard exchanged notes. The wizard suddenly announced he was casting comprehend languages on the paladin, and the paladin said "I step into the light, using disguise self to become the dead kuo-toa".

Speaking in Kuo-toa, the paladin yelled "I've died and returned to you from the other side! I have seen the coral palaces and felt the soft waters of paradise! Onwards my fishy brothers to victory!". I ask for a persuasion check, and the paladin's player smirks. "Certainly, with advantage. Because my paladin is a Shakespearean trained actor." Sure enough, he's got the actor background and is delivering an inspiring speech. He rolls... and gets a natural 20 on the die.

The Kuo-toans were shocked, and their priest, the one who had anointed the champion, rolled insight to try to understand what was going on... but got a natural 1. With a cry of "He's right! The hour of prophecy is at hand!" the fishperson priest whipped all of the other kuo-toans into a frenzy and, with their newly resurrected saviour, charged the earth spirit. All but two of the original 15 Kuo-toa became fish paste in short order, but between them and the rest of the party they managed to hack the spirit into submission.

And that's how my party annihilated my expectations, by getting one boss fight to fight the other. With the help of a dramatically appearing Jesus of the Fishpeoples.

[ATHATH]

I think that the Tale of an Industrious Rogue would be an appropriate example.