Let’s just say my friend didn’t realize the gold dragon was there to advance the plot by giving them a new quest and not there to (attempt to) kill . . .
The same guy also learned that if you are going to accuse the head of the King’s guards of being a traitor in public it would be a good idea to have some evidence.
I was in a Shadowrun campaign playing a troll detective who was also an eco-terrorist and a poet (no shit, I recited haiku to the bemusement of the other players). I won’t describe all the machinations, but I tricked the Los Angeles police into raiding the booby-trapped cache of a rival gang. The ensuing explosion destroyed a solid block of LA plus quite a few cops. Mr. Johnson didn’t reward me like he did the others, but I didn’t care.
Characters got to higher level (9) to where they could get their own stronghold. I (as the DM) had them draw up their own plan view drawings of their compound.
Our fighter’s fortress, completely unbeknownst to any of us initially, looked exactly like a front view of Daffy Duck’s face when turned upside down. The eyes were round bastions topped with guard towers, his collar was the front gate, his beak was an ornate shrine/fountain thing, and the tuft of hair on top of his head was a secret escape path through the main wall.
The conversation went something like this…
Me setting the map in front of the players, them seeing it upside down from their perspective for the first time
Me: “…and here’s Lord Badgeworth’s keep…”
Other Player 1: “His what?”
Other Player 2: “What’s that?”
Badgeworth proudly “My castle!”
1: “Looks like a duck”
2: “Woah, it does!”
1: “Are you serious? What is that?”
2: “Duck Keep! Duckstone! Fort duck!”
1: “Nice beak!”
B: “That’s a fountain! Guys, come on…”
1: "The Roost! The Nest! "
Me: “You know…with that gate it looks like Daffy…”
2: “Wabbit season!”
B: “Quit it guys, it does not!”
…and so on for an endless night of hilarity.
This was a 3rd Ed. D&D campaign I was in about 10 years ago or so.
I was a human wizard. There was also a human rogue, a human fighter, a dwarf cleric, and a human monk. The cleric is played by a first-time tabletop player. The rest of us have varying levels of experience (the rogue and the DM had significant amounts). While walking through the forest, we see a huge beetle-like creature (i.e. 9 squares in size) eating foliage and heading in our general direction. We roll init.
Rogue goes first. Then me. Then the cleric. Then the rest of the party.
Rogue: I full move out of its path.
Me: Same here. (Note: I would have done this regardless of the rogue’s decision. After all, this thing is clearly not a carnivore, and even if an omnivore, is unlikely to find us particularly tasty when it has ample foliage to choose from.)
Cleric: I pull out my crossbow and shoot at it.
Let’s see…Two experienced members of your party decide not to attack the apparently harmless (when not enraged) large bug, and rather than follow their lead, you decide to piss the thing off? :smack:
Needless to say, the rest of the party decided that climbing trees was probably best at this point. The beetle ended up trying to shake us out of them after he managed to knock the cleric to -9 and stable. (The DM actually showed us the real role. It was something like 43 points of damage from a full-round attack on the cleric, which will outright kill any 1st level player out there. The DM was teaching the newbie a lesson about discretion and valor.) Eventually the beetle gave up and moved on after the rest of us tried pathetically to actually do something useful in a clearly outmatched fight while not engaging the beast directly.
We came to discover through the campaign that this player’s mistakes came from more than just inexperience. Flash forward a few months real time…
There is an army of orcs marching on a town we are having some downtime in. This is entirely the party’s fault. Some of it was a result of us changing history accidentally and causing orcs to spread where they weren’t supposed to be. (Note that our characters were not aware of this, being in an area none of them were originally from.) However, the real issue was the result of the actions of the Cleric and the Monk. The town was alarmed by the appearance of Orcs in the general area, since it was a bit of a new thing. (Oops! Our bad!) I don’t quite recall how the DM was handling this history change in the grand scheme of people’s minds, but they needed extra help on watch. Our party agreed to help out the town, and the cleric and the monk were on watch one night. A small orc rading party hits the town, and the cleric and monk make short work of them without telling anyone a thing. Not the town officials. Not even the rest of the party. Two days later the orc army marches on the town. Turns out the leader of the rading party was orc chieftain’s son. And it was some initiation ritual that he was supposed to perform as he transitioned into adulthood and to the status of being able to take over for his father should his father die. The Chieftain addresses the town that they will pay for the murder of his son. No one has a clue what’s going on, including most of the party, other than of course the Cleric and the Monk who might have a clue but still never thought of actually letting anyone else know about the skirmish a couple nights back. (And they were both Lawful Good alignment.)
On top of this, the chieftain has a child from the town attached to his shield as a human shield. The chieftain calls out the entire town as cowards and how he will destroy the town and everyone in it. Our party tells the townsfolk to start getting the children out of town while we confront the leader to buy some time. As we walk up to him, our cleric decides to cast a ray touch attack spell at the Chieftain (I forget which one), thinking that he’ll show the Chieftain who’s boss. Now the rules don’t say what exactly happens when another person is attached to an object a target of a ray attack is carrying, but our DM ruled that he killed the kid and did some damage to the Chieftain. The chieftain is impressed that humans would sacrifice their own this way, so he actually gains some respect for the cleric. However, it doesn’t really stop an entire orc infantry from attacking the town. As the townsfolk hold them off, they tell us to lead the children to safety, which amazingly enough we manage to accomplish without losing a single one. Yes, an entire town other than children wiped out by the indirect actions of our party.
Flash forward a few weeks real time…
Our DM decides that the good powers that be want to send us a message. It is delivered to us via the ghost of the boy who was killed by our cleric. The DM is doing this as a way for the cleric to get closure as well as give us an adventure hook. The idea is that the ghost will also be our guide as an NPC. Our cleric is the one the kid addresses specifically as we hear the message. So here we have a completely benign spirit of a child who is trying to help us, and the cleric has a chance to redeem himself. So what does he do? He casts Cure Serious Wounds on the poor thing. (For those who don’t know, cure spells on undead do the exact opposite to what they do on the living.) The spirit shrieks in pain as its soul is violently ripped out of it’s formless shell and banished to whatever afterlife was prepared for it, rather than moving on peacefully when its task (and our new one) was complete, as the DM had intended.
:smack::smack::smack:
Love the stories so far!
A little background on mine. I was DMing a thieves-only campaign, a very open-ended campaign where the party did whatever they wanted and I did a lot of improvising. We occasionally traded off DMing, although I was it 99% of the time. I did have my own character, a halfling thief, that accompanied the party.
In a previous session, the bad guys had kidnapped my halfling thief…
The party, quite a bit later, discovers the location of one of the bad guys’ camps, and proceed to sneak in. Primary objective is to assassinate the leader, and recover the halfling thief if he happens to be there.
The group splits up, as was common. One of the party members sneaks into a tent, and hears snoring coming from two sleeping bags. One of the sleeping bags is occupied by someone not quite human sized…
You probably guessed it, the thief stabs into both sleeping bags, slaying both of the “bad guys” in their sleep. The rest of the party, great role-players they are, don’t say a word, knowing full well what was happening, as they watch their companion kill my kidnapped halfling thief in his sleep… He discovers his mistake when he goes to loot the bodies and finds my character tied up in a sleeping bag. He did get a lot of flak for that…for the rest of the campaign, and beyond. No flak from me, though, I knew full well the risks… 
How’d I miss this thread the first time around?
The first incident that comes to mind:
“You can’t seem to open the trap door in the floor. It appears to be stuck.”
“OK, I jump up and down on the door.”
“You jump up and down on it!?”
“Yeah, to get it unstuck.”
Well, it did work. And I’m almost certain that the player did actually know better, and that it ws just honest role-playing of a low-Wis character.
My regular group also had our own version of “Good Ol’ Dead and Gone”. One guy’s character, in the very first adventure, ended up quite thoroughly dead from flaming arrows in a sewer prepped with Greek fire floating on the water, and only got revived through direct deus ex machina intervention. The next adventure, in the big battle, she ended up at negative HP, and just barely survived. The adventure after that, everyone else in the party managed to go completely unscathed (even the two third-level characters who stumbled into a fight by themselves against a powerful 9 HD demon), except for this character, who was knocked down to 1 HP (yes, exactly 1 HP, and no DM fudging necessary) from contact with a powerful and evil intelligent weapon.
Temple of Elemental Evil (paper/pen module), AD&D.
DM: “You see a small, shallow bowl of a fowl smelling liquid sitting on the [either altar or alchemists lab table].”
Player/Thief: “I use my wand of detect magic on the bowl.”
DM: “It doesn’t glow at all.” [No magic present.] “What do you do next?”
Player/Thief: “Why, I drink it, of course! What superpower did I just get?”
DM: “I dunno… how 'bout you roll a d20 and we’ll see?”
Player/Thief: “A ‘7’. Good! 7’s a lucky number!”
Well anywho, it was poison he drank.
Several years ago I was GMing a new campaign with my usual crew of players, one of whom was known to be…impulsive. I’ve got a huge campaign planned that will probably take at least a year to get through. It starts in a major city that is controlled by a dictatorial “police state” regime. Anyway…
The very first thing that happens in the entire campaign is the party wakes up one morning in the inn they are lodging at to discover the corpse of a guy. He had been stabbed in the chest and was lying in a pool of blood in the hall outside their room.
**
Impulsive Player:** I drag the body into our room.
**Other players: **What? Why would you… No!
**Me: **OK, you drag the corpse into your room. You now have a dead body in the room and a large blood trail from the hallway into your room.
Impulsive Player: Oh. :smack:
**Other players: ** Grrrrrrrr. :mad:
I used to play with this kid who I’ll call Jon, because that’s his real name, and if he somehow finds this post, he’s going to know I’m talking about him anyway, so why fuck around?
Jon’s problem was pretty simple: he never saw a problem that he couldn’t use violence to solve, and he never really paid attention to what other players were doing, so he’d often act in ways that spectacularly sabotaged what they were trying to do.
Case in point: I was running a bunch of players through an adventure in the Dark Matter setting for the Alternity system - essentially, an X-Files kind of set-up.
The players have a strange artifact from a mysterious civilization that they need identified. The artifact defies rational scientific explanation, but there’s a fringey scientist, largely discredited by the mainstream scientific establishment, who specializes in artifacts from this supposed civilization. As it happens, there’s a New Age expo going on in town at the time, and the psychic has a tent there. The party goes to the expo, and finds the guy. This is purely a “research” encounter: they party isn’t expected to fight, the guy is completely honest with them, and eager to help them out. It’s basically a way to dump some exposition on the party, and get them pointed at the next part of the module.
So, four of the party members walk in and start talking to the guy.
Jon says, “I’ll sneak around the back of the tent.”
:dubious: “Okay…”
The party continues talking to the helpful and knowledgeable NPC.
Jon: “I take out my knife and make a cut in the back of the tent, big enough to crawl through.”
“Um… alright. Make a stealth check. You succeed? Okay, you sneak into the tent unobserved.”
The rest of the party keeps talking to the guy. They’re just about to find out the big secret they need to continue on the adventure, when Jon’s master plan is finally put into effect:
"I grab the guy from behind, put my knife to his throat, and growl, “Tell us what we want to know, or I’ll slit your throat!”
Naturally, the guy freaks out and screams his head off. The rest of the party immediately swings into action, and beats Jon’s character unconscious. The police show up, and they disavow any knowledge of this clearly unbalanced vagrant who attacked this poor gentleman for no reason, and wasn’t it fortunate that they happened to be there to save his life?
The NPC certainly thought so, and gave them some valuable magic trinkets related to the ancient civilization that he had collected during his studies. Jon’s character is carted off to the pokey for the night. He’s released on bail the next day. The judge sets the bail at, “How much money is written on your character sheet?” I got some good mileage over the next couple of sessions, by making Jon have to beg money off the rest of the party for pretty much everything he wanted his character to do.
More recently, I’ve been running campaigns set in the Pathfinder setting, a 3rd edition, third party D&D variant that was released when the official D&D game converted to the 4th edition. Last year, I ran through the Second Darkness campaign, which concerns a plot by a drow priestess to drop an asteroid onto the elven capital, an act that, incidentally, will probably also kill off about 70% of all life on the surface of the planet.
About halfway through the campaign, the party has to infiltrate a drow city to find more information about the priestess, the ritual she’s using to draw down an asteroid, and most importantly, where the hell she is so they can put a stop to the spell.
They find out that the noble house ruled by this particular drow priestess has abandoned the city, shuttering its estates, and decampin en masse to wherever the ritual is being conducted. Naturally enough, the party decides that they need to explore this abandoned estate for the information they need.
Except, they don’t. The module doesn’t cover the abandoned estate at all - all the action takes place in a different drow noble house altogether, one run by a rival who’s more interested in sabotaging her enemy’s schemes then destroying the surface elves, and who ends up as a very uneasy ally to the party. I don’t have anything planned for the abandoned estate at all, and the party wants to go there right now.
So, okay, I just need to make the place as obviously dangerous as possible, so they get the message that this place is too dangerous for them, and they need to go after one of the actual adventure hooks I’d been dangling in front of them. The courtyard is patrolled by four iron golems - one iron golem is more than a match for the party at this point. One of the PCs is a barbarian, though, and iron golems are slow by nature, so he starts leading the golems on a merry chase around the courtyard. While the rest of the party tries to find some stealthy manner of entry. Which, of course, does not exist. The door to the stables is trapped by a fireball trap, which the party learns the hard way. The trap automatically resets after being triggered, which they also learn the hard way. And that’s just an empty outbuilding: the front gate to the estate is so heavily wrapped with malicious enchantments that the party mage can’t even identify everything that’s woven into it. There’s a large pile of drow corpses in front of it to testify to the danger of the doorway: dozens of them, in various states of decay, from all the expeditions sent by the other drow houses to try to find some way into the estate.
The rest of the party, badly singed from their experience with the stable, get the hint, and start retreating out of the compound. But not the barbarian! With all but one of the party having retreated off the map, he makes a run for the pile of corpses. With a quartet of iron golems in close pursuit, he stands about twenty feet away from the enormous, explicitly trapped doors, that have clearly killed dozens of people on several different occasions, and throws the corpse at the doors.
He later explained that he thought that he could safely trigger the (ninth level spell) traps on the doors by throwing a corpse at them, and then just open the door. Never mind that the trap they found on the stables had about three times that range, and automatically reset. Obviously, the traps on the main doors are going to be less effective than that, right?
His one stroke of luck was that the prismatic spray that hit him simply banished him from this plane of existence, rather than, say, disintegrating him. His character eventually found his way back to the party, but in the meantime, I made him play one of the NPCs for a couple of sessions.
Last week, in my current campaign, one of the players was a little casual with a scroll of sunburst, and accidentally blinded half the party. This wasn’t actually that bad of a move: they were fighting vampires, the existence of whom had been heavily foreshadowed, and so he had prepared two castings of Remove Blindness, expecting exactly this circumstance. Unfortunately, he blinded three PCs, so one of the party members spent the entire combat hiding under a table. This party member, incidentally, was an evil-aligned tiefling sorceress.
After the party left the dungeon, the tiefling lured the cleric back to her hotel room, where she bound, mutilated, and ultimately killed the cleric, then carved up her corpse and sold her for stew meat. Which is about where the adventure ended for the day.
Next session is this Sunday. I can not wait to see what happens next!
I had a spare period with 3 other gamers in junior high school, so we decided to start a Gamma World adveture. Mr X decides he wants to play a mutated creature, but can’t think of any specific one.
DM- Why don’t you play a mutated bozo?
Mr X- Great idea, what’s that?:smack:
Starting a Top Secret campaign, one player anounces he wants to play a “defective Russian.”:smack:
During a Battletech game, our unit arrived in a town just before an enemy unit arrived from the other side of town. Our scout mech slipped into a warehouse and waited to let the enemy unit pass by. He turned and asked me, the company commander:
Mr Y-Should I come out now?
Me-Yes, Y, come out and be proud in your homosexuality!!
Can’t understad why Y didn’t like me.
When we played our first D&D scenario (the one with the rust monster included in the old Basic set IIRC) we set a timer clock whenever the dwarf or elf were searching for hidden doors, waited 5 minutes per section of wall (or however long the rules stated) while reading comics, rolled a dice and followed the result.
This only happened the very first time, though. I can’t remember who of us came up with the brilliant insight that we could simply pretend that time went by.
In an old 2nd edition campaign I ran, the party was investigating rumors of unsavory activities at the temple to the evil gods. Now, this temple was actually a legal organization in this particular neutral-evil metropolis. The idea was the priests didn’t so much worship the evil gods as placate them on behalf of the city.
This temple being officially sanctioned and all, the party decides to, for once in their lives, try cunning to get in and find what they’re looking for. They walk right up to the front door and knock politely. When an old priest comes and asks what they want, they confer for a moment, and then attempt: “We’re architecture students. We hear you have some lovely columns. May we look at them?”
After I pick myself up from the floor, I let them make some charisma checks, which they pass to a startling degree. So now this old evil priest is flattered that today’s youth appreciate a good column, why in his day they didn’t have this Neo-Nerrakian nonsense, nosirree, when this temple was built they APPRECIATED aesthetics. He leads them on a tour through the temple, rambling endlessly, the happiest evil priest you ever did see.
After about 20 minutes of this, the party’s cleric gets bored. So this cleric, this lawful good dwarven cleric, this worshipper of the dwarven goddess of hearth and home, draws her warhammer when the priest’s back is turned, and splatters the fellow in his own temple’s indoor garden.
“What? He’s evil, isn’t he?”
The party had to flee the city as fugitives after that. So much for the urban campaign I had planned…
The same party, later on, are exploring a tunnel that leads to an otherwise sealed crypt. The tunnel was fairly recently bored out by some burrowing creature or other, so it’s mostly just dirt all around. As they’re about to turn a corner, they hear a strange noise from the ceiling, like a very faint hissing or scratching. They examine the area closely, can’t see any sort of traps. Detect magic reveals nothing. Eventually the fighter just closes his eyes and jumps past that spot. Nothing happens. Other party members carefully walk past. Nothing happens. Finally the cleric, who has only just regained favor (and spells) from her goddess, creeps past, clutching her warhammer at the ready. … Nothing happens.
This, for some reason, infuriates her. Determined to make SOMETHING happen, she stands directly under the noise, and throws her warhammer as hard as she can at the ceiling.
A cascade of dirt pours onto her… along with a swarm of fire ants whose nest she just punctured. Damage done: 1HP, a minor attack penalty due to itchiness, and the endless laughter of her party.
Later, the wraith at the end of the dungeon inflicted exactly enough damage to kill her, just before the party finished it off. If she had just left those fire ants alone, she’d have survived…
So we’re playing Shadowrun. I was new to the system, and wanted to learn the way it handled magic, and it was suggested that a play a sorcerer adept. I have silly resources, and too many force points; I’m also slightly dumber than wall paint. I’m paired with our stealther, and friends with the troll.
My tutorial in magic has consisted of “use these against physical people, and these fire spells against magically active.”
We’re raiding a warehouse to find out what this Chinese gang was building up to for the New Year. The plan’s simple, stealth group goes in, looks around, leaves. The rest of us will hit the front door hard if a distraction is needed, and do a quick fade while everyone runs around in a panic. Things go wrong, the stealth team botches (how does a levitating guy fail to move silently? Hits his head on the door.) recovers, botches again, and calls for help. The troll grabs the garage door that’s the main entrance, lifts, gets shot in the head, peers through the bullet hole in the door he’s holding up to see who shot him (he’s a troll), that’s when the mages inside cut loose. The troll drops.
So, my character is scared for the stealther, and pissed off about the damage done to his friend; he does what dumb, frightened, angry violent people do: hits the mages with the most powerful attack he can, which you recall would be fire based. What would powerful Chinese gangs be warehousing in preparation for the New Year, that no one had managed to actually find out? Fireworks.
Quoth Chipacabra:
That’s remarkably similar to how my gnome got access to the city sewers, complete with maps. Except in that case nobody minded if we killed the odd otyugh.
A Wall of fire, formed into a circle, makes a good defense.
Unless…you are standing on a frozen lake…
Panurge mentioned rust monsters. A long time ago, we were playing in a 1st edition campaign. He sicced a rust monster on us and sat back to smirk. When I told him my monk was attacking it with a quarterstaff, the look on his face was priceless.
Not D&D (both happened during the same session of Warhammer RPG), but my gaming group still quotes both of these regularly:
DM: (long, confusing description of the place we landed in)
PC: Wait, are the stables to the east or north ? Why don’t you draw us a map or something ?
DM: Oh, all right, there, there, there… hastily draws a map
PC: … I can’t make heads or tails of your map.
DM: exasperated That’s normal, It’s night time, you don’t see anything anyway !
A bit later:
Dwarf PC: Alright, I want to play poker with these guys.
DM: No problem, roll gambling.
PC: I have 55% in gambling. I roll 62.
DM: rolls dice behind screen, improvises distractedly because the rest of the party’s actually furthering the plot OK, you lose some coin, but not much, the leader only beat you barely. Like, you have something like a fullhouse Jacks on Tens, and he’s got Queens on Ladies*.
PC: … I pull out my pickaxe.
DM: OK…wait, WHAT ?
PC: Down where I’m from, we don’t like cheats.
DM: Bwuh ?
Cue the Dorf getting beaten senseless, and the party being evicted from the city… Lesson learned: don’t add unnecessary details to your descriptions !
Vampire:Dark Ages campaign, the players are still human but doing nasty work for the local (vampire) lord. The scenario is geared to tug at their heartstrings, make them question what they’ve been mindlessly doing over the last few sessions. They’re in a ruined monastery which has become an impromptu leper colony, and their current mission is to carry a coffin (with a vamp inside, naturally, though the characters don’t know that even if the players do) down into the crypt below.
One character, played by the girl in the group, is ghastly afraid of rats and opts to remain topside to stand watch. Seizing the opportunity for some quality mind fuckery, I improvise and have one of the lepers beg food from her; then give her a baby, begging her to take care of him and take him far away from this accursed place.
PC: Is the baby alive ?
DM: Yup. He seems healthy, if underfed.
PC: OK. I nod and shoo the leper away.
DM: She looks relieved and thanks you profusely.
PC: Yeah, OK. When she’s not looking, I go and toss it into the woods.
whole table just stares at her, jaws dropping
PC: What ?! It’s not mine.
I saw this thread and thought “Oh, cool, I’ll tell them the bard story.”
Then I realized I’d already told it in this thread… nine years ago.
But Bryan, isn’t a zombie thread perfect for D&D?