Role-Playing Games: Epic plot derailment

The Game Room
1

Well, this is… I don’t know if embarrassing, but definitely aggravating.

I am directing a campaign for a role-playing game, based mostly on D&D. And I have just now been confronted with one of the most epic cases of plot derailment, courtesy of my players.

Long story short, their mission was to VERY discreetely infiltrate the country of Vlax, which was the equivalent, in their world, of North Korea.

To begin with, they decided to try to do that across the equivalent of the Demilitarized Zone. Mistake number 1. In the end, they managed to stumble across a rather big border patrol and their base.

OK, I intended for all of them to be overwhelmed by the enemy, who would capture them and keep them in jail (opportunities to escape, and try to get the hell out of there and try later).

Well… My players had other ideas. Mistake number 2. In what has to be said was a truly impressive display of lateral thinking and creative use of all of their assets, both mundane and magical, they managed to actually thoroughly thrash most of the border guards.

So, the few survivors ran into what looked like a lookout tower, and after a few moments, suddenly, a big fire roared on its top. In the distance, similar fires went on, receding farther and farther away… Upon seeing this, the players decided to have their characters rush the tower and slaughter everybody inside.

At that point, I facepalmed, and said: “OK, congratulations, guys. You, bunch of Gavrilo Princips, have just triggered a war between Vlax and its very very very very deeply hated neighbor”. The game session stopped right then and there, and I am now left trying to salvage the campaign after this thoroughly catastrophic development that definitely came very much from left field.

Any similar catastrophic stories you’d like to share, if only to lift my spirits while I try to see how to deal with what has the potential to be World War I, given the web of treaties between countries and kingdoms in this campaign world?

2

The best laid plans of mice and men…generally work out much better than those of DMs with creative players. Just roll with it.

I’ve done similar things as a player, and had similar things done to me as a DM. One of the most wicked things I did as a player was in a buddy’s game. His first time to DM, actually. We were running a module, where the players discovered a small temple/shrine building on the way to a town. We were probably supposed to note it in passing and head on in to town. Nope. We checked the place out, and my multi-classed elf found a secret door, behind which was a teleporter that lead directly into the Big Bad’s lair. Guess it was supposed to be his escape route or something. Anyway, we popped in, caught him by surprise, killed him and took all his cool stuff immediately. Totally wrecked the whole storyline of the module. :slight_smile:

3

This is where you stumbled. Anything of this nature has to be done narratively, because players will never just give up so long as they can keep rolling dice.

Stuff like this why I rarely script out my games beyond very vague plot points, and do my best to roll with whatever the players want to do.

I once played in a D&D game where the DM would laid out every single solitary detail of his sessions and would brook absolutely no deviation whatsoever from said plans.

I once played in a Shadowrun game where the GM would basically hand us an objective and a map, then go play computer games until we had formulated a plan and were ready to do the run.

I try to strike a balance somewhere between those, leaning closer to the second guy than the first.

The only thing you can count on players to do, every time, is royally fuck up your designs. :slight_smile:

4

Sounds like a wonderful new angle, unanticipated as it is-is your issue that you have no plans/prep for this new tangent? You could have them do a Yojimbo and play off of both sides, or such (assuming that the one side doesn’t view them as war criminals now of course).

5

The problem was that it caught me completely unprepared to deal with that particular chain of events… And I did not feel at all confident about “winging it” because it was a world-shattering thing. That is why I basically stopped the session; to have time to analyze and prepare something to go on with this drastically changed situation.

Basically, the whole plot about “gathering info and rescuing a certain guy” has gone out of the window. The issue now has become “we’re caught right in the middle of World War I, how the hell are we going to survive this”.

I imagine I’ll arrange something, but at the moment I was like “HOLY FUCK WHAT”.

In any case, more stories of epic plot derailings in games will be welcome ^.^

6

So, there’s no abort signal? No cowardice / blind stupidity on either side?

7

Well, the thing is, you see, that the chain of fire signals is a simple “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!” signal. There will be troops arriving and they will see signs of battle and a border garrison thoroughly slaughtered. They will jump to the conclusion “this is the work of our enemies!” (Remember – basically the place is North Korea with the serial numbers filed off).

Chances are they will retaliate by invading their neighbor, which obviously will scream about the unwarranted invasion, treaties will be put into effect, and things will likely snowball in a rather unpleasant way.

But really, this is the first time that I can say that my players have sparked a major war :stuck_out_tongue:

8

There was one group I DM’d that had to make a surprise assault on a castle where magic did not work. They had at hand a platoon of Dwarfs along with their human troops, so I expected them to make an assault by tunneling into the city. One of them even mentioned that. No, not these guys… They made a deal with an evil god to get a fleet of dirigibles to airlift them into the city. I took a certain amount of joy in having the archers in the city send up row after row of flaming arrows.

9

I’ve found that the Arduin system* dissuades …somewhat… players from hacking and slashing through armies.

*20 is a crit. Roll 1-100 and consult the crit chart. The numbers near 100 are very messy and very final. One guy once ,freshly rolled, tried to mug an old lady. She split him in two with her umbrella.

10

When I DMed in High School I had an idea for this epic Fantasy equivalent of World War I. It would entail four of my World’s largest nations (One Elvish, one Dwarfish and two Human Nations) all embroiled in a four way war. I had fully written the first two adventures and had sketched out several more.

Very early in the first adventure the party captured a group of tamed Wyverns (which are basically small two legged dragons for those that don’t play. One of the nations used them as their Air Force). My idea was they would use these to travel around the battle zone while they slowly learned the true causes of the war and how they could stop it before it got out of hand.

Instead they were like, “Wars are dangerous. Let’s get the hell out here.” And flew them off into a completely different part of the realm… I could have used hokey tricks to get them back where I wanted but I just sighed and ended up coming up with something else.

11

Big spoilery story behind the spoiler…

[spoiler]When 3.0 came out, I ran the premade module series that gets the characters from level 1 to 20. In the final module, the characters learn that an ancient dragon, whose heart was removed, managed to survive the experience by grabbing a demon and jamming it into the cavity left behind by the missing heart. This was only moderately successful and the dragon can only live by feasting on the souls of unborn children, resulting in children being born without souls.

In the D&D world, being born without a soul seems to mean being born without any initiative (no jokes), no drive, no verve or lust for life, no desire… people began to notice that some of the children being born were listless and quiet, and (given that they were newborns and couldn’t speak) gave the impression of being brain-dead.

Where the unborn souls are supposed to reside is called the Well of Souls. That’s where the dragon is hanging out, snagging the occasional soul and eating it. The task for Our Heroes is to go there and convince him to Stop That, with a certain amount of Dragon Death involved.

Problem: The gods themselves are, on pain of being made Not Gods and very likely Not Alive, absolutely forbidden to speak about the Well of Souls. In any way possible. The only source of information available to the party is to follow a trail of breadcrumbs left behind by people who had researched this in other ways. The party COULD NOT use any divinatory magic. Well, they could, but they wouldn’t get answers. They had to trust people purely on face value (and divination about those people? No answer). My players had a problem accepting anything at face value; they always assumed it was a trap.

So all of these parents notice their newborn babies are nearly lifeless. They go to the priest to find out what’s wrong. The priest casts a few spells. No answer. Huh. The priest goes to a higher-up and requests the boon of higher-level divination. No answer. Huh. Without telling anybody, a really-high-level cleric goes to the Plane of the Gods, finds his god and asks the god to her face what’s going on. No. Answer.

Children are being born without souls and the gods themselves are unable or unwilling to say why. Mass chaos and panic are literally going to ensue at any moment. And what are Our Heroes doing?

Well, about ten levels ago, they got a pair of Boots of Teleportation, which allowed 3 teleports a day. They then adopted the 15 minute workday in grand style… they’d teleport to wherever they were adventuring, get into a huge battle that wiped out all their resources, grab all the loot, and teleport back to town to rest up overnight and sell all the loot. They were teleporting anywhere, any time. At this point in the campaign, they now had access to many multiple Teleports per day as well as Teleport Without Error, and no power in the universe seemed capable of stopping them from bipping around like spastic blink dogs.

Except random encounters, apparently. See, somebody had just picked up some new mount, like a diamond unicorn or some such thing, and wanted to ride everywhere rather than teleport, so once they found out they were on a breadcrumb quest, they got out their horses and flying carpets and started moseying quietly along, fighting random encounters and piling up sacks of loot, even going so far as to continue to use their Teleportation to go back to town to sell stuff, but not to move ahead and get to where they were going, because they might miss out on loot. All told, it took them three weeks of game time plodding back and forth to get to the final Maguffin, a trip that I had sort of assumed would take them about twelve minutes.

In those three weeks, the populace of the world learned that their children were being born without souls and they had all been abandoned by their gods. Prayers were useless and priests had no idea what was going on… because once Our Heroes figured out what was going on, they DIDN’T TELL ANYBODY, and just got on their horsies and headed out into the wild… by the time they got back to Waterdeep, it was in ruins, as was every major city in the world, destroyed by riots.[/spoiler]
TL;DR version: The PCs find that children are being born without souls and the gods won’t say why. Nobody knows what’s going on and while the PC’s are riding across the countryside rather than teleporting everywhere, the world falls into chaos and destruction, paving the way for the 4th edition Faerun, a world of fallen civilizations and chaos.

12

Sometimes when players derail your plot, it means you are being too railroady or the plot is boring to them.

13

Reminds me of the dickiest thing I ever did as a Paladium GM(I’m so proud of it).

At the end of some big quest arc quest one of the big rewards was a very nice bow which I made up, the Bow of Binky the brave or something. They dutifully researched it, and I came up with some history about a lost ancient city of great power and artifacts ruled over by Binky, and said it had been in some mountain range.
Several arcs later they happened to be in the area, and I had totally forgotten about it. But they hadn’t. Through a pile of divinations and toys, combined with the fact they had the bow, they had a nearly airtight case that they should be able to find it easily. No matter of the urgency of the current save the world quest would deter them. They were determined to go look in the mountains. Coming across demon destroyed villages, and crying orphans caused by the rift they needed to destroy were ignored.

Finally I got annoyed, and let them continue on the “epic quest to the city of Binky”, through Giant infested mountain passes and infectious marshes. Finally they made it into the valley where it was located. They located an inn, and casually asked a huntsman there for info to start the final search.
Player 'Have you come across any mountain sides that look like a bird foot grasping a snail?"
Huntsman “Well there is that old rock above the northern road to the capitol that the locals call Rook’s foot.”
Player “Yes, can you give us directions?”
Huntsman “Sure, it’s not too hard, just take the road east out of town for a 12 miles, then you’ll hit the Northern road. Follow it North for 60 miles, past where the University is doing that big dig up, and you’ll see it from miles away”

Nobody caught on the the University dig part, but they slowly learned over the next hour of gaming travel that they would be able to find the city easily, largely because a University research group had found it 5 years earlier and excavated the whole thing, moving all the good stuff back to the school to be studied.

There was a very informative guided tour of the ruins available though, that for some reason they didn’t seem interested in.

Bwahahahhahah, Evil GM is so fun.

14

My sympathy. The players will always go in unexpected directions.

Here’s one example of a player really derailing the plot.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14131943&postcount=296

15

Here’s something similar.

16

I ran a one-shot set in the thirties, protagonists are a bunch of B-rate actors and pulp writers who stumble on some sort of plot to mine the cities of Elder Gods buried in the Arctic, blah blah blah. They sneaked onto a ship that was taking a key piece of equipment to the mine in the Arctic; the plan was for them to stow away on the ship, get to the Arctic, and get in a really cool climactic water-level fight between cultists, fish-men, sharks, and Pinkerton agents or something.

Except when the PCs got on the ship, they said, “Key piece of equipment? Cool, let’s blow up the ship!” Which they then proceeded to do, and hey, that was the end of the one-shot!

Oh well. It was still fun.

I’d go along with starting the Great War in your game, because that sounds like fun. HOWEVER, if your world has a South Korea equivalent, consider that they know there are crazy reckless adventurers in your world, and they may have countermeasures in place. For example, they may have four clerics who cast a weekly divination along the lines of, “What is the greatest threat to our kingdom this week?” and if alarm bells ever start ringing (“South Korea’s gonna invade you,” for example), they follow up with more specific divinations, contact other planes, and similar spells.

The PCs’ actions may have been roughly anticipated by this magic: perhaps the clerics had been able to determine, via Sacred Twenty Questions, that one of six guard towers along the border would be the site of a terrible act of violence on Tuesday between sunrise and noon. Due to North Korea’s paranoia and South Korea’s buttheadedness South Korea doesn’t communicate this knowledge to the North; but a crack government team is waiting invisibly, ready to provide an exit to the PCs; they then explain the situation to the PCs and ask for help preventing the oncoming war, through trickery, questing, or other means.

17

And some of us think that following events to their natural and entertaining conclusions is more fun than trying to explain how someone just got cut in half by an umbrella. :stuck_out_tongue: Of course, if you have players who do things like try to mug old ladies, they deserve what they get.

Anyway, I’m digging the whole “oops, we started a war” thing; Too bad it will probably just result in the PCs running away.

18

And sometimes, they’re being dicks :frowning:

19

Sometimes you’ve got to change your perspective and see this as emergent behavior, and consider that this sort of thing is why we like D&D differently than CRPGs. A couple years ago, a couple of my superhero/villain characters came across a mission critical ally who’d been apparently killed and was being left for dead by the authorities as a message to others who’d resist the government. The players were intended to wait until the authorities left and then recover the apparently-dead ally. Instead, they created a big fat distraction, snatched the ally’s body, and hijacked the armored car, leading to a merry chase across the city. As the DM, I loved it. That was way better than my plan.

20

NEVER

EVER

count on your players to do what you want them to do.

In fact, you should count on the opposite to occur.