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Ceridan
2008-08-19, 07:27 PM
Have you ever broken your DM, or as a DM have you ever been broken by a player? To be clear what I mean is, has a character in one of your games ever done something so totally unexpected that you where at least initially at a lose as to what to do about it?

For example: As a player my character, a telepath, reached into a tiny rift in the fabric of the planes (caused by the BBEG) with her mind in an effort to see what might be out there. My DM looked at me and said "You do what!?" After a few moments he ruled that my mind was over loaded by the experience, and that the neat pin prick in the fabric of the planes was, unintentionally, torn by my effort. This lead to a great adventure where the other party members had to enter my characters mind and help to piece her psyche back together.

arguskos
2008-08-19, 07:34 PM
Heh. I once threw the party gnome off an airship through a dirigible, and then cast Fly on him, so he could come back to us.

The DM just sorta went, "bwah...?" and shuddered. Then he let it happen, and charged the party for the dirigible's cost. XD

-argus

skeeter_dan
2008-08-19, 07:44 PM
I want to play a Party Gnome. They sound like so much more fun than Whisper Gnomes.

Chronicled
2008-08-19, 07:46 PM
I want to play a Party Gnome. They sound like so much more fun than Whisper Gnomes.

Untrue. Nothing can be more fun than a Whisper Gnome.

monty
2008-08-19, 07:47 PM
I want to play a Party Gnome. They sound like so much more fun than Whisper Gnomes.

Is that the annoying guy who tries to make friends with everybody? Those people make me unhappy.

Dr Bwaa
2008-08-19, 07:49 PM
I feel like I may have heard other parts of this subsequent adventure mentioned on these forums :)

As for being broken as a DM: happens all the time. I'm not as good on-the-fly as some of my friends (though I'm getting better), so it can be pretty funny.

For instance, there was that time half the party was stealing a major artifact and the other half (which included the wizard) was causing a distraction, and then they were all to meet up and flee. Which is hard, in the High Forest. So what happened? As soon as the wiz finished the distraction, he charged towards where they were stealing the artifact from, holding one hand out in front of him Detecting Magic. Since it was such a high-level artifact , which would have knocked him out immediately had he actually detected magic on it within range, I ruled that he eventually spotted a glow far off, where detect magic shouldn't work. Assuming (correctly) that it was the artifact, he... no, he didn't follow its magical signature to it. No, he grabbed the other party members, and said:

Wizard: "I teleport to the Diamond (as it was, in fact, a diamond)."
DM: "...I guess I'll get out the d10s."

Damn near killed himself that way :smallbiggrin:

LoneStarNorth
2008-08-19, 08:04 PM
One of my players broke me once. His artificer single-handedly wiped out all three of the evil doubles of of the party, who were one level higher. I was expected a TPK (I had a plot hook that required it, and they'd have got their characters back shortly), but it wasn't a specifically planned one, so it threw me off. It really bugged me at the time not necessarily because I had to use the less interesting plot hook, but because he dragged the battle out for so long. In retrospect I probably could have killed him off (without resorting to DM fiat), but I'm over it now.

I broke him back recently though with an actual planned TPK. He lived longest, but he was ripped apart all the same. And, again, they didn't actually die. It was a dream :smalltongue:

RTGoodman
2008-08-19, 08:31 PM
Lets just say that, if given the chance, a Batman Wizard and a Chain-Tripper Mage-Slayer Fighter/Barbarian can pretty handily destroy undead enemies given enough time to plan, a chain that can do bludgeoning damage, a Rod of Quicken Spell, and access to basically every PHB spell for research purposes.

For the end of our 10th level game this Spring, we were supposed to fight an epic Bard Lich and several cronies and probably die horribly. One quickened enlarge person, a web, and a 15x15 room later, the DM had to retcon the encounter so the BBEG lasted more than 2 turns.

Occasional Sage
2008-08-19, 08:41 PM
Back when I GMed Shadowrun 2e, one of my players expressed an interest in researching a personal-effect-only Turn To Goo spell.

Eldariel
2008-08-19, 08:47 PM
Heh. I once threw the party gnome off an airship through a dirigible, and then cast Fly on him, so he could come back to us.

The DM just sorta went, "bwah...?" and shuddered. Then he let it happen, and charged the party for the dirigible's cost. XD

-argus

Well, while not a "break"-story, now I just have to tell this:
-Once, a gnome dropped on our party tent at night - from a dirigible. The gnomes were terribly sorry for the broken (and bloody) tent and offered us a ride in return.

Curmudgeon
2008-08-19, 08:58 PM
Once, but it was his own fault. He decided to allow unlimited cantrips and orisons. I played a Cleric. Not only were we all at full hit points (Cure Minor Wounds) going into every encounter, but we were buffed (Resistance, Guidance, Virtue) before every possible encounter point (every turn in every dungeon). We had Light everywhere to negate any advantage of enemies with darkvision. Detect Magic found every magical trap, and Detect Poison found every mechanical trap with poison.

But the breaking point came when we had tracked some powerful enemies to their underground lair. My Cleric just sat down and started casting Create Water, repeating every 6 seconds for many thousands of castings. Instead of heading down into untold dangerous underground encounters, we flooded the enemies out and ambushed them as they tried to escape death by drowning.

The DM actually cried. (I don't need to tell you how quickly the "unlimited level 0 spells" house rule disappeared from our game.) :smalleek:

Occasional Sage
2008-08-19, 09:01 PM
Once, but it was his own fault. He decided to allow unlimited cantrips and orisons. I played a Cleric. Not only were we all at full hit points (Cure Minor Wounds) going into every encounter, but we were buffed (Resistance, Guidance, Virtue) before every possible encounter point (every turn in every dungeon). We had Light everywhere to negate any advantage of enemies with darkvision. Detect Magic found every magical trap, and Detect Poison found every mechanical trap with poison.

But the breaking point came when we had tracked some powerful enemies to their underground lair. My Cleric just sat down and started casting Create Water, repeating every 6 seconds for many thousands of castings. Instead of heading down into untold dangerous underground encounters, we flooded the enemies out and ambushed them as they tried to escape death by drowning.

The DM actually cried. (I don't need to tell you how quickly the "unlimited level 0 spells" house rule disappeared from our game.) :smalleek:

I would submit that anybody who can't see that "unlimited 0th level spells" is a bad idea, shouldn't be DMing.

Hal
2008-08-19, 09:07 PM
My players did it to me, but it wasn't as dramatic as anything else here. They just did the usual shenanigans of attacking any NPC who didn't immediately swoon at them.

More specifically, I had a halfing member of the mob come swaggering into a tavern, talking big and really commanding the room. When he saw the players eying him up, he came over and really started pouring on the bravado, telling them about how they couldn't touch him, and how he and his friends owned the town.

The party fighter just took out his axe and tried to cut the guy's head off.

I brought in the rest of the mob, in an attempt to at least show these guys that they can't just bludgeon their way through my encounters, but they tore through the mob like they weren't there.

I was lost as to how to handle this. On the one hand, they just overthrew the mob which had put the town under it's heel. On the other hand, it looked like they had just moved in to be the new bosses. I decided to not push that angle, as they'd already gotten big enough egos in that game.

Glawackus
2008-08-19, 09:08 PM
One of the players in my group decided to step up and try DMing an Eberron game. We went into a cave with some goblins. I was a warforged fighter.

DM: "One of the goblin charges at you. What's your AC?"
Me: "19" (please note that I do not remember my actual AC)
DM: "There's no effect. It's your turn."
Me: "I grab the goblin and throw it at the other ones."

This was, for both of us, our introduction to the grapple rules. :smalltongue:

RTGoodman
2008-08-19, 09:17 PM
This was, for both of us, our introduction to the grapple rules. :smalltongue:

Those are always great. It wasn't our first experience with the Grapple rules, but we had to sit with several PHBs open for a few encounters with my grapple-focused Monk who, at some point, used some rope and a grappling hook to lasso and eventually wrestle with a dragon. It was awesome.

Curmudgeon
2008-08-19, 09:38 PM
I would submit that anybody who can't see that "unlimited 0th level spells" is a bad idea, shouldn't be DMing.
He got talked into it by the guy playing a Sorcerer. Unlimited Prestidigitation and Arcane Mark didn't seem like such a big deal, and the DM just didn't think things through. He thought he could compensate for things like unlimited Disrupt Undead by beefing up encounters. And maybe if he'd controlled the pace by having our party on the run things would have worked out. But unlimited anything, when the players are driving the course of events, is just ridiculous.

Oh, I forgot to add one thing. After flooding the enemy burrow, I started piling their corpses in our wagon. When the DM asked why, I said I was going to carve them up for meat, because despite a week's journey back to town unlimited Purify Food and Drink would make them just perfect; and I could pay virtually nothing for wagonloads of garbage to add vegetable sides to the steaks. I could feed the whole town, charging half the regular cost for food. Profit!

That was when he started crying.

Dr Bwaa
2008-08-19, 10:13 PM
That was when he started crying.

And right he was to do so. Which is not to say that you were not right to do what you did =D

Arbitrarity
2008-08-19, 10:17 PM
Clearly, unlimited cantrips need to be higher level. Like 9-10.

Except Cure Minor, repair minor, and any other abusable cantrips from splatbooks :smallwink:. And maybe create water, though most dungeons counld drain out into the surrounding ground (which would, of course, cause some structural issues).

nargbop
2008-08-19, 10:35 PM
I am a fragile and helpless DM, bound to my oh-so-clever story. I will not DM again until I've played another thousand hours with multiple groups and multiple systems.

One of my friends has the right idea about DMing - he plans ONLY plot arcs and general plans. No building descriptions, no floor plans, no personal descriptions, no tactics - he comes up with those on the fly. He can handle that because he has an excellent memory and can reliably remember that he said three doors of iron, not four. He has entertaining, memorable characters, and the story progresses because they STAY IN CHARACTER.

It's all possible because we trust each other to tell the story to each other together. Woah. Revelation.

arguskos
2008-08-19, 10:51 PM
-Once, a gnome dropped on our party tent at night - from a dirigible. The gnomes were terribly sorry for the broken (and bloody) tent and offered us a ride in return.
Wow. Any other gnome+dirigible stories out there?

Also, on the "infinite cantrips/orisons" topic, I actually allow them, sans Cure/Inflict Minor Wounds. You prepare your cantrips, and can cast whatever you prepared that day an unlimited number of times. It's not really that bad.

-argus

Dr Bwaa
2008-08-19, 10:59 PM
not a gnome-dirigible story, but my gnome bard (ECL 14ish I think at the time) once stole and hotwired and subsequently almost destroyed a prototype Gnomish hovertank called the OmniGorgon5000. In Lantan. Normal Faerun tech level. With a 70mm cannon :smallbiggrin:

MagpieWench
2008-08-19, 11:11 PM
not a gnome-dirigible story, but my gnome bard (ECL 14ish I think at the time) once stole and hotwired and subsequently almost destroyed a prototype Gnomish hovertank called the OmniGorgon5000. In Lantan. Normal Faerun tech level. With a 70mm cannon :smallbiggrin:

Made of awesome :)

MagpieWench
2008-08-19, 11:16 PM
Due to (unasked-for) cheese mongering by previous DM, my bard has access to Fire descriptor spells (don't ask, it's weird).

The next GM had us facing about 5 dozen undead pirates, a dozen dire sharks, and the BBEG.

Um... I didn't do much with the undead pirates, but the sorcerer and I pretty much wiped out the dire sharks and the BBEG in 3 rounds. Firebrand at 15th level is pretty dang sweet for a bard, even if you can't cast it very often.

The DM was concerned that this would be a TPK, but, not so much, really. I don't think he'd really *looked* at the character sheet copies we'd given him.

:wink:

Zuki
2008-08-19, 11:59 PM
I'll tell you guys the Saga of Murray. As a story about a goat, a submarine, and a demigod, I think this counts. It's a little long, but I'm proud of this little epic.

This was an Ebberon campaign, where we'd acquired a really amazing submarine loosely based off of the Apparatus of Kwalish wondrous item, except instead of a big barrel that unfolded into a lobster, it was a big submarine shaped like a giant sea turtle, that traveled ridiculously fast. The crazy half-orc artificer NPC that designed it was a pretty awesomely grandiose guy.

So after we'd taken our Submarine to Xen'Drik, so we could go investigate an evil world-threatening cult named Ashbane and their nefarious doings underneath Phoenix Bay, we left the sub disguised and hidden along the shore, with the Gnome Warlock cohort our LG Crusader had. Shame she was such a lousy roleplayer, that could have been a great odd couple. The party got involved in a longer-than-expected jungle expedition to help out another NPC (Damn Traveler's Curse!), and apparently in the meantime Merry, the warlock, had taken up dancing and busking to get by. We meet up with her again as she's threatening to blast some customer that wasn't paying well and was trying to talk her into coming back to his place...with, it is implied, the goat he had with him as well.

We drive the creepo off, and someone makes a crack about eating the goat for dinner. Someone else raises a fuss about that. We can't eat this goat! As a druid, and more importantly a shifter, I feel obliged to pipe up that I know a really killer recipe for goat curry.

We buy another goat for dinner and keep the one we rescued, who we name Murray.

By the end of that session, everyone is totally convinced adopting Murray is the Greatest Thing Ever. I observe that with two more levels of druid, I could Awaken him. Or teach him tricks in the mean time, and prep Speak With Animals. I didn't have an animal companion, so why not? We've already got a pretty big NPC cast and a fondness for adopting more, and we are dead-set on making Murray The Goat the party mascot. Because it's totally worth it to take a goat with you everywhere you go.

The DM is...less than enthused, and hopes it'll wear off by next session. No such thing. We take the goat with us onto the submarine. The submarine that we're going to use to (somehow) infiltrate a secret underwater base.

While we're maneuvering the sea-turtle submarine down to the base, we get attacked by one of the leaders of the cult we're trying to take down: The Destoyer, or rather, an extremely powerful fallen celestial that's taken on that mantle and personal in order to steal worship and power. As far as we're concerned, an unstoppable demigod. ...Fortunatelly, not that bright. The illusion spell we had put on the Turtle Sub holds and he thinks it's just an unusual beast. Big Game Hunter time!

A terse game of cat-and-mouse ensues, with us finally realizing that this was an encounter the DM intended for us to be useful in, to 'win' in some sort, and we start fighting back using the sub's magic missile battery and natural weapons. He starts fighting back too--and The Destoyer's Trident stabs right through the Crusader, killing her. It was a fairly sad and touching death scene, which she'd asked for as she had to leave the game. I think the goat even licked a little blood off her confusedly, and it was especially poignant as she'd taken the Hydrophobia flaw, and was absolutely terrified of the submarine and sure it was a deathtrap.

So, after that, the sub's leaking, we're freaking out, how are we going to survive this?

We toss an Immovable Rod out the back airlock/hatch of the sub, figuring at the speeds we're traveling suddenly running into that thing is going to hurt. DM rolls....and rules we nailed him right in the heart.

But The Destroyer's not finished yet, and Aounka, our headstrong and valorous elf duskblade, wants to finish the job. Amaranth (the crusader) deserves vengeance!

Everyone else evacuates the sub...and Aounka rams it into the Destoyer at full speed in a glorious underwater explosion of green fire.

The punchline?

We evacuated Murray but forgot our friend's corpse. Like, specifically mentioned casting Water Breathing on the goat and taking him with us, and completely forgot that I, as an 8th level Druid, could have taken her with us and applied a little old Reincarnate when everything was over. But no, clearly, the goat we picked up yesterday was more important.

So now we're wandering through the ruins of an abandoned Giant city in an underwater dome, with a goat.

At that point, the DM just kind of snapped and, the next time we realized we'd forgotten to mention Murray and what happened to him or what he was doing, he ruled we'd lost track of him in the city, and that he'd been found and eaten by a cultist, desperate for something to eat instead of rats.

Thus ended the Saga of Murray.

Kalirren
2008-08-20, 12:01 AM
So we were playing this one module from a book (for interest of not spoiling the book, I'll not say which it is,) and we were doing it in Eberron because my DM thought it would be a good idea. There was a staff hidden in the private chest of the captain of a pirate ship, and as a sidequest, a local wizard had asked us to get it for him.

So our party naturally split up around town according to our degree of intelligence and common sense, as was the norm. A few people tried to look for a way to keep an eye on the captain and his ship in a subtle fashion. Meanwhile, the confused sorcerer and confused warforged psion robot went around asking for the captain by name in the market square, thinking his name was associated with a vague note about turnips that we had found pertaining to the main quest. They had assumed that "turnips" was a codeword of some sort.

Well, it wasn't long before the captain and his first mate come looking for these strange fellows who are asking about him. They find the two idiots still in the market square, and proceed to question them extensively. The captain and his first mate don't buy the (true) explanation that the two party members had found his name 'associated" with "turnips."

Little do they know that the rest of the party happens to turn the corner just at that moment (essentially by DM fiat.) The captain and first mate proceed to try to shake the sorcerer and psion down; naturally, we get into a fight, and due to the surprise factor of the rest of the party showing up, we win.

We tie the up the KO'ed captain and first mate and transport them in a manure wagon to the abandoned house of the guy we're supposed to be looking for in the main quest. We wake them up and ask them everything about his ship and the staff he's carrying under detect thoughts. Having found out that the staff is in the captain's chest, we knock them out again.

We then spend half an hour iRL arguing about an approach, during which we come up with a half-baked plan of having the changeling disguise himself as the first mate and try to drag the others aboard ship in ropes whih can be easily loosened so as to get the jump on the crew.

We're halfway down to the docks in disguise, still in the same old manure wagon, when the changeling cleric (who had come up with the first idea) comes up with an even crazier idea: the worforged psion is a shaper, and he'd summoned a few constructs before. Couldn't they just sink the ship? The warforged didn't have to breathe, he could just sink to the bottom of the harbor and retrieve the staff from the wreckage.

This, incidentally, was the instant when our DM regretted moving the module setting to Eberron.

The plan works perfectly. The warforged psion sinks to the bottom of the harbor and summons a few astral constructs who sink the ship. The rest of the party beseiges the dock and snipes off half the fleeing crew, who promptly try to contract a warforged of their own to find the captain's chest and bring back whatever was in it. But our warforged is already down there, and finds the key still in the cabinet where the captain thought it was, opens the chest, grabs the staff, puts everything back, and leaves. He meets the other (similarly clueless) warforged on the way and waves hi. The other warforged goes in, grabs the key and the chest, and goes back to the rest of the pirates.

It was perfect.

But the best moment was when we asked our DM to see if there were any more ship-in-harbor scenarios that were vulnerable to the same trick. He looked ahead about 50 pages and facepalmed.

Talanic
2008-08-20, 12:14 AM
Me talking.

"...Okay. So your plan to clean out the manor house of kobolds is to unleash the zombie apocalypse?"

The party was good-aligned (well, chaotic good and chaotic neutral). They didn't follow through with the plan, but it was worrying to learn that the bard was actually the party's voice of reason.

Chronos
2008-08-20, 12:16 AM
I think the goat even licked a little blood off her confusedly, and it was especially poignant as she'd taken the Hydrophobia flaw, and was absolutely terrified of the submarine and sure it was a deathtrap.What's a goat doing taking flaws?

MisterSaturnine
2008-08-20, 12:18 AM
Awesome goat story.

This is...I...I can't even...words...so amazing...:smallbiggrin:

On another note, flames...at the side of my face...breathing...heaving breaths...

monty
2008-08-20, 12:19 AM
But the breaking point came when we had tracked some powerful enemies to their underground lair. My Cleric just sat down and started casting Create Water, repeating every 6 seconds for many thousands of castings. Instead of heading down into untold dangerous underground encounters, we flooded the enemies out and ambushed them as they tried to escape death by drowning.

I have to ask, did your DM even bother to calculate the volume of the lair? Unless it was tiny, you'd be unlikely to fill it for a long time, even if there was no drainage or anything. Remember, cubing numbers tends to make them really big after a point.

To put it into perspective, a 2 meter deep Olympic-size pool (minimum depth) is about 660,000 gallons. At CL 20, barring a bunch of free quickens or something, that would take slightly longer than a day to fill. The average lair is probably bigger than a swimming pool, and if your BBEG doesn't notice water filling his room slowly over the course of a day, then your BBEGs aren't very smart.

Dairun Cates
2008-08-20, 12:40 AM
I have a player that routinely does this. Mind you, I fully expect him to do something patently ridiculous, and I can usually catch it, but every so once in a while he does something so OUT of the norm that he ends up just gimping a problem the players were meant to solve. I'm not complaining. He always keeps things interesting, but yeah... wow.

This is the guy that took a super hard boss and managed to convince his own clones that he was an imposter with a stupid high disguise and bluff check.

LordMalrog
2008-08-20, 12:43 AM
... i'm happy to say, its my specialty. I can't remember the last boss i fought forward in a straightforward manner. Most of my characters do things the way i feel their character would act, not: "LETS DO WHAT THE MAN IN THE TAVERN SAID GUYS!"
for example, one of my characters in a futuristic campaign, Zog, has the attention span of a chinchilla. If he's forced into doing something he'll generally run from it to do something completely differant. For example,
Crew member: Sir, the alliance says we're to send these supplies to zeta 6.
Zog: Excellent, set a course for Hookerville 9!
Crew member: ... sir?
Zog: Did i stutter?
oh and my character Wellby, barely directly attacks anything. He generally uses whatevers on hand to make a self built puzzle.
"Fight a demon god? uuh hows about we just blow up the 3 "mighty pillars" and bring the goddamn temple down on him with some of that gunpowder i bought in town?"
as a DM i've never been broken. I'm flexable... like jello... blue jello. excuse me i'm off to grab some jello!:smallbiggrin:

Seffbasilisk
2008-08-20, 12:46 AM
I broke a DM when she attempted to run an evil campaign, and told my Raptoran Cleric of Pestilence and Planning that Contagnation could apply IRL diseases.

I used DMM Persist to persist Divine Agility (massive boost to Dex), and had a persisted Consumpive Field.

Asked to get a homebrew enhancement to my footbow, that it would be a much larger STR rating.

We hit a tavern. I ripped the life out of half the inhabitants, and then worked on the trio of dragonets that came.

Flying, we hit town soon, and I use a Negative Energy Aura, and an orphanage to power up. Towards the end of that session, I was ripping up chunks of paving and building structures to fling at people. My footbow, pulling in 1.5x STR to damage was stronger then most seige weapons, and when the only person with enough class levels to be a threat was helping the NPC refugees, I shot him with a Spell Storing arrow (also homebrew) to give him HIV.

We planned to visit the town the refugees ran to shortly after, but the DM broke, and was hiding under the table, when my STR 81 cleric used his mace on a mother to get to her child, (He believed if he consumed five hundred babies he would attain diety-hood.) and ate it, as it was the five hundreth.)

End Game.

Paragon Badger
2008-08-20, 01:18 AM
I broke a DM when she attempted to run an evil campaign, and told my Raptoran Cleric of Pestilence and Planning that Contagnation could apply IRL diseases.

I used DMM Persist to persist Divine Agility (massive boost to Dex), and had a persisted Consumpive Field.

Asked to get a homebrew enhancement to my footbow, that it would be a much larger STR rating.

We hit a tavern. I ripped the life out of half the inhabitants, and then worked on the trio of dragonets that came.

Flying, we hit town soon, and I use a Negative Energy Aura, and an orphanage to power up. Towards the end of that session, I was ripping up chunks of paving and building structures to fling at people. My footbow, pulling in 1.5x STR to damage was stronger then most seige weapons, and when the only person with enough class levels to be a threat was helping the NPC refugees, I shot him with a Spell Storing arrow (also homebrew) to give him HIV.

We planned to visit the town the refugees ran to shortly after, but the DM broke, and was hiding under the table, when my STR 81 cleric used his mace on a mother to get to her child, (He believed if he consumed five hundred babies he would attain diety-hood.) and ate it, as it was the five hundreth.)

End Game.

Did your party happen to be comprised of christmas-themed woodland critters, by any chance?

SoD
2008-08-20, 07:32 AM
I was nearly broken with my first session with this bunch.

One character, level one (using 3.5 and 3.0 ed): Damage (on average): 1d10+5d6+4. He ended up being in charge of bringing the party together. First, he knocks out one of the characters, with one blow. The character who was in charge of standing guard, and not letting anyone in. He then drags the unconcious bodyguard into the temple he had been guarding. There's a dwarf with an arrow in his shoulder, unconcious. Uberman (not real name) leaves. He finds the towns ranger, peering in through a window. With his bow on his back. Uberman charges, and knocks him out. And takes him into the temple. And what's more, not only could he justify that, but his reasons were simple enough that I didn't have to ask. And his attacks were legal.

Finally, we actually got on track (after about 4 hours out of game!). My favorite quote ever: "But I can't do it alone..." Probably my second favorite: "Come on [player name]. Don't screw up the campaign yet."

Thrawn183
2008-08-20, 07:39 AM
My friend and I (2 out of 5 PC's) wanted to switch characters. That's all it took.

PnP Fan
2008-08-20, 08:22 AM
It was an accident, I swear, but we had gathered together for some MnM. We had been told "there will be some investigative work, so don't just bring in combat monsters" (paraphrase). In our first adventure, some supers break open a mundane jail and let the prisoners out. We arrive on the scene, do some looking around, and figure we've got two tasks ahead of us: 1. Clean up the mundane criminals and 2. Catch the jailbreak guys. We have no leads on the guys who broke into the jail, so we opt to chase down the mundanes and see if we can gather info on the supers from them. I turned to our GM and ask him, "Hey, GM, does the jail have a list of addresses and family members for the mundane criminals." Thinking that often the small time guys will flee to family to get resources before they go into hiding. The more criminally insane might revisit their "work sites" out of habit. The GM turns back to me and says, "I. . .I don't know." My response, was a bit impatient I admit, and perhaps not the best in the world. I said, rather incredulously, but did not yell, "Oh come on, GM! You said you wanted us to do detective work, I'm doing detective work, what did you expect?!"

He called for a break to the game. By the time we came back from break it was time to head home.

In retrospect, I believe he thought I actually wanted a full list of addresses, rather than just saying, "yeah, you've got an address list, there are a hundred addresses. Go to town."

Coupled with a few other situations that were unrelated to my little outburst, we haven't played that game again. Which is a shame, because it had been shaping up to be a good, fun game.

Curmudgeon
2008-08-20, 09:00 AM
I have to ask, did your DM even bother to calculate the volume of the lair? Unless it was tiny, you'd be unlikely to fill it for a long time, even if there was no drainage or anything. Remember, cubing numbers tends to make them really big after a point.
The DM described the burrow's main shaft as going down at a very steep angle, then back up again to the bulk of the lair, giving the inhabitants the "on higher ground" advantage against intruders (which the Rogue determined by lowering a mirror on a string, as we didn't have an appropriate spell available -- though we did throw in a lot of Light spells to light the area). So my Cleric just needed to flood the bottom of the main shaft, and then the hidden secondary shaft that was revealed when the enemies started to come up to see what had happened to the rock overhang that normally kept rain off the main shaft. With both ways out flooded and more water continually coming in, they panicked. So it wasn't flooding the whole burrow, just the two entrances. It took just under 150,000 of gallons of water to force Swim checks on underground dwellers with no ranks in the skill.

Hzurr
2008-08-20, 10:56 AM
I've had my PCs do this a couple of times, usually because they don't fight at the level I've prepaired for. The problem doesn't arise when they destroy an encounter that was too easy, but there have been a couple of encounters where the dice just went the wrong way, and what should have been an easy-moderate encounter wiped out the party.

Example: The party was traveling through the jungle, trying to get to this tribe of halflings that lived in a temple. On the way, they were ambushed by the halflings who were using poisoned blowdarts. The halfling rolled very well, and almost all of the darts hit, and then the PCs had to make fort saves against the knockout poison. The party was about level 7, the DC was something like 13, so I expected one or two to fail it, get knocked unconscious, and then the rest of the party would fight the halflings. So I figured out who got hit, and I ask for rolls, and out of a 6 person party, not one of them had a dice roll higher than...6? Every single person dropped. It was awkward, and I really wasn't prepared for it.

Fortunately, I was able to modify the temple encounter I had prepared, and instead of breaking in, the party woke up tied to stakes as a sacrifice in front of a cave where a dinosaur was coming to eat them. The party made a dramatic escape less than a round before the dinosaur got there, they got inside the temple and faught their way out. It was pretty cool.


Also, the sinking the pirate ship/sending the warforged idea was awesome. I applaud.

Don the Bastard
2008-08-20, 11:05 AM
I don't break DMs often, but my dice do. Like rolling 3 20's in a row on the first attack on the BBEG (we were using instant kill rules). Rolling a 538 on an attack roll in the old LOTR system (was open ended percentile system) and killing a Worg with a well placed thrown metal pot by my Halfling Cook (he also rolled a 416 on a fishing roll later in the same session!). Or rolling a 52 in the old Star Wars system to drop an AT-ST with an aimed Blaster Carbine shot to the hydraulics system (with my Barabel Shockboxer, a melee specialist, had like 2d+2 in blaster).

Zuki
2008-08-20, 11:39 AM
What's a goat doing taking flaws?

No, the Crusader had taken the flaw.

Hzurr
2008-08-20, 12:40 PM
What's a goat doing taking flaws?

well...how else are goats going to get 4 feets?

*ba-dum chhh*

fendrin
2008-08-20, 12:41 PM
Many times. My favorite three instances are here, but in spoilers because each one is fairly long (especially the second and third).

Once indirectly:
My friend was running a one-shot level 20 game (this was 3.0 and prior to the release of the Epic Handbook, iirc) at the end of a semester. He said to expect a TPK at the end. I told him that he had no idea what he was getting into and that one 'properly' built character would be able to wipe the floor with whatever bossfight he came up with. He didn't believe me.

I couldn't play (it was my GF's birthday, and I had my priorities straight), so I gave one of our friends an idea... He had already decided to play a wizard, so I gave him a few ideas....

From here on out I was only told about later. Bossfight turns out to be the Goddess of Death & Magic (kind of like Wee Jas, but not). She's been stripped down to demigod status or something like that... she didn't have Alter Reality, but was a 20HD outsider with 20 levels of whatever, etc.

The wizard goes second or third in the initiative order, but when his turn comes, he implements my plan. The conversation went something like this:
Wiz: "I cast Time Stop."
DM: "OK... but it doesn't work to full effect. You only get two turns."
Wiz: "I only need one. I take my dagger and do a Coup de Grace!"
DM: "Isn't your dagger tiny-sized?"
Wiz: "Yeah..."
DM: "And you have an 8 strength, right? So the crit does what, one damage?"
Wiz: "Yeah, but it's VORPAL!"
DM: "Wha? ... crap."
Wiz: *laughter*
Other players: *shocked expressions, then laughter*
DM: "...she's a death goddess, she's immune to death magic!"
Wiz: "Vorpal isn't death magic!"
DM: "It is now!"

Same DM, different game. We were playing a (non-d20) near-future cyberpunk/mecha/anime game set in Toronto. Due to the events of the game, we knew that the BBEG was trying to kill a particular NPC and would be striking at a particular time wherever that NPC (really more of a DMPC....) was. This was particularly important information, because we dodn't know who the BBEG was! We only knew of him/her/it by the terrorist acts of spreading a nanovirus that caused people to become paranoid and kill each other. We had a couple of weeks of game time (and a week of real-time) to prepare.

So we decide that in order to spare a populated area of Toronto from collateral damage, so we decide to buy a warehouse (the wizard from the previous story had a character who was very, very rich. Not all that useful in those games typically, as most of the gear involved was super-tech that couldn't be bought, and it was a point-buy system, so he weakened his character in other areas to be rich) and set an ambush for the BBEG there, as the warehouse district would be pretty much abandoned at that time of night.

Now, there had been a lot of inter-party distrust. The wiz and I didn't really feel like we could trust the third member of the party, who had been acting weird (like trapping the door to his room), and the wiz and #3 didn't trust me because I had been acting weird (mostly just trying to avoid #3 when not on missions, but I also tried to do a little surveillance on #3 and the very strange and secretive NPC that the BBEG was after... I was convinced the NPC was the BBEG and was after us.)

So I tell the wiz, "Look, we don't know what's going to go down, but I have a feeling it's going to be a lot worse than we expect... we need a backup plan in case things start to go south." He agrees, and because we knew we were dealing with something extremely powerful and likely to kill us all (a trademark for this DM's BBEGs), we decided to to go... extreme.

We took the wiz's character's fortune, and using my characters connections (friendship with an arms dealer character I played in a previous game), we bought a ton of C4. A literal ton. And more. We blew the wiz character's entire savings (about a quarter mil in US$) on C4 and detonators. The DM broke... but then let us get away with it!

We rigged up 2 kill switches: One in the Wiz's mecha suit and one in a get-away car (in case our mecha suits were damaged or whatever). Most of the C4 was hidden in the walls, floor, and ceiling of the warehouse... but there was also a some in the car (as a paranoid precaution... we didn't want the BBEG using it to get away). The car explosives were only wired to the detonator in the wiz's suit. It's worth mentioning that we kept all of this secret from #3 (both in and out of character). All he knew is that we had purchased the warehouse and the get-away car. Meanwhile he (as the team engineer) was upgrading our suits (i.e. spending the character points we had earned over the course of the campaign).

So the designated night comes along. We have our ambush set up with #3 standing in the middle of the warehouse next to the NPC. The wiz and I are on the roof, waiting to spring down on the BBEG when he/she/it appears. With us is the character of Player #4, who stopped playing months before. We all insisted that even if #4 wasn't playing anymore, there was no reason his character wouldn't be there for this battle. So #4 was there as an NPC.

The appointed time comes and suddenly, my character transforms into a mecha-enhanced monster! The DM hands me #4s sheet (which was an entire campaign behind in power) and takes over my character. It turns out that the nanovirus was the BBEG and my character had been infected way back in the first battle of the game. All the paranoia and what not was perfect blind roleplaying! I was a bit upset at losing my character, and also about getting one that was completely ineffective, but I wasn't about to go off and sulk or anything.

So my character was really dexterous so the BBEG goes first. Less than one round in and we're getting our butts kicked. #3 decides to take the NPC and get away in the getaway car. Left on our own, I say to the wiz "Grab, jump, boom." He knows exactly what I mean. So together we grab my old character, jump through the skylight, and the wiz detonates the C4.

Dm says he thinks the BBEG is tough enough to survive the explosion. The wiz and I look at him incredulously. We do a few quick calculations and determine that the damage would be something like 24,000d6. DM is speechless for a moment, then agrees that the BBEG didn't survive. Being the geeks we were though, we wanted to know just how much damage it would have been.

I plugged the numbers into a die roller I had programmed into my TI-82 calculator (Yes, I am that much of a geek). 10 minutes later it's still chugging away at it, so I shut it down and run it again for half the dice, and take a few minutes to program the DM's TI-83 and set it up for the other half of the d6s. Eventually (about 20 minutes later), we got the two numbers and added them up. It was over 100,000 damage. The DM decides that the explosion not only killed us and the BBEG, but also blew up half the warehouse district and caused a fire that burned a quarter of Toronto to the ground.

#3 then claimed that he was the only character to survive, because he had driven away. The wiz and i laughed and told him that we had also rigged the car. The look on his face was priceless.

The other time that comes to mind was a time that I single-handedly defeated a major BBEG that we weren't supposed to fight for a very long time. It was a matter of general awesomeness and luck. It was a game based off of the world and mechanics of Final Fantasy 7, set after the events of that game (and was long before anyone ever thought up Advent Children).

I was playing a Black Belt that was out for vengeance. He had been an orphan (or the result of a failed genetic experiment or something like that, I forget the details), and was raised and trained by Tifa Lockheart from the original game. Shortly before the campaign start, she was killed by an unknown enemy.

Through various in-game happenings, our characters were having visions of past events, and my character thus magically witnessed Tifa's final battle. Despite her great skill (she was many levels above us) she was completely outmatched and killed by a guy I didn't recognize. I relayed this information to the other players (which included the Wiz and DM from the previous stories) and told them to keep an eye out for him. It was obvious that my character wanted vengeance.

Some time later, we are in a town and get split up (large party, it tended to happen in towns). One of the other players spots the killer, and (rightfully) knows that we are still nowhere near strong enough to fight him. So the party decides that my character needs to be restrained (and they were right to do so, he would have tried to fight the guy anyway).

So, they decide that the best way to restrain me would be to magically put me to sleep and then tie me up. They take my character by surprise and succeed. But then one of them(the DM from the other stories, iirc) decides that my character will wake up from the sleep too soon, and that the ropes might not be strong enough. So he decides to to beat my character into unconsciousness... oh, and they never bothered to tell my character why they were doing this.

Some time later, my character wakes up, snaps the ropes, quaffs a healing potion and heads downstairs. The BBEG is checking in. Now, my character immediately challenges the BBEG to a fight. The DM informs me OOC that the BBEG would be able to take on the whole party and win, so i should probably reconsider. I decline, because suicide or not it's what my character would do. The rest of the party is (OOC) panicking, but their characters are on the other end of town, dealing with an arsonist. They have no clue what's going on.

We go out of town and begin the battle. The BBEG wins initiative and goes first, almost killing my character in one round. However, the attack fills my limit meter (for those of you not familiar with FF7 mechanics, when you take damage you raise your limit meter. When it is full you can unleash a special attack). As a Black Belt, instead of one super attack, I have a series of powerful attacks that I can chain together. Individually they are weaker than a normal limit break, but if they all hit it's stronger. If you miss one, though, the chain ends. At my level, I have three attacks in the chain.

First attack: Critical hit, and almost max damage Second Attack: Another crit, also near max damage. Third Attack: Perfect hit (rolled a 100 on d%) AND max damage. The BBEG was utterly destroyed.

The DM was stunned. Then he laughed. And laughed. And laughed. He couldn't stop. We had to end the session early, because the DM was so overwhelmed, he couldn't keep running the session. I gained three levels on the spot.

drunkmonk
2008-08-20, 01:02 PM
I used to sit in on a redneck nerd party. Our DM was my ex-gf's younger brother. I knew him for a while before I played in any of the games. I generally would play NPC's that were traveling with the group for some reason. I often died - BUT - we almost never had PC deaths.

long story short we had a TRAP TPK that was with in the first 30 minutes of getting into the bad guys stronghold. I had spent time actually rolling up a character, and put in way too much time (that I did not have to spend) getting into the game that I was looking forward to playing. TPK left everyone dumbstruck. Not me, I was furious. Darin looked at me a little too smugly for somebody 10 years younger than me.

I WWF style hip tossed him over the couch, then threw their stinky brown easy boy on him.

Good times.

DM

AstralFire
2008-08-20, 01:33 PM
What's a goat doing taking flaws?

The Crusader had hydrophobia, not Murray.

*was said broken DM*

I didn't 'snap' and kill the goat so much as I seized an opportunity for goat curry.

Zuki
2008-08-20, 01:47 PM
I felt that a little exaggeration for the sake of a story was worthwhile.

Regrettably, I forgot to mention that it was the party Necromancer that took such a strong liking to the goat in the first place.

Telonius
2008-08-20, 01:50 PM
DM was running a module, I'm playing a Rogue. The party is investigating an old broken-down house.

Me: I search the desk.
DM: You find some old papers, rotted pencils, and what appears to be the deed of the house.
Me: Huh. Wonder who it used to belong to. Whose name is on the last line?
DM: It's faded out, and you can't read it.
Me: Sweet! I sign my name on it. Check it out, I own a house now!
DM: ...

Zuki
2008-08-20, 01:58 PM
Me: Sweet! I sign my name on it. Check it out, I own a house now!
DM: ...

...Your DM should be thanking you. The plothooks you can milk out of sudden, unexpected house ownership?

You've got a house! It's all broken down and you want to fix it up! It's home to a family of kobold squatters you've got to clear out! Someone's secretly running a criminal or cult operation out of it! The damn thing is haunted, or there's a portal to the Far Realms in the basement, all Call of Cthulhu style!

Some DMs would kill to have their PCs follow up on a plothook like that so straightforwardly and honestly.

The New Bruceski
2008-08-20, 02:08 PM
The Crusader had hydrophobia, not Murray.

*was said broken DM*

I didn't 'snap' and kill the goat so much as I seized an opportunity for goat curry.

Riiiiight :smallwink:

Telonius
2008-08-20, 02:26 PM
...Your DM should be thanking you. The plothooks you can milk out of sudden, unexpected house ownership?

You've got a house! It's all broken down and you want to fix it up! It's home to a family of kobold squatters you've got to clear out! Someone's secretly running a criminal or cult operation out of it! The damn thing is haunted, or there's a portal to the Far Realms in the basement, all Call of Cthulhu style!

Some DMs would kill to have their PCs follow up on a plothook like that so straightforwardly and honestly.

There actually turned out to be pirates in the basement (it was a mansion built next to a cliff). Which leads directly to the another story ...

The DM had recovered from my unexpected windfall, and we'd gotten down to the basement, and found the hidden tunnels in the wine cellar. We fought our way through the pirates, but their leader (meant to be a recurring villain) was escaping on a rowboat. None of us had any means to follow.

But then, one of our magic-users (can't remember which one) gets this crazed look in his eye. He starts laughing, then summons a whale. DM asks him where he wants it. "Five feet above the escaping pirate."

It was about a year before we ever got him to DM again.

BigPapaSmurf
2008-08-20, 02:28 PM
Well my PC's broke themselves once and ended up inspiring my screen name, all I was trying to do was introduce Smurfberry juice as a potion, but stupid PCs just had to start some **** with the smurfs. First they tried to interrogate a random smurf, who naturally said smurf/smurfy every other word. This pissed them off and they ended up tossing Smurfette in a sack and flying away on their carpet. After arguing what to do with her, one of them threw her off the side of the carpet, later they went back and made Smurf dinner.

Anyway, little did they know that Papa Smurf was a level 20 necromancer(2nd ed) who was more than a little pissed off,(earlier I had a golem/undead filled dungeon that the PCs cleared, so I made that Papa's Lich lair he was preparing) Long story short, Papa became their arch-enemy, when he trapped them in a lava tube, they were put into temporal stasis 2 miles underground for 3 years. When they were finally saved by an ancient brass wyrm(they had info he needed) they emerged to find their former stronghold and the nearby trading city had become a mushroom kingdom ruled by Papa. and on it went.

Moral to the story, dont do evil just for the hell of it, you will probably regret it.

mroozee
2008-08-20, 02:29 PM
Our group had become pretty large - 6 players and a rotating DM (so 7 PC's total) - and we had to increase the difficulty level in our modules. Our characters also became ridiculously arrogant.

In one store-bought module whose name I can't remember (help?), there were three factions you meet, one was a demon, one was a pair of minotaurs, and a third side that I can't recall. As an add-on at the end of the module, the DM wanted to have an all-out battle between the three sides and forced the PC's to pick a side to help. The idea was that whomever the PC's aided would win but he might kill a couple along the way.

The group, realizing this was the end of the module but not knowing this was a home-brewed add-on, discussed their options and decided as follows:

Two PC's would ally themselves with each faction while the 7th (and most arrogant) of the PC's formed a fourth side in the battle. The idea being that whichever side proved victorious, those PC's would have standing with their powerful ally to get the others raised.

The DM looked at this answer as a mix of the dumbest possible solution and an attempt by the players to ruin the module. Ultimately, he refused to run the battle and simply declared the side with the minotaurs as the winners.

SCPRedMage
2008-08-20, 03:20 PM
He starts laughing, then summons a whale. DM asks him where he wants it. "Five feet above the escaping pirate."
Uh, for future reference, you can't summon an animal into an area it couldn't survive in... They made that rule JUST because of things like that... :smallbiggrin:

Okay, so some friends and I are playing in a gestalt campaign, and we're hired to investigate a series of caravan attacks. Witnesses say the attacks looked like kobolds, but everyone thinks that's impossible, because kobolds were wiped out over 80 years ago. Naturally, I drive the DM batty by nonchalantly insisting that the attackers were, in fact, kobolds. But that's not the "break"...

Anyways, we clear out a dungeon full of kobolds, and get to an underground building. Essentially, it's a tavern full of kobolds. We managed to take 'em all down before they manage to throw the barrels of HIGHLY flammable spirits out at us, and manage to learn that the two people behind the whole thing are meeting with the kobold's leader in the back room, at the end of a long tunnel. I can't remember what the guy's class was, but his girlfriend was a cleric. Obviously, they're supposed to be recurring villains, and we're not supposed to be ABLE to take them down at this point.

So, we come up with a half-baked, but fairly decent plan. We throw open the doors on the meeting, and tossed the very barrels of highly flammable spirits the kobolds intended to us against us. Ka-BOOM.

But the REAL break occurs when, in his first attack, the party's Druid takes a ranged shot at the cleric. And crits. For MAX DAMAGE. Between that and the damage from the spirits, we ended up taking her out before she even got to act. Of course, the other one ended up getting Invisibility cast on 'im and escaped out the back, but we still managed to take out his girlfriend, so he wasn't happy...

DM was kinda sputtering over the whole thing... :smallbiggrin:
And a follow up to that...
Later on, we arrive at a city (DM decided to use Cauldron, actually...) and are greated by a familiar face... Yup, the very same guy whose girlfriend we killed in our first adventure. Naturally, both sides recognize the other, but neither side lets on to that. The guy was trying to get people to stay at his fancy, overpriced inn. Apparently, in this town, he had a very good reputation, so we had to get proof of his crimes before we could act, which was going to be difficult.

So, after the druid spies on him, finds out that yes, he DID recognize him, and yes, he IS sending assassins to take us out that night, we start trying to figure out how to prove it. Then, of course, the Paladin//Sorcerer falls back on a classic: Charm Person.

Basically, he sits down at a table in the guy's rather LOUD tavern, and just keeps spamming Charm Person until the guy fails his save. My Cleric//Rogue follows up with Bestow Curse, using a variant curse from Dragon magazine: makes the target incapable of lying. So between the pally's Charm, my curse, and, of course, the pally's high social skills, we managed to not only get him to confess to the town guards about his previous crimes, but get him to tell us ALL the details on the behind-the-scenes plot he was a part of, as well as a list of OTHER conspirators...

Telonius
2008-08-20, 03:25 PM
Uh, for future reference, you can't summon an animal into an area it couldn't survive in... They made that rule JUST because of things like that... :smallbiggrin:


Oh, I know. It was a long time ago, but I seem to remember the player arguing that since it was a whale (which is a mammal), and since it would be in its base environment within a round... yeah. Of course even if he'd summoned it next to the rowboat, the result would have been the same, just not as funny.

Vael Nir
2008-08-20, 04:46 PM
Our party has a mascot as well. Paul the donkey. He was initially in the possession of our archer, who wasn't exactly on the ball all the time ("I'm an archer, of course I should be in front!"). After this player left the game, Paul became ours. He's even got a character sheet. He wears armour (barding?) fashioned out of crypt spider carapace, has survived plague, undead, demons, demonic boars, worgs and a host of other nasties, while carrying most of our stuff.

On topic: the DM of our current campaign tends to break US (well, me :smallredface: ) instead of the other way round. He doesn't railroad (except for the introduction), just sets a general plot (with a lot of thought out NPCs, he does a lot of bookkeeping and thinking and has a co-GM who runs half the DMPCs and helps by playing out seperate scenes at the same time) and sees what we do. We're not an optimized party, although we are very experienced players.

My Mystic Theurge (straight wizard/cleric/MT, level 10 by now) and a human Psychic Warrior with some fiendish traits in the same party have unfortunately been forced to sign a deal with the over-devil/demon (keep forgetting which one). In order to keep our souls, we need to free his "general" from a long-lost city only accessible to those who possess a certain arcane Mark. My mage started out with this Mark (a corrupted version, which drove him nearly insane before we got rid of it), and knows exactly what he needs to get into the city (he's been there before, pushed through the portal by a curious and unscrupulous elf). The problem is, although he's got the ritual to create it in the original form, he hasn't thought of working it out, and so only knows a vague description of the components needed ("the approval of one of the Lords of Suelia [the lost city]").

So he tries to think of ways to find one of the Lords, knowing that one of them is currently serving an evil cult dedicated to Entropy, specifically by summoning great Outer Horrors onto populated worlds... we had a huge showdown with the cult before, outside the capital city of this enclosed land...

The cultists had infiltrated the city in the last weeks and spread their undead-creating plague in the district of the poor. So, in the middle of the night, powers totally spent, resting for the banquet in our honor (we cured the king of another corrupted mark, a prophecy foretelling this was the reason we were rounded up in the beginning), we're woken up by a horn call. Four thousand zombies march through the city, to the gates, opening them, and continue walking. The guards and us fire at them, killing a few zombies, but provoking no response. We decide to head to the city walls to see what's going on. Turns out the plain next to the city, containing a small island with a magical stone of some sort (think of the Whitestone from dragonlance) has a few constructs standing around it. Contructs with great big whirling chains, which the zombies are marching towards. Which clues Marcus (me) into what could be coming next. Especially since the zombies that we killed left some shimmering blue stuff that flew in the islands general direction.

Above the island, we see an old antagonist floating, a Lich of some kind of the Entropans. Uh oh. At this point, I couldn't believe that our DM hadn't even allowed us to rest fully before unleashing this upon us. We were all about level 6 at the time, so we knew had no real hope of stopping this. We weren't about to give up now, however, so half of us dropped down from the walls and started running towards the island. The other half stayed with one of the DMPCs, a very neurotic high-level Wizard apparently serving the king, called George.

George starts casting something, and we see summoned giant wasps appear next to us. He asks us to mount, summons a host of lantern archons, and we start flying towards the island, zapping zombies on the way. And we see another one of the Entropy brigade appear ahead of us. Anxiphe, an evil arcane caster of some kin... George, seeing this, goes for her, as do we. They collide (or are in some way forced down), and go down in the zombie horde. We hear spellcasting, and a couple rounds later movement stops... and our mounts begin to dissapear. I steer desperately towards the river, hoping to not land in the middle of the zombies. I succeed, and turn to face the island. At this point, my (IC and OOC) jaw drops as the DM describes...

The combine-harvester constructs have been "killing" undead for minutes now, the souls have been flying towards the lich... and a portal has opened. A HUGE portal. An Outer Horror (Marcus, while he still had the corrupted mark, experienced unsettling dreams... this thing was one of the recurring ones) has pushed its 600 foot head through the portal already. The rest of the party is either trying to attack the Lich and his companion, an undead Lord of Suelia. Marcus stops pissing his pants, and tries to think of something. I turn to the GM. "Hey, I've still got that wish, right?" (trading away your soul, even under coercion, can have unforseen benefits)

"I wish for You, Maztema, to get rid of that thing!"

My DM, at this point, looks at his co-GM, and both start cackling uncontrollably (I couldn't know at this point that they were planning that anyway!). :smalleek:

Sure enough, the over-devil himself appears and starts draining soul-energy out of the Horror. Marcus, pleased that his wish apparently averted the end of the world, starts helping his friends with the Lord. The Lord is much tougher than us (wayyy over our level), but a desperate bullrush by our psychic warrior pushes him into the reach of one of the harvesters. Ouch. His Lich buddy manages to rescue him and teleport away... leaving us alone on a very bloody battlefield.

The reason *why* I've had to explain this encounter is the ludicrous *DOH* moment I experience as I fully work out the Ritual. "Approval of a Lord of Suelia" means needing a little bit of blood of the same to complete it... had I worked it out before the battle (and not two weeks later), we would all already have the mark! :smallredface: I chased the wrong MacGuffin for two weeks!

My expression when the DM told me about this was priceless. The player of the Psychic Warrior was pretty pissed about it... we were a couple of weeks away from the battlefield by then.

It was resolved fairly quickly in the end, but that's a story for another time.

Our DM is awesome. He does however break us from time to time.

I swear, writing this has just reminded me of how awesome this campaign is. The description above really doesn't do it justice. :smallbiggrin:

Dr Bwaa
2008-08-20, 05:45 PM
Anytime someone posts a wall of text that size on a thread like this, I always read it because 99% of the time, it's some anecdote from a truly great campaign :smallbiggrin:


Must say, fendrin, I really enjoyed yours as well =D

One of my best friends was also the first DM in our group of friends, and to this day I have never seen him broken. Someday, I will do it, and I will tell you all about it, but until then, I'll have to give you a couple examples of things that didn't break him, but should have.

My gnome bard was involved in a battle with some giant skeleton of some kind, and some dread wraiths and various other nasties in a very undead-centered campaign, about ECL 15 at this time. After throwing down some buffs and still the battle wasn't over, she decided on a new plan of action to help out the paladin, who was on hhis gryphon mount and the only one flying at the time. So Mumbles (my bard) casts dimension door to teleport about 1000' straight into the air.
Me: Alright, now I'm going to try to surf my guitar for a bit until I get closer to some enemies. I'm aiming for the big skeleton.
DM: *doesn't even blink* DEX rolls!
Me: *natural 20 DEX check*
DM: sweet.
I surfed my dragonbone guitar to the skeleton, accelerating the whole way, and as I reached it, grab the guitar and attempt to bash its head in (beats trying to walk up to it on the ground through a horde of litter undead), singing all the while. I roll an attack and miraculously hit the thing: while moving at (after some quick calculations and allowing my DEX check to ignore air resistance) 140 m/s--nearly 315 mph! being made of neigh-unbreakable dragonbone, my guitar survived, but the skeleton... not so much (I did have trouble finding my guitar afterwards though). I cast feather fall when I was about to hit the ground.

Since then, Mumbles has used that stragegy a few times, with various results and modifications. For instance, one time she teleported, and then began casting all the Conjuration spells she knew, so that when she hit the ground, she did so amongst a swarm of rats, a couple summoned monsters, and a gong.

There was also the time she botched her DEX check and nearly died =D

The other time that comes to mind right off of "things that didn't break our DM" was when we found a leyline that had just been reopened by the BBEG epic lich (same campaign). After getting a glance at the BBEG, he teleported away and left an ubered up nightcrawler for us to play with instead. After killing it (the pally jumped into its mouth and then did about 80 damage the next round with a dagger), and the wizard's golem exploding from touching the ground on the leyline, the wizard/archmage gathered the party together for a teleportation (the leyline was screwing up the Weave everywhere, so the only safe way to teleport is to do so directly from the leyline). Before we went, however, he asked everyone,
Archmage: Anyone know anything about circle magic?
Me: *bardic knowledge* yes!
Archmage: all right, we don't really have enough knowhow, but we're going to try. Start donating spell slots, people! *godly spellcraft roll*
DM: (again, doesn't even twitch) Alright, go for it.
We ended up casting several disgusting spells through circle magic on a powerful leyline, to try to screw up the town the BBEG had taken over for use as a staging ground, while we were going off to play with some dragons who had some important information for us about the specific kinds of undead this lich was trying to bring about (in OOC knowledge, I actually have a fairly good idea that he's intending to create a Bonfire of Insanity, among other things). The result: a 200-foot-high Flaming Sphere rolling across town, with prismatic effects inside it and dealing fire and sonic damage, cast by a 16th-level archmage with jury-rigged circle magic on a newly-opened leyline: caster level 53. He did a couple other things, too, before we teleported, and when we got to the oasis in the desert we were going to, he dropped to the ground, aged twenty years, and fell asleep for a couple days.

BRC
2008-08-20, 05:59 PM
Anytime someone posts a wall of text that size on a thread like this, I always read it because 99% of the time, it's some anecdote from a truly great campaign :smallbiggrin:


Must say, fendrin, I really enjoyed yours as well =D

One of my best friends was also the first DM in our group of friends, and to this day I have never seen him broken. Someday, I will do it, and I will tell you all about it, but until then, I'll have to give you a couple examples of things that didn't break him, but should have.

My gnome bard was involved in a battle with some giant skeleton of some kind, and some dread wraiths and various other nasties in a very undead-centered campaign, about ECL 15 at this time. After throwing down some buffs and still the battle wasn't over, she decided on a new plan of action to help out the paladin, who was on hhis gryphon mount and the only one flying at the time. So Mumbles (my bard) casts dimension door to teleport about 1000' straight into the air.
Me: Alright, now I'm going to try to surf my guitar for a bit until I get closer to some enemies. I'm aiming for the big skeleton.
DM: *doesn't even blink* DEX rolls!
Me: *natural 20 DEX check*
DM: sweet.
I surfed my dragonbone guitar to the skeleton, accelerating the whole way, and as I reached it, grab the guitar and attempt to bash its head in (beats trying to walk up to it on the ground through a horde of litter undead), singing all the while. I roll an attack and miraculously hit the thing: while moving at (after some quick calculations and allowing my DEX check to ignore air resistance) 140 m/s--nearly 315 mph! being made of neigh-unbreakable dragonbone, my guitar survived, but the skeleton... not so much (I did have trouble finding my guitar afterwards though). I cast feather fall when I was about to hit the ground.


You sir win an internet.

The only time that really came close was our DM's "Halloween Special" adventure, wherein we were attacked by jack-o-lantern headed wood golems that grew more powerful the more of them were around. We captured the first two that the DM threw at us, and a little experimentation told us that snuffing out their candles caused them to shut down. at this point the DM sends a heafty mob of them at us. We had two half dragons- one with a water breath weapon, and one with an ice breath weapon. One breath weapon took out the whole group as the frost went through the face carvings and took out the candle.


Later we encountered another mob of them, this time without any carving, and the fight consisted of us using things like Magic Missles (My character had a helmet that fired them) to puch holes in their heads four at a time so we could pull the breath-weapon trick again.

Destichado
2008-08-20, 06:06 PM
It happened to me on my first night as a DM. I wasn't particularly familiar with the rules, and was relying on my players to help out if I missed anything. So in an encounter I was gleefully trampling the entire party with a war-elephant, when all of a sudden the fighter speaks up. Apparently there's this class ability in 4E that allows a fighter to make an opportunity attack and stop an enemy dead in its tracks. :smalleek:

4E being new at the time, the whole gaming group was baffled at the idea of anyone being so badass that he could hit a rampaging elephant, and the elephant would be like "woah! I'd better back off!"

Tadanori Oyama
2008-08-20, 06:31 PM
New World of Darkness, playing a basic human adventure. One of my players was a boxer.

The players saw a thing in the shadows, one of them pointed the flash light towards it and caught the edge of something. Boxer wanted to tackle it, which basically broke me right there. Nasty thing in the shaodws, dark alleyway, all the rumors about werewolves, and he wants to tackle it?
That guy refused to be afraid of anything, I didn't take that into account.

Anyway, he drops the seven dice he gets on the roll and, by the end, totalled up ten successes and snaps the bugger's neck.

In retrospect I could've dealt with it differently but this was my first game, I didn't improv well.

So, villain's dead... now what? I can't even remember what I had them do for the rest of the game, it's all a hazy bad dream. *sigh*

drengnikrafe
2008-08-20, 07:57 PM
Oh, man, I love this story. I am the DM in this case.

DM: As you enter the clearing, you notice a squirrel run by your feet, and an owl swoops down at it. The owl carries off--

Player: How high does the owl fly when it passes us?

DM: Uhh... I don't know, maybe 5 or 6 feet off the ground.

Player: I punch the owl.

DM: *Stare Blankly* .... uhh...... Roll an attack roll?

Player: *rolls* Woohoo! 18!

DM: The owl.. uhh... collapses to the ground in a bloody, barely alive heap.

Player: I pull out it's feathers.

DM: .......

Dr Bwaa
2008-08-21, 01:33 AM
*awesome owl story*

Classic. Do I assume correctly that the owl & squirrel were basically just flavor?

drengnikrafe
2008-08-21, 02:03 AM
Classic. Do I assume correctly that the owl & squirrel were basically just flavor?

Of course. I wanted it to seem a little more like a real forest.

I did a bad job of trying to get him back when a first level rogue broke into his room wearing an owl mask and tried to stab him. The rogue was a member of OLU. Owl Liberties Union. He wore an owl mask. There was a broken window and a corpse just outside the room that night...

burninnapalm
2008-08-21, 09:52 AM
lol i was in a group that did one time. our group was facing a ton of skellies one time. (2e) we were escaping a castle that had skellie archers, skellie foot soldiers and cav blocking the entrance charging us. our half ogre barbarian ripped off a side of the barn we started in and had everyone go under him to use it as an umbrella from the archers. then our mage used 1 1st lvl spells to take out the skellie army. grease and enlarge. a combat that was suppose to take 3 hours lasted us 15 mins. after that the dm stood up, grabbed a stack of papers, and said this, and i quote "3 weeks of work down the drain." and threw the stack of papers that had stats for all of the monsters away.

Fri
2008-08-21, 11:06 AM
I have been broken by my playe in my original system game.

Well, so in this session, the party sneaks into the BBEG castle and found an imprisoned pretty girl. The party's lovable rogue (and a lecherous pervert) set her free.

The girl turn out to be a powerful genie/demon/whatever, and it give the rogue one wish. Mind you this is a light game and started as a spontaneous one. And what, the rogue wished that the demon turned into a beautiful girl and marry him happily ever after or something (I forgot the exact word).

That's somewhat not expected, but still fine.

What made me broken was, the rogue constantly hitting and making advance to the girl . I kept hinting that I don't want the game turned into some sort of sexual RP, but man, he kept making advance to the girl (aka me).

It's all in good fun, but I had to stop hinting and putting it bluntly before things got ugly.

Well, looking backward, I think he specifically want to broke my mind though.

Ravyn
2008-08-23, 01:14 AM
So there I am. First major game I've ever run, second session. Group runs into a quintet of people who are supposed to be running antagonists....

....and recruits them.

Good news was, it did things for the story I would never have come up with otherwise.

They followed this up, about twelve games later, by telling the most powerful person in the setting they knew something that he really should have killed them for. Fortunately there were enough extenuating circs that I could let them survive.

I still rag on them constantly for that one.

Then there's my favorite story for how I broke my GM. Small group, just been invited into enemy territory, and our wonderfully smug "host" is showing us around his little pocket-city. Including the main power-source, some sort of trapped elemental. Now, along with knowing full well the tactical applications of cutting off the power, a lot of us were freedom-loving sorts who felt sorry for the poor thing. But would you believe he was taken completely aback by our decision to free it?

Dr Bwaa
2008-08-23, 02:38 AM
I'll keep you up-to-date on whether or not I just broke my players in my first PbP DMing experience, with the :smalleek:12-page Word Document:smalleek: story (an old legend, parts of which are true and parts of which aren't) that I just had a bard tell at the inn where they're staying. The whole party isn't even there; they've barely met each other at all. I...got carried away :smallredface:

Nychta
2008-08-23, 05:22 AM
One of the inexperienced DMs I had was... not too canny. He had all these obstacles set up (terribly cliche and easy to bypass mind you) and was really upset when I had the "answer" to everything.
I don't know whether this counts, though. He was broken by my potions of spider climb, the fact that tenser's floating disk could carry our gear/a gnome across lava, and the rowboat that my rogue pulled out of her backpack.
We were then up against a powerful mage. I cast silence, with a wand that I happened to have. The mage didn't have silent spell, so we laughed at him for a while then tied him up and stole his stuff.
... Actually, I think we carried him around his own tower, forcing him to speak the command words for the doors.

Osgiliath
2008-08-23, 05:43 AM
I was recruited to DM the 4th edition module that was played on this year's D&D Day. The final encounter the party had in the cave underneath the graveyard was over in less then a couple of seconds when the party Wizard with an initiative of 24 successfully casts sleep on "the big bad boss." Of course he rolls a natural 20 and of course I don't make the save. The next second I get Coup De Grad by the party Fighter for 6d6 + 4 resulting in 30 points of damage. Needless to say the boss didn't survive the blow.

Most of the other DMs around me got TPK's while my party effectively BROKE the module...

A sad day for DMs everywhere :-p

The Glyphstone
2008-08-23, 08:25 AM
I got broken by my group, for a few minutes at least, in a scene that's since become one of my (and their) favorite sessions.

They had infiltrated a mage's guild to steal some secret documents, and ended up in the personal chambers of a crazed, combat-obsessed warmage. The room was "themed" like a WWI battlefield complete with trenches, barbed wire barriers, and blocks at the other end for the mage to hide behind while pelting them with spells. It's supposed to be a fairly difficult fight -

Then the Rogue rolls a natural 20 plus his hefty skill bonus on a Bluff check to convince said insane warmage that the party is not the enemy, but a group of last-minute reinforcements to his (imaginary) "side". One tanked Sense Motive check later, and they've both avoided a nasty combat and gained a somewhat unreliable ally.

Waspinator
2008-08-23, 11:04 AM
Then there's my favorite story for how I broke my GM. Small group, just been invited into enemy territory, and our wonderfully smug "host" is showing us around his little pocket-city. Including the main power-source, some sort of trapped elemental. Now, along with knowing full well the tactical applications of cutting off the power, a lot of us were freedom-loving sorts who felt sorry for the poor thing. But would you believe he was taken completely aback by our decision to free it?

You know, you need to be VERY careful to find out exactly what and who the thing is BEFORE you free it:
http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/PTS

Conners
2008-08-23, 11:59 AM
Happened in my first (and only thus far) campaign: 3.5ed, 1st level. My players were being assaulted by a battalion of crossbow-expert kobolds, they would've stood no chance if not for the divine intervention which caused all the crossbows to malfunction and not fire. Thus, the players had a chance to rush at the kobolds whilst they were trying to reload--allowing them to overtake said kobolds with a tough battle.
The party's dwarven fighter, however, suddenly decided to hide behind a conjured horse whilst the cleric and monk charged... into a mob of 10 to 15 well-equipped kobolds :smalleek:... So desperate appeared the situation, that I had the god tell the mage of the party to ride on said horse into front-line battle against the kobolds (he was out of spells) and gave his dagger a temporary enchantment. I had a talk with the dwarf, after the encounter, about the conduct of his character...

On situations where I caused my DM to break, I guess the time I gave my gnoll an extra level because it said "Level Adjustment +1" on his racial statistics. I was completely new to the game at the time, as you may guess XD.

sonofzeal
2008-08-23, 03:16 PM
In a homebrew system I once played, my character had a variety of healing and endurance powers, and I managed to convince the DM that my anti-disease ability should allow me to kill germs and bacteria as well.

Flash forward to the first major confrontation with the BBEG, where I decide to purge his digestive track of all those nice symbiotic bacteria. One bout of explosive diarrhea later, and the campaign was basically dead.

ghost_warlock
2008-08-24, 01:34 AM
Most of my DM breaking happened becaue My DM has a missile-attracting crotch. And we tended to have mini-food fights during our sessions. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry when he got hit with a nutty bar (http://www.littledebbie.com/products/NuttyBars.asp). And the look on his face when the wandering coconut minidonut landed perfectly in his lap was priceless.

Other In-Game ways I've broken My DM:

He created an intelligent ooze guardian for a dungeon, which was subsequently avoided by the use if suggestion (looking back, we're pretty sure that involved a misinterpretation of the rules).
The shadow dragon threat he had planned to spend hours on was simply disintegrated.
Otiluke's Resilient Sphere on the BBEG during a chase scene.
Asking to swap out characters because my previous character's wife wanted him to come home and stop "messing around."
In a futuristic StarGate/Terminator/ALIENS campaign, we planted enough explosives under the SkyNet production facility to sink Japan and cause nuclear winter. Not sure about how that happened...
In lieu of standard payment for some miscellaneous adventuring, asking for some blueberry pancakes.
Backstab crit on the BBEG wizard during his monologue abruptly ended the encounter. (2e)
The blind BBEG's medusa slave/guardian was caught in a *compromising situation* by the party rogue and wizard when the paladin wasn't paying attention. Courtesy of DM Fiat, that officially Never Happened.
"MMMmmm. This hellhound is delicious! Please pass the snout."
"Ah, gold dragons...the urinal cakes of dragonkind."
Locking a female drow warrior in a closet "for later."
Offering to take the ogre-in-a-dress in Chateau d'Amberville "away from all this drudgery" and then trying to seal the deal with a kiss (this is the sort of thing that happens when one of the PCs is less sane than the supposedly insane NPCs).


The last 7 were all with the same PC.

Wish
2008-08-24, 11:28 AM
Have you ever broken your DM, or as a DM have you ever been broken by a player? To be clear what I mean is, has a character in one of your games ever done something so totally unexpected that you where at least initially at a lose as to what to do about it?
Yes you do not need to describe what broken is. We understand what you meant. : )




For example: As a player my character, a telepath, reached into a tiny rift in the fabric of the planes (caused by the BBEG) with her mind in an effort to see what might be out there. My DM looked at me and said "You do what!?" After a few moments he ruled that my mind was over loaded by the experience, and that the neat pin prick in the fabric of the planes was, unintentionally, torn by my effort. This lead to a great adventure where the other party members had to enter my characters mind and help to piece her psyche back together.

HAHAHA lol . That is some "messed" up Dungeon Mastering. Lol. Actually laughed here. Jeeeeeez some players can be so difficult. What happened to the days of a chaotic thief and a lawful paladin being the only party members adventuring. Drama !

Draig
2008-09-14, 04:09 PM
I'm not sure if this would count, but One time when my group was playing we had kept running into this sorcerer that was constantly being brought back. So finally what we did was, *Deep breath*

1) after killing the man we used the Flesh to Stone spell.
2) after F to S, our druid used a scroll of Stone to mud
3) after S to M our DM had laughed and said "The water HAS to evaporate so his soul will eventually just float away" (Dont ask...) so THEN one of our rangers decided to make a water evap trap over top of the mud pit and we waited 3 days for it to evaporate. because ya kno... it HAD to.
4) Once the watery soul was collected we all drank some of it.
5) after the drink we all proceeded to go and Number 1 in seperate and opposite flowing entities of water.

After that the DM began a fit of mumbles and "Ugh... Ah... How... Wha..." sounds. :smallbiggrin:

AslanCross
2008-09-14, 04:24 PM
Is that the annoying guy who tries to make friends with everybody? Those people make me unhappy.

He's the guy who tries to look cute to all the girls. His favorite line is "I'm a monster, raarrr!"

In a game I was running, one of the players, a Monk, almost used his Fiery Fists to blow up a smokepowder stash that the boss (a hobgoblin fighter captain) was standing close to. He somehow thought that I'd allow him a save against the explosion if he was standing on ground zero. (The explosion would've killed him, the boss, and the entire party, with the side effect of destroying the garrison the PCs were supposed to retake from the party.)

potatocubed
2008-09-14, 04:44 PM
I broke a GM in Exalted by inventing futures trading with my super-social merchant. Then we broke her all over again with all the wonderful things you can do with two characters with Resources 5 (enough money to buy anything, several times over).

I have been broken as a GM occasionally. Here are a few choice moments - all from one campaign - that forced me to make some major adjustments on the fly:

The paladin took a perfectly well-parked airship and reversed it into the flying ziggurat, destroying the airship and taking out three characters.

I didn't expect them to actually release the obviously trapped-in-a-crystal-tomb demon lord.

I didn't expect Drego to put on the evil bio-armour, steal the McGuffin Stone and unleash a pack of winter wolves on an unsuspecting city.

I didn't expect them to crash the noble party, start a conga line, get thrown out, kick the head of security in the nuts and steal his magic sword. Oh, and nearly murder one of the guests then change their mind and leave her so she can come back to wreak vengeance on them later.

I can't even remember how they ended up in the middle of nowhere with no clothes, no equipment, an unconscious dwarf cleric and several smarter-than-they-were-letting-on riding dinosaurs, but I think it had something to do with the previously mentioned demon lord.

I could go on. I haven't even started in on the list of things they destroyed that they weren't suppsoed to. Man, I've got to run another campaign with inept players... :smalltongue:

CaptainSam
2008-09-14, 07:29 PM
Breaking our DM? Apparently, we've done it, just the once.

A few years ago, we were in a campaign set in Menzoberranzan. We all started out as first level males in the Academy. I was a rogue and we also had a sorceror and a fighter.

Anyway, as low-level plebs, males at that, we had to share a dormitory with the other trainees. There were a couple of others who got our attention. One was a quiet sort, kept to himself. Instantly suspicious. And the other was this loudmouth braggart who was always going on about how rich he was and how he was in with Bregan De'arth. For those of you who don't know the setting, Bregan De'arth is a criminal organisation, run by the duplicitous Jarlaxle (he's well 'ard!). The gobby one was called Vron. We hated him instantly.

After several years of Vron running his mouth off at every available opportunity, we decided to shut him up. Murdering would be too good for him. We needed something special. Looking through the quiet chaps locker one night (hey, I was training to be a rogue, I had to nose through stuff!), we found that he was a worshipper of Shar. Being pious little drowlings, we knew that Lolth didn't like anyone else. by all rights, we should have shopped him to the Matrons. But no, this presented an opportunity we couldn't miss!

We swapped his holy paraphernalia with the contents of Vron's locker! Whammo! Instant blasphemy! One "random" locker check later, totally not instigated by us, and Vron was Drider-bait! Yay!

A couple of days later, Jarlaxle and Bregan De'arth storm the Academy, kill some priestesses and bugger off. We kept our heads down. Nothing to do with us, no sir, Mr Jarlaxle Sir!

And that was the end of it. Or so I thought. It's only now, several years after the campaign ended that I've found out that Vron was in fact a major plot hook. We were meant to get pally with him and thus, get into Bregan De'arth!

Not only that, but Jarlaxles attack was retribution for the slaying of his son!

Hindsight's a bugger, eh! Still, Vron deserved it, he was a knob!

ninjabreadman22
2008-09-14, 08:02 PM
In our campaign it was our DM's first time DMing and he had a whole storyline planned out and expected us to simply follow along with the plan. Despite his lack of experience however, he decided to start us of at a high level. I don't remember what level exactly, but I suggested we rob a bank. When we went through with the plan and it worked he went nuts on us. We broke through the back with acid and killed all the guards with 6 or 7 walls of fire. He didn't know about circles of death.

The New Bruceski
2008-09-14, 11:23 PM
I think we broke ours for a moment on Friday. Fighter was well-placed to keep four orcs off the rrest of us. The fifth one goes out of his way to charge the guy, taking two AoOs, and succeeded on a bull rush to let the others through. The player's response?

"Dude, I'm a dwarf."

Whether it broke the DM or not, we couldn't stop laughing for five minutes.

BizzaroStormy
2008-09-14, 11:26 PM
Well from what i've been told, my DM was already broken. I found out that he'd had an anxiety attack which is why he didnt post in any of our PBP games for a while. I had been bitching up a storm about it before I found out and now I feel like a total ass hat.

Yahzi
2008-09-14, 11:49 PM
Here's how we broke my DM:

My good Norse cleric was going to war with an evil Norse cleric (of higher level). I surrounded his base with my army, and the DM spent weeks designing a hall of death traps for us to fight our way through.

We meet for the climatic session. I say, "Before we start a battle, I have to try and settle it peacefully, because I'm good. So I want to parley."

I go up to the entrance under a flag of truce. I tell the evil cleric I want him to come to a single meeting to try and settle our differences.

Right, he says, as soon as I leave, you'll kill me.

I swear that we'll return him to his lair afterwards, and if anything was not returned to his satisfaction, he could have my soul. I sign a contract in blood asserting this.

Now, the DM knows he's being tricked. He knows that I know that the evil cleric will just find some trivial detail (oh, the stars aren't in the same position as when I left, so I GET YOUR SOUL! MUHAHAHAHAH!). And yet here I am agreeing to this. He just can't stand it, so he... agrees.

We teleport the evil cleric to the Tomb of Horrors, point to a doorway, and explain that Odin himself is waiting on the other side to make the cleric a peace offer. The evil cleric walks through the door... and has his alignment and sex changed.

The text of the ToH specifically states that the character will not want his alignment changed back.

Odin appears and says, "Well, you're a 13th level cleric... without a God. I could use another 13th level cleric, I guess. Want the job?"

The now-good cleric says, yes, of course. He walks back outside, to where we are. I drop to one knee and say, OK, boss - what do we do now? (His 14th level evil magic user wife was still hiding in his lair, along with all his minions (The DM ruled we eventually got her out of there, and tossed her through the doorway too).

The DM had spent weeks making a hallway of death... and we defeated it in 20 minutes without touching any dice.

He never ran D&D again for us. I kid you not.

(We did switch to GURPS, though, so he wasn't permanently broken. :smallbiggrin: )

DarknessLord
2008-09-14, 11:57 PM
No bluff check, really?

If I was DMing that I would have at least have had a bluff versus sense motive check, the dudes a cleric, so he at LEAST has high wisdom, even if maybe not ranks in the skill...

But still, that's freaking awesome!

Friv
2008-09-15, 01:18 AM
I have three stories from two games, although neither are D&D. One I ran, one I played.

#1 - Scion

(Only rules things worth noting if you haven't played - you roll many dice per action, and count up the number of dice that "succeed". Average is one success per two dice. Damage is rolled the same. Most people can take about eight damage.)

In our second-last major boss fight, the players have reached the headwaters of the Nile, and are trying to prevent a smoke-formed dragon from corrupting the Nile and destroying the Underworld of the Egyptian Gods, which would cut off their power and unmake them. The creature was a monstrosity. Mind-affecting auras, devastating claw attacks, dubiously high defenses and damage resistance. I was seriously worried that I would have to downgrade it mid-fight if the players got hurt too much.

GM: The smoke swirls around you, claws growing out of strands of sand and mist. The creature now stands revealed, screeching its anger as it curls down towards you. *rolls some dice* Anyone have mental defense at 9? No? Wow, good luck there. Although the power of the creature's presence batters at your minds, you resist the urge to fall down in worship. First actions.
Player 1: I delay to attack at the same time as Player 2. I snap up my revolver, cycle the barrels, and flip into the air, sending a bullet straight down the monster's throat.
Player 2: I shoulder my rifle, mutter a quick prayer to Thoth to guide my bullet, leap off my horse and fire it sideways, catching the dragon across the head to cross Player 1's bullet.
GM: Very nice! Alright, you guys have thirteen and fourteen dice to hit. You need seven successes. Roll it.
*dice roll*
Player 1: Eleven.
Player 2: Ten.
GM: I... see. Very nice. Alright, roll for damage. You'll lose the first eight successes.
Player 2: What?! That's crazy. We're never going to kill this thing. *sighs* Well, here goes.
*dice roll*
Player 1: Uh....
Player 2: Um...
GM: What?
Player 1: Fifteen damage.
Player 2: Eighteen damage.
GM: ... Really.
Player 2: No, wait. Nineteen. I forgot my weapon bonus.
GM: ... :smalleek:
Players 3-4: Do we get an action?

Dragon dies. Instantly.

Then they reach the final boss and his buddies, who I've beefed up even more... and decide that, instead of fighting him, they're going to talk him out of fighting at all. Through an entertaining mix of sarcasm, idealism, and references to the dragon dying in two bullets.

At which point I declared that I was glad the game was ending. ;)

#2 - Exalted

Our player group had just avoided the evil local Wyld Hunt, a group of powerful magical beings that wanted our heads, and run into the depths of formless chaos to protect some podunk kingdom of savages from an invasion by the souleating Fae. We had defeated the invasion with all speed, repaired some ancient magical temples, and were generally feeling pretty good. Then we got this exchange:

NPC: So, there are a lot of Fair Folk swarming around the area. They can't get in any more, but if you want to get home in the next couple of months, you'll have to leave now.
PC #1 (me): Thanks, but we're cool.
GM: Huh?
PC #2: Well, we figured this is a great place to lie low for two or three months. Plus we're right next to formless chaos, which is really going to be great for my artificery.
PC #1: And I have to teach these guys how to farm, so that we can set up a proper trade system with our hometown when we get back. That'll take, like, a month.
GM: But... the Fair Folk...
PC #2: That's true. We'll probably launch some raids to pick some of them off from safely in here. Better that way.
GM: But... um...

He got us back by having the Hunt raze our town while we were gone, but it was totally worth it. ;)

Kurald Galain
2008-09-15, 07:26 AM
Interesting thread.

I recall having "broken" two DMs (and by "me" I mean "the entire party that I happened to be part of"). Neither was a particularly good DM, but the former has the excuse of being new to the job, since he was about 16 and had been RPG'ing for about a year tops.

One. Well, the campaign was fun for a long time. There was a bit of inter-party conflict but no biggies. Then, the party paladin died in combat. Well, that happens. The paladin's player figured we'd resurrect him, and the DM created a quest we could go on for that purpose, since we were around level 7 at the time, and couldn't cast it ourselves yet.
Two problems. One, this quest was presented as rather difficult and possibly above our characters' abilities. Two, turns out that none of the characters really liked the pally all that much. So, speaking in-character, we didn't really want to take that quest. So we didn't, and the pally made another character.
His new character was a wizard; we already had a wizard, so that's a bit of an overlap there, but more importantly his character was rather obnoxious, and presented in the fashion of the movie, "The Players". This broke down when we wanted to travel on, either by boat or by horse. We sold our horses to buy a boat. He didn't want to go by boat so proceeded to set it on fire out of spite. We then proceeded to cast Charm Person on him. At that point the table broke down in squabbles, the DM couldn't cope, and we never convened that group again.

Two. This was a short campaign with a rather bad DM, who had been playing for a decade so really had no excuse. It was fun because the players were all friends, but the game was really bad. In particular, every single NPC we spoke to was either completely ignorant, or near-omniscient but unwilling to tell us anything, or completely insane, or sometimes two or three from that list. Also, many NPCs were ten or more levels above the party (well, the system didn't have levels, but that's the idea). The party was accompanied by four elves that could each outrun a horse, single-handedly outfight all opposition we faced, and knew everything but weren't telling. Unsurprisingly, that's not very much fun.
The plot was incomprehensible because we tended to teleport at random, either when we were headed off the railroad or did something the DM didn't like, or sometimes for plot reasons. We had been staving off hoards of undead, forced to repair city walls, escaped from a murder trial for some reason, etc. Then all the water disappeared from the world. YA RLY. Somehow this didn't cause us to dehydrate and die, but we were tasked to find the water. This was accomplished by finding one of those uber-powerful NPCs and explain the problem to him, since he essentially knew everything except that.
So we were asked, in character, to explain the campaign to that NPC. Turns out that none of us had a clue since there was no rhyme, reason, or pattern to anything that had happened to us so far. This was when another DM took over with a new campaign that was less idiotic.

Kurald Galain
2008-09-15, 07:56 AM
I would submit that anybody who can't see that "unlimited 0th level spells" is a bad idea, shouldn't be DMing.

Interestingly, that is precisely what Paizo is suggesting for their Pathfinder D&D 3.75 game.

As a DM myself, I don't think I've ever been "broken" per se, although I've had my share of "You do WHAT?!!" moments. For instance,

The party was adventuring in the mountains, running up and down on a small mountain path. Wanting to drive home the point that steep mountains are dangerous and running around in sheer abandon is not such a good idea, I asked for a few dex checks. One of the characters rolled a critical failure, twice in a row, so I tell him he's fallen off the path and is now hanging by his hands from a precarious ledge, over a 500-foot drop.
I figured the party would toss him a rope to get him up again. The party druid thought otherwise. She grinned at him, explained that he hadn't been very nice to her recently, and kicked him off the ledge. Well, she wasn't a druid for much longer after that...

Then, at some point, the party had gotten their hands on the Staff of the Seven Seas, a major artifact. Of course, artifacts don't come with instruction manuals, and attempting to do anything with it is rather hazardous for anyone with insufficient willpower (i.e. wisdom score). This one was rather responsive to emotions, which is to say that if you panic while holding the staff, any large bodies of water nearby will get turbulent.
Now, in an attempt to do something useful with said staff, the party wizard (which was not known for his strength of will) figured he'd test the staff by dipping it in the sea and turning it in circles.... while the party was on a boat.
Obvious in retrospect was that this would cause a major whirlpool and sink the boat. The party just barely survived because some of them could swim really well, and the Staff could confer waterbreathing on the others.

Sstoopidtallkid
2008-09-15, 07:58 AM
Why did the Druid lose her status? It's not like hurting humanoids is against nature.

Kurald Galain
2008-09-15, 08:10 AM
Why did the Druid lose her status? It's not like hurting humanoids is against nature.

No, but purposefully betraying party members is.

In my campaign you can't have divine power without worshipping a specific deity. The druid followed a nature god who is LG, and this wasn't the first evil deed to her name, just the final straw.

(edit) for the record, the victim didn't survive the fall, and the party did not have a means of resurrection.

Zombiemode
2008-09-15, 06:07 PM
Ah this reminds of a long while ago.
It was my first ever real DnD campaign (We're currently still playing it too).
ECL 1 campaign, The party consisted of
A warforged Warblade
A half-drow Ninja(me)
A pyromaniac human Sorceror
A Human Rogue Sniper
And a Human Wizard(NPC)

We all decide to, for the money, assist the rogue in an endeavor. He was given the mission to rescue his contact and long time friend Jack from some nearby ruins where kobolds had taken him.
After Successfully blowing a giant stone door of its hinges using copious amounts of oil, we proceeded inside and dispatched a few kobolds. We searched around the ruins and found some rotting cow meat, which we cut up and smoked. This food source has not run out 15 sessions later.
anyway we come to a fork in a long hallway, taking a right turn we eventually make it to a dead end, so we turn around. There is now a wall behind us. Having convinced myself both walls were illusions, i managed to will my way through the one in the way we were originally going. Finding out the wall was illusionary gave everyone enough of a bonus to get through except the min-maxed Warforged (could one hit pretty much anything at this point, but i could convince him invisible ducks were all around him with bluff) couldnt physically get through the wall (even on a 20... ah flaws).
Eventually we dragged him through a wall that was impossible fr him to get through.
Our Dm, being the wiley sort, didnt even blink at our ludicrous victory. anyway we end up staring down (at ECL1) a mirror of opposition. The warforged easily dispatches the sorceror and the rogues clones, mine managed to escape. (the battle is foggy to remember but i do remember quite a few laughs and tears...)
Now we have made it past 2 massively overleveled obstacles. The DM is practically comatose at this point. Anyway as a result of getting to the end of the hallway, we get sent 2500 years back in time, I still have no idea how or why, other than we shouldn't have gone down that hallway.
Our logic as to why we went down the hallway that was obviously supposed to be impossible? Better Loot.

Arbitrarity
2008-09-15, 06:50 PM
Our DM made a golem that ate gold.
And **** diamonds.
Totally not our fault, though having to use Floating Disk to carry most of those was a pain.

Oh, and later, he allowed a railgun (1d6 damage, can be enhanced by having a party member carrying effectively magnets around in front of it).
Of course, that went odd with the multi-arrow cone.

Oh, and Human-Bane. Warforged Artificer FTW.
3d6+2 in a cone, at level one, against mobs of rogues. We sliced through the poor encounters like butter.

Then again, that's the DM with the "Oh great level 1 characters, my NPCs are all level 10 or higher. Insert dramatic railroad kidnapping here"

Fiery Diamond
2008-09-15, 11:12 PM
I can think of about three instances where my party did something that made me go - "Wait..." and I had to come up with something on the spot. One of them left me completely flabbergasted.

1- The party knew an Empire-wide tournament was coming up, and they were in audience with the Emperor. He charged them with two things (one of which they would get paid for): Investigate the phenomenon of the appearances of monsters all over the land, and escort a diplomat to another kingdom. Then he told them that they needed to participate in a tournament first: which wasn't starting for a week and a half and would last two weeks.

The longer the party waited to get on the road, they knew, by what was happening storywise, the more and more fearsome monsters there would be to serve as obstacles. So, exactly half the party decided that skipping the tournament would be wise. The other half disagreed. They asked the Emperor why he wanted them to be in the tournament if haste was such a necessity, and due to a remark made by the Emperor's adviser, it was clear that it was simply to entertain his kids. They asked to be allowed to step outside and consider. He agreed.

After over 30 min IRL of in character discussion on whether the tournament would be a good idea, they flipped a coin (technically it was flipped by the only person not picking sides, the NPC that was with them). The bard readied an action to cast light on the coin so that it would be hard to see, but the sorcerer readied an action to counterspell because the bard was so predictable. The coin landed on not participating.

The party discussed at length what to do, deciding on putting on a show for the Emperor's kids. They convinced him to at least let them try, and if it didn't satisfy his kids, then they would participate. They spent several hours prepping and perfoming (several hours IRL, but done entirely in character). They used spells and class abilities in innovative ways. The performance was so spectacular there was no way it wouldn't satisfy, so they managed to avoid the tournament. That was probably my favorite session.

2- Just as the party was walking into a trap set up by an evil cleric whom they believed to be a staunch ally, because he had helped them so much in eradicating the undead scourge and the hags who supposedly were behind it (he was really the one behind it), I decided to give the party cleric a wisdom check to notice something wrong with the room they were about to enter because it had desecrate cast in it. He was successful, and he pulled the party short before going in. The enemy revealed his true colors as soon as it was clear that the party was suspicious, and obscured the room in smoke, but the party could just see zombies coming out from behind the curtains.

Party Cleric: What's the temple (where they were) made of?
Me: Um, stone.
Cleric: Oh, yes. How thick is the doorway?
Me: Uhh, I guess it's about a two to three inches.
Cleric: I cast stone shape and seal the doorway.
Me: Wait, you do...oh. I didn't expect that.
Cleric: But given the size of the doorway, there's a small gap at the top.
Bard (who has the most powerful bag of tricks): I toss the ball from my back of tricks into the room and have the animal attack the zombies.
Sorcerer: And I cast flaming sphere and start moving it.
Me: O...K.

(I did actually have a secret passageway in the back of the room that led around planned out, but it's purpose was supposed to be to hide the evil cleric and have scrolls and prepped corpses) I used the passage to have the cleric come around and stoneshape (with a scroll) an opening right next to the party. They had the advantage of situation, even though he was buffed specifically for them (he'd been gathering intel while helping them), and they killed him fairly easily.

When the party leader (the cleric) looked through the enemies equipment, he said:
Cleric: If we had walked into that room, it would have been a TPK.
The battle was supposed to have that potential.


3. It's getting late, so I'll post this one later. This is the really crazy one that threw me for a loop, so stay tuned for later posting!

-Fiery Diamond

Blackfang108
2008-09-16, 10:25 AM
I have three stories from two games, although neither are D&D. One I ran, one I played.

#1 - Scion


I hate you.

I've been trying to DM a game of Scion since it came out. four-five of my friends are interested.

Exactly ONE of them has read the book (which they are all borrowing, as they room together) in this time. He rolled his character, and when I told the others to decide on their gods, I got this response: "I need to know the exact mechanics so I can best kill everything."

This was six months ago. Maybe more. He hasn't touched the book.

I haven't even done a session yet, and I'm broken...

The one character had a great concept: he was awakened a few weeks before Katrina by his Father, Baron Sameidi(sp). He received a Chicago Bulls Necklace (forget the stats), a Teddy Bear, (I think. Let him access the Earth Domain(important)), and an umbrella (nothing special, just an umbrella.)

"But, what's the Umbrella for, Father?"
"You'll see..."

We were on the floor.

Also, I learned in one 3.5 campaign just how useful a free teleport is, with the Dimension Jaunt feat. It's great for exploring places. especially with a high Initiative modifier.

Door's trapped? Let me see if it's even worth our time...

But my greatest use of a short (25ft) teleport is in 4e.

Story follows.

“We will execute them at dawn,” the general said, “take them to the cells.”
While sitting in my cell, I knew that Rolan, my compatriot, was in the next cell over. We were both bound hand and foot, as well as gagged. After spending some time trying to escape my bonds, I realized that I was going to need some help. I figured Rolan and I may be able to help each other out, so I used my Fey Step to enter his cell.
Luckily, he was already out of his bonds and wasted no time untying me. We formulated a plan to escape while I rested. I Stepped back to my cell and arranged my bonds to seem that I was still tied up. The guard came by a while later and checked in on us. He didn’t notice that we had undone our bonds, and when he turned around, I Stepped behind him and grabbed him. Unfortunately, he was able to call out, and I had difficulty subduing him.
“Surrender!” exclaimed the general, coming into the prison area while I was still grappling with the guard.
I looked and saw that I was hopelessly outmatched, and gave in.
The General took a closer look at my ears and swore. “Elandrin.”
So, they took me to a room large enough that I could not teleport out of it, and tied me to a chair. They also left four men in the room with me, so I didn’t scoot to the walls and escape that way.
The General came and checked on me periodically throughout the night.
In the morning I was led to the executioner’s block. “We have Archers covering all avenues of escape,” he told me. But my feet were unbound, which was good news. I could only see one way out, but it required Rolan’s sacrifice.
He was led to the block first. Locked in the stock, his gag was removed and he was asked if he had any last words. I didn’t pay attention. I needed to concentrate on staying alive. No small feat when your mind has been partly broken by the Earlking.
The sword came down, and Rolan was finished. I whispered a brief prayer to the Raven Queen, and prepared for my plan. I was led to the stocks. I was locked in.
Ahead of me was a great mass of militia. Off to one side, the building I had just come from. To the other side, there was open grassland.
Behind me, however, was a road west. A road meant people.
My gag was removed.
“Do you have any last words?” asked the General, stoic as ever. He is trying to usurp the throne, again, and he sees me as the evil one.
“See ya!” I exclaimed, and Stepped 25 feet behind. And I turned and ran. Several arrows hit me, and I shrugged them off. Non-fatal wounds were not a concern. I knew I could take more punishment if I had to. One more arrow hit me before I was out of range of the archers.
I ran on, hands still tied behind my back, and I saw a farmhouse in the distance. As I approached, I heard hooves in the distance behind me. The riders caught up to me shortly before I reached the house, but were unable to hit me from their saddles.
I saw a window and judged that I could make it through, so I jumped.
I landed in a parlor with several farmers. I looked to the nearest and said, “Please untie me. The fate of the Kingdom is at stake.” True enough. And he did.
There was a knock on the door, so I ran to the kitchen. Once there, I grabbed the largest knife they had, and went out the rear door, towards the rider who had circled around. I slashed at him, and opened up a nasty gouge in his leg. The rider swung at me and I dodged.
The dismounted rider came through the door and charged me. I sidestepped and tripped him, then slashed at the mounted rider again. A third rider had appeared, still mounted, and I called on the power the Earlking had traded me, assaulting the mind of the rider I had slashed.
He grabbed his head, cried out, and fell from his mount.
I jumped up on the horse and was able to control it enough to run west again. The other mounted rider attempted to follow me, but I was able to outlast him. I kept riding off as the sun set, and several hours after I had last seen the rider, I dismounted and found shelter. I tied the horse to a tree and meditated.
As I did, a vision came to me of the Raven Queen. I knelt to her, and she enfolded me in her wings, leaned down, and kissed me on the forehead, as a proud parent to a favored child. “I knew I was right,” I whispered. “For your glory.”
And then I woke. I gave the horse a few hours extra rest, and we continued down the road, at a much more sedate pace, still clutching the kitchen knife.


To be fair, the rails had been splintered before that.

We'll be going back, and I've sent a message to the young King and his Loyal Chancelleor(sp) regarding the plot to overthrow him. So the Arc is intact, we're just off in a new direction.

Oh, and I should probably mention the 100 Gold bounty on my head due to that escape and killing the General's Co-conspirator/Brother-in-law

Natania
2008-09-16, 01:32 PM
I refused to die once... which put my DM in a tough spot. In the end he gave in and gave me 10 extra hp. I still died but I took down that irritating dark-elf as well. :smallcool:

There was also another incident that I jumped on a lions back and a forest gnome... I don't remember that one though all I know is that I didn't make it.

Lappy9000
2008-09-16, 02:14 PM
Have you ever broken your DM, or as a DM have you ever been broken by a player? To be clear what I mean is, has a character in one of your games ever done something so totally unexpected that you where at least initially at a lose as to what to do about it?

For example: As a player my character, a telepath, reached into a tiny rift in the fabric of the planes (caused by the BBEG) with her mind in an effort to see what might be out there. My DM looked at me and said "You do what!?" After a few moments he ruled that my mind was over loaded by the experience, and that the neat pin prick in the fabric of the planes was, unintentionally, torn by my effort. This lead to a great adventure where the other party members had to enter my characters mind and help to piece her psyche back together.

Every single game, my friend. My strategy ususally consists of short-term plans lasting no more than 30 minutes in advance, and subtle plot hooks based on how the players play their characters to lead them into pre-planned long-term goals; although both are subject to change at any moment.

Let's see...my players (in no particular order) have:
1) Used their recently acquired airship to bombard the elven nation with crates upon crates of alchemist's fire.
2) Blown up about a third of a city (on a cliff; it collapsed into the sea)
3) Stolen 4 children to add in as cohorts (only 1 currently remains alive)
4) Killed their first cohort (a 12-year old ranger), who would later be resurrected as their greatest enemy.
5) Started multiple revolutions (I think the guard death total is around 48)
6) Upon finding the body of a slain companion, one player immediately called "Dibs" as they began sorting out his equipment.
7) Dumped another player's long, long-dead corpse of said airship (along with the corpse of their looted ally).
8) Released a psychotic fallen paladin upon an unspecting town (whose inhabitants still believe he's good). Currently said paladin is rallying an army (alledgedly of good).
9) Set an entire forest on fire because they could.
10) Almost started (and lead) a war between two enemy kingdoms.

There's more, but I have to leave at the moment.

Blackfang108
2008-09-16, 02:19 PM
I refused to die once... which put my DM in a tough spot. In the end he gave in and gave me 10 extra hp. I still died but I took down that irritating dark-elf as well. :smallcool:

There was also another incident that I jumped on a lions back and a forest gnome... I don't remember that one though all I know is that I didn't make it.

That reminds me of my Evil campaign.

we were all drinking that evening (except me, who had to drive.)

Our DM was sloshed by our final encounter. and Fayed, our Bugbear Fighter(I was playing as him, as the Player was out sick and asked me to.) decided to charge a mini-Kraken at about 6 hp left.

He got hit for 35, and our DM rolled a d% and said he was still alive and at -9.

The player of Fayed was mad, because he was trying to have Fayed killed off.

We prefer to keep him around, as his fists do a lot of fire damage.

Medic
2008-09-16, 02:44 PM
Casting a Favorable Sacrifice (10,000 gp version) that effected 23 players in an interactive at a gaming convention pretty much breaks a DM. But when you can buff all 23 with:

+5 weapons
+5 Armor
SR 33
DR 20/magic
20 to fire/cold/electricity/sonic
Immunity to fear
Immunity to poison
24 temporary hit points
+5 Deflection Bonus
+5 Natural Armor (Transdimensional)
and a few other goodies

DM's look at you and say "Can I have a copy of that build?"

cloneof
2008-09-16, 02:59 PM
My players talked so much over me on our last session, so I let my smaller, 12 year old sister DM that time.

Worked out quite nicely

Threeshades
2008-09-16, 03:02 PM
We broke our DM so many times.
I really don't want to talk about it. And believe me when I say, you really dont want to hear it :smalleek:

Blackfang108
2008-09-16, 03:23 PM
We broke our DM so many times.
I really don't want to talk about it. And believe me when I say, you really dont want to hear it :smalleek:

Yes, we do!

Story time!

Hzurr
2008-09-16, 03:23 PM
We broke our DM so many times.
I really don't want to talk about it. And believe me when I say, you really dont want to hear it :smalleek:

...so why post about it?

if you're going to tell us, then do so; but no one likes a tease.

...

Ok, that's a lie, a lot of people like teases, but you get the point.

Blackfang108
2008-09-16, 03:24 PM
...so why post about it?

if you're going to tell us, then do so; but no one likes a tease.

...

Ok, that's a lie, a lot of people like teases, but you get the point.

we don't so much like teases as much as delude ourselves into believing that, maybe THIS time, they're not teasing.

Threeshades
2008-09-16, 03:43 PM
...so why post about it?

if you're going to tell us, then do so; but no one likes a tease.

...

Ok, that's a lie, a lot of people like teases, but you get the point.

I just wanted to tell that it is so. hat we did break our DM many times.

But It would ruin the thread if I told about it.

Also I'd inevitably break several forum rules just by talking about it.

Leicontis
2008-09-16, 03:59 PM
As a DM, I've been repeatedly broken in the same way. It can be summed up as follows:
"Why are you attacking? You weren't supposed to fight that!"
"How the **** did you just WIN?!?!"

Totally Guy
2008-09-16, 04:02 PM
I nearly got broken one time...

The players had been told of a potential goblin attack on the town of Mansworth. They'd also been told that some goblins were working for the town's ex-mayor, the evil wizard Pugh Djinn.

In reality there were 2 groups of goblins to confuse the players. One group worked for Pugh Djinn and one group worked for an evil elven ranger called Teos.

Teos' goblins were doing some vandalism and trying to blame it on Pugh Djinn. So when the players fought the goblins they pointed them to Pugh Djinn's tower when interrogated. This was an obvious bluff but they thought they'd check for thoroughness.

They approached the imposing black windowless tower, knocked on the door, and start questioning the evil Wizard and potential BBEG without actually asking for his name.

And they do not realise that this man is the same man that every NPC so far has complained about. Half the party want to stop bothering the old man and half want to come back and kill him for being suspicious.

The future of this (envisioned) long term baddie was growing pretty uncertain. Either that or the future of the players was looking uncertain. With the climactic battle looking pretty imminent with the players only at level 1 it was declared lunch time so I had a chance to gather my thoughts.

In the end I brought in a late night policeman to tell them to stop bothering the Evil ex-mayor and powerful wizard (I'd already had another NPC reference this policeman earlier so it didn't seem too contrived). The town did not want him to have any excuse not to attend his mayor power handover ceremony so they had placed watch members in the area. Another plus was that it was a memorable way to introduce the BBEG, meet and greet first, identification later.

Later in the session the party managed to make friends with (the defeated) Pugh Djinn and they all went to the pub. Note: this is why vengeance is a common trait for villians, it allows them to keep being antagonistic even after their plan fails... Pugh... evil, yes... vengeful, no...

Fistendel
2008-09-16, 05:48 PM
It wasn't truly a break of the DM, but he sure did scratch his head alot.

My group was in the depths of th villanous stronghold where we uncovered an evil temple. The rest of the group was trying to decide what to do when a sparkle caught my attention. In a room off the antechamber was walled with gemstones. My character (a thief (1st edition D&D) with only a 6 wisdom) begam pulling gems from the wall. We communicated in notes alot to keep some of our players from reacting to OOC info.

DM: How many are you going to pull off?
me: I keep going until someone stops me.
DM: wha...really?
me: of course. It is either that or try to plan something with those guys.
DM: <laughs>

DM: when you reach 356 gems (specified in the module) smoke appears behind you and in the smoke is a ghostly figure. "How dare you defile my chamber" Suddenly appearing in the room also is a Paladin-like figure who positions himself between you and the figure. "Begone (I don't remember the demi-gods name) you shall not harm this one."
DM: I will not create divine intervention for you again, be more careful.

Later...

DM:You enter a room with an altar in the middle of it. Of to the right is what appears to be a bedchamber. Both rooms appear to be empty.
Party: We examine the altar.
me: I go into the bedchamber.
DM: <lengthy description of the bed chamber> on the mantle is a small statuette. It looks familiar to you.
me: I examine the statuette.
DM: it appears to be a carving of the demi-god you saw before.
me: I hit it against the mantle to break the head off.
DM: What? Sigh, behind you is a puff of smoke. (again, specifically mentioned in the module that it would occur). "You again, this time you are mine."
Party: you know him?
me: we've met.

Blinding light--"You shall not have him at this time.."
That is the last time, I mean it. (In 1st edition, there were actual chance rules for divine intervention.)

At the end of the campaign, we were celevrating at a tavern and my character was telling the tale to whoever would listen. An old man sat next to me, bought me a drink and listened for a moment as I explained specifically about the gems and statue (showing the headless statue). he then patted me on the back and I was suddenly in the middle of the forest with the demi-god and a major demon (about 20 feet tall). The demi-god told me I could not leave until I worshipped him. He then left me with the demon. the demon kept repeating "kneel and worship"

So I did. (my diety was Corellian Lutherian (SP)) so I prayed to him, and got the random divine intervention. The next thing the demon new we were taking turns backstabbing....

To this day Fistendel can be heard to tell the tale. "There was this big guy..."

One of my greatest characters to date and he never made it past 12th level.

Doomsy
2008-09-16, 06:28 PM
My CoC players have broken me twice. It was mostly due to their planning abilities to be fair, and one guy in particular who tends to do some seriously in depth thinking.

In the first scenario Player A was playing a former police investigator gone private industry in the 1920s. He knew the law very well. He was also fairly realistic about the Mythos and their chances regarding them. Player B had not yet learned that guns in CoC are overrated and often useless. He had put the party in danger several times, had indirectly led to a friend of the PIs being maimed pretty badly and nearly killed most of the others at some point through stupidity. His own good luck had kept him from being killed so far. Until this situation happened.

The PI, Player B's character, and a female player C (an American girl who was trying to get into acting) basically broke into the home of a major cult figure while the other players kept the guy distracted by running into his car on a street near his house. The cops arrived soon enough, given the amount of hysterics happening. While this was going on, the PI stopped his search of the house full of bad mojo and calmly murdered Player B in the master bedroom by using a pistol he had found in there and firing through a pillow to keep the noise down. The man was dead before the player even got an action in, and the player was just staring dumbfounded. So was I, because I never saw this coming.

The PI then goes downstairs and tells Player C he has the role of a lifetime for her. Five minutes later she is running down the driveway sobbing, her face a mess and dress torn, with a tale of kidnapping, murder, and distress of a lady at the hands of the cultist leader. Meanwhile the PI casually dumps the car off with a hole punched in its tank in the woods, taking the backroads so nobody would notice. He also left the gun near player Bs body.

So yes. My party just effectively wiped out the Dragon by framing him for rape and murder in such a way that his cover as a respectable business man was utterly blown, and the resulting search of his (booby-trapped) house killed one officer, which just sealed the damn deal.

I'll tell the other later. Not surprisingly it involves the player of the PI. I think he is my nemesis.

charl
2008-09-16, 07:30 PM
Well there was this one time in a werewolf game when I was playing a very untraditionally minded werewolf.

The storyteller (or DM if you will) had lined up an encounter against several rival werewolves in a subway tunnel. My character decided to sneak off on his own while the rest of the pack was still fighting each other about how to deal with the obvious trap.

Earlier that game I had prepared a few essential fighting items, with my DMs approval. First of all I had made a few molotov cocktails (with stolen gas), and I had using illegal contacts obtained a sniper rifle, a stick of dynamite and one hand grenade. My character had also broken into his (human) parents' house and stolen some silver cutlery, handling it with thick gloves to avoid being hurt by it.
So, my character sneaks into the subway tunnel and naturally the rival pack smells him coming their way and goes into full werewolf war-form, charging towards my character, who calmly stayed in human form. When they were just close enough he lobbed his molotov cocktails, creating a minor inferno inside the tunnel. The enemy pack backed of, unable to get through the flames without serious hurt.
Then, my character calmly removes his backpack, full of silver cutlery and two more molotov cocktails, as well as the dynamite. He removes the pin from his hand grenade, drops it into the backpack and throws it through the fire into the unsuspecting pack of rival werewolves, currently busy with using their fire-based spirit gifts to try and put out the fire, and then morphs into wolf form and runs as fast as he can the other way.
So, the enemy pack is bombarded with flaming gasoline, sharp silver shrapnel, and then has the tunnel collapse on them as the dynamite explodes.
Now, the others in our pack had decided they were going to get reinforcements for the fight and had headed home. They heard a small boom, but didn't think much of it. Meanwhile, my character heads to his private little safe house, where he has his sniper rifle stashed, and heads to the ring leader of the rival pack, masquerading as a priest in a local church (this our pack had realized earlier during the game). Climbing up on a roof opposite the church he waits for the priest to arrive to his church for early morning preparations for sunday sermons. Then he blows his head off from hundreds of meters away, uses one of his gifts to disappear into the shadows before the police arrives, then leaves and goes back to the train station, outside of which he smugly leans against a wall smoking a ciggarette.
The other characters return.
"Where the **** have you been?"
"Took care of that problem we were dealing with. Now, who's up for getting drunk?"

Broke both the storyteller and my fellow players.
That character was later banished from the city on threat of "painful, silvery death." And I had to make another one.
This was however but one of the many incidents of great destruction and disregard for werewolf honor and tradition by that character and his legend still lives on in our player group. He was btw modeled after Tyler Durden from fight club.

Dode
2008-09-16, 07:38 PM
Oh sure.

"Okay, I'm going to use Sculpt Spell on my Flaming Sphere"
"You can do that?"
"Oh yeah, 'any area spell' it says. So let's get this 20' radius ball going"

It's the little things that tend to do it.

nobodylovesyou4
2008-09-16, 08:57 PM
I remember the first time we ever played werewolf, the very first thing one of the players said was:

"alright, i head into town and buy some weed."

we were all dumbfounded.

charl
2008-09-16, 10:12 PM
I remember the first time we ever played werewolf, the very first thing one of the players said was:

"alright, i head into town and buy some weed."

we were all dumbfounded.

Sounds suspiciously like my first werewolf game.

Who_Da_Halfling
2008-09-17, 02:47 PM
Well, it didn't really break the DM, he was just totally not prepared for it.

This was the first campaign most of us had done, so we were all Level 1. We'd just returned from a dungeon/forest crawl and were hanging out at an inn when our wizard was attacked in his sleep and his spellbook was stolen. I ran into the tavern of the inn and saw the theif escape out the back. I followed him out the door...

...and he was gone.

I suspect that either I wasn't in an investigative state of mind or my DM failed to give me some crucial clues, b/c that's where the trail ended. With no clues to the theft, we were just sort of like "Ok, that sucks. What's next?"

The DM had planned for the whole session to be us retaking the spellbook from a radical anti-magic group in the town and didn't know how to railroad us properly, I guess, so that's where the session ended.

It probably didn't help that none of us really liked the wizard (and his player was absent), so none of us really cared that he'd been rendered essentially dead.

-JM

Blackfang108
2008-09-17, 03:06 PM
The PI, Player B's character, and a female player C (an American girl who was trying to get into acting) basically broke into the home of a major cult figure while the other players kept the guy distracted by running into his car on a street near his house. The cops arrived soon enough, given the amount of hysterics happening. While this was going on, the PI stopped his search of the house full of bad mojo and calmly murdered Player B in the master bedroom by using a pistol he had found in there and firing through a pillow to keep the noise down. The man was dead before the player even got an action in, and the player was just staring dumbfounded. So was I, because I never saw this coming.

The PI then goes downstairs and tells Player C he has the role of a lifetime for her. Five minutes later she is running down the driveway sobbing, her face a mess and dress torn, with a tale of kidnapping, murder, and distress of a lady at the hands of the cultist leader. Meanwhile the PI casually dumps the car off with a hole punched in its tank in the woods, taking the backroads so nobody would notice. He also left the gun near player Bs body.

So yes. My party just effectively wiped out the Dragon by framing him for rape and murder in such a way that his cover as a respectable business man was utterly blown, and the resulting search of his (booby-trapped) house killed one officer, which just sealed the damn deal.

I am impressed.

That is an AMAZING plan.

Player A deserves the title "Magnificent Bastard."

Brauron
2008-09-17, 03:10 PM
"OK, my Barbarian/Frenzied Berserker is going to cut out the Ogre's gonads and eat them to gain his foe's strength..."

blackspeeker
2008-09-18, 12:25 AM
Let's see...my players (in no particular order) have:
1) Used their recently acquired airship to bombard the elven nation with crates upon crates of alchemist's fire.
2) Blown up about a third of a city (on a cliff; it collapsed into the sea)
3) Stolen 4 children to add in as cohorts (only 1 currently remains alive)
4) Killed their first cohort (a 12-year old ranger), who would later be resurrected as their greatest enemy.
5) Started multiple revolutions (I think the guard death total is around 48)
6) Upon finding the body of a slain companion, one player immediately called "Dibs" as they began sorting out his equipment.
7) Dumped another player's long, long-dead corpse of said airship (along with the corpse of their looted ally).
8) Released a psychotic fallen paladin upon an unspecting town (whose inhabitants still believe he's good). Currently said paladin is rallying an army (alledgedly of good).
9) Set an entire forest on fire because they could.
10) Almost started (and lead) a war between two enemy kingdoms.

There's more, but I have to leave at the moment.

It would appear that every seven times out of ten I am at fault, I will say on the matter of number eight, Jerran though that the "good" PC's were in control then, because the "evil" PCs were incapacitated. So the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the cleric and the barbarian, unless patchy is looking to make himself seem badass. And you have to admit that number three was pretty awesome, sealing up a steam vent with three stone shapes was a work of genius.

Heliomance
2008-09-18, 03:48 AM
We've never actually broken our DM - he's too good at improv - but we have done things he really didn't expect a few times. From the time we were sent out to find a lost mage, saw some cockatrices outside where we reckoned he was, and instead of killing them decided we didn't want to take the risk of getting petrified so went back to town for some weighted nets - that one managed to gain us a male medusa as an ally, for not killing his pets - to the time where, at level six, we rolled horrendously on the random encounter table and ended up with a CR 20 encounter, a nasty homebrew creature with fast healing stupid, the ability to rip your arm off on a crit, and the ability to go down to -1000 HP before dying - only to have the fighter one-shot it by rolling a ridiculous number of 20s in a row - we rarely do what he actually expects of us.
Just to clarify, we don't use the three 20s = instadeath rule. Instead, if you keep on rolling 20s, your critical multiplier goes up exponentially. He ended up doing 4464 damage, if I remember correctly. The sheer amazement of everyone on the battlefield (we were leading an army) spontaneously cast a ritual spell which made his axe incredibly good. It now has a crit range of 16-20, as well as a few other goodies, and counts as a epic weapon for overcoming DR.

Hawriel
2008-09-18, 10:36 PM
My party and I made are GM curl up in the fetal position on the couch away from the kitchen table.

I dont know what game system we where playing I do remember it was a sci-fi space setting. We turned are characters into a bunch of redneck trailer trash hicks. The things we did to are space ship was just wrong. We insisted that it was a mobile home. The crome kind. We had green shag carpit, a white and green awning over the main airlock. Yes it deploid with a hand crank. We had a blue cemical toilet that had to be emptied every time we landed or buzzed a planet. Big pink fuzzy dice. Several gun racks, both in and outside the ship. Two large propane tanks on the back. With a spare landing gear. Mud flaps. Oh by the way the landing gear was 8 cinderblocks. Two large hound dogs. The temprature control was 4/80. ( 4 windows open, 80 light years speed) We had a two stills, wisky and moon shine. A CB radio hooked up to a large TV antena. I think it burned a little oil. you get the idea.

My character was Repo. He was a repoman. He had a pump shotgun, and a chain. He wore dingy denem coveralls over a wife beater and steal toed work boots. had a large tool belt and a bandana. He was always coverd in some kinda michine grease. He was also the mechanic.

My party played the hickdom to the hilt untill the GM cryed.

monty
2008-09-18, 10:45 PM
80 light years speed

For the record, light years measure distance.

Fiery Diamond
2008-09-18, 10:50 PM
I'm back to post the crazy story.


This took place relatively shortly after the whole cleric battle thing. The party decided that the city noble, who had barricaded himself in his mini-castle with hired mercs instead of helping the city, deserved to be punished. Actually, different PCs had different ideas. Some wanted to extort money from him, some wanted to make him pay for the regeneration of the city, and some just wanted to punish him.

The day before (in-game, also previous session) they did anything the party got into a fight about the cohort of one of the players. Basically, it was the thief/assassin against everyone else. They ended up tying him up and using knockout poison on him to keep him quiet. The next day, after a really funny scene (involving the bard bluffing inn personnel into thinking that the rogue tied himself up, even though he couldn't even move his limbs because the ropes were so tight) the bard and the rogue went on stakeout outside the noble's mini-castle.

Then the rogue began the execution of his master plan. He informed me (DM) about it before hand. It was like this:

1) Bluff gate guard into thinking the party is out for the noble's blood, using a map of the interior of the mini-castle gained from the local thieves' guild (but pretended to be stolen from the party) as evidence, and referring to the elimination of the undead scourge as a measure of how strong the party was so that he could get walked inside to where the noble was.

2) Convince the noble of the danger, and work out a deal. The deal was that in exchange for poison-making materials, 1000gp reward, and some of the items the party had, he would poison the party so that they collapsed on intrusion (since they were going to "invade" the following day). Then the noble could lock them up.

3) Poison the water with knockout poison so that the castle guards were unconscious.

4) Wait till nightfall, rob the treasure vault, and spring the other party members.

This was to be a non-permanent revenge of sorts on the party, and a way to get money. Here's what happened...

Part 1) went smoothly. I made sure I mentioned the multitude of guards as he was led through, and described the bodyguard as a very tall human with both a large steel shield and a greatsword (immensely strong). He was nervous, but didn't back down.

He got out his part of the deal stated for Part 2). This is where things started going wrong for him: the noble wasn't stupid, but believed in the power of money -- 1000 gp seemed like a pittance for the level of threat. He questioned the rogue, and caught the rogue in some obvious lies (but the rogue didn't realize it).
Rogue: How about it?
Noble: I've got a better idea. How about I still you in my dungeons instead?

THEN, things got crazy.

The rogue drinks a potion of invisibility. The bodyguard steps between him and the noble and him and the door. The rogue....pulls out a Quaal's Feather Token Tree. And throws it on the floor in the middle of the room. This was on the second floor. The tree appears, crashing through the ceiling and breaking up the floor, but the floor barely holds. The rogue rushes toward the outer edge of the room, tossing a homebrewed item that is essentially a flash grenade (thunder stone + blinding ability). It shocks the bodyguard enough that he steps, hard, on the floor. He's wearing heavy armor -- and the floor gives out. The noble and the rogue manage to jump to the edge of the room where there's just a little bit of floor left, the guard goes down with the tree: to the first floor...through the first floor...and down into the basement. Tilting as it goes, taking out a third of the mini-castle.

The rogue nonlethal sneak attacks the noble, and uses him as a cushion when he jumps out the window.

There's more to this story, but it isn't about breaking me as a DM. I had hand-prepared over fifteen unique builds for the guards (with multiples of most of them). The party managed to clean this mess up with only THREE combat actions.

A quaal's feather token tree ON THE SECOND STORY!

-Fiery Diamond

Brauron
2008-09-18, 10:53 PM
Me: "So...you're melting down the magic item upon which the entire campaign is centered? The one that three different organizations are more than willing to kill you to possess, never mind what they'll do if they find you've destroyed it? And you're melting it down into gold ingots to deposit in an off-shore bank account?"

Players: "Yep, seems like the best thing to do with it, really."

Sstoopidtallkid
2008-09-18, 10:57 PM
Me: "So...you're melting down the magic item upon which the entire campaign is centered? The one that three different organizations are more than willing to kill you to possess, never mind what they'll do if they find you've destroyed it? And you're melting it down into gold ingots to deposit in an off-shore bank account?"

Players: "Yep, seems like the best thing to do with it, really."Lets see here. 3 Organizations, probably of equal capability. You're going to get 2 of them chasing you and the protection of the third. Not worth the risk. If you just destroy the item, you'll annoy them all, but they won't have any real reason to put a lot of effort into chasing you down. Especially if you can pin the melting on one of the 3 groups.

Friv
2008-09-18, 11:02 PM
I hate you.

I've been trying to DM a game of Scion since it came out. four-five of my friends are interested.

Exactly ONE of them has read the book (which they are all borrowing, as they room together) in this time. He rolled his character, and when I told the others to decide on their gods, I got this response: "I need to know the exact mechanics so I can best kill everything."

This was six months ago. Maybe more. He hasn't touched the book.


If it makes you feel better, I don't know that Scion is your players' game of choice. Approaching from even the slightest min-maxing perspective will result in the whole system collapsing into ruins. (Part of the reason my group gave up on it at about 100 XP and went back to Exalted.)

Blackfang108
2008-09-19, 09:42 AM
If it makes you feel better, I don't know that Scion is your players' game of choice. Approaching from even the slightest min-maxing perspective will result in the whole system collapsing into ruins. (Part of the reason my group gave up on it at about 100 XP and went back to Exalted.)

He's the only one who wants to Min Max.

The one who's made a character just wants to try it. the other two say they want to try the game, but haven't read the book.

of those two: One works 60 hours a week minimum (we never see him), and the other hasn't read the book either, mostly because he was busy helping his Wife move in to the apartment.

maybe she'll be interested. I could homebrew one of the Celtic gods...

Doomsy
2008-09-19, 03:47 PM
The second time my CoC players broke me again involved Player A and B, who get along surprisingly well despite how often their IC plans involve the other characters demise or risk of severe bodily injury. I think it is mostly because the two of them have caused eighty percent of my 'Oh dear God' faces at the table and now consider it a sport.

For this scenario we were playing the early stages of the first Gulf War and it was a six person party, approximately half being United States Army soldiers and half being a group of very dedicated archaeologists and students who had been working in Kuwait and had been caught by surprise by the advance of the Iraqi military.

The scenario began with the military players sent to forcibly remove the rest of the players from a site that was about to become a serious war zone. Unfortunately for them things got dicey very quickly. The ghouls and sand dwellers who had been feasting on the chaos of the conflict and lived in vast warrens beneath the sands were just the tip of the iceberg. Eventually they had to deal with a cult that was intent on bringing down the 'God of Fire' and was using the burning of oil fields as a type of summoning mechanism.

The army unit was pretty much wrecked within the first half hour and communications were shot pretty soon. The combination of fire vampires and explosive weaponry killed the NPC survivors and one PC who learned what cooking off meant the hard way. Things were getting really dicey by the morning of the second day. By midnight that night the cultists would probably summon down something that had once turned over a hundred square miles of desert to glass and wiped out an entire civilization. I figured they could handle it.

Player A had quickly realized that the fire vampires were, naturally, fire based. Normal weapons did nothing, but flame-retardant stuff hit them pretty hard. Most people would be thinking fire hoses, sand buckets, extinguishers, etc.

Player A instead started asking me architectural questions about the 'Vault of the Heavens', which was where the Herald of the Burning World slept until woken to bring its lord to earth. I always know that is trouble, but I thought I had it handled. He did not have the explosives on hand to seal off the entrance to the fortress built into the front of the cliff.

No, what he did instead was something so simple I should have smacked myself for not thinking of it.

The opening to the Vault was just huge double doors that had been built so long ago the cult had had to dig it out of the desert about ten feet down. It had a few air ventilation shafts. Player B and one other person went to the top for what I thought was a sneak attack. Instead, they used grenades to blow the damn things shut. I was a little confused, but I figured the Vault would have enough of an air supply to let the ritual finish.

Then A hotwired one of the bulldozers and slammed a mound of earth against the front doors, essentially reburying the entrance. His player then smiled at my puzzled face and asked for confirmation on two things.

One, if fire vampires needed oxygen to burn. They do, given what it what takes to put them out. So did the 'marid', the people of the burning eyes who had acted as undead fire-zombies the game.

Two, if the priest had summoned the 'hundred stars' necessary to wake the sleeping Herald yet. The hundred stars being fire vampires.

Yup. He'd just set up the whole cult to asphyxiate themselves in the process of trying to summon their destroying god to earth. In retrospect, my fault for not thinking about the layout and basic fire dynamics.

It would be a much more boring game without him, at least. He keeps me on my toes.

Lert, A.
2008-09-19, 07:47 PM
This amazing thread made me have to register.

My roleplaying group is full of breaking, both of DMs (and their equivalents) and of players. I have always handled all the d20 stuff - house ruled to the extreme - while another member of the group handles most of the other stuff, particularly Shadowrun and Rifts.

First a Rifts experience. To start, I should mention that our group is fond of note-writing, or more recently, instant messaging during games - good ol’ wireless communication - both between players and the DM. When the players decide to do something special without DM knowledge, we have a method of making a skill check and confirming it by making a note of the action, witnessed by two other players, just to keep it legit. We just love our secret plans.

I was playing a character known as Billy the Shiv, a Crazy. Obviously it is my responsibility to roleplay any character as effectively as possible. Billy thought that he received all his powers from the god Cluckthulhu, more specifically channeled through a medium of Sir Bantam VII, a chicken. Without SB, Billy would believe and act as a “normal” person. Billy was also quite dangerous with his weapons -and lack of control when using such - so a DM controlled NPC traveled with us, in part to keep Billy’s guns away and act as a sort of control.

Our group entered the office of the local sheriff-equivalent, our intent to check for local bounties. The entire office was in an uproar with everyone mobilizing for combat operations. It appears that a band of thugs had entered the town, and started a fight in the old fortified bank building turned bar.

While the rest of the group were busy negotiating a contract to bring in the thugs (for a price), I begin to write notes to the DM. First, I made a check to wander away unnoticed from the group, which succeeds. Then my Crazy starts looking for a way in to the bar, finding a camouflaged entrance on the roof.

Entering the building, Billy sneaks up behind the group then begins screaming demands, not of surrender, but for drinks and, by the way, to repent and follow the path set by Cluckthulhu. The gang points their guns as Billy, to which responds by reaching into a sack at his hip, pulling out Sir Bantam. “Stop now! This thing is loaded!,” he cries out only to be shot at. Billy, diving behind cover, releases the chicken towards the band of thugs, all while singing off-tune hymns to his god.

At this point I hand one of my pre-signed notes to the DM, who responds aloud to the group, “You all hear the sound of a loud explosion coming from the direction of the bar.”

The surgically implanted plasma grenade inside Sir Bantam VII had gone off, killing the thugs - who were supposed to escape through the roof hatch and be the plot hook for the next few sessions - and igniting the bar’s booze. When the rest of the group arrive at the bar they find Billy outside - now a normal person - casually enjoying a glass of Scotch outside, watching the flames.:smallcool:

Sir Bantam VIII ended up being a demon who killed Billy.:smallamused:

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

Of course, as a DM I have done some crazy things to my group. When they refused to find the artifact that would inhibit the local area, instead relying on buffed Will saves against mind-influencing effects they were allowed to carry on as usual.

It was only when they left the area that they found out that:
1) the wizard had ended up eating his familiar
2) the bard had set fire to a local nunnery
And 3) the Paladin was soon to be a father of a half-fiend (not to mention needing atonement) :smallwink:

Calinero
2008-09-19, 10:02 PM
Two words for you: Detect Taint.

Me and some friends of mine were doing our last 3.5 campaign, and I was a halfling Poltergiest (type of Sorceror.) The specific setting we were playing included a substance known as Taint which could infect people and transform them in variously unpleasant ways. It was hard to avoid, and generally annoying. Therefore, using some class features of the Poltergeist and negotiating with the DM, I got to make a spell called Detect Taint (made by giving up the cantrips detect magic and detect poison, I believe, and usable an infinite number of times per day as a free action.) I thought this was a good idea, and the DM thought it seemed reasonable.

However, I became a bit Taint paranoid, and the DM became annoyed with my repetitive castings of Detect Taint. I began to catch on, and started using it as a running joke.

DM: You walk into the forest.
Me: I cast Detect Taint.
DM: ....on what? It's a forest! The trees?
Me: Sure, why not.

DM: You buy three pieces of bread from the merchant.
Me: Detect Taint!
DM: .....no, the bread is fine. Why would there be Taint on the bread?
Me: I dunno, it's your campaign.

Finally, things reached a cap when we entered a monastery and found a statue of the god Palor.

DM: As you walk into the room, you see an enormous statue of Palor. A feeling of calm sets over you, and your troubles seem to fade.
Me:.......I cast Detect Taint on the statue.
DM:.....the statue. The holy Statue of Palor. The one that just filled you with holy light. You think there's evil magic on it?
Me:.....there's no Taint, is there?
DM: You know what? Yes! Yes, there is Taint! So much Taint, that it comes alive and eats you! You all die!

Fortunately, he was just joking, and the running gag essentially ended for that campaign. However, I still bring it up occasionally in other, entirely unrelated, Taint free campaigns. It is generally met with threats of death.

Ceridan
2008-09-20, 12:18 AM
Ah, lots of very interesting entries. So how did my party break me you ask?

The Party, all around 15th level.
Nim: Half Nymph/Half Star Elf Bard
Delron: Wood Elf Ranger, Nim's adopted brother.
Grim: Goliath Fighter

The party had returned to Silverymoon in Forgotten Realms. The decor had changed in the time they where away, as there was not nearly so much smoke and naked flame.

Some how, a Drow strike had circumnavigated the Mythal protecting the city and layed waste. Alustriel and the cities defenders where handicapped from using some of their most potent spells by the large throngs of panicked civilians.

The party fought their way in and became trapped in a building by a Drow house mage (A deep dragon in disguise), a Matron Mother, and a weapons master. Knowing they can't take them all at the same time, Delron strides out and stairs all three down. After a few minutes the Drow attack and Delron fades from view. Thats the last time I let a player tell me he casts a spell with out telling me what he cast.

The party used the distraction to good effect and made a break for the domed building in the center of the city. Little do they know that the cities mythal is housed with-in. When they arrive the mythal has been unbound from the statue that housed and concealed it and appeared as a pillar of pure unrestrained magic. Before it stood one of the Archmagi of the city, a man who had been stalking Nim for most of the campaign.

The party approaches and the archmage gloats and offers to save Nim from certain doom if she agrees to go with him. She saunters forward and tries to kick him in the go nads. She strikes the wall of force keeping Delron and Grim from rushing him. The arrogant archmage laughs at her foolishness. "You could never harm me my dear."

Nim casts Dimension Door and takes Delron to the far side of the wall of force. The Archmage whirls and begins a spell, Delron forgoing his twin blades and leaps at the Archmage. Delron wins initiative and bull rushes the BBEG Archmage into the unbound Mythal and physically carries him in to make sure he dies. None of the many defensive spells around the Archmage worked. GRRRRR.

They both died in weird and unusual ways. A single 15th level Ranger killed my 20th Level archmage with his untrained bare hands.

Lert, A.
2008-09-20, 12:55 AM
Our Shadowrun group built what was basically a giant golem (a drone actually).

It ended up taking on at least a platoon of security forces, followed by half a company of armor and winning. Eventually it was destroyed by the GM calling in an airstrike.

PCs: "We thought there were no air bases around."
DM: "There wasn't."
PCs: "So where did the fighters come from?"
DM: "BOOM! I guess you'll never know."
PCs: "Uh, weren't you supposed to role some dice for that?"

Hawriel
2008-09-20, 01:03 AM
For the record, light years measure distance.

For the record, No $#!+.

As I said we where playing hicks.

Thoughtbot360
2008-09-20, 01:24 AM
Hey! Don't break the GM, he's expensive!