Stupidest move your DM has ever had to bail the party out of?

[Lord Tyger]

My favorite example and all of my players have heard this story.

So we are on a quest to find a demi-godess and have to scale this mountain. Third level adventurers with a Cleric, a Psionic Warrior, a Rogue, a Sorcerer, (me,) and a Barbarian. Some perils along the way, of course, but we reach the top. It is a deserty plateau of sorts with a steep cliff on one side. There is 'nothing' on top of this cliff. We are a bit disappointed but this is standard. We have to prove our patience or find the secret magic or do some riddle or somesuch, right?

Apparently, our Barbarian didn't think so. The player gets this bright look in his eye, smiling, like he has come up with something ingenious. (Which was intriguing to us, because ingenious he was not.) "Guys, I know what we have to do!" "Hmm?" "We have to JUMP OFF THE CLIFF."

Now, I don't know what kind of test of faith he thought this was, were you have to do something so blatantly suicidal with no prompting to prove oneself but anyways... Everyone, GM included, says, "What?" Response, "I jump off the cliff."

DM: ... Are you sure?
Mr. Barbarian: Yep.
DM: Really?
Mr. Barbarian: Yes, I jump!

Needless to say, it was not a test of any kind. If it was, he failed...

Someone had watched The Last Crusade recently...

[TuggyNE]

Am I bad person for thinking it should have been a potion of Love's Pain (BoVD)?

That is amazing. Your journey towards the dark side is complete.

[EtherianBlade]

Awesome? No.

Bone-headed? Yes.


The PCs were exploring an abandoned palace built by dragons. They found one chamber that was a long hallway that ended in a 30-foot pit into nothingness. True Nothingness, as I even strongly hinted that it was as if there was a "black hole" at the bottom. Four of the six players jumped in thinking it was the way to the treasure vault.

It was a Sphere of Annihilation at the bottom.

2/3rds of the party essentially jumped into a dragon toilet and vaporized themselves. I bailed them, letting the party redo their last action so they could stop themselves from falling all the way and wouldn't die in a move that would make Gygax laugh in his grave.
Charged the four PCs 50% of their earned EXP for that specific dungeon though.

I had a DM pull almost this exact same scenario on us once, and after the first idiot in our group jumped in, we decided to attach a rope and scale down to both look for him and to confirm it was what we thought it was.

The DM then decided that an invisible assassin was also in the room above -- after we had searched the entire place carefully -- and gleefully told us that the rope was suddenly cut and we plunged into the Sphere of Annihilation.

He liked doing that sort of thing. We didn't play his campaigns often.

As for player "moron-ness," in the campaign I am currently running the players have found their way into an ancient subterranean citadel. To gain access to the real heart of the citadel, the heroes have to activate a portal in a room which consists of five stone chairs and a glowing circle on the floor.

They already figured out that four of the five heroes have to sit on the chairs and the fifth stands in the center. I placed all sorts of clues as to what awaits the fifth person when the portal is activated. I even included a journal that the players found from a previous (unsuccessful) party which detailed what happened to their paladin when they activated the portal and he was the one in the middle.

That's called foreshadowing, since the heroes included a paladin in their ranks. I had hoped they got the hint.

They didn't. The rogue, the wizard, the ranger and the monk all sat in the chairs, leaving the Paladin to activate the portal.

Portal was activated, those in the chairs were frozen by hold person spells, and a twelve-foot iron golem comes marching out to meet the paladin.

"Do you swear an oath of fealty to the glory of the Enclave?" the golem asks. The heroes already deduced, by this time, that the Enclave was an organization of evil wizards and priests.

So, of course, the paladin says, "No! And I will destroy you!"

Now, all they had to do was put the rogue or the wizard in the middle, characters whom I knew would be willing to lie to make their way into the citadel.

But the paladin was too stubborn and they didn't catch the hints.

Paladin died.

Oh, well. I brought him back, and he learned his lesson. He plays a bit more cautiously now.

[Squirrel_Dude]

A recent event in my game:

A Druid, bored with a fight against an ooze, and already weakened from a previous fight, decides to wander off from the rest of the party. He starts opening doors and finds a chest. I tell him that the chest has potions of fire immunity in it (which in a previous session with another DM, who was a jackass, was a mimic), and that it would be odd for this chest to be sitting in the middle of a poor person's house, with all these potions.

He goes up and tries to open the chest, and is quickly bitten, grappled, and stuck to the mimic by its natural super-glue covering. The Druid, when I prompt to scream for help, opts to not do that. I flub some perception checks so the party actually knows that the Druid is in danger, and the rush over to find him with 3 health left, and still stuck to the mimic and it's adhesive.

I BS something about the wizard's hydraulic push separating the two, while the gunslinger and the fighter start trying to fight it, and the rogue (who uses claws) stays the **** away from it.

By the time the fight is over, the mimic has knocked the druid and the wizard (who had to try and heal him) to negative health, not killing the druid by 2 hitpoints.

[Sith_Happens]

Lucky for the paladin that you apparently aren't a Fullmetal Alchemist fan, because when I read this--

five stone chairs and a glowing circle on the floor.

--I immediately thought "traps his soul to create a major artifact."

[Cisturn]

I was running a horror game when one of my PCs shouted out this gem "I grapple Slenderman!"

I was trying to bail them out, but it still ended up a TPK. We ended up just making it a dream sequence. We're playing again next week.

[Blue1005]

The good old dream sequence, used by people everywhere to get out of a stupid idea

[Lucianus]

I was DMing a party of 6 experienced players in a homebrew 3.5 game, level 5 characters, all L or N Good. A fighter, ranger, druid, sorcerer, rogue and a gnome hoplite wannabe. They are on their way to a new continent to assist in the establishment of a colony when the Admiral of the fleet orders them search an island for food/water/etc. They find an scary old cave with undead trickling out and decide to go into it to kill them, as expected. What I did not expect, was for them to try and take the undead baddies BACK TO THE SHIPS! they figured they could use them as slaves or guards or something in the new world and stowed them away on board, the rogue making every damn hide and move silently check I forced on her while she moved them, bound and gagged, into the hold.

I intended this to be a get your feet wet mini adventure so they could get a sense of my DMing style, but instead I handed the Good party a hold full of undead! I had a crew member stumble upon them one night and the Admiral (who was the commander of this ship) ordered the evil things slain and cast overboard. I assumed the players would be smart enough to keep a low profile during this whole ordeal, silly DM, intelligence scores are for NPC's.

They proclaim that is was them who brought the undead on board and threatened to attack any who would try to destroy them. I should also mention that this ship had 100 marines, with more levels than the party, as well as high level officers on it, the Admiral himself was level 17. A VERY one sided fight ensued, the PC's were getting their derrières handed to them on a silver platter. Suddenly, the hold grate just "happened" to give way causing the PC's to fall to the lower deck where the life boats just happened to be, what luck! *sigh*

They escaped, rowed back to the island and just happened to be rescued by a passing fishing vessel (never mind the fact that they were seven months sailing away from their nations coasts). Thus ends the tale of how six morons derailed my whole campaign!

[Dr Bwaa]

Oh gods yeah I've got one; I was the DM for this little beauty.

The game is D&D 3.5. The party's around level 11--they've just gotten and subsequently started abusing Teleport to nearly get themselves killed. Doing stupid things with it like trying to use it in a thick forest as though it's Dimension Door, that kind of stuff. In retrospect this should have been a warning sign of future stupidity, but I digress.

The whole campaign up until this point has taken place on one half of the continent; there's a huge, bottomless chasm in the middle almost a hundred miles wide that cuts the continent in half, with a desert on each side. It was created thousands of years ago when an unreasonably epic mage with too much time on his hands decided to try to take on the Gods (he lost, but he took most of the pantheon down with him). People don't really go there.

Over the course of the campaign (since about level 4 or so when they found the main quest), the party has been learning that eventually they're going to have to cross to the other side of the continent. They'd done research and so on, found witnesses who had seen various attemps to cross over. They talked to a guy who watched a wizard teleport to the other side thirty years ago, except the wizard had never arrived, or if he had, he'd never sent word back, and he certainly wasn't visible at that distance. Someone who had tried to Overland Flight across the gap had suddenly lost control and plummeted into the abyss. The party wizard had found tomes speculating on the nature of the gap in an old lab pockmarked with void magic areas, which the Wizard started to be able to sense. He, in fact, experimented with the void magic areas and found that they actually interfered with some spells even outside their boundaries, especially those that are transplanar in nature. The party even figured out a workable (if long) sea route to get there, assuming they could handle the various issues with the sea (if it were easy, everyone would do it), which was my intended plan for them.

They got to the coast, thought about getting on the boat after some lizardy encounters/negotiation, and then the Wizard says "everyone grab on" and then tells me "We teleport across."

The wizard isn't the crazy guy in the party. His player is definitely the most serious of them all. He is not joking with me.

There is a fifty-mile band of void magic that splits the entire plane nearly in two; there's no jumping over it without Plane Shifting somewhere else, then Plane Shifting back and praying you land on the other side. Officially, if you try to straight up jump across the void under magical power, what happens is that the magical energy holding your pattern together falls into the space between planes (not the Astral--the Space Between) and is lost. You have a transporter malfunction.

My six-person party has just, despite the overwhelming evidence, decided to TPK themselves on a whim, no save. :facepalm: Because I didn't want to kill the campaign, I bailed them out by plane-shifting them to a random plane (Plane of Fire), and applying some cascading residual effects (they bounced around to other random planes at increasing speeds for the next few weeks and the Wizard now has a very small chance, based on spell level, to Plane Shift every time he casts a spell). They eventually got back and managed to continue the campaign, but JEEZ.

[Doug Lampert]

Party is investigating a series of murders in a town.

I have a list of characters of possible interest, one of which is a deformed dwarf with a cheap brass ring which he keeps calling "his precious" and he's occasionally making "Gollum gollum" noises. Note that this guy has nothing to do with the actual mystery, he's a fairly minor red herring.

The party steals the ring. Then they hold onto it for a prolonged period while the wizard examines it to try to determine what it does. Then the wizard pockets the ring (everyone sees him do so), the rest of the party NOW tries to insist that the wizard give the ring back....

One dead wizard later the survivors begin debating what to do with the ring. The rogue puts it in a box and carries the box for several days....


Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
Thirteen for the Adventurers too stupid to live.


Mind, I didn't bail them out, eventually the survivors did get rid of the ring.

DougL

[TuggyNE]

They proclaim that is was them who brought the undead on board and threatened to attack any who would try to destroy them. I should also mention that this ship had 100 marines, with more levels than the party, as well as high level officers on it, the Admiral himself was level 17. A VERY one sided fight ensued, the PC's were getting their derrières handed to them on a silver platter. Suddenly, the hold grate just "happened" to give way causing the PC's to fall to the lower deck where the life boats just happened to be, what luck! *sigh*

Impressive, and fast thinking on your part. (No thinking at all was involved on the PC end obviously. )

My six-person party has just, despite the overwhelming evidence, decided to TPK themselves on a whim, no save. :facepalm: Because I didn't want to kill the campaign, I bailed them out by plane-shifting them to a random plane (Plane of Fire), and applying some cascading residual effects (they bounced around to other random planes at increasing speeds for the next few weeks and the Wizard now has a very small chance, based on spell level, to Plane Shift every time he casts a spell).

That's awesome. By which I mean facepalm-worthy.

Did you ever tell them what should have happened?

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
Thirteen for the Adventurers too stupid to live.

Good times, good times.

[Dr Bwaa]

That's awesome. By which I mean facepalm-worthy.

Did you ever tell them what should have happened?

After the campaign ended I told them what specifically they'd done, yes Although they probably knew they weren't supposed to try that right after they did it, when I asked "Are you sure?" they said "yes", and I stared at them slack-jawed for a few seconds before saying "fine"

[CardCaptor]

I was the Dungeon Master when this happened.

The party (3rd level, we had just started) was exploring the lair of a wizard who was obsessed by abberations of all kinds. They found his alchemy laboratory, and the barbarian of the party started looking at all the vials on the table. He couldn't read their labels, since he's illiterate, and he'd be unable to understand them otherwise anyway due to the fact he's got 6 intelligence. So, of course, while the party tries to elaborate a plan of sorts to ambush the wizard, the barbarian opens a vial, asks the Cleric if it's poisonous. The Cleric had miraculously prepared Detect Poison that day (honestly never seen a PC prepare that spell, but hey, it may be a good idea to do such when you enter an alchemists' lair), and says that no, indeed, the vial wasn't poisoned, before turning back and plotting with his friends. The barbarian doesn't smell the bottle or anything: what counts for him is that it isn't poisoned, and he chugs it down, thinking it was just a normal drink or something. I honestly can't see the logic behind this. Neither could the player, afterward. Who drinks a vial that just lays around in an alchemist's lab?

I had determined in advance that these vials were all filled with diminutive sized oozes that the alchemist wizard was basically breeding. I give a fortification roll for the guy to vomit it out, DC 15. It's a Barbarian with 20 con and a cape of +1 to all saving throws, mind you. I figured we'd all laugh it out, "Oh you, silly dumb Barbarian!" and pat him on the back or something, and we'd proceed, expecting this to become a running gag of sorts. Yet, he manages to fail the save. Now, he has an ooze that basically starts eating him from the inside. The Cleric turns around and notices the barbarian on the ground, wailing in pain. He starts dishing out the Cure Light Wounds on the guy, and every turn, I make the Barbarian make a Fort save to vomit the thing out. Somehow, he always fails. He had also used his rages of the day, too, so he couldn't just raise his con like that, and the cleric didn't have Bull's Endurance prepared.

This goes on like this for, I kid you not, maybe 10 turns. And by then, everyone was trying to do Heal checks to induce him into vomiting. Issue is, everyone but the Cleric in this party has, for some reason, 8 wisdom, while the Cleric has 18 wisdom, but no ranks in healing, so he can't just take 10 and succeed the DC 15 of the Heal check. Whoops.

The barbarian is at -7 HP now, unconcious, but I still let him do fort saves. And this time, I just tell him: "That's enough: use 3d6 to roll your fortitude save, it's getting ridiculous".

He rolled 3 natural 1s on those dices.

I could only look up to the sky, feeling like Gygax himself had decided to doom this character. So yeah, he died. And he used everyone's d20 around the table, and we averaged them afterward, most of them had 9 or 12 average after 100 rolls, all of which would've been sufficient for the Barbarian to make his fort save. We all agreed on the fact this guy had an identical twin brother (stat wise, feat wise and skill wise), and they keep the old one's decaying, eaten corpse around as a reminder for every time he tries to do anything stupid.

I wish I had recorded these dice rolls. I swear that what happened was mathematically improbable in the billions and billions of zeroes. I should've bought a lottery ticket.

[Autolykos]

All from Shadowrun:

Our Hacker and our Cat Shaman (both small guys with no combat skills worth mentioning) go in a bar, get drunk and decide to pick a fight with five Ork gangers. The Hacker went down in the first round, the Cat Shaman tried to Shapechange into a rhinoceros (ridiculous TN from the Con difference, plus he was drunk), failed, and followed suit. The GM was nice and had them just dumped in some back alley and their stuff stolen.

Our Streetsam has the trunk of his car filled to the brim with home-brewed explosives (about 50kg, God only knows what for), parks next to a donut shop, notices the police car next to him and goes in anyway. One of the cops sees his (pretty obvious) cyberware and asks to see his permit. He goes "Oh, I must have left it in my car!", and the cops follow. He does not have one (not even fake) and pretends he must have left it at home. Cops start to get pissed and demand to look in the trunk of his car. Sammy demonstratively drops the keys into the next sewer manhole, and the cops decide to shoot the lock.

Oh, and then our Rigger tried to shoot Harlekin. With the assault cannon on top of his van.

[Alaris]

Am I bad person for thinking it should have been a potion of Love's Pain (BoVD, 98-99)?

>.> Why didn't I think of that? That would've been AWESOME! And it would've shown how terribly evil he was...

[Snowfire]

Whew, this is bringing back memories....

So, this is a rather old story for me.

Party is: Minotaur Barbarian, Natural-Born Elven Werewolf Monk (I houseruled it), Drow Rogue (who was evil and did it well), Human Sorcerer, Human Cleric.

Everyone in the party other than the Sorcerer were varying degrees of evil - done surprisingly well for a party new to D&D. The Sorcerer, if I remember correctly, was Chaotic Neutral.

So, somehow, I get these guys to work together for a rather length campaign arc, building up into a fight against a level 15ish gish - which I forget the exact build of - in a fortress on an island in the middle of an inland sea (none of which existed a century ago). By this point they know that the guy is working for a rather powerful guild that runs on the intra-planar level. So they burst into the fortress, murder the guy, and then start looting.

At which point the problem starts. When the Minotaur decides that the lever over there, that the guy they just killed died trying to get to when he realised he was losing, obviously is the release mechanism for the secret door to the treasure vault. I am currently looking over the loot list and sort of fearing what exactly they're going to do with it - the party had a penchant for doing rather crazy things with their wealth - and don't realise that this is happening until the party draws my attention to the fact that the Minotaur has pulled the lever.

I literally sit there for about ten seconds, knowing what I had rigged to that, and desperately attempting to work out a way to let them live when:

a) Neither the Cleric nor the Sorcerer have Teleport prepped or in their known lists.

b) They have no scrolls of Teleport - or other such things.

c) Even if they did, the Sorc is fresh out of slots for Dispel Magic. As is the Cleric (somewhat my fault, but they could have trusted the rogue to disarm those traps).

d) The island was raised by Epic magic, and then subsequently trapped by the people who raised it - who linked all the traps to the lever. One of these traps was a Dimensional Lock covering just about the entire island.

I finally work something out at about the same point the players realise that they just did something extremely stupid. So, via a few desperate Knowledge checks - and some extreme luck on Spot - they manage to find the one room in the entire base that isn't Locked. Because it has a controllable Teleportation circle. I even describe the fact that it has something similar to a control panel.

The players immediately crowd in and trigger it. Without even looking at the coordinates.

There is another ten second silence on my part, then I roll some dice.

I eventually manage to have them snagged by a small group of extraplanar agents working for the Paragon Force Dragon who they'd run into before and managed to impress on occasion with their competence.

I'm pretty sure that was a DM fiat on my part...

Oh, and that isn't even it. The island - that they blew up - was a verdant paradise, absolutely full of life. None of which survived the massive explosion. The coast of the inland sea got pretty much devastated by the Tsunami that the explosion triggered.

So they get healed up by the people who saved them, dropped back off with some leads, kudos, and the loot they managed to grab before the entire place exploded, and wander into the nearest town. Where they get confronted by a rather pissed Avatar of the Lesser Goddess of Nature who had been the patron of the aforementioned inland sea.

At which point I called the session. They actually managed to work out a deal with her in the end - which they even delivered on - whereby they eventually managed to re-raise the island, repopulate it, and use a great deal of their Leadership to help rebuild the utterly savaged coastline.

And then they hit the hard stuff...

Sometimes I wonder if I'm occasionally too cruel to my players....

[mishka_shaw]

All from Shadowrun:

Our Streetsam has the trunk of his car filled to the brim with home-brewed explosives (about 50kg, God only knows what for), parks next to a donut shop, notices the police car next to him and goes in anyway. One of the cops sees his (pretty obvious) cyberware and asks to see his permit. He goes "Oh, I must have left it in my car!", and the cops follow. He does not have one (not even fake) and pretends he must have left it at home. Cops start to get pissed and demand to look in the trunk of his car. Sammy demonstratively drops the keys into the next sewer manhole, and the cops decide to shoot the lock.

Would love to know what he had planned with all that ordanance.

[Autolykos]

Seriously, I have no idea. The run didn't even require blowing anything up, let alone leveling an entire city block. He was quite fond of using explosives as backup maglock passkey or as a distraction, though. So maybe he just wanted to have plenty in reserve...

Oh, and somewhat offtopic, but I remember a particularly stupid move by our DM:
Harlekin Campaign, Dr. What tries to torture our Decker. Decker smiles, tells him to go f*** himself, kicks in his RAS-Override (which removes all sensory input) and continues to write some utilities on his implanted Cyberdeck. Not to be outdone, Dr. What tries to hack our Decker's brain (with a measly Computer skill and some old off-the-shelf deck). To add injury to insult, the Decker just completed a new-and-improved version of a Black Hammer utility, leaving the doctor's brain slightly fried.

[North_Ranger]

Group of Level 1 Pathfinder players, all pretty new to tabletop gaming save for one discontinued WoD campaign, start their quest in a tavern. After meeting the questgiver - a merchant who needs them to retrieve some lost goods from a clan of pesky kobolds - I give them a chance to talk to the guy who refused the deal, on account that the kobolds' lair is somewhere within the druid-controlled woods. I used every descriptive method available to make the characters understand that this is a grizzled veteran warrior, with a big-ass axe and plenty of scars.

Unfortunately the druid's player in the team is of the mentality that every NPC is there to be killed, slept with or slept with and then killed - and picks up a fight with what was intended as a chance for some easy tips on finding the kobolds and world-building. I had to prevent a total party-kill by getting the tavern owner - a retired, mid-teens adventurer - to break up the fight and tell the characters they are banned from the tavern.

The players are getting better. Now they just magic missile passing birds for fun...

[The Random NPC]

Would love to know what he had planned with all that ordanance.

If you have never found yourself wanting a trunk full of explosives in any given situation, you have failed to think hard enough about the situation.

[Sith_Happens]

If you have never found yourself wanting a trunk full of explosives in any given situation, you have failed to think hard enough about the situation.

: As an Evocator of much talent, I can confirm the truth of this statement.

[miz redavni]

My D&D group, well, we call ourselves team samsung, why? Don't ask.

Here's partway through a campaign we were doing, can't remember too much, but our party dug ourselves a deep hole and our DM decided to give us several chances to stop, get out or die, but check after check after check and a huge case of ******* around, we went further.

Anyway, team samsung was given a blimp, more like took a blimp, after quite a few successful checks.

There was a pilot and several hundred passengers.

We decided that the forest nearby was too much of a forest.

So we knocked out the pilot and aimed the blimp at the overly forest forest.

We slow falled or flue out.

Our NPC guide wasn't too happy about this but our DM was a retard and allowed all of this.

As the fires tore through the forest at retarded speeds, we walked away only to find some random dungeon about 30ft from the wreckage.

We decided to go through it.

Our clueless DM threw mob after mob after mob at us. We jokingly destroyed all of them with our nearly TOed characters.

After clearing the 3 story dungeon we decided we were going to ditch our dwarf NPC guide and collapsed the dungeon around him and left.

Now where's what happened once we got out. The DM was probably tired of our douche baggedness and was going to kill us with quite a few(alot) armed guards to teach us a lesson.

DM: You see guard from the nearby village, he obviously saw the explosion from the blimp. "What's going on here, everything ok?"

Me: bluff check

DM: Ok, on what?

Me: It was horrid! We were the only survivors! The Pilot went insane and decided to kill us all!

Other member of samsung: It was madness!

Other other member: MADNESS!!!!

DM: fine roll

me: nat 20

DM: FINE!

So yea, our DM tried to teach us real good, but let too much stuff slide.

[Kelb_Panthera]

@miz redavni

A) that's kind of the opposite of the vein of this particular thread.

B) It's not nice to call your DM "retarded" since that person was not only willing to be a DM, a difficult and all too often thankless task*, but they chose not to kill your characters via unexplained and unavoidable meteor from heaven turning you into a smear on the side of a mountain when the nearest mountain is half a continent away.

Your DM certainly made some mistakes there, but I'd bet that's more the result of being a new DM or forming a new group more than persisting incompetence. I don't know you or your DM personally, so I could be wrong about that, but those seem to be the more common causes of DM blunders, though we all make the occasional misstep. This thread has a few tales that prove that point.


*In spite of this, DM'ing can be a very rewarding endeavor, and I encourage anyone who enjoys their game to give it a try once in a while.

Btw, is there a thread for players to complain about incompetent DM's? Catharsis is nice and it'd help to avoid bogging down the forum if all that venting was done in a single thread rather than have a new one pop up every so often.

[Dimers]

the team is of the mentality that every NPC is there to be killed, slept with or slept with and then killed ...

I suppose that's better than "killed and then slept with".

[Gavinfoxx]

The players are getting better. Now they just magic missile passing birds for fun...

The next bird should be a Wild Shaped Druid who summons a bunch of Storm Elementals and a huuuuge windstorm and call lightning and such on their asses...

Cloudburst, Obscuring Snow, Briar Web, Arctic Haze, Call Lightning, Boreal Wind, Control Winds, Blizzard, Avalanche, etc. etc.

http://www.thetangledweb.net/forums/....php?cid=54924

Use whatever won't kill them, but will definitely teach them a lesson!

[The Random NPC]

Btw, is there a thread for players to complain about incompetent DM's? Catharsis is nice and it'd help to avoid bogging down the forum if all that venting was done in a single thread rather than have a new one pop up every so often.

These forums have a rule about reviving old threads, and so we have to create new ones every so often. If there isn't one currently, feel free to create one.

[Kelb_Panthera]

These forums have a rule about reviving old threads, and so we have to create new ones every so often. If there isn't one currently, feel free to create one.

I would, but I'm between groups atm, so I don't have any current complaints to vent about.

[TuggyNE]

I would, but I'm between groups atm, so I don't have any current complaints to vent about.

Then just create one as a favor to other players?

[The Grue]

longpost, ice devil etc

I have to ask...if you didn't expect the party to go along with the ice devil's deal, and it was way over their heads for a survivable combat encounter...

...what exactly was your original plan to let them avoid getting killed?

On-topic, this one didn't happen to me, but to the previous part of someone I played with in highschool.

Party wizard gets himself a Staff of Power and uses it to great effect for a couple of encounters. At one point he uses it and it fizzles - whether due to spell resistance or antimagic field or being out of charges, I don't remember, and I don't think he bothered to stop and consider why. Regardless his immediate reaction was, "Bah, stupid staff. I break it on my knee."

The DM had a strict "no takebacks" policy, so...actually I guess that's not really on-topic after all.

[EtherianBlade]

Lucky for the paladin that you apparently aren't a Fullmetal Alchemist fan, because when I read this--

--I immediately thought "traps his soul to create a major artifact."

I considered changing it to something like that, but it would not have made sense in the context of the game. Besides, as it turned out, it was a fairly helpful in-game lesson. He was raised -- at enormous expense to the party -- and has since been a bit more careful.