The DM stole my plot twist!/ Players should whatch what they say in front of the DM.

[NeoPhoenix0]

Just tell stories of times when the DM took something you said and used it against you in game. or if you are a DM something you took from your players.

I never made one of these before so i have no idea if it will be popular but here goes.

To start off, during a mutants and masterminds game i was talking about vampire lobsters a concept that i came up with years ago. We were fighting a crustacean themed army. Apparently the DM needed an idea for a kind off lieutenant class monster between the crab people and the humongous (i forget what crustacean) super robot. next thing i know there is a large lobster thing for each of us that can heal by siphoning energy on touch, shoot water cannons and jump pretty good. and no they did not have a weakness to sunlight.

Edit: i'm just glad i have never talked to this dm about one of my oldest secret concepts that i keep for rainy days.

[Airk]

This is a pretty standard GMing tactic on a lot of levels, but most of the time the players don't know it's happening, so I wouldn't expect a whole lot of posts here.

[WarKitty]

Seriously, my plot strategy is to listen to my players scheme, pick my favorite two, combine them, and run with it.

[lytokk]

Not exactly a plot twist, but I had been reading through the BoED for our eberron game, and mentioned some sort of construct arm that good characters could get grafted to them if they lose an arm in combat. I think it might have been a minor artifact. Just commenting on it how it would actually somewhat fit in the Eberron world.

Next session he triple crits against me and my halfling paladin loses his left arm (using some critical table he found, first and only time it ever was used). Dumbfounded he looks at me and says "Well, at least now you can use that arm you found in the book" I'm convinced it was an accident, but it did work out pretty nicely. House Cannith (I think) donated the arm to me because we had actually been doing something to save some significant portion of their operations.

After my character blew up, that arm and a sword were the only parts of my character to survive, both of which now have the markings of major artifacts, but only when used together.

[Brookshw]

Hmmm, not sure how much this counts.

Had a pc named Lupin the third. Halfway through the campaign he gave me carte blanche permission to mess with his backstory since there were a lot of unknowns in it (like who his father was). The PC had been nose diving hard into evil. Grazzt had slowly been coming into focus as the true bbeg who was manipulating things. I ended up making the pc his great grandchild and much scheming was born.

[Eldan]

I love doing that as a DM. "Oh my god, what if... the BBEG wasn't the BBEG? What if, instead, he was controlled by the mine overseer, who was a vampire all along? Think about it! He's down there all day, away from the light, no one would notice!"

And then you twist it a bit more so it's unexpected again.

[Segev]

*cough* I'm the kind of player who takes "don't give the DM any ideas" as a challenge. But then, I also only play with DMs I trust not to abuse this, in general. Anything I discuss with a DM is usually because I think it'd make an interesting story.

[Milodiah]

I accidentally did that once. A PC of mine had a preexisting fear of both spiders and wasps (the former was, of course, the DM's fault), and I threw a spider eater at them. Not intentionally, even. It was just the first level-appropriate encounter the donjon generator gave me without being a baker's dozen zombies or something stupid like that.

Although I am currently working towards exploiting a loophole in said lawful good player's self-imposed clerical code of ethics to make him choose between signing his soul over to the Nine Hells or breaking his oath by letting an ally die. Plus he's constantly looking for his parents and has outright stated I can put 'em wherever I want.

This will be fun.

[supermonkeyjoe]

The number 1 rule that my old RPG club had was "never ask the GM/DM/storyteller 'is it explosive?' unless you want it to be"

[geeky_monkey]

I really don't see how this is a problem.

I love it when a DM does this - taking ideas that interest the players and modifying their game to include them. Surely that's what you want them to do?

[Eldan]

The number 1 rule that my old RPG club had was "never ask the GM/DM/storyteller 'is it explosive?' unless you want it to be"

The answer, of course, is always "You're not sure. How are you testing it?"

[Cikomyr]

I would personally be flattered that a GM likes my idea so much he used it.. ;)

[Akodo Makama]

The answer, of course, is always "You're not sure. How are you testing it?"

I prefer "It neither looks nor smells like any explosive you've previously encountered."

[nedz]

I've had this happen the other way around.

I've come up with an interesting plot twist, whatever, and then some player has said something like "Wouldn't it be funny if X happened ?". Now you might be able to twist it around, but you might already be committed; in which case the player thinks I've stolen their idea

[BRC]

I had kind of the opposite happen to me.

Mystery campaign, but the world was intentionally unbuilt, so everybody (players and DM) were introducing new elements as they seemed fun (Is there a wharf leading to the dwarven district called D Wharf? Sure! WHY NOT!). My main PC was indisposed, so I was controlling his brother, a member of the Orcish Mafia.
I casually mention, in-character, that I hired a pair of goblins to burn down a warehouse belonging to a rival gang. The DM jumps on this, gives the Goblins names (Fitzwick and Litzflick, the goblin mischief men), gives them habits based on a joke (They walk around on each other's shoudler's wearing a trenchcoat), and has them keep showing up.

It turns out, they were behind the whole plot. We never suspected them because we thought they were just two random NPCs based on a one-off line of dialogue I'd improvised that the DM had taken a liking to. It never even occurred to us that they were the antagonists (Also, we were distracted by a plot involving an ancient ruin with a magic amplifying field, a gang war between competing factions of the Orcish Mafia, and a nigh-omnipotent orc vampire/mafia boss)

You see, the DM's plans ALREADY called for a pair of mischevious, Chaos worshiping goblins named Litzwick and Flitzwick to be behind the entire plot. My one-off line about hiring a pair of goblins to burn down a warehouse had just been the perfect opportunity to introduce them.

[Drelua]

This can be a good thing, or it can be very, very bad. I have an example of when it was the latter.

A few years ago, we were starting a level 12 gestalt game, not long after we had switched over to Pathfinder. I figured there should be a reason my character got to that level, so I decided he was a retired adventurer whose wife had recently been killed by an enemy he made years ago who he had thought to be dead. He eventually managed to track the guy down and get revenge, and now he's just wandering and grieving. When I told this to the DM, he decided that my wife was still alive, and that I was being blackmailed into doing things for some evil group. Even worse, he then had all the other players name an important friend or family member and had the exact same thing happen to them. Basically, he took my backstory, pissed all over it, and gave copies to everyone else.

As if that wasn't bad enough, when I met the guy who was telling us we had to do things for him or our loved ones would die, I said 'I charge him.' This didn't go with the story he had in mind, so he had me roll a sense motive check and told me that's a really bad idea, and when I said I don't care, he used all sorts of heavy handed crap to basically force me not to attack. I don't know what he had planned for that game, but I gave up by that point. That game did not make it to a second session, 'cause if it did, it would have been without me.

[Alex12]

The number 1 rule that my old RPG club had was "never ask the GM/DM/storyteller 'is it explosive?' unless you want it to be"

The same thing applies to "is it flammable?"

[Velaryon]

We were playing a campaign in the DM's homebrew world, and I forget how but somehow the phrase "fiendish deviltry" was uttered. Being a fan of terrible jokes and puns both in and out of character, I was like "Fiendish devil trees? Where?" And then when people around the table gave me weird looks I pulled out some scrap paper and applied the fiendish template to some Treants.

Next session we were nearly TPK'd by a grove of Fiendish Devil Trees.

[braveheart]

in my pokemon game one friend found a driftloom in the city, stuck in the hand of a decomposed child's corpse. latter we get a malwile from the same city who we are told has a tragic backstory and lost his original owner long ago. I make the joke that it was the same kid as the one that had the driftloom, the gm ran with it and now we are waiting for the two of them to be out at the same time to see what happens

[Brookshw]

The answer, of course, is always "You're not sure. How are you testing it?"

"With my face" obviously.

[NeoPhoenix0]

I really don't see how this is a problem.

I love it when a DM does this - taking ideas that interest the players and modifying their game to include them. Surely that's what you want them to do?

I never said it was a problem, i just put this topic here for fun so people could share some stories.

This is a pretty standard GMing tactic on a lot of levels, but most of the time the players don't know it's happening, so I wouldn't expect a whole lot of posts here.

I'll be honest, as of writing this comment i wasn't expecting as many replies as there already are.

[LimSindull]

I wrote into a back story that my character was told that his brother was murdered by elves. It turns out he liked the idea, turned it into my brother being captured and raised by elves.

When we got to a very main siege to get our city back, my character's brother showed up trying to convince me that meteor swarm was the best way to handle the situation. It was very conflicting to me as a player. I was at tears as I decapitated my long lost brother.

[Melville's Book]

I wrote into a back story that my character was told that his brother was murdered by elves. It turns out he liked the idea, turned it into my brother being captured and raised by elves.

When we got to a very main siege to get our city back, my character's brother showed up trying to convince me that meteor swarm was the best way to handle the situation. It was very conflicting to me as a player. I was at tears as I decapitated my long lost brother.

I get why you used him based on OOTS, but Elan goofily grinning most certainly does not mesh with the image of feeling conflict and shedding tears at losing your character's brother.

Hm... I'd say my biggest example of this was in Ars Magica. I was playing a Quaesitor, the equivalent of a magical lawyer/detective. There had recently been a string of magi being bloodily massacred by an unknown force, and my character was asked to investigate, to which my familiar pleaded and was allowed to come with. I made the mistake of chuckling and saying "jeez, why is my familiar so worried about me as to follow me to all of the murder scenes? Does it not think I can handle myself, especially with so many other magi around?" (My familiar was being played by another player, who was actually just trying to find a way to play a character in the situation) My SG heard this and, after talking to the player playing my familiar about it in private, decided that the familiar (who I mostly gave free reign to come and go as long as he didn't cause trouble, and he mostly stuck around so how was I to know?) was the perpetrator of the murders, and was coming both to make sure he cleaned up his mess properly and to steer my character off the right track if he started getting smart.

That revelation was hard to take. Deciding that I wasn't willing to kill my familiar and accepting death was even harder. But my familiar deciding that our friendship had been true and deigning to run away so I didn't get dragged into the conflict, only to be surrounded and killed as it fled, was hardest.

... Me and my big mouth.