I played a cleric years ago who was in an advanturing party with this wizard, and between the two of them they were pretty ssadistic bastards. Without going into extraneous detail, it was pretty normal to see the spell Disintegrate thrown out multiple times in the same day. Near the end of the campaign we face this spell caster who was at least 20th level - higher than either one of us. She had collected appropriate intelligence on us and prepared Spell Turning, keying it to our favorite spells. So... when I cast Disintegrate on her, it was I who overcame my own spell resistance (yay feats) and blew my own saving throw (yay for rolling a 2), and I who was reduced to mere traces of dust.
I'm not sure if I can draw the distinction between epic fails and DM douchiness.
We had one DM who was used to running 2nd edition, but he had been running 3.0/3.5 for a fair bit by the time of the story. He was obsessed with undead and they made a fair amount of appearances in just about every game.
We started out in a relatively magically advanced city with a large population. The head of a local and important church was actually a religious archmage, and he also happened to be responsible for a large amount of the city's defenses. One of the defenses being a fail safe in case of large scale magical attack, a network of disjunction spells set up in along the city wall and most places of any significant concentration of people. He had been trying to make something akin to a Mythal but hadn't got the design there yet.
So where did he set up the red button, so to speak? A Huge Rune inscribed into the marble in front of the altar in the church. We go to visit the "priest" to discuss a problem unrelated to the defense of the city, and the party (2nd level) rogue starts examining the area. While my character, a wizard 1/psion 1 was discussing an unseen force that was putting people in comas, the rogue notices the disjunction seal is a permanent magic item, much like a permanency'ed teleportation circle.
So what does he do to the Huge Magical Seal taking up over forty feet of floor? Use Magic Device. How does he do it? Activate blindly. What does he roll? 20.
According to the DM, the city was magically wrecked. All arcane items were destroyed outright, so no longer were there potions or scrolls or wands to buy. Not only that, but he made all arcane casters make a fortitude save or die from a magical aneurism. My character passed and lived. 99% of the arcane casters did not, including the archmage.
Because he was not using magic/psionics transparency, psychics quickly replace key positions within the economy and hierarchy. I think we made it to fifth level before we switched to something else. By the end of it, my character ran a mercenary company who also contracted law enforcement for two quarters of the city and was good friends with a courtesan slave trader.
It was an odd game.
The GM ruled the spell went off with the force of bomb. Large portions of the city were destroyed. It was latter spun/believed that it was terrorists.
My character participated in volunteer rescue operations and never quite found out that his friends blew themselves up on accident.
Long time ago, I was playing an Orc Barbarian. Everyone else was like a crazy creature in the party because the DM wanted crazy creatures like centaur and drow, and such. I choose Orc to be odd by being 'normal'. Anyways this guy was exceptionally dumb.
The cleric in the part tried to explain to him the concept of Pi and that it was a circle. Orc responded with "Duh, Pie made in a circle." He ended up wrapping the cleric up in circles and confusing him about the whole thing. Anyways, this dumb Orc Barbarian was presented with a hallway full of traps. They convinced him there was pie on the other end of the hallway, so he ran full bore down the hallway and set of 8 traps along the way. It didn't end well. It was not so much a fail as much as it was playing a character to the hilt, and coming to the natural conclusion. Lesson: don't play a dumb naive sucker with players who will abuse it.
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I once trusted in my companions.
Crazy right?
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I once trusted in my companions.
Crazy right?
Indeed.
I count this as the dumbest thing I have ever done in a game session:
Playing a cleric, initiative was rolled. Mine was higher than the rest of the party. Rather than cede to at least one other party member who would have been better prepared, I walk into the room, where I know the monster is, knowing what the monster is (in this case, a Beholder), and after performing in ineffectual spell, I get disintegrated into a small pile of dust.
Epicly epic fail. (I rolled a "1" for my save by the way).
My party monk and my party cleric...
BACKSTORY: High level dungeon crawl (level 15). The monk is a faily competent player and the cleric was kind of a new guy.
Well we are in a room being attacked by a bunch of golems. Me, as a Beastmorph Vivisectionist Alchemist with a level dip in barbarbian (YAY RAGE!!!!), Greater Eldritch heritage (abyssal) (YAY STRENGTH!!!!), and pretty much built to kill, was pretty much making short work of the golems in my area.
The monk (a Flowing Monk with old Crane Wing and STUPID HIGH AC) was holding his own vs some other golems when our cleric epically failed his Knowledge Check. This check was rolled in secret with the GM so as to limit meta-gaming. Well the player mis-identified the golems and thinks them IRON golems when in fact they were BRASS golems (don't ask). Well he asks the monk if he could pass a reflex save and our monk's response was "YOLO! Go for it!".....
Well the cleric goes and casts Flame Strike... and the monk rolls a 1 on his reflex...
net effect: Monk ends up falling unconscious, the golems get HEALED, and I have to come in and kill the golems and the cleric had to rez him.... oh and this was THE FIRST FREAKING ROOM IN THE DUNGEON...
-.-....
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Early 3.0 Campaign:
The party (a motley lot of non-good alignments, save for one guy) had been interrogating a captured Lizardman and were getting nowhere with him, so they decided to let him think about things overnight before they executed him the next day.
The only good aligned member of the party, the Cleric, taking a measure of pity on him, wanted to use Alchemy to create a drink that would help calm him and deaden the pain of the upcoming execution. I made the roll and failed miserably. So, because of my roll (the result of which I kept secret) the Lizardman died a horrible twitching and foaming death by poison instead. The Cleric picked up the nicknames "Pastor of Disaster" and "The Sinister Minister", despite his protests that he was only trying to help.
Questions for the curious:
Question #1:
The Present does not interest me,
only of the past I write.
Stony words they claw in me,
I fill the young with fright
Look at me and feel sad,
Then slowly turn your head
Well meet again when times are bad
I'll crown you when you're dead.** spoiler omitted **
Question #2:
The commonest of soldiers found where rival armies meet;
He'll charge or hold the line, and never will retreat.** spoiler omitted **
Question
...
I just stole these (runs away, laughing maniacally)
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Tonight in a home game, the boss for the session, a corrupt noble, surrendered after he tried to attack my character, fumbled(two natural 1s in a row) and ended up critting himself for 20 points of damage. We're level 2.
My character is now boasting he can make people stab themselves instead of hurting him. XD
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Most of the people I play with tend not to make overly stupid mistakes but there were a few.
The first involved a paladin who had received a mission to save slaves. Sounds easy enough so after investigating we find the kidnapped people underground in a derro lair. While the barbarian/rogue is carefully picking the locks on the cages the paladin is gleefully killing all of the weak mites attacking us.
This continued on throughout the adventure with the paladin killing around 85% of all the mites due to them being so much weaker than us that the rest of the party (cleric, barb and ranger) didn't bother.
Cue to the final boss fight where the paladin's player re-reads his faction mission and reads out that it said that "even evil creatures deserve a chance at freedom" and realizes in horror that his paladin had been slaughtering the very creatures he had been meant to save.
Needless to say he failed his mission.
The second is more player stupidity than epic failing. The group consisted of a paladin, barbarian, sorc, cleric and one other. The 7 wis, 7 int sorcerer had proceeded to show a secret message he received to anyone he could (since he was an incredible gossip) resulting in plenty of people seeing the message and who we were working for at the time. The paladin took the message off the sorc but not before the damage had been done and the groups trust in their newly met sorc went straight into the outhouse.
During the adventure we found some incriminating documents on the table after a fight and the sorc demanded to see them. The paladin announced that they were of sensitive nature and the sorc couldn't be trusted with the documents. The sorcerer declared that he HAD to see the documents. Once again the paladin denied the sorc and the sorcerer player declared that he was casting burning hands on the paladin.
This brought the table up short, total silence. The DM asked was the player sure about that and he said he was. The barbarian who had been next to the sorc cleaning his greatsword asked again, was he sure, and the player still declared that they were. The barbarian player asked if he was casting defensively which the sorcerer was not. The barbarian proceeded to take a nonlethal attack of opportunity, he crit and confirmed resulting in taking the sorc into negatives due to rollover from nonlethal.
The cleric cast stabilize and the party put his unconscious body into the loot sack and carried him through the rest of the dungeon. After which he was dumped at the inn and ooc was suggested to tone the character down or design another one.
The player decided that the character had burnt too many bridges on his introduction and brought in something else.
Our intrepid party consisted of a cavalier (cockatrice order), a alchemist, a barbarian/oracle, a sorcerer and another character which I can't remember at the moment.
After clearing the goblin menace from the town the group realized that they had to go through a large bramble batch in order to get to the goblin den. The cavalier refused to leave his noble mount behind and proceed to charge through the thorny vines blindly.
He cleared a path straight through the thorny patch... to the cliff edge which his horse rode straight over. The falling damage knocked both unconscious. The barbarian dove off the cliff and stayed awake channeling positive energy which woke up the cavalier but not his mount. The cavalier dove under the water to try and get his mounts head above water
The alchemist used their touch of the sea potion and dove off afterwards hoping to use their extracts to help and proceeded to take nearly maximum damage from the fall and almost dying on impact. The sorc and other character were just standing there wondering what the heck just happened while the goblins were laughing their green backsides off from their own vantage point.
The barbarian/oracle proceeded to channel again which woke up the horse but not the alchemist so the cavalier and horse swam to shore while the barbarian carried the unconscious alchemist to shore.
The cavalier, alchemist, barbarian and other character all retired after that incident for varying reasons.
The sorcerer from the previous story rounded up a new adventuring group willing to risk their lives to stop the goblin menace. Finding two paladins, a ranger and a inquisitor the group made their way into the castle where the goblins seemed to be using as a base.
Coming across a room with two doors and a corridor proceeding away from them, the ranger carefully leaned down and began picking the lock on one of the doors. This was taking some time (due to a botched roll failing by 4 followed by a successful one) one of the paladins walked over to the other room and heard noises and proceeded to burst into the room while the 2nd paladin proceeded to announce that he started banging on his shield and walked down the corridor between the two rooms challenging the cowardly goblins to come out.
As the lock clicked open unheard in the rangers hands the three remaining party members all facepalmed as now multiple encounters were triggered at the same time. The corridor paladin ended up in a 1 on 1 fight against a fighter while the other paladin burst in on a bugbears harem. The half elf ranger, the sorc and the inquisitor moved to back the (slightly less stupid) paladin at the harem. Unfortunately the bugbear was a ranger with favored enemy elf and elf bane arrows so he took an attack of op from the paladin to target his most hated foe. Proceeding to crit and confirm the ranger was left with only 2 hit points left before death claimed him.
Unfortunately the fighter had knocked out the corridor paladin in this time and charged the inquisitor tying him up while the other paladin was focusing the bugbear so the ranger bled out on the floor. The fight didn't go well with the inquisitor and paladin both being dropped by the fighter before the sorc just managed to take him out.
So sadly due to the paladins acts the innocent ranger lost his life.
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In a 3.5 game a few years ago I was playing a warblade from the tome of battle, things were going well, I'd gotten a brilliant energy sword that me and another character played with after it didn't affect undead, I ended up stabbing him in the foot with it. fast forward a little bit I ended up riding another players griffin mount, having the time of my life I threw my hands up in the air and whooped, followed immediately by my fall and hitting the ground for 50 some damage. While trying to figure out how long it would take me to heal naturally, (i don't think we had a cleric) I found the massive damage, rule, mentioned it, and that was the end of my warblade.
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This one happened about three weeks ago, while playing the new 5th ed Encounters.
Have you heard the phrase, 'pulling defeat from the jaws of victory'?
So, six players who don't know each other (a bit like PFS), playing brand new 1st level characters. One guy has a teifling paladin, but apart from not having a gender (because the player hadn't decided yet), 'it' looked so human that you couldn't tell. Apart from the horns. And the tail.
Anyway, the paladin is tooled up with armour, javelins and two longswords. Can't use two longswords at the same time, but hey, there was probably a sale on.
During combat, the DM would point to the player and ask what their PC was doing, in the traditional manner. We answered in the equally traditional manner by saying things like 'I hit him with my sword' or 'I shoot him with an arrow'. The DM points to the paladin, who says, '..errm...can I throw a rock at it?'. Well, yeah, but you'd actually have to put your javelin down to pick up a rock, hint hint.' Throws rock, misses, wastes everybody's time.
Later, we are fighting kobolds, we've taken down all of them except one who has a single hit point remaining. One of his deceased colleagues is in two halves after a particularly entertaining crit. Paladin has been particularly useless. On his turn, he asks if he can pick up one of the two halves of that kobold and use it to hit the remaining baddy. DM sighs, 'Whatever'. Paladin rolls a crit, DM has no option but to declare that the last kobold loses his last hit point, despite the stupidity of the whole thing. Great. Now the paladin is wondering how to chain the two halves together to make kobold nunchuks. I die a little.
After a few more battles (including one where he charges an enemy acrobatically with his javelin when it would be easier to just step up and belt it, rolling a 1 and landing on his stupid head) we arrive at the castle, and go to the rooftop to see the leader of the good guys. Of course, we are immediately attacked by a massive dragon(!). You do know that we're 1st level, right? He does. I conclude that we surely can't be expected to defeat a dragon, so organise the evacuation of the boss and his soldiers to the interior of the castle while we distract the dragon and try not to die. We're heroes, dammit!
After a few turns of, 'Ha, hit AC 20 with my arrow!', 'Tough, the arrow bounces off its scales', 'Crap', the paladin has his turn. '...errm...I talk to the dragon'. Really? 'Yep. I say that we are on its side, so stop attacking us'. Here we go again. DM requires a Deception check. Paladin rolls a nat 20. DM rolls an Insight check for the dragon, rolls a nat 1. Oh, I don't know what to do now! For some reason(!) the adventure didn't have this as a possibility. No problem, says I, use the table in the confusion spell to decide what the dragon does. DM rolls, 'Dragon does nothing for...' *rolls* 'three rounds'.
Victory! All we have to do is evacuate the roof, pretending like we own the place, while NOT ATTACKING THE DRAGON. What can possibly go wrong?
DM says, 'Fighter! Your turn. Are you attacking the dragon?' 'No! I persuade the soldiers to evacuate the roof in an orderly fashion. Do I have to make a roll?' 'Heck, no! They are happy to follow that order!'
Each player is asked on his turn what he wants to do, and is he attacking the dragon? 'No! I'm helping the soldiers to evacuate.' Victory is at hand, 'victory' in this case being 'not dying'.
Then, it's the paladin's turn. What are you going to do? Are you attacking the dragon?
'...errm...'
Oh, lord no!
'...errm...I talk to the dragon again'.
Why? We've won! Why mess it up?
'...errm...I tell the dragon that he's my b~&+~ and has to do what I say.'
Silence.
Paladin rolls a check, doesn't roll a 20.
Dragon rolls a check, doesn't roll a 1.
Dragon roars, 'You LIED to me!', swings around and breathes destruction. DM rolls 4d6 (oh, it's smaller than I thought), picks them up and rolls again (okay, maybe not so small), and again, and again...
'Wait a minute, how many dice are you rolling?'
'Eighteen. It's an 18 hit die dragon.'
'You do know we're first level, right?'
I swear he was trying to stifle a grin, and then pretends to be apologetic while saying, '65 damage. Save for half.' Save for half?!? 32 will kill us instantly anyway!
Fortunately, the targets were the paladin and (not so fortunately) 8 innocent soldiers. For the paladin, it's the clearest case of suicide I've ever seen.
After it's all over and we go to the courtyard and get spontaneous applause because of the lives we did save, the boss says to me, 'Wasn't there one more of you?'
'...no. Just us.'
2e game; The good guys are besieged in a small, abandoned fortress by an army of gnolls. Finding a crate of some sort of highly volatile liquid, they devise a plan to use arrows to shoot the small vials of the explosive at the gnolls in an effort to make them think they have a high level mage among them.
Affixing the first vial to an arrow, the Ranger draws back and...rolls a 1. The vial falls into the crate, exploding and killing half the party as well as creating a breach in the wall. The remaining heroes manage to escape via a secret passage in the nick of time. But no thanks to the Ranger.
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A 2e game, I was new to the system and was handed a pregenerated half-orc thief. Looking over the skills and through the book the stats I was generated with made me think I was the guy who sets up traps/ambushes and gets the first hit before the fighting began. I asked if I could buy some fish hooks which were cheap and a net. I began using fishing line to tie fish hooks to the net to make a cheap one man trap. Basically something I could fling at a guy and get him entangled and stuck as the barbs wouldn't let go. First time I tried to use it I rolled a 1... no more fish hook nets for me.