Derailed your campaign so hard you've had to stop in the middle of a session and say, "I need to consider the ramifications of what just happened."? I like stories, and am extremely interested in hearing about something like this.
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Years ago when I was playing the old FASA Star Trek RPG, the GM had to hit the reset button or the whole adventure was screwed. We were playing agents, not traditional crew members. We had to find this guy and talk to him for some vital info. We also needed to check out a couple of other things in the area.
IIRC, we knew what he looked like, we asked one of our group to just follow him, maybe find out what hotel and room he is in. But don't make any type contact with him whatsoever.
So he tails the guy up to his room, watches him go inside. He walked up to the door nd when or mark answered he shot him point blank with a phaser on disintergrate.
Me: "I roll to seduce Arueshalae."
GM: "You WHAT?"
Me: "Natural 20!"
The campaign was unrecoverable.
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I've had campaigns end unexpectedly for werid in-game reasons, although most of those were early in my GM career and before I'd learned some important lessons...
1. I once wrote an adventure where the PCs ultimately find themselves outclassed and outnumbered, and were supposed to surrender. I had planned a series of adventures where they were to be sold into slavery as gladiators and would ultimately foment a slave revolt in the Country of the Bad Guys. Unfortunately, they decided "Death Before Dishonor" and used suicide tactics to take out their enemies while sacrificing themselves. That session ended both the campaign and that particular gaming group.
Lesson Learned: Get out-of-game buy-in from the players before you write a "PCs get captured" scenario. Players HATE IT when their PCs get captured!
2. A LONG time ago, I decided to shake things up and let the PCs find a deck of many things. BIG MISTAKE. Four out of five PCs ended up dead or worse, with the remaining PC ending up crazy rich. The one surviving PC didn't have the means or the desire to try to rescue/resurrect his friends, and just retired to count his vast wealth. End of campaign.
Lesson Learned: Never, ever, ever let the PCs find a deck of many things. It is a campaign extinction-level artifact.
3. I once ran a very short-lived Champions game where the super-team's first reaction to anything was, "How is this our problem? We call the cops and let them handle it." This was before the super-hero explosion in pop culture. It turned out that none of the players were particular super-hero fans.
Lesson Learned: Make sure your players are familiar with the tropes of the genre you want to run, AND want to play in that sandbox.
4. I once tried to run an urban D&D campaign set in the City of Greyhawk that would ivolve a lot of underworld intrigue and the Thieves Guild. The third session involved shenanigans at the Docks, and the PCs ended up boarding the bad guys' ship... and commandeering it. They then pressed the crew into their own service and sailed away to become pirates. It turned out to be a really fun campaign, but I basically had to throw out everything I'd planned ahead of time.
Lesson Learned: Let the players take the lead in what they want to do!
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One more...
5. The first time I ran "Rise of the Runelords," the players really liked Book 1. At the end of the session that concluded Burnt Offerings, I announced the title of Book 2: The Skinsaw Murders. The expression and demaeanor of one of my players changed dramatically, and not for the better. He said that he didn't think he could play in the next part. I asked him to stay after everyone else went home to talk about it. I started to explain that the plot of the adventure would be that the PCs were tracking down a serial killer, and that the plot owed a lot to films like Psycho, Se7en, and Kiss the Girls, but he cut me off. I knew that he was a professor of archaeology at a local college, but he told me that this was his second career. He had once been a forensic anthropologist, like the main character from the TV series Bones. In his first real job after getting his PhD, he was hired by the United Nations and the El Salvador Truth Commission to investigate and bring to light the atrocities committed by death squads on both sides of the Salvadoran Civil War during the 1980s. He said that for a year and a half, he excavated mass graves, and interviewed both former members and surviviors of the death squads. He said that he ultimately had a nervous breakdown over the work, and quit the entire field of forensic anthropology. And because of it, he found stories of serial killers and mass murderers to be far from entertaining. He said that he liked RPGs that were stories of chivalry and swashbuckling heroism, not gritty investigation.
Lesson Learned: Before you decide to run anything edgy or gritty, make sure you have player buy-in. You don't want to accidentally blunder into any of your players' psychological sore spots.
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"So," I said, "you have collected the Plinth of Earth, the Jar of Fire, the Staff of Air, and the Sphere of Water. Now, to thwart the demon's world-ending plan, all you--"
"The Staff of Air?"
"Yeah, the Staff of Air."
"Um. We sold that. Like, back on the Peninsula Dei six months ago. On the other side of the vast ocean. To some gnome, I think."
"F---."
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I created a Star Trek RPG totally from scratch. Rules and everything. My guys were very interested in playing so we put together a campaign very quickly. They were supposed to be patrolling the Romulan Neutral Zone.
Long story short, we played 2 sessions. I had so much planned for them. The very first game ended in 20 minutes because they pulled a stunt I didn't expect and accomplished the mission. The second game ended after 40 minutes for the same reason. After both sessions we all left for our favorite Chinese buffet restaurant. I realized then that all my hard work had largely been a waste of time and we shelved the whole thing.
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Heh. Smart players. I feel your pain. A couple months ago I head-tabled behind my GM screen and muttered "I have GOT to get dumber friends..."
LOL! Yep. I know exactly what you mean.
Derailed your campaign so hard you've had to stop in the middle of a session and say, "I need to consider the ramifications of what just happened."? I like stories, and am extremely interested in hearing about something like this.
In my own DMing career, I don't remember any such episode... but I have a horror story about something related... so it happened in D&D5 quite recently, our party was tasked with finding a bunch of ingredients for a ritual, and then to take the ritual's result to a certain place so as to summon a bunch of BBEG's that were causing havoc in the game world, so they would fight each other, and then we'd deal with the survivor. we finished the scavenger's hunt and brought the components to the wizard who prepared the ritual, and gave us the activating item to put somewhere and then message him so he would launch the ritual and we'd wait in ambush for the surviving BBEG to destroy it and be done with all those things' exactions.
Well, in seesion end -2, I don't remember what we did wrong, but in session end-1, we wake up in a mysterious environment rather than where we finished last session... eventually, it appears that our guide, an evil wizard has betrayed us to a souped up spider monster who has captured us and taken us to her lair while putting us into deep hypnosis with the illusion of a shared fantasy world. We avoid major interaction with the fantasy, destroy the spider monster, and decide to pursue our way to a goal we want to accomplish before we finish the mission. (going to a certain city of ill repute to attend a wedding of old friends and have some words with the mofo who started all the trouble we're out to put an end to))... so we go to that city and start getting in trouble... session end-1 finishes.
Final session, well, what happens but that we wake up prisoners to a group of mind flayers, betrayed again by our evil wizard mentor, and realize that every event of the preceeding session was a dream sequence.
We're suitably furious at the DM, and manage to negociate our freedom with the Elder Brain who sees our mission in a favorable light as the BBEG's playing havoc in its bailiwick is less than an enchanting perspective to it... so we're being railroaded into finishing the mission this session rather than spending another session or two on our own pursuits, which would not have endangered the mission anyway.
Final results, both myself and a fellow player are furious at the DM, and have not seen or played with him since (ok, that was december, as he plays about once a month, that's not much missed yet), but seriously, a guy ready to go back like that on stuff that reasonably happened in game, and to which he didn't oppose a veto while we were doing it, or planning it, is what I deem to be one of the worst faux pas a DM can commit : if, at any time, he had told us that he was not ready to let us go on side quests of our own choosing rather than cling to what's prepared for in the campaign book, we migh have accepted it, but there he just let us go on our sidequest, and just tried to railroad us back into the formatted adventure, twice, and decreed that preceeding side stuff we had done was "only dreams"... definitely the worst possible breach of etiquette.
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Not so far, as I am rather adept at making things up on the fly.
However, I have been taken aback by things like :
Me "The room is suffused by a Golden Glow."
Player: "How many Hit dice is a Golden Glow?"
Room, with gong, with sign "Ring Gong for Demon": they always do, to their regret.
I dont think this has ever happened to me since I started in 1981 because...
..I have replacement character rules
Over the past couple of years, I've changed my games of preference from traditional RPGs where the GM is supposed to be omnipotent (e.g. the D&D family of games, Traveller, GURPS, or Call of Cthulhu) to narrative-focused storytelling game systems, like Fate or (especailly) the "Powered by the Apocalypse" family of games (e.g. Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Urban Shadows, Monsterhearts).
In narrative-focused games, the players are part of the world-building from the get-go. The GM's adventure is more of a one-page outline. You play to find out what happens. The GM's job is to be a fan of the PCs and to help them tell their own story.
In a game like this, your players can't derail the game, because there are no rails. It's your job as a GM to help them tell the story they want to tell.
a Dungeon World Example:
GM: After several days of travel through the Lost Forest, you make it to a bustling town. What do you do?
Fighter: Let's find a tavern!
GM: Okay. What kind of tavern are you looking for?
Wizard: We'd like a warm and friendly place where we can chat up the barkeep and get a good meal.
Fighter: Yeah! And decent rooms. I'm sick of camping out.
Bard: And a place where they'd let me perform for tips!
GM: Okay, there is a such a tavern in this town.
Wizard: Cool! What's it called?
GM: I don't know. What is it called?
Bard: The "Open Hearth"?
Wizard: Uhh... how 'bout "The Drunken Drake"?
Fighter: Ooh! I like that!
Bard: Me too!
GM: *Jots down some notes* You walk into the barroom of The Drunken Drake...
Bard: Do I know anyone here? Or, more importantly, does anyone here know me?
GM: I'll say your songs are known in these parts. Are you looking to see if your reputation precedes you?
Bard: Yes! Can I make a Reputation check?
GM: Go ahead and roll plus Charisma. On a 10+, tell me two things they know about you. On a 7-9, tell me one thing they know and I'll tell you one they know. And on a miss, what they heard won't be good.
Bard: ...Ugh. A 5.
GM: Okay, you walk into the bar and get a table. The place isn't too crowded. The bartender agrees to let you play. Halfway through your first song, one of the other patrons starts to heckle you about stealing that song. What do you do?
...etc.
I find GMing PbtA games to be much less work and much more fun than GMing traditional games: There is FAR less prep, and I find myself surprised and entertained by all the twists and turns that the players send their own characters through. It's a very different style of gaming, and resonates a lot better with my GM style than traditional gaming.
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I started playing World of Darkness, and the flexibility is similarly fun.
I like that you can make up any check on the spot pretty easily. I'm also very comfortable letting the players decide what happens.
Including when they decide to drink blood from a dead vampire... Which if you're familiar with World of Darkness leads to shenanigans.
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In one game our party did manage to screw with the GM's timetable a bit. We had said originally we were stopping in one city to suss out the situation, resupply, and get some allies. What we learned caused us to just run to the capital (that or our mood swings, not sure which). So we arrived two weeks ahead of the expected timetable for the civil war. It worked out better in some ways, but it definitely made our GM's life more difficult than it had to be. At least we didn't have to face the high priest of the chief evil gods in the the streets....
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I learned one lesson of good GMing from a group of terrible players, back when I was in college, circa 1990.
I co-wrote an AD&D 1e adventure that was set in our college gaming group's homebrew D&D campaign world. It used pregenerated characters designed for the adventure.
Background/context for the story: In the campaign world, the Confederation was a political and military alliance of several human, elven, and dwarven states. Their great enemy was the Orcish Lands, an empire rules by— you guessed it— hobgoblins. The Confederation and the Orcish Lands had fought a bitter off-and-on border war for decades. Even though the Confederation was winning the war, they successfully sued for peace, and a peace treaty was signed at the Free City of Gnolloch: An independent city-state on the border, where any sentient being was allowed so long as they abided by the local laws. The peace treaty had only been signed a year earlier, and the peace was tenuous but holding.
Background of the adventure: A rogue general of the Orcish Army did not want to end the war, and thought that agreeing to a peace treaty was a sign of weakness. He stole a war wyvern with the intention to sneak into Gnolloch to kidnap and assassinate the Ambassador from the Human Kingdom of Lirikos (the de facto leader of the Confederation), hoping to provoke the Confederation back into war.
The Emperor of the Orcish Lands knew that the war was not going well, and that the human-dwarven-elven alliance would almost certainly have been victorious: Which was why he signed the peace treaty. He knew that re-igniting the war would probably spell the end of his rule, and the end of his empire. To stop this roguye general, he assembled a team of high-level operatives and two human slaves from the area to serve as guides—the PCs—and sent them off on their own war wyverns.
* * * *
TL;DR: The PCs were high-level characters on a covert infiltration mession into a hostile city. They rode wyverns. The covert nature of this adventure was stressed in the overview read to the players, which we also gave as handouts.
The players were given a second handout: A map of the area. The map showed some major details of the City of Gnolloch and the surrounding area. We designed the map to show some decent places to hide their war wyverns and possible ways to sneak into the city, as well as the location of a nearby castle to which the clues in the city were going to point. As "dungeon dressing" we also added a couple of other details just to flesh things out: On the northeastern edge of the map we marked a "Kobold Lair" and on the southern edge we marked "Swmapland of Despair" with a skull-and-bones symbol.
Despite the covert nature of the mission, the players decided to fly over the city in broad daylight to "scout". This resulted in the city defenders firing volleys of arrows and flinging catapult missiles at them. They retreated, and landed in the nearby woods to figure out their next moves.
Looking at the map, one of the players pointed to the Kobold Lair, and said, "Hey! Let's ask the kobolds! They might know what's happening!"
Ignoring my "Are you SURE you want to go to the kobold lair?" GM prompt, they went to the kobold lair. The module didn't have anything to cover this situation, but I kept a copy of The Keep on the Borderlands in my GM bag. I then proceeded to run a party of five 14th-level characters through the Kobold Lair: a dungeon designed for first-and-second-level PCs.
Of course, one of the PCs fell into a 10-foot pit trap, and that made them all decide to just up an kill all the kobolds. The players LOVED THIS. The level of glee the players had while their high-level PCs slaughtered a bunch of 1HD monsters was almost infectious. But, after they'd killed all the kobolds, they realized that they hadn't left any alive to interrogate about the location of their target.
They thought about it for a little while, then another player pointed to the "Swampland of Despair" and said, "Hey! Let's go to the swamp and see what's there!" So they did, where I just rolled a bunch of random swamp encounters from the DMG.
At the end of the allotted time, the players had a BALL just fighting a bunch of random swamp-monsters. At the same time, I was upset and kind of angry at them for ignorning the tournament module they'd ostensibly signed up for: I'd co-written this thing, and was rather proud of it! How dare they not follow the adventure we'd worked so hard on!
For years, I told this story as one about a bunch of dumb players who were too stupid to even find the start of a module.
But reflecting on it now: The players had fun! I don't think any of them had ever run characters that high level before, and they were completely gleeful about their PCs' abilities. The players didn't care about the plot of the adventure I'd prepared: They just wanted to roll dice and kill monsters.
I could have had a whole lot of fun running the adventure the players wanted: Instead, I silently seethed over what I considered how dumb these players were. They had fun, but I didn't.
The lesson I learned: The GM's job is to offer a plotline, but if the PCs want to do something else: Just let them, and enjoy the ride!
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While playing Wrath of the Righteous, my Players bluffed their way into the BBEG's Castle in part 2. They are more or less his guests, and the BBEG is manic-depressive, so he doesn't really care about them being there most of the time.
They wander around a bit until they get fed up with the demons harassing them, the Wizard (Archmage path) Pops Invisibility Sphere and they start to Trail the bad guy during his wanderings. They end up with him and his Bodyguards at the place where the big bad ritual takes place. Instead of waiting for him to leave, they decide to go nuclear right there.I told them I would need some time to prepare and think about this, as they had just decided to combine about three Encounters worth of enemies into one room.
It did work out in the end, but after that we decided that the Archmage would get rid of the "Any spell, any time" power. He was overwhelmed with the choice and I was completely unable to predict ANY Encounter with that in place.
Our group is playing through Wrath right now, and I'm running the Archmage. I took Wild Arcana as my first mythic path ability, but I'm so stingy with my mythic points that the GM doesn't really have to worry about me making wildly unpredictable choices to throw off the adventure. I also tend to die a lot, even with mythic tiers.