One of the things I love about coming to the message boards is the stories. So I thought I would start a thread to collect some.
Story 1
I try my best not to rail road my players. I do my best to get them to run the content I have prepared but if they don’t want to fight the kobold lich I am not going to make them.
The group had discovered that a group of assassins were testing a plague on the town they were in. The group intercepts a communication between assassins; it basically said “The only apothecary who currently knows of a cure to the plague is a dwarf who lives in a short tower in the east side of town. He never leaves his home he is extremely paranoid. His home is likely to be riddled with traps. Kill him, and burn his library. Hail the Bone Assassins!”
I mapped out 5 levels of tower. With traps and trap like encounters. The whole place was sprinkled with treasure and one big reveal as to the nature of the Bone Assassins. Namely that they were the light weights of the Assassins Guild and the party still had to watch out for the Blood and Flesh Assassins.
The Party gets together and decided to send a letter to the guards. They paid a kid on the street to drop the letter off, and not tell anyone who they were. And they went shopping. They were worried the town guards may have been infiltrated by assassins and didn’t want the assassins to come after them. I figured the anonymous tip did alert the town guard in time to get some people down there but really what are a bunch of level 1-4 warriors going to do against a tower full of traps a few trained Assassins? (lvl 3-5 Rogues)
The next game the party is alerted to a massive fire. Three guardsmen were in the tower when it went up and the guards are spread thin because on top of this they have normal law and order type stuff and a minor noble is freaking out because her son didn’t come home yesterday. The only clue is the kid brought home a gold coin the day before he disappeared. They are calling on the local adventure community for help.
It's not D&D or Pathfinder, but I'll share anyway.
In one of our Shadowrun game, our 3-man group consist of a Street samurai not too bright, a decker(not to keen on good hygiene) who looked like the Clown is Spawn, and a mage (myself).
At one point the street sammy got a phone call from one of his fixer. We had to meet Mr. Johnson at restaurant X at 7:30, suit and tie requiered.
So he called both the decker and I and told us to be prepared by 7pm. The Clown wasn't to satified with the suit and tie clause, but after long discussion to convince him he took his first bath in many years (thank god deckers don't need to be close to you on all mission), got an hair cut, paid big money to get a suit fit for him and be ready for 7pm.
When we all gathered at restaurant X, the valet asked for any reservation and since the sammy never conveyed that info to us, we relied on him. Unfortunatly not too bright sammy (and player) forgot the name of the reservation :S The decker was so pissed for all the trouble he went through, but not as much as our GM that had prepared that intro for us to play that day...
For our most recent bi-weekly gaming session I had worked up four encounters for the group (all encounters occurred within 24 hours). Everything went according to plan up until the first combat encounter. It happened at night during their watches and they managed to capture one of the enemy. He was more than happy to tell them that others were coming to finish the job of offing the PCs (they are being hunted by an evil group of slavers). Well, this worried the PCs enough that they decided not to wait until the morning (which is when encounter #2 was scheduled) and use their feather token: swan boat to sail quickly down the river to town rather than hoof it on foot (thus missing encounters #3 and #4 which were to occur on the way back to town).
So they bypassed 3 whole encounters. To top it off, they were griping at me for not having more encounters so they could earn more exp. =)
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For our most recent bi-weekly gaming session...
Something similar just happened in the World's Largest Dungeon game I'm running. The players were hired by a minotaur chief to assassinate his allies, a medusa and a rakshasa. The medusa and rakshasa had spies within the minotaur's tribe who informed them the players were coming for them and moved up their own plans to turn on the minotaur chief. The medusa and rakshasa lured the players into a trap and planned to kill them while their minotaur spies carried out a coup on the tribe's chief. The party barely survived the encounter with the monsters and decided to take a break not knowing the minotaurs were, at that same moment, involved in a civil war. After three days resting in a Secure Shelter, they come out to find they missed the entire battle I had prepared for them to take part in.
At one point, I had a small group of minotaurs come by and knock on the wall of the shelter to get the players' attention (the wizard had positioned the wall of the shelter to block off a hallway so they couldn't look outside.) One of the players actually told me he was going to knock back and tell whoever it was to go away because he was trying to sleep. On the second day, another player had 14 minutes in Gaseous Form to explore the tunnels outside the shelter (and possibly discover a group of minotaurs fighting one another) but decided he'd rather play it safe and stay put with the rest of the party. By the end of the session, the party had only killed four of the traitor minotaurs and one of the players (the wizard, coincidentally) wondered aloud why they hadn't had more encounters.