Ok, im tired.. just reposted my 7th sea story... as if I hadn't before... deleted that post but making this one just in case someone saw my fail and replies to it. I'm tired.
I still hate you for being the only DM I've ever known that could turn treasure and reward into grueling hardship....
I did something similar a long time ago. The players were relatively low level, so they didn't have access to Bags of Holding or very many transporting spells. They defeated a corrupt prince, and found his treasure hoard... Which literally contained more gold than they could carry. We spent an entire game sessions figuring out how on earth they were going to move the currency with little to no magic, many days from any civilization, and more monsters on the way... That was fun. :)
A couple of big mistakes I can't forgive myself for:
1. Attempted my own homebrew which fell apart. I had a idea of making every character a Bhall Spawn (it was set in Faerun.) and so they all had dreams of upcoming bosses such as a elf ranger seeing a half-dragon orc taunting him, a fighter seeing his presumed dead brother back as a ghoul (planned ghoul with fighter levels) and so on and unfortunatly I got carried away wiht the suggestiveness of one person's dream and they dropped out of the game and the game relatively died after that.
Incredibly stupid mistake and will forever haunt me as she was an amazing roleplayer.
2. Whilst running the first part of curse of the Crimson throne I wanted to involve the soul bound dolls however I then realised the level a wizard would have to be to make them so the entire encounter was a messed up CR with treasure far out of the PC's reach. Big mistake and the wizard is walking around with a wand of lightning bolt.
I had a group of 7th level characters who were fighting an adult red dragon. Knowing it was so far out of their league, I had given them an NPC ally, a couple of magic items that were "on loan" to them, and nerfed the damage of some of the dragons abilities. Well, the dragon rolled last in initiative, and every single PC and the NPC rolled a critical hit. The last one to go was the fighter, who was wearing gantlets of strength +3, and wielding a +3 warhammer. He maxed out on his damage roll, and with the crit, wound up doing something like 100 damage. The dragon died due to massive damage. I expected this fight to last for the whole session, and had nothing else planned.
Total gametime that session: 30 minutes.