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Like anybody, I enjoy threads that recount the unexpected (and inexplicable) turn of events that sometimes occur in games or those that expose the mind-nubblingly dumb things that PCs (or DMs) occasionally do.
A little less common, in my experience, are the stories that recount ridiculously unlikely deductions, leaps of logic or unintended accidents which have lead PCs to solve mysteries, prematurely defeat bad guys or stumble out of a problematic situtation before they're even aware of being in it. These are the events that leave lesser GMs weeping on the floor, their carefully plotted storyline in disarray and with no idea of how to pick up the pieces. Here's one such example from the other thread:
Champions game. Until that point in the game, it had been very classical super heros. Fighting other supers, lots of tech and such. So, the GM pulls each of us aside in turn, and I'm 3rd in line. As I'm bored, I start thinking to myself, what is the most stupid plot line I could think of, given our game style. I hit on throwing in werewolves or vampires. As I'm thinking about how bad of a clash this would be, I devise a joke to play on the GM. When he pulls me back in the other room, I count to five as he starts talking, and then carol out in a loud voice. "VAMPYRES! Are you Serious?!" The GM looks shocked, and several people look back into the room. He looks so shocked I feel bad, and apologize, saying it was just a joke.
To this day he still thinks I cheated and looked at his notes or was listening to the two people that went before me. We were attacked by vampires. :) And it was as bad as I thought it would be, it clashed horribly, and we killed the head vampyre, rather than capture him to find a cure, so the GM had to come up with a wierd cup ritual to undo the vampirism he spread to half of us.
How about you? Ever had a PC unexpectedly kill your disguised BBEG while trying to read a campaign's opening boxed text?
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
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Like anybody, I enjoy threads that recount the unexpected (and inexplicable) turn of events that sometimes occur in games or those that expose the mind-nubblingly dumb things that PCs (or DMs) occasionally do.
How about you? Ever had a PC unexpectedly kill your disguised BBEG while trying to read a campaign's opening boxed text?
I had a player back in 2e that would intuit plot points all the time. I remember once I was running a dungeon for a con game, that I had written up myself less than an hour before, and it was almost like he was reading my mind and notes. There was one room with an underground glade sort of environment, and he immediately told me he was going to sit and meditate next to the pool for one hour. I had put in a benefit for that exact action in the adventure. I can only imagine that I must have given some sort of visual cue or I had gotten predictable in some way.
Champions game. I was playing a young speedster. We were looking for a shape changing alien. The party brick was dating a stretchy guy and brought him to a fancy dinner party/ art auction. The stretchy guy reached passed the speedster for a drink from across the room. Not remotely buying the connection as a player, I had the speedster "eeeep" and run up the wall to the ceiling.
Turns out later the stretchy guy was one of the shape-shifting aliens. (just orphaned on earth at a young age so he couldn't use all his powers)
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How about you? Ever had a PC unexpectedly kill your disguised BBEG while trying to read a campaign's opening boxed text?
Something like this happened in the first WEG Star Wars campaign I ran. I was 17 at the time, so I had started to become a "serious GM," but I wasn't yet immune to player surprise or know the value of having a back up plan (this experience is what taught me to always have a back up plan).
I had outlined an adventure that involved the PCs arriving at a meet with an NPC Rebel spy to get vital information from him, only to watch helplessly as that same NPC was kidnapped by a pair of bounty hunters who had no idea the guy they were kidnapping was a spy.
This would lead into a lengthy adventure where the PC have to track down a group of space pirates and rescue the hostage before an Imperial rescue squad tracks him down and rescues him. It was going to be an awesome adventure.
To make sure it went off without a hitch, I made one of the two bounty hunters Boba Fett. Not actually Boba Fett, but same basic concept: jet pack, badass body armor, loads of built in weapons, more or less unstoppable. The other bounty hunter was there to get nuked by the party, while the Boba-clone snagged their contact and soared off into the sky.
Things went awry when the party's Gambler (i.e. Lando) whipped out a hold-out pistol (weakest firearm in the game) and shot the bounty hunter in body armor. Normally this would do nothing, but the player rolled a 6 on his wild die (in WEG games players roll collections of D6 to generate a score and overcome a DC, one of these dice is the wild die and every six rolled on the wild die allows another roll of the wild die, potentially resulting in infinite success). Then he rolled another 6, and another and another, until he had done something like 43 points of damage with gun that does an expected 4-9 points of damage.
Result? One Shot, One Kill on the Boba Clone before he could hijack the Rebel spy.
And I had no idea what to do next. None at all.
The groups I've run for over the years have frequently confound me by doing things that throw the whole plot askew and leave me scrambling.
Example 1: The characters search diligently for and find a back way into the BBEG's lair (a megadungoen I designed myself), one that I had not expected them to find. This way leads directly to some of the most dangerous encounters, stuff that is way beyond level appropriate, and they can die quickly. In fact, the first thing they encounter is a big green dragon. It is sleeping and there is a chance, since they are approaching from a way the dragon thinks is secure, that they can just sneak past it. They blow their Stealth rolls and the dragon wakes. The dragon assesses them quickly and doesn't feel particularly threatened. It also is not particularly hungry at the moment and does not have any love for the BBEG, who has humbled the dragon in the past and forced him to do tasks the dragon considers beneath him. So he's interested in talking and engages the party in dialogue, after casting a spell that allows him to skim surface thoughts. The party starts talking, and quickly guesses that the dragon is reading their minds. The wizard of the party starts to get fidgety, convinced the dragon is just toying with them before inevitably attacking. He suddenly decides to hurl a fireball at the dragon, even as the rest of the party is still talking to it and a deal is emerging by which he'll let them by and provide them a certain amount of subtle assistance in killing the BBEG. The dragon, of course, detects the thought, and an initiative roll is called for. The dragon wins and breathes on the party. TPK, halfway through a campaign I had spent six months writing. Aaaaarrrrgggghhhh!
Example 2: Party is on an underseas adventure, and comes upon a drowned temple to a long-banished evil wizard/king/god, the big bad boogyman of the whole campaign world. While searching the altar for secret compartments and traps, the rogue touches it. That touch triggers a direct contact with the banished god, who, assuming anyone touching the altar must be one of his priests, proceeeds to deliver straight into the rogue's mind a soliloquy revealing his plans for returning to the world to establish dominion over it once and for all, defeating the upstart gods who had banished him and drowned the corrupt and evil empire he ruled in the first place. Major foreshadowing that would allow the party to consult with their tribes' leaders and plan for the coming cataclysm that would be the capstone of the campaign. The only problem is that it scares the crap out of the rogue, to the extent that he never says a thing about it to any of the other characters, taking the ostrich approach (yes, I know they don't really do that) of burying his head in the sand and hoping that evil will pass him by. I was counting on that foreshadowing to help the plot along and set things up. Without it, I needed to do some major rewrites. Still worked out in the end, but lots more work for me and a much tougher path to victory for the party.
Towards the very end of my one homebrew campaign, I had a fort which was ruined several hundred years ago by a black dragon with a bunch of the alternate breath weapon abilities from one of the 3.5 books (effectively, he gave up spell casting to have a breath weapon which was 2-3 times as effective as normal). He'd basically melted the forts defenses, then moved in.
Jump forward to campaign-time. The party reaches this fort, where they're expecting to find one of the McGuffins. After fighting through several layers of recently re-activated automated defenses (a tornado of animated adamantine shuriken and a corpse-harvester of some kind, which may or may not have actually been connected to the fort), they reach it and find an old man sitting in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe, dog across his feet. Turns out he's the tourguide, though there hasn't been many people coming through recently (given the fort was now in the middle of nowhere...).
The conclusion I was hoping for, although I didn't have any plot-hooks dangling on it, was that the old guy was actually the dragon that destroyed the fort, still around. One of the party members just looks at the scene and says out of nowhere, "I'll bet the dog's a dragon." It turns out he was entirely right (the old man was the dragon's half-dragon sorcerer child), but the campaign ended before they got back out of the fort's catacombs, so they never found out until I told them a year or so later.
In several of my games, one of my players had a habit of taking two unrelated pieces of information, getting one of them wrong, and then linking the two in an entirely erroneous bit of reasoning...
...and correctly coming up with a major campaign spoiler.
It drove me nuts.
Something like this happened in the first WEG Star Wars campaign I ran. I was 17 at the time, so I had started to become a "serious GM," but I wasn't yet immune to player surprise or know the value of having a back up plan (this experience is what taught me to always have a back up plan).
I had outlined an adventure that involved the PCs arriving at a meet with an NPC Rebel spy to get vital information from him, only to watch helplessly as that same NPC was kidnapped by a pair of bounty hunters who had no idea the guy they were kidnapping was a spy.
This would lead into a lengthy adventure where the PC have to track down a group of space pirates and rescue the hostage before an Imperial rescue squad tracks him down and rescues him. It was going to be an awesome adventure.
To make sure it went off without a hitch, I made one of the two bounty hunters Boba Fett. Not actually Boba Fett, but same basic concept: jet pack, badass body armor, loads of built in weapons, more or less unstoppable. The other bounty hunter was there to get nuked by the party, while the Boba-clone snagged their contact and soared off into the sky.
Things went awry when the party's Gambler (i.e. Lando) whipped out a hold-out pistol (weakest firearm in the game) and shot the bounty hunter in body armor. Normally this would do nothing, but the player rolled a 6 on his wild die (in WEG games players roll collections of D6 to generate a score and overcome a DC, one of these dice is the wild die and every six rolled on the wild die allows another roll of the wild die, potentially resulting in infinite success). Then he rolled another 6, and another and another, until he had done something like 43 points of damage with gun that does an expected 4-9 points of damage.
Result? One Shot, One Kill on the Boba Clone before he could hijack the Rebel spy.
And I had no idea what to do next. None at all.
I know what I would have done (given that there was no time to think, and I'm no good at thinking fast.)
First, I would have thanked my lucky stars that it wasn't the BAD GUYS who rolled multiple wild dice. Seriously, I remember an abrupt and messy end to a campaign I ran in MEGS, which has a "rolling doubles" mechanic very similar to d6's "wild die," when the bad guys just kept rolling doubles upon doubles upon doubles, resulting in a TPK.
Second, I would have congratulated the player who made the lucky shot. Remember that players have more fun when they WIN.
Third, I would try to think of how to salvage the adventure by getting it back on track (for example, by having a Boba-clone-clone, using the same stats, attack and kidnap the spy while the PCs were trying to talk to him.) If I didn't think of that, I would try to stall the players by having the PCs would try to bring that info to the rebels, only to get attacked by imperials, or even by some money-seeking thugs who have nothing to do with the adventure. Remember that "random encounters" are very useful for filling time. If I didn't think of that either, I would let the PCs bring the info to the rebels, and improvise the beginning of a different adventure where the rebels use the info to send the PCs on a mission. I might even manage to pretend convincingly that this had been my plan all along.
Fourth, (if I didn't think of any of those ideas in step 3,) I would admit to the players that I was stuck for ideas, cut the session short, and ask for time to plan the next adventure. These things happen.
The Serpent's Skull campaign I'm playing in has had two short sessions and it has been two months since we last played. In the interim, I've cross referenced and tabulated all of the permitted texts available to me, and I've managed to glean a great deal of information about the NPCs (mainly from their boarding ports).
I hope it comes off as Holmes-like in the next session. Or better yet, Data as Holmes on the holodeck. Woot!
EDIT: Before you cry foul on me... I'm playing a well-read bard and my GM is cool with me plundering the setting books... just not the AP itself.
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Third, I would try to think of how to salvage the adventure by getting it back on track (for example, by having a Boba-clone-clone, using the same stats, attack and kidnap the spy while the PCs were trying to talk to him.) If I didn't think of that, I would try to stall the players by having the PCs would try to bring that info to the rebels, only to get attacked by imperials, or even by some money-seeking thugs who have nothing to do with the adventure. Remember that "random encounters" are very useful for filling time...
Yeah, this is basically what I did. I just chased them around the city with Stormtroopers and threw a bunch of random combat encounters at them until the session was over, and wrote a whole new adventure.
Now, older and wiser, I don't write adventures that hinge on PC failing at a task they can theoretically accomplish.
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I was DM-ing the adventure Dead Man's Quest (from Polyhedron) as an introduction to the Freeport campaign. At one point the PCs hand over the "eye of the sea dragon" to the priest of the sea god, who brings it inside the cellar of the temple, where he places it into the dragon turtle statue that was there. Then he goes upstairs in order to reward the PCs, and in the meantime the villains (yellow sign cult members) are supposed to passwall into the cellar and steal the gem again. The PCs then have to track them to an abandoned warehouse and there to fight the cultists and a horrible monster.
One of my players was playing a rogue who was rather opportunistic as far as religion was concerned, since he was only praying to gods who relate directly to the adventure. At the exact moment the priest arrives from the cellar, the players states: "I am going down in order to pray to the sea god." The incredible thing was that all the other players thought that he was planning on stealing the gems, but he was really going to pray to the sea gos. And of course nobody knew about the passwall.
I hesitated for a moment and at first wanted to delay the theft by the yellow cultists, but then decided it was too beautiful a coincidence and I let it go. So the rogue suddenly saw the hole in the wall appearing, and I changed the whole adventure into a chase adventure (which was luckily still quite exciting, mostly since nearly all the PCs slipped in the grease spell one of the cultists threw at them). Of course they finally captured the cultists.
I hesitated for a moment and at first wanted to delay the theft by the yellow cultists, but then decided it was too beautiful a coincidence and I let it go. So the rogue suddenly saw the hole in the wall appearing, and I changed the whole adventure into a chase adventure
Kudos to you for rolling with your players' unexpected actions and giving them a chance to catch the thieves red-handed rather than taking the easy way out and robbing them of their fun.
I hesitated for a moment and at first wanted to delay the theft by the yellow cultists, but then decided it was too beautiful a coincidence and I let it go. So the rogue suddenly saw the hole in the wall appearing, and I changed the whole adventure into a chase adventureKudos to you for rolling with your players' unexpected actions and giving them a chance to catch the thieves red-handed rather than taking the easy way out and robbing them of their fun.
+1 You're a good DM. *pats DM head*
Edit: I didn't mean that quite as sarcastic as it sounded. I really do like how you handled it.
Thanks all! You make me blush!
I always try to avoid railroading.
I have a reason for it, too. Even if I have to rewrite part of an adventure, it is more interesting when the players come up with unexpected actions than if they just follow the plot. I think it makes for a better game, and a better roleplaying experience for the players. When they have the feeling that their actions matter, they get more involved in their characters and in the plot. And then their actions are again more interesting for the DM.
You will have to be able to improvise, though. I can imagine not all DMs are completely happy with that.
In a long running, epic level campaign that started back in the 3.0 days, my group was plane hoping trying to locate 4 ancient prisons, one on each of the elemental planes and each one built to contain a single cosmologically immense being.
They went to the plane of fire first, and in the prison, found an NPC in an argument with the Guardian of the jailed being. Through the course of the encounter, my players came to the exact conclusion I wanted them to - that the NPC was their friend, and that he was a nice and helpful guy. In reality, he was manipulating them and working for the BBEG.
I had the big reveal that the guy was actually evil all planned and plotted out - it was going to be so wonderful when the party realized too late that they'd been working with the wrong side.
Well, the party gets to the 2nd of the prisons, on the plane of water. As they are exploring the complex, fashioned entirely from ice, they find some of the treasure I'd tossed in for them to find, a set of bracers frozen in one of the walls.
Since it seemed silly to me to just have bracers frozen in the wall, I had the bracers on a corpse.
Well, one unanticipated speak with dead spell later, and I realize they're about to find out the NPC's true allegiance. I decide that, while unexpected, they deserve to know if they're smart enough to find out, so I decide I won't fudge anything or mislead them if they ask the right questions. And boy, did they ask the right questions!
Question: "Did [the BBEG] order you to come here?"
Answer: "No."
Next Question: "Who ordered you to come here?"
Answer: "[the NPC you think is a good guy who isn't]"
... gasps and grumbles from my players with dawning looks of horror
Next Question: <player hesitates, as he knows he is not going to like the answer to this question> "Is [NPC] working for [BBEG]?"
Answer: "Yes."
In the end, I think the reveal the party worked themselves into was WAAAAY better than the one I had intended. Kudos to my players for that one - it was well deserved and loads of fun.
A couple of years back I was running a game where the PCs needed to seek aid from a thieves' guild. After doing a pretty thorough investigation to find out where the leader's base of operations was the party headed there and gave the secret knock that they had learned. A peephole slid open, on the otherside was the halfling guildleader. Having heard that the party was looking for him and assuming it was to start trouble, the guildleader pretended merely to be a guard and from the otherside of the secret door asked the PCs what the password was, telling them that without the password, they weren't allowed to enter to see the leader. There was no password, really, it was a lie made up on the spot, but the majority of the party exchanged dumbfounded looks, thinking that they had blown their chance since they had never heard of any password in their well plotted investigation. Except for one girl who is a ton of fun to play with. She said, and I quote:
"There's no password, you little [expletive], and you know it. Now stop playing games and let us in!"
I paused for a moment. Everyone at the table was taken aback by her answer, which she gave without a moment's thought. Intrigued by her insight, the guildleader permited the PCs entry and heard them out. To this day the other players are still shocked by the situation.
Level 1 adventurers:
"We need you to kill this Cocatrice."
"Man it'd suck if this turned out to be a Medusa."
It was.
Later,
"You see an abandoned cabin."
"Man, this feels like a goblins encounter."
It was.
...I need to stop saying things in our games, because my intuition is ALWAYS right.
I suppose I have one that I did myself as well...
I was playing a gnome illusionist that tended to be rather snarky and was always making jokes. Along the road we had met a clumsy alchemist, and Roondar, my gnome, said something along the lines of: "You were one of those kids with no eyebrows, eh?" Appearently we were SUPPOSED to get our next plot hook from her (joining her side in a violent rivalry between her and her brother, which had been steadily escalating since they were young and he made fun of her for that very thing). Instead, we ran.
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Like anybody, I enjoy threads that recount the unexpected (and inexplicable) turn of events that sometimes occur in games or those that expose the mind-nubblingly dumb things that PCs (or DMs) occasionally do.
A little less common, in my experience, are the stories that recount ridiculously unlikely deductions, leaps of logic or unintended accidents which have lead PCs to solve mysteries, prematurely defeat bad guys or stumble out of a problematic situtation before they're even aware of being in it. These are the events that leave lesser GMs weeping on the floor, their carefully plotted storyline in disarray and with no idea of how to pick up the pieces. Here's one such example from the other thread:
How about you? Ever had a PC unexpectedly kill your disguised BBEG while trying to read a campaign's opening boxed text?Champions game. Until that point in the game, it had been very classical super heros. Fighting other supers, lots of tech and such. So, the GM pulls each of us aside in turn, and I'm 3rd in line. As I'm bored, I start thinking to myself, what is the most stupid plot line I could think of, given our game style. I hit on throwing in werewolves or vampires. As I'm thinking about how bad of a clash this would be, I devise a joke to play on the GM. When he pulls me back in the other room, I count to five as he starts talking, and then carol out in a loud voice. "VAMPYRES! Are you Serious?!" The GM looks shocked, and several people look back into the room. He looks so shocked I feel bad, and apologize, saying it was just a joke.
To this day he still thinks I cheated and looked at his notes or was listening to the two people that went before me. We were attacked by vampires. :) And it was as bad as I thought it would be, it clashed horribly, and we killed the head vampyre, rather than capture him to find a cure, so the GM had to come up with a wierd cup ritual to undo the vampirism he spread to half of us.
Oh god. He picked Vampires out of the hat of most common Villains?
I used Ratiocinatrix: A 'villian' who works so far below what is obvious it is deemed a natural occurence.
Ex- BBEG might flush Goblins from a cave using Spiders...so that the local Village is put under pressure and the woods becomes off limit to logging because of Goblin Occupation. Now consider this occurring across a region. So that groups of Woods across the region that were once subject to local logging eventually becomes a Forest a century from now occupied by a Goblin.
Your PCs saw Goblins taking up residence in woods (and if you go looking as to the cause - it is a spider infestation is happening in the caves where they live - no BBEG there).
This loss of a Logging industry might cut growth to a region so that a City will develop impoverished zones where the buildings fall into disrepair and become home to Stirge. The BBEG might introduce breeding pairs to a ruined manor. The Stirge infestation spreads to infect the city.
BBEG introduces Yellow mould into the city Sewers and causes sickness in creatures living in the sewers to the point where they surface more often for the healthy air - instant Were-rat Invasion of the Alleys and Streets at night.
Disapproval of the Government increases because they have failed to maintain the infrastructure and let the economy fail. Other Criminals and enemies of the state see an opportunity to help this along. The Kingdom Falls.
It pits the BBEG directly against the PCs and anyone else sent to clear out the Spiders that started this all off. This BBEG is more concerned about the pillars that prop up the cause of anarchy than participating in it.
These are great anymore?
We confounded the DM, but only by wasting an *inordinate* amount of time on absolutely nothing.
We were in one of those 3.5 AP's (savage tide I think?) And as usual the DM gives an excellent account of what the room looks like.. except that the room "had no use" except, as a room.. go in one side, kill whtaever's inside, turn around, go back into hallway and to the next room. Except we didn't.
We spent the next couple of hours actual real time scouring the room asking for the description again and again, trying to figure out what the poiint of the room was.
There was no point, whatever ancient thing the room had been used for none of us could figure out and the book didn't tell him. We eventually just asked him out of character and he waas like. "I have no idea, it doesn't say and the layout of the room doesn't bring anything to mind".
I don't blame him for not telling us (afterall- if we want to scour a room we have that right) but it certainly did waste alot of time and confuse the heck out of him.
:)
-S