What stunt did your D&D players pull that completely derailed the campaign? #6
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- Опубліковано 17 вер 2024
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D&D players, what way did you use a "useless" spell in a good way? #2
D&D Players, What was your best "Wait...what?!" moment?
What's the biggest mind-f**k you've seen during a DND campaign?
What's your worst loot stories?
What's the saddest death that you have ever encountered while playing D&D?
What's the funniest way you spoiled a important plot element in your campaign?
DND players, what was your funniest “rolled a 1” moment?
DMs, What is a plotline you've always wanted to run?
Ever had another PC kill your character?
DND Players, What is the coolest character you have ever played?
DND players, what was your funniest “nat 20” moment? (r/askreddit)
DND players, what’s your best Stories of Rope? (r/dndstories)
D&D Players, what's the most screwed up thing you've ever done in a game?
What's the worst TPK you've experienced?
D&D Players, what's the most screwed up thing you've ever done in a game?
DND Nope Moments #1
What’s your best Tarrasque story?
What's the funniest thing PC's latched onto?
What is the most unexpected damage you've ever done as a PC or DM?
What is the smallest way your DM has driven home how "evil" a villain is?
In a bleak, rainy world where all the gods died a century ago, our party found a True Resurrection scroll to revive a disintegrated NPC. However, the cleric figured "hey gods are creatures too, right?" After using the spell scroll, the adventure changed in tone and direction drastically as the party became crusaders of the only god left, originally a minor god of sunrise, and worked to actually fix the dystopia instead of just surviving it. Poor sunrise god was massively underqualified but he got there eventually
sounds cool, tell me more please.
@@bonefetcherbrimley7740 Well, it was a lot more upbeat and high-stakes after the True Rez, with the original vision being classic dungeon delving and faction warfare. After Sunrise God was reawakened, the "God Squad" could start to tackle the big issues of the world. One of them, for example, was poisonous rain, in which Sunrise God showed us a passage to the celestial clouds to find the ever-leaking decomposing corpse of the Rain God. After fighting our way through elementals and a lich, our cleric put a Gentle Repose on the corpse and stopped the poison (and got other clerics to keep casting it ofc).
As far as faction warfare goes, we went from kinda participating but most evading, to rallying and polarizing. Factions that believed in old gods took some convincing (like with the rain) but ended up firmly in our corner. Former allies who created new worship systems now saw the return of Sunrise God as a threat and turned on us, which hurt a bit.
As for disintegrated NPC, after one of our players retired her drunken master monk to Alcoholics Anonymous of the Apocalypse, she took over as the disintegrated NPC as a Reborn Divine Soul sorcerer, resurrected as Sunrise God's avatar after the first sunrise in a century. Loved that PC, not only for fantastic RP moments but also her 16 hour Extended Spell Aid at max level.
please tell me it was Solair
@@cjkula Would have been a fun coincidence but DM went for Savitar, Hindu aspect of sunrise sry
What a great twist! And actually a great handling of the situation from the DM's side.
6:35 "So, the merfolk is mute." "That's a problem." "Well, she taught the parrot to speak for her. We still haven't figured out how."
If you give a parrot the opportunity to scream profanity and annoy people, it will take it without question. I assume the parrot approached Arial, not the other way around. :D
“Awk! Ready the sail!”
I view this as a miss opportunity. I've had plenty of character that were either mute. Or spoke only telepathically.
The first find different ways to communicate. The second have had their powers blocked by enemies or friends. Which means they are effectively mute then.
It just means being more creative.
@@KumiChan2004 AND ALL the Charades and dubiously improvised "sign language" makes for some HILARIOUS antics, while everybody at the Table has to figure out what the "mute" PC is trying to say...
GODS!!! When I'm up for it, I LOVE a solid mute PC... OR one that only speaks a language NOBODY else at the Table can know... Like Demonic or Drow in a Party FULL of "goody-two-shoes" types... HAHAHAHA... LOADS of fun...
It's best if we do these improv's at a Table "IRL" though. Kinda hard to get the full Charades to fit on camera so the rest can see it on Discord... or whatever...
AND there's always the room for misinterpretation, or the "defeated" expression when someone gets an idea (that's clearly not correct) and congratulates the "mute" for being a genius as the Party takes off on a Plan NOBODY should be engaging... haha...
Good times!!! ;o)
My BBEG had an almost equally powerful lieutenant serving under them who would antagonize the party when they tried to interfere with his plans (which he always succeeded in anyway). The wizard of the group decided she wasn't going to sit by and watch him succeed again, and cast Geas upon him.
Now you must understand, this guy has advantage on wisdom saves. I didn't roll him up to be broken, but to be an appropriate challenge for a later level when the party eventually fights him.
No problem, he has advantage. What can go wrong.
Nat 1.
Nat 1.
"......"
Her command? Stop acting in any means that supports (insert BBEG's name!) So for thirty days he is charmed. The charmed condition allows the player who cast the spell to have advantage on all social interactions with the target.
She literally convinced him to retire from his evil ways and join the cause of good as a force of great strength and conviction, because she KEPT MAKING GOOD PERSUASION CHECKS.
And after a month, when Geas wore off, his alignment had shifted to neutral good.
That's how one player ruined my entire campaign with a now neutral good vengeance paladin NPC who wants revenge on his former employer's evil ways.
The dice doesn't lie
redemption revenge paladin! awesome concept
As a brand new player in my very first ever session, I rules-lawyred us into a tpk.
So, lets start at the beginning:
I was invited to an ongoing campaign a group of my friends were playing. This was back in High School for me, in the 3.5 days. I rolled up an Elven Ranger, spent a week reading up the entire PHB and DMG, I wanted to be hit the ground running.
At the session, the party is exploring a mine, they unlock a door and find it *full* of spiderwebs, and in tangled up in the webs is; me.
Party: "How'd you get there?"
Me: "DM? How did I get here?"
DM: "I don't know. It happened to you, so what happened?"
Me: "... Spiders."
Party: "..."
Me: "I... tried to ride one... and I failed my Handle Animal check."
DM: "... makes sense."
Party: "well, lets get you down from there?" "How we gonna do that?" "Fire will burn the webs." "I got a torch!"
DM: "You burn the webs? OK, Elf, roll me an acrobatics check to not get burned."
Me: [nat-1]
DM: "Your struggling only gets you more wrapped up in the webs, You cook a little longer than intended taking 5 fire damage, additionally your clothes and backpack get a bit burned, you'll need to replace them at the next town if you want anyone to take you seriously in conversation."
[The party laughes]
Me: "So, the stuff I'm wearing gets burned? So things like rope and belts too right?"
DM: "Uh, yeah, I guess."
Me: "So; the 6 days worth of refills I have strapped to my back, for my oil lantern, those all light up too then, right?"
[The Party stops laughing]
DM: "It would... hold on that's combustable... that's really combustible, why do you have that much oil?"
[One trip to google later]
DM: "Ok, so I need everyone within 20ft to make Dex saves vs. 12d6 fire damage, so [Rolls] 36 or half that on success..."
Party: "We're level 2."
DM: "ok... then uh, everyone... everyone dies."
This is too good
This is totally on the DM for not hand waving it away lol
Ive heard of people rules lawhering out of a tpk, but never into one, that's some serious lawyering dedocation lol
Similar story. Wizard hides in dying bush (was autumn in game). We are in a dense forest. I asked if it was evergreen forest. It was not. How big are the trees crowns? Yes. Wizard casts burning hands. Goblin 2 feet from him. Me 35 feet away, asks how close is the nearest river/body of water. Many many feet away. How many goblins? 6 we can see. So the wizard sparked maaaasssiiive forest fire. My turns were run, dash. Run, dash. Leave combat. Run to river. Turn around. Watch the party running through the forest on fire. Both party and forest are on fire. Healer makes it. Fighter dwarf dies, but not before killing a goblin. Gnome ranger dies, failed to notice the fire. Dont ask. I ask the healer, "so, thats a bust. Wanna go get a beer?"
My favorite story of derailment actually led to the game being far better than I'd originally planned.
I was running Ghosts of Saltmarsh for my brother, his fiance, and a friend; a group of 3 to run this undead pirate adventure. Originally, I had planned for the game to deal with the internal politics of Saltmarsh's two factions, and the party's involvement in the adventure would effect which faction would tighten their hold on the town. I intended to run all 7 adventures provided by the book back to back as the main campaign, but after I concluded the first adventure, I realized that I did not give the party enough EXP to be ready for the second one. I looked in the back of the book and found a useful appendix of undersea adventures that I could use as filler content; a nice break from the regular game and a fun little sidequest to catch up on EXP. These appendix maps had several different adventures you could run using the same map at different CR levels, so any given map had the assets for four different adventures.
I decided to run a simple one in an undersea ruin where players must track down a mystical conch shell that had accidentally opened a portal to the Elemental Plane of Earth. Part of the flavor text of the ruins also hinted at a sunken city who worshiped a kraken, pieces of which were relevant to a higher level quest in the same zone. I thought those pieces of lore were really interesting so I gave them to the players, and they seemed to grow more and more interested in the story of this kraken cult. As the quest continued, I noticed that the map also had the asset for the CR 23 Kraken that was meant to appear in the higher level quest, and I thought to myself "What if I just /added/ the kraken to the map? /Surely/ the party wouldn't wake it up, that would be ridiculous". Lo and behold, the party's Wizard takes a dive into the Kraken's lair chasing a piece of treasure and wakes it up, leading to an escape sequence where the party flees the ruins with the kraken hot on their tails.
After this quest, I tried to steer the story back into its original direction with the political squabbling, but every now and then I kept referring to events regarding the now-awakened kraken causing problems for the town. Eventually, the politicians all had to put down what they were doing as the Kraken loomed closer and closer, and the rest of the game became about stopping this kraken from destroying Saltmarsh entirely. In the end it was WAY more exciting, and the party was far more invested in the plot since they were responsible for the Kraken's release in the first place.
well your fault BUT in the end the result was about 20 times better than intended.
I think the best derail story I have is actually from my first DnD campaign. Our sorcerer, who had access to a plane that only she could access. After a bit, we got our hands on a Sword of Evil that was supposed to be used as part of a plan to destroy the Material Plane and that prevents the ressurection of anyone killed by it. So, the sorc goes "give it to me." and then goes to her plane that only she can access and promptly kills herself with the sword, locking it away for all time where no one could ever retrieve it. Apparently, we were supposed to do some big quest to bring it to somewhere it could be destroyed.
Ah, the statute of limitations is finally up on this one.
Essentially, I was DMing my first campaign with a group of friends who had never played before. I had them arrive in a village and talk to a polite village elder who told them about a nearby cave. (They had been looking for this elder for months, so it’s not some random NPC)
The party convinced the elder to go with them to the start of the cave dungeon. (Bards amirite)
One issue.
This cave was on the side of a cliff overlooking a ravine. Getting down was easy enough, and they all safely reached a landing which was connected to the entrance of this dungeon, and as promised the village elder sat down on the ledge just outside of the cave while the party went to go explore and would wait for their return to lead them back to the village.
As they were about to enter, a swarm of bats flew out of the cave entrance and caused the sorcerer to panic and cast thunderwave. The sorcerer was at the back...only 10ft in front of the elder...who was on the edge of the landing. Failing the save, the elder goes careening off the edge and into the ravine below...
And here’s the kicker. Village elder had on them a SUPER important artifact, that would allow them to discover the hidden city they were looking for the entire campaign.
I kinda just stared at my notes for a solid 5 minutes in silence while my party was rolling all over the place laughing. I ended up calling the session while I tried to think of some other way, like keeping it under his bed or something in the village.
Next session:
Party never went back to the village because they were afraid of getting in trouble...
Unfortunately scheduling conflicts got in the way of finishing the campaign, but even now 7 years later I kinda just laugh at the whole thing.
Ohhhohoho, first time DM with first time players here, I sure hope mine don't end up killing the super important NPC too XD
Oh ho! I would so Monty Python that with a "I'm not quite dead yet" for the elder and see if I could persuade them to go save the elder.
@@amjthe_paleosquare9399 Funny thing is my main questgiver they can't actually kill because he isn't actually there when he gives the quest. He's a lich and I based him off Walt Disney. That questgiver is actually just a disney animatronic built to look like him. They function as his avatars. If you break one he will just bill you for damaging company property.
I'd have made them go down into the ravine to get the darn artifact.
Let me introduce you to Brick. My buddy's animalistic jet black bugbear barbarian. Given that he rolled really high on all stats and average on one the dm said he'd give him the feat for more health in exchange for taking the average roll making it a 5 and making it his intelligence. And the sole reason our campaign has gone from saving the world to the adventures of brick and friends. Brick is easily startled and likes to collect sticks. Because of this combo whenever something scares him or upsets him he freaks out and chucks a stick. Within the first 4 or five sessions he did this 5 or 6 times and some how on like 4 of them got a natural 20. Bricks one redeeming feat though is that he is always there for his friends for better or worse my character was trying to calm down a shop keeper who was angry at a villager for stealing which he didn't do. As a result I was going to knock out the shop keeper brick rolled higher than me but lower than the shop keep so I got hit by him and brick took a little off the top. The dm is cool though so now the campaign is being progressed more though completely nonsensical due to us all forgetting the plot from dealing with brick. Stay tuned for more of the adventures of Brick and friends!
thoes are good side railings
One of my players decided to allow hersefl to be basicaly possesed by a spirit of BBEG draconic demigod abomination the party defeated. They decided to work together, convinced rest of the party to abandon the main quest, and one magic school heist and gang war later she managed to get her hand on a corpse of different demigod and a wand of a greatest necromancer to ever live and proceeded to incorporate parts of those two things into her body (how? Its complicated). Unfortunately campaing ended prematurely before her plan of world domination reached its goals, but that character will make for a great vilain in the next one.
That was an interesting turn from othervise mostly heroic campaign
Just like the story of the guy who was forced to play a Wizard, I once got forced to play a Cleric. I'm not to big on playing Clerics because they're not my playstyle. I'm either the inventor of the group (Artificer) or the frontline (Barb or Fighter). So, I decided to go with the good ol fashioned Malicious Compliance style of Cleric. I was Lawful Good and I healed everyone and I mean EVERYONE. Players, NPCs, and the Baddies. Of course this caused some tension with the other players but I told them that I was just playing my character. If I'm gonna suffer playing something I don't like, I make everyone suffer a little as well.
Recently had a session where the players were supposed to have a really intense boss fight. Completely derailed after one of my players challenged him to a dance battle, where the winner got to stay and the looser had to leave forever. After rolling a 19 on persuasion, the player won the dance battle. The boss started down the narrow hallways, and one of the players started to talk to him. As she was distracting the boss, another player flew past them, and told the army of weaponized otters (don’t ask) to throw a bunch of grenades down the passage. The passage was a huge staircase, so the boss was trapped. The grenades not only killed the boss instantly, but also the 2nd player, the bosses army of undead, and collapsed the entire bunker. The boss had a powerful magic item that just so happened to teleport to whoever killed him, so the player got that. He proceeded to use that magic item to beat the crap out of a Black Dragon, and melted it’s eye before intimidating it into leaving. The second player also came back a Revenant and started her evil arc with the Black Dragon. My party doesn’t always follow the rules, so this wouldn’t work in a normal game, but still funny.
So you are the guy from the grenade otters
The work around for the warforged PTSD dwarf would be the quest giver having a non warforged go-between and having therapy RP sessions.
I made my DM concerned for my mental state because of playing my character.
For backstory, my character was the product of a union of a high elf (d) and a drow (m), whom were discovered and killed by their respective sides, the mother drow hid my character away before being killed.
Being homeless and orphaned, he had to learn to stealthily take food and supplies from towns and cities to get by, *which eventually got him noticed by a monastery of mushroom people* (*dm given portion of back story*) whom taught him to hone his craft and use it to benefit others, so he became something of a locksmith.
Once the party formed, they made their way to a town that looked nearly abandoned, my character noticing a run down blacksmith shop decided to investigate.
Inside he immediately found a dagger with a red bit of fabric tied to the hilt, and a bag hidden in a cupboard.
Being the curious one, he opened the bag to cursed bones that made him believe his mother was haunting him, begging and demanding him to end his life because he (essentially) killed her by being alive.
He clung tightly to the bag, frantically looking for his friends, maybe they could help him appease his dead mothers spirit, maybe they could end her suffering.
In his madness, he found the cleric and paladin, whom identified the bag as a curse, and with a little assistance from the church, was able to dispel curse.
The role play for being cursed made my DM pause the game to see if I was ok, because normal people can’t usually “portray being that distraught without having trauma behind it”
I said nope, I just put myself in his shoes 😭
Simple solution to the warforged story: disguise the warforged.
Why should they? And should they disguise just this one WF or all of them? Or do you think it's perfectly normal that a vietnam vet shoots up some Little Hanoi or China town just because his squad was massacred by vietcong?
More simple answer: I don’t consider it particularly good roleplaying to blunt force everything.
I strongly disagree that a character wouldn’t survive long in society if they didn’t, at least on the surface, keep some control of themselves. There’s a lot of ways that hate could’ve been managed in an interesting way rather then just lashing out all the time.
@@lordbiscuitthetossable5352 I was honestly thinking the same thing. Its also weird that the DM allowed this backstory while knowing that this player would be adversarial to the main quest giver. I would either change the quest giver or not allow the background if it was really a problem
@@colecraddock1187
Yeah. The DM is kind of at fault there too. Like why make a major NPC that is important to the story into a race that one of the PC's hate.
Or if you do. Disguise the NPC till the character finishes their arch and isn't all, "I'm going to murder you for being a single race."
@@colecraddock1187 yeah really weird call by the dm on that one, a simple change of race for the questgiver or disallowing that backstory would make it pretty avoidable.
In my first campaign I ever ran my two players decided to be evil warlocks, which took me by surprise. But what really derailed it was when one of them really upset their patron. She told him that to regain her favor they would need to destroy one of the major cities in the world. I had it set up that she could be negotiated with to lower his "sentence" and hinted heavily that that was what I had intended for them to do. However they both leaned into the impossible task and spent the next few months recruiting monster allies and evil artifacts to make it doable. They did such a good job with it and in a way which made sense to me so the city burned.
It made such an impact on the world that my new campaign is actually based around the event, though this new party is trying to rebuild the city, no more evil warlocks.
If I was going to play a wizard based off a Disney character, it would definitely be Jafar. He'd play the straight man to his wisecracking parrot familiar. Of course I'd play him as a kindly lawful good person, helping the party, and giving sage advice. All the while secretly amassing power for myself, and trying to make sure I ended up at the top by the end of the campaign.
that DM with the warforged PTSD dwarf surely had to have known that when deciding first session that both the wealthy noble and quest-giver would be warforged... sounds like a clown
The dwarf angry at warforged does not sound like a good character/player, tbh. To my understanding warforged are fairly common in Eberron, so flying into a bloodthirsty rage after just hearing about one is a HUGE problem.
Agreed. A session 0 setting better expectations could have made it less of an issue. I like the idea of a war forge hating character in ebberon but if your character kills any war forged related thing in a world with many war forged that’s just a well played murder hobo.
This is something I read in a green text years ago. I'm going to add my own little flair on it to hopefully keep your attention.
The group invited a new friend over who happened to be a social justice warrior (SJW). You know the type, where everyone HAD to be equal or else.
The party met at a tavern, were introduced to each other, and an NPC was giving them a mission telling them about a necromancer raising an army of undead, when:
"Is gay marriage allowed in this kingdom?"
"Uh no," the DM said. "The kingdom is very conservative and..." that's when all Hell broke loose.
Sjw insisted they overthrow the Kingdom to allow gay marriage. The party agreed because it sounded like fun. Allies were gathered, anti-gays were murdered or mysteriously disappeared, and the battle of the century was brewing.
Months later the kingdom was in turmoil as both factors clashed. After a long and grueling battle, VICTORY!
The party was deciding the new rulers when the sky grew dark, a foul stench approached from the Horizon. The Necromancer had come.
Not only did he have an army, he achieved lichdom, and due to the kingdom being weak, it was overthrown and the party was slain.
SJW was pissed. The DM simply stated "I told you a necromancer was building an army. YOU insisted upon bringing equality to a kingdom."
The group had a good laugh, while she (the SJW) stormed out.
i'd say they were sucessful in death arnt all equall?
And then everyone had cookies. The end.
this would get removed from r/thathappened its so fake
It wasn't a complete derailing, but it derailed that night's Friday DnD. I'm the player that kind of derailed it. Apologies for the length.
We are playing "Ice wind Dale" as our first campaign. The East Haven Docks were being investigated, by our party, where we met a Duergar Prince. He is immediately captured for interrogation, but his bodyguards are not far behind. My fellow party members chase them leaving me (a dwarf barbarian), alone with the prince. Without a beat missing the prince shrinks down, escaping his bindings and I can't find him!... Meanwhile combat hasn't started except for one Duergar knocked into the icy port waters.
I'm frantically trying to find this sucker. I ask the DM,
Me: Is there anything flammable or explosive on this boat?
DM: No...
I'm fully prepared to do whatever it takes to get this Mother Hubbard who happens to be in a wine cupboard. (Which I found out after a perception check.)
Two other party members join me in apprehending the now teacup sized prince with anger issues. Our ranger motions for his little drake to attack the Gray Dwarf in the wine cabinet. His drake enters and within seconds is thrown like a ragdoll across the Boat's Cabin
I begin to think that if we fight him there is no guarantee he won't
A.) Shrink to escape
Or
B.) Take us on and it's a huge headache.
I begin trying to deescalate the situation by flattering the prince. Saying how he has lived more lifetimes than I and was likely the better warrior. This goes back and forth until he and I agree to have hand to hand combat. Little did I know this was a ploy so he could use his neat little eye trick on me. He is attempting mind control... it doesn't work. : )
Me: That Tickles.
Duergar Prince: How are you this Stupid!?
Me: Hey, I'm average! (10 intelligence)
DM: You only have one action to take. What will you do?
Again, willing to do WHATEVER so this dude doesn't escape. I think for a few moments. The DM then voices the prince with a smirk.
Duergar Prince: What are you going to do?
This smirk would be our DM's demise, because it gave me the most ludicrous idea on how to deal with the situation.
Me: I "interpret" his smirks as flirting, and I lean forward for a kiss. This is so I (a straight dwarf) can confuse our opponent and give my fellow members a chance in the dude's apprehension.
DM: You don't even have to roll for that. I do.
He rolls.... it's a nat 1.
The DM sighs thinking how to move forward.
DM: He is caught off guard by your approach, and while backing away screaming he falls.... He is now prone.
Fellow Player at table: How dare he be homophobic!
We have a good laugh, and the DM describes the rest of the situation.
Turns out if the bodyguards hear their prince scream, they will surrender and give you any information you want so you don't hurt him. They surrender and the one that fell into the water emerges from the depths and is now towering over the boat getting ready to fight. He looks over at his fellow bodyguards and is slightly disappointed and also as a giant Duergar raises his hands in surrender.
DM: Well now I have to be creative because I thought this fight would take longer.
TLDR; We encounter a Duergar prince. He's captured then escapes. The DM is prepared for a massive fight which involves a giant gray dwarf. I'm to average to be mind controlled and I (a straight dwarf) completely avoid the fight by trying to kiss a homophobic Duergar Prince
just last week , the group was invited by a barbarian chief who was supposed to be the plot hook.
5 minutes into the conversation and the Mage cast a fireball at his crotch for fun.
now they have an enrire village of angry barbarian who should have been allies that want to kill them for castrating their chief.
I might have done this twice in the same campaign, but if I did, the DM just rolled with it.
We stumbled into playing a game of Liar's Dice (the game from Pirates of the Caribbean 2) with a god. We earned half a million gold pieces just for participating (at level 1) and would get half a million more if we won. In the middle of the game, we realized we where playing with people's fates (in character we did, it was obvious out of character), so I had the idea to offer him half a million gold pieces for some of his dice. We lost anyway, because the game was clearly rigged, and did not get the half million gold pieces, the DM probably had plans for us to use.
Later we met one of the people who's fate was altered, who started a fight with us, hoping it would allow him to avoid the fate the dice game caused him to have. This was clearly a big bossfight. I pointed out, that us meeting was clearly arranged by the god to make the man cause his own downfall, and therefore, there was no possible outcome of the fight that won't be very bad for him. The DM then went through his notes for the next 5 minutes before allowing me to roll Persuasion. I made the roll and we skipped a very hard bossfight.
And that is why you should be careful when one of your players decides to play a jester (Celestial Warlock with Entertainer Background, because Bard is just what they would be expecting!)
How one of my players made my DMPC derail the campaign by accident.
This story is from my first campaign that I played and eventually became the DM. This story took place in a homebrew Pathfinder campaign and the original DM was a very easy going dude that let me homebrew a large race, a half giant. He gave me a template he found on the internet and told me to modify it as I want but for general guidelines, if I buff something, I need to nerf something or give some kind of curse. So here came into creation, Tiny (named by the other player, he was just a number before) an ex-digger who used to be enslaved by a group of wizards. To compensate for all the bonus to strength given by the large size, i made it so it didn't understood the concept of money (5 int), magic (they were just all bad, even healing spell) and good/evil, so he sometimes try to play and make friends with zombies, goblins and even a mimic. He also had PTSD whenever he saw a whip, pickaxe, attack by spell or under the darkness spell (this will be important later on) and that was the main way to trigger his barbarian rage. He was hilarious to play as everyone knew how much damage he could do, but often just tried to disarm everyone (sometimes even the party) to stop the fighting, along with all kinds of shenanigans.
Now the DM had to stop playing as he just had a promotion and was way too busy. I didn't want it to end so I asked him if I could take over. He gave me his notes and told me what had planned to do. The rest of the player didn't want me to stop playing Tiny the Friendly Half Giant. For me, as a new player, now a new DM, I thought it would be too much but the more veteran player helped me out and it was very smooth and got me ADDICTED to the DM
Forward a few sessions later, the party is about level 7 or 8 and is giving chase to a witch that has been plaguing them for a while. They enter her tower low on resources, clear the first floor which had a cellar. Went to the second floor and saw a lot of undead that were barely moving. Deciding they don't want to risk that floor they go back to the cellar, barricade it and take a long rest. Karl the Stupid human fighter (played by my real life best friend) was to take the last watch and as always, pranked him to wake him up. This time he put a blindfold on his eyes and said "Tiny, the witch is here, help me". Now Karl (or his player) doesn't know Tiny has a phobia about darkness and he also didn't know he was a barbarian of the archetype breakers with the Smasher rage power, both give a lot of bonuses to break objects, on top of his massive bonus to strength and large size. Now I decided to roll to see which direction Tiny goes towards on a d8: 1 is north, 2 north-east, 3 east ect. I don't remember which number did what but i remember that most roll would have send me to break a "small" hole into the exterior wall and exit the tower that way, i rolled straight toward the center pillar of the tower and the stairs, roll for every gore attack against brick walls, wood pillar, the stairs, the back wall, they all hit with enough damage to destroy everything. I estimated that the damage done would be so great that the tower would be shaking and crumble to pieces, giving my player enough time to leave following Tiny's trail, but not to take anything with them. The whole battle with the witch was cut short, she died with her tower. She had a grimoire (spell book) which also linked her as a follower of an evil god and accomplice of one of the nobility, which in turn would follow the plot back into the main town. They search the rumble for their gear but never bother to look for the witch's body or any loot, so never find the grimoire and allow the evil noble to continue his bidding. To quote Karl: "it's just a prank bro".
T.L.D.R.: A prank done on a breaker barbarian sends him into the main structure of the witch's tower. Destroying the tower entirely and they didn't bother to loot the rumbles leaving the criminating evidence of an evil noble behinds.
In my Waterdeep Campaign (Spoiler warning), my players decided NOT to open the Tavern after learning of the optional rival.
Instead they decided to create a stripclub on the ground floor and a brothel in the rooms upstairs and even convinced the rival to put a hole in the wall between the 2 buildings and have him sale drinks in their club.
They completely ignored the Fireball and just went full on business making more gold then the missing treasure even had.
how did the specter react to that
@@24601st Our Artificer build a roomba for it to possess. It now drives around cursing people and cleaning glitter
Let me tell you about my monk.
This 3ft halfling, Balmar, was searching for meaning behind the flames that could shoot from his fists.
Our party entered the monastic village and we met with the Sensei - who wanted to test our prowess in hand to hand combat.
Here’s the issue - we had this Aarakocra, Hek, and they didn’t… uh, get the memo.
Hek ended up dealing the finishing blows to 4 of 6 monks, but used Talons, which fatally injured the four monks that were sent to test us.
Uhm, yeah, they really did not appreciate that, and we burnt down the village while running from the monks, with the justification: “so they’d have to choose between us and saving their village”.
I mean, if it works, right?
so, for the unaware there's a Tabletop System for Firefly. it's called Cortex Plus (2nd edition as it were) and I was playing a custom adventure of it. I had a party of 2 (small I know but groupfinding for in person is beyond difficult) and the party was a merc with a cyborg eye, and a successful psychic from the school River Tam escaped. VERY FIRST SESSION they receive a job from Adelei Niska's son, to try and destroy an Alliance Cruiser, through a long series of strange choices, the first of which being TAKING THE JOB, they found a way, using psychic powers and caskets, to get a bunch of unstable nuclear material onto the cruiser, and have it erupt destroying part of the engine deck which, naturally, brings the cruiser down . . . . onto the planet it was orbiting . . . causing thousands of miles of damage, massive nuclear fallout and killing untold hundreds of thousands of deaths as well as destroying a huge section of the planet by what was essentially a secondary massive nuclear blast.
The point of the first session was to be for them to get told a mysterious benefactor has a job, find out it's one of the villains, turn him down (just like in firefly) and have that villain sending assassins after them for the rest of the campaign . . . . . *but they took the job*
so my heroic campaign had to instantly change to a villainous campaign focusing on a pair of GALACTIC TERRORISTS
I was running a 3.5e game, and the party had a Alchemist/Gunslinger NPC that accompanied them. The NPC was no longer needed, so they died saving a party member. The players were so upset over the loss of the NPC that, rather then continuing on their quest to stop an evil Necromancer, they used gentle repose to preserve the body of the NPC, sold off all of their treasure, tracked down a high level Cleric, and paid to have the NPC raised from the dead. And this happened over the course of 3 sessions.
Add on. After the 3 sessions, one of the players took me aside and threatened to beat my ass if anything bad happened to that NPC ever again. I had to explain to the player that he was threatening me with physical harm over a game, over pretend. It hadn't dawned on him that was what he was doing
Dnd Moments that completely derailed the campaign: We were supposed to wait in a fortress and fend of a giant army until our allies would arrive and and the attackers would flee so we could spend the rest of the campaign reconquering the Country. So naturally I accidentally invented a Ballista Fired Fireball Nuke which disintegrated 30000 men in a Matter of seconds. DM.exe stopped working and ended the campaign a Session later due to a lack of ideas for the story
Another idea for that derail at 5:35 would be to reverse questgiver and BBEG and make it a reverse alignment campaign.
It was a post nuclear fallout apocalypse type setting. Our DM had a long string of side quests he wanted us to do first before addressing the massive robot uprising in the country's capital. He made the mistake of giving us nukes the size of a rugby ball.
Me: "I look for a vehicle that can fly."
Rolls a nat 20
DM: "you find a small jet"
Our party decides to skip all notions of side quest and head straight to the robot city.
DM: "one nuke won't be enough"
Player 2: don't worry last session I found 4 others.
DM sighs, then grins and says there is a forcefield around the capital. It will obliterate anything organic that goes through it.
We strategise among ourselves before deciding that since the nukes aren't organic all 4 of us would grab a nuke and jump out of the jet I found right above the center of the city and the forcefield. We dived out with our nukes and not only killed what would be his final quest for us which was meant to take a session or two alone but also TPK'd. This was only the third session
TLDR: party jumps out of a moving jet to nuke a city of robots with 5 pocket nukes. Ending the campaign on session three with a TPK and dead villains.
A bad one for me:
Homebrew campaign, and I was still pretty new to DMing. The party had a short meeting with the queen of the country to get a quest. Thing is, the queen was lawful evil. My idea was that she had done a hostile takeover, and her being evil didn't matter much yet as her word was law anyway. Though it would come up later in the campaign. The party's cleric, being all self-righteous both IC and OC, decided he was "suspicious" of her and cast detect evil. On the queen... So he found out, and decided to tell the party, while still in the castle, they had to do something about it.
So yea, while still in the castle he was basically plotting the queen's assassination. I mentally facepalmed already. They were level 3. The royal guards got orders to capture them. What do they do? They run and hide in a cave. The guards find them. (mind you they're ROYAL GUARDS...they're level 10 or so) The party decides to fight instead of surrendering, mostly because of Mr cleric's persuasion. And not surprisingly the party wipes. My campaign, that I spent 3 weeks on working out, derailed and destroyed, in 3 sessions.
Really turned me off of DMing for a while.
Glad to see my story got into one of the videos. Great narration as usual.
Player here, but this happened last night and I am still quite proud of it, though I am unsure if I truly derailed the campaign or just made my and another person's character into boss battles for later (we're still unsure what'll happen next session).
A friend of mine who also DMs an amazing game for us was venting to me how he was the only one really roleplaying in another game where he was a player.
I had some free time so I cooked up a Bloodline of Baalzebul Tiefling Clockwork Sorcerer/Divination Wizard called Kaos with a lot of social and sneaky spells (as well as subtle spell of course), on top of a bunch of feats that made him really good with a gun.
He was a slimey, silver tongued ex-mafia enforcer who got bored and ventured the world to cause chaos, not in the "I'll set everyone on fire" way but more in the "The world is my playground and with enough lying and deception I can do what I want" way.
I tried to not be destructive or a murderhobo though, that's not fun for anyone involved, and I roleplayed him as a background character just kinda doing random shit.
One time we needed to provoke an goblinoid clan into attacking a non-goblin city so that another faction would be left with no choice but to return a favor and help defend the city.
Our plan was to trick the city's guildmaster into thinking I was a gun merchant and promptly spread rumors about this mysterious gun merchant around town, which worked out beautifully.
After that we had goblinoid disguises ready to infiltrate the goblinoid clan and tell them about this rumor of that city acquiring guns to kill them and persuade them into attacking the city so they could take the guns for themselves.
After some roleplaying we finally convinced the clan into rallying to the city, where we would follow them for a while before conveniently dropping off.
It was then when the much more cunning and intelligent general of the clan hopped out of a portal in front of us riding on his mount, congratulating us for our plan working so far.
We were all getting ready for a boss battle, as was I and I told the group out of character I had a plan and reminding them of my massive spell list as well as my metamagic options.
You see, I told them about how I could subtle spell cast dominate person on the general, using a nat 1 portent I had on standby to automatically make him fail.
But then the general spoke of...opportunities.
He proposed to all of us a place in the clan as captains with the freedom to accomplish whatever we wished to do, which for Kaos was causing mayhem and chaos.
Kaos walked forward to the general, with everyone including the DM expecting him to pull some bullshit trick on him like he's always done as he took out his left hand and smiled and said "I'd like to be part of your army if what you promise is truly what you can offer me".
DM asked if I could roll for deception, but I reminded him that I wasn't trying to deceive him in any way and that he genuinely was interested.
Another character whom the DM expected to be the most reasonable of the party also joined him.
By not indulging myself in chaos for once I only further indulged myself into chaos, and I was loving every second of it.
Nobody was ready for it, not even the DM, and we had no clue how to proceed from here since it completely threw everyone off guard.
That's probably the most proud I've been playing a chaotic character.
The PTSD dwarf is a problem with 100 existing solutions. We've already seen it in Avengers, how they manage Hulk. And it can be as simple as sending a scout ahead to the local tavern and checking no warforged are present. Or yeah, sleep spell, tying the guy up, charm? Why would you ever take him to any place where you know there is a warforged? And task one, even before the first quest, is solving the problem of containing his aggression, and getting treatment. Suns getting real low...
Two of three players said fuck it and killed a fellow party member to the blood god. Rewind and retcon required
I've got two that spring to mind, both derailed so hard it ended the campaign.
In the first one we took part in a last team standing deathmatch (where any who died were revived at the end). The kingdom was expanding into the monster controlled wildreness, claiming a large chunk of land and building a fort to protect/rule the area and the winners became the owners of this new land and gained noble titles. The DM already knew who was going to win and was planning to have them offer us jobs after seeing how well we did in the match. You could take in whatever nonmagical equipment you wanted, and cast whatever spells you wanted, but couldn't leave the arena. About halfway through the match the "winning team's" darkness was dispelled, revealing they were hiding inside a blade barrier ring (a wall of hundred of rapidly spinning magical spinning blades that diced up whatever tried to go through). We were kind of in a corner with a wall of force on one side and lots and lots of caltrops on the other. We'd taken several 500 pound barrels of caltrops into the fight with us for terrain control. We hucked those barrels over the top of the blade barrier so the hit the inside on the side of the barrier. They shattered and the rappidly spinning blades kept launching thousands of caltrops back and forth inside the barrier, pretty much liquifying the "winning team". A large number of the caltrops ended up getting launched through the barrier and the shrapnel took out pretty much everyone who was left, except us, safe behind a wall of force.
In a campaign that had been going on for about a year, one player wanted new armor. The DM openaly rolled up a random set for sale at a shop. It was a great set of rolls, the armor was like +4, had the drawback of permanent gender change first time donned, and a couple of powers that could be activated and one of those powers was the freaking WISH once per week (10% chance a body part withers and falls off). After buying this much better armor the player starts wining he's broke now (actually indebted to the rest of us). I made a smart ass suggestion he use his wish to have someone buy the old armor for the cost of the new armor. He takes that idea, puts his usual genius spin on it and wishes for someone to buy his new armor for what he paid for it. The DM describes the person who suddenly appears with a sack of coin and trades for the armor and the moron doesn't recognize the description of the BBEG we've been struggling against for at least half a year now and hands over the wish granting armor to the BBEG. I honestly can't figure out what he was thinking. Even if that hadn't been the BBEG, he bought great new armor, put it on (permanent gender change), and risked the 10% body part drops off to wish for someone to buy it from him for what he paid for it?
Oh my God. I've never seen that kind of stupidity in a game, and I hope I never do. I am sorry for you guys.
Something that happened to me (I wasn't the master, but a player) is that one of my friends got a magical staff that extended or shrunk when a magic word was said, and my friend decided to use it... to forge a bazooka that shot using the force the staff made when it extended. It made the master create a new rule just for the bazooka 😂
"You face some monsters..."
"Ok"
"On a narrow catwalk above the clouds"
"LOL NOPE"
Don't know what topic this would go under, something related to Funny/Unexpected Player Behavior.
I'm a second time DM (the first was as brief test-run with my family) running a 5e game for my co-workers (plus one other), and two of my players broke up. I put the game on hiatus while the player I knew from work recovered. I decided to create one-shots to explore their characters' backstories in the meantime while we waited. Of course, they each lasted 3 sessions instead of one. During the first one, we explored a past adventure of how our Blood Hunter joined the Bounty Hunter's Guild. Since most of my players were also new to DnD, I had the other remaining players create new characters with the exact same stats as their main character to keep the learning curve lower.
The story started off as the Blood Hunter and two others got a mission to solve a murder mystery and locate the perpetrator. During the climax, the players got teleported by a hidden teleportation circle that took them to a cave with a hoard of treasure and a sacrificial slab. During their investigation, the teleportation circle timed out and they were stuck. It was revealed that the sage they were seeking was actually an Adult Red Dragon who murdered the sage and took his place to gain access to the tools he needed to resurrect his father who was defeated by the sage to enact his revenge. The dragon was collecting blood from the sage's assistant in tubes on the corners of a blood ritual table.
Before said dragon appeared, they were discussing amongst themselves how to stop the ritual, and after the reveal and battle started, they decided their plan of action was to ... defecate ... in the blood jars. I had them make Athletic checks when they tried to open the jars, to which they failed. By that time, the senior Bounty Hunters sent to observe their test in hiding reactivated the teleportation circle and barged in at the beginning of the next round (which was lucky on their part, because I was using the Dragon's Breath recharge system to determine when they'd arrive). While the Bounty Hunter's epically fought the dragon (as they were designed to do since an Adult Red Dragon is way out of the league of a few Level 1 PCs), the players kept trying to get into the blood jars. While trying to damage the jar enough to open the top, the Monk in the party readied himself by pulling down his pants and squatting above the jar, using his readied action to poop in the jar when it was opened. When it came to the Bard's turn, he dealt the final blow to the jar. Since my players are new, I have a homebrew system in place where I call for Memory Checks (straight Intelligence roll) when I come across a situation where the character should theoretically know more than the player. Up until now, every player had failed their Memory Check, and it was up to the Bard to succeed. The Bard passed his Memory Check, and as the character in the party with Prestidigitation, he realized that their whole plan to defile the blood could be easily fixed with a cantrip.
As dumb as the plan was, it was the most memorable event that came out of that session, and we had a blast laughing the whole time.
My party and I ended up flooding the entire newly-discovered continent we were supposed to be exploring. It was really early on, too. Gotta say, not where I was expecting the campaign to go, but hey, it’s been pretty fun so far. (It’s been a few months since then.)
I joined my brother's party as a guest character and immediately proceeded to seduce half the guards in a main plot town, cause a rebellion, release a serial killer who I befriended who then murdered every other prisoner and guard he came across and cause all remaining guards to become suspicious of each other. I did this over the course of an hour and in doing so forced the dm to rewrite everything that he had planned for the town and the next 3 stages of the campaign. This was done mostly by accident.
Wow, that is a truly impressive level of sheer chaos.
I know it was in 3.5 but that Disney story would have been great if OP played a twilight cleric based on Peter Pan. Any twilight cleric is OP to the point of being punishment enough for any DM like that
Our bard (my little brother irl) started toothless dancing in front of my best freind, an ancient silver dragon. Irl he got slapped, in game he got stabbed.
Well to sum it up. I was the player that derailed the campaign, so me and a few friends started a new campaign where our dm was fairly new. We’re all playing through(ultimate goal beat the big boss at the end) and we asked for some magic items to help us out. Dm being a meany head was like here. Here’s a ring no one knows what it does. Have fun. Soo I use it and it’s “The Ring of the Colonel” so me being an experienced player I was like hmm I already know animal handling. I politely ask the dm if I’m may be allowed to teach a pet of mine 1 magic spell. He left it up to a roll an I got it. So now I’m allowed to teach my pets a magic ability. Then comes into new ring, for days I’ve been using it calling hordes of chickens raising them and teaching all of them magic missile. And we encounter our big boss. Absolutely obliterate him with 100+ chickens simultaneously casting magic missile. The End.
Here's my story. It gets close to a full Henderson, but the plot still survives.
There was a player who tended to be problematic and this involves two of his characters. The first is Ninad, who had reached level 20 by the end of the last campaign. The second had no name, so I will refer to them as Nonam. Both were druids, both knew each other, both hated this one nature goddess.
There was a church to that particular goddess in the town we started in. Nonam decided this was the most despicable insurrection imaginable. They told Ninad about it, who agreed, and proceeded to attack the town with an army of various elementals. We flew away on floating disks. The DM salvaged the campaign by skipping the plot forward and taking us to another country.
TL;DR 0.75 Hendersons. Character from prior campaign destroys starting town and plot in first session. Plot recovered through fast forward.
Had a ''that player'' who refused to reveal their character during session zero and then proceeded to avoid the party for the whole session (which lasted no longer then 2hours) the campaign was ruined because of that stunt. I've never invited that player ever again.
5:37 or maybe the DM who would have approved the character at session zero could have not made the quest giver a warforged
In one of the earlier sessions of my “Curse of the village of Luskis” Campaign, we had a rule that all dice rolls were binding, even if they were rolled for no reason they would always have an effect. One time the hosts brother decided to randomly roll some story die that happened to be lying on the table. It rolled a bee and a rainbow. He then rolled another number die. The result was that an entire hive, plus the queen, of passive carnivores bees, flew into the middle of the aftermath of a giant badger fight. One of my players is a stupid and very friendly skeleton who immediately rolled athletics to try to grab the queen. He wanted to make the bees form their hive in his skull or ribs. Both attempts failed before the bees fled. For the rest of the session, and a large portion of the next, the skeleton and our wizard tried various methods of trying to find the hive. Unfortunately it was located outside of the village, and the curse would not let them want to leave. This caused their characters to become soft locked, aimlessly wandering the village for nearly 30 combined hours. I wonder what will happen if they survive long enough to break the curse and find the hive. Our goblin managed to recruit an entire platoon of goblins by convincing them he was a god by hiding in the skeletons ribs and casting disguise self to become a massive goblin with four arms. I have some wild players.
If any of you are familiar with the eternal falling trap I think you also know it's a dungeon makers favorite FU to dumb characters who try to jump over it. See, around halfway across the pit a reverse gravity spell takes effect and pushes the character into a portal in the ceiling which leads to a shaft that has wall glyphs that destroy magical items utterly before plunging them back through the floor portal to the reverse falling point of the trap. In effect, this creates an endless falling trap where the character tumbles endlessly upward past his companion in the center of a 10' pit, unable to free themselves since they pass through the anti-magic shaft every few seconds, canceling spells midcasting and magical devices entirely.
The players never forgot this dungeon or its dirty tricks, and after knocking out the bbeg they threw him into the trap in question along with feathers, several open bags of feces, and bottles of urine. Even I had to admit it was clever, even if it did shorten my campaign a lot.
So, now we have a lich free falling in the worlds dirtiest lava lamp 200 ft underground in a dungeon that's door only opens every 100 years for the period of one year, waiting for future adventurers to find him. 😆
I'll offer two derailments for your amusement.
1. Like in the last story I was running a game with no cleric, so I created a sisterhood of one of the local deities who functioned like town medics and had one of the PC's newly arriving in town meet her. That way I figured they could use the sisterhood as npc healing as and when they needed it. However due to a misunderstanding, the PC's became utterly convinced she knew more than she did (she didn't), and was secretly the head of a conspiracy they uncovered. We're now a dozen sessions in and the start town lay priestess who was intended to help has now been promoted to the BBEG's main minion and is directly responsible for starting a war. Didn't see that one coming.
2. Many years ago I had a party Paladin routinely bump into the BBEG's conquest Paladin and set up a rivalry between the redemption Paladin PC and the evil conquest Paladin. I did not expect the PC to announce after one conversation that the conquest Pally could be redeemed and that he'd redeem her or die trying. The other PC's were on board and I had to hastily rewrite a lot of the middle section of the campaign. Sadly the game collapsed before we reached the end, but they were well on the way to prying the BBEG's most capable minion out of his clutches.
I have two, was a PC both times. The first was my very first DnD campaign, playing 3.5, so memories are a bit fuzzy. The relevant part is that it was derailed the second session. We were suppose to be cowed by a horde of undead in a cave temple and then thrown out as "insignificant" when their god appeared. Instead, our wizard decided to rush up the steps of the temple while we are holding off the horde (he did not listen when we yelled at him in-character to not split up) and gets far enough away that the DM has to roll for where the BBEG will appear... Welp, IN the wizard was apparently on the table. The resulting force of whatever magic was enough to destroy the temple and the DM had to come up with some random BS. So we ended up in the underdark. Wizard is reconstituted but now is technically undead (he later became the BBEGs right hand)
The second was far more recent, playing 5e, and while it didn't fully derail the campaign, we subverted a good 2-4 sessions of labor (maybe even 5 if we had been unlucky). DM this time was a fan of homebrew random encounters for every type of environment. We were tracking down a general of the BBEG responsible for creating war machines in a desert and we were SUPPOSE to take forever to search for it and we would periodically stumble upon ruins of oasis settlements and caravans. However, we took a job from an eccentric man to hunt down a Roc in the desert, which we do. The random encounter table is rolled on a few times but we were on a rocky plateau in the desert instead of the desert itself. DM rolls for that... we get brass dragons. Plural. We have two wizards with massive bonuses to Arcana and History. Instead of fighting, we tell stories and converse about the recent goings on in the desert. We get the location and hint about what the fortress actually is (a moving mechanical centipede-trap colossus) and the nearest oasis's and settlements. We sate the dragons' thirst for convo, and head off to set up an ambush.
Our DM was... proud that we used the random encounter to our advantage, but supremely disappointed we wouldn't be searching for days or weeks and making us listen how entire settlements are disappearing and the panic it would cause in the area... He liked high-stakes, high-risks, you will either die horribly or become damned legends sort of style
One of our group wrote a rather lenghy campaign, that we completely screwed over in one session. Something was killing people in a town, we were hired to investigate and stop the harassment. The town had a harbor, so after a few unsuccessful attempts at figuring out who it was and where they were coming from we talked the townspeople into getting in boats in the harbor so we would be able to lay traps. In the middle of the night we set fire to and sunk the ships with every man women and child on them. We looted the town and on the way out posted a sign that read "Warning great evil destroyed this town" And just as we had met, we once again went our seperate ways.
What? We were hired to stop the harassment of the townspeople..... they will never be harassed again.
I’m curious how the DM that had their campaign screwed over by the players joining the cult managed to justify the vision
First I'd like to say, this was the fault of the DM, not ours.
We were playing Rime Frost Maiden campaign, I'd entered halfway into the campaign so there's a lot of stuff I was missing on for details, but we were level 5 or so. Anyways, one of the personal quests our party member had was to retrieve an heirloom ring, which the DM said Locate Object could help with (but it was something like a 1% chance to actually work). After succeeding in said side-quest (and finding the ring in a very large fish, got a lot of meat to sell), we rested. Soon enough the town was evacuating. We made way towards the next location and a couple hours later we see a dragon fly over head. The description was it was black, big, wings (which weren't moving/flapping), etc. Due to details i didn't think it was a dragon (I'd thought it was some goblins piloting a dragon-like mechanism or something).
But this is what derailed it all. Assuming it WAS a dragon, you are often told by experienced players not to fight a dragon. Why? Because they will kick your ass and we probably didn't collectively have enough levels to beat it. (Also this dragon seemed to shoot not fire or anything, but beams of destructive light).
We took cover trying to stay alive, thankfully (or not?) the dragon didn't take notice of us. We continue walking and we soon see smoke trails in the distance, and as the hours go by more and more trails of smoke appear in the distance where we can roughly identify villages we have been to are at. APPARENTLY the dragon was taking out each village one at a time and after each it's max health would go down like 5%-10%. But we didn't know these details, although we did come across one or two people who'd fled and were freezing to death. So we climbed a mountain, avoided fighting a pair of Yeti's, and found a strange symbol on the ground. My character chanced it, and got teleported to Waterdeep..... with no way back. The rest of the party moved on. At that point the game was over because all the forces of... whatever (never quite learned that part, probably the underdark) were swarming over and took over the entire area with all the villages gone. Game over, no do-overs or anything like that.
If we had known this was a 'do or die' situation, we probably would have pinged the dragon as it went by to get it's attention, then fought it and hoped for the best, or fight it in town and hope to get a few extra rounds in of distractions while we did DPS. But nope, no warning of impending Dead End route and the game ended 2 hours early that night.
TLDR: DM Didn't tell us we had to fight a dragon, so the campaign ended in our utter defeat.
my favorite Kender was a Paladin in a 3.5 game, made for interesting RP in any city because would have to spend about half the night going through his bags to sort the stuff that wasn't his and figure out how to return it.
My players are level 8 in a homebrew campaign I started a few years ago. One of the players has caught the attention of a dark cult to be sacrificed in a ritual to release the dark god Tharizdun. The leader of this cult commissioned a Steel Predator (CR 16) to retrieve and return the player's character without killing him. It ambushed them while they were camping outside of the city they were currently completing quests for. It tried to knock him out and run off with him, but the rest of the party quickly surrounded it and made it clear that it wouldn't be able to escape so easily. So a bloody battle ensued where most of the party was close to death. They only managed to defeat the predator because I had given the Barbarian an adamentine warhammer after completing a quest for the city's dwarven blacksmith. The target player was the Barbarian's best friend, so the only outcome was for the Steel Predator to become a broken pile of scrap. I had to come up with new plots for the cult to try to get their hands on their sacrifice or at least push the party to seek them out and kick their ass.
Not me, but my brother. He played a Tabaxi Cat Bard named Thunderdrum who was notorious for nat 1 Charisma roles when it came to flirting. In the Campaign, he was supposed to use his bongos to meet his soul mate. Nat 1. Derailed the campaign completely. The “magic premonition” the bongos showed turned out to be an ad for a dating site, and now Thunderdrum permanently has talking bongos that talk s**t about him.
The worst derail I experienced was an adventure that started with us a party of 4 escorting a wealthy patron of the inn we stayed at. We all needed to cross an old rope bridge and everyone of us minus the patron fell to their death due to failing our dex to cross safety. That was the first 5 minutes of the game. We quickly rolled new characters and had the patron as us again. This time we avoided the bridge and chose the long route. We needed to climb a steep cliff face this time and again we all fell down the cliff to our death.
At the end we all agreed with the DM, that terrain is deadlier than any monster encounter we would face and choose never add role or die scenarios ever again.
Alright this is a bit long, but a fun memory.
I wasn't the GM, but we were playing Only War - a Warhammer 40k rpg playing as Guardsmen - our GM wanted to do a little pre-campaign lead up mission as a way to set the scene for our actual campaign. So essentially a mission 0. Well we were supposed to drive from one area in a city to a barracks, do a night of watch and in the morning leave for an Underhive.
This had us spend over an hour driving around the city with no idea where to go, I threw a coin into a street in the industrial district, causing a child to... relinquish the life of another kid with a lead pipe over the single coin. Us eventually getting to the barracks, another PC trying to setup a lightning rod with a pile of grenades at the bottom on the roof, then none of us taking lookout. Finally reaching the underhive the next day, and a PC going crazy after getting shot in the eye with an arrow and killing a bunch of gangers and cutting off their thumbs.
All this was fine, we could work with this. Until a player rants about killing the commissar (the top of the top for the military leaders), we all ended up getting "executed" in a firing line, all but one of us burned fate points (40k rpg 'lucky' re-rolls) to survive.
We wake up hours later in-game, naked, stripped of all equipment, old-mate's collection of thumbs strewn across the street. GM, after explaining what we see, simply sighs and says "well, I honestly don't know where to go from here, so I guess people can go home if they want."
It's been over a year and we still haven't continued that campaign
So I was doing a Home brew where I added different fantasy creatures of my players favorite books. To make things fair to them, I sent them a doc the day before explaining all the lore and changes. One thing I added was pixies who steal from your players and are generally a nuisance. Another thing I added with this fairies who were peaceful creatures and would guard the tree at the center of the forest. That tree was called the home tree and is what keeps every forest from dying. Now, A little bit ago my players had encountered some pixies and one of the characters had gotten his only throwing dagger taken. He was very pissed at all pixies and that was when they reach the center of the forest. We were supposed to just walk on by when we saw the home trees since it was all explained in the doc what it was, but apparently my player didn’t think he needed to completely read the doc and screamed PIXIES!! when he saw the home tree with faeries floating around it and burnt the thing down along with all the fairies near it. The rest of the campaign became desperately looking for more fairies, trying to see if there’s a way to heal The tree and finally talking with the giant community of people who lived in the forest about how they could plant new trees and how to save their village. It was supposed to be a worldwide adventure that ends with them slaying a goblin cult.
I was a player in a Pathfinder AP. We'd been playing the campaign together for 7 months by the time we got to the end of the AP. Everyone had been talking about keeping the campaign going passed level 20 once we finished. Little did they know, I had secretly been in contact with the GM and since Level 14 my character had been a Lich. I used magic items and spells to conceal my true Identity and Alignment. So everyone was super pumped up for the last battle with the BBEG. I had acquired a pretty astonishing list of spells, abilities, and a few minions of my own. Throughout the intense battle with the BBEG, spirits were incredibly high. When we finally landed that killing blow everyone at the table was off the rails in excitement. The GM did a very good job of ending the story partially to make them all think that it was the end but before we walked out of the tower and my character's true identity was revealed. With a quick succession of spells and abilities I wiped the entire party out in just 2 rounds. Only 2 of the 5 had time to even react before they were dead. Everyone was mad at first but it quickly turned into everyone being astonished about how I pulled it off and was able to keep it from them. They still talk about it and laugh 4 years later. One of my favorite moments of all time!
Had to take over a campaign when the (then new dm) let the world have gun powder. One of the players manged to steal almost all of the barrels of gun powder from the local guards. Then he "accidentally" [ I personally believe he did it on just to see what would happen] lit the gun powder. When he did this, the starting dm when "Help". I then agreed to take over. I (3.0/3.5 game) The city then "came to life". We had a elemental of the city that decided to hit us all, and random thing/npc that were around it when it "woke up."
All died. The game then ended, and new house rule, NO GUN POWDER!!!
I feel like that first story needs several revenants
my group was casually questioning a bookkeeper, who reportedly had protection and we wanted to speak to his protection providers as he couldn't call upon them. so I threw a book through his window, next thing you know we're fighting the book keep, guard arrive and we get knicked, we now have 20 days to pay a 1500 GP fine
That kender story - i love a happy ending
OH OH, I have one for this... As a player, I was playing a Hexblade/Swashbuckler, at that time we were in a arena that before every battle we had some points that we could buy weapons and other shit, one of this things was a ring that served as a focus, needless to say that after every battle we needed to return the items... The thing is, I had +9 Sleight of Hands, +11 Stealth and +13 Deceptions, so I just snuck it out to our cells, not happy with one ring, I stole another, but this time, it wasn't for me, it was for a Dwarf Wizard from the cell next to ours, I gave him the ring and he just made a portal out for us, we ended up inside a dead giant worm, but we didn't have many places to go, so we got back trough the portal... But still, our DM had to improvise the whole giant worm thing
Remembered bag of beans and how a party member throw it into a giant enemy’s dragon’s nose summoning a prymid. Then we derailed it for a bit to destroy the prymid. That was when my DM banned bag of beans from any of his sessions.
*I* was the one who ended up doing the derailing, but I get the sense that it won't last for long (which, honestly, I'm not mad about). The party was supposed to try and keep the five great sorcery lords of a particular city from being assassinated, and we were failing miserably. Only one was left alive by nightfall of DAY TWO. The last surviving lord came to confront our benefactor, whom he suspected of being the one behind the assassinations.
My character IS an assassin, just for another organization.
The sorcery lord was right next to me during the chatter, and, acting on a whim, I took my poisoned miséricorde and rammed it into the lord's side. He backhanded me pretty hard, but got charged by the bugbear cleric who had taken a liking to my character. This shocked everyone, even the DM, but we ran with it for the rest of the night. As it turned out, our benefactor *was* behind everything, and we flavored it as my character being hired to hand over the city to him in exchange for something. I ended up with 100 gold as everyone went their separate ways for the remainder of the night in-game.
Yeah, so one time we were playing this game (I think it was a homebrew with elements of D&D but was mainly influenced by Elder Scrolls) anyway, we started in an arena and I don't even remember what the game was about because the game started with out me and I joined in the second session. Now, keep in mind, back when we did homebrew games we didn't even use any systems from any actual games because nobody owned the books for them. I had a friend that was really good at math and working out where buffs and debuffs, advantages or disadvantages, or any other factors to take into account in terms of difficulty on something you're attempting, should apply. He wasn't running the game. His cousin was. So we play for a bit and how we used to do it was if one of us was alone in a scene the others would walk away from the table listen to music and play a short game of something while the one (or two depending on what was happening) players in scene would play through a scenario with a DM.
So, beginning of my first session in this game, I create a character, (our character sheets are practically non-existent it's just attributes and list of items as we go) and I go into the building where I meet the guy managing the fights of the arena. Conversing a bit with the head honcho (I was awful at social stuff back then I'm better now still not as good as I would like to be) I noticed the gear the guy was wearing. He had a pretty dope sword and so I rolled to kill him with my bare hands (my characters strength was ridiculous because I was a martial focus) and I do it in two turns. Everybody was pissed and I didn't really understand at first, but apparently that NPC was the main quest giver for the first part of the short campaign we were starting. Like I said, my friend running that particular story wasn't good at taking certain things into account, it was nice that he would be open to running with any idea we had but he really needed to tighten up on what was realistically possible for us to do. Not to mention, I didn't have a lot of experience with TTRPG's at the time so I was thinking more Sandbox video game but more freedom then that even. Session ended immediately afterwards with everybody feeling differently (mostly negatively though) and my one buddy who always DM's was bitter and pissed with me and his cousin for ruining the game.
I laughed, I got angry based on the reaction in the moment, but now nearly 8 years later we can only laugh about how ridiculous that scenario was.
lvl 6 party sees bbeg (lvl15 undead gladiator. Btw it has an int of 8) wizard uses familiar to cast touch of idiocy rolls a 5. So now it’s int is 3. Then the party cleric cast command undead and since it’s int is under 4 it works. The party finds a wand with a skull on the end. wondering what it was our bard snatches it and waves it at a body lying near by. Dm says roll a d100, the bard got a 98. Dm looks on the table and says the body snaps into an upright position and points at the bard. So the bard throws the wand at him and runs and everyone follows.
The wand was the wand of Orcus and the bard raised a greater vampire and gave him the wand. Needless to say the campaign so turned into the walking dead.(btw the bard never returned to the campaign even after 7 more levels of this hell)
Midway through a short homebrew campaign in which we were meant to recover a stolen Helm of Brilliance, our party had to go through a cave filled with spiders. Just before entering, I have a chitty-chat with our wizard (I played a druid). I then asked if the spiderwebs were flammable. DM makes a roll, shrugs, and says we have to get some role to burn the webs away. The wizard makes a gentle breeze, I cast my fire spell and WHOOMP (there it is!) go the spiderwebs. Then the DM rolls some more. And rolls some more. And writes. And rolls. And rolls. And writes some more. And after more rolling and writing, he sits there in this "My dice just flipped me off" sort of manner. THEN he groans and facepalms. "You enter the cave," says he.
We go up the cave. Every. Single. Enemy we were meant to struggle against is now burnt to a crisp.
Swarms of Things That Go Nip-Nip-Nip on our skin (with a chance of poison) reduced to Piles of Things That Go Crunch-Crunch-Crunch beneath our feet (with a chance of stink). The big spiders meant as more serious encounters: toast. Four ettercap guards are reduced to charcoalized meat.
Our path to the final chamber is completely unimpeded, and we soon reach Big Bad, the Dread Lord of these caves, the Final Boss, a drider, surrounded by his pets, with all his magic powders and potions, and etc. etc. etc, and wearing the Helm of Brilliance he stole.
Or, more specifically, we come up to what's LEFT of him. The spiderwebs in his lair also caught fire. As did his powders and some of his more... entertaining potions. And did I mention he was wearing a Helm of Brillance? I'm sure I mentioned the Helm of Brilliance, that we were supposed to retrieve, because he'd been wearing a Helm of Brilliance. Which failed its save (what this means is that ALL the fire-based spells stored in it go off all at once, and the helm is ruined.)
I kinda felt sorry for our DM, as did the other players, since this kid really did try to make it fun for us, only for the whole second part of the campaign to go down in flames and up in smoke. One of our party looked at the DM--who's looking rather glum--and says "think we can replace it and not have our patron notice the switch?"
DM lights up. He sends us on miniquest after miniquest to gather enough gems. We get a couple miniquests to gather the right metals. The wizard who can do the enchantment will not accept mere gold, we have to do favours for her PLUS the payment (more miniquests). By the time we had the new Helm of Brilliance ready, we'd been playing his homebrew campaign for longer than the original would have EVER been.
As someone who loves to completely and utterly destroy any roleplay I'm in... I love the parrot idea and i plan to use it against a DM i freaking hate.
Mimic pet ate a important npc
I've heard of a way to stop the campaign from being derailed: The BBEG's dragon wears the Collar of Contingency, which teleports her to safety when she's low on HP. Each time the party beats her, she is set back, and her frustration grows. For the final battle against her, she rips it off, so she can fight the party to the death.
My PCs decided to derail the campaign and become glass merchants. They encountered a roadside encounter, a glass merchant ambushed by brigands. After defeating the brigands they (with some very lucky roles and exceptional RP) managed to swindle the glass merchant out of his wares and his cart. And they decided to become traveling glass pedlars. Not really a way for them to defeat the BBEG if all they do is wander around fighting bandits and selling glass. But everyone had a blast none the less. This happen because it was all of thiers first game, and they didn't believe me when I told them they could do whatever. I think in an effort to see if I'd railroad them back to the BBEG they derailed the campaign on purpose. Jokes on them though, It was the most fun I have had running DND.
Not the DM, but my party completely derailed our current campaign because _some people_ decided that giving the ancient cursed mask to a coven of hags was a good idea.
Our druid ended up marrying the hag we were supposed to slay, we ended up committing mass sudoku to restore balance
I really hope that guy's wife enjoyed the game despite the mischief.
I had a campaign where not even 30 mins it it got derailed. We got our first quest to investigate a goblin cave. Inside we ran into some traps and such but eventually came across a goblin ritual sight. Inside many of them were trying to summon Tiamet... And here.. with a warlock who their dump stat was charisma.. some how got a Nat20. With said Nat20, he convinced the goblins that he was Tiamet reincarnated... There for.. they no longer wanted to continue with the quest. Instead they all lived there with goblins treating them like gods.
Current campaign im running. The chief warrior gave the party a kill-quest to eliminate a cave full of undead. The party slowly cleared the cave however the problem came when they were fighting a holy priestess who had sworn her life to the god of madness. She was there to kill a servant of the god of death, which the party beat her too because we have a murder-hungry drow rogue (keep him in mind he’s important). The party while fighting the priestess had the dragonborn ranger pick up a knife in the middle of the room which upon passing a wisdom check is then approached by the god of death and sworn to uphold his bidding in return for the Dragon ranger to get super cool powers. One boss fight later to which the party is clearly not ready for and they elect to run. They make it to their carriages but then begin to be hunted by the dogs of the god of demons. As the party runs rapidly on a carriage drawn by horses all the spell-casters are hurling attacks at the different enemies when I make the two Fae run perception checks. Only the drow (told you he was important) notices that large blue and white lights follow along the night path guiding them to the road they are already currently on. The drow proceeds to turn the carriage of the path and into the woods. Multiple dexterity and animal handling checks later, all which were passed, the party is in-front of a giant manor which not even the demon dogs dare approach. The drow without even asking the rest of his party decides to go in. And is immediately teleported into the past. Now this area was supposed to be the final stop in the campaign where they would rescue a very important NPC from being murdered in the past and would pull her to the present so she could use her time manipulation ability to break the city put of a groundhog day loop. Instead the level 3 party was able to break a level 15 vampire fighter with the unique ability to cause loops and control time in a limited radius out of the end stage area. This resulted in the NPC who would give them the save quest reacting very hostile towards the vampire as they were sisters with a whole mess of backstory to go through. And the final battle to be completely scrapped as the big bad could effectively not be alive now do to the fact someone else with time control abilities was in play. The party broke out the 20th session npc out of her jail placed upon her by the gods themselves…on session 4. Cue me scrambling to adjust 18 sessions worth of plans immediately.
Not the entire campaign, but a one shot. The first trap the come across is a basic open spike pit trap. 10ft wide and deep. They spent over an hour discussing how they were going to a rig a very complicated pully system to get across because they were sure that it wasn't as simple as just jumping across. This was my first time running a game. It was then that I realized how traumatized some players are. Those poor paranoid buggers. I adore them lol.
Was playing homebrew world of the DM's personal project. I, as an aspiring writer, had more or less forced him to worldbuild at a breakneck pace because I use the world around them to build my characters rather than building the character (class, stats, etc) first. Made a half dragon dragonborn draconic warlock who's mom (described as the most momish mom possible but a dragon) is his patron. As the child of a great a noble beast, he's rich, a little bit racist against non draconics, and prideful. Add in some time screwery allowing my character (and the party) to be killed repeatedly and my guy is NOT happy with staying around in the place where they're basically destined to die. Another player basically got a fetch quest from an NPC that required abandoning the main story and I, as the player, was against it... up until I realized my character would IMMEDIATELY jump on any excuse not to get killed AGAIN by staying. We had to get moonstone ore from a place that required sailing for like 7 days. Fought a giant octopus monster that I managed to name "A Krakpuss" (kicked it's arse) and now we're in a completely new city being sent into the mines to get the ore ourselves and after killing Krakpuss I just know the DM is gonna make abandoning the main storyline as bad of an idea as he can
One of my players split off from the party when my chaotic/evil neutral demi god antagonist sent an army of minotaurs after him. The demi god calls himself "Collector" and collects strange or weird things and the PCs fell into that category. He manages to get himself trapped on top of a building as the rest of the party escapes. Monsters looking for him on all sides and Collector telling them where to look. he has challenged Collector to a card game with the winner being able to request anything of the loser that they are physically capable of doing. If he loses, he and possibly his team are going to end up as part of a collection.
PS. he completely missed the deus ex machina escape I provided.
I wasn't the dm but a player, human artificer, another player had the deck of many things and lucky pulled the wish card, he used it to give me the ability to have unlimited infusions that lasted indefinitely, well, fast-forward to near end of campaign, the party was in a layer of hell tracking down towers to destroy them to weaken and kill a demon queen, well my party was getting ready to take a rest and all decided we'd rather not do this. I was informed by my buddy who played with this dm before that my she had a slight homebrew rule where if a bag of holding is put into another, it doesn't just open a portal to the astral sea, no, it completely destroys whatever plane of existence its on, so naturally I made Two bags of holding and our cleric prepares plane shift. *Poof* mission complete.
I knew it'd happen in my campaign eventually, I wasn't expecting it to happen in the second session.
For the inciting incident the party collected dubiously magical jewels from a dead wizard who was clearly trying to hide them, and were supposed to deliver them to the apprentice due to a note found sort of like a last will and testament, sparking off a murder mystery of why the wizard was found dead protecting these jewels with the apprentice being an obvious but obnoxious red herring.
The jewels were more of a 'blood money' kind of situation and just enchanted to disrupt any divination magic in their vicinity, but being the identifying mcguffin that was going to lead the party to the underground blackmarket eroding the kingdom, typical economic political subterfuge plot.
The party is either neutral or chaotic alignment, a lawful neutral two chaotic good and one chaotic neutral if memory serves, there's been some unexpectedly funny statements when conflict between them arises, but they've been working together surprisingly well when they get into a pickle.
But In the second session, the party gave away these identifying jewels to a homeless guy in the first town before leaving to find the apprentice, the same jewels that were going to be their 'in' to the secret sector and cannot be magically found, effectively locking them out of finding the conspiracy plot within the first couple hours of the adventure.
I had to call for a ten minute break to brainstorm how to get them back on track, and after throwing out half the intended story, I decided to have the homeless guy return much later as a mob boss.
TL;DR: Dwarf Wizard says "screw this"; kills party/boss with a roof.
Player here. We were mercenaries in DnD 3.5. Meatgrinder campaign; we all had spare characters. This should hopefully absolve me of the absolutely dickish stunt I pulled.
The boss fight took place at the top of a really tall building. Having been the only survivor of last session's nigh-TPK, my dwarf wizard decided not to take chances when this next boss fight went poorly.
While the other players decided to stay and finish the job, I found the load-bearing walls for the upper floors and set an empowered delayed blast fireball before jumping out of the window (we'd all been given rings of featherfalling for the mission. Tall building).
The resulting collapse killed the target, his minions, and everyone in the party except for one very lucky rogue.
We went from mercenaries to fugitives very quickly.
our player hijacked an airship, and charmed them into driving the massive airship into the bbeg palace. i don’t think he expected to be praying to an evil god and his fucking flagship smashed into his face.
I've never actually managed to derail a campaign, or even a single session, but in my first ever session, I tried to. I'm mostly a CN player, had one CE PC, and so I decided that since I already ended up having to improvise my character's introduction since the plot of the campaign negated the backstory I had come up with, I improvised that entire session. I was hoping my stupid ideas would derail the session fairly quickly but somehow, MY INTENTIONALLY STUPID IDEAS ACTUALLY HELPED. Still bitter about it today.
Spoilers for krakens gamble. Obviously was running kraken's gamble and the players had made it to the fight with the abolith in the sewers of a major city and things are not going well. Everyone had single digit hp, were in full retreat, but the wizard was unconscious and still in the water right next to the abolith. Earlier I'm the campaign I had given each player a bean from a bag of beans and the monk decided it was time to throw a hail Mary and "planted" it in sewer skum and tossed it into the water. Bean grows into a pyramid with a frigging mummy lord. End session. Next session starts with the mummy lord and some normal mummies emerging from the pyramid that engage with the abolith and its minions in an epic monster bs monster bash and the unconscious wizard no longer underwater but on the wrong side of the battle. Shenanigans ensued to get the wizard back leading to a skill check to escape the collapsing sewer that came very close to everyone being crushed by debris. Party then decides the best move is to find an inn and take a long rest without warning anybody about the mummies or sea monsters in the sewer. Took some dm liberties and changed mummy rot to turn people into zombies instead of dust and the party awoke to a zombie apocalypse. Had a whole story arc planned for them to find the other survivors and help save the city but they instead decided to flee town. Good news, they saved the wizard. Bad news, they unleashed an ancient evil and doomed a major city. I love this game.
Why would you try to deliberately derail a campaign? That seems like a bit of a shitty thing to do.
I was finally going to try running a game after playing in my first game. I chose dragon of icespire peak....... they left the beginning town immediately and started sailing and never looked back
War forge.
PC goes mad
But it's what my character would do
Is relatively new to DnD personally But I enjoy it we were playing a one shot that was honestly from what the DM told me later supposed to be a tpk. So we enter into a circus a circus everybody's having fun everything's going great and we get to the main show of the circus and we're transferred to a demi plane with a Large creature of some kind I don't remember off the top of my head what it was but we were all decently leveled for this one shot and what had been happening is the rate master had been essentially just stealing people's life forces and we were unaware we were just visiting the circus you're just visiting the circus so fast forward to me and just our bard are still living and we decide to put a portable hole inside of a bag of holding. DM looks at me almost a mix of anger and fatherly pride, closes his book and says "welp you're all in the Astral sea and I guess this one shot isn't a one shot anymore, I gotta go write"
I over roleplay a bit. Minor spoilers for Curse of Strahd
We started Curse of Strahd and I was a Tabaxi rogue. I was playing to the obsessive nature of the Tabaxi and kind of corralled us into the opening murder house by obsessing about the ghost children's dead sibling. In the house my character was beaten by an animated broom in a closet and nearly died right then. Traumatized me a little and forced me to be more motivated to save the baby. More trauma from water my character is naturally afraid of as a cat.
Oh the baby was stillborn? Not on my watch. Walter is GOING TO LIVE. More trauma exiting building but now I have a goal. A goal that does not end until Strahd steals the baby's corpse when I come back with a way to bring back the long since dead at the end of the campaign.
Literally none of us remember any of the major characters of that game, apparently you meet Strahds relatives but I screamed about Walter nonstop and so we never really interacted. It was an amazing campaign and I have no clue what actually happens in Barovia besides dead children.
I remember when a deal with Mephistopheles fucked my campaign.
Essentially I had the choice to side with him or my dragon daddy. For the record, my PC DID NOT want to side with Mephistopheles.
So why did he? Well his bond “Friends above all” left a crippling weakness in my character’s persona. I knew a week in advance that if the devil lord threatened the party, it was GG.
Everyone, despite the fact that this bond has appeared multiple times throughout the game now, sat in awe when it happened. Even the DM was thrown off. The viable option was to side with the good aligned dragon, but I play immersively.
Campaign took a different turn, but was overall saved. Though a That Guy claimed I ruined the game and I later left because everyone wasn’t going to do anything about the manchild giving me shit.
No regrets on my end. Fuck perfect characters, the best protagonists in stories have flaws
So I was the player in this one. we we're playing deadlands, the players were James the Marshall/hexslinger basically a lawman of the occult, dances with spirits a native American spirit shaman, doc the opium addicted doctor who was a slight pacifist, and me the mad scientist old man. The dm had decided we were to be given a train as the focus of the plot was saving a bowl shaped Valley from a zombie outbreak. So me being the mad scientist thought attaching a gun was a good idea and designed us a galling gun but we only had cargo cars for the train instead I scrapped the top of one and turned it into a cannon and reinforced the other car. I built a mobile death machine. We derailed the campaign when we came across a mad scientist who was making the undead and adding tesla coils to them to control them. He just so happened to build a giant tesla tower in the fort he was in. Well after a half dozen shots the tower drops and we burn out the zombies and scientist effectively neutralizing the threat. Sadly he also gave me a crashed airship and I didn't get to add that to the mad science.
I had one of the last bosses the party was supposed to fight was going to show in the background a couple times before they finally fight it. The boss was intended for them to be Level 16-ish when they fought it.
Nope.
First time I had it in the background (a localized storm moving along the water they could see from the ship they were on) they made a beeline for it and decided to piss it off. If it wasn't for the healer NPC I gave them at the start of the campaign because none of the PCs could heal they probably would've TPK'd because the party was *level 6*
Cleared out an entire fortress full of enemy soldiers they were supposed to just be scouting. I stacked the odds against them, but they kept rolling high with AoEs, and the OP commander that came out to fight them kept fumbling, and I don't fudge rolls to be perfectly fair so I couldn't BS it. They did SO MUCH damage over 2 rounds I also couldn't BS him as having more HP. So they earned their winning - a defensible position and an entire castle full of loot. They sold EVERYTHING and made so much gold that one guy used it to enchant a chair.
Im the player at the time not the DM, I was playing a lvl 7 ware-dire-tiger rouge and hints of barbarian with 23 str 7 int we get to meet the BBEG for the first time. we had failed to stop the cult from summoning them and even killed everything before the summoning but it was too late my character used a sling to shoot rocks at the BBEG as she flew from a portal in the ground and rolled a NAT 20 my first shot, the rock hit her in the head then landed on top of her head. My character saw this as theft as she had his rock and went enraged only to rip the BBEG in half with his claws with another nat 20 and almost max damage as she comes out the portal. this fight was suppose to take 6 of us to complete it only to have her flee wounded and come back later for revenge
Shadowrun. We are hired by a bar owner to deal with a gang that is harassing him. It was laid out like the ST's favorite bar IRL, a front bar area, and through the back a large dance floor and the main bar. My street sami was a demo man, and trapped the front bar in case they tried to storm. We sent a message via dwarf they sent for the protection money (My PC ripped his beard off and my guy had it tanned and sewn onto his jacket as a trophy), and the gang come in their large civi tank of a truck and PARKS IT IN THE FRONT BAR. I tell the party to wait to see if they want to talk and this is just an intimidation tactic, or if they are here to throw down. The ST notes they all start to rush out carrying heavy firepower, and every player holds out their hand like they were holding a remote detonator, like the one my guy gave all of their PC's, with a big smile on their face. The ST groaned as he realized he parked the entire gang in the middle of the trapped area, and already admitted they threw open their door and left the protection of the tank. We almost all beat everyone in the gang in initiative, and the first player jus says "click". The find battle of this little arc against a dozen heavily armed street goon is over with a push of a button (Except the dwarf who was being treated for having half of the skin on his face ripped off by this overly chromed out psycho).
TLDR: sold out the other players PC for a bounty.
Story: I run a game for my two friends A and B we where 4 sessions in and due to backstory B's PC was part of a family with a horrible past and during to that there is a bounty for anyone found with their family chrest the only thing B had with the crest on it was his duster style coat.
A is a tabaxi monk and B is a half elf artificer. They were staying in a small town for a while doing little jobs to make money the local guards had already talked to B about the crest and he passed with a deception check telling them he found it in a cave.
They were just getting back to the town after a job and the tabaxi got burned by a wyrmling so the artificer gave him the duster to keep warm the get to the inn and the artificer goes to his room to get something.
While he upstairs the guards see the crest on the coat and started questioning him about it at this time the artificer came back down stairs and noticed the guards when the tabaxi saw him he goes I got it from him and what does the artificer do cuts and runs. The guards took Chace the artificer managed to escape.
At this point the guards gave the tabaxi the reward for the information and the artificer was now on the run. Now I'm looking for a way for the artificer to come back as a mini boss and a future encounter
Wanted to create a big intrigue story with underground criminals using the PCs for their own gain and a fake noble, the fake noble being the boss of these criminals.
One player made him black out drunk mid fight and our orc warrior woman gave him a „light“ smack to wake him up, he barely survives and is now a paraplegic. Evolves into a story being on the run and one PC almost eating a child if I didn’t intervene lol.