Your best fuck-ups

[Alex_Steel]

You were playing a vampire...why not just kill the noble and suck him dry?

Nobles tend to be ghouls. His death might have lead to dire consequences.

choices and consequences, BITCH

This rule doesn't apply to God.

Great thread btw, keep going! :D

 

[deus101]

OK, another 4 hour game module at Arcon a few years earlier( which is a gaming con in Oslo btw).

It was called "A Gathering of Sigmarites" and involved the PC's travelling to their destination and taking a pitstop at a small village.

Now, this is my WORST character roleplaying I've ever done.

I was a Lawyer/Sigmar Priest, heavily into fistfights and quoting the law.

Now, I've only gamed for about a year, and the dystopic priest of still was a bit of a chew for me.

My excuses was that I followed the law.


But as my fellow Priests ran around looking for ghosts and witches which didn't exist, I was trying to stop them.
In the endgame they split up, some were to go after a teacher...rest including me were to go after the smith which was a battle hardened priest of Myrmidia.

We were to set fire to his home and ambush him before he could get into his armor, but I wanted to align myself with him to set my followers to the straight path.(So passed a note to the GM telling him i sent a message to the priest of Myrmidia)

When we approached I was afraid they'd succeed in setting fire to his home before he got time to prepare...so I shouted out...and my co-gamers killed me for it.

The Priest ran out, started slaughtering the others, and witout me to mediate he also went to the others that were to string out the teacher.


Total party death... courtesy of signed.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

My character knew a druid that owed him big favours. Druids can cast reincarnation.

Yes. Reincarnation.

GM rolled for new race while the barbarians player was sputtering. Dice came up "random monster from MM, GMs choice". GM decided to roll 3d100 to pick a page. The barbarian came back to us as a centaur.

Which put the munchkin in a peverse situation. His previous build was utterly wrecked because of level adjustment, size modifiers and what have you. But OTOH he just got access to a whole new kind of polearm cheese. So he couldn't bring himself to abandon the character.

That happened to me too, my bard was reincarnated and I thought it was cool, maybe he'll turn out to be a Sahuagin or something but bah. Just a human female. I just rolled a new character then.

Dark Heresy sure seems popular around here. Last time I was playing I had a psyker who could heal people among other things. Well I healed them so good it was almost a total party kill, with perils of the warp throwing everybody high up in the air. Then I just made a Tech-Priest, fuck that random psyker shit.

 

[Whisky]

The first PNP game I played was the 4th Edition DND Red Box (Please don't lynch me) with my friends. I modified a bit of the adventure, removing that chess battle and replacing it with some kobolds who decided to lead a rebellion for freedom from the white dragon in the dungeon. I had placed a row of kobolds on the map in front of a trap they had placed in case the players were hostile and intended for them to tell the players about them once they cooperated, leading to a much easier fight against the dragon and some bonus experience. Unfortunately, it turned out one of my friends was playing a sadistic wizard and he was being rather creative that session. He used a spell that pulled one character one space (Forget the name. Only played one game of 4th Edition) onto the trap and set it off, killing the kobold leader. The rest fell quickly.

This was the first time my friends have destroyed something I made. I will never forget it.

 

[Ulminati]

The first PNP game I played was the 4th Edition DND Red Box (Please don't lynch me)

This was the first time my friends have destroyed something I made. I will never forget it.

Good.... Good! Give in to your hatred!

 

[Misconnected]

Dark Heresy sure seems popular around here. Last time I was playing I had a psyker who could heal people among other things. Well I healed them so good it was almost a total party kill, with perils of the warp throwing everybody high up in the air. Then I just made a Tech-Priest, fuck that random psyker shit.

DH has one of the most popular game settings there ever was, and it has a lot of other things going for it. If anything, I'm surprised it isn't more popular around here.

Anyway, in our very first game of DH - the first of three one-off games using GM-made PCs - the first time our psyker tried to manifest a power, the dice gods hated everyone so badly that he would have accidentally called forth a daemon prince instead. That's when I vaguely recalled Fate Points, so I asked the other players to roll AG and had the fastest spend a FP to knock out the psyker before they all got eaten.

This was the first time my friends have destroyed something I made. I will never forget it.

That's one of the reasons I don't do plots. I find I not only save myself a lot of fairly boring work, but that our sessions also flow better, if I try to avoid clearly defining scenes before they play out.

 

[Akasen]

In Pathfinder, I jumped down a well that was like 100 ft. deep. Why? The crazy necromancer was gonna kill me. And I didn't know it's deep.

 

[Zardoz]

I'm running a Pathfinder in FR campaign with a bunch of lvl 3 guys that we're travelling in some pretty dangerous goblinoid and giant infested hills. I had this planned encounter with a hill giant which was way out of their league and was supposed to be a hazard to avoid more than a killer dm trick since he was a long way up the hill to chase them down effectively. First boulder/warning shot crushed the inquisitor's mule and the group decided to avenge the poor animal. Almost got a tpk out of that fight but the summoner's dire rat spamming saved the day. One npc died but the group was scattered enough so that the giant couldn't finish them off in time before getting nibbled to death.

Never underestimate the need for revenge

 

[TOME]

We were playing a campaing using rolemaster but we weren't familiar with char creation at the time. So we each finished making our char, mine was a mage, when GM tells that we fucked up at the very beginning. We were supposed to roll a special ability from table and after that create our char. But we were lazy so we opted to keep the char we had created and just roll the skill afterwards. And of course it just happened that I rolled an ability that gave me +20 bonus to strength and a couple percent chance to screw up every time I hit something. My mage ended up being stronger than the party fighters combined.

Later on we were hunting some bad criminal that the king wanted alive. We managed to capture him alive in combat (with rolemaster it's damn hard) but before turning him in we wanted to interrogate him a bit. He was chained to a chair and my mage was alone with him. He refused to talk so what do I do? Hit him of course. The GM asks to roll first the special ability roll, which fails. Then GM says that there is 80% chance that I'm paralyzed for a while and 20% chance that I lose control of my muscles and hit him much harder than I intend. I roll again and it's within the 20%. I roll again, this time to get the force I'm hitting, and I "lucked" and the roll was natural 100. End result: criminal with a pulverized head and rest of the party asking what did I do to him and my mage explaining that he only hit him once.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

Ok our D&D campaign has gone pretty hard off the rails. We found one of the artifacts at last, couldn't just grab it because it's frickin' huge so instead I step into some portal that's there, and before the mystic theurge can say it could lead to for example the elemental plane of fire or something I'm gone. So he angrily follows, turns out it's some place where devils, archons and demons have this sort of blood war style action going on, also it turns out the portal was one-way. Later our Warforged fighter follows taking with him a plane shift scroll made by the giants that's supposed to work even back to Eberron even while that's kinda impossible. Some pieces of flying crap or something constantly attack us and when we find a fortress we could hide in (our theurge didn't understand that he could read the scroll even without read magic prepared, which I frankly would have always prepared but whatever, I don't much pay attention to the mage shit anyways, or something of that sort, point is he could have taken us home right then instead of wandering around in hell), turns out it's owned by the devils, and they offer us protection if we join their legion. Well we don't want to fight eternally in hell so instead we make a deal with them to take five of them to Eberron where they can't normally get, so they send a Pit fiend and some others. When we get back, it's a random location, that is, middle of ocean, and our theurge doesn't have flight spells, our warforged would simply sink, so I deal with the devils again to trade unspecified work for taking us with them in the Pit Fiend's teleport spell. So now we're working for a Pit Fiend, helping him start a cult of some sort in some cursed forest. I'm thinking if we should just work with him in finding the artifacts that would probably allow them to conquer a lot of planes if we can just share in the power.

However if I just hadn't stepped randomly in a portal we'd have one giant artefact for ourselves by now and we'd be off to get the next one instead of working for a pit fiend.

 

[Ulminati]

Your GM sounds like my kind of guy. I like that you managed to go completely off the rails and he just rolls with it. Brokering a deal with devils can only lead to great incline!

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

He told us he doesn't plan anything in detail because from long experience he knows nothing ever goes as planned, sometimes completely in an unrelated direction and he only cares if the world's internal logic works.​

 

[Alex_Steel]

for your GM.

 

[Zardoz]

Being able to improvise instead of just railroading's one of the better dm traits indeed and one of the reasons why tabletop gaming will always be better than computer games which usually have little replay value storywise. If the players are more interested by some random encounter than the storyline it's fine by me. I usually just have a few notes defining who's doing what instead of a fixed sequence of events/encounters. If you're out of ideas you can always set up some roleplaying encounter or just take a few minutes break while thinking about what to do.

 

[Monocause]

It wasn't a fuckup of mine, but a rather funny story about how much of a jackass I was when GMing back in high school.

I prepared a short (took three 4-hour sessions or so to wrap up), low-level D&D campaign for my three friends. I was supposed to GM follow-ups (had drafted two more short sessions and a finale that would supposedly end with the players around level 9) but then summer came, and after the summer we left high school and me and another guy lost interest in PnP due to whole new life starting at the uni and stuff like that.

So, anyway, the adventurer party reached an island. I wanted the story unfold slowly, so they didn't begin at a tavern talking to some seedy character, I just placed them at the port and managed to draw them into the storyline almost seamlessly. I achieved that by dropping quite a few loose ends at them which they believed to be "the real start". The best one was with the goblin conspiracy.

The party had to reach a larger force on the island for some mercenary work, clearing out a bugbear den that recently became a large problem for the local landowners, hindering their logging and farming enterprises. The merc recruiter gave directions to the party, some travel provisions and told them that the two best ways are to either follow the shore or take the road and turn south at a certain point. "Don't know which way is safer, to be honest. Strange things happen recently in the wild, best be on your guard while en route. Just be at the assembly point within a week. Sign this. If you don't show up you'll get blacklisted and won't get any more jobs with the guild anywhere, if you show up and desert you'll be found and hanged. This is everything you need to know.".

I noticed that the players got pretty excited at the notion of "strange things happening in the wild", expecting it to be a hint that something important is going to happen along the way. Both the route and the merc job weren't important storywise, so I decided to troll them a bit. They took the shoreline route and travel time would be around two days; on the second night the elf wizard passed his listening check and interrupted his meditation to notice a small figure creeping close to the camp. She tried to silently wake up the others but this time the check failed. Turned out it was a lone goblin who gave the leg immediately after being spotted. The party tried chasing and shooting him, but they only barely scratched the goblin as he got away, being the quicker one.

The party naturally imagined that this must be important, and the rogue, who was a fairly competent cross-class woodsman skillwise, attempted to track the escapee. They grew increasingly fatigued and got ambushed by wolves once (which they butchered effortlessly because of a really lucky roll with the wizard's sleep spell). They lost track a couple of times, but they still pressed forward. Finally, ten hours later or so, the tracks took them to the environs of an ominous looking cave with some shanty wooden huts around its entrance and lookouts which they barely managed to avoid. Adventure!

They moved away to a safe distance, set up sentries and camped for a well-earned rest. All details aside, the brave adventurers crafted a bold plan to assault the goblins. First they executed the lookouts, then butchered some goblins in their sleep, then entered the cave. It turned out it was fairly small, with a relatively tough fight of them against two goblin shamans and three ordinary goblins versus them - wizard, rogue and the reader, a special very jack-of-all-trades class I created for the campaign that could spend perks to develop in multiple ways but never could truly excel at anything. Through nice use of tactics and resources at their disposal - a good bunch of players they were - they managed to gut the goblins without any serious injuries. The looting started; they found a wooden box containing the goblin tribe's "treasures": a mundane but somewhat valuable gem, a long dagger with a cheap heat radiation enchantment and a mysterious parchment with some writing in an unknown runic language. The party debated what to do and decided to ignore the merc assignment and get the writing translated somewhere in the town they started out in, probably imagining that whatever is written there will foreshadow a dark plot or another that they are supposed to unveil. After leaving the cave, however, it turned out that they were lost - the tracks they used to reach the camp were gone, the forest was very lush and hard to get around in and they forgot to purchase a map and all three failed the relevant rolls. Thus began the six day-long odyssey towards the civilisation; they figured that following the goblin must've took them north while it took them east, and since they headed south they ended up in the most remote and sparsely inhabited part of the whole island. Still, they reached the shore, and following the shore they reached the city - badly bruised, malnourished, with torn clothing and damaged equipment (the reader even had to improvise a club at some point and the rogue used his bolt quiver as firewood), two of them with scarred faces.

I'm getting bored with writing all this, so let's cut the story short - after paying for the translation it turned out that it was simply a paylist from the neighboring logging operation ran by foreign workers. The disbelief followed by extreme butthurt on the players' faces was awesome - the session was basically over and they realised they wasted over four hours chasing a red herring, two of them received scars that permanently lowered their CHA and they wasted a job opportunity, blowing their standing with the merc guild. After restocking and purchasing new gear to replace the battered oldies it turned out that the profit from their grand escapade was just thirty coppers, a cape fashioned from wolfskin, a poorly enchanted dagger and a single experience level for the rogue.

 

[RK47]

I tried DM-ing some modern scenario PnP RPG and the guy insisted he wanted rape someone - any female NPC.
I think that was my last real attempt at DM-ing.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I tried DM-ing some modern scenario PnP RPG and the guy insisted he wanted rape someone - any female NPC.
I think that was my last real attempt at DM-ing.

why?

you should have let that happen and either given her a vagina dentata or aids. Or give her guns and kung-fu fighting and say that BY A WEIRD COINCIDENCE she was an off-duty secret agent.

That's how you grant players their wishes. They will be so satisfied they won't ask for anything ever again.

 

[RK47]

I was 13 and wasn't in any position to imagine rape scenarios nor familiar with diseases that could be transmitted by putting your pee pee into a hole in the frontal region between a woman's thighs.

 

[Darth Roxor]

It still leaves kung-fu fighting secret agent

 

[Monocause]

why?

you should have let that happen and either given her a vagina dentata or aids. Or give her guns and kung-fu fighting and say that BY A WEIRD COINCIDENCE she was an off-duty secret agent.

That's how you grant players their wishes. They will be so satisfied they won't ask for anything ever again.

Yeah. There were three categories of PnP players I hated: LULZers, who found it very funny to RAEP everything, or insult some powerful guy, munchkins, who tried to play PnP as they would a computer game (OK, so I'll start with 18 in DEX and dumb WIS and CHA cause the pally will be talking, weapon finesse, then go for criticals... what do you mean I can't start with 18 DEX?) and the smartasses ("Why are these fortifications so circular? Shouldn't they have additional strongpoints? They wouldn't construct this that way..."). All three required specific approaches (preferably ending with their character's untimely death) to understand that GM is the ultimate overlord and if they don't like it, well, sucks for them.

On the other hand I think that everyone starting their PnP experience has to go through one of these before becoming a proper player. I was the lulzer type, though not RAEP focused but with my characters I took cliches to extremes. Like, playing a dwarf fighter who's extremely keen on threateningly calling everyone his "friend", was an extreme drunkard and who threateningly patted the head of his waraxe about forty times per day whenever someone even barely slighted him. Or playing the Elven bard who would be extremely and flamboyantly gay.

 

[RK47]

There was another dude who kept trying to turn the pnp session into gambling ones, by suggesting we should 'gamble at the tavern' with dice and shit.
How do you guys handle this?

 

[darkling]

I tried DM-ing some modern scenario PnP RPG and the guy insisted he wanted rape someone - any female NPC.
I think that was my last real attempt at DM-ing.

Wow, I had that happen when I was a kid too. It was extra-awkward because it was a new person I brought to my regular D&D group. I had to convince them afterwards that everyone I knew wasn't a retard.

There was another dude who kept trying to turn the pnp session into gambling ones, by suggesting we should 'gamble at the tavern' with dice and shit.
How do you guys handle this?

Have him win a ton of money then drop him on an alley combat map where he has to fight a bunch of thugs who aren't too happy about losing, possibly solo (until the rest of the party decides to come and help, if they do. If he's detracting from the adventure, it's likely the other players won't mind a few rounds of singled-out trouncing) saying while he was wandering out back to relieve himself after winning, he got jumped. If his character was drinking and it's Pathfinder, apply the 'Sickened' condition and say he's having problems due to excessive drunkenness.

 

[Gregz]

Some of the best fuck-ups in recorded history happened in Norath (Everquest).

Back in the day, there were only a handful of high-end raid locations. So the best guilds would negotiate a calender, and certain guilds were allowed to farm that location on that particular day of the week. So, your guild would spend an entire week prepping for that raid. Farming items to sell in EC so your cleric could buy that essential heal spell for your tank, shit like that.

Anyway, the day comes, and after 2 hours of prepping you have managed to organize, port, and carve your way through the trash MOBs to the target MOBs. Maybe a big dragon in Veeshan, Lady Vox, Lord Nagafen, whatever it was.

So say...hypothetically...you have a healing chain of 5 clerics in your 30 man/tranny raid team. You're about 2.5 hours in, prepping for the boss fight (the fight itself takes about 20 minutes, if successful). So the monk/bard pulls the boss and everything goes like clockwork but 16 minutes into the battle one of your clerics DCs because his brother reset his router or there was a lightning strike, or whatever, and is back online 1 minute later. In the meantime however, the healing chain was broken, and the tank that was at 3% health, fell, and the boss subsequently destroyed the entire raid.

Then you get to devote the next hour or so to finding everyone's corpse, rezzing them, and 4 hours after starting the whole thing...you debate for 30 minutes to see if you want to try again (and pray no one DCs). If you were lucky you could quit and call it a day, but usually the Guild Master's pride wouldn't allow it, so you'd do it again, and wipe again two more times.

10 hours of nothing but cock-ups, bitching, and lost XP (which could take 4-6 hours to grind back up to where you were when you started that day)...say what you will about MMOs...but original EQ was fucking hardcore.

Example of said carnage and lulz (monk pulls 4 dragons that wipe the entire raid in under a minute):

 

[Zardoz]

I tried DM-ing some modern scenario PnP RPG and the guy insisted he wanted rape someone - any female NPC.
I think that was my last real attempt at DM-ing.

Yeah I had a similar player once except more on the barwench chaser end of the horny/sick spectrum. Flirting with a player's not to my liking and since he cheated on dice rolls anyways I just used vampires/demons or some polymorphed very lonely wizard and so forth. I also gave him that sex switch girdle so he could get hit on by the other players/npcs.

He finally understood that it's an aventure game not a loser's dating sim.

 

[Monty]

I was 13 and wasn't in any position to imagine rape scenarios nor familiar with diseases

Asking a 13 yr old girl to GM a rape scenario is pretty damn creepy.