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Tabletop RPG Tales of Terror, Intrugue, and Humor!
Erin The Red
The Name's Erin! Woman, Podcaster, Dungeon Master, IT nerd, Parent, Trans. AMABaton Rouge, LARegistered User regular
The Name's Erin! Woman, Podcaster, Dungeon Master, IT nerd, Parent, Trans. AMABaton Rouge, LARegistered User regular
I think it's a safe assumption that we are all nerds of some form or another.
Have you played a tabletop RPG and had annoying-ass PCs playing with you? Did you maybe have some fantastic ones that made the thing more memorable than the DM did?
Did you have an awesome DM who wrapped you up in a story like nobody else ever could?
Heck, were YOU a DM with some... less than stellar characters? Did they make a 1:12,000,000 saving throw and kill your bigbad evildude upon meeting him and ruin months of writing?
Tell your tales here!
To start off with, let's go with 13th age. I've got a dwarf bard named Taldin. He was cursed by the three (Three evil dragons of horrible power) for trying to steal from one of their hoards of treasure. Only due to his charisma does he manage to walk away with his life, but he's forever cursed with a metal arm that has souls inside that speak to him and, should he ever act in a manner that would be counter to what the three would desire, will face bad bad things.
Our intro to the campaign is that we make it to a town where there is obviously some necromancy afoot. We wander in and after some discussing and negotiating, we offer to help the folk of this town. We stop (so we think) the zombie incursion from the graveyard and call it a night. Head back to the inn and go to sleep, only to be awoken by zombies spilling into the rooms! We fight the buggers off and make it to the main floor of the tavern, where we find out that some ghost...spirit...lady... things are controlling huge numbers of zombies and they are tearing the town apart. Through some more fighting and our use of surrounding ale casks and torches some zombies are dismembered and some are exploded. After the dust settles, our dm (@Anialos) has us roll to see who is left alive in the town, and how helpful they are to us. Turns out there are only like 4 or 5 people, but we each then roll a d100 to see how much that benefits us individually. TWO of us manage to roll a 100. The DMs facepalm was glorious!
Long story short, I get half ownership of the general store and tavern/inn, and I got to rename the inn after The Three. Right after that, @Jdarksun the party cleric uses his 100 to make the worship of his diety, The Crusader, compulsory. I'm rather curious to see how that'll play out. Hopefully there will be hijinx! Although I guess in a town with 5 living citizens, the laws are probably a bit lax. Especially since the sheriff was eaten in a most gruesome manner. Hrm.
Have you played a tabletop RPG and had annoying-ass PCs playing with you? Did you maybe have some fantastic ones that made the thing more memorable than the DM did?
Did you have an awesome DM who wrapped you up in a story like nobody else ever could?
Heck, were YOU a DM with some... less than stellar characters? Did they make a 1:12,000,000 saving throw and kill your bigbad evildude upon meeting him and ruin months of writing?
Tell your tales here!
To start off with, let's go with 13th age. I've got a dwarf bard named Taldin. He was cursed by the three (Three evil dragons of horrible power) for trying to steal from one of their hoards of treasure. Only due to his charisma does he manage to walk away with his life, but he's forever cursed with a metal arm that has souls inside that speak to him and, should he ever act in a manner that would be counter to what the three would desire, will face bad bad things.
Our intro to the campaign is that we make it to a town where there is obviously some necromancy afoot. We wander in and after some discussing and negotiating, we offer to help the folk of this town. We stop (so we think) the zombie incursion from the graveyard and call it a night. Head back to the inn and go to sleep, only to be awoken by zombies spilling into the rooms! We fight the buggers off and make it to the main floor of the tavern, where we find out that some ghost...spirit...lady... things are controlling huge numbers of zombies and they are tearing the town apart. Through some more fighting and our use of surrounding ale casks and torches some zombies are dismembered and some are exploded. After the dust settles, our dm (@Anialos) has us roll to see who is left alive in the town, and how helpful they are to us. Turns out there are only like 4 or 5 people, but we each then roll a d100 to see how much that benefits us individually. TWO of us manage to roll a 100. The DMs facepalm was glorious!
Long story short, I get half ownership of the general store and tavern/inn, and I got to rename the inn after The Three. Right after that, @Jdarksun the party cleric uses his 100 to make the worship of his diety, The Crusader, compulsory. I'm rather curious to see how that'll play out. Hopefully there will be hijinx! Although I guess in a town with 5 living citizens, the laws are probably a bit lax. Especially since the sheriff was eaten in a most gruesome manner. Hrm.
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I was DMing a group of people last year while in prison (long story, don't sell drugs). Anyways, all my players were new to D&D. Well, the first few sessions were slow since they were getting use to it but by the time they reached level 5 (4e btw), I felt as that they were ready for a big dungeon. They traveled to a church, found the hidden crypt underneath, and fought undead creatures. This is were it goes bad. The Paladin dies in this dungeon due to him thinking that he was a Striker while being built for Defender/Healer and that causes everyone else to run away, without the Paladins body. Next session, I've
zombified the Paladin and everyone now has to face an undead teammate (I let the guy control this monster since it was his PC in the first place.) Ranger dies, group once again runs out with grabbing the Ranger's body. Now we have two zombified PCs. This time, the Fighter, Warlock, Cleric, and Rogue get better, kills the PCs and gets them raised by a cleric they helped earlier. Finally, after going through the dungeon looking for two switches to open the last chamber door, everyone decides to rest for a bit, heal their wounds, ect. and the Warlock decides to "investigate" the next room by walking into it. Needless to say, door slams, Dungeon Boss kills him in 2 rounds.
But they did get better. At level 8-9, they had to go on a ship to a major city to give a lord there a message about what they found in that dungeon and they get attacked by a pirate gang. Now, I've kinda updated the story so that the pirate's ship is a steam-powered paddle boat like those that use to go down the Mississippi. The Ranger decides during the second round of the Boss Fight that "Hey, I have a rope in my backpack. Tie the rope to the pack, make a lasso, round-up the boss, and toss the bag into the paddle wheel. I'm like "Ok, try it." He's successful and the Pirate Boss is grabbed and pulled into the ship's paddle wheel, causing the ship to blow up (and making a great escape skills test). They got 300 extra XP for that.
* In the D20 Modern campaign I was running, the party was working as mercenaries for the US government, and had recovered an experimental rail gun. Rather than returning it like they were supposed to, one of the players got in touch with one of his contacts in the mob and cut a deal with them, having his mob friends ambush the party and steal the weapon while planting the seeds among the party that it was an internal coup by another government.
* In a Star Wars Saga game, we had been trapped around a planet that was in a complete interdiction zone with weapon platforms that would kill any ship that got within 100 miles of the edge of the interdiction area. This area was created because the planet was home to a black ooz species that was impossible to destroy and would attack anything with a force connection. It was to be a survival horror campaign. On the fifth session, we had been captured by a bunch of pirate/scientists who had a sample of the ooz in a giant container. Our force sensitive player, of course, just had to see what would happen if she tried to talk to the ooz using the Force. Of course, it went insane and broke free. The pirates all gave the abandon ship signal and ran away. Except for the poor pirates on the bridge. You see, as they were getting in their escape pod, the Force Sensitive player succeeded at a Force Power fear effect on the Ooz, causing it to get scared and flee into the bridge crew's escape pod. At which point, I jettisoned them all. This left us in command of a fully armed and operational Mon Cal cruiser. Suffice to say, we blew right through the defense network and got home.
* We were playing a Forgotten Realms game in the Dales with Pathfinder Rules. Our home town had recently been taken over by Thay. My character had a Wisdom of 8. So, while the rest of the party was arguing about what to do, I just wandered into town. I wasn't recognized by Thay, thanks to a Wizard's experiment recently adding the Half-Dragon template to my character. Anyway, I had a couple of ranks in Profession: Bounty Hunter, and when I saw that there was a bounty out on my party, I went to talk to the guys. A few diplomacy and Profession checks later, and I got a 100 gold advance on bringing myself in alive and a promise 1000 gold bonus if I brought three or more members of the party in at the same time. Unfortunately, that was the last session we played, so I didn't have a chance to convince the rest of the party to let me.
My brother and I were a sorcerer and rogue, respectively, playing our first DND campaign with some friends. We did the dumbest shit sometimes. We found a room that had floor tiles with words on it. We had a clue in the form of a picture. O think the answer was 'right hand up' or something. What did my brother jump on? 'Unleash' and 'hell'. Cue demons appearing out of braziers and statues coming to life.
I learned to always check for traps the time I just pulled on a door and the floor dropped us into a pit in the floor with enemies coming at us from all sides.
Also we once found a pool of weird liquids surrounded by piles of skulls. My brother and I decided to drink the liquid using skulls as bowls. That ended up helping us. Restored a healing surge I think. But what the fuck kind of plan is that on our part?!
Other time, the same group of people from my last post had their cleric "Command" an boss into sliding into a fireplace. The wizard used a spell to set the fireplace on fire and the fighter stood in front of the fireplace and kept the boss inside thanks to his Combat Challenge. The boss burned to death while the rest of the party looted the bodies of his allies.
The first event occured as they made an incursion into the swamplands to hunt down an artifact. Now despite being set in Forgotten Realms, I was near a fan of the package that came with the setting. I never used the Elminsters or the Drizzt of the settings. What I would do instead, if I needed a strong NPC, was use player characters from previous campaigns. So I decided to give them a little hint that there were more players in this little game than they initially thought. So I choose the familiar for my old character, a elf Wizard named Cecilia (and my first D&D character), to set on their path. This familiar, by time I retired her at max level, was pumped up with all kinds of permanent spell enhancements and wishes. This was ment just to be an introductory moment - the scout character, a drow ranger ( @Nealneal ), meets the cat while doing what he does best, all alone with no proof of the encounter early on. Most of the party would assume he was crazy. A cat who walks on his hindlegs with a staff, hat and boots that can talk? Crazy town right? Anyway, I decided the cat would just warn him about a momma black dragons nest so they would just avoid it and take the long way around, then take off back into the swamp like he was never there. No need to fight a dangerous dragon, right? Wrong. They wanted to tangle with the dragon, now I was sure I had just commited my first party wipe by complete accident. Crap, that was just supposed to be a story moment. Okay, let me get my MM so I get the stats and quickly draw the nest scene on the playmat. Well, that's when the drow, who initially just wanted to go around but got out voted, got clever. He snuck up on the dragon and used his racial power to cast darkness on the beast's head. One rounds later the party had decimated a black dragon that should have wiped them out. Oh, they also decided to adopt one of the dragons eggs to start a menagrie of monsterous pets, but that's another story.
The next event was I staged for the capital to be burning on their return - overrun by goblins, orcs, cultists, etc. I engineered this event to actually kill the NPC I had planted in the party (another NPC created from a character played by someone else in a different campaign). I had set him up to acclimate them to life as a mercenary company - rank, duties, etc. Well, now his job was over and it was time for him to go. So I seperated him from the party while they worked to rescue civilians and kill monsters. When they found him, he was doing battle with the guy I planned to be my big bad. A level 18 character built with a prestige class from the Book of Vile Darkness that would let him sprout wings and escape. He skewered the NPC then spouted wings to leave - that was when the dwarf player demanded an Initiative Roll. I thought, okay, one player dying could show this guy means Serious Business(tm), so I let everyone roll initiative. The dwarf won. He declares his action - he wants to charge forward, leap at the guy and grapple him. Umm, okay, right? Well, I decided this has to be nearly impossible so I call for a Jump roll and I set the DC way high. He makes the roll. Shit. Umm, okay make a grapple check... let me read the rules on grapples again. Okay, I got it, make your grapple check. Well, okay, you got it. And you weigh how much with all that gear and armor again? Enough to completely overload my villain, keep him from flying off AND give the party bonuses to attack him? This time it took a whole two rounds for them to kill him. I came up with a new villain to lead the cult but godamn you know... that was discouraging.
I guess the moral of this story is expect your players to do whacky shit and save your important villains until they're absolutely necessary for the story.
We were doing intros for that when I saved a game from ending before it began. I'd gotten character submissions and was running one-on-one intros when a Shining Plate Mail fighter critically missed an aquatic ghoul and fell into the murky waters of Saragoss. I made him roll out trying not to drown in an effort to give him a chance, but the dice weren't going his way. Dude got very bummed about dying right off the bat, at which point, inspiration struck. "You wash up on a beach, sword in hand, with no idea how you got there."
Apparently it was exactly the right intro; gamed with the dude online for years afterwards.
The mistake in that situation was not assuming they'd go for the bad-guy. If you assume they will you end up with, for example, a really memorable half-TPK that I'll post when I don't have to write it up on a phone keyboard.
But I actually disagree with you, Grunt, and I'll tell you why. Because even though they completely caught me off guard and I was ill-prepared to deal with their decisions, saying "Yes" created two of the most memorable moments of my D&D career. When we talk about the "good ol' days", those always make the top of the list. They're memories that are now priceless. So I learned the exact opposite from that experience - sometimes saying "Yes" is harder and can make problems but when it works it's some of the most rewarding moments of our games.
Being a good GM is not dissimilar to improv; "Yes, and..." is nearly always better than "You can't do that." Having a plan for the and-part is where experience helps, but ultimately the GM's plan is less important than whether people are having fun.
The guy's got a point. Personally I like to fall back on "Yes, and that'll get you killed by [horrible thing]." "No, but..." can also be a good answer, as it lets you re-channel enthusiasm without first quashing it. A really weird meltdown in another AIM game came out of one of those "You can, but..." situations.
The PCs were in Greyhawk, working out of a city controlled by the church of Hextor, who is Greyhawk's God of Police States, basically. I had some sort of complicated, doomed-to-failure scheme to have one good-aligned group and one evil group and, to my utter surprise, it was the former that caused the problem. Due to the word-of-IM recruitment I'd done to fill both groups we had a couple players I didn't know. The guy had rolled a pretty standard dumb-but-virtuous Paladin. I'd told him something like "You can go against the church of Hextor if you think you'll get away with it, but you should probably lie low." Some trivial event or other - I think it was a tax on imported goods, i.e. loot - caused him to Smite a gate guard in broad daylight. We'd have gone on from there except that the situation devolved into him ranting at me in the chatroom about how "medieval people made their own justice!"
That brought a quick end to that character.
Turns out the DM was just fucking with us to keep us on our toes, and we had to explain to our boss that the shotgun wound to the murdered politician was... post-mortem.
The same investigation: we had the murder weapon, which was a shiruken. We had a suspect. All we needed was some proper evidence.
My suggestion: Provoke the suspect into attacking us, and do a ballistics comparison.
It worked, but we didn't count on the suspect bringing backup. We just escpaed with our lives, but luckily we had plenty of ammunition from his shiruken gun to convict him.
Incidentally, my name is synonymous amongst various groups I've been with for "plan which is detailed and uses resources ingeniously but has a substantial flaw obvious to a five year old".
I hated that damned cat so much.
I really wanted to avoid both of those encounters, but was vetoed both times.
There are two other moments from that campaign that will live on forever for me. "Claw, claw, rend." and "I just need a 3 to get past your magic resistance..."
Aspects which I could have done better:
1) If I have powers which can alter the physical properties of clothing, I don't need to kill a guard to take his clothes.
2) If I have a magical bell that can send people to sleep, I don't need to kill a guard to get past him, even if I want his clothes (see 1).
3) In order to subtly interrogate someone, speaking the same language as them is vital if you don't want to arouse suspicion.
Players needed to rescue an operative held by the GIGN in the south of France. Concocted an elaborate plan involving pre-raid satellite surveillance, local reconaissance, swiping an delivery truck and uniform, disguising their gear in identifiable packages inside the truck, a second element - all excellent work.
PC reaches the gate, depresses the call button to contact the main house and says "oh shit, I don't speak French."
Post-morten: If you didn't see that delivery truck ending up embedded in a wall of the house (with a guard attached to the front), then you don't know how player characters think
Sneaky Guy announces that if I can hack the outside security, he can pick the lock on the window of the office we need to enter and nobody will know we were there.
I hack the outside security, Sneaky Guy gets up to the window.
GM describes the window: "It's your typical domestic window - wooden frames, double-glazed, simple lock on the inside..."
Sneaky Guy ends up jimmying the window, leaving obvious signs of our ingress and reducing our payment.
I maintain that my plan of setting up a shell company of party planners would have worked (there was a birthday party going on at the time).
In that campaign, incidentally, I had a tricked-out van which was a mobile base of operations, and I burned a mix CD of Vegas cabaret hits from my previous gig as stage manager at Half Pints, a Dwarf nightclub. Whenever we were in the van the DM would play the CD, which sped up the planning process somewhat.
Ha! I wish! In that d20 Modern campaign I mentioned DMing, in an early mission the PCs were going to raid a South American drug lord's plantation, who was using slave labor. I setup the thing to be this big 80s action movie set piece where they players do what players normally do and break down the front gate, killing a bunch of level 1 mooks as they fight their way through the building.
Instead, they spend two hours of real time doing surveillance, tracking shipments, watching guard changes, etc so that they can bluff and sneak their way past everyone and quietly get the slaves out. I planned this big, exciting, heroic battle, and they just snuck past the whole thing. I was very disappointed.
Are you sure they were actual gamers and not some sort of impostors filming a documentary?
Players needed to storm an apartment to stop some half-mutant, half men creatures from doing, well, whatever it was they were doing (been 12 years since the game, hell I can't recall).
Player A: "we need a plan - here's what I propose... (cue lengthy plan for multi-pronged entry inspired by playing too much Rainbow Six)"
Player B: "here's my counterproposal - I kick in the door!" (rolls dice, kicks in door, takes shotgun blast to (armored) chest, returns fire)
But I'll wet your appetite with this; one of the players in my long-running group is known for his catchphrase; "I see no potential downside."
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Oh yeah, they were gamers. They had captured a tank a couple of sessions before and ended up destroying most of a city police force and a few army helicopters with it during their...interrogation of a local drug runner to get the location of the plantation. Unfortunately, a failed drive check caused the tank to go down a small (60ft) cliff. The players survived easily, but there was no getting the tank out.
But the best friend of threads like this one
This was part of my 4E Dark Sun campaign. The number and specifics of the players fluctuated a bit, but the central premise was that the PCs were going to foment rebellion in Raam. This was after the whole Free City of Tyr thing, so revolution was in the air generally and Raam is one of those places where an uprising is only a few minutes away at any given time anyway.
While they were building a coalition of locals to take down the local monarch, the party ran afoul of a local drug gang composed of waste-creatures that were basically ripped off whole cloth from the Vorcha of Mass Effect. These guys were capturing elemental spirits and draining them of their essences, then turning it into a powder that they sold to the locals. Each type of spirit made a different type of drug; wind spirits made you move faster, rock spirits gave you DR, etc. The effects didn't last very long (until you next short rest in game terms) but they were substantial. And crazy addictive. The party Fighter wound up hooked on the speed boost drug, and wound up having to detox after the party took down the gang.
But before that happened, they had just taken out a huge cell of the Vorcha, while simultaneously burning down most of Raam's poor quarter, when they found one of the most precious things in the city; an underground spring guarded by a water spirit. This is where things went bad (unless you were broke and living in Raam, in which case you were already screwed AND burned so you didn't care much about this).
My wife, who was playing an elemental shaman who was very concerned with the environmental recovery of Athas really wanted to make peaceful contact with this spirit. So she takes all the drugs, which were made out of defiled spirit corpses, if you'll recall, and throws them in the spring as a peace offering.
I should say at this point that I'm a huge proponent of player agency. Especially when it screws the players.
The spirit interpreted this as an extremely hostile action, since she was hurling dead spirits that are poisonous to mortals in the long term into a fresh, untouched pool of water. At this point, the party had a chance to appease the spirit via a really quick skill challenge, which they failed miserably. Then they got to fight the spirit (which I hadn't actually stat'd out as a monster, so I used the Water Drake from the Dark Sun guide), who happened to be all hopped up on the drugs. So it was zipping from one side of the battlefield to the other with a ton of temp HP and about a billion action points. And it was out for blood.
Ironically, the only PC to die before they called a retreat was the shaman who started all this. Luckily, the party leader, a thri-kreen ranger, recovered her body before they fled. He then promptly ate her.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
We're doing a high seas Palladium adventure. We're on some dinky pos floating in the middle of the ocean. I can't recall why we were out there exactly but we end up coming in contact with a fairly large pirate vessel. Seeing as how their boat was way better than ours we decided that we wanted to commandeer it. So as we finally make our way up to the side of the ship we each begin to jump off our vessel and onto theirs (its worth mentioning here that the deck of our ship was slightly higher than theirs). Well, one of our party members was a bearman, which is exactly what it sounds like, some 600ish pound creature that can walk and talk like a human and is the next to jump. We didn't take into account that he was basically a cannonball with a mind of it's own. As soon as he hits the deck he crashes right through it and two other floors right into the ocean. The thing quickly sinks and we eventually make it back to our pos. I'm pretty sure we were stuck with that thing for the entirety of the campaign.
1st mission of the game and we are trying to get a job. things turn south with a bunch of grey clad goons breaking up the meet, but we make short work of them. a quick rundown of their vehicles means brings up a list of people, some unsavory, some prominent members of society, a couple of our runners were on it. Ok, someone wants a few of our guys dead.
through myriad events, we go down the list of people trying to find leads on this while also working on our mission from another mr. j.
We go to a night club to find an ork ganger on the list. We have our troll fist fighter go in and get the guy to come out and talk with us, since the scene isnt all that friendly to humans (me)
Turns out, he's a member of Sauron's Army (pro-goblin gang, hates the other types). Things devolve as he talks to me, our troll, and our orc hacker. None of use have charm or diplomacy skills, so we are doing this talk live with the GM on the seat of our pants. I think we are doing pretty good, mentioning to this guy that ''hey, we are trying to help you, guys in grey armor are looking for you, and we just took out 3 groups of them so far. They mean business." Troll guy doesn't think its going so well, so he slaps a tranq patch on our ganger. All of the sudden, his eyes roll up in his head and he falls to the ground. Im all like "what the fuck? dude we had this. Oh shit what's wrong with him?" then our troll in a fit of gamer logic puts a stim patch on the ganger, hoping to counter the tranq. then Im all like "stop doing things!! it doesnt work like that!" Luckily, Im a bit of a bit of a medic, so I bust out the med kit and see what's wrong. Im not the best medic, but our ganger is suffering cardiac arrest and is definitely OD'ing.
Cue panic and pandemonium as we throw the guy into my van and we drive like fucking maniacs to a detox clinic. Meanwhile our ork hacker is loosing his shit doing CPR and the Troll is trying to hold down our ganger from flailing everywhere because drugs are a helluva thing.
"I dont wanna go to prison man!"
"Hang on! Hard turn left!"
"Oh shit he dont look so good."
"Push the fucker out, they dont need to see us!"
"Yea and how long till someone walks out the front door?! Throw him in the lobby!"
Turns out our ganger was hopped up on Zen and our Troll just about stopped his heart with the tranq patch, then speedball'ed him with a stim pack of synthetic adrenaline. I don't know what those clinic types did, but they managed to save that ork's life. Everyone else was laughing at the table was laughing at us. Luckily the ganger survived and had no idea how he overdosed. He's actually rethinking his life views because a human (me) saved his life.
I asked our GM for maybe a karmic point or something because I had the right skills at the right time (medic, routes to hospitals, rigger driving), but he said the Troll started it all, so no deal... cue my grumpy face ಠ_ಠ
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