What's the stupidest thing you've had a player during a campaign...

Bard thought he could redeem an evil NPC with his dick. Player had to reroll character.

with....with his axe?

No

yes. up to that point he had played neutral good pretty straight

So, pretty much the elf invasion strategy.

>have an idea for a magical item that would go well with a PC in my campaign
>spellcaster can use it to take damage in exchange for spell slot restoration
>player uses it sparingly for a while
>cue small dungeon crawl which leads to a couple of fugitives
>player has been using magical item to misty step a fuckload while replenishing spell slots
>combat with fugitives ensue, look at player's character sheet
>5 hp before any damage from enemies done to character
>character in the middle of a grease pit
>fire bolt makes its way to grease pit
>character is unconscious in a small puddle of flames

Seriously I hadn't so much as targeted the character and her HP was already at 5. To be honest I'm considering myself more stupid for inventing the item than the player for not using it well.

>Fight a couple of undead enemies
>Routine detect magic indicates their cloaks and swords are magical
>My PC (older mercenary guy) calls pic related
>Other guy goes to put on cloak
>"Bet it's cursed."
>He tries to cast a spell
>literally blows up in his face
>suddenly a giant zombie-golem thing shows up
>He rolls well on initiative
>casts another spell
>Without taking off the cloak
>He drops to 1 or 2 hp
I don't know how he didn't get killed

This is why blood magic is forbidden, you know.

Who is the idiot: The one who invented TNT, or the one who blew his legs off with it?

Oh god, I have a whole ream of these, I'm not even sure which one is the worst.

The one that's coming most vividly to mind at the moment is

>Players have managed to buy and partially even control an old abandoned archmage's tower, which they use as their base of operations.
>They don't fully understand everything there, and every so often have to fend off a rogue golem or a magical apparatus about to explode, but there's some advantages too.
>One of them is a teleporter, which was a fairly complicated device, and they spent several sidequests just doing stuff to amass information on how to use it safely.
>In the course of their adventures, they make several enemies.
>One of them gets pissed off to the point of hiring an 150 man army to attack them in their home.
>Players decide that running is a better idea than a siege/standoff.
>And they've got this handy teleporter.
>Meanwhile, going all scorched earth to destroy or protect things that they can't carry with them.
>And they have this big power crystal, which is useful in several magical rituals.
>It's too unstable to take through the teleporter.
>They don't want to leave it behind.
>Hey, let's use it to power our teleport out!
>DM, we want to go to [location]
>Uhm, you're using a power source with a way higher charge than you need to get there, you have a very high chance of a teleporter mishap.
>Oh, it'll be fine.
>There's a mishap.
>The ensuing explosion not only kills them, but blows up half the tower.

>GM tells party that building we're at is the meeting place of the Cult that worships the monster we're chasing
>We kick down the door and slaughter everyone in there in one round using superb strategy and team work for the first time in the entire campaign
>everyone was on point
>everyone was having fun
>our barbarian finishes off the last cultist
>GM sighs and rubs his temple
>"They were going to help you find the monster"

>Players have ventured into Hell in order to
>Players have attended a slave auction in Hell, in order to purchase a slave for an Aranea so she'll let them take her shortcut to where they need to go
>Paladin is involved
>Plans on bamboozling the Aranea
>Seems like a good plan to me, but that's where the good planning ended
>Party is trying to negotiate a better deal for a particular slave the Aranea wants
>Auction guards are getting antsy
>Paladin really wants to smite the slave master
>He's got a mighty tingling in his smitin' arm
>I know this guy, he'll smite from sun-up to sun-down and his work will never be done
>but he has a particular ritual, when it comes to smitin'
>You see, he'll smite an evildoer because his god requires it
>He'll smite an evildoer because he needed smitin'
>He'll smite an evildoer just for getting in his way
>He'll even smite evildoers who were just buggin' him with their evildoin'
>but before he smites anyone, he always wants to be sure
>Surely that won't be necessary in this case, the guy's running a slave auction
>Surely he won't need to make sure, he's surrounded by slave owners and slave buyers and slave sellers in the midst of literal actual hell
>Surely he can just skip to the smiting, this time if no other
>* [PALADIN] gets ready to summon [SPECIAL MOUNT] if he has to run.
>* [PALADIN] uses detect evil, just to be ready

Now, I had to really quickly look up the detection spells to find out how much evil would be overwhelming, and what the effects should be. Obviously, he was facing down about 30-50HD of evil creatures, creatures with evil descriptors, and literal demons. Not to mention he was in literal actual Hell. And, though I wouldn't hold it against him for not knowing, he was currently within the personal space of a potent god of evil. I was well within my right to simply declare his head exploded, but wisely decided to just have him stunned.

DnD. No excuse. They just assumed they were cool enough.

Anyone have a screencap of the phylactery story?

>Fellow player complains and gets super pissy if they find magic items that aren't what their character uses or aren't what they want to wear/wield
>Doesn't seem to get that those items can be distributed amongst the rest of the party
>Takes magic items that are completely useless to their character and hoards them for no good reason (gave me a Book of Exhalted Deeds they found but refused to hand over the key that was required to open it)

This is hilarious and amazing.
I love this paladin, even if he's a giant headache at the table.

I've got this in my Through the Breach game.

>Player has a soulstone, but never uses it because "I don't wanna run out of charges"
>Player knows another character wants a soulstone. That's his goal, it's on his sheet.
>Player finds a second soulstone trying to power a dark ritual.
>Player keeps the second soulstone and never uses it.
>Same player then bitches that her character is lame despite being able to shoot fear bullets, electric bullets, and turn invisible.
>Rest of party is not amused.

I had a good laugh. Well played.

Okay are you ready for stupidity.

>Group enters a old keep that been recently inhabited by the king's men.
>They were told to wait for there appointment with the general.
>Some decide to explore the keep.
>One PC finds a door with a guard next to it
>Guard then tell the PC the box will shock you
>The PC then goes into the room and touches the box, almost kills him.
>Does it again and kills him.
>Has a cry that I'm being unfair.

Sometimes I question people logic.

>Black Crusade
>A Lictor climed on top of our parked transport ship and started tearing shit up
>We climb up to fight it
>Have a serious discussion on if we should have the pilot blast off full speed upwards and let the fall kill it
>While almost the entire party was on top of the ship

We ended up not doing it, not out of self preservation, but because we thought it would still be able to hang on

Party is on a ship in the middle of the sea

They are all lv 1

Storm, Ship get attacked by a Giant Squid.

Party attacks the Squid tentacles, saving sailors, being heroes.

Wizard decides to jump from the ship into the Squid's beak with a knife in his mouth telling

"Don't worry, We are just level 1, DM-user would never put us aganist something that we can't kill"

Guess what happened.

Nat 20 and the squid dies horrifcly, followed by the clapping of sailors and lamenting of women?

One of my Shadowrun players once used the Physical Adept power that allows you to use any small object as a throwing weapon.

Using the flask containing a biological terror weapon that was the primary target of their run.

In an airport.

>Shadowrun players
You know, I started laughing when I saw those two words together in this thread. Shadowrun has the dumbest, most disastrous and hilarious fuckups of any game.

Shit like "Oh, shit we forgot to develop an exit strategy" is so par for the course it doesn't even surprise me anymore.

jesus christ

how did that turn out

Failed the jump, to give him a chance decided that he landed on the squid head, near one eye.

The Wizard tried another jump to get into the mouth insted of stabbing the eye.

The Fighter raged so hard that he had to leave the table for a minute or two.

I think we know exactly how it turned out.

Luckily for them, it was not a complete weapon - the idea I had was that the weapon was in two parts, the vector and the payload. So the stuff the physad broke all over the floor next to a ventilator shaft was actually just really infectious and not particularly lethal.

But then someone pointed out that a small percentage of everyone who got it would have bad reactions even without the payload.

So I sat down, looked up some epidemiology online, and eventually calculated that my PCs managed to wipe out around 2% of the world's population over the next 12 months.

I actually ended that portion of the campaign there. The sammy committed ritual suicide, the physad was hunted down by the people who gave them the mission (who were actually trying to STOP a bio-terror attack in the first place), the rigger went into hiding in a shack in the middle of nowhere, and the mage was the only PC who went on to the next section of the campaign as the player hadn't been at that session and therefore avoided direct blame, although her reputation took a long time to recover.

(She later wound up in a Brainscan/Arcology storyline. Just could not catch a break, that mage.)

>2% of the world population

oh lord my fucking sides

Why would the cultists who worship the monsters help them find the monsters?

This one's less "ridiculously stupid" and more "hilarious consequences"...

>TORG group
>In Core Earth
>All from non-Core Earth locations
>Walking to the next location they need to find
>Motorway between them and location
>Some of them have seen cars but not so many and travelling so fast
>Party can't figure out how to cross
>Aylish Barbarian decides to intimidate the traffic
Barbarian:"I SHALL FLEX AT THE METAL BEASTS AND THEY SHALL KNOW FEAR!"
>Okey dokey bro
>Uses like 4 cards and gets a ridiculous dice roll

Me: "Er... Um."

>Decide that the obvious reaction to a very successful flexing would be the complete distraction of the drivers
>Massive pile-up, crosses into both lanes
>Dozens, maybe hundreds dead
Barbarian: "HA! Witness my might! Now we cross as we wish!"
>PCs cross, carry on to where they're going

Something similar happened to me
>looking for lost miner
>found demon cult
>see four cultists
>"do we get one alive to gather information?"
>"nah kill them the monster will show itself eventually"
>this happens constantly throughout the campaign
>eventually DM tells us the campaign would have ended a long time ago if we just fucking stopped to talk to people instead of beating the shit out of them
>generally shrug because we were having too much fun

From tonight's Pathfinder game...
>One player plays a gunslinger
>Is braggy about how amazing his character is, how edge and cool he is, etc.
>Party is beset upon by Wyverns.
>Ranger and Barb lock down one and set up a defensive line.
>That leaves the alpha right next to gunslinger and rogue.
>Ranger informs them that they should work their way to the defensive line.
>Rogue informs Gunslinger she will back him up and help the retreat.
>Rogue flanks, and uses spring attack to stay the hell away from this thing, as they made lore checks to know about Wyvern poison and how nasty it can be.
>Rogue is setting up escape routes over and over.
>Slinger stands right next to the thing unloading into it with dual pistols.
>Poisoned, full round attacked twice, absolutely destroyed.
>Player is confused about why he died.

Same pathfinder game, different session.
>Paladin has a sweet mount. (Pegasus)
>Barb decides he wants one too.
>Convinces Assassin to join him on a mount capture mission.
>Doesn't ask anyone else to help.
>They go off alone.
>Find a group of Dire Hyenas.
>Barb: "These will be perfect!"
>Barbs plan is for Assassin to jump the pack, and use Death Attack on one. Then Barb will rush in to tank the remaining three. Bad plan, but okaysurefine.
>Death Attack occurs, insta kills one. Woohoo.
>Combat starts, inits rolled, Assassin goes first, Barb goes last.
>Assassin attack another Hyena.
>Hyena's rip Assassin to pieces in one round.
>Barb finally gets into the fight, kills 2, subdues the final.
>Assassin is fucking dead.
>Barb manages to capture final Hyena and leaves.

This is why villains explain their plot before attacking..

>Box will shock you

It's a literal skinner box! A SKINNER BOX!
That player has less than the intelligence of a domestic animal!

>Fight gigantic spider toughie
>right beside it so I get the clever idea of getting behind it because I mean come on, a spider can kick backwards and its preocipied with rest of party
>Dm is having none of my shit and the spider sits on me.
>Deals like 6d8 damage and I die

While I agree it was stupid of me to not just running away I feel justified because when the fuck does a spider sit down?

>GM can't roll with the story
Ftfy

Meh...I could see it if the spider was rearing back for a grapple or something and you were behind it at the wrong time.
But spiders are ambush predators. Sucker would have run from a group of adventurers anyway...not let itself get surrounded.

I had a button that was labeled as "death button", with a plaque that reads "if you press this button, you and your companions will be instantly killed and your souls will be eaten by demons".

They argued for 40 minutes and finally pressed it.

Did they die?

I don't think I've ever seen a spider sit. That seems absurd.

Your GM should have just had it throw back some of those hair thingies like tarantulas do so that you were blinded.

To be fair, the aura must belong to a single a-lot-of-HD-outsider to be overwhelming. But still great ruling.

Is it just me, or are about 90% of these stories horribly one-sided "God, players are so dumb, why do they do such stupid things?" tales that leave out the horrible miscommunications and poor establishing of important detail from the GM?

GMs are often just as much at fault in these stories. They just "gloss over" the "trivial" details like explaining A or B in such a bad way that players think it to be X or Y instead.

And let us not even get into those GMs who drone out walls of text/speech with no enthusiasm whatsoever and expect the players to pick up one the one "super-important" detail buried between scene-setting cruft.

They did and their souls were eaten by demons. One of them had a literal fit about me being unfair and quit the campaign. He asks if he can return now.

>he found a story about him in the thread
>laughingelf.manuscript

Was the NPC male or female? ...or, knowing that this is a PC we're talking about, a stone golem or something?

>new campaign with some new players
>cleric makes his way to the slums alone
>a little girl leads him to a sick woman
>he wants to help
>I say, "Hey Cleric, you can roll a wisdom medicine check to see if you can actually help her."
>"I want to use a spell though. "
>doesn't have a spell that cures disease
>"just roll medicine"
>"yeah but I use healing word."
>"that restores Hitpoints and doesn't say it heals illness."
>cleric rolls a STR check to knock her out to zero hit points.
>she is knocked out
>girl runs away to get guards
>he casts healing Ward to restore her hitpoints
> is she healed now?
>no but you're getting arrested by the town guards.

Here is a good example of a miscommunication.

I am willing to bet that the GM miscommunicated this line:
>"that restores Hitpoints and doesn't say it heals illness."

In such a way that it came across to the player as "That restores people who are low on hit points, but it does not heal illnesses on its own."

This is why the player might have wanted to reduce the HP of the NPC before using Healing Word.

Besides:
>cleric rolls a STR check to knock her out to zero hit points.
This would have been an attack, not a Strength check.

Should have used his Dagger of Healing instead.

Let's be honest - would it be in any way as good a story if it was explained, calmly and rationally, the faults and errors on each side and the misinterpretations and miscommunications they suffered?

Bbbbut hitpoints are the entire RPG formulation for health, right?

Seriously some people

Depending on how new the PCs are, what hitpoints represent is a game mechanic, not a part of the story. I don't think its unfair to suggest that at least in more advanced groups, the burden to understand the relationship between gameplay mechanics and the universe is on the players, not the GM.

>Running Pathfinder campaign.
>PC's discover a Lich sealed in an underground magic prison, and have been asked to reset the wards to make sure he stays there.
>PC's approach his prison cell, deep underground.
>Large stone doors covered in warning that read 'do not open' in a variety of different languages.
>Magus PC gets to work setting the wards.
>Cavalier says "I open the door".
>A few seconds of incredulity pass.
>I carry on and detail what happens.
>Doors open, magic wards are disrupted fully, Lich escapes, campaign has new BBEG
Worked out well in the end. Most successful campaign I've ever run.

What...what he thought would happen?

Or the player could have bothered to read what his character's power did before trying to use it. Like a real person.

>What's the stupidest thing you've had a player say during a campaign?

The four buddies I used to play with in Highschool only ever had the most basic understanding of the game and how their characters functioned.
After years of their retarded shit all four of them stated:
>Why should we have to buy or even read the PHB? You're the DM. You should know how my character plays!

Regardless of what could have been miscommunicated, the DM communicated firstly that he should roll a Medicine check. There's no way to misinterpret that. That request was just ignored.

It really isn't the DM's fault he chose to ignore the DM's request. And opted to punch a sick lady out in order to try restoring her Hitpoints.

Wizard turned his familiar into a dragon. Duplicated his familiar. Turned the monk into a dragon.

It was a shitstorm and the wizard's turns were like 15-20 minutes each.

>PCs on the run from the law
>PCs all get disguises to sneak out of the city
>Except one
>Lone PC flips his collar and messes up his hair
>The obvious happens

The guards let him go because he was too cool?

>GMing Pathfinder
>tell players that third-party content is allowed and encouraged
>specifically recommend Path of War
>they don't even look at it
>play fighter, rogue and monk instead

Okay?

That's the player's choice. Especially if they're new to Pathfinder, they might not want to use third-party content, or maybe they just prefer the standard classes.

Nooo you missed the stupid part of the story:
>GMing Pathfinder

>Players sneak into BBG's mansion
>Decide to steal everything that isn't nailed down
>Can't lift the grand piano
>Rest in the house in order to prepare spells for transporting more goods
>Rest in the BBG's bed because its "the most comfortable"
>BBG gets home

Female but cursed to be insatiably hungry. Bard managed to keep a relationship going with her till she got hungry and ate him, after which he got incorporated into her, body and soul in a nightmarish eternal suffering.

My Dark Heresy group is so stupid it drove me to drinking.

Stories, zoggit, we need s t o r i e s

That's very, very odd. Is it part of your Magical Realm?

>Players set out in the forest to find a friend
>Everything's going fine and dandy
>Get to the forest, see one of the pale zombie shitters in our campaign outside for some reason
>Kill it, continue in the forest
>Come upon a hole with possessed armor, and two of those zombie shitters
>Two of the Dwarves want to just stab it with their pikes for exp
>Group carries on
>Runs into another one of the armors, and more zombies.
>Group kills all of the zombies, monk pushes the other armor in the hole while dwarf#1 was stabbing the shit out of it.
>Now the hole has two armors
>Both dwarves want to keep poking the armors for exp.
>Group carries on instead
>Soon find missing friend
>With two other possessed armors
>Turned out he was possessed or something, DM never said
>Fight for a few hours, eventually kill all of them
>Its now night time
>Those pale zombie fuckers are wandering the overworld now
>ohshit.jpeg
>Group books it for the wagon, and starts driving
>dwarf#1 says to light the forest on fire
>ranger with 40-something flasks of oil says no
>keep going
>pale fuckers everywhere
>literally pass hundreds of them
>eventually make it to some temple
>completely surrounded by the pale fucks aside from the temple
>Group goes in the temple
>Dwarf#1 says to light the door on fire so they can't follow us
>Again, everyone passes it off as if it were nothing
>Go down into the temple
>Find another old friend's mangled corpse pinned up on the wall
>Group turns on itself
>Everyone's about to kill eachother
>Hear the sound of metal clinking from the entrance
>Those two armors from the hole are back
>With hundreds of pale fuckers
>Whole group is injured
>Only options now are fight to the death, or walk into their trap.

>We should have listened to the dwarves.

Wow.

I hope you bastards get tpk'd. The lost dude also happens to be the Ranger's husbando who wandered into the forests to die. Anything bad that happens to you folks is on you now.

t. a player in the same campaign

But... why?

Fuck you, Heijndrick
Thx for posting in the discord, though.

Making the characters responsible for their goal is the best! They were all in on it, they all know what happened, they made the mess and now they have to fix it!

I wonder if this would ever work with arcane PCs accidentally creating The Blob.

That place is a death-trap and the gm let you know it.
That ranger deserves it for splashing acid in my dude's face anyways.

I just have to ask...
since the wizard was doing something particularly stupid, would he have properly reached the beak on a successful jump check and what would have been the results of a botched check?

>GMing PF
>Raiding a thieve's guild hideout because they are terrorists
>Find a crate of "bombs" that have been designed to explode on contact with fire and nothing else
>Ask if the alchemist wants to check em
>"Nah, too much trouble"
>Ok then
>They come across the big fight with the local leader and his goonies inside a giant room planning their evil terrorist plans
>The players think of the smart idea of lighting the fuses (which there are none) of the bombs and shove a knocked out guard with em into the room for irony's sake
>Ask them several times if they want to inspect the bombs, including outright saying that there are no fuses
>"we seen timed bombs without fuses" and "Nah, takes too long" the adrenaline hungry bastards
>Now with a knocked out guy wearing the, as we dubbed it, "Traditional Afghan Funeral Vest" they rush in and light the fuses
>TPK
>I push a little card i had made about the bombs, including a rather well written part on how they work and their purposes
>Highlighting the "DC 15 to discover the trigger of the bombs"
>Then i pointed out how a several times asked if they wanted to check the bombs in greater detail
>Still my fault that i didn't outright tell them this when they found because their alchemist is just that good at alchemy that he should know what they are
>At level 2

Yeap, my fault clearly.

>Playing good old AD&D
>Group of complete newbies with me as GM
>They are currently level 1 and do ghting a bunch of lizardmen.
>They kill the lizardmen and begin to try to loot for the silver pendants they found on earlier lizardmen.
>A swarm of 2-3ft long lizards are obviously seen coming for the players
>The fighter decides to keep trying to grab the necklace
>Fails a Roll-under-DEX check to grab the necklace
>Gets bit by a lizard
>Tries to hit the lizard with a sword
>Fails.
>Gets killed by the lizard

This is just PF players in general though. Its DnD, but EVEN MORE casual.

We stopped a game for nearly twenty minutes while three of the four players started a conversation about chicken breeds and which ones were available at the market. Eventually, after many Google image searches and behavioral portfolios on different breeds, they decided to buy a few silkies for eggs. Pic related

I like your players.

Silkies are so goddamn adorable. I've owned two, one white one and one black one. They can't fly for shit but their feathers are soft and fluffy.

Silkies are so fucking majestic.

And also was the bbeg actually three bears, each larger than the other?

Why. Why would you argue for TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES over something so forgettable and minor as CHICKEN BREEDS in a MAKE BELIEVE GAME.

Those are fucking chickens? Okay, I have now found the steed that my eccentric spellslinger will ride!

the Silken Chocobo?

They literally had their character randomly commit suicide because they wanted to play a different class.

Dude you're a shit GM.