Instead of bashing our players, give examples of when your players surprised you in a good way.
I for one just had my players completely trump my session in a way I didn't see coming, but really should have, namely shrinking a party member and sneaking them into a jail cell to start a slave uprising.
My favorite thing is coming up with clever plans in the back pocket.
My group came up with an awesome combo with the Stinking Cloud spell in 5e D&D and then the Fighter using Pushing Attack to keep crowds of enemies on lockdown while other ones are focused down.
We also took out a bbeg really early in a campaign when our monk drop-kicked him out of a tower and the rest of the group ganked his ass.
ever seen a wizard speed himself up and then use occult BS to obliterate frogs till he reached level 3? Yeah, that was fun. Entire civilization had to run away in terror due to him.
God I hate DM-ing.
Sounds like a player took you for a ride.
They needed to get by a feral animal and the ranger/druid didn't want the party to kill it.
I was planning on them feeding it and it would actually kind of lead them on the safe path through the next dungeon room.
Instead they made some minor illusions of rabbits and animal noises and got it to run after them out of the dungeon.
>minor illusions
Best fucking cantrip
>playing with sister and her bf
>fighting evil half spider half human
>spider hybrid has a orc follower
>instead of killing the orc the charisma check to convinse him to join them and the will spare his life
>they now have and orc friend whom they have bonded with in their adventures
Sci-Fi campaign. Players get hired by the rulers of one world to track down one of their members who is currently on a hunting trip on a different planet, because the need him back urgently to deal with a crisis. FTL comms in the setting were not portable enough for him to stay in contact.
Players land near his shuttle. They locate him because he has an implanted tracking chip, and find him about a days travel away. My plan was for them to go track him down.
Instead they decide to wait for him, because they know he will be coming back to his shuttle. Skipping the dangers of the forest that they weren't prepared for.
>Game is SCP-style organization in a fantasy universe
>Characters are a politic detective who has to deal with magic in an urban setting, a super-Scientist with a paleofuture bend, an electronics store worker who can manipulate time, and a black dude whose a self-appointed "Professor of the Occult"
>PCs run into a ghost the DM hadn't intended for us to be able to interact with, because he was from a dead culture and his language was unknown. Typical magic to commune with the dead didn't translate.
>Magic Negro's did, he ends up convincing the highly religious ghost to give away half the plot immediately.
One time a buddy of my ran a game of Pathfinder where we had to track through the tundra during a blizzard. He thought he weren't supplied for the journey, but we went anyway.
>his face when my Psion built us foxholes every night with psionic digging effects and we managed to make it through
Plan B if this didn't work was to dig down so deep we fell into the Underdark and just to make the rest of the trip on foot but that wasn't necessary.