Moments in games where the party was stumped by something incredibly simple

Did you not read that? All they had to do was turn a crank.

But there was literally nothing in that scenario that would've suggested lowering the bucket with the crank would magically open a secret door. There's no logical progression there.

>dungeon
>farting on a potted plant opens the ceiling
>mention potted plant repeatedly (be dm) but party can't figure it out
>they wander off and get eaten by the floor later

6 rounds is barely a minute in D&D 5e, so I really hope you weren't playing that when you did this to your players and was playing a system where each round was at least like 5 minutes.

Isn't 'playing with shit until the door opens' a normal way to solve puzzles in these kind of games?

Why do evil wizards and goblin kings always build castles with retarded switch puzzles anyway?

>Running the first session in a game where every player takes turns running a session
>Discuss our characters beforehand
>Tell everyone my character is a shape shifting assassin, go over it in detail
>Session begins, party lands on an outlaw market looking for an assassin killing spies of the main enemy faction
>Tell players not to worry about finding them, just explore the place and have fun
>Players start trying to track down the assassin
>Puzzled over who it could be, or where
>Over the days more spies keep dying, party gets confused about who is doing it
>Tell the main investigating player that the first spy to die dropped off the corpse of the third in the marketplace
>They get more baffled
>They start ignoring literally everything else going on in the setting to find the assassin
>One of them finally puts it together, near the end of the session, that the assassin is a shape shifter
>By the time they put it together and everything we ran out of time for the session

It wasn't even a mystery, and it was probably the most frustrating session I ever ran.

This 100%

>Isn't 'playing with shit until the door opens' a normal way to solve puzzles in these kind of games?
This isn't a video game where you can mash 'interact' with everything in a room till something happens.

Though I don't know why they didn't use the bucket to get the water.

>Trying to witch hunt

Fuck off, we're having a nice thread.

OP pulling some rule breaking bullshit on the players isn't fun and if he doesn't realize his mistake now he'll probably do it more often in the future except in a way that makes it unfun for his players.

>PCs in town
>big reward for stopping the beastman raids
>talk all kinds of shit about how they're going to kill beastmen and bring back their heads

>walk like six in-game hours tracking down the dungeon
>see entrance to dungeon
>send familiars to investigate
>they report 4 kobolds standing by the entrance
>The party consists of six combatants who all outclass the kobolds in every way
>Have previously killed kobolds in droves without taking a single point of damage

>players freak out
>oh god what if there's more in there
>what if one of them runs and tells other kobolds
>they'll bring 20 kobolds down on our heads!
>we can't go into this dungeon it's too dangerous!
>they turn back
>walk all the way back to town, never having set foot in the dungeon
>complain OOC the dungeon is too hard and they don't know what to do

I guess I should have interrupted their planning to tell them that I wasn't about to drop that many monsters on them in room 1. But even if their nightmare scenario came true, they could probably have taken those 20 kobolds. But if they had so much as stepped foot in the first dungeon room without waving their weapons at them, one of the kobolds would probably have mistaken them for bandits and just let them in.

>Continuing to Witch Hunt
Fuck off.

What the fuck

If you're going to play you need to play by the rules. Doing some BS stuff that fucks over the players is bad GMing.

Fuck off Witch Hunter. Last (you) I'm giving you.

I was the player in one of these

>fighting some monsters in a dark jungle
>described as "black, slimey tentacle masses"
>party is entirely unable to damage them
>struggle for ~half an hour
>DM: "THEY'RE SHADOW MONSTERS, CUT THE TREE CANOPY OPEN OR USE YOUR TORCHES OR SOMETHING"

I had a game completely collapse because a GM thought it would be a good idea to make the a dungeon just increasingly difficult puzzles.
and not like find this key or figure out the riddle of the monkey, like the block moving puzzles from the legend of zelda and if we tried to Jerry rig them or break them there was always something to stop us, so the game ended with the party approaching our third dungeon and going "Welp looks like the world is doomed." and half the party just leaving.

>defeat this door for 6 rounds.
>6 rounds.
>A round in D&D is 6s
>36s
Holy hell are those bandits organised and fast.

How do you include block puzzles in a tabletop game? Do you just roll strength checks over and over?

He made maps on paper and we had to move our pieces one space each turn. Except on the "ice level" then they slid.

> party leaves the city en route to adventure
> NPC secretly watches them leave
> I rule that the party should get a Spot check on him
> one guy rolls high enough
> I cough up that he thought he saw someone watching him from the gatehouse.
> he turns the entire fucking party around and searches all over the city,
> for 60 minutes of real time,
> while I ad lib irrelevant nonsense for an entire hour trying to dissuade him,
> all for this minor functionary NPC
> who was just making sure the party actually left town to go on the quest!

In 1e and 2e a round lasted 60 seconds.

That's your own fault, you could have simply said "One of the villagers was keeping tabs on you as you exited the town, they're probably just making sure you keep your word."
If you say
"A mysterious figure was lurking in the shadows watching you leave the town."
of coarse there gonna go check it.

>What the fuck
I've been asking myself that question for about 2-3 weeks since that session.

Yeah, I've had stuff like this happen because of just one, little, "flesh-out" detail. If they get off track I usually just let them beat a suspicious person or find a note that signals an end to the "teaser" I just had to make up.

That's still 6 minutes. Pretty damn quick response. I'd like these bandits to be the police force.

You should've let them find them man. Sometimes you gotta give the party what they want for the sake of the game.

>shadows are slimy

Yeah I think if someone was coming to kill you, you would get out ASAP

Even something that spends six minutes knocking down a door?

My party was in a dungeon were, due to cultists, things were getting fucky.
He find a room at the bottom of a set of stairs, completely empty except for a puddle and a slow drip of water. In our defense the water was dripping UP.
We spend over half an hour in real time marveling over this.

They had crossbows

crossbows arent good for knocking down doors

>Spend six minutes shooting bolts at a door until it eventually buckles and collapses
Please at least tell me the door was locked.

I don't know about you, but if someone just shot at me and was in the process of breaking down my door, I would bail and probably grab my most important shit on my way out.

I don't know how inept these guys are for taking so long to open the door, but I'm not waiting to find out.

>>They start firing from the hallway
>>Look down at the battle
>>Suddenly realized that not one of them had stepped foot into the room
>>Bandit gets up, goes over, and locks the door
also I'm not the DM, so I assume they werent shooting at it, just being weak

I have one.

>running futuristic campaign in 3.5
>one player has taken hacking skills
>I throw an obstacle at her as a tutorial
>series of holes in the ground, something moving around inside, and a large barrier around her, the druid, and the druid's wolf
>wolf sniffs and finds it's not an animal, smells like metal but that's all she knows
>druid is pretty much useless here
>rogue with hacking skill decides to block holes to lure thing out instead of trying to interface with it, as I've already instructed she can during the same day IRL
>takes 2 IRL hours to move on, they draw it out and she FINALLY interfaces with it after she has it in her hands and sees it's a drone

This same rogue tried to hack the security system on the back door of a police station without checking for cameras when I'd already established cameras were everywhere in the city, and got arrested for it, then later died to driders. Good riddance.

... I felt kind of bad about the driders. I wasn't intentionally trying to kill her, just made the encounter moderately difficult. The other player escaped.

Oh god, reminds me of my party

>Party is level 2
>Have been previously warned I run sandbox games and am not above throwing high level critters out there in front of them, and sometimes running will be necessary
>Long story short, they start to clear out a goblin cave, having thrown out half of the goblin carcasses into the woods
>This eventually attracts an owlbear, something that could absolutely one-shot all of them
>One of them sees the owlbear, ignores it, goes back into cave
>They FINALLY clear out the cave, but the leader has run away
>They go back to the entrance
>blood trail leading into side cave
>Rightly guess this is the owlbear

>For some reason, decide that the only way to get eyes on this thing is to not peek around the corner, but to toss a fucking torch into the cave and look at the shadows
>This wakes UP the owlbear who had been snoozing (so they could run out)
>The owl bear starts swatting at the torch, back turned (so they could run out)
>Owl bear will also need to eat eventually (so they could run out)
>Players decide that apparently none of these options are worth considering, charged the goddamn thing
>Owl bear proceeds to, one-by-one, one-shot all of them. It even crits and insta-kills one of them
>Was literally one attack routine away from a TPK until one of them used their brain to run across a small bridge that collapsed under the Owl bear weight, allowing just one more round to put the damn thing down

Players are mentally ill. The entire lot of them.

Put something in the microwave for thirty six seconds. Then walk across the room to close a door.

>needing more than a minute
your bandits don't plan for their camp/bastion being found? bandit bug out bag when

To be honest, the fire plan was pretty inventive if nothing else.

>Fuck you Witch Hunter
what the hell did Vin Diesel ever do to you? Be nice to Mr. Diesel, he is a good person.

That happened to me about six, seven years ago in a 3E/4E game.

Bad GMing on proud display ITT

>My players are total morons because they don't read my mind!

Congratulations, you have a complete and correct understanding of the situation and the world because you are inventing it. The players don't have this; all they have to go on is the words that come out of your mouth. If their ideas or their understanding of the situation conflict with yours, yours obviously takes precedence every time. What looks to you like a totally obvious solution, or a completely moronic idea, or whatever, is rarely so clear to them.

My players are so absolutely terrified of fucking levers after a SINGULAR incident that instead of pulling a lever to open the blast-door right next t oit they spent three irl hours trying to circumvent it in some way. they let the mage over-channel to attempt casting a spell twice his mastery level and blow it down, almost killing the whole party in the process when he predictably lost control. All the lever did was open the door. This was after circumventing lots of smaller and equally harmless lever door combinations and elevators and whatnot through a series of portable ladder shenanigans using holes in the floors/cielings- originally meant to serve as obstacles. A single session dungeon ended up taking four because of this.

>Players pull lever, get boned.
>Haha! I guess you should have been more careful and less trusting.
>... Guys, why are you wasting time being careful and paranoid?

They only got boned earlier because they tried to skip half of the "puzzle". That "puzzle" being to do with a pressure chamber and a door, and letting the pressure off before pulling the lever to open said door. If the mechanic hadn't flubbed his apraisal check for the control pannel by an enormous amount it wouldn't have happened either, even still they had a 50/50 shot to fuck with the valve first instead. I even told them all this after the fact in the hopes of avoiding such paranoia. None of the other levers were on a bigass control pannel, had a valve, or interface with giant multi-stage doors labeled with obvious pictographs for STEAM and / or FIRE (which they did not even need an apraisal check for).

The consequence was some morale damage and some mostly cosmetic damage on said mechanic, and from there on they all went full-retard DONT EVER TOUCH ANY DEVICES EVER mode for the rest of the dungeon. This was far less dangerous than over-channeling a spell that the mage already could barely cast without blowing himself up.

So while I can see where you are coming from and they were in fact acting paranoid, I maintain they were also dumb. They didn't even have the good sense to stand back from the battle mage when he went to cast the spell either.

Did any of your players have a clue that the owlbear was a bunch of levels stronger than them?

Did you let them roll on some relevant Knowledge skill, and, even if they failed, dropped hints that this thing looked big and freaking scary?

>Puzzle relies entirely on succeeding a skill check for the players to have the vaguest hint at what they need to do

Masterful design right there.

>the vaguest hint at what they need to do
>its a fucking lever and a valve

Okay now you're just being silly.

>its a fucking lever and a valve

So they have two choices:

>Pull the lever
>Turn the valve

Both of which are equally likely to be the right answer since they don't know what either does.

For all they knew, the markings for FIRE and STEAM meant that if they turned the valve, the room they were in was going to be flooded with deadly steam.

They already knew better than that, the boilerworks itself wasn't really a big mystery to begin with, they knew what they were dealing with on the other side of the door because it was obviously similar to similar devices in the city and had recognizable warnings on it. The whole problem was with the control panel being manual instead of magical. For what its worth the manual they had already found in another room would have told them how it worked via pictograph if they had opened the damn thing and not went OH COOL ANCIENT LITERATURE, PUT IT IN THE STEEL TIN SO IT MAKES IT OUT OF THE RUINS NICE AND SAFE. Or if the mechanic had actually put her points where they belonged and not tried so hard to be a jack of all trades she could have "taken 10" on the check so to speak (not exactly its a homebrew, but similar auto-success threshold) and gotten it too. Do I need to go grab my old laptop and dredge up my campaign notes for you?

Nah, all those previous hints actually sound reasonable enough.

Our party did a similar thing. Started in a dungeon under a typical fantasy setting, walked into a portal to get out of said dungeon, ended up in !arabia.

Ended up with us destroying the continent via a lich and a shit tonne of ghosts

>At a hidden door to the keep to the King of Dragons.
>It's locked
>Written in Draconic is 'Speak friend, and enter.'
>Literally lifted straight from Lord of the Rings.
>Party spends forty minutes yelling Friend at the door in all the elven dialects.
>Got fed up and had one of the King's thralls open the door for them, demanding to know what the fuck they were trying to do screaming in elvish like that.

Mabe they prefer to no bring /d/ into the game?

can people really be this stupid?

Through a party against a Chain Devil that had been bound to guard a dungeon by the wizard who had created it. I figured at least one person in the party would have either an alchemical silver weapon (to get around its Regeneration/silver) or a means to banish it, but just in case they didn't, I hedged my bets. I had three doors blocking the room it was in, one of iron, the second of steel, and the last of solid silver. I figured someone would get the hint that to the Kyton, silver was the most dangerous of the three, and prompt the party strongman to rip it off the hinges and bludgeon it. If all else failed, I would have just let them hold its head under water until it drowned.

Didn't want them to get stuck there, you see.

Despite my sincere best efforts to the contrary, they totally got stuck there. Spent two hours killing that thing, over and over, until they finally impaled it on a bunch of iron rods and then bent them around its limbs in such a way that it had no leverage to move and make strength checks to escape.

>Bandit gets up, goes over, and locks the door
This might work in the turn-by-turn artificiality of an RPG, but in real life, it's obviously very risky (and probably entirely impractical) to run towards the doorway from which people are shooting and try to shut it in their faces. For that reason (and the fact that it would ruin immersion), it's not something I would've done as GM. Hell, it's probably not something I would've let the players get away with doing either, but then I've never been much of a "follow the rules" kind of guy.

Brutal...

Only two party members in tge campaign so far: wizard and bard. They're in an alcove in a cave. They can look down to see a dark pit. There's a path leading down so they don't have to climb.
>wizard casts some light on a rock and drops it down.
>You hear a loud screeching. All you see down there but some large fungus.
>Wizard cast light on another rock to throw down (which ends the light on the previous).
>shrieking stops
>throw down new glowing rock.
>shrieking starts.
>"There's something hostile down there ;better be careful."
>Cancels previous light to make another near him so he can still see around him.
>shrieking stops
>casts firebolt into the pit
>shrieking starts but nothing in particular got hit.
>More firebolts.
>Eventually they wearily walk down.
>Bard uses racial darkvision (was out of range before) to navigate down below without light.
>walk through the room without any problems.
>Later, they asked what the screaming as all about.
It was just some shrieking mushrooms the whole time, bred to be an alarm system for the currently absent orcs deeper in the cave. They spent so much time trying figure out where some imaginary predator was hiding. Every time they asked, I told them there's nothing in the room but mushrooms... But they kept being cautious.

I kid you not, a door, with a bowl and a couple of coins in it. Nothing else. Just a magical toll. I have no idea if the players knew or not. They might have just been doing their absolute best to avoid giving up any gold. But they spent an hour on that door.

I was on the player side of this just the other night, our DM put us up against a cult of jesters that partied endlessly and revered a party god (in a more specific way, the Lord of Fun and Deception)

>we get into the party at the palace
>there's guards with lances made of cardboard with sequints and beads glued on them
>there's an apparent "human sacrifice for fun" going down in an arena-like area of the palace
>the gates open up
>in walks something reminiscent of a chinese parade dragon, full with paper back and everything
>our sorcerer lights it on fire and reveals a horrible monster behind it that looks like a centipede of human legs
>we proceed to have a fight with the thing and nothing seems to work
>after what felt like an hour, sorcerer decides to try something different and attack him with an illusory sword that finally damages it
>i want my character to realize what's going on since the sorcerer couldn't tell the rest of the party and shove a cardboard lance into it, but i fail the necessary check
>next round, sorcerer gets to reveal the strategy
>dwarf and I pretend to cast fireball
>it's dead in two turns
>GM: "I kinda balanced him against cardboard weapons so this is a surprise to me"

i felt a little bad afterwards
it was fun though

That is a really cool idea.

it was, i honestly felt bad that we didn't caught it earlier and managed to kill it in two turns because it's such an interesting concept

plus fighting with cardboard weapons would've been fun

>DM for a single player
>Introduce beloved noble son who is a prince charming in training competing for the apprenticeship the player wants
>of course he has a knight as a bodyguard
>bodyguard corners the PC one afternoon and says something along the lines of "I think it'd be best you give up now before you get hurt."
>he's following orders from the noble to undermine the competition unbeknownst to the noble son who is legitimately a nice guy even if he is a bit spoiled
>PC stands his ground and flat out refuses to be shaken by this man who is at least three times his size due to playing a tiny race
>"Cute, I'll give you the count of three to run before I draw my sword."
>tell my player that the pauses in-between the countdown is enough time to size him up via making 3 different checks
>rolls a decent arcana check, tell him that the knight has a magic weapon and boots
>rolls a decent charisma check to convince the knight to let bygones be bygones
>rolls a decent perception check to see that they're vastly superior
>despite the knight being statted like an angel the low leveled PC is able to last 3 rounds because I don't bother with saving throws and condition nor multiple attacks
>the PC gets one attack in but the knight almost laughs at the attempt
>knight knocks out PC and they wake up chained to a wall where other candidates for the apprenticeship
>formerly naive whimsical character now acts like they took rage viagra due to their hate boner for the noble's son never being detereed
>say "...Okay... We'll come back to this tomorrow."
>next day we start to play and he changes his mind and says he doesn't feel like it anymore
>he lets the campaign die because he's too upset he got taken prisoner by a clear antagonist

>49512893
>Party kills assassin after they attempt to kill them, finds "bring them back alive" note in their cloak
>assassin
>attempt to kill them
>"bring them back alive"
either they were not doing a good job or you fucked up

kek

>Turn 1 move pick up gold
>Turn 2 full turn sprint to leader
>Turn 3 talk to leader and spread the word
>Turn 4 full turn sprint to escape tunnel
>2 more turns of full sprint down tunnel
>Players unlock door

You'd be shocked what you can accomplish in 6 turns. Now fuck off and die.

You couldn't figure out the puzzle and you made it, you impossible tool.

>Through buggery get possessed by a demon
>Now have to continue acting as if i wasn't possessed while trying to fuck over the party
>"Hey, i don't think we should go there" I say when there's a room that could save me and is obviously where we should be heading
>During combat i try to fuck up all the time with poor tactics
>Even once i tried to ATTACK MY PARTY
>Go into traps on purpose or trigger them on my party on purpose
>Act completely out of character (Usually friendly joker type now calling the party racist terms, quote stuff I shouldn't know and use dialect one can recognize as demon language)
>Constantly avoid holy looking things, even hissing at them
>Jerking unnaturally when i get proper control of the character back and even start writing HELP with the character's own blood on a wall with one hand while the rest of the body is stabbing the arm with an arrow to stop it
>Nobody realizes this until the GM tells them that I am clearly possessed
>Events happen and finally the demon is exorcised
>"We thought you were joking"

Put something in the microwave for thirty six seconds. Then try to break down a door.

Given that the assassin didn't kill anyone, and left a trail the average PC could follow, I think they were doing a pretty good job. Well, right up until they died...

Something similar happened in the Oglaf comic. I wonder if your GM was inspired by it. Still is a neat concept either way.

What game were you running? Just curious.

How is one assassin supposed to bring back a whole party of live adventures? Did he have a paddy wagon?
The party is right, this is beyond mere bandits

oglaf.com/riseofthefunsnake/

Literally Oglaf

>PC that is from a family that owns an electronics company has magical potential
>Makes a deal with Fae to learn to hone her abilities so she doesnt fuck up her day job.
>That fae is one of our recurring big bads
>Was thought to be dead after she was hit by a nail bomb
>The player has to drop out but I was given permission to use them as an NPC
-2 campaigns later-
>The electronics company is tied to a paramilitary group thats trying to kill Major supernatural players in the area.
>There is evidence magic is being used to assist the paramilitaries in their endeavor without their knowledge
>The sigils used in the magic are tied back to electronic symbols used in schematics, such as the diodes, resistors and capacitors.

They couldn't figure out who the fuck was behind it all.
Eventually I had to spell it out. Kind of bummed me out

I would never say "There's nothing in the room", but if I ever did I am not to be trusted. I am quite literally god of their world, but at the same time I don't exist, so they have nothing to trust (or distrust) but what I tell them they sense.

I normally don't like to give such blatant information, but they were spending so long investigating nothing that I felt it appropriate to tell them they're wasting their time.

I made a door puzzle. It was made of heavy stone, and had no hinges they could see. It had a door handle, not a knob, and wasn't locked. It took the party 45 minutes to deduct the door was a sliding door.

>Party is attacking goblin fortress at level 3
>I, Wizard, cast stone call twice to fuck shit up
>Shit is duly fucked up.
>DM is Civil engineer
>2 damage gets past the hardness of the wooden structures
>DM rules that the damage to the structure has warped the door frames, causing the already shitty doors to become stuck.
>party spends the entire fortress crawl smashing doors apart with strength checks.

On the plus side, we did get to have an opportunity to say "Mr. Paladin, Tear down this wall!"

>Party running Temple of Truth
>Enter into circular room with an altar in the center
>Altar stained with blood and draped in chains
>No doors, but the walls seem to be moving
>Party begin to examine the walls.
>Snakes attack
>It was all snakes
>Tell them that they can see a door now that the snakes are falling off the walls
>Fighter runs up and bleeds on the Altar, thinking this is the only solution

It was an obvious trap to fuck with players who jump to conclusions, AFTER THEY SOLVED THE ISSUE. That Chain Devil at level 6 was deserved.

Tuckers Kobolds.

He's not talking about the door, he's talking about how every bandit in the place got the message, cleaned up what they were doing and looted the place in barely half a minute when taken by surprise.