What's the most you've seen a player outsmart a DM? What about the reverse?

What's the most you've seen a player outsmart a DM? What about the reverse?

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I was DMing Curse of Strahd, and Strahd was attacking the party in an old tower.
His tactic was simple - while the party was distracted by the vampire spawns, he would use spiderclimb to scale the walls and shower them with fireballs from above, while staying out of the area himself.
The players were already making their saving throws, when somebody asked: "Wait, how high is this tower? Also, how high is this floor? Shouldn't there be a ceiling in the way?"

Oh. Right. Ceilings. I felt pretty dumb.

I find it to be a better experience for everyone not to include such remarks.

>party fighting drow assassins on an airship
>"The ship's moving, right?"
>Yeah, only very slowly though so it's probably around 10 feet per round
>"Okay, if I cast Banishment, when it ends they re-appear where they were before they were banished"
>...right

The worst part is that the Drow they banished was a mage - he came back and cast Fly to save himself but one of them shot him with a crossbow and he failed his save to keep concentration.

That's really smart actually.

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone have Strahd cast polymorph to turn himself into CR 15 adult bronze shadow dragon.

Clever. I'd reward that kind of thinking with a favorable little event or item. Positive reinforcement, you know?

Anyone have that pasta wherein the DM invented a thorough bitch of a Wizard's tower, so the party alchemist fucking wired the base and blew the whole thing up, undoing some pretty intense plans said DM had set?

player used clearwater solution injected into a kraken to turn it's blood to water and kill it.

It was brilliant but then he tried to use it again and again as a one-hit kill and the DM eventually had to ban the item.

Same with the obsidian steed he would try to shove in people's mouths then summon to make their head explode. He ended up selling it after the DM pointed out it only worked once per week in 3.5, after he flew over two wizards' heads whiel invisible (well not invisible, chameleon power from psions which isn't affected by see invisibility because 3.5 rules for detection are FUCKING RETARDED) and one-shotting two level 13 wizards at level 8 becasue the DM didn't know how to run wizards for shit.

Polymorph turns you into a beast. Without third party, the highest CR beast that exists is T-rex, and it's only CR 8.
Also, a t-rex in Curse of Strahd kind of ruins the mood.

Strahd turning into a t-rex sounds like something that would happen if an 8 year old was GMing

I was a player in a Pathfinder game where the basic setup was that a bunch of orc tribes had invaded a valley and we were being sent in to clear them out, but unknown to us a cult was acting in the background to try and empower their god with blood sacrifice. However, one of the other players (playing a alchemist/gunslinger explosion happy mercenary) repeatedly uncovered the cult's activities early through the combination of an observant player and a violent character. By the time the campaign was over, the DM was totally flabbergasted and admitted we did the adventure in half the time he expected.

Is the DM having more or less fun when you come up with stuff to fuck him over?

More fun if it's a clever use of an item.

Less fun if it's an "ACKSTUHALLY" crack open errata of rules from 3 splatbooks is why I can do this.

>What's the most you've seen a player outsmart a DM?
Any illusionist worth his salt.

Such as?

>implying DMs don't punish you for doing this because they are crybabies

I don't mind it as long it seems like something the pc could do or know about but I can get annoyed pretty fast if they try to look for a work around for something pretty simple thus making something that would take 2 mins or less take 30 mins.

His polymorph is much more fun to use on a charmed PC. Won't save to resist as charmed, and then they get to be a cockroach or kitten or naked elf chick or whatever

Seems like a case by case thing. And like the other user said, wether or not the PC in question would actually be able to accomplish/think up their plan is bound to make someone salty in the heat of it (at least for a few of the players I know).

Personally, I tend to look more at the intent of the player involved more than I probably should. If it's something quick witted to gain an edge in a fight, I'll likely roll with it, but full on nullifying a large section of a session or hyped up encounter is not likely to go thru.

The first time I played D&D I made sure to stock a lot of bottles of oil. It came in handy eventually when I solo infiltrated a bandit camp, but flubbed a stealth check and the whole camp came down on me, I climbed one of the guard towers and covered the ladder with oil so it was pretty much impossible for any of the bandits to make it up to me as I sniped them.

Also I ended up using another bottle to light a dwarf sorcerer's beard on fire.

It's not really outsmarting, but I like to think they were good uses of items.

That's not a pasta that's a gif from an anime

As a general guideline, PCs won't care about anything but saving their own hides and give no fucks about how much time was spent planning that section/how much it will drag out the game in the effort to save minimal resources/a planned encounter is almost always better than a winged one to fill time.

*Fucking rad

And autocorrect ruins everything for ever now I have to wait five hours to delete this post.

#
>Strahd turning into a t-rex sounds like something FUCKING RAD

Fixed that for you

If banishment can keep them in place while the planet moves, it can keep them in place while the airship does.

It's only moving when the turtle it is on moves.

Yeah I just started gming about a year ago and I'm starting to pick up on that the player in question was new to the whole thing and I wanted them to do something with the skill set that they had that could had helped the rest of the party but as you say he was too scared to roll the dice and that leaded into 20 or so mins of him and a other player trying to do things they would not know IC.

At some point one of the other players wanted to replace the new guy skill roll (he wanted to carry the new player across a mine field so the new player would not have to roll) looking back on it it just might had been better just to let the other player just helped him but I did wanted the new guy do something for once.

> mini-boss sort of villain intercepts the PCs on a dock
> paladin uses the shove action for the first time in a year to just boot him into the harbor
> encounter over

Didn't try to think of some kind of way for the guy to rope himself around or did that fuck up too?

One time I had a person of interest held at a KE precinct. The players had to get them out. So they got the person's mom to collect the person from holding, instead of doing anti-establishment things to the precinct.

what?

God speed to you user. I too started gming "recently" (2yrs ago, only/still in that campaign due to college and flakes). While it's not a popular opinion nor wholly in your control, I like to have minor party splits happen to force action by certain members. It's gotten to the point where my PC's are doing it naturally now when it makes sense ("I got shit to do, meet y'all at base/next town over tomorrow"). Also lets you introduce plot in a 1on1 context to help test the in-character information spread.

My party has done something similar. It's why every one of us now carries at least one Adamantine weapon, some method on invisibility, and several pounds of explosives. We've take to calling it "architectural warfare" and have, on more than one occasion, settled for blasting pillars out of a building and dropping the roof on the enemy. Because setting a blasting charge isn't an attack, so it' doesn't pop the stealth spells.

I got through a nasty wizard's tower once as a bard just by spamming invisibility on myself and the rogue

The guy didn't expect (because I didn't expect) to be kicked off the dock. If a player blindsides me that cleanly I always let them have their moment.

An infamous stunt by the party wizard was to spend a couple days casting Shrink Item on boulders. Enough to make about a double handful of gravel. Then, while flying invisible over the stronghold of an order of antipaladins, cast antimagic field over the five foot area blow him and dumping the pouch through it. Then the rest of us moved into the leveled fortress to do a quick and messy mop up. The DM was pissed.

They were playing Shadowrun and the player characters had to break someone out of a private security precinct, and they decided to do so by getting their mother to collect them instead of, say, blasting a hole in a wall and nabbing him.

At least that's how I understood the post.

Thats a pretty good idea oddly enough one of the players is split from the party atm and I plan to do a solo session with them but that didn't work out. In the next few weeks I might think up something where I can have the new player alone and see how he does -- not that I want to stress him out but I do want him to be more active.

Been there, done that.

yeah that was my idea too just wasn't sure

>The DM was pissed.
That's amazing. I feel like players should give a heads up to the DM about stuff like this more often so he doesn't spend too much time planning an encounter that the players want to breeze over.

Amazing

I managed to take away all a large dragons actions while it was in midair, forcing it to crash land in the middle of a hostile army (which promptly murdered it) through an egregious combination of cheese, timing, and inhuman luck. I was level one.

I've did something similar in the Shadowrun game I'm in. I'm the newest player, and while everyone else was arguing over the best way to knock over a whole Lonestar precinct, I simply looked up the posted charges and the bail fee. Having more than enough money to do so, I decided to tell the others I was going on a "supply run" which they agreed to to keep the newbie from suggesting dumb ideas. Stopped by a fence, sold some extra weapons off, the went and paid the fee.

Arrived back at the crash pad with friend in the passenger seat just in time to see the rest of the party loading assault rifles and at least one RPG into the back of a stolen van. They were stunned silent for a few moments, at which point the girl playing the party face wondered aloud why they hadn't thought of doing that.

Anti-magic field is centered on the caster.

Fair enough as long your having a good time and the players are having fun then great.
I think the biggest or the time I remember the most that where players did something I didn't plan for was during a shadowrun game they was asked to kill someone on a jet that was grounded with his two bodyguards. On the way over they came along a attack heli (There was a war going on in cuba long story) that they didn't have any keys for but knew that guy they had to kill also had the keys so once they got to the grounded jet or trying to enter and clear it they walked over to the fuel tank and popped a frag inside of it thus blowing the whole fucking thing up. I was more or less fine with it because they did kill the target but they didn't have the keys for the heli so I gave the teams rigger a test to "pop" the heli's lock before the army came around and check what was up. he failed and they ran off with no heli a few of them was kinda upset but didn't take it too hard as far as I can tell.

...

As a DM who regularly got his plan blown up by players, it's insanely fun. Now I don't even make plans anymore, I set the stage and the actors and let the show begin.

I have to confess that I have, on a few ocasions, set up encounters with no intended solutions, just to see what my players will come up with.

Another shadowrun story.
Our group had to deal with a Yakuza group at the docks who had imported a tank.

We just called the police on them.

>but full on nullifying a large section of a session or hyped up encounter is not likely to go thru.

I bet you're a fun DM to play with.

As soon as any player or all your players get creative, you shut them down.

No one has referenced Old Man Henderson?
1d4chan.org/wiki/Old_Man_Henderson

Wasn't there a thread some time ago all about a DM who tricked the party into releasing the ancient evil just because the couldn't count the number of the seals properly?

I should've screencapped that

Because That story is old and overused, and frankly just ain't funny.

Most of that could only work with a GM who was like a fucking doormat.

Something about the ancient evil being held captive by magical swords put in place by so many paladin orders. The PC made a deal that with each sword they pulled, the evil would answer one question. Except the last one was an illusion, so they freed it.
Nice story.

That's a pretty funny manuever for a paladin anyway, I would have kept it for that alone.

No on on expects the paladin to just Sparta you off a ledge

Henderson isn't really the same thing as op premise anyway, Henderson is taking over a bad game and making it good.

Kind of a rookie version but a game in highschool the DM gave a player an oak seed that would magically sprout into a full tree with a command word

They fed it to a dragon and split it's head open

Once had a player who had this odd, quiet demeanour. She would also be very silent, and never act much in the game. It makes this event all the more impressive.

It was Dark Heresy. Playing an Adept, she was never much in the front line, but had some knowledge of explosives, especially grenades, mostly acquired because of the shit they've been up against.

So they are tracking down a former inquisitorial agent, and are having a lot of issues with getting caught off guard, and generally being ran around like fools. Until they find his hideout.

Here, they approach a door, and can hear him on the other side. I say they hear a small clock as they approach the door.

At this moment, she immediately says "I step back away from the door, and throw a grenade down the hallway I came from."

I was not planning om letting them react. She cut me off. The whole event was supposed to be them walking into a rigged door, luring them in with a recording and a trap none of them noticed (rolled too poorly). And then he would come in from behind and capture one of the players after being knocked out by the explosion.

Except now she was not only stepping away from the trap, she was also throwing a grenade straight at the assassin.

He was also.ost killed instantly by the explosion, and a single shot from a laspistol took him out by the adept afterwards. The other players were knocked out or stunned by the explosion, so this event, where they weren't even supposed to fight him, ended up with them capturing him. Or rather, the ADEPT capturing him.

For the record, an Adept in Dark Heresy is a book monkey. They have all the intelligence skills, but practically no useful combat skills. The group's assassin was VERY pisses about not being the one who brought down the assassin they were hunting, and complained for hours after the game about not being given the chance.

This is why magic in D&D tends to have a caveat about not working inside living beings. I forget whether it's a rule or not but I've never heard of anyone who'll let it work because if you do Create Water becomes incredibly lethal.

I think that's up the DM, who could conclude that Banishment only anchors the banished subject to that geographic location, but not a moving platform.

Adepts are the strongest class in Dark Heresy. They got tons of knowledge skills in a setting where knowledge is dangerous and powerful.

6 orders of paladins, "ten" swords in the thing
The GM was very explicit about the SIX orders, all campaign
They asked stupid questions for a while and pulled six swords, and it was all KTHXBAI

Less Outsmarting and more like Horrible GM luck.
Bard in pathfinder cast "something Apathy something", which makes the target lose their actions if they fail a pretty easy will save, on a juvenile red dragon that would have slaughtered the party. We were 5 level 5's and, after checking it after the session, the thing was CR 11. The dragon failed all 5 will saves, never rolling above a 4 on the die (it had +10 to will saves). So we ended up just beating into the thing and it still nearly killed two party members when it acted on the last round before we killed it.

It was 9 and 12 respectively, IIRC. That's important because they asked lots of dumb questions that led them nowhere.

Couldn't you make a Dire T-Rex with a higher CR?

This thread right here, it's fucking golden:
archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/50579499/

Some of the questions:
Well, there was some other extra suff worth asking.
And truthfully, I might have been a little dickish with how I phrased the answers
>what's wrong with me
>>you got your spells though an agent. A third entity that resides in your soul
>what for
>>he uses you as an anchor to this world, a beacon that maintains his avatar
>does this mean [partly irrelevant]
>>yes, but there's [a factor]
>what factor
and so on

also, the very first question that was asked was
are you the [big bad] himself?

I played in a game with an (admittedly shitty) homebrew ruleset. Gave my character the starting spell teleport item, and spent all my starting gold on poison.

Teleporting an item into an enemy does 5 damage, poison does 5 on contact and 2 more damage at the start of every turn. It was a low HP system where most enemies had 11-12 HP, so after I one-shotted the first boss the DM changed the rules to make my character useless and then buffed every future enemy.

I'm now running a game with that DM as a player and he's our groups /thatguy/

One adventure, my party is doing a cleanup on a gang of goblins (or kobolds, I can't remember which) with, in the boss gobbo's chamber, a magic mirror on the wall.

The mirror smokes over, and an evil voice comes out, asking about the progress of sacking this little village. I expect the louder players to brag.

They bluff, and roll well. The thing on the other end is fooled... for the moment.

I was a noob GM at the time, and still am, I'll admit.

Have him face an enemy that teleports poison into him.

Like I said, it's a context based thing. It's a two way street for those cheese solutions. If your argument for why you should do it boils down to "it just makes sense", why then are save or dies a taboo for GMs to use? Or better yet, no save, just dies like the shrunken boulders story from earlier in the thread?

I've never really had this issue, players jump the tracks all of the time. Its really a question of how far and how quickly they move, versus your ability as a gm to improv. The better you can make shit up on the fly the less of a worry it is, likewise if you can make some buffer to fill things in until the next session (and more planning) again no issue.

But here's the thing. The game is where the gm planned. You came here to play a game right? Why would you purposefully walk away from it?

Level one is the place where you have to cheeze it the most and use everything at your advantage

Yeah, I made the call based on what I'd decide to do if a player activated an immovable rod while the ship moved

A Shadowrun story of my own: I gave the players an extraction job where half of them had to go to a big party on top of a skyscraper because that's where the target was. I had intended that they'd cause a distraction and then make a break for a back elevator, designed for executive escapes. Instead they bought enough parachutes for themselves and the target, bought or rented a boat, caused a distraction and then went over the side of the building with the target. I had no idea how to react, but it was hilarious.

Whenever my players fight a mindless construct I try to encourage this. I just write a sort of AI for them in pseudocode, making it operate by very rigid rules. If they manage to find out the rules they can oftentimes exploit it.

That's just good planning.

>GM running a Ravenloft campaign
>I'm playing the wizard
>decide not to do the dungeon crawl to battle Strahd
>set up a fake wedding to mock Strahd
>have party fighter dress up like Strahd's brother and the village girl who looks like Tatyana (or however you spell it) as the bride
>Strahd shows up pissed
>polymorph the best man/monk into a T-Rex and mockingly read from Strahd's diary between spell castings during the fight
>my face for the duration of the battle

I'm not sure if "outsmart" is the right word, but there's the time I defeated a shoggoth with a rubber ball.

We were playing Beyond the Mountains of Madness, a published CoC campaign based on (duh) the Mountains of Madness. The GM stressed over and over the importance of having our equipment sorted out before we left port to go to Antarctica, because it would be pretty hard to resupply when we got there. Whenever I play tabletop, there's always a point at which I kick myself because "oh, I thought of taking that but I didn't and now I need it", so I resolved to take along everything that popped into my head. This included sundry shit like magazines, jars of marmalade, loose change, and a red rubber bouncing ball, which I imagined I'd use to stave off boredom like that American POW in the Great Escape.

Anyway, we get to Antarctica and we have to pare down our equipment list to things we can take off of the ship. I left a lot of my crap behind, but I brought the ball, because hey, it's pretty light. Then we got to the base camp at the base of the titular mountains, but we needed to take a plane to a city among the peaks, and we had to pare down our inventory list again because the planes couldn't handle much weight. I had to leave some of my weapons behind, but again I figured the ball was pretty light, so I included it on the equipment list we handed into the GM.

We get to the mountaintop to find an ancient, Old Ones city. We go exploring, and the party manages to wander down some winding steps into some sort of large, subterranean room with dozens of doorways. While we're down there, we see an albino penguin waddling around. It sees us and starts bleating, and a few seconds later, a massive shoggoth slides out of a doorway and devours it.

The GM asks us all for fear checks, and those that fail, freeze in place. I think I passed, but my character was charged with protecting another PC, so leaving was not an option.

We've put out our lights, but the shoggoth knows there's something else up here and is sliding around in the dark looking for us. None of us are in any way equipped to take on a shoggoth, and the GM is telling us how we've fucked up, we've missed our chance to escape and now things are going to go very, very badly. He was probably despairing on the inside wondering how he could salvage this campaign for the surviving players, assuming there WERE any surviving players.

At that point, I tell the GM, "I reach into my pocket and pull out a red, rubber, bouncing ball."

One of the other players makes a quizzical face and looks up at the GM, but he tells her "He does, in fact, have a rubber bouncing ball." As silently as possible, I throw the ball down one of the doorways, with it making plenty of noise as it bounces down to where it went (probably down more stairs, in retrospect). That prompts to shoggoth to slurp (the GM actually made a slurping sound with his mouth) after it, at which point we all beat feet.

And that's how I saved the entire party from a shoggoth with a rubber bouncing ball.

Did you have a followup adventure to get your ball back?

That's entirely exploitable in the other direction though. Just banish someone on a platform and then wheel the thing off a cliff.

That's the plot of Fate/Zero

Hate to blow your mood but

>The target remains there until the spell ends, at which point the target reappears in the space it left or in the nearest unoccupied space if that space is occupied.

What part of that implies it wouldn't work as user says?

Cant you read?

>or in the nearest unoccupied space if that space is occupied.

But user, empty air is unoccupied

You could make the argument that banishment should maintain the Newtonian reference frame for its targets, but that's an issue, too. Imagine banishment hitting someone right after they jumped upwards (going maybe 2 m/s). If the spell lasts for a minute, when it finishes they'll reappear a hundred meters up in the air.

You could also try ignoring physics (as you should) and arguing that it should work relative to whatever the target was standing on. But then it could be abusable: you could have a friend stand on board, banish them, then throw the board up onto some hard to reach balcony and have them reappear up there.
(And you also open yourself up to questions like "What happens if the airship gets disintegrated halfway through?")

...

Right, i thought the event was taking place inside the airship not on the deck. Which would have brought along the question of people getting stuck inside the ship parts when they return from banishment.

>DM has several homebrew items that are mostly one-off consumables
>Bard at one point acquired a pouch of dust that when thrown into the air sprinkled everyone in an area with the dust and caused them to get a buff that reflects the next spell cast on them back to the caster.
>Party also had several equipment pieces that could raise resistance to fire damage, and a few potions from something we did a while ago that granted 50% resistance to fire damage
>Get to a big fight with an ancient white dragon
>Wizard tells the bard to ward the party with the dust, bard had completely forgotten about it
>Wizard teleports up to the dragon's back and quickened casts a fireball back down at the party
>Spell strikes, reflects off of the other party members and their pets/familiars/etc
>several fireballs fly back up and explode on the wizard who's completely immune to the damage
>One-Shot the dragon
>Two people failed their reflex check and got crushed by the corpse though.

The answer is simple. The banishment retains the creature's position relative to the battle scene instead. Banishment was created not by a wizard, but rather by a bard who used it for theatrical purposes.

Haha holy shit I love this

I once played a sorcerer that dabbled with necromancy.
Because of that campaing, we no longer have intact gargantuan dragon skeletons as background props.

>Party ventures deep underground, finds an ancient civilization where the machines that were originally mining equipment became self aware and killed their creators
>Machines have created their own underworld civilization
>Big sentinels have Tri-Lasers that were originally meant for superheating and liquefying stone, reformed to be used as hand-cannons instead
>Party beats one of the sentinels, Sorcerer has an idea
>Barbarian can carry it, Wizard can power it, and Rogue has enough knowledge in mechanical things that he can fire it every now and then
>Wizard studies the thing, learns that it operates similarly to a scorching ray spell
>Proceeds to start golemancy with scrapped bots, he and the DM work out something awesome
>Pooling money and resources together we cobble a makeshift dummy sentinel we can pilot
>It's complicated to use though and it requires multiple people to operate
>Build a fucking Jaeger with four people controlling the arms and legs, and the wizard in the middle who's gone mecha-lich mode sacrificing his arms to the machine by having himself hard-wired into the thing so he can channel his spellcasting through it
>Proceed to perform the greatest ass-kickings of all time with the whole party going full Hybrid Heaven with crazy punches, kicks, and wizard firing his blasty shooty spells through the machine's hands
>Get to the Core
>Get FUCKED by the giant Overlord in the core
>Jaeger is jacked up, only rogue and wizard in it so it can only look around and move an arm
>Party trying to recover, crawling out of machine
>Rogue tells wizard, "I'm going to move this thing, then I need you to fire with everything you got."
>Wizard and rogue proceed to shoot and miss, hitting the ceiling instead
>Wizard fires it again, Overlord ignoring them, monologuing about how it's pointless to continue etc.
>Wizard fires again, intentionally hitting the ceiling
>DM stops mid sentence, thinks about it and says "oh shit.
>Ceiling collapses, Overlord gets crushed by cave in

>Playing a Geralt of Rivia clone
>Second to final battle of the adventure
>GM has us each fighting a phantasmal manifestation of the thing we hate the most.
>My phantom opponent was a copy of one of the other PCs, who killed my wife
>This was an evil group, except for me, and they were all significantly stronger than me, so I couldn't do much to oppose them. My character was basically coerced into joining them. This group was like a fucking cult.
>GM: "user, your turn, what do you do?"
>Me: "I forgive her"
>GM: "W-what?"
>Me: "I forgive her"
>GM: "Uhm....ok....roll Charisma, I guess?"
>Pass Charisma check, despite terrible Charisma stat.
>GM: "Fuck it, the phantom fades away, you win your duel".

Right after this fight, I betrayed my team and sided with the Final Boss, who was some hero trying to put a stop to the endless genocide this evil group was committing. I fought valiantly, but evil won that day and killed us both. We put a pin in that campaign so we can begin our current game of Black Crusade.

I know you meant that it's a scene in Fate, but now I wanna see an anime where the MC just uses common sense to cockblock everyone's keikakus, in a Captain Tylor kinda way.

>What's the most you've seen a player outsmart a DM?
At least the worst that's happened to me, (they're easier to remember than when I'm on the other end of the screen), is this one time my players talked an ultra-strong silver golem into clearing out a nest of vampires for them because it exploited a hole in his technical pacifism I hadn't thought about. They also quite logically pointed out that the punch of a silver golem should count as a silver weapon.
>What about the reverse?

GM dangled a bunch of clues in front of us that the bad guys were preparing this massive demon summoning ritual to defend what looked like a glaring weak point in their defenses.

It would have taken all of a few hours to divert over to the area and smash the crystals, kill the acolytes. Instead, they summoned a mega-demon that ate an entire army and wrecked a very delicate plan.

And the worst part was, there were all these clues that were obvious in hindsight that we never stitched together, like how we traced the movement of the (extremely rare, expensive, and of few uses) Crysx crystals to a stupid little podunk village right where there was an apparent gap in their lines.

I was in a campaign similar to that.

It resulted in a TPK because at just the right moment I siezed the day.

Behold my true form and DESPAIR!