Can we get a thread for DM gaffes? Times when a simple mistake or misread rule led to funny or disastrous results

Why didn't you just have one of the bandits fall on their knees, begging not to die?
Or run screaming, only to trip and disembowel themselves on their own weapons, and have them beg the party to heal them?

no. metagaming is avoidance of roleplaying. its using irl knowledge (like everyone knows trolls are weak to fire) in character, even if that character shouldn't necessarily know something.
In D&D, for example, the only book a player "should" have access to is the player's handbook because the characters aren't supposed to know about creature resistances via they player's knowledge. they should have to pass research checks to learn something.

used to watch this with my little brother

there were a lot of clever references to literature and other things, and anything involving Doofenshmirtz and Perry was fucking great.

>Running my first game (3.5)
>Have party kill some goblins building a fort Inna woods
>Everything is smooth, everything goes well.
>Count up all them goblins as one encounter instead of lots of small ones
>Fuckeditup.exe
>Roll fucktons of epic tier treasure
>Realize my mistake, & have a convenient goblin suicide bomber bring the fort down & destroy all that loot
>Party salvaged encounter relevant amount from the wreckage
>Still feel bad about pulling the rug out from under them, but they were not that mad

Had a similar experience where our first dm thought the +6 flail on a gnoll's stat block meant he had a flail with a +6 enchantment bonus

He let me keep the flail but it was a learning experience

>Sending players on some stupid fetch quest, don't even remember what it was for.
>Item in question was in this old, decaying, rambling fortress, which used to be used as a place where demonology was studied.
>As a consequence, most of the defenses are designed inward; this fort is built to keep things inside, not keep them outside.
>But it's been abandoned for decades, and not in great shape, and when they went to get the McGuffin, a critical staircase collapsed, and they couldn't get back up.
>Unless, of course, they would use some of the materials in teh chamber they were stuck in to summon a demon, which would activate certain fail-safes and open a portcullis they couldn't otherwise get through and a way out.
>The downside to this, of course, is that they're summoning a very large, hostile beastie without the means to control it
>Idea was to be a chase and flight, and possible consequences of unloosing such a beast down the line.
>They realize they're stuck
>They realize the only likely way out is to open the gate by summoning the demon
>They realize how insanely dangerous this is
>They also realize, and I did not, that the demon would arrive on a very specific point of the summoning circle
>And this is an old, broken fort has some old, broken ballistae
>And one of the characters has the sort of magic that can fix them, at least well enough to fire once or twice
>They aim 4 ballistae right at the summoning point.
>Demon is summoned
>Doesn't quite die instantly from the barrage, but loses almost all of its health, and the players are able to finish it off easily and stroll out the front door whistling merrily.

Don't get me wrong, it was awesome, but it was something I should have anticipated.

One other stupid thing I want to elaborate on; I actually had thought of them fixing the engines to use them to smash down the gates, which is why I made almost a dozen between them and the outside, more than even a fixed ballista or two could handle. That they would use them against those but not thinking they could kill the demon they'd summon with it was just dense of me.

Meta gaming is shit. It's almost as bad as power gaming.

> 5e
> Party is storming a castle at level 8 or so
> Despite this being late in the campaign, it hasn't been too long out of character since 5e was released
> Party is outmatched by swarms of cultists
> Druid casts Conjure Woodland Beings
> Summons Pixies
> Each Pixie casts Polymorph on a member of the group
> One turns into a CR 7 dragon
> One turns into a CR 7 mind flayer
> etc., etc.
> What would have been a difficult encounter turns into an embarrassing meat grinder for the cultists
> Breeze through the stats, cultists get wiped by the end of turn 3
> Then check the rules for Polymorph more closely
> It turns out that the Druid, like me, initially read "beast" as "creature"
> Because they changed the creature type from Animal to Beast

The Druid at least had the good grace to be embarrassed.

I did pretty much the same thing with a werewolf, right down to the "oh fuck." It happens.

If the only interesting thing about your encounter was that the players didn't know what they were fighting, you didn't create an interesting encounter. Stop whining when players metagame through your boring encounters.

It means to use knowledge your character wouldn't have. Whether it pertains to abusing rules, knowledge of opponents, or happenings in the world.

'trolls are weak to fire' is kind of a bad example, because most people would have heard that from traveling bards in stories and song, if not from elders.

and by unfortunate, I mean EXTREMELY FORTUNATE! *spike trap falls from the ceiling*

Dodge via +5 Fedora of Perception. *Menacing Platypus noise*

Which is why the knowledge checking DC 5. You can still fail it, and just happen to have never crossed that info.

I mean, then just go mammoth. It's cr7.

>Plan a big boss fight
> A Cabal of seven sorcerers being puppeteered by the BBEG
>Each of the seven representing a different element and aspect
>The battle begins and blows are exchanged
>A few of the cabal are taken down, and the tide turns
> "You've killed 3 of the 7, and 1 more snapped out! You have almost won!"
> "But... user. There are only two left"
> huh?
> Nah. You have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet..... oh shit
> Retconned it that the BBEG slit his throat before the players arrived.
> not gonna live this down

Indigo

Anyways, mine:

>First time ever playing a proper PNP RPG
>d20 Modern
>Reading class tables
>Mistake what the + means on the tables
>Add that level's BAB at every level

So a level 1 character would have +1 BAB, a level 2 character would have +3, a level 3 character would have +6, etc etc

It wasn't that much of a disaster in the end, since it wasn't a really combat heavy game, but man what a weird situation that was.

> not spiketrapinator

+210 for a fighter at twentieth level.
Power attack
>my dick

Since most of my players GM as well, I consider everything in the monster manual to be common or at least uncommon knowledge. Trolls are weak to fire, vampires are weak to sunlight, that kinda thing. Then I start modifying monsters and calling them something else. Like the lamprey-men who are reskinned goblins with the stirge's blood drain ability.
Cuts down on metagaming while still giving my players fun things to fight that they haven't already passed over in the monster manual.

*CLANG*

the trap is just the trap, the -inator comes later (along with some solid backstory)

>tfw now want to run a campaign where the Doof is the BBEG, definitely with bard levels is repeatedly trying to stage elaborate non-violent coups against his brother the king, and has a rival that wears a Hat of Disguise except instead of disguising your appearance, it just makes it so that people don't recognize you without a good WIS check

This is probably bait, but I'm saying this for your sake, OP.
There are two ways to solve metagame issues:
-Don't create them in the first place (this guy gets it , if your players know what a troll is but the characters don't, you've messed up)
-Don't play with shitters. Bring it up with your group and kick out the players who do it too much.
In-game punishment for OOC behavior is fucking stupid. Avoid the problem in the first place, and when you can't, handle it like adults.
If you need to use the carrot and the stick to fix your players' shitty habits, you're not a GM, you're a tard wrangler.

Yeah I feel this is the correct approach.

Fantasy is so ubiquitous now that it's ironically pretty un-fantastical in place. The onus is on the GM to keep the game unique by creating unique things in the game, not by arbitrarily punishing players.

And likewise even choosing not to metagame is a form of metagaming where I'm suddenly acting on the knowledge of my characters lack of knowledge which doesn't play out naturally either.

While it's a gaffe, I'd be proud of your player's ingenuity when faced with that problem. Kudos to them

>You see Perry The Adventurer back in my home village I was forced to gain experience by killing boars because all the the high experience monsters were killed by all the adventurers. As a result I could never level up past level 3. So I built this. THE EXPERIENCESTEALERINATOR! Now all the experience from every kill shall be mine so I can finally get a third spell slot.

>And likewise even choosing not to metagame is a form of metagaming where I'm suddenly acting on the knowledge of my characters lack of knowledge which doesn't play out naturally either.

This is taking things a step too far. There's metagaming against monster weaknesses, which is somewhat understandable, but then there's just general metagaming. Maybe you as a player learned something another player learned, but there was no feasible way your character can know that. Are you just going to act on that knowledge?

metagaming doesn't solely mean combat and monsters. Its possible and easy for players to learn things their characters can't possibly know. Acting on it is what makes you a dick.

This I always houserule that any mythology players know is also known by their characters. For people whose job is exploring dungeons and hunting batshit beasties it's probably common knowledge that trolls hate fire, vampires hate sunlight, you need to destroy the lich's phylactery, use mirrors to look at the gorgon, etc.

It's not like there's literally hundreds of rarely used monsters (nucklavee, wendigo, ogopogo, banshee, kelpie, silkie) to pull from for unique encounters

You know how when you're playing a game like Dark Souls, you know that the enemies have set ranges at which they pull aggro onto you, or set ranges at which they'll stop following you and return to their default position? That's metagaming. It's using knowledge that exists outside the game, within the game.

Not the best example as probably they have ways in-game to know what a basilisk is. However, the thing is their character's do not know, but the players do. That's metagame.

So what if I fail my knowledge check that trolls are weak to fire? Am I just not allowed to burn them? What if I already use fire attacks on mamilliam creatures to inspire panic?

I actually have a good one for this.
>Playing game of shadowrun
>have to save some documents and a girl named Lilly from gangsters
>gangsters keeping her in brothel
>send face in to scope it out
>GM names one of the prostitutes Lilly as well on accident
>we go in with me on sniper over watch
>prostitute lilly is sent out by inside team
>she gets stopped at the gate so I snipe the guard and we go hot
>GM asks "why are you saving this chick?"
>tell him we are rescuing Lilly
>he looks confused then swears a bit.
>admits his mistake we all have a good laugh
>save real lilly
it was a fun time

There's a level where common sense can beat out the result of a knowledge check.

In your example, you wouldn't KNOW that fire hurts a troll. That doesn't stop you from trying though. Fire hurts things, usually. There's no harm trying it in a lot of cases.

If common sense can bridge the gap, you can wave it off as intuition or something.

Booo

This is off-topic but if you want to get rid of meta-gaming, just re-skin and homebrew the shit out of your game. Change damage types, creature types, and status effects and they won't know what it is. Got a useless stat block? BAM! New monster. Creatures for a swamp? BAM! Desert creature. Already fought 10 Beholders? BAM! Reality altering Celestial being.

I was able to piss off a metagamer in the group. He was a newbie who was playing in two games, one was where I was the GM. After a while he stated things about monsters the group never encountered as if they were little fun facts. They were true, though. But never relevant or important. He just wanted to boast about his knowledge.

In a different session, they fought a large plant monster that didn't need sunlight to live. (There are plants who don't need sunlight. It's rare, but true.) The monster was a heavily adjusted Troll, the only thing that was recognizable was that it stopped regenerating after being hit by Acid damage.

After the plant was defeated, it freed a captured wizard from a pod. They revived the wizard and asked a bunch of things but it was at the end of the session so I wanted to wrap things up. "No." said the metagamer, "I don't trust this. Plants require sunlight for photosynthesis, that means this plant has other ways to live. This wizard must know more or is perhaps behind this!" And so the session just dragged on and got nowhere fast. He played a Monk...

In a different session, the moment he wanted to investigate a dark room and a Warforged turned around and saw him, said "You are not registered." and attacked him, was the last straw. He actually wanted to ignore what happend and ignore the damage. He said it was unfair to let a Golem attack him without rolling a Perception check first. (Why do they always whine with the Perception checks?) I tried to reason with him but he got angry and left the group.

Good riddance.

>Behold, the LICHDOMINATOR-INATOR. I was the smartest, most cunning boy in all of Draetal. My wit could surpass even the wisest of heroes. But when my father was writing his will, he instead decided that King Henry should be the one who receives the family phylactery, not me. He is an oaf who probably uses it to eat pickled ham with, and doesn't use it to its full potential. You see Perry the Adventurer, with my newest inator, I will take control of all liches across the world, including dear Henry. And with control of the liches, some of the richest magic users in the realm, I WILL FORCE THEM TO BUY STOCK IN MY DUNGEON, ARTIFICIALLY RAISING MY VALUE! HAHAHA

But there's a difference in my opinion on the application of fire that determines if it's metagaming.

Let's say the GM gave us knowledge about a troll cave, none of the party is familar with trolls, and they don't ask what a troll is weak to.

So they go spelunking, now is it metagaming if they bring a torch down with them? No, even if they use the torch to beat the troll away it's reasonable for them to bring a torch with them. A oil lantern with extra oil is fishy, depending on intentions it could just be precautionary or a weapon, especially the extra oil. However, if the players have already been in caves during the adventure and picked up a ring of light or already fixed lighting problems, THEN decide to go with torches or oil that's moderate metagaming. Finally running down with a flaming longsword fresh from the enchanters is pretty evident metagaming.

Exactly. Its all a matter of degree's.

"Hey, fire hurts, lets try that" is fine. it works on most things, so why not the one right here?

Purposely going with something less efficient is a bit metagamy, but at the same time, maybe they are afraid of something happening to their magic gear for one reason or another. Easily explainable, but obvious metagaming. I'd allow it.

As for the last one, your players would need to be smacked for that kinda thing. The more esoteric and strange the monster, the worse it gets.

Worst example of metagaming I've experienced was a party member who snuck a peak at the DMs campaign notes when everyone went outside for a break, read that our host was secretly a vampire with a bounty, then ripped down the curtains while having breakfast at his table when we started playing again. Didn't even wait for a hint to be dropped. DM about had an aneurysm, ended up scrapping the whole thing and making the host a normal dude who kicked us out for tearing down his curtains.

Basically, it's one thing for people to burn trolls, it's another if lightning mage starts using ice magic against a living leaf pile, or stops looking directly at a reptile because it has twice the legs.

I think that surpasses metagaming and goes right into legitimate cheating, as much as one can. Seriously, I like optimizing my characters and feeling powerful, but what possibly could be the joy in peeking behind the curtain?

"Win At All Costs" means ALL costs to a certain subset of human trash.

I witnessed (wasn't party to, thank god, or I would have probably killed him) a guy during the last round of a Warmachine tournament who picked up and "dropped" his opponent's warjack model (it was in a good position to kill the asshole's warcaster and win the game), breaking it. He then called the TO over and pointed out that since his opponent was fielding an unassembled model (which was against tourney rules), that his opponent should be DQ'd. And the kid was, in fact, DQ'd, and was missing parts to his warjack to boot.

At least a few other people in the tourney commented that it was a scummy play, but it was rules-legal (nothing prohibited breaking an opponent's model, after all, and the warjack *wasn't* assembled when the TO looked it over), so it was technically OK.

>I no longer play Warmahordes; people like this are the reason

Even as a bystander I would have had to kill that person.

>deliberately breaking your opponent's shit is okay
What the fuck? I refuse to believe there isn't some kind of basic rules for conduct in that type of thing. Imagine going to a tcg tourney, grabbing an opponent's card and tearing it up to keep it from being used against you.

>sabotage is legal

By what fucking standard. Rules-legal or not, thats technically not law-legal. He shoulda been DQ'ed, potentially arrested.

What kinda shit tourney would ever allow something like that just because its not explicitly said?

Or to be more serious, I would aggressively intervene and reveal what I saw to the judge.

I believe the defense was "but it was an accident, I swear-sy!". Which there's no way it was, but hey, nobody really watched it happened, and the TO said he couldn't magically believe one guy over the other without a clear witness.

The rules *did* say that all models had to be assembled and based, and when the TO came over to find what was wrong, the guy's model wasn't assembled. So when the asshole pushed for a DQ, the TO said he didn't have a legal reason to not DQ the guy.

I'm not saying it was right. I'm saying that WAAC players do sometimes mean exactly that.

I'd say in that case, it's a matter of if they've already been doing it on other things. Like, if the party sorcerer happens to like using fire spells, and the party has built around that with the rogue tossing oil on people and the Fighter using a Torch and a longsword, then it makes sense that they'll go for it.

If they've fought orcs or goblins before a troll and didn't try fire, then it does raise eyebrows if they pull it out before it even starts regenerating.

That's kind of stupid when the only reason for the metagaming is the DM giving away unintentional information about the encounter. It's not, like, complete bullshit metagaming.

>first time DMing
>D&D 4e
>do the starter pack dungeon
>Monk in our party has that whirlwind attack ability
>get into boss room full of skeletons
>Monk performs attack, starts spinning through the skeletons
>instead of calculating the damage split across all of them we calculate damage for each one
>every skeleton in the room she spins by takes like 10d6 damage
>room is cleared apart from flesh golem, necromancer and 1 skeleton archer

That was pretty hilarious.

Upon reading this I had to go outside and smoke because I was really fucking angry that these people exist.

I had it all written down, I just.... forgot to have him actually be in the fight. Oh well. Probably woulda been a party wipe if I did have him there. All works out. Though my players now give me monumental crap about colors.