I... wasn't expecting that

>Intrigue/murder mystery adventure arch that's not quite long enough to be a campaign.
>Lay out lots of clues, expect them to investigate and try to form a theory of the case.
>Players instead grab a random suspect, torture her into confessing to the crime, and then execute her on the basis of said confession.
>Are surprised when I change their alignment to Evil.

Well there are a few more minor ones, like stock piling grenades until I do a melee rush and then all being wipes in a few seconds.

Or ofcourse the endless creative ways we find to throw around inquisitorial power. Assaulting an office block becomes a hell of alot easier when you have managed to acquire a valkerie and 20 inquisitorial storm troopers.

Honestly sounds like you have a potential story there. Like mabye someone is now on their tail they have to try and lead to a dead end. Or at least corner and murder.

>Players are infected with fur like leaches of magical origin
>Boat ride back to main land, plan being the town greets them and hug them before they get a chance to say no
>Realizing they are infectious, the monk prays to her god and has the ranger chop her head off
>ranger and wizard write full report of the trip to the island they got infected and shackle themselves on the ship

To say the least, It was a surprise to see them throw away characters like that.

Did the ranger and wizard also die, or did they find a cure?

>GM 5e Game
>Huge monster living at a waterhole attacks group from inside the waterhole
>Expect party to do typical combat
>Wizard pulls out Control Water out of nowhere (Turns out he's always had it but never found an opportunity to use it)
>Whirlpool sucks monster in
>One other monster who was to put PCs to sleep goes after the now struggling huge monster because it's intimidating
>Monster with 200+ HP drowns
>players mob up the smaller monsters without any problem
>mfw

You have learned an important lesson

>Playing in 5e game
>Party is attempting to take out a wizard's apprentice who stole a bunch of legendary items from the wizard and barricaded herself into an abandoned lighthouse.
>When we find her, she is performing a ritual to raise a mummy lord. There is a magic circle surrounding the alter and a force wall in front of her that makes our ranged attacks useless.
>We take massive damage if we attempt to push through the force wall. We're already severely hurt so melee is out of the question.
>I cast Mage Hand on the other side of the barrier and smear the magic circle chalk.

>party keeps encountering tons of metal gates that need keys to open
>weshouldvebroughtarogue.exe
>party gets sick and tired of bashing them open (low lvl party)
>go back up 2 lvls, I assume to rest
>mage goes right back after the rust monster they ran from
>polymorphs it with a 1 shot scroll into 1/10th it's size
>proceeds to pick it up & uses it as a fucking pipe cutter on all the gates
I was pretty impressed by the abstract idea so i allowed it.

made me chuckle, so petty, so useful.

>dming Pathfinder for friends
>give the PCs a lead on a mysterious and apparently ummanned ship that floated into the bay of the seaside city they were in
>they go to investigate
>as they go into the decks of the ship, there's a whole menagerie of dire animals, giant insects, and other strange or rare creatures
>signs of the crew left behind, but not a soul throughout the ship
>some strange things begin to happen (a couple of walls and doors seem to be out of place, corpses of previously killed enemies have vanished when they backtrack for a bit)
>get to the hold
>as soon as they enter, cone of flame covers the party
>except for the rogue, who had preemptively hidden in cowardly fashion
>there's an angry half-dragon Roc in front of a pile of treasure chests
>roll initiarive, everyone begins to take positions
>party face asks if he can try to talk to it in draconic
>really had expected this to be the final combat of the dungeon, but I let him make a diplomacy check to try and calm things as the party hadn't attacked yet
>success, he talks to the Roc-dragon
>she's still very wary of the party, but is at least willing to share that she was one of the creatures loaded onto the vessel before laying a clutch of eggs
>the party asks if they can investigate the treasure hoard
>roc-dragoness says sure, she doesn't care for the treasure, just wants to protect her eggs
>rogue approaches the hoard and begins to open a chest
>sees teeth
>treasurehoardentirelymadeofmimics.jpg
>the party begins to fight off the mimics
while the Roc rushes to her eggs
>as they slay the chests, the entire ship seems to start shaking
>moving
>gurgling

Actually, this is why you should pay attention to the PCs and their abilities.

Still, creative ways of completely shutting down an encounter are rewarded in my games, if it's feasible and in-character. Tackling the daemon-summoning cultist would have resulted in full encounter XP for neutralising the threat.
And a chewing out from their boss for getting close to heretic scum, finishing with a 'good job preventing the summoning, though'.

were you playing AGE of Rebellion?

...

>DMing custom campaign
>Idiot players sent to spooky's house of jump scares in the middle of a rotten clearing
>pitfalls, monsters, grates, a non-euclidean mirror flipper
>Party manages to not shit check their way through every single room and make exactly the right decisions
>"OK, maybe I made it too easy"
>Demon owner of house possesses one of the idiots, uses their body to try and kill somebody
>Fails miserably, gets shit punched in by other two members despite having a 3 in 4 chance of NOT TAKING ANY DAMAGE
>"OK, maybe these characters are weaker than I thought"
>Actively decide to defy the government and befriend demon that tried to kill somebody
>Murderhobo assassin/rogue that can teleport decides to take it upon himself to kill every slightly political figure in the campaign
>Later fucks half of them
>Becomes overpowered and 1-shots almost everyone that I don't ass-pull to save
>Mage character decides to aspire to become a demon lord
>Inventor is along for the ride
>Later in same campaign, aliens touch down
>Mage decides to fuck up one of them, inventor then befriends them
>Around 20% of everything goes as planned
>Everyone has a blast except for the assassin who is slightly disappointed that he's not allowed to kill everyone
>campaign isn't even halfway done

In a oneshot Nechronica game I ran, the players befriended a zombie-eating bio-horror by tearing out their own guts and feeding them to it. Which in Nechronica is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but I wasn't expecting it (I expected they'd either try fighting it, or take advantage of the fact that I had established it hunted the zombies swarming around the area and get it to chase after some zombies and leave the path it was blocking unguarded).

Correction
>Mage decides to fuck with ALL of the aliens by throwing insults at the commander (And a dead war hero) via Thaumaturgy and impersonating the rando foot soldiers
>Which nearly gets the party killed by a super pissed off solider

Come on DM, give me some credit

cont'd
>face turns to the Roc
>tells her that the only way her eggs are going to be safe is if she helps them escape
>she really doesn't want to leave, but when the walls of the hull start moving she listens to reason
>party picks up the eggs
>everyone climbs onto Roc-dragon
>except for the rogue, who's looting mimic corpses
>they yell for him
>just as he grabs a large gem from one of the mimics, the hull starts to collapse in on itself and a huge tongue shoots out from the floor
>Roc takes to the air and the rogue just manages to grab her tail before he gets gobbled
>the Roc-dragon, with party in tow, busts upwards through three decks of the ship in dramatic fashion
>get to the main deck
>whole thing is becoming more organic, the railings have formed into giant teeth, and the entire vessel is folding inward in an attempt to chomp down on the party
>describe the Roc as pumping her wings as hard as she can to get up and out of reach
>but there's a sickening crash as the maw of the colossal beast closes just in time to catch her by the leg
>Roc-dragon speaks to the party face again
>she tells them to jump and leave her behind
>rogue is already two steps ahead and has jumped into the bay with his gem and an egg
>most of the party follows as well, taking the whole clutch of eggs
>party face is the only one left
>expecting him to jump off and call it a job well done, too bad for the Roc
Really he's not exactly what I would call selfless.
In fact, he's almost That Guy in our party because of how much he expects things to be about him and cater to him.

>he draws his sword and tries to hack at the teeth around the Roc's leg

cont'd
>does some damage, but not enough to free it
>he looks at his character sheet, tries to throw some alchemist fire, anything else he has into the mouth, but to no effect
The player looks at me and asks if there's anything else that he can do in possibly the most heartfelt manner I had ever seen from him
>I answer back as the Roc
>she asks his name, tells him hers
>tells him he's done a great service for her, that if he really wants to do more, then he can make sure the eggs are cared for
>she grabs him in her mouth and chucks him off into the bay
>as he gets tossed, he sees her turn around to face the mouth of the colossal mimic
>as the giant tongue wraps around her, she opens her mouth
>*chkk,chkk* fwooosh
>a huge fireball erupts from the giant aberration as the party solemnly makes their way back to the dock

How one of my players got a half-dragon Roc as an animal companion.
In the end, the face player really subverted my expectations and made the whole session way more fun than it probably would have been originally.

As a player in an evil campaign.
>heard a rival party was visiting town
>a bunch have been getting the drop in us lately, decide we're gonna get them first this time
>steal room keys late at night
>cast zone of silence on their rooms
>let ourselves in, their mage was up memorizing spells
>kinda hard to cast with a dagger in your throat
>axe murder the rest in their sleep

The hardest part of that encounter was trying to stuff the dwarfs berserker armor in a bag of holding, that shit was spiky as fuck. For shits and giggles we snuck the keys back onto the innkeeper belt.

>chaos-powered munity on a spaceship
>raving passengers barricaded behind a corner with heavy weapons
>DM expects us to find a way to sneak around
>There's no time to be lost!
>put all the party's grenades into a handbag, throw it over the obstacle
>barricade explodes
>same with the 16 enemies behind it and the outer hull next to the corridpr
>party desactivates the emergency airlocks and use their respirators to go through the now void-exposed section
>jettison the air in the next section just to be sure
>500 dead people, 2/3 of the module circumvented
He shouldn't have been so liberal with explosives.

did you give the party the monster xp or the wizard the xp

The players inferred that when they return the other royal wizards would surely do experiments on them, as they do to all non-human races. Accepting this by putting the chains on, we all concluded that their characters died horrifically.

GrimDark boy, love it.

My original plan was to have the players race to find a cure as the infestation spread. It was all them to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

Kinda proud honestly.

I've made this mistake too.

I once had a player down a bad guy, and I had a huge plot revealing monologue planned that showed that the players worked for the big bad dude.

Player one shots him dead before he can speak.

And this mistake, having a huge gun-fight ended in two turns by a bag full of molotovs.

>addition

>Party gets a clue early as to where the monk's old friend was.
>Take clue as deciding factor to cross the ocean to land where most undead are, assuming its the source
>undead problem been a thing whole campaign
>wasnt entirely prepared for them to cross the ocean
>Randomencountertable.pdf
>Fuck it, pirates
>You guys like to roleplay?
>roleplay this!

>Paladin dyes a flag yellow with pickle jars
>Tells everyone to play dead
>Paladin's cha is through the roof
>Pirates fail bluff check
>Pirates flee from plague infested ship
>mfw

This was a "bug" in my homebrew shitty system, but
>Paladin can inflict Life damage that does double damage to Undead and heals the living
>Paladin can cleave, hit 3 adjacent targets with the Life damaging attack

>Paladin hits 2 Undeads and bonks himself in the head to heal himself, allowed by RAW

I was so happy with the "bug" i made it a feature just for him, but will not allow it in future games

From today's session:

>Plan a trap, goblins set up a door with a riddle
>when the players start calling out answers, the goblins hear them and start cranking a device behind the door, distracting the players
>Goblins crawl out of hidden tunnel and ambush players
That was what was supposed to happen, but...
>Player just bought a pickaxe
>Wants to use it, ignores door, says he hits pickaxe directly where hidden tunnel is
>Crazy insane luck, there was no way he could have known
>Send rogue through to look, he sees the goblins lounging about in the next room and understands what is going on
>He sets up spikes in the tunnel and they set up near the door
>Start making noise to attract the goblin's attention, they start cranking device
>Goblin rushes through hole and starts screaming for his friends to pull him out
>They start, but players grab the goblin and start pulling
>Tug of war starts, dragging goblin through spikes, a player on the other side gets him with an axe
>Pull a second goblin through that's still holding onto the first one and repeat
They took out about half the encounter before it began. Not as cool as some other stories here but it was kind of cool.

Wall of Force beaten by a cantrip

Beautiful

Playing a game with my brothers and sisters I was like 15 My dad's DMing we're getting our ass kicked by wererats we're fighting in a tower. On elf my brothers climbed down the rope we climbed up to get to the top and just runs away. The rest of us decided to follow suit instead of climbing down we ran through the tower and out the door that apparently wasn't locked. The wererat leader is taking pot shots at us from the top of the tower. Lo and behold the brother who first ran away came back climbed the tower pulled the rope up with him wrapped it around the leaders neck while tackling him off the side of the tower.

The leader dies my brother takes fall damage. The other wererats see their leader killed and run away (probably my dad taking pity on us.)

Still called him an ass for running away like that but he won us the fight.

That's fucking hilarious. An unplanned tug-of-war between a panicked team of asshole goblins and a party of adventurers who completely avoided their trap.

>Player 1 is a socialite Mind/Life Adept built for communicating with people and knowing everyone. Player 2 is an ex-thug turned Awakened. Outrageous Spirit focus with a pet familiar. The most they have is a single handgun for the two of them, and the thug isn good with it.
>Strange magic events happening around a certain building, trying to talk their way past a secretary to investigate.
>Piss off the secretary, get sent to a 'shard', a small pocket reality otherwise identical to the real reality
>Tough, regenerating golems burst out of the building. Bullets do little to nothing, and the damage they deal is quickly regrown

>Spirit player- a brand new RPG player- decides to open a portal to the spirit realm directly underneath the golems

>Investigate everything from the shardside, using the spirit player's interplane vision to see what's going on in reality

I was so proud. I'd expected either a big fight or a chase scene, but instead they sent the golems away.

Of course, next time they're in the area in the spirit realm, they'll get to fight scarier, spirit-possessed golems. Which should be fun.

Change the story so she is related to the murderer. He now wants to avenge her.

>>Start making noise to attract the goblin's attention, they start cranking device
Was it a retirement cave for goblins or something, that they needed a noise louder than tearing down a fucking wall to be noticed?

>oWOD Mage game
>story revolves around a powerful artifact that has upset the balance of the setting
>players are torn between two factions that want to claim the newly discovered artifact for themselves
>both factions are otherwise sensible and worked together before the artifact appeared
>expect group to choose A or B
>group decides they liked the status quo better than giving someone the upper hand
>group decides to steal the artifact, make it vanish, and come up with a plausible bogeyman to unite the factions again

Also good.

Yesterday evening I had such a situation. Just so this makes sense: the GM had given me a Stoneater chainmail which allows my character to 'swim' through ground and stone.

So we were in a cave and needed to talk to a spirit. There was, however, a barrier made of electricity that blocked us from reaching the spirit. I asked how high the ceiling was. Then I asked how high the fence was. They were 15 feet and fourteen feet respectabily. I asked if the barrier was electrified on the top too. The GM said no, so I burrowed into the wall, 'swam' to just above the spirit and dropped down beside it. It was a bit cross that I did not solve it's trials, but we did not roll for initiative.

Felt good. Also because my tarot card that another player selected for my character was 'the Fool'

>On a boat with the party
>Suddenly, about a dozen lizardmen climb onto the boat
>I cast Gust of Wind, blowing two of them off the boat
>I then use my bonus action to redirect the spell, blowing another three off
>The entire party loses their shit at the utility wizard removing five enemies from the encounter in a single turn
that was a good fight

This is great, I like your wizard

>self
>adjacent

only in an extremely loose reading of RAW sure

A proud moment of mine was when my party ambushed the dungeon boss in her study and struck up a polite conversation. Things went okay until they tried to relieve her of a magic item and she proceeded to go all out on the party.

They won, she died. Unfortunately, the item that started the fight was a panic button for her necromancer boss. Campaign ended before I could bring back a vengeful undead cleric for round 2.

This is why I design my encounters so the players are unlikely to win in traditional combat. I pulled the same thing on my GM a few times when my warlock finally decided to use a spell slot and wiped half the encounter.

If it's 5ft adjacent to the original target, which I've seen it worded as before, then yes. Still silly.

>Designing encounters so that players are unlikely to win in traditional combat
i like you
>Party was fighting a wizard dude to save a princess, standard dealio
>Suddenly, he runs back and reads from a scroll
>hellnaw.jpg
>A shitload of goblins, ogres and our two missing party members
>waitwhat
>Party members snap out of whatever was compelling them and run over to us
>We now have to fight, at the DM's count, 97 goblinoids of various shapes and sizes
and that's when the party found out that 'Traditional Combat' is less effective than 'Run to enemy, Thunderwave-punch, use haste action to disengage if any enemies are still in AoO range, run behind cover, repeat until everything dies'
when that fails, run from cover to cover using Chill Touch fingerguns

>MFW my character started out as a utility-based wizard who set out to hunt down necromancers and become a hero so he could go home without fucking peasants trying to burn his house down for witchcraft or whatever
>He's slowly turning into All Might
i don't know if I'm okay with this or not

More fun "avoid direct combat" gimmicks I've seen or used...

>Release a caged monster.
>Scare away mounts.
>Illusions.
>Ledges.

>Kindred of the Middle East round
>players find out who the culprit in the court intrigue is
>"Look friend, we know you did it, and if we tried hard enough, we could even produce proof. But it's bothersome and you seem useful anyway, so if you can present a third party to pin the blame on, we can do business."

I had to take an entrance exam to a mage's college once. We were being graded on ability/creativity/spell selection and other stuff. One of the tests involved blowing out a circle of candles without moving from a predetermined spot and without repeating a spell we'd used previously.

Well I'd already used the one wind spell I knew, so I summoned an angel and politely asked her to blow the candles out for me.

Not even the craziest thing to happen during the exams, but a lot of those honors go to NPCs.

An old PF game from years ago.
>Trying to find the three translations of the Book of the Damned before a demon cult does
>Steal one from the cult, then find another in an ancient Dwarf ruin
>Along the way, our dead barbarian finds the long lost dwarf King's axe
>By dwarven law he is technically king now
>We are invited to an emergency meeting among the other kings and world leaders to discuss this
The main human kingdom was currently occupying the dwarf territory because it connected to another continent ruled by orcs that they wanted to invade. They were only able to do this because the dwarves had not yet picked a new king after their last one disappeared.
>We recognize a man and woman at the meeting as the demon cult leader and her demon bodyguard in his human disguise
>She's apparently head of the "council," some sort of oligarchy controlling a neighboring country
>After dwarf barbarian and the human king negotiate a gradual withdrawal of human troops out of dwarf lands, we ask for a recess
>Wizard has a scroll of Mad Monkeys
>Summons a monkey swarm that understands his commands
>He also has lots of parchment
>Wizard draws several explosive runes and hands one to each monkey
>We run back into the meeting and unleash a swarm of kamikaze monkeys at the councilwoman and her demon friend
>The cult leader is reduced to ash, dropping the Book of the Damned while the demon (a glaberzu) angrily transforms in front of everyone

After killing him in a huge fight that cost the life of my bard, we get away with this blatant assassination since we can prove they were both evil. One was a demon; the other has a demon book. King decided it was good enough. Fun game. Lots good memories.

Lizardman can swim yo

Oh, sure. One or two of them got back on, and were promptly barbarian'd.
The boat was still moving at a decent clip, so the rest just couldn't catch up. I guess the two that made it back on were really fast swimmers or something.

Either that, or they did a risk-reward evaluation on the entire situation.
Get back onto the boat with the human who has apparently made the god of wind his bitch, the ten foot monster of a man with a greatsword bigger than you are, the extremely angry woman and the, uh, elf.

>Running game for two gestalt PCs
>One is a Drider/Anti-Paladin
>Other is a Medusa/Kineticist
>First encounter is three 1/3 CR Bandits and one 1/2 CR ranger
>They kill one bandit and get their shit shoved in so horribly that I don't think they'll ever shit properly again.
>Game went from standard beginning to them being enslaved by the local bandit warlord to be his attack dogs.
>Game improved by low/high rolls.

>Star Wars Edge of the Empire
>Players are robbing a Hutt casino
>Expect them to go for the credits in the vault
>Nope, instead they decide to steal the golden statue of the Hutt himself from the center of the casino floor
>Rig the Hutt statue with scavenged repulsor-units during running firefight with security
>Climb on-board and fulton extract out through the skylights
>Later use the Hutt statue to cripple a star destroyer by slinging it into the command bridge RoTJ style

I love it when a plan comes together.

-You can't possibly defeat Maldrin! He's an unparalleled psionic, who can even deflect bullets!
-"You did say this tower is six miles tall, and there aren't even safety railings here..."
-"Oh, I did say that. "
(A roll later, the villain is pushed off his own tower and reduced to a pancake)

>Players are mercs in a warzone, get hired to aquire an APC, the better state/model it is the more they get.
>Set up a few hooks, a broken down APC they need to repair, some better but heavily defended APCs at the docks
>Players initially go for the broken down APC, repair the tracks and main engine
>Figure they are ok with modest payment
>Instead they steal enemy crew uniforms and get forged IDs, and drive the APC towards the docks
>Since the enemy is in full retreat towards the docks, noone really questions the heavily damaged APC
>Party bluffs their way onto the docks, party mechanic helps load some stuff while the infiltrator sneaks aboard a cargo ship
>Hijack one of the APCs there and burst out of the ship, firing HE autocannons everywhere
>Manage to escape to a safehouse they organized earlier
>Made bank
I didn't expect them to use one APC to get a better one, but I wasn't complaining.

As a crazy wizard I jumped inside of a water elemental and cast thunderwave. Fun shit

Sorry, I should elaborate. The idea is that the players start calling out answers to the riddle. The riddle was obviously bad, along the lines of:

i flow an flow
down I go
then I gone

The players make themselves known to the goblins by calling out answers to the door, so the goblins can be lazy and not have to keep watch. The goblins also have a device behind the door that simulates the sounds of gears turning behind the door, making the players think they solved the riddle, so they sit and wait for the door to open. This gives the goblins enough time to sneak out and set up a proper ambush.

*Dwarf barbarian not dead barbarian

>riddle
it was buckets of goblin filth thrown in a river, wasn't it?

There was no answer. Water maybe? I didn't have to have an answer, just something to make the players start calling out answers or otherwise discuss loudly.