Give us tales from your campaigns showing how quickly a session or campaign went from "perfectly normal session" to complete shitshow, either due to bad luck or really stupid player choices.
I'll start. I recently started a campaign which is set 1400 years after the last campaign in this setting. The four PC's started by making a gunslinger, a cavalier, and two orc barbarians; orc twins competing to see who was the stronger brother.
Well, the first session went well, and they made it into the local town after being attacked by halfling-supremacist bandits on the road. All going well, but almost immediately the orc brothers start acting up. One plays a stupid but harmless practical joke on the other, which he responds to aggressively. It continues to bounce back and forth until they're being thrown out of the Inn for breaking stuff and disturbing the customers.
Now, out in the street, they continue their little rampage, moving up to disturbing the peace, scaring passers by, plotting a robbery of the mayor, and stealing from a dwarf merchant. When the guards tried to arrest them, they fought back and killed a guard before being beaten unconscious and dragged to jail.
The next day, an execution was arranged, but the guards didn't know which of the two was the murderer since they were identical twins. The orcs were given the oppurtunity to confess to save the innocent one, but both blamed the other, so both were to be executed. Well, they decided to fight to the death from inside their cell, ultimately forcing the guards to shoot one in the head while the other was bludgeoned to death by a mob of people that came to assist the guards.
It took one and a half sessions for two PC's to die because they couldn't stop feeding off each other's taunting and bullshit.
Brody Jenkins
>halfling-supremacist bandits holy shit stealing this
Owen Nguyen
More.
Running Dark Heresy and a new player joins the campaign. He makes a psyker and decided he is playing a “we must purge the degenerates” /pol/ type. Second session after he joins, he’s decided just hunting cultists isn’t good enough, he wants to kill all the degenerates, including hookers, the homeless, Thots, drug-users, and the like. So, he goes to a local brothel with the intention of slaughtering the hookers inside. He bluffs his way inside and takes a hooker to a room, where he loudly murders her. The bouncer goes to investigate and discovers the psyker standing over the body of the hooker. Enraged he whips out his pistol and tries to shoot the psyker. The psyker replies by attempting to attack with a psychic power. Unluckily, he triggers perils of the warp when casting the power, causing all gravity within a 100 metre radius to reverse, and people to rise 30 metres into the air before falling. As you might expect, a hundred metre radius in a hive city means a lot of people have just fallen to their deaths. So in one hour he went from trying to murder a hooker in a brothel to accidentally causing a psychic phenomena that killed hundreds and caused mass panic.
Henry Butler
They belong to a wider group of Halfling supremacists who want to “kill all the long-legs” and drive all non-short folk out of the valley, thus forming the glorious Halfling ethnostate where they can live and gorge themselves in peace.
Jace Gray
>Party is working for a corrupt noble who's secretly using them to tie up loose ends in her own elicit dealings by telling the party they're going after criminals >Party starts to figure this out over time, except for the wizard, he's busy trying to fish for downtime so he can research some cursed artifact the party found earlier in the campaign >Noble knows the party is onto her and she declares THEM criminals >Her guards show up at the Inn to arrest the players, who all cheese it the fuck out there because they know what's up. >Nobody has told the poor wizard this, so he's like "HEY GUYS! I'M SURE THIS IS ALL A MISUNDERSTANDING! LET'S GO TALK TO HER!" and lets himself get arrested. >Party wizard ends up in the fantasy version of a secret blacksite prison being tortured for information on the rest of the party when he doesn't even know WTF is going on and the noble now has posession of a cursed artifact that's slowly turning her into a vampire because she has no idea what it does or how to safely handle it, and can turn other people into vampires if she ever finds out what it is. >This literally all could have been avoided if someone had taken like 10 seconds to tell the wizard what was going on. These were literally filler-bounties to pad out the party's brief stop in this city before the next major plot arc...
Connor Davis
Next from me, and this is the shortest a campaign of mine has ever lasted.
Make fantasy campaign, and all three players make halflings. Since they’re all halflings, they immediately decide to play Halfling supremacists that want to purge their homeland of non-halflings (this is where I got the idea from).
Immediately they ditch the main quest to try and murder some humans. They start by buying a pie, filling it with bags of gunpowder, and drop it off at the nearby human settlement and tell them to cook it. Then they decide to join the guy I had originally set up as the bad guy of the setting, a Halfling who had been taking outsiders as slaves to work their silver mines.
While wandering around to find this guy, they come across one of the silver mines, and they discover an elf bard in a cage, who was captured by the halflings so she could entertain them with entertain them with music.
One of the players suddenly decides his character has an irrational, murderous hatred of elves and spellcasters so he ‘had no choice’ but to run up and slit her throat, “it’s what my character would do”. At that point I called the game off since it was obviously they wouldn’t be able to interact with anyone without trying to murder them.
Carson Edwards
It's like GTA. Everyone starts the game with killing pedestrians, robbing stores, crashing cars and break shit. I usually let them blow of some steam for a while (with consequences of course).
I found that after a couple of sessions most of my players got tired of doing random stuff and murderhoboing, and the real campaign could start. Might not work with everyone.
Samuel Ross
We've had the same thing. This guy keeps complaining how we all reference that incident and how he keeps having to deal with the consequences of accidentally turning off gravity and killing a few hundred people in the process.
He still hasn't registered two months later that major psychic phenomena isn't something that gets forgotten.
Aaron Lewis
>be playing Dark Heresy >dealing with slaanesh cult >have a psyker >raid the main cultist hideout >psyker perils into an anbound tzeenchian demonhost with absurd stats who looks like a normal person >players get the fuck out of dodge >Slaanesh cult is no longer a problem >have to contain the unbound demonhost >lol 5kexp group.jpg >the campaign shifts into us hunting the demonhost as our arch-enemy, who constantly fucks with us on other missions >killed him by primaris psyker launching a dead rubric marine at him on top of a blood volcano
Adrian Howard
Pathfinder playing Kingmaker with a first time (for us) GM who used to be player. I'm a half-elven Bard and bastard child from a noble family with a swan motif from brevoy (jokingly called the black swan as a play on black sheep), geared to support and social, we have a human cavalier, a human wizard, a halfling ninja and a dwarven Cleric. We get two books into it and the campaign is going great. My character is King by group consensus, Cavalier is lord of a second town we build and general of the armies, Wizard has set himself up in a tower on a lake, Halfling is royal assassin/spymaster, and Dwarven Cleric has built a temple to Torag, funded the building of a temple of Erastil and Abadar, and sits at the head of a Clerics council. Trade was good, game was going great. Until GM brought along his new girlfriend.
She rolled up a half-fairy elf, and at first session she played she was going to be the queen. After bitching and yelling at me for not stepping aside as she was "the rightful queen of the lands" the GM intervened by having my character killed by an errant ballista bolt (no rolls, or saves, just happened) that flew in through the window. Told me to roll a new character and told the dwarven cleric he couldn't resurrect mine. Told the other players that the new queen was "voted in" by the people because apparently my character was hated by the people, despite it not being an issue. This sparked an argument with the rest of the table as they felt that as I'd been put in by group consensus the GM shouldn't just shit on their choice. The argument was ended by the halfling player who told me to stop bitching and roll a new character, for everyone to calm down it's just a game, and we should just get back to play. I set to rolling new character (still pissed) while game resumed. Halfling player's first action was to stab Half-fairy queen to death.
And that's how that gaming group ended.
Ayden Torres
>"Stop bitching and get back to playing" >Stabs the bitch
I hope you're still friends with that guy. Fuck that GM though.
Zachary Butler
That halfling was pretty cool
Angel Diaz
Still friends, and we still laugh at that one. Really into committing to roleplaying and character, helps new players and always gives good advice. I'm louder, outgoing, he's quiet, kinda taciturn, with the others a spectrum in between.
Definitely a cool guy
Christian Wood
The funniest part is that he was totally justified. The guy was literally your spymaster and personal assassin; it's not a stretch to think that the ballista bolt was somehow her doing.
Tyler Miller
Redeemed at the last moment. A good read, user.
Dylan Parker
>playing a game about colonizing a land >looks good >That Girl wants to be Gunslinger >oh boy here we go >That Guy wants to be Hexblade, of course >when autism and cancer meet
>start session >immediately That Girl despite being a ranged Gunslinger takes the lead >That Guy Hexblade says he also takes the lead and the two start vying for DM attention >meanwhile, me (Bard), Rogue, and Ranger barely get to say anything or do anything as 90% of interactions is That Girl and That Guy talking over each other and us
>enter in to ruins >That Girl and That Guy split parties up >I say we shouldn't do that >they do it anyway >at this point I and other party members already feel defeated and just follow That Girl's lead >That Girl brags about how her leadership is great because we decided to follow her lead >eventually we find some magic items >Ranger is the one who picked it up, but That Girl takes it and prys it from his hand
>next session >come to a trapped door >our Rogue is running late an hour and says we can control him >That Girl decide to use our Rogue as trap meatshield >after Rogue is consistently getting hurt and better and I have to heal him, we come across a locked chest >That Girl uses Rogue to open chest, and after more traps, takes chest for herself
>only relevant thing that happened for me was noticing some spooky ghost man as we leave ruins from Perception rolls >reporting to captain of colonizing crew of what we saw >That Girl takes charge of course, explains everything >as I'm about to bring up spooky ghost man she goes "Oh yeah and one of my guys saw a strange ghostly figure" even if her character had no idea what I saw
>later on That Guy decides to steal from That Girl >they steal the magical items she looted and sell it >no idea what happened after because I dropped out of the game
Sad because the DM and world setting was decent. All ruined by two That Guys.
Jason Clark
Somehow the people telling these stories are always bard players.
Levi Baker
Makes sense, doesn't it?
Samuel Bailey
Was this a Roll20 game? I'm curious as I feel it could have been a game I was apart of a while back. Terra Nova was the campaign name
Caleb Torres
I posted this the other day but it remains relevant
>literally four days ago >players punch way above their weight class, fighting a rhemoraz at 2nd/3rd level >the encounter was meant to illustrate why the region they're in was dangerous, the idea was to hide from the creature and escape when it attacks >there is an argument at the table over what to do, and by argument, I mean three players are completely and utterly silent, the tactician wants to run, and his girlfriend? >fucktard girlfriend wants experience, decides to attack it
This is the part where I knew the session was in trouble. If a player is convinced that something will give them experience, there is nothing that will stop them. And a rhemoraz, or really any CR 10+ creature, will be able to chew a party of 3rd levels to bits if played even remotely correction.
So the session turned from "run D&D" to "coddle a bunch of idiots and desperately try to keep them from getting into a TPK.
>derail the NPCs into screaming 'run' and having them actively run just to convince them that they, too, must run >this gets the players mad at them for being cowards
And then we actually get to the person that caused all this who is also convinced she's playing a half-fairy, in a nod to this unlucky bastard
>whines whenever its not her turn >whines whenever the stupid fucktard thing she wanted to do doesn't work, because of abysmal rolling >whines because characters might die >whines because I killed a character that jumped straight towards the damn thing's mouth >whines because the session is running long It took all of my power not to drop the group right then and there, and I decided that it was just going to run away at like 60% health even though it could have eaten them all in one bite without incident the way they were playing >whines they she didn't get to kill it because it ran away and burrowed out of reach My fucking face.
Nolan Reyes
Roll20 game yes, but not the name of what you mentioned.
Anthony Hughes
Just have the monster kill some NPCs. Watching the DM move the monster's mini over to an NPC, pretend to roll a bunch of dice behind the screen and remove the NPC mini while claiming he just took several dozen damage and was instantly eviscerated tends to send the message. At that point if they don't run or come up with something, have the monster down a PC per turn until they figure it out.
Bentley Morales
Apart from the fact that I was running without minis, I did.
Owen Edwards
We had something similar happen in our game last session, nearly ruined by a That Guy.
>Our group is working for a cult-like group trying to stop a powerful being from being restored to power by rival cult. >New PC is introduced, a orc wizard with the ability to see the alternate plane where the bad guys are. >NPCs give him a macguffin that lets us teleport to this place, which is a Roman-colliseum style place. >NPCs tell him to find us a safe place to land. >He sees the center of the arena and decides "this is a good place." >We teleport, only to see us surrounded by a giant Troll and a PIT LORD.
If it wasn't for the fact that the DM brought along his donutsteel plot armor NPC we wouldve been trashed. He ended the session after the fight and most of us players (who had no idea what we were getting into when he did the teleport magic) are this close to simply murdering this PC.
Kayden Jenkins
I mean it just seems like a dumb decision to make on the player's part. The only red flag I see there is the 'can see into alternate plane' thing.
Austin Bailey
I think the last thing to go horribly wrong in one of my games can be summed up as >Raging barbarian punches straight through the only person with AC worth a damn
James Barnes
Well, I talked with the DM afterwards cause a group of 4 level 3 PCs should have no business near a Pit Lord, and he told me that this battle was supposed to happen in the backdrop while we investigate the arena thing for unusual activity. The PC saw the fight and said "That's cool we should go there." And the DM warned him strongly against it. He did it anyway.
Julian Hall
Fuck that guy.
Justin Stewart
Last Friday
Playing friend's Homebrew campaign in which the world was destroyed by Tiamat following our previous parties failure in final confrontation of Rise of Tiamat. Currently in the elemental plane of fire in the City of Brass to find some asshole slave trade leader in the Underdark. Following a game of chance we played in a local pub, we received information how to get to where we need to by crossing the Sea of Flames with a spelljammer ship. We go to the docks to aquire a ride after stocking up on supplies but the dockmaster won't give us information on the ship because we don't own it. Tells us the ship was last used to make a delivery to the bar we had just left several weeks ago. So we begin to head back...
Enter some cloaked douchebag in a carriage that spits on one of our party members, an Orc. Orc tells him to apologise. Douchebag doesn't and tells him that he is beneath him. Orc then tells him lick the spit off his leg. Douchebag refuses. Orc then grabs him and begins to force him to the ground. Douchebag begins to call for the town guard nonchalantly.
Shit begins escalate from here...
Robert Parker
>the world was destroyed by Tiamat following our previous parties failure That's pretty ballsy on the part of the DM.
Zachary Reed
>flametongue weapons can only be swords! >"The dm doesn't care. I've seen other people break that. Let It Go" >Change it! >"Fuck off" >I'm leaving then GG no re.Game ended because some slurring she-nog was the only person who'd try and enforce a pointless contrivance rule
Gavin Turner
Suddenly, our tabaxi player says he wants to make an action to stuff his mouth full of moon sugar he had on his person... DM asks if he's sure about that. Tabaxi says yes and makes the roll. He succeeds and stuffs the douchebag's mouth full of drugs just as two fire elemental guards show up. Tabaxi then punches the douchebag in the stomach to force him to swallow the narcotics and begins to run away. Guards order the orc to drop the man before pursuing the fleeing tabaxi. The orc complies, all the while the rest of us are just watching this shit show unfold before our very eyes. The tabaxi gets incapped with one attack and arrest him. The rest of us, including the orc, are about to get off scott free because we didn't escalate the situation. Orc player then asks DM where the douchebag is. DM says he's getting into his carriage and probably going to a medical facility as he just been poisoned.
Our orc player asks if he can kill him before he escapes...
DM is... Surprised by this. Some of us begin to speak up that he should not do that. DM says the choice is his to make. Orc says he does want to kill him.
Makes the roll. Succeeds. Orc ends up throwing an axe and hitting him in the head, killing him instantly. Guards begin to turn on the orc after he does this. Orc prepares for a fight. Incapped in one attack.
Two... Two of our players are now being arrested. One for assault... And one for murder. Both crimes in plain view of multiple people in the middle of a street. Guards ask us if we know them. We all say no, but ask what is going to happen to them. Guards say they will be given a trial, in which their friends, whoever they are should try and find them a lawyer to defend them, otherwise they will both be executed in five days...
Bentley Thomas
>she-nog ?
Alexander Carter
Black woman. No white girl sounds like she does, no asain or other ethnicity. She is black and sounds like her tongue is glued to the bottom of her mouth- it's like listening to a woman do a bad Murderface impression
Michael Cooper
At this point DM calls the session there because he doesn't have anything else for what has just currently transpired. He says this is the first time a players action's have actually thrown him for a loop.
He had planned a big high sailing adventure that would have involved encounters with pirates on the Sea of Flames, but that would have to be delayed possibly, should we decide to help our comrades out of their situation.
We were about to play Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag but it seems that now we're playing Ace Attorney. Both great games mind you but I was hoping for a little more plot progression and encounters.
Tonight we continue this little side quest. And I gotta say, I'm actually interested to see where this goes.
Cameron Roberts
We were all surprised when he said he was writing the campaign. It's actually been quite impressive so far. He's put about a year's worth of work into it.
It takes place about 100 years in the future after Tiamat and her dragons ravaged the world and everyone who's left lives in the Underdark.
Gabriel Young
I'm not sure how you're going to phoenix wright your way out of a murder two guards just blatantly saw him do from a distance and without provacation
Nathan Peterson
I've played a game where we were in a similar situation. We ended up planting false evidence implicating the victims (a husband and wife) in various crimes, like treason, espionage, and embezzlement.
The resulting outrage from the "scandal" was so widespread and readily believed that the PC on trial actually ended up being commended for his actions.
The couples daughter, who knew her parents were innocent, ended up becoming our most dangerous enemy.
Benjamin Allen
>Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag >great game What
Jayden Evans
Honestly that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to happen when you've got two Orc Barbarians trying to one-up each other in a civilized area.
Eli Brown
One of the only good AssCreed games, alongside 2 and Brotherhood.
Jack Baker
I've had a campaign where the players got themselves trapped in the Fey realm due to some bad decisions that culminated into a "let's destroy the portal so they're trapped in here with us" type plan. And I use the word "plan" extremely lightly here. Anyway, I was like fine, I can roll with this. It was a dumb and unnecessary plan, but there's plenty of shenanigans to be had with Fey stuff and it'll make for an interesting adventure.
So I give the players some basic info on where they are and they make some knowledge rolls to find out a bit more. Good, at least they now know not to fuck around, pay attention and don't piss anyone off if you can help it. Of course, they go around pissing off every goddamn fairy they come across by just generally being suck-fucking ratdick murderhobos. I figure I have every excuse I need to mercilessly ruin them, but that's not particularly fun so after they get slapped down they're captured and taking to the elf lord ruling this particular corner of the realm.
They get a choice. Either they'll be executed right away, they'll be locked in chains and forced to forge steel weapons (since Fey can't handle iron themsleves) for the rest of their lives, or they get to go on a quest and on completion get a full pardon and a free ticket home. Obviously they go for the quest thing, which is to kill a particularly nasty witch. Kind of a Baba Yaga type character. I explain to them that to get to the witch they have to pass a series of challenges, the first of which is to simply follow a path through the forest without ever leaving the actual path. So I throw some shit at them like a treasure lying just out of reach, but luckily they're not that fucking stupid. Until I introduce some faggot elf hurling insults and arrows at them from afar. They can either shoot back with whatever ranged attacks they have or just get on with it and keep moving since he's not actually doing much damage.
Daniel Perez
>DMs running a bandit vs nobleman campaign >no one plays to lose so we have at max 4 players on the bandit side while the rest play nobles sipping tea and steamrolling NPCs >one of DM suddenly makes the bandit king a demon puppet because ??? >ICly fractures the bandits even more >we create an offshoot to try and break away from the rapists and murderers that the bandit king lets rampant >off to a good start >one of the DMs' pocket players has their elf kill the leader of the offshoot group mid-ritual, ending the storyline >meanwhile on the nobleman side, they invade our zone ONCE and then just fuck off to better zones because the ones the bandit controls have literally NOTHING decent in it >writing all over the place >3 DMs are even considering quitting as DMs because of how bad it is
Amazing storylines indeed. Sasuga, ToW.
Asher Campbell
Except of course this is the point where the resident Barbarian decides that the faggot elf has insulted his honor and needs to die in a very personal way. So despite the protests of the rest of the party, he rages and runs at the elf. The elf is taken by surprise and swiftly ripped apart, but as soon as the elf is dead, the Barbarian just disappears. No saving throws, no nothing, fuck you, welcome to fairyland, you're out. The plan was to have everyone who failed the challenge magically return whenever another party member finishes the challenge so he only would've been out of the game for a short time, had the rest of the party not gone full fucking retard at this time.
I still have no idea why, it was one of those things where player logic goes on a merry adventure all of its own, the party convinced itself that it was actually the witch who was responsible for the challenges rather than the wood itself just being Fey bullshit (which it was), and that as such the Barbarian had to have been captured by the witch. From that they made another leap of logic, in that they assumed getting captured by the witch would get them to their target a lot faster than completing whatever bullshit challenges I had in store for them.
Completely ignoring my subtle "are you ABSOLUTELY SURE you want to do that?" hints, they all charged off into the woods. I could've, and perhaps should've, come up with something clever here without falling into the trap of validating their fucking retarded plan. I'm not too proud to admit that instead, I just gave up. Fuck you, rocks fall, you're all deleted from existence by sheer retardation while your souls are being raped by Fey bullshit for all eternity. Time to break out a new character sheet while I go ahead and dump all my wonderfully clever plans I had for the other, increasingly difficult, challenges.
And that's the story of how my players failed the epic task of walking in a straight fucking line.
Dominic Scott
Sounds like they were metagaming faggots in the "lol the DM wouldn't put us in any actual mortal danger" while simultaneously trying to cheat their way out of the challenges. Just awful.
Cameron Martinez
>manlets broke out of their pit again
Ryder Flores
Last year, my players asked me to DM something different than usual. So I proposed them to play Shadowrun. None of them had heard about it, which didn't surprise me: in my country, it's a pretty obscure game (I know, we're barbarians).
After explaining the setting, we started rolling characters. The party was composed by a troll street samurai with no sense of self-preservation, a rigger obsessed with old movies, a human mage that had utterly refused to spend points in anything but magical stuff, and a socially inept elf lady who cared only about sneaking, sniping, read manga and play videogames.
After a few runs, they found out that the campaign's bad guy was hiding in a repurposed mercantile ship that was just out of the bay.
So they decided to check a boat renting place, to get the necessary means to reach the bad guys' lair.
While the face got inside to rent something feasible to their needs, the elf broke inside of a nearby building and got on the roof. I asked why he wanted to do that, and the player told me that he wanted to give overwatch in case someone had followed them.
When I asked how the player wanted his elf to give "overwatch", he explained to me that he wanted to use his sniper rifle to look over the street to see if anyone was looking at the party members funny.
In broad daylight. On a crowded street.
Standing over the edge.
Obviously, people panicked and started yelling and calling the police.
Liam Harris
>Party is investigate a hamlet were everyone seems to have been kidnapped by blood cultists >As a sort of calling card, the cultists cast an illusion on the well to make it appear filled to the brim with blood >Only half the party sees through the illusion and they all have a laugh arguing over whether or not there is actually blood in the well >Several real life months later the party heads to another hamlet being harassed by the same cult >Cleric immediately goes to the well to see if there appears to be any blood in it, ignoring the unresponsive, glassy eyed villagers >Even though there is no illusion illusion this time they spend thirty rl minuets thoroughly investigating the well >Only one party member tries to figure out what's wrong with the villagers, everyone else aiding in the investigation or just watching. >I ooc tell them that there is nothing special about the well >"That's exactly what you would say if there was something interesting about it!" >mfw
Adam Gutierrez
Sounds like an average day in the Imperium.
Austin Scott
>years back be DM'ing post apoc one shot for way too many people >PC's woke up from hibernation and acquired a van for transportation >a big ass black sandstorm anomaly coming in setting it brings visions of pre-war world >they travel real distance, but swapping between post apoc scennery and that before war >eventually one PC declares that he knows how to wake up and advises everyone to shot themselves >CollectiveIntelligence.xls >eventually single player remains sitting in a van full of corpses
