DM's What won't your players do?

[Charles Dunwoody]

Walk in fog. I've sent them to Ravenloft (old style Ravenloft where truly horrible things happen and you can't get out) for the last three Halloweens. They totally freak out whenever fog rolls in. Some (both player and character) have taken to rolling into tight little balls and refusing to move until the horrible fog is gone and everything looks familiar again. Things like that make DMing really worthwhile.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Very little. I could present them with an old victorian house with misty vapors eminating from the windows and wolves howling in the distance and they'd cheerfully go inside and sleep that night holding signs saying "possess ME first!"

Getting them to bring their character sheet to the game, however, is another story.

 

[Eccles]

Run.

They just won't do it. It's freaky - like they're allergic or something!

 

[StalkingBlue]

My players won't have their PCs enter any towns.

Of course this is a Midnight game and all the towns are occupied and heavily garrisoned by orcs.

 

[milotha]

Stay in an inn. Something bad always seemed to happen to them in the inn, or perhaps it was the time the inn was a giant mimic and tried to eat them.

 

[gideonn]

Never trust a woman

My players no longer trust female NPCs of any kind. There were a spate of evil trickster type females for a while and that was it. Now even if she is a lawful good palladin of Heronius, they will still not trust her.

 

[Mr. Kaze]

There's not a lot that my players won't do (except do their darnedest to ignore hints and easy solutions), but we do have a story. It's called "Getting a Ladder."

So we're running one of those $2.50 pocket mods one week when the rogue didn't show up. For the purposes of the campaign, she was off joining the theives guild or somesuch. Anyway, heroes show up at shop of evil cultists down on the docks. Evil cultists were double-crossed and lost a relic-sort of item and they want it back. PCs confront the cultists about this. Paladin -- who has been looking to smite evil the entire game -- detects evil and gets a good solid reading. Cultist merely says -- doesn't charm or even roll for diplomacy -- "You go get us our relic and we'll be nice, kind and sociable and such" and off the party goes to find them their relic so that they'll be nice, kind and sociable and such.

I hadn't thought they'd do that.

So we spend the next hour wandering around town looking for leads with regards to this relic. Eventually they happen upon the thieves guild, but they don't know the secret knock to get in -- so they're hanging around in the alley for some time wondering how to get in. The party rogue spies on them from the roof (thus saving them from death by sneak attacks), but they don't spot her so they don't know it's her. All they know is that they heard something on the roof.

So they should try to get in through the roof, right?

Well to get up to the roof, they'll need a ladder. So they'll just go to the bazaar and get a ladder. Except that it's well after dark and the bazaar is closed so it will have to wait until next session.

Except that the realization occurs to the players that I hadn't turned any of the very few pages of the mini-mod in the past hour, meaning that they were probably horribly horribly off course. So now they refer to anything that results in neither page-turning nor RP progress within 15 minutes or so as "Getting A Ladder." And when, in a future campaign, the PCs decided to go chasing after a red herring (for two game-time weeks) that they'd cold shouldered in the first session, my wife simply grumbled about "chasing a ladder" and left her character in town.

::Kaze

 

[Henry]

As the trail of dead Player Characters can attest, there's NOTHING my group won't do. They'll split the party, trust an Evil Lich, volunteer to fight a dozen Frost and stone giants, walk into a room one by one where NO ONE's returning from, and in TWO separate instances walk straight into a trap for the promise of monetary gain. The only reason they didn't do it three times was because they decided to pick a more appealing job in town instead.

Not to say that they're very thoughtless or anything - it's just that the majority don't think about anyone's motivations but their own. There are a couple of players in the group who really don't go down the road of, "hmm, WHY is this guy or woman offering such a good deal? What's he getting out of it?" Conversely, where danger is concerned, if a town is offering a huge reward for a job, they get visions of the reward, and don't think why no one has to that poitn collected the reward. The aforementioned Frost Giant debacle happened when they wanted to save the town, but faced the giants head on to do it, rather than scouting and sizing them up first. In the end, they got some of the town treasure, but only after the giants raided the town first and razed it to the ground (they got it by stealing it and then hiding from the giants. )

 

[Talmun]

There is very little my players will not do, with one exception:

Trust an NPC.

I guess it's my fault, really, I've had NPCs betray them so many times they've come to sort of expect it.

 

[eris404]

In our party, the players won't own or use a wagon or cart and one player will even go to lengths to destroy one.

We once had a player who delighted in accumulating stuff. He would strip dungeon rooms of furniture, carpeting, anything that looked (to his character) to be valuable. He would take mundane armor, weapons, boots, even the clothes off of vanquished foes and store them in his wagon. Soon, he had huge hoard of almost worthless items that he had collected and catalogued. Whenever our party would go someplace where the wagon couldn't (which was most of the time), he would be very concerned about it and sometimes his character even would stay behind to guard it.

Eventually, the player left due to personality conflicts (unrelated to the wagon), and so the session after he left, one player had his character thoroughly destroy the vehicle with an axe and liberal use of fire. To this day, that players shakes when anyone mentions the word "wagon."