Meanest DMing Moment

[Ruined]

I had a bit of metagame meanness with my party recently. The party is currently in possession of half of an artifact looking for a way to destroy it before the enemy wizard can take it from them and make it whole. One of the PCs never knew her parents, having been orphaned to the church where she was raised. At one point earlier in the campaign, they ran into a double of her, possibly doppleganger, who fought like a rogue and escaped. This was established and later the player went on maternity leave.

When she came back, we decided to have some fun with the party. The PC appears back to the group, all nice and friendly. Since she's a knoweldgeable cleric type, they readily agree to let her hold onto the half of the artifact for study the first night she returns. Unfortunately, it was the assassin duplicate they handed the artifact to, who easily escaped the village. The player played the role to the hilt, working under my guidelines of what she would and would not know. And then of course I ended the session with her having gotten away, so I could hear the grumbles of players for a week.

 

[TheYeti1775]

The Ninja Rat Death....

Clearing vermin from a room. Just cleaning out a tower. And we played Triple 20 = Death.
7th Level Wizard, Burning Hands.
Sequence ----
1. Rogue listens and picks the door, says sounds like a lot of rats.
2. Fighter kicks open door.
3. Wizard steps forward and casts.
4. All but one rat are horrible burned with failed saves.
5. Ninja Rat Saves, One Hit Point Left.
6. Rat's Initiative.
7. First Roll - 20
8. Second Roll to confirm - 20
9. Third Roll - 20
10. Dead Wizard. Because of the Triple 20, we figured the rat had leapt and tore out my guys thoart. Dead before he hit the floor.
11. Party rolls miserably, chassing rat through the three rooms on that floor. Finally Cleric hits it with the shocking mace for a crit splattering her in blood all over her nice white vestments.

 

[Blackrat]

Well then. little background first. In my campaign I allowed the groups sorcerer to have a girlfriend which he picked in a bar in Calimport during one of the first sessions of the campaing. So I used the girlfriend as NPC. The group has come a LONG way since and are now in rashemen, they have used guite a bit travelling magic so the ingame time has been about two months. They were travelling through the wilderness and it was time to camp for a night. I asked the players to describe how do they arrange the encampment and guarding and so on. They plan about an hour when they finally reach an agreement. The wizard casts "Leomunds secure shelter" with a modification so that there is a hatch to the roof. Guard sits on the roof so he has a good sight around the hut. It is the end of the first guarding shift and the rogue climbs down to wake the fighter. I ask him to roll Spot and he gets natural 20, so I start telling: "First you notice that all the bag of holdings are gone. You look around and see that most of the weapons and armors that were beside the beds are also missing. You wander how The H*ll has anyone got past you and all the magical wards in the hut when you realize that one of the beds is empty, the one that belongs to Deldiyr (The sorcerers girlfriend). As you already know she is able to cast teleport."

The real fun is that the players made it all too easy for me. If they had desided to sleep in the open or with the guard inside the hut, I would have had to roll pretty damn well for Deldiyr´s move silently when she took all the stuff but now I didn´t need to roll at all.

 

[demiurge1138]

In the Mythos vs. FR epic game I ran a few years ago (I have a slight fondness for the Mythos, if you hadn't noticed), there was one thing I did that was so screw-with-player cruel I still haven't gotten over it.

Six words: Character discovers she's a deep one.

The player practically handed it to me; her backstory was her parents were evil clerics of Umberlee and the leaders of a pirate gang. Thus, she was incredibly afraid of the sea, and fairly mentally unstable to begin with. The revelation of slight scales on the neck and difficulty blinking sent poor Katte over the edge. That led to even more fun, as she checked into "Dr. Shiny's House of Rest". Dr. Shiny was, of course, a shoggoth lord.

Demiurge out.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

I think mine would be due to lack of thought of consequences on my part:

1 high level party, loaded with magical goods.
A small lake of lava.
A teleport lock effect.
An island in the middle of the lake they needed to get to.
A 1 round recharge disjunction trap.
A PC who really loved his boots of flying.

Made several discoveries from this.

Lakes of Lava are really lethal.
Removing the items from a 16th level fighter is slightly more crippling than killing them!
Disjunction is more hideous than I thought it was.

 

[Captain NeMo]

My first campaign is in it's early days yet (not a single weapon has been drawn yet) but it is probably subjecting a dwarven NPC of mine on them. Morl was his name, and he suffered from delusions of grandeur, mood swings and a need to rhyme every sentence. Oh, and he was a shady armour trader who stocked only *basic* supplies and a "magical" (hahah!) suit of bark.

 

[amethal]

My evil moment was during one of our rare forays into Call of Cthulhu.

The players had managed to get to the end of the scenario without a single character death, and had tracked the monster (a Star Vampire or something - it was a long time ago) back to its lair. They had a dismissal (?) spell handy, and were feeling pretty pleased with themselves.

The monster ambushed them, and grabbed 2 of the 3 party members in its tentacles. The third member of the party quickly cast the spell and forced the monster to return to its own dimension.

Of course, it took the two grappled characters with it .......

To this day my brother (who was playing the survivor, not one of the victims) will still whine about how I didn't describe the scene properly and how his character would have acted differently etc. etc. He may have a point

 

[Halcyon]

This may not be mean so much as comic, but then again it was a situation the player created. I should preface this by saying that I was a player in this game and not the GM, but it was recent and most of us (except the poor guy this happened to) nearly hurt ourselves laughing. In fairness the DM did let him roll several times to avoid this series of events...

So to set the stage our party is travelling along a mountain pass when we are ambushed by some kind of giants. The mountain is kind of tiered, so that there is another ledge about 20 feet below the one we are on, and another about 20 feet below that. In the initial attack most of our party is pushed off our ledge and knocked to the one below, taking falling damage and all that. The only party members who manage to avoid this fate are an NPC traveling with the group, our giant warmain and our wolverine totem warrior (this is an AU/AE game). The totem warrior was so pround of his new wolverine companion (we had all just got 3rd level) and had been telling us the whole time we were heading up the mountain about how his wolverine was "such a good climber." Because of this, and perhaps some weird fetish Id rather not speculate on, he had decided to take a rope and tie one end around the wolverine and the other end around his waist. Perhaps you can see where this is going... Since we had almost all been bullrushed off the ledge, the next round the giants had turned on the few remaining characters on the original ledge. After a few rounds of combat the totem warrior is really hurting, with his wolverine incapacitated and his own hit points dangerously close to zero. At this point, despite our greenbond's urging to sit tight, the totem warrior decides his best option is to jump. The slight problem being, he is tethered to a now unconscious wolverine. So dragging the wolverine to the edge of the ledge, he leaps down, dragging the wolverine off as he jumps. It's at this point that events really start to mirror some kind of cartoon. The totem warrior rolls for falling damage and takes enough so that he goes unconscious. The DM makes a few rolls, and then informs the warrior that the last thing he sees in a haze as he falls to the ground is his wolverine....falling past him to the ledge even further below. This of course leads to the now unconscious warrior being pulled off the ledge by the unconscious wolverine. The totem warrior ends up falling onto the wolverine, killing it and barely surviving himself. I hadn't laughed so hard at a game in a long time.

 

[spectre72]

Back in 2E days (around the time Ravenloft was released) I was running a campaign for my college gaming group and pulled out Ravenloft for use in the game.

One of my players found out and I heard through the grape vine that they had bought a copy and were using it to plan and they thought it would be "Easy".

Well I then spent the next week preparing for the game by replacing the version of Strahd in the module with a more "Ravanloft" version and started setting more traps and such in the castle.

They expected an easy adventure and I was going to make sure that was not what they got.

Looking back they were way outgunned because moving from the original Strahd to the one from the Ravenloft boxed set just made him at least twice as dangerous.

The party left for the castle without being invited (because of PC danger intuition) and went to the front door where the fighter proceeded to enter the castle without anyone checking for traps.

When the greased pit trap opened up under him and shot him out the front of the cliff around the castle he fell screaming to his death.

The group had strange looks on their faces but they pressed on to slay the evil in the castle.

Things went downhill from there as they walked into illusion covered prismatic walls, delayed blast fireballs, and an opponent who could move around the castle with no restriction through spells like dimension door.

I remember the 4 hour session ending with all but 2 characters dead and those were running for the next village.

After the session they admitted that what they had tried to do and it never happened again....

 

[Drunken Master]

the first time i ever had a chance to use a beholder against a party, i paralyzed and then petrified the party's barbarian in i think the first round. there was another combat going on around the corner, so the party took off that way to deal with the easier threat. the beholder didn't feel like leaving his defensible position by pursuing (knowing the party had to come back his way eventually), so he decided to sit tight and wait for the fight to come back to his lair. in the meantime, he's looking at the barbarian statue in front of him, and out of malicious boredom he decided to disintigrate it.