Most Unexpected Moments In Your Campaign

[Cadfan]

I had a 3e game where I permitted a War Weaver prc. I thought it would be cool to include someone who helped everyone actually work together for a change.

What it really did was amp up the game's power level an incredible amount.

I rolled with it, since I knew the game only was going to last for a semester. The wildest moment probably involved raiding a hobgoblin fortress by flying over on griffons piloted by allied warriors, leaping off, and landing in the fortress with the entire 8th level party benefiting from feather fall, invisibility, bull's strength, bear's endurance, cat's grace, enlarge, haste, and prayer.

I let them play out the campaign as super paratroopers of doom. They had a good time with it, even though it really wasn't what I had in mind when I started running the game. If it had been a long term campaign I would have stomped on this at some point, but I relax a bit when I know there's a predetermined end point to their shenanigans.

 

[Akaiku]

Well, in my most recent game, a 7th level starpact warlock girl held down a gibbering mouther. Sigh@high rolls. I guess that's not as cool as your stories though....

 

[Evilhalfling]

The game started in a city run by necromancers, they had a couple of adventures and had run into three or four important city factions.

Meanwhile, this world had a running grapevine that talked about what the high level NPCs were up too: wars, world saving missions, feuds, unexpected lesbian pregnancies etc...

One of the news stories from the grapevine mentions a series of high profile actors being killed & beheaded in a distant city. The PCs decide to abandon the current plotline, hike cross country and attempt to solve/stop the crimes.

PCs level 4, NPC villian 17th. They won, out-maneuvering him to at first disguise their identity, and foiling attempts to quietly dispose of them. They turned other power groups against him. During the final confrontation, they fled the city to avoid being killed in the crossfire.
It was a much better campaign than the one I was planning.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

[Minor thread derail]

Yay! This forum is about sharing gaming stories and wisdom again!

[/minor thread derail]

Yeah, I miss these sorts of threads. These used to be around the place a lot on EN World. Now they seem to only pop up every now and again. That's why I decided to start one.

Olaf the Stout

 

[Jhaelen]

They used locate object, lo and behold it was in the pointy top of the pyramid. So instead of plowing through the base and working upwards, they blasted a hole in the top of the pyramid and my brother flew up on his mount and plucked it from it's resting spot.

Yep, I remember us dodging an extended dungeon crawl with a similar method. In our case it involved the use of two potions of gaseous form, though.

There was another adventure that should have been about entering a gate to a different plane. Since the DM thought the other plane would be pretty tough, he decided to place a treasure room before the gate room. Naturally, we plundered the treasure room and never bothered actually entering that gate...

 

[Tewligan]

In 1e campaign I'm DMing, the party had fought their way deep into the tomb of an ancient and infamous bandit king. Along the way, they learned that Brekkar Hundred Hands apparently had some demon blood in him, with plenty of dire descriptions, frescoes, and hints scattered throughout his tomb. Finally, after plenty of undead and unpleasant traps, they force open the door of a chamber containing an 8' tall dessicated corpse sitting motionless on a stone throne, holding a weapon in each of his four hands - I had plans for him to animate and fight the party once they crossed the threshold. Instead, the characters huddled just outside the door without entering, and discussed their next course of action in panicked half-whispers. Eventually, they decided that the rather ominous-looking Brekkar had been doing just fine left undisturbed for the past few hundred years, and they didn't really need whatever treasure he might have anyway. With that, they quietly closed the door and carefully made their way out of the tomb complex, saddled up their horses, and hightailed it back to town.

 

[aboyd]

What have your players done that you didn’t expect?

One from a game I play in, one from a game I DM.

As players running through the Freeport trilogy, we made it through all the quests to save Freeport, except the very last part. We stood at the lighthouse mere hours before it would turn on and send out its evil beacon. We were rested and ready to enter. Then one of us shrugged, and said, "We're neutral. Wouldn't it keep some balance for evil to flourish in the world?" The rest of the players agreed. We got on a ship, sailed away, and left the city of Freeport to its destruction.

Five levels later, the DM is still trying to work out the effects that has had on the world.

Now for the game I DM. My players had come across an overly well-defended town run by a lawful good lord. He had a military background, ran a tight ship (no thieves' guild or assassins' guild at all, not enough leeway for crime to flourish much), and the citizens were pretty thankful and proud of it. But my players, who at the time were almost all neutral good, had done a forced march to get to the town before nightfall, and were under exhaustion effects. When the guard wouldn't let them enter, the players intimidated him, and were jailed for threatening an officer. They became furious. When they were brought before the lord of the town to be released, they instead got into a shouting match and were re-jailed, and then eventually escorted to the town's perimeter. The players deemed the lord of the town to be the villain of my campaign. So now this party of do-gooders has a long-term goal of overthrowing a respected, lawful good leader.

Needless to say, that was unexpected.

 

[WotC_GregB]

One of the most unexpected and memorable moments in my campaign was in the climactic fight of the campaign arc. The characters had failed their skill challenge to quell the swirling vortex in the center of the room. The characters didn't know where it led, and as they concluded the fight, all of them began to be pulled toward the center. They tried to escape, but only one PC succeeded. He, along with two of the important NPCs made it to the exit.

He then closed the door on them and braced it shut.

It was the end of the campaign, and the vortex didn't lead to their deaths, so they were forgiving. Nonetheless, I sort of expected all of them to get sucked in, or else none of them. I never considered such an amusing betrayal! Fortunately, it gave me lots of fodder for the next campaign arc.

 

[Stormsparrow]

Just last week, our party, composed of an incredibly varied and disfunctional lot of characters, stumbled upon the lair of a green dragon. The dragon seemed more than happy to barter with us and was cheerfully asking us what shiny things we might trade for macguffin in question. Unfortunately, our stab happy Paladin decides to take a poke at the poor dragon leading to a fight that should have resulted in a TPK.

Somehow we make it through with only one casualty and a badly wounded rogue. Our cleric makes an attempt to heal him, only to critically fail and push him into a lake of acid. Wracked by guilt, he jumps in after him, forgetting that he doesn't know how to swim. While this is going on, the bard gets upset with the paladin and decides to convince my antisocial warlock that he is plotting against us.

When the cleric, having failed to save our rogue, pulls himself from the acid water, he is greeted with the sight of his two party members murdering the paladin in cold blood. The bard, who has gone completely insane, then forces my warlock to put on a suspect necklace which subsequently possesses him with astral spirits.

My warlock murders his two remaining companions, but only after desperately attempting to tear the necklace from his chest while screaming "I'm so sorry!" The cleric was his only friend.

So everyone died and now my warlock is the villain of the next campaign.

It was supposed to be a dungeon crawl.

 

[Nightson]

Start of an adventure, PCs have woken up confused in an empty room with no memory of who they are or how they got there

*after some interparty dialogue*
DM: You hear footsteps from the room beyond, someone is coming.
*party hunkers down*
DM: The door opens, several humanoids talking to themselves are coming in...
PC: I shoot the first guy in the face.
DM: ...what?
PC: I chaos bolt the first guy. *rolls* Sweet critical hit.
DM: ...his brain explodes.

And so I tossed aside my two pages of potential dialogue with the NPC captain of the squad and eventually every single thing I prepared for the adventure.