<not the adventure> Burn down the town

[Len]

A couple of weeks ago we got about halfway through that comic strip. But when it came to "So...jailbreak?" the warlock, who could dimension-door out of the jail, decided that he liked it there - it was fortified and guarded, they fed him, and he could come and go as he pleased. He wanted to make it his stronghold.

Then our cellmates attacked us.

Nope. It's quite hard for a four-men group to destroy a town of respectable size.

It didn't take much to burn down Chicago.

Besides the fact that the Great Chicago Fire started around 9 o'clock on Sunday evening, October 8, 1871, somewhere in or very near the O'Leary barn, the exact particulars of its origins are unknown. But, given the dry summer and the careless way the city had been built and managed, a kick from a cow would have been sufficient but by no means necessary to burn Chicago down. As A.T. Andreas, the city's leading nineteenth-century historian, put it, "Nature had withheld her accustomed measure of prevention, and man had added to the peril by recklessness."

http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/conflag/

 

[the Jester]

I've had a group of pcs start a forest fire.

It killed all of 'em but one.

 

[BlackSilver]

Oh, this hits close to home. I could have killed them.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

How many Players have done this to their GM?

My brother ran a solo campaign for me way back when (1981, I think). One of the few things I remember was a town filled with undead. The iron gates were locked. Call Lightning, while safely outside the gate, earned my PC a lot of xp for very little risk--as well as angry stares from my brother.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Never had it happen. Had the bad guys partially burn down a city in the process of looking for the party. Lots of terror, screaming, and running around in circles. Fun.

What I want to know is, how do those guys in the comic strip play without a table? Doesn't everyone use a table?

 

[the Jester]

What I want to know is, how do those guys in the comic strip play without a table? Doesn't everyone use a table?

We have a lil card table for our battlemat, but we don't actually play around a table. It has never really been a problem, and I can only think of three times ever since I started gaming in '81 where our group did so.

 

[Particle_Man]

Had a bunch of evil PC's go through The Village of Hommlet and kill every single villager.

The town itself, however, remained unburnt.

Hey, I was 11 or so, ok?

 

[Chimera]

I think it really surprised the players that their town was destroyed just because they didn't do anything to prevent it.

Been there, seen that. Players who think the only 'real' things that should happen are the ones they chose to be a part of. If they ignore it, it shouldn't happen.

Past Campaign: Shock of all shocks, a major (NPC) ally's new town gets destroyed by a troll army that the party failed to stop, lost interest in and decided to walk away from and then didn't bother telling their friend about. Then they get angry at the GM because the "major Ally" becomes a "FORMER Ally".

 

[Eli-kun]

Just roll a triple critical on summon monster to get a giant fire elemental, then have the fire elemental roll a tripple critical fumble on a reflex check.

 

[Contrarian]

I had the exact opposite happen: The DM got tired of the village he had designed for our characters homebase. One day, our characters returned from an adventure and found out the place had burned down during a peasant uprising.

There was no adventure connected to the event at all. The DM just wanted our characters to move on to a different city, so he told us all the NPCs we knew were dead or relocated.

I actually consider this one of the more amusing examples of railroading I've encountered over the years, because it was just so blatantly deus ex machina, there was nothing we could argue with. Sometimes peasants revolt, you know?