What's Your Proudest Moment in DMing?

[EricNoah]

End of my first Planescape campaign -- each of the PCs had been approached by a different faction or informant and each had different knowledge and different motivations going into the final set-piece encounter, which had a lot of roleplaying and some very difficult choices to make with no clear answers. Probably the only time I ever had an actual heart-pounding D&D session.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I have two moments that really stand out, but I'll start with one.

D&D 1st ed, heavily houseruled. Solo Play (the Wife ran a paladin and a Wizard). The characters are high teen levels IIRC. And the wife has played Thonolan her Paladin perfectly since level 3 (which was where we started). The character was courteous, kind, stern when he needed to be, and relentless in his pursuit of evil, and also relentless in his pursuit of helping those less well off than himself. The perfect paladin.

"I want to run a fallen paladin story for Thonolan" the wife says.

I just stare at her. "You what?"

"I want to run a fallen paladin story" she repeats.

So I think about it. The character is a Paladin serving Athena, the goddess of Wisdom, Tactics, and defensive Combat (as we ran the Goddes in our games).

So I set up one of those "chose chaotic or choose evil" type things that bad GMs throw at paladins specifically to make them lose their paladinhood. Thonolan chose the perfect solution, the action which was least in conflict with his code, but created a greater good. He loses his paladin powers until he can get to a priest and atone. It is refused.

So the character is feeling rather put upon, and gets all melancholy, turns into a near drunkard, and hooks up with some mercanaries. The alignment of the mercs is all over the place, but the leader is evil. Thonolan doesn't much like him, and some politics happen with parts of the troop lining up behind Thonolan and the rest behind the leader. A showdown will happen. All of this over the course of a couple of levels - a few months in real time.

Then the leader tells them of a great contract, that will pay lots, and ally them with a power going somewhere. The group goes to the meeting, and it is a temple of Ares (Ares and Athena were in a cold war, with some open battles happening). Thonolan balked, and refused to work for them. The showdown between them happens, and Thonolan is the victor, and gets healed by the group cleric.
Being the new leader he tells the High Priest of Ares that they are no longer interested. The priest is annoyed and wants his advance back. They give it to him. Then the priest attacks, along with other members of the temple. He is killed rather easily, but his dying breath summons an avatar of his god. (We used a lower level writeup based on the 1st ed DDG).

He offers Thonolan service (effictly doing the blackguard thing two editions before), willing to take him in as an anti-paladin. He was sorely tempted but refused. The two fought. Thonolan won but with single digit HP (and really great tactics from the wife, and really great use of some of the special abilities he'd acquired (the house rules mentioned above)).

The avatar of Ares is defeated. We had established in the world that this means that he cannot appear as an avatar on this world for 101 years.

Then Athena shows up. She tells Thonolan that this was all a ploy of hers (Goddess of Wisdom and Tactics). She saw that something like this could happen, and forced him into a mission that would, by the formal rules, make him lose his paladinhood, and then denied his atonement, to set him adrift. She then almost tearfully tells him of how much she hated to do this, but doing so let him get close enough to Ares to kill the avatar, something he could never do as a Paladin, and that she trusted him to remain loyal, even when it looked as if she abandoned him.
And he did stay loyal.
She restored his paladinhood, and then more.

The wife was really pleased with the story, and I was amazed as a GM that I could pull that off, especially the ending that kept the character in the good graces of the Gods.

The more was multiclassing to Cleric, and some special abilities borrowed from the old "Saints" article from Dragon Magazine.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

My proudest moment as DM was when I was DMing for the first time in years. I never felt I was a particularly good DM, especially when it came to NPC interacting out of combat with the PCs, until this session

Running a module where the PCs needed to find a map that belonged to a person who had died a number of years back. Standard D&Dism, the map had been buried with him so the PCs needed to open his tomb, where of course a fight with undead would ensue - until one player decides maybe the map isn't in his tomb, but in the house where he used to live. The party splits up, with half going to the tomb, the other half going to his former home.

Huh? I don't have anything in the module about where he used to live, [panic begins to build] but I decide I will do my best and wing it. I make up a location for the home on the spot as well as the couple who lives there now. The players spend almost 30 minutes real-time talking with the woman and searching the home when she gives them permission. I make her act like a star-stricken fan if a celebrity were to visit their home; so impressed with these exciting adventurers, and her little home being a part of it all! She spends time chatting on and on, bringing them tea and relishing how jealous Goodwife Jones will be when she finds out adventurers visited her.

At the end of the session I ask for some feedback from the players since it had been so long since I had DMed. Everyone mentioned how much fun the search of the house was. Nothing that had any signifigance to the adventure happened, but it stood out in all of their minds above the fight at the tombs and other more exciting moments that had actual relevance to the adventure.

 

[Set]

I'm always fond of moments when everyone in the room is red-faced and teary-eyed from laughter, but that is a combination of stuff happening in game and one of us saying something completely smartass...

Most recently, I whipped up a small adventure in-between pre-packaged adventures, and the players said that was the best of the 'module' so far, not realizing that it was something I'd added myself. I kinda felt all smug and proud of myself after that.

For pure mechanics, I re-wrote an encounter in the adventure to better suit what I thought was an appropriate power level, and the encounter brought every single character to zero hit points (at different times, thankfully!) with only one going into low negatives. At the end, they'd won, but had no spells, no potions and were running in single digit hit points. It was probably the most perfect on-the-edge combat encounter I've ever run. I'm still looking to recreate that 'sweet spot.'

 

[Silver Moon]

That's easy. Around five years ago the father of one of our long-time players died. Most of the group went to the wake or funeral. He missed the game immediately afterwards but came the following week. After a few minutes it became clear to me and others that he needed to talk about his grief. So we sat aside the game that evening and spent the night talking to our friend and helping him through a difficult time. I'd say that was mine and the group's proudest moment.

 

[djdaidouji]

I'm ashamed for this to be following silver moon's example, but my groups favorite moment was after a long session where the PCs were locked in tiny rooms and had to do gruesome things to get out. One of the players hadn't slept the night before, but because he had no life he came anyway. After the session, when he went to the bathroom, another player snuck to the bathroom door with a paper clip and turned the door lock from the outside. (It was a crappy door). We waited a few more minutes, then heard loud banging and hollering. (It only took him a few seconds to figure it out, especially after we were laughing our heads off right outside.)

 

[Silver Moon]

I'm ashamed for this to be following silver moon's example...

Don't be, that last post was a borderline thread derail.

In keeping with the spirit of the first post I would say that my best time as a DM was with my PBP Wild West game. If I had to pick one particular mement I would go with our first online "game night" when we had arranged for everybody to be online to post simultaneously. The module had been running for a few months at that point as a PBP but never with everybody posting at once. For that first group night I had a running stagecoach battle as the storyline and it went spectacularly. You'll find it in this tread as Chapters 78 to 80 (bottom of page 6, top of page 7):

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=99053&page=1&pp=15

 

[ArconBlue]

My proudest moment as DM was when I was running a campaign in a homebrew system and world, and my players turned up for one season and told me had every thing worked out they had set up a set of message boards and been working on the plot all week. I asked if I could view the pages they gave me the link, there was a lot of good detail and background. There was also some password protected areas mostly about the plot which I never got to read, which really made me proud, they must be learning. They had all put so much effort in it.

 

[dragonier]

My proudest moment as a DM came very unexpectedly and mostly out of simple goofing around. It was an OD&D campaign in Mystara using the Rules Cyclopedia. I was kinda' winging it from a set of rough notes because I had come to learn my players would go off in any direction at a moment's notice. Even if I've had minimal prep time though, I always try to set a specific tone with a scene. In this instance, it worked better than I could have imagined.

The players were helping defend a halfling village against a humanoid army invading from the Black Eagle, Baron von Hendricks. They had decided to scout into the woods early one morning to get an idea how close the enemy was.

The elf in the party was run by a woman who had not had much experience roleplaying, but she seemed to be having a blast. We were in a friend's living room and I was set up on the coffee table and sitting on the floor beside it. She had left the party to scout ahead and ended up in a mist shrouded clearing confronting a troll that was doing it's own scouting. She had heard the troll coming, sniffing it's way through the fog. When she finally fought it, she didn't realize it regenerated. She did finally manage to defeat it, but it was a very tense fight and the eerie setup of the scene really worked well. Towards the end of the combat, a couple of very impressive criticals led me to hand-wave the severing of one of the troll's arms....

So she's bloody, badly wounded, panting, alone, standing in this creepy clearing with mist swirling up to her knees. I pull a blanket off the couch close by, put it over my head and say, "Suddenly you feel...!" and I reach out and grab her knee really hard from under the blanket. At first you can see she doesn't quite get it. Then it suddenly clicks. Her eyes go wide and she screams at the top of her lungs and starts frantically slapping my hand and arm. When talking about it later, she actually shuddered when she thought about the dismembered troll arm grabbing her leg from out of the fog.

It was the best truly immersive roleplaying experience I had ever seen. It brought the scene to a beautiful climax and is one of those moments we tell and re-tell.

 

[boerngrim]

My proudest moment as a DM was when I got the chance to DM a one shot for an old friend, Lance, that I used to game with and one of his childhood friends. We played in the same group when we were in the USAF together years ago, but I was not the DM. We got together in Lance's home town. I took my game kit along, just in case. They made 1st level characters and we played late into the night. The next day Lance and his other buddy told me that it was the best game they'd ever played in. Lance said I was the best DM he'd ever had. Running a game for one of my oldest friends was cool in itself, but to have him tell me that it was the best game he'd ever played really made me proud.