When the Session goes Pear Shaped

[S'mon]

Except... the low-level monsters really couldn't hit the PCs (and if they did, it was for piddly damage)... and the PCs could almost one-shot the "minions". It got to the point where they were actively moving away from these guys, knowing that the eladring "bandits" couldn't hit them.

I think the DMG advice not to use monsters more than 4 levels lower than the PCs is good. For 5+ levels, turn them into minions 8 levels higher, which keeps the same XP value. Damage should be about the same, attacks & defenses much higher, but they die easy and don't need tracking.

Eg For a party of 6th level PCs, a 1st level creature doing 1d10+2 damage can become a 9th level minion doing 7 or 8 damage, and still worth 100 XP.

 

[vagabundo]

My game on Sunday was pretty flat. I had some RPing and meeting/greeting of NPCs in the Seven Pillared Hall in Thunderspire. I also had a - what turned out to be railroady - NPC scene that just sucked. What was I thinking?!?

I felt the whole session was a bit of a disaster, but as always my Players made their own fun and focused on doing their own thing. So they seemed to have a laugh. We wrapped up early anyway.

Lots of lessons learned.

 

[Starfox]

One of my more memorable sessions recently happened because the players wandered into an encounter in a dead end and got captured, then had to break out from the inside. This won't work for every scenario, but was just lovely here.

 

[ExploderWizard]

In an old 1E campaign over 20 years ago, the PC's had been captured and released into a large cavern maze sans most equipment to be hunted down by an evil "master of the hunt" overlord for his amusement. The party ran, hearing the baying of the hounds getting closer and happened to run into a passage that dropped off into a seemingly bottomless chasm. The other side of the passage was over 50 feet away. There was a "bridge" of sorts made up of webbing from a horrendous huge spider that was nowhere to be seen.

The party started making thier way across the web climbing over the dried husks of dead giant insects. The hounds were getting closer and a little over halfway across the spider shows up. Moving slowly in the web and having few weapons the situation looked grim. The druid decided to throw caution to the wind and unleashed blue fire at the spider. The damage was enough to do the job but it also burned through the webbing serving as a bridge!

The party was now falling down a huge chasm and I had nothing.

The rest of the session was 100% pulled out of you know where.

........Of course there was deep water below, a giant underground lake. The party turned the insect husks into canoes and followed a river leading out of the lake.

The river eventually led out the side of a mountain far to the South in unfamiliar lands. The climate and plant life was tropical and nobody (including me!) had any idea where they were. I was able to convey the confusion and strangeness of the surroundings well because it was as bizzarre to me as it was to the players.

Below the mountain was dense jungle. The party began to explore as I raced to create the space in front of them. The party discovered a strange mechanical flying contraption that had apparently crashed up in a tree. Inside were the remains of several strangely dressed humanoids and a couple of weird artifacts. ( A flashlight and a loaded .45 ACP). The party had unknowingly stumbled onto the set of Predator.

The roleplaying with the artifacts was great. One of the fighters claimed the flashlight convinced it was weapon of awesome power.

The PC's soon encountered a tribe of natives who were living in fear of the ghostly Ilguu. The party decided to befriend the tribesmen and hunt down thier problem.

It was an epic fight, PC's with primitive bone armor and flint weapons against the demon who made trophies of men. On the first round of combat the fighter with the flashlight shined it right in creature's face expecting it to be vaporized. The powers of the .45 were discovered and the PC's returned with the head of the creature.

End session. Good times.

Before the next game I created a whole ruined city nearby to explore filled with strange homebrew creatures and items.

 

[malkav666]

My worst mistakes involved homebrew riddles and puzzles. I realized very shortly that I just don't reason things out like my players, and what makes sense to me, and what conclusions I draw are not necessarily the same as where my players arrive at.

I have been gaming with the same folks for about 15 years now, and the awful riddle session still comes up in jest. I still use riddles and puzzles, but never again have I made the adventures progress hinge on one of them. I also let them get clues and such by rolling their skills, and tend to include additional clues in or around the adventure site that contains said riddle or puzzle.

As far as overpowering the players. The second campaign I ever ran with them was a straight sandbox, where many of the random things they ran into were too much for them. They learned in that game that sometimes you can take down something that is technically too big for you, not to shrug off encounters that were too easy (free exp), and when things start to go bad, there is no shame in running. After a few wipes in that campaign my players learned to run if they thought they would lose. Even though I tend to structure most of the campaigns I have run since (instead of sandbox elements where certain areas they may travel through are way too big for them), they still to this day will discuss fleeing if things look grim. Sometimes they flee, sometimes they take a stand and win, sometimes they take a stand and eat floor. But by this point in time they are aware of fleeing as an option so when they stay , they no they may lose and arent usually mad about it.

love,

malkav

 

[Bedrockgames]

I tend to agree with the folk who prefer the running away option. However, it is also true that some players never truly consider that an option.

In one of my 3.5 campaigns, I sent a celestial foe at a party (I forget the exact monster, but it was basically one of the angels in the MM). The party was decent level, and I just relied on the CR table, without looking at the specifics. It turned out, the monsters AC was so high the players basically had to roll natural 20s to hit. I don't believe they rolled any. If I remember, they ran away eventually.

 

[RangerWickett]

A few weeks back I ran a one-shot "monster" game where the PCs basically worked for David Bowie from Labyrinth, and they were supposed to sneak into a princess's birthday party on Halloween to kidnap her. I let the players be level 8 or lower monsters, and rather than choosing anything like goblins or whatever, we had:

A floating brain in a jar
A floating undead that's just a brain and a spinal column
A floating flameskull
A black hole wraith
A displacer beast
A half-elf con artist

Somehow I did not realize this would be a problem. Cue an hour later, after the monsters have horrifically slaughtered a few guards, and the con-artist realizes these things are scary. He runs off to warn the king, while the rest of the macabre group tries to figure out how to sneak into the castle, since even though it's Halloween, no one will buy that "floating skull with viscera-dripping jagged spinal column" is a costume.

Finally the PCs get in, and the con-artist player wants to know if the guards are waiting for them. Things have gotten out of hand, so I just decide that the king put his princess into lock-down and got a handmaiden to pose as the princess so she can get abducted instead. So when the monsters decide to screw sneaking around and just fly to the princess's tower, the 'princess' agrees to go with them.

Victory, sort of. And then we played Modern Warfare 2.

 

[Jack99]

"Heh, I screwed up" "Man I am a bad DM"

"Man I am a bad DM"

Not dwelling on anything, but quoted for posterity

So I want to hear about you guys: how have things went south for you? Where the ball seriously was dropped, and how you managed to get it back (or not!).

Last time things went south in my campaign, was the last session of my epic campaign. That which happened is what always happens when things go south. I kill my players and its a TPK. My combats are very much very much on the edge of what is possible (at least the "boss battles") so it is a fine line, and when things go wrong, they go very wrong.

Do note that my players want it like that, hell, they demand it. Else they feel that they haven't earned the right to continue living and adventuring (the character that is, of course)

 

[Blackbrrd]

One DM I had made a keep in Rolemaster. It was about 10' by 10' with a enclosed courtyard, stable and main keep. We pointed it out and he doubled the size to a generous 20' by 20'. One of the players who had a bard character made up a song about this keep that I still remember, and it's like 10 years ago. (It rhymes in in Norwegian: "I Berters dal ligger Berters slott, det er ikke stort det er ikke flott, det er kanskje noe han har fått?", roughly translates to "In Berter's valley lies Berter's castle, it isn't large, it isn't nice, he probably got it as a gift")

My biggest personal failure was in the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil when I thought it would be a good idea to set the level 8 sorc and level 14 evil madness cleric in the same room. In addition the sorc had used the alarm spell to give them a head-warning if the PC's entered the area. The cleric summoned two dire bears, got hasted and started the combat using destruction and disintegrate on two characters (who died) and followed up casting confusion on the rest of the party, except for one character who grabbed the confused gnome and teleported away. That was the end of a campaign that had gotten to level 11.

You might say that I overdid the encounter and that I should have just exchanged the cleric with something else. Save or die is just so lame. In addition I got so annoyed by the dungeon crawling that I haven't DM-ed one for 6-7 years now.

 

[Rechan]

Not dwelling on anything, but quoted for posterity

I hope you can be OK with my game. I may not do the most epic of boss battles. And I have pulled punches in the past, as I'm ever the softy who errs on the side of the PCs. But damn if I want to slay one in a straight up grudgematch. Grrr.

On the topic of Meh sessions, I've had a few. The one that comes to mind:

Inspired by this thread, I decided to have the PCs try and interrupt five ritual sites that were going live.

Problem is, I didn't iron out the rules for how to do that. So when they started asking questions, I started fumbling because I hadn't thought of them. It came across very limp, and was in general a waste of time.