Campaigns that 'Jump the Shark'

[Tinner]

Back in 2e days, we had a campaign that had been running for about two years.
The demise of our game came from a little beauty I like to call Hour of the Knife

I remember very little about what happened, since I've worked hard to block it out. We were framed for some Jack the Ripper-style murders, had mechanical scarabs implanted over our hearts that would kill us if we didn't catch the killer, and none of our magic worked.
The DM gave us a death sentance, no clues, and nothing we tried to do worked.

We jumped that shark and went home.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I've got two, both from my college days. Both with the same DM, both for essentially the same reason.

The first campaign was the first I'd ever played in with this DM. He was enerally pretty good. Towards tehe end of the campaign though, we got involved in a world-shattering adventure, and the DM had us getting help from a bunch of high level NPC's - all higher level than us. The players ran the NPC's but they were 3-4 levels above the regular PC's, so we were totally outshined.

The kicker, though, was after the big confrontation. The dungeon was wiped out in essentially a magical nuclear explosion, but the artifact behind all the evil (a black gemstone) was unharmed. We scried on it, and it was sitting there in the middle of the crater.

We had dealt with this artifact before, and knew how to handle it. However, none of us could teleport, and one of the surviving NPC's could. He was an elven wizard with a 21 INT or something like that. I very carefully explained to him not to touch the evil, bad artifact. And what does he do? He teleports there and trieds to pick up the damned thing. It was like the end of Time Bandits. That was it; we went on another adventure after that, looking for the now-possessed elf, but my PC and another PC started just talking about how we were taking a vacation, and we only hung around bars, and went to the beach, and totally ignored any and all plot hooks. "Someone higher level than us will handle it," we'd say. The game dies out soon after.

The second campaign, the DM (unbeknownst to us) talked one of the players into playing one of the DM's own PC's - a 1st level illusionist. Of course, the PC was also a 21st level Archmage - the DM wanted him to hit mega levels in both classes, this being 1st edition. He wasn't supposed to use any of his mega-wizard powers, but of course, the DM put us in situations where we were outclassed, because he knew we had the extra power to back him up.

Eventually, we made it to Ravenloft. We were 7th level. The DM, in order to make the adventure a challenge for his own PC, boosted Strahd to 16th level wizard (I think the original I-6 he was 9th). We were utterly wiped out. TPK, although we never actually went through the drudgery of playing it out.

The thing is, he wasn't a bad DM, he just had a couple of serious blind spots in his DM'ing makeup.

 

[Nightfall]

Er...is that good?

Only if you're Mick Dundee.

PC, if you do, make darn sure it's the Bloodfire one. Like to see someone say "Go on! Jump THAT Shark!"

 

[dj2145]

Talk about jumping the shark...

I ran a campaign where the PC's began at 3rd level and had an outside chance at gaining a minor magical item. Well, one of the characters got lucky and managed to get his hands on a necklace of fireballs. Im thinking no big deal, right? Wrong.

To make a long story short it was the first round (actually the surprise round) of their first fight against a warband of Orcs. The character in question passed his spot check and immediately lobbed one of the necklace beads at the Orcs...he missed...crit fail. Rolling on the grenade mishap table and taking into account the two range increment penalty I concluded that the throw was 10' short and, much to my chagrin, the resulting blast actually hit the character...holding the remaining necklace of fireballs...and he failed his save...as did the necklace.

Long story short was that the cleric and two others died instantly. The fighter was badly burned and dropped the next round under a relentless hail of Orcish arrows. The last PC, a wizard, turned and ran. The last thing he heard was the Orcs sharing a good laugh over the near TPK.

The crappy thing is that i had spent months writing up info for the campaign and had centered much of my writing around the now dead PC's.

 

[STARP_JVP]

Another campaign I was in jumped the shark when the GM tried to railroad and failed miserably. It was a Shadowrun game, and by all accounts a pretty standard one. The thing about Shadowrun is, played as it is, it gets kinda dull pretty quickly. We'd begun to realise this and thought we should make things more interesting, and were debating how.
At this point, the DM gave us a helping hand by sending the Renraku Red Samurai after us. If you're unfamiliar with Shadowrun I'll just tell you that this was not a pleasant experience. Anyway, no matter what we did, we couldn't escape these guys.
The GM's intention was for us to hide out in the Redmond Barrens, a gang-infested slum, and wait for the heat to die down, which was his way of 'transforming' the campaign into something else. However, we decided we didn't want to be railroaded quite so much.
So, instead, we laced my apartment (my PCs' apartment, not my own) with C12, which in the game is the most powerful explosive you can get, basically putting it everywhere (my fellow PC had about fifty kilos of the stuff) and waited for the Red Sam. When we saw them arrive, we legged it down the fire escape, having turned on the TV (or trid, or whatever). The Red Sam broke down the door and went into my apartment, we floored the van, I pressed the detonator...
Does the term ka-friggin'-boom mean anything to you?
We took out the apartment, the apartment building, the surrounding city block, blew out the power grid for half of downtown Seattle, killed about five hundred people.
The campaign did't progress beyond that point - that was the last adventure. Our GM was pretty miffed at us for wrecking his campaign, but we maintained it had been wrecked long ago and we just 'spiced it up'. He got over it in the end, and we laugh about it now.
But it was all worth it, just to see the look on his face.