Dopey things DM's have done.

[Dragonbait]

Pfft. You guys call these GM fumbles? Actual exchange from the first (and last) session of a campaign:

Us: "Okay. Now that we've captured the corrupt sherrif we interrogate him. Why on earth was he hiring bandits to attack trade to his own town?"

GM: *stunned look* "Huh. I never thought to give him a motivation."

Happens to me. I often figure out the adventure, but neglect the initial hook.

 

[VirgilCaine]

Skeletons taking half damage from slashing and piercing. That happened like twice in a row in an adventure.

 

[Kormydigar]

Oncw while going thropugh a dungeon, our party opens the door to a room and the DM promptly starts describing the room, then tells us "Standing in the far corner of the room are two 7th level fighters"!

We all kinda looked at him, no one said a word as we were all shaking our heads trying to make sure we heard him right.

Thats a good one , a very kind DM. One DM I used to game with had a really great slip of the tongue that we never let him live down:


Player: " Well, seeing as this room looks cleaned out, we will prepare to go downstairs."

DM: " OK give me your marching order".

Player: " I will be in the lead with the rogue to my left. He will be checking for traps as we descend slowly"

DM: " No problem. The stairs are dusty and go down about 30 feet. There is a large chamber below."

Player: " Can we see anything in the chamber from the bottom of the stairs?"

DM: " Yeah. Across the chamber are four traps. Would you like to check for statues?"

 

[Nomad4life]

I’ll never forget my best friend’s brother’s first Warhammer game. It was just so… Above and beyond the call of “bizarre.” The majority of our catch-phrases and one-liners to this day still come from that infamous game.

One of my favorite moments from that session:

GM: “Uhhh… Okay… On your way to the secret meeting point, you notice a house fall through the ground. Alright, you reach the appointed secret meeting spot…”

PLAYERS: “WTF!?!?!? What was that about the house falling through the ground !?!”

GM: “It fell through the ground. Now, as you look around the meeting spot, you notice…”

PLAYERS: No, wait! When you say it fell through the ground, what do you mean exactly!?!”

This went on for some time, with the GM getting exasperated that we were so hung up on witnessing a house fall into the earth- But can you really blame us? Apparently, this had something to do with an illegal mining operation in the area, and was only mentioned for “flavor.” It had just never occurred to him that the we would demand to stop and investigate this!

Pretty much the whole adventure slogged on this way- Like an unintentional Monty Python movie. I’ll never forget the completely insane way that game ended. Five hours into what was supposed to be a one hour adventure, the party was in some nonsensical abandoned mine under the city. Eventually, our weary and embattled GM stood up, walked across the room, and tossed his notes into the trashcan while mumbling over his shoulder:

GM: “As you enter the final room, they keel over dead.”

PLAYERS: “Huh!?! They who!?!”

GM: “The guys behind it all.”

PLAYERS: “… ... ... ... The guys behind WHAT!?!”

Oh, Gawd, every time I think back on that moment, I cry with laughter, and lose a little more of my sanity.

That was nearly 10 years ago, and this guy got much better at designing adventures over time. (He had always been a great player, but somehow this didn't translate when he tried to run a game himself.) The funny thing is, we sometime beg him to please, please, please make another adventure like that one.

He won’t do it.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Ages ago, I ran an adventure that included a game of Volleyball of Death. The PCs were one team. Monsters were the other. Every point scored caused damage to the opposite team. Game point required a saving throw against a finger of death effect.

Does that qualify as dopey?

I don't get it. What's so supposed to be dopey? I guess you forgot something, like the monsters were spiked devils and the ball would always deflate when they hit it. Or was it something: "It was volleyball - but beneath the waves"? Oh, I get it: Volleyball is for wusses.

No?

You can't mean that they play for pain. That's one of the only two things sports are to be played if it's not for fun. The other one is for drinks. So, if you lose a point, you either get hurt or drunk. If you lose the game, you're dead (drunk).

 

[Hypersmurf]

Instead, the cry of 'shoot the windows' saved us, Dawn of the Dead style.

Schieß auf das Fenster!

Ours was a Bearded Devil, that was potentially TPK potential. But we managed to trap it in a Web spell, letting us gang up on it and save the day.

After the session, I said to the DM "I was surprised it didn't just use its Greater Teleport At Will to get out of the Web."

DM blinked, and said "Its what, now?"

-Hyp.

 

[Snapdragyn]

In a 1e game, my druid (I forget his level, would've been between 6th & 10th IIRC) charmed a titan. The fight leading up to this had just about destroyed the other characters, so while they slept, my druid's New Best Friend went through the dungeon with him, squashing encounters left & right. The fact that titans were immune to mind-affecting effects somehow got forgotten by the DM.

More recently, we fought a vampire & got it to negative hitpoints, then carried its mangled body through the streets of the city we were in to find someone who could tell us how to kill it (we'd witnessed its regeneration, but failed our Knowledge checks on ways to actually kill it). Though the DM later realized that this should have required a balloon (0 hp or less, pink mist....), it did leave us with great imagery of the bloodied party running through the streets, half of a corpse in the fighter's arms as he repeatedly stabbed it with the bard beside him hysterically screaming 'Vampire! How do we kill it?! Vampire! How do we kill it?!' to everyone we passed.

 

[shilsen]

Schieß auf das Fenster!

Ours was a Bearded Devil, that was potentially TPK potential. But we managed to trap it in a Web spell, letting us gang up on it and save the day.

After the session, I said to the DM "I was surprised it didn't just use its Greater Teleport At Will to get out of the Web."

DM blinked, and said "Its what, now?"

-Hyp.

You're a nice guy, or at least nice to the PCs. I'd have mentioned it while the fight was going on.

Yes, yes - my fellow players hate me.

 

[Sejs]

I've definitely been guilty of the whole freudian slip thing before.

PCs are persuing a group of calishite gangsters thru the muzahd in an effort to get back their friend who had been kidnapped. They know the group they're chasing after includes the gang boss, a man by the name of Hamzah, whose description they've been given (tall, skinny bald dude, smirks a lot). At this point in the game there has been absolutly nothing to indicate that anybody involved in the whole affair is anything other than the human mobsters they appear to be. The party closes the gap and finally catches up with the fleeing badguys.

PC Ranger: ... okay, and that's the end of my turn.

DM (me): *glances over at the initiave order jotted down on the wet-erase map, noting that the next person up is Hamzah* Ah, right, the yuan-ti's up next.

PCs: *dead silence at the table*

DM: ...god-damnit. ><

 

[bigdamnnerd]

Here's my mapping freudian slip:

The PCs make it to the wizard's throne room, and after a bit of banter, decide to charge him. So I start drawing out the room. The evil wizard is on a dias on the far end of the room with two staircases up to his level. I'm copying from a pre-prepared map, so I'm drawing along, and put in the dashed lines indicating the traps at the base of each set of stairs.

*Everyone* at the table notices as I quickly erase said traps. Oops.

You know the worst of it? Both main fighters then fell into the traps. I'm sure they were just trying to make me not feel so bad about it.