Game Derailment

[Renshai]

Have you ever had a game completely derailed by a word or sentence that you mangled?

Last night, I meant to say, "The Hobgoblin responds to you in broken common".

What I actually said, "The Hobgoblin responds to you in broken condom".

The game was almost a complete loss after that. I laughed until I almost passed out, the players laughed for half and hour. I turned beat red... because... my teenage son was among the players.

 

[EricNoah]

Well, not completely derailed, but yeah...

I was running a Dark Sun one-shot, and the PCs were about to be ambushed by a gang of psionic humanoids. I don't know the correct pronounciation of the name of the race (maenad), but to their ears, the players thought they were being attacked by "my nads."

 

[Renshai]

Oh, now that's a good one!

 

[Siberys]

Running through the 3.5 Eberron adventure path; we were on the adventure in the back of the book. A warforged with an axe jumped 'em. What do I yell?

"The warforged grabs his ass, and... wait..."

I, of course, meant to say axe. It didn't help that one of the players, who happened to be a WF, immediately jumped up, grabbed his own ass, and started dancing around.

This wasn't the result of a mangled phrase, but it's infamous in our group no less. One player (the aforementioned WF player) fake-laughed at something I said. Then a player thought that was funny, so started laughing, making the first player laugh in earnest. When the first player laughs, his face scrunches up and turns beet red, so, naturally, the rest of us start laughing. For 15 whole minutes, we did nothing else. I was sure one of us would die from suffocation.

Now, it's very easy to get anyone in the group to start laughing uncontrollably. I wonder why? Hrm...

 

[Agamon]

In a campaign a few years ago, the party found an informant at a tavern with some info they needed. The problem was, the bad guys had found out he was a snitch and we was scared for his life. He'd only tell the party what he knew if they would protect him and get him out of town the next day. So the dwarf tells him, "Don't worry, laddie. Ye won't be alone tonight!"

Yeah, there was a lot of laughing after that. It's become a recurring joke at the table.

 

[Harlekin]

Have you ever had a game completely derailed by a word or sentence that you mangled?

Last night, I meant to say, "The Hobgoblin responds to you in broken common".

What I actually said, "The Hobgoblin responds to you in broken condom".

The game was almost a complete loss after that. I laughed until I almost passed out, the players laughed for half and hour. I turned beat red... because... my teenage son was among the players.

I'm not sure I'ld call a game failed where everyone almost passes out from laughing hard.

 

[Eccles]

We had a DM who described on more than one occasion that the room was lit by burning brassiers. Which caused me and one of the others to collapse in hysterics...

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I once derailed a game with a single sentence, though it wasn't that serious to begin with. I simply said, "I put the bowl on my head for a helmet." My DM gave me a +1 to AC but apparently the soup inside was poisonous so you got this Elven wizard drenched in poisonous soup running around with a bowl on his head.

This just ended any amount of ordinary gameplay. From that point on we found a sleeping ogre decided to set it on fire by throwing all the furniture we could find into its room, lighting it on fire then locking the door... It got through and chased us (on fire) out the dungeon into the woods where I set the woods on fire and all the woodland creatures attacked. I stayed to fight while my Barbarian buddy ran away... You can figure out what happened.

 

[Oryan77]

The players just finished saving a city from a BBEG and started talking about what to do next. A female player got excited and blurted out, "Maybe the king will reward us with a golden shower!"

She honestly had no idea what that meant and I guess she heard that term before and thought it was related to wealth. She sat there dumbfounded as the rest of us couldn't stop laughing. It was pretty awkward explaining to her what a golden shower was.

 

[TarionzCousin]

"A huge, gaping mouth opens in the middle of the stalagmite and it lashes out at you with two long testicles!"

This was in the 80's, and given the abundance of weird monsters in AD&D, a couple of my players didn't know that I had misspoke.