Jump with me -- Forked Thread: When Your Group Jumps the Shark

[jmucchiello]

Forked from: When Your Group Jumps the Shark

Okay, so the dungeon article messed up with the definition of Jump the Shark. The concept is too good to ignore though. So post some cases where your campaign or group has jumped the shark:

We were investigating strange goings-ons in a small village when we all started having dreams about being attacked by potatoes. Yes, potatoes crawling out of the dirt zombie style and attacking with their vines. But that wasn't the jump as we were asleep. Every farm house was abandoned. The jump was when we approached a few more farm houses and they hopped up onto previously unseen legs, screamed, and ran away.

At the start of the next session, the DM asked for a mulligan. He had wanted us to feel that the land was becoming evil (with the potato thing) but hadn't planned for us to keep looking at farmhouse after farmhouse so he panicked and the next ones ran off. We wound up rewinding about two weeks of pointless wilderness insanity.

 

[I'm A Banana]

My deep and abiding love of puns has lead to more than one "jump the shark" moment in some of my early campaigns (pirates who seek "booty" proved to be something that I still flagellate myself over).

 

[Wik]

I think we jump the shark about twice a session. Some fond moments:

* The Dwarven Cleric of Death getting a clockwork Parrot that hopped about on one leg and made off-key grinding noises. He shined it up, and named it something silly, like "Pete" or "Tim".
* The ogre "Hero" the PCs met, who portrayed himself as a brave knight. In fact, he was responsible for slaying THREE DRAGONS AT ONCE. Yup. "Was kind of tough to break through the shells, though"
* And let's not forget the half-elven Lawyer who navigated the PCs through a dwarven bureaucracy city that had the PCs fuming (except for the aforementioned Dwarf, who said "Hey, I love this place!"). The lawyer was great, charming, and just a tad too silly.

Maybe not true "Jump the shark" moments, but they definitely break the tone of the campaign. And I'm okay with that.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

I was banned from using a die after it gave me three criticals in a row.

While using a crossbow with Exit Wound enchantment.

That's right, my kobold sniper shot clean through three people, killing all three.

It was somewhat disapointing to just kill things one at a time after that.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Not sure what would count. In the Final Fantasy 1 campaign I was in, which was probably jumping the shark just by existing, we played music for battles, overworld travel, towns, dramatic moments, etc...

The very first session, we're having a tough fight. I'm a Black Mage, and I decide to enlarge person on the dwarf Fighter. I declare that I throw my staff to the ground and yell out, "Make my dwarf grow!" Which of course cues the power rangers theme to get played. Large dwarf proceeds to clean house and turn the tide of the battle. It became by FAR the biggest running gag I've ever seen in a campaign, with us always playing power rangers when he went large. It really took on a life of its own later on when we visited the dwarven lands and they gave him a special artifact that had been guarded and held to give to the legendary dwarf hero that would arise.

If you haven't guessed...it was a belt buckle. Allowing him to enlarge himself, as well as adding several other powers, as he donned the full Blue Ranger suit, helmet and all. Oh, and the command to activate it was "It's morphin' time!"

After THAT, he eventually found an effigy Triceratops* (a type of construct), which he named David Yost. The whole time, we still wanted some sort of internal consistency, so as the joke took on its own life, the rest of the party increasingly saw the whole thing as some really weird dwarven cultural thing. We had to maintain a similar (but much stronger in magnitude) attitude of "he's crazy" for the Red Mage, who was largely 8-bit theater inspired and actually had the class skill "Knowledge: Metagame" (instead of Bardic Knowledge).

*[sblock]The triceratops itself spawned its own in-joke, that has spread into every single campaign I or any of the other players or DM has ever run since. In one particular battle in tight quarters, we had a lot of difficulty, because we could not reach the enemies to melee because the triceratops kept getting in the way. So now, "There's a triceratops in the way" has become a common statement (at least once in any given campaign) for any time a path is inaccessible. If the DM doesn't want the party to go a certain way, he'll put a triceratops blocking the path. I've yet to see a party dare try to get a triceratops out of the way. [/sblock]

 

[I'm A Banana]

Hahahahaha, I'm totally putting more triceratopses in my game...

 

[Kichwas]

I JUmped the shark in my last MnM campaign when I decided to run a Christmas special. What was meant for one session took 3 or 4 I think... The basic plot: After deposing the Easter Bunny a renegade faction takes over Christmas town and imprisons Santa. Near the end when the PCs manage to rescue Santa I had loyalist troops of the Easter Bunny parachute in to help us speed through 'mook wrapup' of all the 'elves and bunny brownshirts gone bad'.

And of course... at one point, stealing a line from a Saturday Night Live skit, mixed with a Piers Anthony novel about Death, the PCs got the skinny on what was going on from a disgruntled drunk tooth fairy in a bar in Christmas town who was roughly modelled off Eddie Murphy in the guise of a guy who killed the previous fairy when he cought him sneaking into his house through the window... and suddenly found himself cast in the role...

Yeah... it sounded funny when I came up with the idea, and if I had been able to pull it off in one session it might have worked as a source of laughs... but we spent most of that first session just wandering aimlessly and dealing with rules questions...