Meanest DMing Moment

[Breakstone]

So I allowed the Paladin/Commander in my group to take a Giant Eagle as his Cohort/Holy Mount. For about half the campaign, he and this big, golden, talking eagle are together, cleaving through any enemy I throw at them. The Paladin really takes care to not put the eagle in harm's way, knowing that at the higher levels, any blow from a big critter could take it out.

Anyways, it's the end of the campaign, and the characters are defending this small town from a big ol' army of Hobgoblin Werewolves, Spiderweb Goblins, Kenshar-Riding Orc Barbarians, and a bunch of Orc Mages. After decimating an entire unit, the Paladin/Commander flies high above the battlefield on his Big Golden Eagle, the sunlight glinting off of his magic armor and electric greatsword and all that.

I look at Dan, the player of the Paladin/Commander, and say, "I'm really sorry for this."

The 30 4th level Orc Mages all fired their Magic Missiles. At the Eagle.

As the Paladin/Commander plummetted on his crispy Giant Eagle mount, feathers and fire flying around him, I swear the player almost cried.





...it was wonderful!

 

[Evilhalfling]

Darksun, the players are looting a ruined city. They find murals of a sorcress queen wearing a black cloak, they find a statue of her in a black cloak. They spend 2 sessions diging through the city, fighting off poisonus rats and rival NPCs. Finally they find the cloak one PC puts it on.
dies no save - from the cloak of poisonesness.

In another a DS dwarfs lifequest is to kill a large monster called a Braxat. He dies falling to the bottom of a long shaft. Later a new PC joins the party starting with Braxat hide Armor. The PCs now have to get past the undead 20+ str dwarf absolutley driven to kill a PC. the undead managed to drop the PC to negative HP but was pulled off before finishing him. Nothing like haveing to fight the now skinless, and immune to charm ex-party tank.

 

[Shemeska]

Oh boy....

#1 Made players CRY both in and out of character. The details are recounted in story format here

#2: Making them trust Yugoloths, at all. That ended poorly in a number of cases.

#3: Players finally track down this Rakshasa in the depths of a lower plane. Big final confrontation since they've already killed him once but he came back and tried to have them killed. Well, one PC fires a blessed crossbow bolt at him and rolls a nat 20. She gets the crit and the player shouts out "CRIT! EAT IT YOU BACKWARDS PAWED ANIMAL SHELTER REJECT!" or something along those lines as she OOC starts dancing around the room.

The 'Rakshasa' then got back up, plucked the bolt out with some level of disdain, and resumed his true form. *snicker* The expression on the player's face was priceless given the nat 20 on that roll.

 

[Agamon]

Not so much a moment, but it's recent, so I'm feeling most guilty about it. I'm DMing RttToEE, and every session since the party has made it to the Crater Ridge Mines, there has been an average of one PC death. Seven sessions, seven dead PCs. One player's working on his 4th PC. Nasty mod. The players are clamering to get back to my homebrew, as my adevntures tend to be far less meatgrinderesque (that huge howler, converted to 3.5, is frickin' brutal).

 

[Ant]

I'd have to say it was when a player returned to the campaign after missing a few sessions and found that his dwarven warrior was being kept alive through arcane means after having all of his bones forcibly removed from his body. Did I mention he was now residing in a bucket?

 

[cmanos]

I have notoriously horrible dice. I usually cannot hit crap when I am a DM. Back in college I was running the Giants series, that I had converted to 2nd ed. There was one player who was a total annoying pr1ck. Everyone hated him...not the character...the player. Well. The party had been having a pretty easy time, since my dice were true to form and not rolling well at all, when suddenly I rolled a nat 20 on a hit on Mr. Annoying's character (wizard of some sort) by a carnivourous ape who was hiding over the doorway he had just entered. Of cource the critical came up and the ape basically tore him limb from limb....end of his first character.

So he made up a second character. As they were wandering through teh frost giants, they came upon an encounter with giants. He ran around the corner to try and get behind them, and ran smack dab into a giant's leg, who used him for putting practice with his club. End of 2nd character.

Character #3 another wizard. In the fire giants lair he was being particularly annoying. As he was running across the kitchen to get a better angle on the giants, I decided to see if I could kill him again, and moved the pit trap that lead into the lava lake to right underneath him. gave him 3 attempts to grab the edge to save himself....end of character #3

Character #4 was a necromancer. The party was holed up in a crypt resting, and he had the brilliant idea to be introduced to the party by hiding in a sarcophagus, casting Corpse Visage on himself, and popping out to scare the party... End of character #4

 

[diaglo]

after finally getting the PCs upto a level in which it was possible for them to tackle a module i had purchased years ago... i convinced the players to pull their PCs out of retirement for a one-shot adventure.


the entire party was slaughtered in 10 minutes real time.

so we hit reset and they tried again. they made it further but... still didn't survive.

the Module:

S1 Tomb of Horrors.

 

[Rel]

I sometimes have this tendency to set up a series of encounters where each one would be tough all by itself and there is no way the party can stop and rest until they've done them all. Near the end of my last campaign the party had gone deep into an enemy stronghold and had battled their way through this nasty maze filled with traps, darkness and fog plus a handful of Half-Troll Barbezu. Then they fought a Maelephant guardian to get to thier true objective...and found that a Forbiddance had been cast on the area and there was pretty much no hope of them getting in to tackle the primary objective of their quest.

At that point the whole place starts to rumble and a "Volcano of Blood" begins to erupt beneath them. Nasty critters based on the Ferals from Scarred Lands start jumping out of the blood and the blood itself is attacking them doing acid damage. They flee only to run into the main portion of the Temple of Bane that they're infiltrating where they are forced into battle with these large, stone guardian statues. Those killed one PC before the rest rushed out the front doors of the place where they found the Volcano of Blood eruption continuing. This included another batch of the Blood Ferals and their good pal, the reborn demigod of Murder and Destruction. At that point the party was in the open at least so they could take to the air and flee for their lives.

When they landed and set up camp, I had them attacked by six Ogres and a Dire Bear.

The following day they took a vacation to Hell to rescue a friend and it was a comparitive cake walk.

 

[ashockney]

This is a great thread, and I've got a couple of bad (good) examples:

1st Edition, the party was "loaded down with magic items" and I was looking for a good way to take them down a couple notches (probably around 12th level, and there weren't many bad guys left to fight, that weren't uniques). So, during the wedding of one of the characters, the whole party got jumped by the "shadow ninjas" who did nothing but use Rods of Negation on all their items. I didn't even play it out for the players, saying, "it would be too painful, trust me." It was bad, really bad. In a reunion adventure, circa 2000, the characters finally got to the evil villians behind the "shadow ninjas".

One of the characters took a break from our campaign, and at the beginning of the night, I had one of the campaign's BBEG's show up with the missing player's character's hands lopped off. Again, no chance to play it out. Just, bam, he's not here, so he got whacked. Ohhhhhh...he was mad when he found out.

Finally, one that I played in. One of my friends was running a great 2nd Ed campaign, and we were up to about 12th level. We really liked our characters, and we had to get from one end of FR to the other (I believe Waterdeep to Thay). We hadn't been there before, and there was no immediate way to get there quickly. We'll teleport! Everyone joined in. We don't teleport often, so we were really surprised when he told us to roll percents. Needless to say, we failed miserably, and it killed the whole party. End of campaign. Boy, that stunk.

 

[SteelDraco]

I was running a long-term, RP-intensive game set in 1760s Boston - think a combination of Call of Cthulhu and Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow movie.

The two relevant PCs are a half-vampire rogue (Broderick), and a druidish witch (Annora). They were involved in-character, and had a young child, about five. The whole group loved that little girl - we did a lot of roleplaying with her, and there were a number of prophecies and such about her, as a result of her unusual origins.

Like any long-term game, the group had a number of enemies. One of the cruelest, however, was the former mistress of the half-vampire PC, a vampiress of considerable sorcereous power. She wanted Broderick back with her by any means necessary, and to punish him for leaving her.

While the PCs were away on a mission, she managed to dupe her way into their home, bypass all their protections, and turn the little girl into a vampire. My cruelest moment as a GM - ever - was when the little girl smiled at her father, revealing long fangs, and told him with her usual sweet voice, "You were warned, father, that betrayal would come with a price."

My only regret is that it was an online game, and thus, I couldn't see anyone's facial expressions.