Most interesting dilemma you've thrown at your players?

[Cor Azer]

So 3 and a half months of real-time (2 months of game time) of subtle hints came to fruition last session. The party has had the side goal of tracking down a werewolf in their home town, so are back home for the full moon. First night, no luck. Second night, they find and capture one (interesting side note - they had to escape an angry mob that misunderstood the situation as them protecting the werewolf rather than capturing it), but discover there were two werewolves around.

The party's cleric is at her lover's place for dinner the last night of the full moon. Hear's a crash in the kitchenm, and runs in, bt only finds that her lover dropped a water jug. And then her lover shifts into werewolf form (uncontrolled shift). The cleric goes for a Harm spell - hoping it'll let her take down her lover with minimal collateral damage, but the werewolf flees with 1 hp left. Noting that the werewolf is faster than herself, and having no party members nearby to aid her, she checks her prepared spells for distant incapacitators... and can only find flame strike. Her choice let the werewolf go and continue to randomly kill, or kill her lover...

Deciding the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (and hoping she'd be able to raise her lover), one divine pillar of flame engulfed the lycanthrope. Her lover, an elf, chose not to be raised as she valued the santity of life.

Who needs powerful foes for a semi-high level party (6 12-14 level characters) when a single first level expert (lycanthrope - werewolf template) with emotion ties causes such stress?

So, any interesting dilemmas or problems arrayed against your players recently?

 

[Macbeth]

I run a spelljammer campaign (well, sort of spelljammer. More like my homebrew with a little of the spelljammer stuff from Polyhedron). The player's spelljamming ship was attacked and distroyed in the upper atmosphere. THey had no readily available spells to save them from the fall, so a few of the players grabbed the corners of a sail and used it as a parachute. Unfortuantely, one player was playing a niblewright (scaled down into a class, as in Savage Species), which was too heavy for the other players to counter. So the nimblewirght starst grabbing the corpses of the grimlocks (and their mindflayer master) that attacked the ship. I ruled that each corpse gace him slight damage reduction, and he ended up with 5 hp after the fall. That was fun.

 

[Crothian]

I had a cleric be put on trial for heresy against the church. His god ordered him to do something that went against the teaching of the church, so he choose his god over the church.

I had the villian of the piece get reduced to an infant and then had the party argue oiver killing the baby.

I had a secondary villian get captured and tortured by a friend of the PCs, but since the PCs were all good and disdained torture; so they had to defend the guy they hated and argued against tortureing them. They hated me for that.

I had the party choose between all dieing and ending the campaign that they were really ejoying or oweing death a favor. I got yelled at for that one too.

 

[barsoomcore]

In Barsoom our heroes offended and were persecuted by a cranky sorcereress who had been apprenticed to a much more powerful and even crankier sorcereress. They turned over the apprentice to the mistress and thought their problem was solved.

Reckoning not with the fiendish imagination of the mistress.

She showed up a few days later with a much-disciplined apprentice -- the girl had been brain-sucked and turned into a sort of magic battery for the party sorcereress -- she could use the still-living-but-nearly-comatose apprentice as a source of magical power -- but at the cost of slowly killing the helpless woman.

And of course immediately after that the party had a massive need for sorcerous power.

Said helpless woman died a horrible death as a result, but the players never really forgave me for that one. Heh heh heh...

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

That's a great story, Cor Azer.

I was running my kids (+ friends) through "The Forge of Fury."

At one point, they retreated into a room with no exits, to rest up. The next morning, the pesky orcs had piton'ed the door shut.

The kids sat there for half a hour, trying to think of what to do. They were stumped. Finally, I told my daughter to look at her spell list. She still didn't get it. So I pointed to Knock. She had forgotten what that spell did. So, things got tense for a little bit, but they survived.

 

[Mark Chance]

Last campaign I ran was heavy on conflicts between the party's paladin of Heironeous and an assortment of baddies led by a champion of Hextor. The party was duped into entering a "prison plane" occupied by Hextorites, who kidnapped folks in order to hunt them down and kill them like animals. The only way to leave the "prison plane" was to offer a blood sacrifice of a sentient creature to Hextor in order to open a planar door that led back to the Prime Material.

After the baddies were defeated and Hextor's champion slain, the paladin volunteered to be sacrificed so that the party could continue its mission. Since the paladin voluntarily sacrificed herself to Hextor, a spirit fell under Hextor's province. When the party raised her from the dead, she came back temporarily stripped of paladin status, and had to work out the Hextorite taints on her spirit by questing for a lost relic sacred to Heironeous.

 

[BigTom]

In the campaign I have been running, the Paladin has received a direct order from his god to accept a cleric of hell into the party. Needless to say he is not happy. The high clerics around him have received the same orders, and so have been forcing him to put up with it.

Unfortunately, I am not sure if the campaign will last long enough for him to find out why his god is doing this. If he ever does though, he will be more than happy I think.

SPOILER ALERT FOR THOSE IN MY GAME!!!!





















The reason the paladin is in this position is that everyone in the party has the potential to become an avatar of the gods. The gods long ago made a deal with the hells that they would dearly like to break. If the cleric of hell becomes an avatar, he would legally be the representative of the hells, and could abrogate the contract. The gods will offer him enormous advantages if he does so. The paladin can then be set loose to destroy the rest of hells servants.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

In one game I was in, an evil dragon that had been banished from the shores of the continent millenia ago had decided it was time to come back. Rather than give the heroes reason to oppose him, he started by buying land and becoming a pillar of the community.

That was...irritating. However, it was funny when the DM mentioned the dragon was going to build his lair in the middle of one character's province, which had the largest city on the continent in it, all sorts of diversions, and human shields aplenty for when the heroes did come on.

Brad

 

[twofalls]

Several years ago I ran an Earthdawn game that spanned several years of playing time. Earthdawn features Horrors, which are essentially very powerful demons that are dangerous on a spiritual level as well as a physical challenge. I had a female player who played an aborigine scout. She was corrupted by the horror (known as Horror Tained within the game context) without the rest of the groups knowledge (her husband was the group leader). For the next year of game time the horror commanded her to slowly kill off her companions family members and then the companions themselves one by one, but to remain undiscoverd while doing so.

We accomplished this by convincing the group that an enemy they had not slain long ago when they first began to adventure together was stalking them. The player kept this secret for an entire year of playing not only from the rest of the players, but from her own husband as well who was going nuts trying to protect the rest of the PC's family members and lives.

When the campaign ended, a great Dragon of Barsaive ended the life of the horror and cleaned the taint from her character... the look on the faces of the other players when they realized what had been happening was nothing short of priceless.

 

[Morrus]

My campaign contains a sweet little 6-year old girl who happens to be the embodiment of pure evil - only she doesn't know it. She isn't evil herself - as I said, she's a sweet little 6 year old girl - but she is the embodiment of evil. The party paladin is faced with something of a dilemma, as the fate of the world depends on her death, but he can't bring himself to do it (and rightly so).

He has accepted the responsibility that he, out of the party, will be responsible for her; there's a specific place and time when she has to die, and he is the one who will do the dirty deed (if he can). She keeps asking him "Will you keep me safe?" and "Will you protect me?" and he's having great trouble answering her, falling back on things like "None of the evil beings in this world shall harm you", and "I will not allow any of our enemies to touch you".

I can't reveal any more, unfortunately, as my players read these boards, and the final couple of sessions of the campaign are taking place over the next couple of weeks. They've just arrived at the prophesied place at the correct time, so some world-changing decisions will be taking place next week! That's assuming they are able to defeat The Necromancer (who turned out to be a black dragon), who has a singular interest in having the girl survive.