RBDMs, what's the most RB thing you've ever done?

[MonkeyDragon]

A mild RBDM moment.
Our group was running a big meatgrinder dungeon. In my level, the PCs were transported to faerie. The queen has the widget they need, and is interested in entertainment.

The end, of course, is a huge arena. In the middle is a big box. The PCs are told that what's in the box could quite possibly slaughter all of them. They're being given a choice. Either a) they pick three people (out of a party of 7) to fight to the death. Three go in, one comes out. OR, the whole party can choose the mystery monster, and it will do its darndest to kill all but two of them. The idea is, two live, or two die.

In the end, they stick together and chose the box, and a combination of ingenuity, luck, and plain shoddy dice rolling on my part led to all but one of them surviving.


My best RBDM moment.
The party is on the quest to get the widget. A friend is coming up for the day and I let him get a character together to drop into the game for the day. Well, he enjoyed that session so much that he decided to join the group for the rest of the campaign, and came up with a backstory that required him to steal the widget from the party in order to save his kidnapped sister. I encouraged him throughout the game, talking with him a lot about it privately.

Along comes the end of the campaign. The party gets back to the main town with the widget and bunks down in the inn, planning on taking the widget to the NPC in the morning. Then James makes his move. A few sleight of hand checks later, and he's off with his widget. The other PCs are FLOORED. They can't believe they've been betrayed and they are pissed as all get out. They can't wait until "morning" so they can discover the widget missing and hunt the traitor down.

Then, at the VERY end of the session, James takes the widget to HIS NPC, who's promised him information on his missing sister in return for it. Why he was so surprised that the man prompty turned on him and threw him into his dungeon is beyond me.

So the next week is the last session of the campaign. Everything is going to be resolved. The PCs hire a tracker to trail James. James wakes up in the dungeon and discovers my final twist. I've always had trouble acting out very dramatic scenes, espcially violent or cruel ones, without giving in to the giggles. So I'd outsourced the BBEG to Eric, a good friend of mine who was also a gamer and an actor. I made the evil wizard, let him tweak the spell selection, and gave him max ranks in profession (torturer) and knowledge (anatomy).

By the time the party reached the dungeon, Eric had played the sadistic maniac to the hilt, James had played along beautifully, and several other players looked a trifle queasy. When the PCs finally found him, they had completely forgotten about skinning him for stealing their widget. Th final hours of the campaign included a daring escape, a dive at low hit points through a glass window, a chase scene through the city, and an emergency resurrection. They managed to save the world in the end and have everyone alive to do it.

It was a truly grand finale.

 

[Firedancer]

Backstory:
the party rogue crept forward to see their camp had been taken by some demon worshippers, who are currently performing a ritual, with one of his disliked npc's as the focal point.

He watched the ceremony, didn't try to stop it, didn't run back to get the other party members, nothing. So the npc died and the high level demon was summoned. The party took him down at great cost.

Later, the guilt ridden party tried to rescue the soul of the sacrifice. So they jump through hoops, make deals with mortal followers and finally summon it back for a talk. It casually tortures a soul it implies is the sacrifices, and agrees to return it to them - cost, ending its banishment, supplying it some liquidised pain (can't remember waht its called, from BoVD), leaving his minions in peace.

Done deal, soul goes to this body ready for it and when it awakens....oops its not him at all, but some woman professing to have been another sacrifice from years ago.

Ooops.

Once they get a second chance to call the demon it trades the soul for a very specific magic item, the PCs having balked at returning the woman to the demon.

Threads returning to haunt the PCs: the demon leads a small army to invade the prime material, aided by the item they provided, and secondly the woman - well, she wasn't a sacrifice, but a despicable cultist of great infamy, returned to life and protected by the PCs!

Faces when PCs tracked lots of evilness to her, some ingame years later was pricelss.

 

[+5 Keyboard!]

To preface this, I really don't consider myself a RBDM, but I can be very unmerciful when the dice fall. My rolls are made out in the open and often with a lot of taunting speculation about the results and how badly things can go for the player(s). Sometimes they even go as badly as predicted.

I had a player that was kind of a prick that joined my game having never suffered a character death and thus had an inflated sense of his own gaming superiority. Knowing how often character deaths happen in my more brutal campaigns, I just snickered when he bragged about this fact to the group.

Well, he did have some character deaths during that campaign and acted like a real baby about it each time. I have to admit that I found it quite amusing and even satisfying because of his attitude, but I never went out of my way to crush this guy's characters or stacked the odds against him. In fact, he suffered the least amount of casualties in the group, to give him a little credit.

I guess he was getting burnt out on the game or just not enjoying the campaign and he had a character death that really pissed him off. Outside of the game, he told me he was thinking of quitting. I asked him to give it another chance and I'd try to make it more enjoyable for him.

He returned the next week with a new character and I ended up killing that character too. At the time, I thought about intervening in some way to reverse it, but it was such a dumb mistake on his part and a resounding overkill of his character that I really couldn't see how I was going to do that without straight up cheating and being unfair to the rest of the players. So I let the dice fall as they were and we never saw him again.

 

[Darklone]

One of the players changed chars. Quit paladin, enter the spellsinger. I took the paladin, gave her a nice heroic exit... and secretly let her survive, yet imprisoned by the BBEG. Who had a vampire cohort. Welcome blackguard vampire.

It wasn't that bad or creative, but it was easily the thing that hurt my players most. In 25 years.

 

[the Jester]

In the ol' 2e days, there was a bitchin' 9th level wild magic spell called wildfire. While it was active, it let you make items, emulate spells, etc- basically do nearly anything. It was essentially the wild mage's version of wish.

Well, enter our heroes, exploring a deep, deadly dungeon. They find a corpse wearing a ring that radiates EXTREMELY strong magic. One of the pcs puts it on.

BOOM!!! Wildfire bursts from the ring, giving the wearer incredible powers- but the effect also permanently drains 1 point of each stat. Now, back in the old days, you didn't have all this easy fixin' stat drain stuff... those points were NOT coming back. Simultaneously the ring informs the pc that it can be used at will, and that the wildfire will last out the immediate situation, but each time it is used or donned, it will do its drain thingee.

So at this point, the pc who just lost one off each stat has no real interest in giving up the ring. He's already "paid" for it. But naturally it is a weapon of last resort...

...except that it's addictive, and as the pc uses it, he has less incentive not to use it- because, in 2e, most stats didn't give you a bonus til you had a 15. So it only took a couple uses to make the pc an "everyman"... but conversely, he had a long way to go before he started facing penalties from low stats.

The end result was a super powerful item that couldn't be used casually, but whose power grew more and more addictive the more it was employed. Just perfect.

 

[Jolly Giant]

Not my worst RBDM moment; but the one which was the most satisfying to me, since the players never found out they had been tricked:

The party has just reached epic levels and make their first visit to Union (the trader city from ELH). After they've spent a couple of hours aquainting themselves with the city, an old man carrying a book approaches them.

"Excuse me" he says, "but you guys completely match the main characters in this book, and I thought you might be interested. Actually, I think the book is about you. I bought it a few weeks ago from a guy who looked a lot like you (indicating the party wizard), only older."

He goes on to explain that he runs a shop here in the city and he specializes in old books. The book he's got with him is obviously very old, but the author's name matches the name of the party wizard. They buy the book and start reading as soon as they get back to their base.

The book tells the stories of all their greatest accomplishments. The book is written in first person perspective with the wizard as the central character, just as if it had been written by him. The book even mentions their first visit to Union, which they have just returned from. However, this is only about halfway through the book! It goes on, telling tales of mighty deeds that they have not yet performed.

The players immediately decide that the book must be from the future. They all get very excited; discussing the possibilities of time-travel via magic, et cetera. Obviously, the wizard will one day learn such spells and now his future self has travelled backwards in time to ensure that they get thier hands on a copy of this book that he will one day write. This must mean that he wants them to the stuff the book says they did/will do.

So they go ahead and do all those things the book mentions, and mostly things turn out the way they do in the book. Okay, so they make a few blunders along the way and have a few mishaps (such as a PC death or two) that are not mentioned in the book, but they figure the wizard has omitted these incidents to make them all look better for posterity. That would be just like him, actually. Also; the wizard spends an awful lot of time visiting colleagues on every plane, hoping to find someone who knows something about time travel spells. He has no success, though.

What the players never suspected, although the campaign lasted for a couple more years, was that the book was a forgery. The frail, old 'book seller' had made it himself and manipulated the party into doing what he wanted them to do! Essentially, they have been working for him for a whole year without knowing it and without getting paid, of course.

 

[noretoc]

My players love and hate giving me backgrounds.. One player coming into my game new, played a merc, who had been raised by his father, which he always called captain. He didn't remember his mother. During the campaign, he encountered people from his past, most unscupulous, and he loved me working his history into the game. One session he went to a brothel, and spent some time with a lady there. Later he found out that the lady was not a brothel worker, but the wife of a prominent local merchant, who had shady dealings. Also, she was pregnant with his kid. (I usually stay away from soap opera play, but keep reading).
When the merchant found out, he worked to find the player and end him, and for several months, they went back and forth, looking for ways to take him down. Eventually they caught him in the act, and the party split, half to a warehouse to capture him and the other half to his home where they would find evidence and rescue the wife and unborn.
The player went after the merchant. The others after getting in the house and finding the woman, listen to her sob story, about how her husband was not always evil. When he was young, he had a tryst with a woman, and a child resulted. He ordered his guard captain to kill the child, for the embarrasment. The soldier did, but then left the merchant's service. Well, by now the other players have figured out that the missing son was never killed, and was raised by the Captain and that is it the other player.
Also while searching out the house they found the merchant's journal, which states that the reason he had the baby killed was that his family had been cursed by a gypsy, and the first born of every generation would always kill the father. They rushed to find the first player, and managed to get to him just in time to watch him pull a punch on the merchant, who tripps and hit his head and dies. They they all remembered the merchants wife was carrying the player's child, cursed to grow up and kill his father.

The look on his face was classic..

He ended up playing the son in the next campaign looking for away to end the curse, to fins that the curse was tied up in a pipe, the merchant owned, which the last players had happily sold for loot.

 

[Numion]

What the players never suspected, although the campaign lasted for a couple more years, was that the book was forgery. The frail, old 'book seller' had made it himself and manipulated the party into doing what he wanted them to do! Essentially, they have been working for him for a whole year without knowing it and without getting paid, of course.

Hehee, excellent ! ! !

 

[Jolly Giant]

Hehee, excellent ! ! !

Thank you. It was a most satisfying RBDM experience.

Kudos to KrazyHades for starting such a cool thread, btw! I've thoroughly enjoyed reading it and plan to steal shamelessly from it.

 

[KrazyHades]

Thank you. It was a most satisfying RBDM experience.

Kudos to KrazyHades for starting such a cool thread, btw! I've thoroughly enjoyed reading it and plan to steal shamelessly from it.

I'm learning some great ideas here too.

Next time we meet, my PCs are going to be faced with a fun little hostage situation. A vampire cleric/lifedrinker named Maloch Disterlo (a recurring enemy) had kidnapped and tortured a man who knows where the players can find a certain widget. The vampire has wiped out his own weak allies to both get bonus hit points and to fill up his lifedrinker lifewell. Maloch's willing to negotiate for the life of the hostage: he wants in return another NPC that the PCs have captured, a military commander. If they make the trade, the military commander is turned into an enslaved vampire who leads the armies of the Church of Bane against the PC's homeland. If they DON'T make the trade, the hostage will probably get killed (unless my players do something ingenious, which they very well might).

There are ways to advance the plot if the hostage gets killed, but it involves going up against a very big, nasty, scheming black dragon.