Stupid Player Syndrome

[Testament]

Holy funting Moses Merric, where did you find such profoundly stupid players? The Ettin incident had me crying with laughter just reading it. If you, as GM could keep a straight face during it then I am impressed!

My favourite one is a bit longer, but was hysterical for me as a GM. The PCs had just managed to stop a group of evil cultists operating under a chandlery, with the help of the most wanted pirate in the entire Republic. Needless to say, the fight was quite dramatic, complete with red light blasting out of the windows when the hellhound pack was summoned to stop the PCs. They emerge victorious, to find themselves staring at the muzzles of 30 soldiers from the coastal fort nearby. The pirates are also being rounded up.

During their incarceration, the guards and authorities hear stories about one PC in particular, who tortured a captured cultist Resevoir Dogs style, except that he also ATE the ear. He's also been ranting the whole time about how this is unjust that he's imprisoned, and that the Prince of the nation is a git and that he'll eat his ears.

After a little while in prison, the Prince arrives with his staff to interview the PCs, since they have stopped a threat to the Republic. His physician in particular wishes to interview the noisy one. The highlight of their conversation went thus

Dr: So you don't like the Prince I take it?
PC: No, he's a F###tard! We're out there risking our lives to stop these psychos from killing more innocents and wrecking the whole nation, and what's he doing? Sitting on his fat a## back in Hydebarad*, counting MY tax money!
Dr: Oh...(GM shock hits). You do realise that the Prince has many affairs of state to deal with. You created one when you exposed the regional Governor of this province as a member of this cult. Plus, he was trying to deal with the panic that the murders in the capital started.
PC: Well then must suck as his job! I've been in this whole for 2 damn weeks.
Dr: Well you were in the company of Brass Ky'Ulth. He's a wanted pirate. His lair was also...interesting. We found several bodies, that looked like they'd been tortured. One had his ears removed and had been viciously beaten.
PC: He had it coming. By the way, you have very nice ears.

That was it at that point. The character was deemed a dangerous madman and subversive, and now languishes in an insane asylum.

*-Capital city.

 

[Acid_crash]

I have one.

A group of 3rd level adventurers, at half hit points, exit a cave. In the group, a Monk, Sorcerer/psion, Druid, Rogue/Sorcerer, Wizard.

They are on a hill, and hear a loud smash coming from the other side of the bend in the hill. They reach the corner, see a Hill Giant picking up some dead goblins and tossing them into his bag. Then he picked up a elf corpse, put it in the bag, along with some rocks.

PC 1-4: Ummm, I think we should get out of here.
PC 5 (Psion/Sorcerer): I fire light crossbow at hill giant.

Three rounds later, TPK.

After that, they all looked at the guy who fired the crossbow, he said, "I just wanted to know how tough they are?"

Not my fault they all got killed when a Hill Giant isn't even paying attention and they just rush in and get themselves slaughtered.

 

[MerricB]

Merric, where did you find such profoundly stupid players? [/SIZE]

They breed them in Ballarat, it seems.

Though, there was a time when I was learning the art in Melbourne...

Situation: We're playing a Marvel Superheroes game.

DM (not me, for a change): The man you've rescued looks to be on the edge of hysteria. He gasps, "Who are you?"
PC: (Talon, a mutant tiger-person): "We are the Harbingers of your DOOM!!!!"
DM: He's no longer on the edge of hysteria. He's way past it now.

That group instituted a "Talon Award", to be given to the player who said the most inappropriate thing at a dramatic moment.

Bit of a pity about the clues we were meant to get from that man...

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

I had one similar to Merrics ettin one above. We were using minis and the archer had party members directly in front of the small creatures they were fighting. THe archer fires, hits friend PC twice. Next round does the same. On the third round the PC who just got hit with 4 arrows runs back to the archer and sunders his bow.

I'm sure that, in my last few sessions, the PCs have done more damage to each other through ranged combat than the enemy has done to them...

Cheers!

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I had one similar to Merrics ettin one above. We were using minis and the archer had party members directly in front of the small creatures they were fighting. THe archer fires, hits friend PC twice. Next round does the same. On the third round the PC who just got hit with 4 arrows runs back to the archer and sunders his bow.

I found this to be the funniest story that I've heard on this thread so far. I have played with a number of players that I could easily imagine continuing to shoot despite the fact that they're only hitting their fellow party members and another couple that I could see sundering the bow (or worse!)

I think that this scene would fit quite well in Monty Pyton's "The Holy Grail"

Olaf the Stout

 

[Psychic Warrior]

MerricB - those were the second funniset things I've read today (they would have been first but Order of the Stick had a new comic today )

 

[MerricB]

(they would have been first but Order of the Stick had a new comic today )

It is hard to compete with the Giant.

Cheers!

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

We had a new guy playing a 12th-lvl druid who just... didn't... get ... it. Tried to take on a white dragon (I forget the age, but it was something like CR 16) all by himself (not to mention the other 2 white dragons flying nearby). He had the 2E monstrous compendiums memorized.

Too bad we were playing 3E.

To his credit, he lasted 2 rounds!

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

This same guy made a new character - a ranger. Upon meeting the P, he promptly insulted and belittled them all as being beneath his stature.

The P turned around and left. Shortest character ever.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Well, lets throw in some bad player stories.

Strangely enough, my players seem to be able to keep their head in D&D, so these are about shadowrun.

I had a character (who was hiding in a kitchen cupboard at the time) explode himself on the grounds that if he was going down, he was taking the enemy with him. He killed them, and his mate in the cupboard next door. Unfortunatley, the guys coming after him were armed with tear gas and rubber shotgun rounds.

In fact, I think I'd already made that fact clear when they bounced off someone's armour vest.

The plot is - the runners have to nick a scroll from a secure building on a university campus. They come up with the idea of faking an infestation of deadly insects, intercepting the universities phone call for exterminators, then posing as the exterminators.

Good plan, yeah?

Ok, so this one player decides it's his job to fake the infestation. He decides bees are an easy insect to get lots of. He phones up an apiary (that's the word, right?) and strikes a deal for a couple of hives. He then goes to get them. Figuring that he doesn't want to get stung, he shows up in his light security armour. One of the two beekeepers comes out to do the deal, while the other one goes to get the hives ready.

The deal is going well, when the beekeeper he's dealing with says "Hey - that's an interesting looking suit. Where'd you get that?".

The runner, panicking, quickdraws his (unsilenced) heavy pistol and shoots him dead.

The other beekeeper, unsurprisingly, hears the gunshot, comes wandering back to find out what's going on, sees the body and starts running towards the office, screaming "I'm calling the cops!".

The runner, sensibly this time perhaps, shoots him in the back.

He then goes and gets the beehives and stuffs them in the back of the truck, closes it up and drives - not to the university campus, but to the hotel that the team are staying in.

He parks in the underground parking lot.

He then opens the back of the van.

Now - it's been a long drive. The bees have been shaken up. He didn't pick up a smoker or anything. Unsurprisingly, the bees are a bit agitated, and when he opens the back of the van, some of them begin to fly around in the parking lot.

I, as gm, suggest that maybe the van would be better off shut... The player apparently didn't agree...

The runner figures "hey - smoke calms them down, right? I own smoke grenades. Hell, they're loaded in my grenade launcher!".

He then goes into the back of the van, takes out the launcher and then fires it.

Grenade launchers have a minimum range of 50m, so the smoke grenade bounces up and down and up and down (about 10 times) before going off, filling the parking garage with very heavy smoke.

He then leaves the van, bees, hives and everything as they are, puts the grenade launcher back into the van, and proceeds to take the lift back up to the teams hotel suite.

The team decide that they don't want to be associated with the double homocide at the apiary, and believe that the presence of a large number of bees, not to mention the smoke currently pouring out of the carpark door, will probably draw some attention, and as a group they... ahem... bug out, leaving the beehives.

Later, they formulated another plan that involved using a high-powered jammer, a highjacked docwagon chopper and an earth elemental, which went quite well, except they left the valuable scroll buried in the botanical garden for long enough that the original owners tracked it via magic and took it back (I believe they intended to leave it buried there for nearly a week).

Oh well.