Stupidest Things DMs Have Done

[shilsen]

In the same vein as the Stupidest Things PCs Have Done thread, here's one for the really dumb and hopefully amusing things you've seen a DM do or even done yourself.

I'll start things off with the one that made me have to take over DMing and start the campaign in my sig.

The group, consisting mostly of people who had met through ENWorld and didn't know each other, was about to start play in a homebrew campaign. The DM sent us lots of campaign info, and it quickly became clear that (a) he'd spent a lot of time on it and (b) really should have been running a grim and gritty GURPS campaign rather than trying to shoehorn it into a D&D game (mainly because he couldn't find people to play GURPS with him).

The problem was that he wanted all sorts of flavor elements without being able to match the mechanics to it. Like when we encountered undead and he described it as "the realization crashes in on you that all those horrific stories about the existence of the living dead are actually true, and you are paralyzed with horror for a moment." And then the PCs got to attack, killed the undead with one hit each, and had a nice in-character about how these things weren't so bad.

And the best was when he, trying to make the obtaining of food extremely difficult, gave us prices for rations that made us reallize a steel shield cost less than a day's worth of rations. Leading to the moment when we defeated a group of bandits, took the gold and very fancy equipment they had, and then found their incredibly well-stocked larder and started throwing away our treasure just so we could stock up on food.

In short, the poor guy just hadn't paid enough attention to mechanics before wanting to tweak them. He's also the DM who said "WHAT?!" when my 2nd lvl raging barbarian hit someone for 17 pts of damage, and made me look at Power Attack when I was about to take it at 3rd lvl and think, "Damn - I'm going to make him cry if I use this!"

I never did see 3rd lvl, however, since the DM just gave up on the campaign and the group, and I took over since someone had to. Which led to the Eberron campaign in my sig, which I've had a grand time running and is going strong and heading for its 3rd year. Plus I met this group due to his campaign. So I owe him for that, as well as for never being able to look at a steel shield or rations the same way again.

Okay, that's mine. Your turn...

 

[Kafkonia]

We were playing in a homebrewed adventure the DM had originally co-designed for her sister and her sister's friends to play instead of going to their prom. It was a very tongue-in-cheek game; at one point, we literally had to follow a railroad to get where we were going.

But what really stands out was when the DMPC character that accompanied us for the first part of the adventure used her ability to turn plants on the shambling mounds attacking us. While another player's treant character stood right next to her. By the end of the adventure, my PC had been turned to stone, the treant was permanently insane, and the artificer had been transported to Ysgard and decided not to come back, all courtesy of a well-placed prismatic spray.

 

[Andor]

One springs right to mind.

It was the first day of the new campaign. We had made our characters and got our first mission. Someone had been raiding trade caravans coming into town and the merchants wanted us to find the raiders and stop them.

Pretty standard stuff, sure, no problem. So we track down the lair of the raiders and it's a small pack of hobgoblins being led by the local sherrif. So we had our climactic battle and managed to kill the gobbos and capture the sherrif. So naturally we interrogate him. "Why were you attacking trade coming into your own town?"

At which point the DM gets this puzzled look on his face and said "Gee, I never thought to give him a motivation."

And that was the end of that campaign.

 

[megamania]

My first 3.0 game we fought Lizardfolk. CR 1. I figured CR 1 for a group. okay. And after three sessions with very few survivors I came to relieze fully that the CR was for 1 Lizardfolk... not 4-6 of them at once!

First of several new edition rules I blew in the beginning.

 

[Aeric]

It was a homebrewed world, and the area we were adventuring in suddenly came under the effects of a supernatural winter. All of a sudden, the bounty hunters who were chasing us had all kinds of arctic gear with no logical explanation of how they could have gotten it so fast. No, they weren't allied with the BBEG who caused the winter. No, they didn't have a high-level mage to teleport to the north for a shopping trip. It was simply an us-versus-the DM scenario. These same bounty hunters used a magic heat-generating ring to create an elaborate series of tunnels through the snow to maneuver around us. Yes, that meant the ring melted snow faster than we could ride our horses. No, of course it didn't work that way for us once we killed the bounty hunters and took the ring.

As frustrating as the snow tunnels were, the low point came one night while we were camping. We knew the bounty hunters were following us, so our wizard (who was supposed to be on watch) cast Invisibility and Fly on himself and did a little aerial recon. He found their camp, and a single cloaked and hooded figure sitting close to a fire. He flew back, only to find that the party's horses had been burned to death. You see, while the wizard was off checking on the bounty hunters' camp, the bounty hunters (with some strange precognitive notion that this was going to happen), tunneled through the snow to our camp (being amazing navigators to be able to tunnel over a mile straight to us), and managed to pour oil on our horses without either waking us up or, more importantly, freaking the hell out of the horses. And then they lit the oil on fire, and the horses died. All while we were asleep.

Oh, and to add insult to injury, the lone figure in the camp by the fire? A snowman with a hood on him. Never mind that a snowman close enough to a fire for it to mask its lack of a heat signature (this was 2nd edition and the wizard had infravision) would have melted.

Another amazing moment comes not from a D&D game, but from a Mekton Zeta game. We were in our mechs fighting against a tank the size of a battleship. And it got a dodge roll against our attacks. That's right, folks, an 800-foot long, God-knows-how-many tons heavy, tracked supertank dodged our fire. The GM's defense was that the tank was built using the same construction system used for mecha, and since mecha got a dodge roll, the tank should too. A shining moment where rules and reality met and decided to go their separate ways.

 

[rose4100]

allowing his wife to play....

 

[JustKim]

allowing his wife to play....

You are so right, my scrotum-possessing brother, women should not be allowed to play D&D. Now let us punch each other to affirm our manliness.

 

[argo]

This story has a "moral" to it, one I try to remind myself of frequently when GMing.

So we are playing what was supposed to be like a two-session "mini game". In the first session we get a rumor that there is trouble in the fishing village and we are supposed to follow the south road to get there. Except we get in a tussle with a local militia group on the road and spend the rest of the first game first fighting them then running away (atually that was all my fault, long story... )

Anyway, so we are back for the next session and the GM is really trying to get things back on track. We start lost in the wilderness (we ran from the soldiers in the night)
player 1: So where to next?
player 2: We're still going to the fishing village right?
player 3: Right, we were supposed to follow the south road, lets head south!

Now none of us realize it but at that point the GM starts freaking out inside his head. You see, he had maped out this part of the campaign setting and in this provence the "South Road" takes an eastward turn So if we were to keep going south we would never find the fishing village. But even worse, he had decided that the milita from last night were patroling to the south, so if we go that way we are going to run into those guys again and he doesn't want a repeat of last session.

So he comes up with a plan.

We head out southward and find a small road which we naturally start to follow. Minutes later we see a group of 50 clerics of the Death God wearing black full-plate and black cloaks riding black war horses!
GM: "You know that the church of the Death God is allied with the milita, they probably called them in as reinforcements after their fight with you. You see the lead cleric give a yell and they all ride towards you."
US: "WE RUN AWAY!"

Thus begins a wild cross-county chase as we try to escape the "Nazgul" as we dubed them. However, the Nazgul are driving us eastward, towards the fishing village where we were supposed to go. In the end we get away but it takes us the entire session to get there (remember, we were supposed to be here last session).

So after the session I'm talking with the GM, going over the events of the night.
ME: "Man those Nazgu were scarry, and we still didn't find out what the trouble in the village was"
GM: "Yeah, I made that all up on the spur-of-the-moment.." And then he explains everything I told you about us going the wrong way, etc...
ME: "Uh, couldn't you have just put a signpost there that says 'this way to fishing village'?" :\
GM: .......


And thus we have the moral of the tale: "Never send fifty Nazgul after your players when a signpost would suffice"

 

[shilsen]

You are so right, my scrotum-possessing brother, women should not be allowed to play D&D. Now let us punch each other to affirm our manliness.

 

[Squire James]

Let's see... how about these?

1. PCs learn of marauding orcs from villagers. They go out seeking orcs. They see orcs, and ask the DM to check for surprise. The DM declares that the PCs did NOT attack the orcs, because they are of Good alignment and they players should have held off on attacking since they didn't KNOW these were the orcs that marauded the village! Yes, he actually nixed PC actions because of (mis-)alignment issues! I wasn't there for the aftermath of this, but I wouldn't be surprised if the orcs attacked the PCs with surprise...

2. Same DM running Forge of Fury (module spoiler warning). PCs approach fortress. Without rolling anything, the orc sentries see them and shut the front door after going inside (presumably to alert his fellow orcs). The door seemed indestructable, and no amount of weapon damage could break it. Player with PC dead from last encounter builds a dwarven barbarian with Destructive Rage SPECIFICALLY to destroy that one door! They destroy the door, and the BBEG of the module promptly comes out and does various draconic things. PCs score multiple crits in a round, doing over 100 points of damage. Medium-size dragon snatches a just-as-big PC and flies away with him.

3. Same DM running what appeared to be G1 from Against the Giants. Monk decides to check all the side rooms for sleeping giants (exactly the right thing to do in this situation). Coup de graces several sleeping giants and cave bears, and loots thousands of gp from the rooms. DM rules that a level 20 vampire had hypnotized him, and that none of this really happened. In broad daylight. Without other party members noticing. Without rolling any dice for little things like, oh, Will saves.

4. Paladin pokes at an assortment of dirty rags. A Rot Grub leaps out of the rags and kills the paladin in one round. No dice rolls whatsoever, not for the rot grub hitting, or the paladin to attempt to win initiative and cut his own arm off. No rolls at all. One dead paladin dead within 5 minutes of creating the character. He didn't even get a chance to take over the character to require him to act Lawful Stupid (see #1).

These are just the worst... his games were essentially one moment like this after another. And this guy gets 6-10 players for his games, and I am unable to sustain more than 3 at a time (usually 2). He probably killed all interest in D&D forever for about 6 people.