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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DrNilesCrane" data-source="post: 3156194" data-attributes="member: 7652">Old story, early 2nd edition, eons ago…The party is traveling across a large island.  There are known, easily recognizable pirates operating near the island but certainly not inland.  That’s important in two paragraphs.  They encounter a group of young knights and camp with them.  Talking with them, they learn the knights are basically on a training exercise: there’s a senior knight who knows what he’s doing and a bunch of young recruits.  They’re all wearing nice plate armor and are well equipped with weapons and supplies, but it’s clear that they don’t know what they are doing (think rich noble “boy scouts”).  Party camps overnight with them, shares watches, even show the kids a few “adventuring tricks of the trade” before going their separate ways the next morning.  Nice role-playing encounter.  A few days later, the party meets with a corrupt leader of a nearby city who tells the party that the knights of the island are bad guys.  The party says, “Oh, like those guys we just met?”  As DM, I figure that the party is going to realize the corrupt leader is full of BS as he tells them “Yep” and adds that the knights they met are actually pirates in disguise and they need to be killed (it was a little more suave than that…but not by much).  To my surprise, the party agrees (ah…what?) and heads out, tracking down the knights and slaughters them.  A few of the PCs wonder aloud “Is this really a good idea?  I mean, they really, really don’t seem like pirates…do pirates ride horses, train with lances, and wear lots of plate armor?” as a few of the “boy scouts” cry for mercy, but one PC (something of a bully) is all for it and convinces everyone else that it’s all good.  As DM I loath to railroad so I figure, “hey, let’s see where this train wreck leads us.”The party returns to the city and informs their new patron that the mission is accomplished (much to the patron’s surprise).  Seeing that he has a party of naïve murderers on his hands, he points them to a rival of his on the town council.  “He’s a pirate too: go kill him!”  Party agrees, I collect my jaw off the floor, and they stroll from their patron’s house, across town, right to the home of the rival in the middle of the day, asking for directions from the local guard on the way.  They see the rival on the porch—doddering old guy.  Half the party wants to attack (in the middle of the city, around noon – tons of witnesses) the other feels “something is wrong.”   I’m entirely confused from the DM chair that they think this might be a good idea, but OK, let’s see what happens…While half the group readies weapons, the other half chats with the target and quickly realizes that he’s not a pirate, isn’t allied with them, and has nothing to do with them.  It’s pretty clear they’re being duped.  They tell the rest of the party that they’ve been set up, but one character doesn’t believe them and attacks the geezer.  In broad daylight.  On his porch.  They kill him and flee after a brief fight between the party members, returning to their obviously diabolical patron—who, upon hearing the news of their attack on his rival, quickly realizes that his connection to the party is a bad idea.  He immediately sends them on a fool’s errand again, getting them out of the city so that he can have them killed off.At this point the campaign is in the toilet—the party has gone so far off the path of reason, I’m not sure where to go.  But the party finally (!) starts to wise up and decides to take off rather than let their patron kill them, leaving the city and trying to find a way off the island.  More knights show up and a short while later, the party is all captured and “executed” by poison…  I decide to throw one more chance out there to salvage things and the party wakes up later and is forced on a “Dirty Dozen” suicide mission by the local king (“You’ve got thirty days to live…you can either run off and enjoy them or come back, mission accomplished, and get the antidote.”).   At this point we decided to pull the plug on the campaign and try something new…I asked the players “So what were you thinking?”  The “bully” just wanted to kill stuff.  The other players were wishy-washy and couldn’t say why they had gone along with it…” guess it was the thing to do.”  HUH?</blockquote>

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