The DM Hall of Shame

[Psion]

Well, once upon a time I ran an adventure where the players were commandoes in a traveller game using jump capsules to retreive someone from a prison planet.

Through a series of remarkably bad rolls, the party all died upon reentry. At the time I prided myself for sticking to my guns, so said "sorry guys! Adventure's over."

Hindsight is 20/20. Letting the dice fall where they may is well and good, but I have since made it my philosophy that the challenging rolls certainly should be at a climactic moment or non-essential.

 

[demiurge1138]

Personally, my most embarrasing moment was when I made one of my players cry.

Really.

It wasn't my fault, and in retrospect I shouldn't have blamed myself. The player was (slightly unhealthily) attached to her kitsune-esque character (yes, I was a nice enough DM to create a race of anthrofoxes specifically for her character plans). So the party fought a teratomorph (from MMII), which has a "chaos warp" slam attack. She gets hit, fails her save, I roll percentiles...
And she's polymorphed into a human.
Enter crying. It's soft and pretty subtle, so I don't know what's going on for a while. Then I feel terrible. So I let the polymorph "wear off", and tried very hard to keep from altering her species in any way.

Again, hindsight being 20/20, I did what any DM would, and would have had no idea of her reaction, which was definitely a little extreme. But still, I felt so guilty at the time.

Demiurge out.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

This year, I started this great campaign, with the initial story arc centered around a new creature..."The Dark". Weak demons, The Dark were vulnerable to to light and attacks that generated light, so would force PCs to make Will saves before taking any action that would generate light.

They also drained stats...

Months into the campaign, the party defeated the Dark of that Prime Material, and did it quite easily. The epic close to the story arc wasn't nearly as epic as I'd hoped.

3 days later, I figured it out...the stat I had the Dark draining was Strength, not Wisdom. Thus, as the PCs advanced in levels, the Dark became not just weaker, but exponentially weaker. The spellcasters just wiped the battlemat with them.

I was so embarassed, I apologized to my group.

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

Generally I am pretty happy with my abilities as a GM but some of the bad moments over the years were:

making a player cry after an arbitrary decision against her character

allowing a plyer to control the group by letting him get away with bullying people and talking the loudest

not kicking some people out when they should have been

Though there was a time I thought would be a disaster that ended up being oen of the most fun the players had. The characters were ready to go up against the campaign's biggest bad guy to date. It was going to be the start of a major new epic series. I forgot the bad guy's stats and just made stuff up as I went along. I had no HPs, powers, spells or anything else in front of me. I just had the guy be tough and dish out some toughness. The charactesr were challenged and excited, all of them unaware that I had nothing in front of me. I just had the bad guy drop at the most exciting moment.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Personally, my most embarrasing moment was when I made one of my players cry.

Heartless bastard!

-Hyp.

 

[Clint]

The time I introduced the very first dragon into my 3.0 campaign and gave it a different physical description. The players forgot to read my mind and realize that this was one that they should have fled from.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

ShadowRun. I had two plots going on at the same time but forgot to tell the players. They kept wondering why random people were trying to kill them. Ooops.

 

[fourthmensch]

At the risk of turning this into a contest, I've got a story of personal stupidity that can give anyone else's stupidity story a run for their money. It still makes me laugh when I think about it.

I was running my players through a heavily modified "The Black Egg" from Dungeon magazine. For those unfamiliar, it involves a wizard's stronghold plummeting to earth from low orbit--a stronghold that is made of solid iron.

One of my players (the one who is always thinking on his toes, looking for unusual advantages) actually did research (between sessions, that is) and discovered that ferric meteors become heavily magnetized during their descent. So he innocently asked me in the middle of the next session, "So would the iron in this place be magnetized?

It was kind of an off-day for me, and I didn't really think about it too hard. "Sure," I said. He promptly picked up several chunks of magnetized-iron rubble.

It slipped my mind that magnetized iron is a metamagic component (from UA) for a maximized chain lightning. I had no idea until they toasted a party of hardcore half-dragons and bodaks with two maximized chain lightnings. Did I mention that I failed to notice that bodaks are immune to electricity? After that massacre, they loaded up on all the iron they could carry.

That's two bags of holding and a portable hole full of magnetized iron, conveniently packaged in small rubble-sized chunks as per the adventure text.

Do you have any idea how many maximized chain lightnings that is?

Neither do I. But rest assured, it is a disgustingly high number.

Thankfully, my players were very cool about fixing my blunder; the one who hatched the scheme even admitted that he was just screwing with me, and wanted to see if I would say yes. They refrained from taking advantage of their hoard, save for a once during a suitably climactic moment, and then "sold" their iron to a component collector for a fraction of its market value.

Bless them for their mercy on a silly DM prone to blithe answers to innocuous questions. Needless to say, now every time a player asks a question that comes a little bit from left field, I respond with, "Why do you ask?"

 

[EricNoah]

One of my greatest regrets was that I allowed a TPK in an Underdark campaign I was enjoying greatly, and that the final death totally depended on one judgement call from me. Last surviving character pulls out what he thinks is dust of disappearance. He doesn't know it's dust of sneezing and choking. I could EASILY have just decided then and there that the dust was the good kind and not the bad kind. But I didn't. So they all died, and a campaign I was enjoying simply ended. Blah!

Crap -- I just remembered that I did the same thing in an Al-Qadim campaign -- allowed a TPK to end an enjoyable campaign, robbing both me and the player (it was a one-on-one game) of the satisfaction of wrapping up months of gaming in a satisfying way. Urggggg ... I'm not gonna make that mistake again.

 

[Whimsical]

Oh, I have one. It's so bad to me that I occasionally find myself screaming "NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" at my memory, hoping my voice will go back into time to my ears at the time.

I was running a RPGA Living Greyhawk adventure at a gaming con and set up a combat scenario to be set outdoors during the night. I informed everyone that there would be regular concealment level of darkness outside so that everyone could see each other but there was a 20% miss chance for their attacks. The player playing the elf infomed me that he should be able to see just fine out here. I "corrected" him informing him that although he can see twice the distance with a local light source, that since the moon was so far it pretty much made everything the same level of concealment for everyone. Another player politely read the low light vision rule to me out of the book, and in my mind I thought that my explanation fit what he read. To the players' credit, they stopped trying to persuade me and let the game continue without further comment, while I was having the elf roll his 20% miss chance for his attacks along with everyone else (and he did miss a couple of attacks because of it.)

It was only after the con did I realize my mistake. I was really stuck on the idea that there was "light", "darkness", and "total darkness" and it was only afterwards did I realize that there were four levels of illumination (or lack thereof):

Normal / Low-Light​

1. Light / Light
2. Darkness / Light
3. Total Darkness / Darkness
4. Total Darkness / Total Darkness

Now, this may not seem like a big deal to others, but I tend to have a high quality knowledge and understanding of the rules and tend to be the rules guru for the gamers I game with. And if I'm not sure about something, I won't state that something that I think is true is true. I'll qualify it or do some spot researching just to make sure. It's just that this time I was sure about something that wasn't true. And since I would like to be regarded as an expert on the rules and to be able to be trusted with my word, this little slipup pains me.