DM’s: Any tales of a great scheme gone awry. You sat chuckling in your fortress of solitude knowing that the plans you had for your players were just dastardly. They would stare in horror at you and curse your name. But game time hit and they totally blew it away. They ran right through your scheme and hardly noticed the twitch in your face.
Come on, it happens. That is why they invented grudge monsters
This happened just last week. I'll sblock it since I'm including a hefty amount of backstory.
[sblock] The party had travelled through a tunnel under an impassable mountain range(not hyperbole, the mountain range is actually an artifact that extends past the atmosphere). And on the way through they killed a purple worm and were rather beat up, so they decided to rest.
An hour or so later,
something is heard approaching down the tunnel ahead of them. Being smart types they quietly peeked down the hallway, and saw the 15' long reptilian beast slinkking down the tunnel toward them. After a quick retreat and discussion, during which the genius-intelligence kobold with really terrible speaking skills makes his knowledge(arcana) check and tells them, "It make us crispy, we all die" They went ethereal and sneaked by as the dragon started eating the purple worm.
They headed away as fast as possible, congratulating themselves on their close escape, but then they reached the next room, which happened to be the dragon's lair... with hoard (actually just part of its hoard, but they didn't know that) After a moment's indecision, the group's greed won out over their sense of self-preservation. One player goes, "I'm grabbing the coins!", another says, "I'm stowing the gems". At this point I interrupt and tell the second player to make a reflex save, he failed and took a little damage as one of the gems detonated in his hand, and the characters freeze as the echoes roll through the chamber, and down the tunnel...
The immediately take off at high speed, passing through a chamber resembling a barraks with two ettins and about 30 gnolls... Through another tunnel and out to the desert on the other side of the mountain range. After a bit of thought, one of the PCs took the treasure, sneaked back into the barracks, and planted it while the ettin on guard was having a fistfight with itself. They thought the dragon would blame the ettins for stealing, kill them, and the party would be off scott free. The session ended there.
The next week I had a pair of players who were only going to be there for that game (boyfriend/girlfriend), so I handed them a character sheet for an Ettin I made up and told them they each control one arm and one head, and whoever wins inititave each round gets the legs. First scene of the session was the dragon chewing out (not literal chewing) the ettin for sleeing on watch duty and sending it to find the @#$@ who had stolen the dragon's treasure. Some worried looks around the table, but then the ettin comes out of the tunnel and wanders around at random, after some fast talking, the PCs hire the ettin and they head off to take care of their buisness in the area, which took the entire session.
Now the background is out of the way, here is the evilness that was foiled. The following session the party went all out buffing up for the inevitable fight with the dragon, including plannar ally to call a devil and raising a gargantuan scorpion as a skeleton(did I mention it's an evil party?) Incedentally, one of my favorite lines from the game was from the devil, "what? I'm here to fight a dragon, you deal with the ettins." Deals with devils and all that.
After fighting their way through the paltry defenses the ettins and gnolls put up, they buffed up and went ethereal to enter the dragon's lair(the kobold psion was glowing like a christmas tree). The fight started out as expected, two of the party failed their dragonfear saves, and the cleric had to throw up an antimagic field to keep them from running past the symbol of death on the door they bypassed. The party engaged, and both sides were giving and taking damage in great quantities.
Then the ghost sorceror(side note, his player wasn't there so I was NPCing him), who was basically out of spells after buffing everyone, decided to try for the long shot and use his possession ability. Me, "you see Asha float over to the dragon's head and try to dive into it, muttering, 'might as well try'." Then I rolled his spell penetration, 25, it passed as expected, then the dragon's save, it needed a 3 if I remember correctly, 1. I just stare at the die for a bit. My wife notices how quiet I got, nobody else seems to, "Honey, what happened?". I reply by throwing my notes in the air, this gets everyone's attention. As the paper rains down around me, I say, "The dragon looks up, a strange expression on it's face, and says, 'hey guys! It worked!', I assume there is a pause in the 'killing the dragon' action?" They agree, and as they discuss what they should do with their temporary pet (the possession lasts 10 hrs), the devil falls to the floor laughing, and a moment later the dragon fires a lightning bolt at the ceiling and says, "wow! This is cool!" (very chaotic-type ghost/sorceror).
They then proceed to heal the dragon, smash their way through the dungeon (magically restocked, I mentioned the mountain range was an artifact, right?) and fly off to attack a city the party started a war with several sessions ago, before finally returning to a friendly(terrified of them) hobgoblin fortress where they plan on tying the dragon down and killing it so they can animate it as a mount for the cleric.
I present this as an evil plan that failed purely tounge-in-cheek, the session that resulted with the players riding around on a dragon strafing an enemy city was much more fun (and generated far more plot hooks) than the session I had planned. With that in mind, how about a third round of stories, about how your players ran off with the plot you lovingly crafted and made it a better story than you ever could?
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. Horray for readable posts![/sblock]
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
