The Oddest Thing You've Done As A DM When Running A Game

[Angelsboi]

What i mean is "Whats the oddest way you have ran a game?" Someone said they did a flashback. I thought about doing a musical episode where id get my players (This was when i had players) to give me 3 or 4 songs that reflect what was going on in their characters lives and then find the songs and burn them onto a CD. Then during the course of the game, id play the song at a key moment. havent tried it but thought it sounded cool.

What do you think? What have you done and how?

 

[LostSoul]

The strangest thing I've done, I guess, was start the game off in the middle of the game.

The first part we played was near the climax. After we did that, I put everything back in time and played the adventure that led up to that point.

 

[Scarab]

Have the characters get stuck in an elevator and play the Super Mario theme on repeat for 90 minutes real time.

 

[Chaldfont]

In Media Res, et al.

I love playing around with these kind of things to add spice to a game. The music idea is a cool one that I just might steal

1) There is a dramatic tool named "in media res" (latin for in the middle of things) that is used in just about every action movie. Starting a game in the middle of a fight is a pretty fun thing to do. I did this once for a swashbuckling pirate game--started right off in the middle of a fight between two different pirate ships fighting each other suddenly being attacked by sahuagin in the middle of a gale force storm.
I am actually going to kick this method up a notch in my next session by starting players off after they have been fighting a running battle for two days. I am going to take away hp, spells, items and such like they have just been pounded over the last 36 hours and then hit them with a climactic last defense fight--right at the beginning of the session!

2) Start a campaign for a few sessions to set the tone and then hand off DMing to one of the players. Have each player "guest DM" for a session. I did this for one campaign and I was amazed at what the other players did with some of my plot lines--things I never thought of! Plus, the players will try to out-do each other and the game will be great.

3) Do stuff you never do. This throws players off balance and makes them think. If all of your dungeons are symmetrical (I have this problem), joke about it for a few sessions. Actually hide secret rooms that are easily found if you assume the map is symmetrical. Once you have lulled the players into this line of thinking, use it against them.

4) In a new campaign, kill all the PCs off in the first session and then give them weaker PCs to continue. TSR did this in a Vecna module and it was awesome. Really powerful wizards were wiped out in a handful of rounds in the first encounter. Then, their apprentices and minions had to pick up from there. I still remember the looks on the faces of my players that day I tell you.

5) Have the PCs find the journal of a group of adventurers. Read sections of the journal to set up encounters and then let the PCs play the adventurers. This is a cool way to introduce secrets and plots into the game. I had my PCs find a journal on the body of a dead man who was one of a group of paladin brothers who went on a doomed mission to investigate the rising evil in a nearby city. I had the players play the paladins to the glorious final battle and along the way, the regular PCs learned more about the source of the evil and how to fight it.

 

[Simon Magalis]

I was running a D&D session (typical medieval type setting) and apparently was in a strange mood because I had the characters end up on Darth Vader's Star Destroyer where the Dark Lord of the Sith told them that they were only fictional constructs of geekish minds. After ten years of DMing it is truly the only moment where I still think "WHAT THE HELL WAS I DOING?!" LOL. Weird weird weird. Maybe I had just seen Toy Story, who knows.

 

[BlackMoria]

I did a recursive time loop thing with the party. Regardless of what happened during the time loop, they awoke in a strange chamber (where the loop first happened) and everything started to repeat itself again....and agiain...and again...

They got totally freaked out by the experience, so I must of conveyed the total weirdness of the situation just right.

 

[Darklance]

I did a recursive time loop thing with the party. Regardless of what happened during the time loop, they awoke in a strange chamber (where the loop first happened) and everything started to repeat itself again....and agiain...and again...

They got totally freaked out by the experience, so I must of conveyed the total weirdness of the situation just right.

How did they eventually escape?

 

[Rel]

In a one-shot game over the holidays, I turned the whole party to stone in the first five minutes (didn't even give them a saving throw). They were all returned back to flesh an instant later to find out that twelve years had passed in the game world. The duchy they had strove so hard to protect had come under the despotic rule of "The Stone Lord".

Worse yet, the guy who had transformed them back to flesh (the once proud mayor who had hired the adventurers in the first place) hadn't been able to afford a permenant fix for them. They only had one week until they turned back to stone again. Unless they could drink an elixir made from the blood of The Stone Lord (Medusa with Sorcerer levels and a cocatrice familiar).

Those were VERY motivated characters.

Of course this was very heavy handed of me and I don't normally like to resort to this kind of railroading. But, like I said, this was a one-shot game and we had limited time to play. I needed a means of getting the party pointed in the direction of the adventure fast and a way to keep them on track (many of the people who were gaming that session were novice roleplayers).

Worked like a charm.

 

[Kobold Curry Chef]

Strangest thing I've done so far:

While running an Amber Diceless RPG session, I rolled a wandering monster check, right in front of the players. At least one of them nearly had apoplexy.

But the strangest things are the ones I haven't done yet...

 

[King_Stannis]

during "the gates of firestorm peak", the PC's were in possession of a cursed item. to make a long story short, they were fighting. each other. in the middle of this mess, to puctuate the weirdness of the entire scenario, i had a well dressed merchant emerge from the wall on one side of the room. he walked across the room during the combat, tipped his hat and smile to each of the PC's as he was walking, and then simply vanished into the wall on the other end of the room.

my PC's had a "what the #$%& was that?" look on their face. whereupon, they continued beating on each other.

the general mood after that bizarre encounter was "we gotta get the hell out this place!"

yep. weird.