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

[nameless]

Halfway through the session, one of the PC's horses was badly wounded. Not wanting to let the beast suffer, he decided to coup de grace it and put it out of its misery. Only the horse wouldn't die. No matter what they did, the horse didn't die.

They rode it to the next town, and took it to a local wizard. He cast disintegrate on it, and the back half disintegrated, but it was still alive. We left the horse in his care, and about an hour later, there was a large explosion that knocked us off our feet (from miles away), and also left a large crater in the center of town. With a screaming horse in it.

I basically decided that nothing could possibly kill the horse, though it didn't ever heal, and felt immense pain. The PCs never figured that one out...

-nameless

 

[Henry@home]

nameless - watch Me, Myself, and Irene much?

 

[Methinkus]

time travel

I don’t want to get into too many details – though the DM at the time certainly did – but I played in a long running campaign where we switched DMs frequently, and when it was this guy’s turn he decided that time travel would be the coolest thing in the world, so we went back in time, killed the baby version of a major villain and one of the players ended up being his own father.

The player took it pretty well, he played an orphaned half ogre and we weren’t sure if anything was going to happen where we would learn about his family, but we kind of wish it hadn’t now.

 

[UrielFallen]

My players would raise a big fuss if I were to leave the table for anything during a game. They wanted to get as much as possible done in every session. I couldn't got to the washroom, and I had to ask for food and drink so they could bring it to me.

I once simply walked out on my game, took a 20 minute stroll, bought some pencils and came back. When the players complained, I told them that they would need the pencils to make some new characters.

No one questioned my intentions for leaving the table again. EVER.

 

[Quickbeam]

I was not DM for the following anecdote, but I thought it fit with the general theme of this thread .

While wandering through Ravenloft as part of my brief time playing 2e, the DM had our group stumble upon a very strange town. It seems that some maniacal source of evil had possessed the town's toymaker, and his puppets had become animated pawns in the devious plot. These demon puppets wielded magical sewing pins, which could immobilize folks if they failed a save after being stuck with 'em. At one point, several large hordes of these animated freakshow toys ambushed the party, capturing everyone except our rogue.

When we awoke, our souls had been placed inside of puppets and our new "bodies" locked in birdcages suspended above the ground by some eight feet. Our actual bodies were now under the control of the evil toymaker, and being sent about town on missions of chaos. Our goal was pretty obvious -- find a means of escaping and eventually reclaiming our rightful bodies.

 

[Cor Azer]

I was not DM for the following anecdote, but I thought it fit with the general theme of this thread .

While wandering through Ravenloft as part of my brief time playing 2e, the DM had our group stumble upon a very strange town. It seems that some maniacal source of evil had possessed the town's toymaker, and his puppets had become animated pawns in the devious plot. These demon puppets wielded magical sewing pins, which could immobilize folks if they failed a save after being stuck with 'em. At one point, several large hordes of these animated freakshow toys ambushed the party, capturing everyone except our rogue.

When we awoke, our souls had been placed inside of puppets and our new "bodies" locked in birdcages suspended above the ground by some eight feet. Our actual bodies were now under the control of the evil toymaker, and being sent about town on missions of chaos. Our goal was pretty obvious -- find a means of escaping and eventually reclaiming our rightful bodies.

That was actually a Ravenloft module; although I can't remember its name.

My DM at the time had tried running it for several groups before, but they all gave up after being put into the puppet bodies, until our group.

The DM was laughing so hard as we devised plans to get our bodies back - each one we came up with was more-or-less the same as the plans the module writers thought of to use against the PCs to get their bodies in the first place - we even used pirate accents when we did the swinging on ropes trick (although the module had the puppets wearing pirate outfits).

That was a great module...

Sorry for the hijack, back to your previously scheduled wierdness...

 

[Victim]

Wow, I played that adventure a few months ago in 3e game. However, the entire group didn't get taken down, so we only had to recover the bodies of 2 of the characters. One of the bodies got held, so we just had to figure out what happened to the real character, and how to complete the switch back.

Those cursed puppets had hardness and were riding around on little kids. Bastards.

 

[Xar]

Once my players wanted to use some kind of a dreamwalk ability, but ended up stuck in the plane of dreams. Now they lost their physical forms and magic and had to go through several dreamscapes to reach the border of the dream plane where they could return to the real world. The dreamscapes ranged from childrens dreams (Peter Pan, lost in a shopping mall (they got really freaked out on that one)), to cap. J.L. Picards dream that the Enterprise was overrun by Borgs (they were changed into crew members, Data was played by the barbarian ) . We even replayed the battle of Agincourt, but the barbarian was now changed into King Henry V, so his famous speech only consisted of: "Uh... Let's fight!"

 

[arwink]

Back in high school, my friends and I played the original castle amber module, immediately loved the wierdness of it and decided to make it a permanent feature in our games. We instituted the rule of Room 50: No matter who was running a game, what system it was, how many rooms there were in the dungeon or the theme of the adventure at the time, every session would have a room called room 50, and it would be crammed with the weirdest encounter the DM could come up with at the time.

I can't remember half that stuff, but I can recall turning everyone into trolls and sending them into a tea party, complete with cup-cakes as props, making them fight a bunch of skateboarding goblins in a half-pipe and having them defeat an evil necromancer only to find his expansive and well furnished adventure playground in the next room.

The weirdest thing I can remember happening when I was a player was when one of my friends created an evil necromancer called lord negash who developed about six different spit-personalities. The Dm would roll a die an announce a change in personalities half-way through the session, and the seriously evil necromancer would suddenly transform into a somewhat dim and goodhearted gully dwarf, a kender with asperations to paladinhood, a female tavern-wench and a few others that I can't really recall.

Not long after he was created, he found a ring of polymorphing and the boddies started to change with the personalities.

 

[Moe Ronalds]

I once played in a game my friend's dad had invented. Anyway, we didn't get to pick our characters, we got them by rolling a die, and then he handed us a character sheet. And some of the characters were more than slightly strange. My friend ended up playing a spice-girl type warrior. Her sister played some guy who'd lost his face in some thing. My friend's father's friend played an obese dwarf who wore a moose-skin kilt. My character was a malfunctioning, bald, female robot. Each round I'd roll a six sided die to see what kind of action I would take. This included punching a guy one round, then successfully getting his approval the next round by giving him three gold coins, then punching him again. It wasn't very helpful that my character loved negotiating. Later on in the same game, we had to fight a couple of evil cultists who worshipped the mystic spoon god and attacked us with giant grape fruit spoons...
Then there was this weird guy who had his pet blue gorilla thing attack us. And the hologram that had a delightful tea party with us. And the angry bladed plants of doom. And this weird myst that made everyone except the obese scottish dwarf (he was too short) hallucinate. That was a very strange game...