When did you bait & switch and how did it go? (Spoilers)

[Retreater]

One of my specialties that I run very rarely is a farcical parody one-shot I call the G.G. Scenario (because Gary Gygax traditionally appears as an NPC). I bring pre-generated characters that go into trials that sort of call out (in a humorous way) issues that we have at the table. So the bossy, "always calling the shots" player became the party's pack mule. The guy who always wants to try a new system five sessions into a campaign has to convert his character on the fly to a different game engine each turn to adapt to fight the monster. The guy always complaining about inappropriately balanced encounters had to solve a puzzle using encounter design math from the DMG.
It's not for everyone, but we've had good laughs over the years with it.

 

[StormbringerAUS]

Bait and Switch works best with plot lines not so mach with system or settings changes. I try and have a few of these in a campaign - they generally only work when it is an 'oh yea' moment by the players. That is they put the clues together which take them from one conclusion to another, if you have to basically point out the 'switch' or when they pull open the curtain it is not the villain they thought it would be - not quite so tolerant of it.

 

[Lanefan]

I've never bait-and-switched game system or genre (other than a very slow-motion one [over a period of real-world years!] that's ongoing in my current campaign where more and more sci-fi elements are appearing in an otherwise-standard medieval D&D campaign).

But I have pulled off some major in-campaign bait-and-switches, usually by having someone that originally appeared as a mentor or ally turn out to be a villain, much to the PCs' annoyance and, once, impoverishment. I once also did the reverse, someone they originally thought to be a BBEG ultimately turned out to be on their side, and became a long-time mentor.

 

[werecorpse]

Never, because it's one of the worst behaviors a DM can do. It's a bunch of people getting together to have fun. Enticing real people in with one type of game and then intentionally decieving them is just messed up beyond imagining.

"But I wanted to surprise them" - can you guarentee they will all like your surprise? If not, then don't try to surprise them with it. Talk it over with them.

This isn't saying don't have plot twists. Bait and switch is completely different thing than that.

Have you played in a game that had a bait and switch element?

 

[Nagol]

Have you played in a game that had a bait and switch element?

I have in several over the decades. The more egregious tend to be used as cautionary war-stories I post on the boards from time to time.

There was a Aftermath campaign set in the Mississippi delta that was actually a dome on a Starlost-style space ark -- despite 1 PC being a fighter pilot with an established backstory of coming from California.

There was a Traveller-esque Hero games campaign that had the universe erased and the surviving PCs "rebuilt" in Chivalry and Sorcery.

There was a modern day private detective game (think Magnum PI, Remington Steele, or Simon and Simon) that was actually a War of the Worlds invasion.

 

[darjr]

I haven’t done it. If I did I’d want to run D&D but it turns out to be Metamorphosis Alpha.

One time I was in a shared Traveller campaign and the DM at the time was turning into a Cthulhu campaign. I LOVED the idea, but the traveller folk who came to play traveller were not impressed.

 

[Voadam]

I've run a Pathfinder game where when the party went into a fey gate into the more primal fey version of reality I had them all convert to first edition AD&D and we used those mechanics for the games while in the fey realms.

There was some apprehension about 1e rules which many did not like and the resulting huge character imbalances, but I let them know it was only for while they were there and they went with it for the few sessions they were adventuring there.

I had not told them about this beforehand, I had not even thought of it when we started the campaign but the idea grew as the otherworldly fey elements of the plots and the players' interactions with the fey grew over time.

It turned out pretty well.

 

[Jer]

I've never done a bait-and-switch. I've had players tell me horror stories about DMs pulling a few: "it's actually a holodeck simulation on the Enterprise", "everyone has actually been dead all along and the game world is actually hell", and "you wake up and come out of your sleeping pods into a post-apocalyptic world". None of them were appreciated by the players in them (though to be fair they were all from High School games where everyone thinks they're more clever than they really are, so some of the complaints were less about "bait and switch" and more about how dumb they felt the plot twist was).

The closest I've had is something along the lines of what @Umbran described - I was a player in a game where we thought we were playing in a Kolchack the Night Stalker or Forever Knight inspired game using WoD rules and it turned out instead that our GM wanted to run a Wraith game and when the opportunity arose killed off our characters and had us make ghosts to run instead. But we all were warned that the campaign could shift radically when we started - most of us thought he intended to shift it into a Vampire game and he was doing an extended origin story for us as an experiment - so we weren't really upset by it.

 

[Variss]

Not so much a bait-and-switch as a subversion of tropes. The heroes, doing heroic things, are being leveraged by the BBEG to undermine faith in the Gods. He wants them to win against the adversaries he pits them against. There were hints along the way, but it took until Tier III for them to really wrap their heads around it and start working against it. Went well, ran to 20th.

 

[Lanliss]

Not sure if it counts as a bait and switch, but when playing a 1-on-1 game with my girlfriend she went into a thick forest. We rolled for a few random encounters, one of which led her to a portal that went into the Fey Wild. She had no idea what it was, and went in.

This was the beginning of a now infamous session, and she swore if I ever sent her to the feywild again she was gonna kill me. The threat was in good fun, but I might have gone a little bit overboard with the mischievous fey...