Worst/Most Ridiculous Gaming Experience Within a Homebrew Campaign

[The Grackle]

The group accidentially travelling to the past (horray for Wild Mages), where they ended up beating off some ogres and stuff from a primitive human village. When they returned to their own time, the Wild Mage realized she had dropped one of her spellbooks, and they found out that there was a new nation (a powerful magocracy), where the party was seen as gods or demi-gods.

Neat.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

I was once in a game where giant flying cats carried barrels of sodium to use as bombs.

Bearing in mind that I've been to chemistry class, and I know it "reacts energetically" to water...but I'm pretty sure it's not now nor ever has been an economical form of explosive.

Brad

 

[El Mahdi]

I was in a homebrewed 2E AD&D Spelljammer game. I had recently gotten the Complete Gnomes book and wanted to play a Forrest Gnome Beastrider. After consulting with the DM, he said my character could start out with a Blink Dog as a mount (I know, potentially pretty powerful for 1st level but he said it was okay). So, opening scene of the campaign: Your group wakes up in a wooded area. You have obviously been unconscious and feel beaten-up. Scattered around is the smoldering wreckage of a small Spelljamming vessel. Oh yeah, and your Blink Dog is wrapped around the ruins of a tree, obviously dead! Grrrrrrrrrr.

I was really upset and disapointed for a while. However, it ended up being for the best. In the end my character bonded with an Elven Cooshee dog, which turned out really cool.

 

[Halivar]

Goofiest, most awkward homebrew moment EVER.

Homebrew d6 dice-pool sci-fi system. You pick your spell DC's; the higher the more powerful. You can spend character points to raise your result on a 1-for-1 basis. 5 is average result. The DM thought he was impressing us by telling that God used a DC 40 spell to create the universe.

So, of course, the mage decides to drop 45 character points (he'd been hoarding them since the first session) to open a door on a spaceship.We could have used a DC 5 security check, but... what the hell. We decide to do it. Said player also decides that the best reagent for the spell is... (wait for it)... the Shroud of Turin. The. In a sci-fi game.

The spell's result: The ground open up... the heavens split (in the middle of the engineering bay of a spaceship) and... I can barely get myself to type it out... Jesus Christ, hanging on a cross pops out to angelic chorus and gives us all magic powers.

I buried my face in my hands, while everyone one else in the party threw ginger snaps at the DM.

 

[Kzach]

I'm ashamed to say it, but I'd have to put myself up as the DM responsible for the worst/most ridiculous homebrew games I've ever been involved in.

I blame the learning process

 

[JohnBiles]

I´m not sure this counts, but my first DM had a tendency to play "by the RAW" in incredibly annoying ways...

Like using the random encounter tables, and not fudging the rolls..


"But Gary, we are 1st level! We can´t fight 12 trolls yet!"
"Too bad, thats what the dice say you encounter!"

Yeah, I gamed with a guy like that. We spent 4 gaming sessions being killed by Random encounters. By the end, only my first character was left--cleric / thief halfing who only survived by his stealth skills. Finally, in a miracle I still can't believe, we managed to kill a hill giant with most of the Pcs at first level!!!! (1E game)


In general, I've had lots of bad gaming experiences but most of them didn't actually relate to homebrew rules/settings, per se.

However....

My friend Lee Garvin cooked up what started as a really cool homebrew setting--our PCs were basically the Suicide Squad--we were doing missions for the government that had imprisoned us to reduce our prison time.

I lost my character shortly after the Party went renegade and escaped our masters' control; I got killed by a trap I missed (Halfling Rogue)

My new character was a half-elven female cleric, created to be the half-sister of another PC (who was an Elven Cleric). Cathy and I put a bunch of work into building up the background and stuff. So I finally get introduced just in time for when our Wild Mage decides to go out in the woods and summon a familiar while the Dwarven Paladin is busy getting his full plate repaired. (This = 2E game)

Most of the party goes with him in case wandering monsters show up. The reason he went out in the woods is that he was afraid a wild surge might set the town on fire or something.

Instead, he gets a wildsurge, and the DM's homebrew wild surge table indicates...gateway to the Abyss, Type VI demon comes out.

Round 1, the Demon TKs me high into the air and I fall to the ground and die. Splat.

Then the Demon slaughters the party like wheat. However, they manage to knock him down to about 10 HP. At this point, Cathy's turned into a tree, most of the party is dead, and only the Halfling Juggler (Bard kit, IIRC), who has only ONE ARM LEFT, is left facing Mr. Demon. The Dwarf Paladin is alive...3 miles away.

What follows is a running battle in which the Juggler keeps popping the demon just enough to prevent him from regenerating using a magical sling and magical slingstones, while the demon keeps trying to kill him and he keeps making saving throws.

Eventually, the Demon chases him within crossbow range of the city. The Dwarf takes his +3 blessed crossbow and blessed bolts, goes up on the city walls and kills the demon with a critical long-range shot.

They become heroes of the city, while wild animals gnaw on our corpses.

 

[Greg K]

Two of the worst

1) Fart Dragon: It is flatulent and shoots hot steaming diaherrea as a breath weapon out of its butt and mouth.

2. The party had to recover a jeweled collar for some merchant's cat. We return the collar and, when it is placed on the cat, the cat sports a top hat, black tuxedo with tail, and cane and starts dancing off while singing like the Warner Bros. frog.

 

[Vayden]

Hmm . . . most ridiculous one for me has to be the time that both of our casters got petrified, so the rest of the party went back to town to try and find a magic item that would get us un-petrified. They found a rather kooky druid who offered them a cheap potion that would grant them a "vision quest" to find a magic item that would do stone-to-flesh. Being short on cash, they agreed. Next thing we know, everyone in the party (including the petrified characters, un-stoned and re-united with the party for the vision quest), is in the middle of a forest, surrounded by a bunch of knights who kept saying "Ni!" to us . . .

Yes, that's right, we got rail-roaded through Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail (despite groans of pain and anger and multiple attempts to jump the rails "you get lost in the woods and find yourself in a village where a woman appears to be on trial for being a witch"). Looking back, it wasn't THAT bad, but at the time I came pretty close to walking out in annoyance.

This was the same campaign which produced the line "Wait, since when are there AIRSHIPs commonly available in this world?!?" Still, moments of flat-out crazy aside, the campaign is pretty fun, and I'm still playing in it.

 

[Dykstrav]

My most ridiculous experience with a homebrew was back in my 2E days, right after 2E had come out. I had a long-time player who finally decided that it was time to make his own homebrew, and with a sheaf of hex paper and colored pencils and graph paper, immediately set out to mapping his setting and populating it with dungeons and cities. It seemed to be going well, and we sat down to make characters for the first session.

First of all, we had ability score generation using 5d6, drop the lowest. Yes, that's right, ability scores in the 4-24 range. The DM thought that we should potentially be able to use the high ability scores since they were included in 2E from the group up in the Player's Handbook. I wanted to play a ranger, and my lowest score ended up being a Charisma of 15. Most of my other ability scores ranged from 18-22, my Dexterity was 23.

Then we were informed that characters got to select a magic item of our choice and a pet monster. That's right, a pet monster that was something like a sacred totem for individual nations in his setting, and all player characters had one. I selected a decanter of endless water (which earned me the derision of some of the players) and a manticore, intending to use it as a mount. Other players selected mighty magical weapons (of course, the paladin got a holy avenger and the wizard took a staff of power) and one player selected a platinum dragon as his pet (yes, statistics identical to Bahamut).

We started at 1st level in a dungeon where a paladin had disappeared. At the end of the second session, we had slain an army of balors and red dragons and were 15th level. Homeboy loved to hand out XP and ignored the thing about gaining only one level at a time.

He was a big fan of an anime called Dragon Ball too. We ran into space aliens with spaceships and energy weapons and monks around 30th level as a routine matter. Fortunately, I didn't "get it" as much as some of the other players and just glossed over most of the Dragon Ball stuff. We still had a Dragon Ball DMPC who followed us around and had a scanner that could tell him the monster stats in game, and once we got them, we could accurately read the stats of any monster that we looked at.

He was also a fan of a video game series called Final Fantasy, so we rode giant chickens instead of horses.

To top it all off, he was immensely proud that his world was shaped like a d20. He loved to tell the story about how he couldn't reconcile a flat sheet of paper to accurately match a round planet, so he just drew off 20 triangles and decided that the world was literally shaped like a d20--each section was flat, so his maps were accurate to the actual shape of the world, but it was still basically round.

 

[Obryn]

To top it all off, he was immensely proud that his world was shaped like a d20. He loved to tell the story about how he couldn't reconcile a flat sheet of paper to accurately match a round planet, so he just drew off 20 triangles and decided that the world was literally shaped like a d20--each section was flat, so his maps were accurate to the actual shape of the world, but it was still basically round.

The rest of that stuff was kinda dumb, but this has a degree of brilliance to it.

-O