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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PatrickLawinger" data-source="post: 4441872" data-attributes="member: 2735">Hmmm,Well, maybe I am the bad DM, but I was the DM for this one. This was a 1e/2e hybrid game that had actually been going on for quite some time.The PCs run into a tribe of more "modern" lizardman (something they knew they could encounter, it was part of the world) who are clearly pretty hostile. The lizardman chief walks out to talk with the party bearing several holy symbols and a very nasty-looking weapon. Now, he challenges the party to one-on-one combat with a PC of their choice (not a fight to the death btw). The party has to either leave his lands or one of them has to fight. If they win, they get free travel through his domain, if they don't, they will be attacked and killed if they come back onto the tribal lands. Basically, they were taking a shortcut that they knew was risky.Somehow my description of the chief triggers a memory in one of the players. He says, "Oh this is like a X warrior in (bookname-sorry, never did actually read this book)." He goes off on a tangent about the book, in an effort to get people back on track I let them all know that this is NOT based on that book and that I never read the book he was talking about.It didn't matter, his character convinces the party to SURRENDER. That's right, they could have simply said, no, we're sorry we didn't mean to trespass and left. OR the fighter or ranger could have fought and most likely won (the chief was mostly decoration). INSTEAD, they surrender. By this point I have to "ruin" the whole thing by actually saying, "Listen, guys, you can fight, or you can leave, but if you surrender they will take everything you have and sell you as slaves." (this was actually something they should have known but I had to make it VERY clear).THEN the player above tells me what the Chief is SUPPOSED to do-based on the book he read. He actually got mad at me because the simple NPC didn't act like a character in a book he just read. He actually stormed out.The party decided that his character surrendered as "tribute" to the tribe so that they could pass through the tribal lands freely. The game was over that night, but it continued the next week and went on for another 2 1/2 years so I like to think I didn't really screw up as the DM there. The player actually came back a few weeks later and continued on in that campaign without any further problems. His new character was a paladin that vowed to his god never to surrender under any circumstances, it provided some interesting moments later on.Edit: Okay, in an effort to keep it short I didn't really explain how the lizardman character was related to the homebrew campaign setting nor did i really explain the fact that the characters and players had been playing in that world for over a year and KNEW about the various types of lizardmen in this particular part of the world, etc. Basically, everything they knew about the campaign world got tossed out due to a book one person read and they got ready to act completely out of character.</blockquote>

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