Your biggest screw-up as a DM?

[Nightchilde-2]

Mine would be NOT fudging a dice roll, I think.

The situation: The party had been fighting this's organization and plans for 15 levels; a 25th-level elven sorcerer lich. The party was 18th level when they finally confronted her face to face the second time (the first time they actually "met" her was way back at 3rd level when she handed them their butts on a platter and let them live). Oh, and her pit fiend planar ally. Forgot about him.

The *plan* was to have her teleport out and leave the pit fiend behind. Unfortunately, I rolled poorly on initiative.

One arrow of undead slaying and a 1 on my saving throw later, and this big, bad mamabjamba went down. In one round, and the first attack of the round at that. It was very anticlimatic.

The dice are my bane.

Had a similar incident in Deadlands at the end of the Devil's Tower Trilogy. The posse had a face-to-face with Stone and I proceeded to fail or go bust on EVERY. SINGLE. ROLL. They beat Stone easily.

 

[fredramsey]

Milk a cow; you get milk. Milk a bull... you get a friend for life.

What if you gave her a potion of Bull Str - would you find traces of steroids in the milk?
If you used animal growth would the milk have bovine growth hormones in it?

Milk from the cow is pretty safe, w/o pasturization, you just couldnt store it, unless you used purify food&drink.

I guess profession farmer skill could be used by the milker, to determine the amount of milk produced.

Questions aside I think we need to Moo-ve on

 

[ThoughtBubble]

My biggest mistake, and it's not a single mistake, as I did it often was to not have a sense of humor about the game. I just took everything sort of personally. I mean sure, they might be having an 'in character convesation' but they're just talking about rocks, certainly not 'role-playing'. And I certianly wasn't about to laugh at an out of character joke. Especially not while I'm trying to talk for an NPC.

I'm a lot more laid back now.

Of course, I still have a ton of mistakes I'm making, but taking myself too seriously is the biggest.

 

[Mr Gone]

This wasnt a error on my part but a humerous dice disaster. It was a game of Changeling and the characters ended up in a cave along with a large dragon. I botched the Initative roll for the first 3 rounds straight, so the Dragon got no actions. I had the Dragon just giving a heart villian laugh as the heros pounded on him for 3 unanswered rounds.